Geometry assignment; March 17

We spent time going over homework today before beginning section 9-6.  The topic that we dealt with today involved working with angles in circles that are neither inscribed nor central angles.  We worked through two different scenarios of angles inside a circle and then angles outside a circle.  The sample problems we went over helped the students get a start on their homework before leaving class.


Homework:  section 9-6;  page 359-360;  #1-21 all

Algebra 10-12 assignment; March 6

We went over our exponents quiz today after the entry task.  This was the second of three short quizzes on exponents that we will be taking.  The third one is tomorrow.  We kept working on polynomials today with more work on adding like terms and then covering the topic of degrees of a polynomial.  After a few examples together, the students spent the last portion of the period working on their homework.


Assignment:  Degrees of Polynomials worksheet

Geometry assignment; April 8th

We went over our homework from yesterday and did a short entry task in reviewing the areas of triangles and parallelograms.  We then spent time going over several problem together in working on areas of rhombuses.  The students then got started on their homework at the end of the period.  We now have 4 area formulas that we can use:  rectangle, parallelogram, triangle, and rhombus.

We will be having a quiz on these shapes on Friday.

Assignment:  section 11-2;  page 431-432;  classroom exercises #4-9;  written exercises #4, 14, 17, 21-24

Geometry assignment; March 10

We introduced section 9-4 today that deals with the relationships between arcs and chords in circles.  We went over several problems together, as well as did some review for the quiz coming up on Wednesday.

Assignment:  Arcs and Chords worksheet  #1-14 all

Geometry assignment; April 29

We went over our chapter 11 test today and continued working on the properties of prisms.  We went over a few more examples together before starting to put together a formula notecard.  These notecards can be used on tests and quizzes.  The students then got started on their homework in class.


Assignment:  Surface Area and Volume of Prisms worksheet

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Algebra 10-12 assignment; May 6

After going over our homework and entry task today, we spent time talking about how to solve equations with radical expressions.  The new step was to square both sides once the radical expression has been isolated.  Once several problems have been worked through, the students got started on their homework in class.

Assignment:  Solving equations with radicals worksheet;  #1-18 all,  47-53 all

Geometry assignment; April 9th

After going over our homework, we introduced the topic of finding the area of trapezoids.  We used triangles again, and came up with another formula to add to our tool box of working with polygons.  After going over several examples together in class, the students then got started working on their assignment.

We will be having a quiz on sections 11-1 to 11-4 on Friday.


Assignment:  section 11-3;  page 436-437;  #2-8 evens,  9-16 all, 18-20 all

Strawberries

I honestly didn't know the guy.  We share a college alma mater, but little else really. He's a tradesman, I'm a retired prof. We live in the same neck of the woods, basically, and he was over, a repair man.  Nice guy. He seemed more than a little interested in yakking. Younger than I am, but not by decades. 

It's clear he knows what he's doing.  I watched him for a while, just as I'd watched oodles of tradesmen in the last year--dirt movers, concrete layers, frame carpenters, dry-wallers, insulators, finish carpenters, painters. I watched 'em all when our house went up, and I loved it, thought about how incredibly far I'd been away from the trades for so long, from the crowd that does day labor day after day, across the country--and here.  Makes things.

One of 'em told me he charged $15 an hour labor, $30 if I hung around, $45 if picked up a screwdriver.  Yesterday, I told the guy that and he laughed, comfortably.

Like I said, nice guy. Didn't know him by family or town, by college class or any kind of reputation, only by business, his business.  He's told me that long ago he went to Dordt. Somehow--maybe simple prejudice--I simply wouldn't have guessed. 

It was late in the afternoon. He finished up after six, and I couldn't help but imagine that his wife was rolling her eyes in some tv room back at the house, wondering how long she was going to have to wait for him--again.  But he liked to talk, and he seemed to appreciate me standing there beside him going on and on.  He seemed almost oblivious to time.

That morning, we had picked more than our share of strawberries. My wife had made muffins and jam and a yogurt souffle to die for, smothered in 'em. Oh, yeah--and bread too, strawberry bread. Sounds strange, but I could eat half a loaf in one sitting--that good. Anyway, it's in the freezer because we just couldn't eat everything she was cooking up with that motherload of strawberries.

I thought I'd pack some along with him. Be nice, right?  We had way too many.  I came back into the house, asked my wife whether she could part with a few. She looked at me and rolled her eyes, then pulled out one of those little green baskets the hard ones come in when you buy 'em at the store. You know.

