Travels in Spain

Some pictures from our first day in Spain. We arrived in Madrid 5 hours before our hotel was ready, and spent four hours waiting in the hotel lobby. Serious jet lag. We later took a walking tour of old Madrid with our tour group. It was hard to get pictures because our group was very large and the guide really rushed us.

Our second day in Spain we took a bus trip from Madrid to the town of Segovia, and visited the ancient aquaducts and the palace where the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand united two kingdoms. The castle was the inspiration for Walt Disney's logo. We ate lunch there. Our tour guides urged us to try the suckling pig, which I did, and regretted. The restaurant was a tourist trap. It was like greasy fried piglet chunks. I took two bites and left it on my plate. The tour was beautiful, however. Later and I went to Madrid on our own and and a good dinner with grilled octopus and paella.

Today, our third day in Spain, Dan and I left our hotel in Madrid, and took a long bus ride, stopping in Toledo, considered the religious capital of Spain. This is where the saying "Holy Toledo!" comes from. We took a walking tour through hilly and narrow streets and saw what was once the Jewish Quarter before the Spanish Inquisition drove the Jews, and most of the arts and culture out of the city. There were many beautiful shop windows, though we couldn't shop, we had a very tight schedule, and it is too easy to get lost in Toledo. We continued on our bus ride stopping in La Mancha, home of Cervantes and Don Quixote for lunch, which was simple and pretty good, but we had to keep swatting away the flies. I saw a cute black stray cat at one rest stop. We rode a total of 200 miles, arriving at our new hotel in Seville. I'm adding pictures Dan took of us on his phone yesterday in Segovia and Toledo.

Seville is the most beautiful city in Spain I've seen so far. There were so many stunning views, of architecture from all different eras. I finally had to put away my camera and just take it all in. Between cities our tour director, Lydia, gives us a lecture about the region we are about to visit on the bus. She is like a motherly drill sergeant professor. We have travelling companions from Australia, the United States, and some Asian countries, and we have become very friendly with some of them. Our first tour of the day was a visit to the buildings of the Seville Expo of 1929, and Parque Maria Luisa, named after a princess who donated her gardens as a park. We ate a very good lunch of ceviche, oxtails, jamon iberica, and Octopus after a tour of the Alcazar de Seville, built by Arab artisans for a Christian king. I was exhausted most of the day. I didn't sleep well the night before. I rested a little before we went out to see a local flamenco show, and a view of the futuristic buildings of Seville Expo '92 on the way.

We are up at dawn every day. Today we are leaving Granada and are on the road to Valencia. Granada was the seat of the Moslem empire in Spain before the sultan surrendered peacefully to Isabella and Ferdinand in their campaign to unify Spain under Catholicism. In Granada is where the Arabic influence is most prominent. Granada means pomegranate and was the symbol of the Moslem empire. We took a walking tour of the neighborhood of Albaicín, which has houses that were typical of the moslems or gypsies with floral gardens with Jasmine and beautiful flowering vines overflowing the courtyard walls. From the lookout point we could see the Alhambra palaces and fortress from which the sultan was exiled moslems were forced to leave Spain or convert to Catholicism, much like the Jews in Segovia and Toledo. The streets of the Albaicín are very narrow and hilly, but the pavement, 500 years old, is an artistic and intricate design to allow for traction, and the retention of water. We later toured the cathedral that houses the tombs of Isabella and Ferdinand. We were very hungry after the walking tour and found a small restaurant nearby and had a delicious meal of oxtails and a large platter of typical Spanish food. After resting a little at our hotel we enjoyed some free time to explore the city, and got churros and chocolate, and delicious gelado. I had the pomegranate flavor which was tart and sweet with pomegranate seeds. Dan bought Polverones cookies, which are considered a specialty here for holidays. They fall apart like dust. "Polvo" means dust in Spanish. We left them in our hotel room.

