Happy Thanksgiving to My American Friends
And thank you to all my subscribers in other lands, as well
In my novel Restive Souls, which is stubbornly still searching for a home, one of the main characters provides this narrative regarding her meeting with a cleric in an alternative world of the early 1800s:
Our discussion, as we walked around the area immediately surrounding The Congregation House, covered many topics in that short time, from the idea of a formal holiday for the Carolina Union called Thanksgiving to celebrate the end of slavery, to the very nature of career development within the framework of congregational economics.
In Restive Souls, slavery ends in the late 1700s after the British defeat the colonials in their failed rebellion. It isn’t a noble gesture on the part of the British. As that same narrator describes it, Cornwallis, the new governor of the rebellious colonies, “added our emancipation as one final tax from the crown.”
In the novel, King George III thought that a restive, newly freed class of slaves would keep the colonies in servitude to the crown for decades. He considered them an impossible burden, an impediment to progress. Also in the novel, little does King George, who had little respect for the slaves, know that the emancipated slaves would make the most of their newly found freedom and help give rise to a powerful nation in America’s Low Country along the Carolina coast.
In the real world, it’s been awhile since the United States has been such a mess. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a lot of reasons to give thanks. The United States has long been an ideal more than a perfect country. It certainly wasn’t a perfect country when coffles, which were lines of slaves held by chains and gunpoint, forced slaves to march hundreds of miles to unknown destinations after being torn from their families. For female slaves of that period, they were sent to breed more slaves. For the men who survived, other brutal fates awaited.1
It also wasn’t a perfect nation when Andrew Jackson perfected ethnic cleansing.
This post is not intended to outline the various indiscretions of an imperfect nation. For, as governance goes, the U.S. has been lucky compared to many other nations.
Coffles, and slavery, did eventually go away. In Restive Souls, as in our world, the dreams of a perfect system of government remain elusive, despite a head start and boost provided by early emancipation.
Unfortunately, governance is sloppy and most often led by power brokers with little interest in the common good. This is a universal truth among all nations. Politics does not lure best of breed. No nation has escaped this truism.
However, the United States has been blessed with just enough politicians who have the common good in mind that it has become a beacon of hope for many around the world.
Try telling the newly arrived Uber driver in Atlanta, who has spent his formative years in a place like Liberia or Nigeria or Venezuela, that the U.S. is a poor model for the rest of the world. “Oh my friend,” he will chuckle. “Do I have some stories to tell.”
Many Americans, including myself, are distressed over an election in which 74 million of our fellow Americans chose as their next president a 78-year-old felon with a clear distaste for democracy and often appears to be less than cogent.
But history demonstrates that we’ve been through much worse. I suspect that any attempts to truly throttle democracy will be met with strong resistance, not just by those who voted against him, but the majority of those who voted for him and find themselves blindsided.
And who knows? Maybe the majority of that 74 million who voted for him, most of whom would never wear a MAGA hat, are right and he’ll be more bluster than blight. I’m in no mood to say, “Let’s give him a chance,” but I’m more than willing to say, let’s give us a chance.
For this and other reasons, I choose to look at Thanksgiving Day as an opportunity to give general thanks.
In Restive Souls, the genocide and ethnic cleansing against Native Americans that many consider emblematic of Thanksgiving never takes place. This would have been ideal. We’d live in a more productive, spiritually sound nation if it hadn’t. Native American ancestry would not have the hole in its gut that it now has.
So my Thanksgiving is more of a holy day than a statement about anything related to the early days of the United States. For me, it’s a day to give thanks to the continued obstinance of my heart to keep beating (some of you are aware of my recent health scare) to my subscribers and readers, to the food I put on the table today.
Tomorrow is Native American Heritage Day. I’ll embrace that, too.
Thanksgiving for me, as it pertains to the nation I live in, isn’t about what has been. Like my novel, it’s more about what my nation could be, what it aspires to be, through forces that ultimately may be too powerful for the winds of carnage blown by those who wish us harm to overcome.
Thanks for reading. And have a great day, no matter what you call it.
Notes
For a few peeks into Restive Souls, you can visit these pages here on Ruminato:
Or, just click/tap the “Restive Souls” menu item.
For a thorough and sometimes difficult narrative on this and other breeding practices of slavers, check out The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry by Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette.
Great post!