"Does he want to eat 'em on the way home, you think?" she said.  "If he does, I'll pluck 'em and wash 'em up."

So I went back out to ask. "We got a ton of strawberries," I told him, "too many for a couple of old farts. All day long, my wife's been putting them in everything but summer sausage."

He looked up, smiled.

"Want some?"

He looked at me as if he thought I was kidding.  

"You going to eat 'em on the way home or you going to save 'em for your wife?" I said. "Makes a difference, Barb says."

"I'll eat 'em on the way home," he told me. "Nice of you."

"Like I said, we got tons."

"I love strawberries," he said.

"You sure you're wife won't be mad?" I said, joking.

"My wife left," he told me. "About nine months ago already.  She's in California, and she's not coming back. At least, I don't think so."

I didn't say a thing. Maybe I should have. I went back in the house.

"He's going to eat 'em on the way home," I told my wife of 42 years, 43 tomorrow, in fact.  "He told me his wife left him nine months ago already. She's not coming back, he says."

Stopped her cold. She plucked the berries, ran 'em under the faucet, and rolled them into that little green basket. 

I brought them out. 

I didn't know what to say really. I mean, he wasn't my friend, not a close friend. Do you just haul off and ask him how he's doing with being left behind? If you don't even know him at all, not really, doesn't questioning seem like just walking into his house without knocking? Should I have prayed? 

I went back into the house for supper. He was finishing up.  Couldn't have been long and he and the strawberries were gone.  He texted me later, said he left the bill and thanks so much for the strawberries.

I couldn't help but think I let him down somehow.  

"She's not coming back, I guess," he told me, screwdriver in his hand. 

And I didn't say a thing.

Geometry assignment; Jan. 30

We went over our quiz from earlier in the week as well yesterday's homework.  The remainder of the period was spent working on a review worksheet that emphasized section 7-6.  The students were given answers to the first page of the review worksheet.  The answers to the second page appear below.

Assignment:  chapter 7 review worksheets


Answers to second sheet:

1.  48
2.  20
3.  12
4.  12
5.  10
6.  40
7.  10
8.  7
9.  10
10.  11
11.  6
12.  10

Memorial Day, 2014

He was, in a way, both a large part and a small part of the Allied Invasion of Normandy, June 6, 1944--a small part because, that day, he was just one of Gen. Omar Bradley's First Army, 73,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands Allied troops to assault occupied Europe. In sheer scale of operation, his death that day was incidental, but the role he played was immense because he was one of thousands of GIs who knew that when they'd cast off from England's shore, some would not be coming back. They knew. They had to. The cost of freedom must have been written starkly on their faces that rainy morning.

They knew, but they went anyway. That's a huge role.

He was just one of thousands, but he was, nevertheless, a man with a story, just like each of them were. Family lore says he stepped off one of those landing crafts, the one to which he'd been assigned, and just like that took a Nazi bullet. I don't know that he'd served elsewhere in the war, don't know what his role was, or how long he'd been in the service--"PVT 112 ENGR," his stone says, and then, a line below, "COMBAT BN," all upper case.  Date of death: June 6, 1944.

Nor do I know what kind of horrifying impact his death had on the woman who would become my mother-in-law.  I can imagine, but I don't know. 

Three years after he was killed, two years after the war ended, she put her life back together and married my father-in-law, another vet, a man whose mechanical skills had been put to good use in the motor pool, where he repaired tanks and jeeps and armored vehicles behind the Allied front on the long liberating trek to Berlin.  

She married my father-in-law and life continued, as it does. The name Gerrit Ter Horst was rarely spoken. 

Little flags wave in the prairie wind all over the Orange City cemetery today, Memorial Day, marking the graves of veterans galore. Some stones have summaries, but most list nothing at all, only a flat American Legion medal that describes what can already be inferred from the dates carved into the granite--"World War I," "World War II," "Vietnam."

The marker for Gerrit Ter Horst sits in a little covey of white stones, a couple of dozen other vets, including my father-in-law's brother, Charles Van Gelder, who never made it out of the States, a young man who, sometime during his military training, was a drowning victim before he ever shipped over and got near a battlefield. 

I don't know how the Ter Horst family talks about their ancestor's death, or whether they do at all.  I hope so, because there has to be more to his story than a young woman, in tears, turning a diamond ring on her finger back home, here, in Orange City, Iowa, a woman who, years later, didn't talk about his death, never mentioned it to me at all. After all, some things simply have to be put to rest.