Every city we have visited so far has something unique and special about it. In Valencia it is the blend of baroque and futuristic architecture. Valencia was built on a river instead by the nearby Mediterranean sea to protect the inhabitants from invasion by sea. Valencia means "valliance," in honor of the warriors who retired there. After the flood of 1957 where 81 people died, the river was routed out of the city. Valencia is famous for its oranges. Two popular beverages there are "Agua de Valencia", which is like a screwdriver with orange juice, vodka, and prosecco. I tried one and I really wasn't impressed. In our walking tour in the old city we tried horchata, which is a vegan blend of tiger nut milk, water and sugar. It is supposed to be very healthy. It is different from the Mexican kind made with rice water. I really liked this horchata and would drink it again. Our tour in Valencia began in an architectural complex called the City of Arts and Science designed by the architect Santiago Calatrava. The seagulls in the water are bright white, and the turquoise water reflected off of their white bellies as they flitted around, giving them a surreal quality. You can see one of the turquoise birds in the corner of one of my photos. After stopping here we took a tour of the old city. In one of the photos Dan took you can see a statue of a wanton woman grasping her breasts projecting from the side of the cathedral. This statue was to warn visitors not to tread into the red light district that existed on that side of the town in medieval times. Valencia was once a walled city. Two of the gates are still standing, but the walls were torn down in the 19th century to allow the city to expand. Over a thousand buildings were destroyed in World War II, but the buildings that still exist are extraordinary. After a dinner of paella at the hotel, we walked back to the City of Arts and Sciences to see it lit up at night.

Our last two days we ate lunch at the beach town of Peniscola. Dan had a hotdog, and I ate some questionable octopus. Then we continued on to Barcelona where we had a city tour and viewed Gaudi's famous church, the Sagrada Familia. That night the group went out to a fabulous dinner on the water front, where we had garlic shrimp fried calamari, salad, and a choice of paella, fish, or beef for the main course. I chose fish, and Dan chose beef. A man went around playing the accordion and urged us to dance. I did the macarena with Willie, who was always entertaining us with his commentaries. After dinner we took a drive to see the lighted fountains. The day next was a drive to the cathedral of Monserrat to view the Black Madonna and a mountain view, which remained almost completely enshrouded in mist. After a brief rest we were driven downtown to the center of Barcelona to a marketplace called Las Ramblas, which reminded me of Quincy Market, except much longer and much more crowded. There were street performers dressed as statues, little places to eat, and off to one side a gigantic indoor market with stalls for ham, smoothies, fruit, fresh fish, almost anything you could imagine.
Our last dinner at the hotel, covered by the tour was a bit of a disappointment for everyone It started with a bowl of flavorless lukewarm pumpkin soup. The meat was like fried reconstituted shoe leather, with a side of lukewarm greasy potatoes, and a ball of tough looking stringy spinach. People were saying they would have gone out to buy their own dinner. It seemed more like a "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out", than a "farewell dinner." Gordon Ramsay would have made their ears burn if he reviewed this meal. Dan said no wonder our tour director was in such hurry to get those evaluations back before dinner.
All good things must come to an end, and this week had me clicking my heels three times and saying "There's no place like home, there's no place like home!". The past 3 nights we were arriving at a new hotel at 6, and then getting up at six to start an optional activity. My body really started to rebel. I felt like sleeping all the time in the day time, then our last night there I got really sick to my stomach. I was so sick at the airport, when I saw how long the line was to the women's room, I busted into the men's room in the Barcelona airport, and said, "I'm sick, I'm sick!" But I was able to push through and now we are home, where I was able to get American medical care today.
Lessons learned, don't overschedule, get enough rest, and drink bottled water. Still, our trip to Spain was a beautiful life experience.

