My Own Hagiographical Impressions

We had our class, late last evening.  I’d gone off for a quick nap in the early afternoon and told myself I’d read a few pages of “Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State” by Ira Dworkin and ended up reading through the next two hundred and fifty pages to finish it.  Drawn in, finally, we spent some familiar ground reviewing the remarkable examples of the early African American engagement with the Congo, in George Washington Williams and William Henry Sheppard.  But these accounts weren’t terribly different to my reckoning, from what was covered in Adam Hochschild’s work “King Leopold’s Ghost.”  It was wonderful though to suddenly connect this to the Progressive world of America in the 1890s that we’d been otherwise been covering in our quarantine class of U.S. History and then tie the centrality of the Congo through African American artistic and political expressions that sprung from these pioneers to Pauline Hopkins, through the Harlem Renaissance up a through to Malcolm X. 

When the wife summoned everyone to get the table set I was within the final ten pages and it was already 6:30PM.  A sunset, that were it to have been part of an eighteenth- century landscape painting, we’d have called it hopelessly exaggerated, beckoned to us out on the porch.  This would be the first meal out on the porch since we hibernated in last fall.  And soon I had the cushions on the chairs and the umbrella up and unfurled.  Our girls however did not want to eat outside.  There were too many bugs. 

I had been called more than once today to kill a wasp or remove a stink bug.  Responding to yet another shriek as we set the table, I announced that while I would remove this one, it would be the last one.  “Next time do it yourself.”  Out on the porch they both sat sullenly, darting and overreacting to the bees and wasps that occasionally flew by.  “What?  You’ve both been exposed to bugs.  I’ve taken you to the jungle.  Why this entomophobia?"

Class, then had to wait till after dinner and after the younger one’s Korean language class and my 9:00PM Sunday, 9:00AM Beijing Monday, weekly call.  My early nap had been a good investment as I had sufficient energy then, to teach our next lesson, shortly 10:00PM.  Sometimes these late-night sessions don’t go off so well, but tonight, covering the Great Depression, things went alright.   My older one opened up by asking essentially, was there anything Franklin Delano Roosevelt did that wasn’t great?  A good critical instinct, no doubt and I tried to explain the word hagiography.  And while there were fits and starts and cul de sacs and unsuccessful overreach during the New Deal . . . my lesson is certainly replete with my own hagiographical impressions of FDR. 

Sunday, 5/03/20