Last night, we discovered flowers on Uncle Charles' gravestone. Someone had remembered. Someone hadn't forgotten. It was a joy to find them there.

That there was no flowers on Gerrit Ter Horst's cemetery stone doesn't mean he's been forgotten. Last night we remembered that once upon a time, June 6, 1944, a man engaged to be married to a woman very precious to us was killed on a beach in Normandy. He left a sweetheart, and died a hero for all of us, family or not.

This morning's sky seems a perfect memorial--cloudy, a soft red band out stretching across half the horizon north, an almost heavenly red badge of courage. When I stepped out just now, a light rain was falling gently, as if the whole world outside my door, a world Charles and Gerrit must have missed terribly, was remembering, a whole world that hadn't forgotten.

Sunday Morning Meds--"though he stumble"

“. . .though he stumble, he will not fall, 

for the LORD upholds him with his hand.” Psalm 37

At the turn of the 20^th century, what Willa Cather experienced as a child out on the Great Plains, surrounded as she was by a weave of ethnics, recent immigrants all, was something she never forgot and always celebrated.  My Antonia, a great pioneer novel, has given us one of the most powerful women characters in American literature, Antonia Shimerda, whose strength of character and purpose simply will not be defeated.

And hers was not an easy life.  When she was still a girl, her father, an educated musician in his native Bohemiaand someone clearly not fashioned for the hard work of opening the rugged prairie, takes his own life one cold night in his first winter as an American.  Because he was a suicide, the local cemeteries wouldn’t take him; the most unpardonable sin at the time, it seems, was the despair he suffered, the abandonment of hope itself, which is to say, the abandonment of faith.  Mr. Shimerda, who shot himself in the barn, was buried in the road.

Willa Cather frequently drew her stories from her own experiences, and if you’re ever blessed to visit Red Cloud, Nebraska, the place where she grew up, you can follow dusty roads through the bleak and unforgiving landscape she loved, roads which pass places where she dug out the roots for some of her stories. 

Mr. Shimerda had a prototype on the land west of Red Cloud, and on one of those roads you can actually drive over the intersection where an anguished suicide, forbidden a place in the local cemeteries, was once buried, very much alone.  Driving through that intersection is an eerie feeling, even though the man’s remains have long since been moved.

           

Today, suicides are not refused burial in any local cemeteries that I know of, and, for that, all of us should be thankful.  I can not sympathize a whit with those who kept Mr. Shimerda’s body out of proper burial, but when I read a verse like this—from David—I can at least understand something of their fear, for fear is what it was, I’m sure.  To take one’s own life is to reject the eternal truth of what David says:  “though he stumble, he will not fall, for the Lord upholds him with his hand.” 

           

Even though, out here on the Plains, we have come a long way from Mr. Shimerda’s—and others’—horrific rejection, we still don’t know quite what to do with those among us who depart by taking their own lives.  We don’t know what to do with them, in part, because we do know—those of us who are believers—that the act of suicide defies the eternal hope of this line and so many others from the Word of God almighty.

Not long ago, it happened again, in a community not far away.  I didn’t know the man, never met him, but I know his family, several of the members, and I know of their profound grief.  Since it happened, no one has said much about it because, well, there’s not much to be said.  By all accounts, he was a believer.  And he suffered, suffered badly, within, for the past several years.  I know very little else.

What I do know—what I can believe because I know this much of the Almighty—is that he alone will judge the living and the dead. 

And I trust Him.  I trust God and his promises.  I trust that he will do what he has always done and promises he will do forever—he will love. 

Morning Thanks--Revery

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, 

One clover, and a bee.  

And revery. 

The revery alone will do, 

If bees are few.

So saith Ms. Emily Dickinson, the Belle of Amherst. No need for purple prairie clover out back of our place, no need for bees even.  No need, really, for prairie itself because we can, all of us, simply create a prairie of the mind. 

Sure.

She sounds like Milton. "The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven." 

That too. And that line would be touching if I didn't know it belonged to Satan who was, at the time, taking a good look at the depths of Hell all around him. 

I prefer prairie.

So Saturday, I Robin-Hooded a few ditches, stole a half-dozen clumps of black-eyed susans, some purple prairie clover, and anything else with July color, dug out holes in our backyard, and dropped those clumps of native plants in, watered them, then stood back and watched 'em dance in a glorious summer breeze--our own colorful prairie beneath the open sky. 