The Descendants of Harvard Slaves Titus, Venus, Juba and Bilhah should be Harvard Legacies

In 2017 a plaque on the side of Wadsworth house was dedicated to four slaves who lived and worked at Harvard. I happened upon the ceremony, presided over by Harvard President Drew Faust, and a crowd of spectators, and reporters on my way to get coffee on break. Being African American, myself, I was intrigued by the history of slavery being memorialized at world famous Harvard University, where I've worked for over 20 years. One of the names, Titus, was very familiar to me. It was my grandfather's name, passed down to my father, and brother as a middle name, and given to another of my brothers as a first name. The plaque reads:

Titus & Venus

Lived and worked here as enslaved persons in the household of
President Benjamin Wadsworth (1725-1737)

Juba & Bilhah

Lived and worked here as enslaved persons in the household of
President Edward Holyoke (1737-1769)

This simple plaque serves to memorialize a tragic history that was the basis of the American economy nearly 300 years: the forced and uncompensated labor of black people in order to enrich their white owners, and the establishment of the racial caste system, opening up opportunities to white people, and closing them off to black people, resulting in the cumulative enrichment of white society, which depended on the exploitation and corresponding impoverishment of black society. Slavery and racism became the foundation of a false meritocracy.

These four individuals' lives symbolize the lives of untold numbers of enslaved people of Harvard, but who were they as people? It is likely that their lives were entirely consumed by their identity as enslaved people, as opposed to a chosen occupation of work, and that is how they are commemorated. But still I wonder what they dreamed about, living as enslaved domestics at a prominent institute of higher learning. Could they read and write? Did they yearn for knowledge and education? Did they seek freedom for themselves and their children, or accept their fate as a condition of survival? It is worth noting that around the time of their enslavement at Harvard, 1755, two slaves, Mark and Phillis, were publicly executed in Cambridge for conspiring to murder their master, Captain John Codman. In Edward Holyoke's diary there is an account of four slaves running away from their owner, Mr. Davis, and a slave murdering his master, Dr. Griffin. All around Venus and Titus, Juba and Bilhah there were pockets of active resistance.

Very little is documented about these slaves' lives. There is no documentation of a relationship between Titus and Venus, except that of being enslaved to the same family. Venus is described in Wadsworth's journal as a "negro wench" who was in service to Wadsworth's wife. The account of her purchase by Benjamin Wadsworth is as follows: "Oct. 25. 1726. I bought a Negro Wench (thôt to be under 20 years old) of mr Bulfinch of Boston, Sail-maker, was to give 85 pounds for her; she came to our house at Cambridge this day, I paid no money down for her, but was to pay in a few months...I saw not her Husband, thô he had been discours’d wth before." President Wadsworth’s servant Titus was described as a Wampanoag Indian in First Church records, where he was one of only two non-white people permitted to participate in communion (First Church Cambridge), but his privileges were limited. Faculty notes from 1740 contain a decision to "forbid students from associating with Titus, a 'Molattoe slave of the late Reverend President Wadsworth.'" He was not permitted to enter the Harvard campus after President Wadsworth died, or to be sent there on errands. (Harvard University, Early Faculty Minutes, 1725-1806).

Though the names Juba and Bilhah are paired on the plaque, they likely did not work in Holyoke's household at the same time. Juba's name appears around 1748, and does not appear in Holyoke's journal in any weigh ins with Bilhah. He likely left before Bilhah came to live in the Wadsworth household. He was married to a slave owned by a Harvard professor named Ciceely, and there are several journal entries of him acommpanying Holyoke family members on various errands. Bilhah's name appears several times in President Holyoke's diary, as part of a list of annual weights of individual members of the household including both his family members and the slaves. There is one entry documenting that she gave birth to a son, on October 31, 1761, though there is no male member of household who appears to be her partner. The next entry where her name appears, the household is weighed, and the infant is not listed. The last entry April 24, 1764 is of her death, three years after giving birth. Who was the father of Bilhah's child? What happened to Bilhah's son? Did he belong to her or the Holyoke family? Did he stay with his mother in the Holyoke family as an infant, or was he sold as a capital asset? Who mourned Bilhah when she died?

