Injera and lentil wat (and a tiny Shel update)

Quick Shel update: 1) Jack's teacher was as amused by the whole situation as I was which is comforting, to say the least. 2) I have learned more about Shel than I ever expected to know. 3) When in 5th grade, Oliver will not be doing his poetry research project on Shel.
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Ok, so as y'all might know, I like to talk to people- friends, strangers, neighbors, whoever. Generally speaking, I'm a social gal. 

Also, I am the mother of sons and have a husband. Because of this, I am an almost-daily regular at the market nearest me. Because, constant, high-quantity eating. 

In any case, I have gotten to know a number of the store's employees and truly enjoy seeing them when I'm there. Last time I got one of my horrid sinus rages, Hiwot reminded me that drinking my body weight in hot water with lemon, ginger, and honey was wise. I ran and got a huge knob of ginger and later that afternoon was grateful for her advice.

The next time I saw her, I thanked her profusely, and we talked some more and then were pals. One week ago yesterday, I was at the store purchasing, among other items, some red lentils because I have been helping a friend test recipes for the cookbook she's writing. Hiwot said, "Are you making lentil soup?"

"Yes!"

"I make lentil wat and always put berbere in it."

"Is that like pili-pili from Kenya?"

"Not the same but it is a red pepper. I bring mine back from Ethiopia. Do you have any?"

"No, sadly. It sounds great."

"I'll bring you some. And my recipe."

"OMG, I will bring you some preserves."

So, we set a date, met in the check-out line at the appointed time, and exchanged goods. I made her a pear, lemon, honey, and ginger preserve (because hello, she and I met because of ginger), and she brought me a generously-filled Ziploc of berbere and her hand-written notes on lentil wat.

Powdered gold.

"Do you like injera?"

"I love it. Do you make yours with teff only or a teff-wheat blend?"

"Only teff, of course. Both black and white. Well, ivory. Have you had both injeras?"

"No, I've only had ivory. This is so cool. I had no idea there was black injera."

"I will make you some. Let's meet back here next week, same time."

People, I was overwhelmed by her generosity.

We met yesterday, and she had the most amazing, yeasty, spongy, full-of-moon-craters injera for me. THAT SHE HAD MADE JUST HOURS BEFORE! You have to have a starter and let it ferment and everything. Truly, I was and remain so deeply touched. And my inner foodie was just off her rocker.

Today for lunch, I made myself Hiwot's red lentil wat. I stood over the stove as oil and onion and berbere melded, as ginger and garlic made everything fragrant, as the lentils went in and I added water by the cupful as if I were making an African risotto. 

While it cooked I called the White House comment line and waited on hold for ten minutes. Democracy in action, y'all. And then I spoke to a lovely woman and told her how desperately worried I felt about our country. I asked her to please tell President Obama that I felt it'd be grand if he would declassify everything pertaining to Russia's hacking of the DNC, DNCC, Hillary, Bernie, everything BEFORE the electors place their final votes on December 19. It won't change the outcome but we all deserve to be as fully informed as possible. 

And she thanked me for calling, and I thanked her for answering, and we hung up and I burst into tears because this country and Trump's buffet of unqualified Cabinet choices and Aleppo. But then the wat was done and Hiwot's injera was waiting, and I had the most magnificent, beautiful lunch I've had in a while.

I sat in silence and gratitude, thinking of all the beautiful difference in this world. Of cuisines and people and names and places of birth, and how so often when we come together in compassionate, generous, curious, lovely ways, we are all strengthened and made better. 

Miscellany, mostly of the Christmas and feline persuasion

It is very cold suddenly. Winter! Things appear to be hardening all around. The ground, for one. Drivers are more aggressive. Fewer are smiling. Coats are zipped high and tight.

But I patently refuse because Christmas is nigh, and I am nothing if not a jolly g-damn Christmas reveler.

My entire dining room table is covered in holiday card- and gift-making supplies. Even Oliver, a serious crafting guy, is impressed. "Mama, you have a LOT of craft stuff." Tom, too, feels my Martha-parts are really living big these days. I think my use of his heat gun took him aback just a tad. But y'all, embossing powder is fun! Teachers, grandparents, friends, neighbors, "strangers" (those online friends you've not yet met in real life but intend to and so in the meantime, snail mail during the holidays!)...there is much love and gratitude to be shared. 

Lest you think my inner activist is quieting, she is not. There is much work to be done, and I have tried to do at least one action-item per day since the election. The orange yam continues to disgrace the office of the Presidency. It is shameful. I am ashamed of him. Stand strong everyone.

"When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But that is not what great ships are built for." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Indeed!

The Nut and I spent a great deal of quality time together today. He is so delightful! Also, Big Boggle. Fun game for the whole family. I was competitive but only quietly. ;) Oliver repeatedly found "Ol" and "SOS." I'm not sure what to make of that- hidden message?

He lives a charmed life.

I finished Hillbilly Elegy, quite good not amazing; more on it later, yesterday and am continuing now with H Is for Hawk, masterful. Does anyone else feel totally overwhelmed by content lately? God, it's like a world-sized snowball.