For one day at least, it was beautiful.

Saturday was a day for life. And death. All morning a funeral. If all that remained of the deceased was what was left behind, then the preacher was blowing smoke because the man whose life we celebrated actually lost an epic battle with cancer and death was the victor. But the preacher claimed he'd won because there's more to life than meets the eye, more to prairie than what waves for a moment in a gentle breeze of a warm July afternoon, more to life than life.

And Saturday it also was my father's birthday. My guess is his daughters, my sisters, remembered too, but probably no one else on the face of the earth. Calvin Schaap was born on July 26, 1918, somewhere in Michigan, just a couple months after the doughboys put boots on the ground in France. He was the seventh child of ten, son of a preacher and the woman his parishioners would have called the juffvrouw, his wife. That child was my father. He died about a decade ago, but Saturday, when I was dropping those black-eyed susans in the backyard, after the funeral of a wonderful man, Saturday, my father's birthday, I was thinking of him too when trying to transplant all that beauty.

I was thinking of parents and how strange it seems to be parent-less, as if I were an orphan, nobody back there to write to, to call, to think about. The child in me says, no one back there any more to care. 

I know very well that digging up those ditches and transplanting all that sweet color may have been an exercise in futility. Purple prairie clover survives out here because its roots roots run so deep I would have had to dig a hole as deep as a grave to get it all out. 

And I didn't. This morning, right now, in the face of a cloudy dawn, those transplants are all still standing; but they don't look as if they've got much fight in 'em any more. They're droopy and peaked. My mother would say they look sad--they look vlauw, a Dutch word I don't have a clue how to spell. I could call her and ask; but even if she was still alive, she wouldn't know herself, I'm sure.

Still, Saturday afternoon, after the funeral, on my father's birthday, a dozen bunches of prairie flowers out there dancing in the breeze behind our place looked, at least for a moment, as lovely as Wordsworth's daffodils. And that was good enough for me, good enough for the time being.

Somewhere down beneath the top soil of our back yard, I'm told, there still are elaborate root systems from a time long, long ago, a treasure chest of native prairie, roots still vital enough to send up new growth if given the chance. They're still there.  Even if my back yard funeral day projects don't take, there's still life down there somewhere beneath the ground.

Isn't that great?

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the Bible says, the evidence of things not seen.

Even if my transplant black-eyed susans look vlauw, life is more than meets the eye. I like that.

The preacher wasn't lying: that good man we buried didn't lose the fight. 

Death has an awful sting, but there's much more to life, so much more. And that's reason to give thanks this morning, the sun just now rising behind me.

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Wasicu at Chankpe Opi: A White Man at Wounded Knee IV

But what exactly did happen on the morning of December 29, 1890?

With nothing to stop it, sound travels easily on a landscape this barren. So imagine the bleat of reveille cutting through the morning cold. It’s eight o’clock, and the sun rises magnificently, albeit late, winter solstice just a few days behind. Many of the women, some of them singing, are packing for the 17-mile trip to Pine Ridge, where they anticipate meeting relatives and friends. Children play innocently around the ragged tipis and wagons, and for the first morning in many, most have eaten well.

By Indian messenger, Col. Forsyte, the commanding office, calls the men of Big Foot’s band to come to parley directly southeast of us, at the spot where the chief’s tent stands, maybe 300 yards down the hill. Spread around the entire encampment like a huge lariat, even beyond the dozens of Indian ponies just west of Big Foot’s camp and the ravine behind it, 76 unmounted sentries, equally spaced, watch the movement. On the rise beyond the ravine and set against the horizon, a long line of mounted bluecoats wait menacingly, just in front of them, some several dozen of the cavalry’s Indian scouts. From the vantage point of the soldiers, the field seems well in hand, the position geometrically arranged to prevent escape. There is no chaos, yet.

As they were commanded, something close to one hundred men—no one knows for sure—from Big Foot’s band take their places in the council circle. Behind them, those lines of bluecoats move quickly to separate the men from their women and children.

The command is given to disarm. In the face of such untoward odds, the Sioux men are wary—not only does the positioning all around them seem ominous, but to a culture created on institutional violence—a boy becomes a man by proving himself in battle—giving up one’s means to fight is giving up oneself. What’s more, they’d been promised the day before that they could keep their arms until they arrived at Pine Ridge.