These scant details about the lives of Titus, Venus, Juba, and Bilhah inspire curiosity, especially in this era of ancestry research and DNA analysis. How do we fill in the blanks in their stories? What country were their ancestors from? What customs did they leave behind? What were their original names? What names did their descendants adopt? Who are their descendants? How did the legacy of the enslavement of Titus, Venus, Juba and Bilhah impact the lives of their descendants? Are they living in poverty today, or have they achieved the "American Dream"? Perhaps if we could find the descendants of these four slaves, Harvard could make meaningful reparations to them, and restore some of the fruits of their labor back to their families.

There is a book on archive.org called Fair Harvard: A Story of American College Life by William Tucker Washburn. This book gives a much clearer picture about what life might have been like for slaves on campus. There are stories of sumptuous feasts being served by slaves, slaves acting roles for the amusement of their masters, and one appalling story of a slave, nicknamed "The Infant" because of his immense size, chained up and made drunk, then having a dog attack him to the mirth of the students: "The infant had just reason enough left in him to spring back for dear life, when snap went the dog's chain: and as the slave, forgetting that he was bound, turned to run, the dog's teeth buried themselves deep in the the fleshiest part of his person." It's unclear if this is autobiographical or historical fiction. In the wake of the college admissions scandal where wealthy parents paid admissions officers to help falsify qualifications for their coddled offspring, I think ancestors who sacrificed their bodies and lives to slave labor for the benefit of the Harvard community, are worth at least as much as ancestors who profited from that, and donated a few million dollars for a campus building.

Racism, it's Not Against the Law

Our nation has become immune to shock since President Trump, with the "Make America Great Again" mandate, has taken office. While listening to Michael Cohen's testimony this past week on MSNBC I learned that Trump used 129 million dollars in public money to pay for a Trump Links golf course in The Bronx, aside from the other little things his supporters have already dismissed, tax evasion, using charity money to pay for expensive self aggrandizing portraits, colluding with a foreign government to sway an election, paying mistresses for their silence, close to 500 instances of threatening enemies, and racist comments. What really struck me was that the commentators during the break in testimony in the context of Trump's myriad of illegal acts, dismissed his racist comments as "not against the law."

Not having committed a felony should be the lowest common denominator for the leader of our country, as it would be for a cashier at McDonald's. Moral and intellectual fitness should be equally important as a clean criminal record. Of course racism is not against the law. We have freedom of speech in the constitution, the wealth of our nation was built on the backs of black slaves, and for centuries our laws enforced slavery and white supremacy. Racism enforces this legacy. The evolution of social conscience, activism, and civil disobedience has gradually changed the laws to protect the rights of black people, women, the disabled, and the LGBTQ population. Changing the law is only one component of sharing power equally. The law does not punish racism, or even racist acts that cause harm, unless it is enforced.

Racism was incorporated into the law in the American colonies as a strategy to divide the races and render the lower classes less powerful against the ruling class. During Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia in 1676, people of all classes and races united against Governor William Berkeley, driving him from Jamestown, and setting the capitol on fire. Following the rebellion, the passage of the Virginia Slave Codes of 1705 by the Virginia House of Burgesses prohibited black people, regardless of free status, from owning weapons, black people could not employ white people, court protections were established for a free and legal slave trade, and the apprehension of suspected runaway slaves . The codification of a "white identity" encouraged lower class white people to think they had more in common with the white ruling class than they had with black people. Racism became the fuel to make the lower classes do the bidding of the ruling class.