Do: cook your salmon with lemon, olives, grilled artichoke hearts, salt, and a pat of butter in a foil pack. Serve with asparagus, quickly roasted until just crisp-tender, generously dashed with olive oil, lemon juice, and salt. A healthy, easy, winner of a meal.

When history repeats

I spent yesterday at the new National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Months ago, when the museum opened, my mother-in-law, Claire, got two tickets, and although I'm sorry my father-in-law wasn't able to join her, I feel awfully lucky I got to take his place.

It is an incredible place in many ways. The sheer number of artifacts housed there is astounding. Even if you simply looked at everything and ignored all placards, you'd need days to get through. But you would never want to do that because the enormous amount of written information enriches and gives context to those treasures. As do the interactive displays and videos. And the museum shop which has a deep, library-like book selection that I felt I only scratched the surface of.

Claire and I spent a good two hours, maybe more, on just the bottom three floors which starts a couple hundred years prior to the Atlantic slave trade. The museum does a phenomenal job of educating visitors about when slavery shifted from being something that affected people of many colors and faiths and was often a temporary status to a thoroughly racialized commodity exchange of black bodies to white hands. The concept of whiteness developed and in a depraved effort to continue profiting and gaining power off the backs of black slaves, white slave owners and sympathetic members of the government enacted increasingly repressive laws banning education, religious practice, the ability to move from place to place and so on. The rights to safety, privacy, personhood were completely stripped away. 

In 1705, the Chesapeake region made it legal to dismember any unruly slave and passed a law stating that "all negro, mulatto, and Indian slaves are considered real estate."

In 1730, Humphrey Morice, Governor of the Bank of England, said, "Negroes...are a perishable Commodity, when you have an opportunity, dispose of them for gold." 

Evidence of slavery's vast dehumanization efforts is, of course, prolific in the museum, and being surrounded by quotes and slave-for-sale signs and pictures of children being ripped from their mothers' arms and men branded and hung is deeply upsetting and moving, which is at it should be. The museum felt almost holy to me in some ways. I say that not from a religious perspective but from a spiritual one of profound sorrow and sadness and humility.

In many ways, the hardest things for me to handle were the sentiments and efforts to dehumanize and criminalize that were current hundreds of years ago and still feel awfully present today. We continue, in too many ways, to perpetrate entirely-too-similar ills on Black Americans now as we once did.

It is unconscionable and deeply shameful.

In 1864, Spottswood Rice said, "Whether freeman or slaves the colored race in this country have always looked to the United States as the Promised Land of Universal freedom." He must have been so hopeful then, just after the Emancipation Proclamation (EP) had passed. And yet, Reconstruction brought with it the Southern "black codes" and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and ferocious backlash after ferocious backlash.

In 1876, Frederick Douglass said, "You say you have emancipated us. You have and I thank you for it. But what is your emancipation? Bue when You turned us loose, you gave us no acres. You turned us loose to the sky, to the storm, to the whirlwind, and, worst, of all you turned us loose to the wrath of our infuriated masters."

As you know, it wasn't until 1965, a hundred years AFTER Lincoln's EP that Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act giving Black Americans the right to vote. Their attempts to register and act on that right were often threatened and repressed and made impossible. And in 2013, the Supreme Court (the majority view expressed and written by Chief Justice Roberts) voted to strip huge parts of that Voting Rights Act because "our country has changed." But has it?

Three years later, "our country" in some ways* voted in an unfit bigot with zero political experience and lawsuits of fraud and sexual assault hanging over him because they wanted to "take our country back to its former greatness." 

You can't not see how all this fits together. How we are not remotely post-racial. How in fact we are still a racist place that believes the myth of racial inequality created by white Europeans and Americans centuries ago. Race is a social construct and as it was once used to oppress some for the benefit of others, it way too often still is.

Sure, it's often couched differently, it might simmer rather than boil. Trump and the whitelash he inspired are eerily reminiscent of the rise of Jim Crow and the KKK following emancipation. Racism isn't the only reason Trump "won," but it's a big factor. 

When I hear Trump talk of forcing Muslims to register, and then I go to the NMAAHC and see Freedom Papers for which free Blacks had to register every two years and carry at all times, I shake in a seriously uncomfortable way.

When I heard Trump supporters scream about Civil War were Hillary to have been elected and scream about locking her up so that they could "take their country back" and then I read Douglass' words of having been turned loose to face the wrath of infuriated masters," I shake some more. 

When I read that more than 50% of every 100 slaves taken from Africa died before "being placed" and then I look at the outrageously imbalanced numbers of Black Americans now incarcerated, I continue to tremble.

We all should. It is time to rise the fuck up and own our history, America. It is time to figure out how to stamp out the insidious scourge of racism that bedevils and weakens us. Racism is not the only issue facing America. But it is a big one. We need to be and do better. NOW.

*I say "in some ways" because Trump lost the popular vote by a landslide, by nearly 2.7 million votes at last count.