Troops are dispatched to search and seize what arms they can turn up in the encampment behind them. What happens is not pleasant. The women do not take kindly to their mistreatment, the sometimes brutal ways the bluecoats plunder their selves and their possessions. When the soldiers return, they have more guns, but also axes, knives, bows and arrows, tent stakes, even beadwork awls.

It is early winter, remember, but there is more than enough emotion in the air to ignite the landscape. Fear, prejudice, a history of deception, mutually defiant cultural values, and nothing less than hate lay beneath us here like so much kindling, waiting for the pop of a flame; the whole place is combustible. What exactly happened next may be debated forever, but the trajectory of events is no more debatable than the outcome.

Somewhere on the peripheries of the council circle stands a man variously described as half-crazed or desperate. He was, by all accounts, a man of faith, a medicine man, who considered it his duty to advise the men in council circle of their dignity and their calling. One account describes him this way: “. . .a grand figure. . .with green-colored face and a yellow nose, terrifying to behold. He wore with pride his floating crown of eagle feathers, while his costume was a wonder of wild adornments.” Some name this man Yellow Bird, while others claim Yellow Bird was nowhere near Big Foot’s camp. Whatever his identity, his eccentric look and behavior calls upon the dignity of Lakota history and culture. What he espouses is at least something of the doctrine of the Ghost Dance. He tells the men not to fear. As Crazy Horse, by legend, once exhorted his men before Little Big Horn, this man reportedly cried and sang to his people, told them this was a good day to fight and a good day to die. He promises eternal life.

The sound produced in Native songs and chants begins in the front of the throat; for centuries, white musicians have been exhorted to sing from the diaphragm. The difference is startling. To white folks unaccustomed to the keening, me among them, the sound produced seems more like a shriek than a hymn. As you stand there, those Hotchkiss guns poised just beneath you, listen the medicine man’s seemingly mad music and try to stop your fists from tightening.

“The men are hiding guns,” an officer says.

It’s December, still early in the morning, and the Sioux men are wrapped in blankets. A search follows. In a pile in the middle, almost seventy old rifles lie over each other like fallen branches.

Then, something happens—nobody knows exactly what. The bluecoats draw their rifles and swords. Rifle magazines click open and close; guns are brought into position to fire.

_______________________ 

Tomorrow:  the massacre

Algebra 10-12 assignment; April 10

We reviewed our factoring skills with quadratics today, as well as the method of finding greatest common factors.  After going over the homework and entry task, we focused on working with quadratics that have a lead coefficient other than 1.  In working with these types of quadratics, we factored out the GCF first before using the sum and product puzzle to complete the factoring.  We did several problems together before the students got started on their homework at the end of the period.

Our first quiz on factoring will take place tomorrow.

Assignment:  Using GCF and Standard Quadratics WS   #1-26 all

Chin-strapped neighbors

Given the mess they leave on lawns, given the sheer noise they make, and given the fact that you see them all over the country, calling the river dwellers in our back yard Canadian Geese seems almost a slur against our northern neighbors. They're everywhere, including the open fields behind our house, where dozens of them gobble roots and cackle incessantly as they wander out from their bivouac on the sandpit just behind the river--greatly desirable goose real estate. 

Just now the railroad went clattering by, drowning out their endless off-key braying. Birds are supposed to sing, right? Last night a goldfinch did half an opera on our bird feeder, an aria that must have lasted a quarter hour with only occasional pauses to feed, a remarkable performance in a soprano so shrill it might have shattered windows if we didn't have Pellas all around.  

But there's nothing beautiful or moving about the song of the goose.  How's that for a title no one would buy?--The Song of the Goose.  Try Amazon.

Still, when our noisy neighbors take wing, their precision is perfectly military. They even come off the ground in formation, their massive wings toe-to-toe; and it only gets more precise and practiced as they rise. You just can't help but admire they way they land too, wings motionless from a quarter mile out, so proudly disciplined you might think they're just now returning from training a bunch of upstart 737s. 

They're huge, imposing, a force to be reckoned with. When they take wing right over the house, they put us in shadow land. As long as they don't camp out on our yard, they're great neighbors really, if you don't mind the noisy falsettos. Every night we hear them, a gaggle of rookie clarinetists.

In Celtic Christianity the goose is a symbol of the Holy Spirit. I'm serious.  Look it up. Other than the fact that they have wings, beaks, and feathers, there's little to link doves and geese. Doves coo, after all. Like saints, doves eat off the ground in their hair shirt coat of dull gray, abstaining from any possible ostentation. Do they even create fecal matter?  For pity sakes, doves even mourn almost blessedly. And they love well. You see lovebirds and you see doves, right?