Almost two hundred years later, in 1857, the Dred Scott Decision in the United States Supreme Court case, Scott v. Sandford, a slave, Dred Scott, attempted to purchase his freedom for himself and his family, but his master refused. After moving through a series of lower courts, his case reached the Supreme Court, presided over by Judge Roger Taney, where in a 7-2 decision it ruled against Dred Scott, establishing that black people, whether free or slave, could not be United States citizens, and could not sue in court, the right to own slaves as property was affirmed in the constitution, and slaves, even if transported to free states by their owners, would remain slaves. Written into this decision was that slaves were an “inferior and subordinate class of being,” and that a permanent and intractable barrier should be erected between slaves (black people) and the white race. Judge Taney summed it up with the infamous quote that black people, whether slaves or former slaves, and their descendants had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Following the passage of the 13th amendment (1865), which freed the slaves, the 14th amendment (1868), which granted them full citizenship, and the 15th amendment (1870)which gave them the right to vote, full equality was still out of reach. In reaction to these Federal amendments, local and state “Jim Crow laws” perpetuated the legacy of racism for almost another century, until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended legal segregation and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, or national origin.

The election of the first black United States president, Barack Obama was a sign of progress, but if you think we live in a post-racial society, consider how different the national reaction would have been if he had been alleged to have committed any one of the crimes or moral transgressions attributed to President Trump in the Senate Hearings, or if he had been alleged to have made "lawful," constitutionally protected racist comments against white people. The United States was founded on legally enforced racist white supremacy. So saying “racism is not against the law” is a bit of an understatement. The law should not be the only yardstick for what is morally right, as it is only a reflection of the values of the people currently in power. Change did not happen because the people in power willingly relinquished it. People demanded and fought for change, protested, and disobeyed unjust laws. The laws may have evolved to protect the people it originally exploited for free labor, but the attitudes that created those laws still exist. As the case of President Trump illustrates, laws are for the little people, not for the powerful, and they are selectively enforced to maintain the status quo.

Government Gangsta Rap or the Ballad of Brett Kavanaugh

With a scowl on my face and and a howl in my heart,
Giving you my testimony that boofing means fart.
And the Devil's triangle is gonna be
the three branches of government in the land of the free.

Gavel to gown, the more beers that I down,
Gonna lay the rules down and make your pussy frown,
And by pussy I mean cat,
Got a new definition for it, how about that?

I got a friend in the West Wing grabbing pussies with impunity
His white skin and celebrity give him immunity.
That Christine Blasey Ford looked really hurt,
Quick get me on the court before they find more dirt.
I can't break the law, 'cause I make the law,
I got legal control over your hoo-ha.

A young white boy shouldn't have to pay
for pawing unwilling pussies back in the day,
his future awaits in the corps elite,
making laws for young black men getting shot in the street.

When I see tribal land I go bling bling!
Uprooting brown people don't mean a thing.
Cause my pipe is long, and my pipe is strong,
push it through to Alaska like a horny King Kong!

My rivers of beer have led me here,
to the motherf*cking court where I'll reign supreme,
And when I get there never you fear,
Gonna break out a bottle of old Jim Beam!

Our Fight is Marching on!

[Sung to the tune of Glory Glory Hallelujah]

Harvard's Dining Halls are empty
For its workers are on strike
They are marching for fair wages
And against the healthcare hike
and for regular employment
They have now begun to fight
The Union's marching on!

[Refrain]
Harvard's wages are outrageous
Loss of benefits contagious
But we will remain courageous
Our fight is marching on!

Wealth and poverty are side by side
but our com-mun-ity is tight
Students, workers, and professors are now taking up the fight
other places pay much lower
but it doesn't make it right.
Give in our to our demands!

[Refrain]
Harvard's wages are outrageous
Loss of benefits contagious
But we will remain courageous
Our fight is marching on!

While negotiations stall
The endowment's climbing higher
They don't have to pay no taxes
'cause they're smart as Donald Trump
but they know the world is watching
As they hoard up all their cash
and let the workers starve.

[Refrain]
Harvard's wages are outrageous
Loss of benefits contagious
But we will remain courageous
Our fight is marching on!

Written for my union brothers and sisters who are striking for sustainable wages and benefits.