A goose as the Holy Spirit? Give me a break.

Flannery O'Connor will forever be associated with peacocks, since she raised them; but Ms. O'Connor, I'm sure, would giggle at the idea of a goose as the Holy Ghost. After all, in many of her stories, the third person of the trinity takes comic disguises, from bulls to bullies, even to mass murderers. You never know exactly how he/she/it is going to show up.

But then, seriously, the Holy Spirit generally gets the really fun jobs, God almighty's comic sidekick. I once met a Japanese man who became a Christian because he'd listen to Christian radio between burglaries. Go figure. An old preacher friend once told me about a woman who became a believer simply because she'd seen an Arizona desert crowned with snow. Once upon a time on the Damascus Road, something goose-like struck a man named Saul flat-out blind.

And they hiss--geese do. They're not cuddly. In an interview on NPR last Sunday morning, an Appalachian pastor named Edwin Lacy claimed that geese make wonderful symbols of the Holy Ghost because they're wilder than doves and occasionally, if you don't behave, they'll come right up and bite your butt.  

I like that too.

Anyway, our neighbors, the ones with the big white chin straps, basically mind their own business. They just make a lot of joyful noise, really, lots of it. Where two or three are gathered, it seems, there's got to be an argument or a concert--there's little difference. Sometimes I wish they weren't such an eternal presence.

But they are.  They're always there. They're always, always there. 

Sunday Morning Meds--The Meek

“But the meek will inherit the land and enjoy great peace.” Psalm 37

Christian piety is, by the standards of traditional orthodoxy, never good enough. “Give all that you have to the poor and follow me,” Jesus told a rich young CEO. The guy, Harvard-trained, turned tail back to the office. Some claim Christ himself was being more than a bit hyperbolic. I think that’s true.

The injunction to righteousness can be crippling, in a way, because the heart-felt desire to do good is, in plain fact, never good enough anyway, as Luther himself observed on bloody knees. We’re saved by grace, not works, and the combined good deeds of all the Boy Scouts of the world won’t make a difference. Thus saith the Good News.

I find lines like this verse disconcerting, declarations of the glories of a piety that’s so grandly unattainable. Maybe it’s all the fault of my Aunt Meek.

Honestly, I knew her only silver-haired. Physically, she was, like all the Schaaps, small and square. As did most of my father’s brothers and sisters, she had an adolescent giggle, a little warble that eventually rose into an off-key falsetto. Sitting in a room of Schaaps was like being surrounded by seagulls. Her name was Marie, but everyone called her “Meek.” Even as a child I associated the biblical word with her character.

The woman got her own Beatitude. And she was my aunt, too.

One other thing about my father’s family—they were all good, good people. A cousin of mine told me that a marriage counselor once told her that her own marital problems were caused by having too good of a father—my uncle. What a curse.

Aunt Meek’s children can probably recount moments when she fumed, when she flashed hot bolts of anger. She could not have been always as soft and gentle as I knew her. But the fact remains, that if Aunt Meek is the model for biblical meek, then I feel crippled by a standard I can never reach. Humble, kind, and sweet, she was among the kindest of human souls.

And what about me? There were times, I admit, when, frustrated by the administration of the college where I worked, I rose to speak in a faculty meeting and roundly accused the brass of lack of leadership. Some lauded the speech; others felt it a violation of whatever defines “community.” But what’s clear to me—as I remember—is that I wasn’t acting in the least like Aunt Meek. I was abrasive and, even arrogant in my desire to lay a glove on honchos. Will I not inherit the land? Are God’s blessings not mine?

Good question. Will peace be the blessing only of those who don’t rock the boat? Does “servanthood” imply servility? I know this much: that speech of mine did not grant me peace. I spent sleepless nights wondering if I’d said too much, gone too far.

The only way I can begin to answer the questions I’m asking is by opposing meekness with its opposite—pride, the kingpin of the Seven Deadlies. If rising temperature and volcanic behavior is created by pride—my desire, my will, my personal sense of injury—then I’ll always be a renter and never inherit God’s bountiful blessings.

The $64,000 question: was it? That’s for me—prayerfully—to determine, I guess. Perhaps I should say, that’s for me, meekly, to determine.

Strange as it may seem, it has to be possible to fight injustice meekly. The phrase is not oxymoronic. It can’t be. The Bible tells me so.

Pride, however, always goeth before the fall. That truth I need to bring home into my heart.

How?—well, meekly, I’m sure.

Roots

Count me among the millions of those who watched the agony of Kunte Kinte a half-century ago and were deeply, deeply moved.  Roots, a story--a novel, really--by Alex Haley, affected me so powerfully that it sent me scurrying to uncover my own. Sometimes people wonder why I care about my own Dutch Reformed background. Alex Haley made me wonder who I was when I really didn't know, and ethnicity--even the lack it--is one ingredient in the identity cocktail. 

[I spent too many years reading term papers not to say anything about Haley's shameful plagiarism in that book; but that's a story for another time.] 

Kunte Kinte's story was very bitter but incredibly wholesome. White folks don't fare well in Alex Haley's portrayal of the lives of his ancestors. Roots was a main stage production that wouldn't let America look past the rising action of its own story. Me either. And even though I'd spent a number of years outside the church back then, it still hurt me to see that sometimes--oftentimes--the madmen spouting scripture did the most savage bloodletting.

That phenomenon is front-and-center in 12 Years a Slave, too, a great film that likewise creates downright beasts out of bible-toting Christians from south of the Mason-Dixon, men as deft with a whip as they are quick with proof texts. When it comes to slavery, the sullied past of evangelical America is haunting.

And it's there again in Sue Monk Kidd's bestseller, Oprah-blessed, The Invention of Wings, a powerfully plot-driven novel of two women, one of whom Ms. Kidd pulls from the pages of real American abolitionist history, Sarah Grimke. Sarah and her sister Angelina turned their back on their family, went north from their home in Charleston, and became marquee lecturers on the abolitionist circuit by forswearing their own slave-holding past. 

Fascinatingly, Ms. Kidd's novel creates something of a twin character, a slave girl named Hetty or "Handful," who is all of that. Hetty's mother teaches her that the only way to live with slavery is to keep a live portion of yourself in all-out revolt, a spitfire revolt that doesn't kill you--because it can--but maintains the fire of her own authentic human spirit.

The villians of The Invention of Wings are evangelical Christians like the Grimke's mother, who requires her slaves attend a Sunday School she serves up using a slaves-and-masters curriculum designed to perpetuate servitude. It's awful--not the book, but once more having to realize that men and women used the Bible to justify a way of life that would not have existed if it hadn't been fueled on blood.

Just once, I'd like to read a book about good Christian slave-holders. Did they exist? I'd like to see a movie that told stories about Bible-believers who bought into both Jesus and slavery, who didn't lock people in leg irons cast from their own damned fire and brimstone. There had to be some like that, don't you think? I have to think so.



A book some might call "the greatest American novel" doesn't have any either. When Huck Finn finally decides that staying with the slave Jim as Jim makes a break for freedom, he knows, inside and out, that his decision to keep going down the river, to not turn Jim in, is not only a crime in the South he's leaving behind, but, much worse--a sin. 

And that's why little Huck utters the most famous line in all of American literature:  "All right then, I'll go to hell." 

The book my parents read from when I was a boy, the Bible specifically designated for kids, an early version of Catharine F. Vos's The Children's Story Bible, made it perfectly and memorably clear that that son of Noah named Ham got himself cursed for laughing at his soused father and then went south in the family's diaspora, to Africa, where his people would live and prosper as servants of the other brothers. Slavery was that clear, that biblical.

I put out a note to faculty years ago, just to see if anyone had that fat old blue book around somewhere, and I found one. I photocopied the passage and, as long as I taught Huck Finn I brought that passage up in class to college students who seemed nowhere near as shocked as I had been at the way I'd been reared. It was a passage I remembered hearing as a boy, a biblical interpretation just as dangerous as anything those Southern Christian bigots could spout. 

It was in me too somewhere, this despicable theology of race and faith. 

Dutch immigrants to this country, I'm told, deliberately steered away from the American south in the immigration wave that populated west Michigan, southeast Wisconsin, and south central Iowa before the Civil War. Despite their own slave-trading past, those wooden shoes wanted no part of an institution that America held onto longer than most in the Western world because it clearly empowered the American South. 

A century later in a small town in Wisconsin, when the Schaap family finished supper, my father would grab our well-worn copy The Children's Story Bible and read a story or two to us kids, our own family altar.

I never had a slave, never owned a whip; but, as a boy, I knew something about slaves because I knew the story of Noah and his sons, and where specifically one the boys, that one named Ham, had gone, where he went and what he did and why it was he served us.

That's what I was told.

Amache on the Santa Fe Trail

There's really little to see but row after row after row of foundations, like this one, a procession of perfectly rectangular shapes angling down a slope toward what once was the front door of the Amache Relocation Camp. If you get there in a week or two, the place will still be festooned with wildflowers that put a smiley face on the whole place.

Check it out.

It's really much, much bigger than you can imagine, but then it had to be, holding as many as 10,000 Japanese-Americans, Japanese we thought--the rest of us--far too vulnerable to their own inborn nationalism to side with the U.S. of A., during World War II.  Good night, some still spoke Japanese?

So we built camps like this one, ten of them, in addition to transforming race tracks and other plots of ground elsewhere; and we filled them with Japanese-Americans.

One can only imagine how much distrust, how much hate was created by the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; but if you stand on the broad ground of Amache Relocation Center, just outside of Granada, Colorado, some morning, and look up and down the rows of foundations, you can still feel some animosity, something of the hate that must have arisen.

I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. I don't mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd 'em up, pack 'em off and give 'em the inside room in the badlands... Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.

So wrote newspaper columnist Henry McLemore.

There were other reasons as well, selfish reasons.

We're charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons. We do. It's a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown men. They came into this valley to work, and they stayed to take over... If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we'd never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we do not want them back when the war ends, either.

That's what the head of a California agricultural association told the Saturday Evening Post is 1942.

There were 10,000 people here, in hundreds of rudely constructed barracks, ten thousand men and women and kids who had other lives up and down the west coast, all of them herded to places like this because of racial hatred and deep fear.

Just about everything is gone now, so many years later, but the absence of people and places have not emptied the place of voices, especially if you're alone. Once the place was a city. Once thousands crowded into its mess halls, worked its gardens, created its newspaper, maintained a place that became, for better or for worse, home for years. Babies were born, people died right here.

To call Amache a concentration camp is going too far. Amache wasn't an American Bergen-Belzen, nor anything close to the death factory at Auschwitz. The men who poured the cement for the endless foundations that sit awkwardly in the prairie grass at Ameche these days were not creating a death camp. The world knows about death camps.

But the images are stunningly reminiscent.

Because once upon a time, just outside of a tiny little town called Granada, Colorado, 10,000 people were surrounded by a fence and watched closely by armed guards in towers just like this one. In 1942, after a day that has, as Roosevelt said, lived in infamy, hate grew from the flames of Pearl Harbor, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans, most of them second and third generation, were herded up to places like this, where they bunked with dozens of others in habitation we still call "barracks," dozens and dozens and dozens of barracks.



There's a cemetery at Amache, a few stones set there by parents with broken hearts, parents who laid to rest their children. But there's also a small stone monument that celebrates the gift camp residents gave to a country who thought they might be traitors.

It's hard to imagine, but it's true--31 residents of Amache camp volunteered for military service and gave their lives to the country that took them from their homes and marched them to camp outside a little Colorado prairie town. The enlisted to fight for a country who opened a fenced gate, showed them their assigned barracks, told them where to sleep, then left, shut and locked the gate behind them, and made sure the men in the towers were armed and ready lest there be some sort of insurrection.

But then, ironies abound at Amache camp, where today there are no more people, only spirits, spirits abounding. I don't know Japanese funeral rites, but you may have noticed the coins on the grave of the child, above, as well as the shape of the decorative cemetery sculpture, perfectly and dynamically Japanese, as if asserting self-hood and beloved identity.

And there's an apple tree right there in the graveyard, small and well-kept, a tree that right now is bearing apples in the middle of all that emptiness, in the place where the camp's dead are buried and its heroes celebrated. Somehow, all alone that morning, I couldn't help thinking that that tree--like the wildflowers--was a blessing.

Because, Lord knows, it's easy to be jaded when you stand out there on the empty plains in a place where once there was a city of 10,000, the tenth biggest city in Colorado, a city that was, in fact, a prison. When you stand out there alone, it's not difficult to confuse Amache and Dachau.

Just imagine, this endless procession of empty foundations, is a hop, skip, and a jump from what once was the most famous highway in America, the Santa Fe Trail, the domain of Kit Carson and a host of other iconic Western heroes. What could be more American than "the way west"?

And there it is.  There's Amache.

It's hard to forget.