Plantation Odyssey, a Short Novel by Stan Rice, part three. Payback Time!

When Odysseus returned to his mansion on the island of Ithaca in Homer’s Odyssey, he found it besieged by the leading men of Ithaca, each of whom wanted Penelope to choose him as her husband. Penelope, besides being disgusted by them, still believed Odysseus would return. Then he did. Then what? Just what you would expect from a two-thousand year old story: Odysseus kills all of the men and reunites with Penelope. And this is what happens in Stan Rice’s novel Plantation Odyssey as well.

 

The local plantation owners (or former owners, as the Union army had displaced them) who lived around the plantation where Penelope (Penny) and Ulysses had been slaves insisted that Penny would choose one of them as her husband and therefore as the owner of the estate. They thought she would choose the one with the best barbecue. Then Ulysses returns disguised as her former servant Minerva (Minnie).  It is so difficult for Ulysses to keep his disguise as Minnie a secret. Minnie just happens to know as much botany as the lost Ulysses did. S/he and Penny put poisonous mushrooms in the barbecue. While the men are sick from toadstool poison, Minnie (who has turned back into Ulysses) kills all of them, including the one decent white man, whom they offered a chance to live but he stayed with his social peers.

Rice’s motivation in this short novel is very clear. He is fantasizing about payback for oppression. Rice is not Black, but (as indicated by his science book Forgotten Landscapes, he is Cherokee, and his science book reflects a clear anger at what whites have done to Native Americans. He apparently identifies with Blacks as well in this novel.

Rice seems to encourage people of color to be resentful of whites. While some readers might think this is not helpful, in this time in which racial tensions are flaring, I agree with the author that the resentment of people of color against white suppression throughout history and even today is justified and has a place in modern literature. We need to hold the white race accountable for what we have done in the past. Donald Trump’s blasts against Juneteenth and Harriet Tubman show that conservatives would still like to suppress white America’s admission of slavery in our history.

I very much doubt that Rice’s novel, even though it celebrates violence against slave owners in the Civil War, will lead to any violence, or even protests, on the part of Blacks which would not have occurred anyway.

Plantation Odyssey, a Short Novel by Stan Rice, part two. Timeless Adventures

This novel by Stan Rice, about the adventures of a slave boy named Ulysses, shows the hellish unfairness of black slavery in what became the Confederacy.

But Plantation Odyssey is closely modeled after Homer’s Odyssey. If you know nothing about Homer’s epic poem, you will be lost in reading this novel. Here is a parallel list of the events in the original and new Odyssey.

• As the Greek Odysseus went home, he first fell among the drug-addled Lotus Eaters. The slave Ulysses stayed with a dirty man who ate only cattails from a swamp.
• Both Odysseus and Ulysses encountered a Cyclops, a monster with one eye, who raised sheep and ate humans.
• Odysseus encountered the enchantingly beautiful Circe, beloved of birds and animals. Ulysses encountered Sissy and romped with her on her bed of moss. Rice combines Circe with the country song Wolverton Mountain.
• Odysseus visits hell, where he talks with dead heroes including Achilles. He has to offer them a bowl of blood before they will talk. Ulysses the slave visits hell, which is a gigantic fleshpot of endless struggle, where he meets his former owners who are now dead. After Ulysses offers them whiskey (which would you rather have, whiskey or blood?), they tell him how to find the path back to the plantation.
• Both Odysseus and Ulysses are trapped by a sex goddess named Calypso until they convince her they are serious about going home to their old wives.
• Odysseus is enchanted by the irresistible singing of the Sirens, then is shipwrecked, and rescued by women, including Nausicäa. Ulysses hears the beautiful singing of a chorus of Cherokees hidden in a swamp.
• Odysseus and Ulysses are both transformed into forms that can be recognized only by close observation: Odysseus into an old man and Ulysses into a Black woman.

In the next essay, what happens when Ulysses returns to the plantation!

Plantation Odyssey, A Short Novel by Stan Rice, part one

This novel by Stan Rice, about the adventures of a slave boy named Ulysses, shows the hellish unfairness of black slavery in what became the Confederacy. So many depressing things can be and have been written about slavery. But Rice’s novel is very specific: slavery prevented slaves, as humans, from using their talents, even to the benefit of their owners. This is a theme that frequently shows up, as in Horse and March, in novels by Geraldine Brooks.

 

 

In exploring this theme, Rice is able to use a lot of humor. The delightful framework is about Frank Hicks, a white man, and Alberta Hicks (Bert; a black woman) who were lovers in rural Oklahoma in the early twentieth century, a time and place where interracial love was kept secret when it happened at all.

The main character in Plantation Odyssey is a slave, Ulysses, who was very smart, and trained himself to be a botanist (an image inspired, no doubt, by George Washington Carver, who lived later). Ulysses got a lot of help from the old white woman who owned the plantation, something that perhaps never actually happened. She wants Ulysses to use his botanical knowledge to increase yields on the plantation. Penelope is also a slave on the plantation, but she is seven-eighths white. Of course, she and Ulysses fall in love.

But the Heir Apparent (the old woman’s son) is not at all pleased that his mother has chosen Penelope, not his own white daughter, to inherit the plantation. But Penelope is also his daughter. But because she has a drop of black blood, she is ineligible to be an heiress in the Old South. The Heir Apparent plans to not only kill Penelope and Ulysses but even his own wayward brother, who has connections to the North. The Heir Apparent kidnapped Penelope as she fled with Ulysses. Ulysses escaped to the North to work with the very real, abolitionist Harvard botanist Asa Gray.

For a young Black botanist in the middle of the nineteenth century, there could hardly be anything better than working with Asa Gray. But, like Odysseus (Ulysses) in Homer’s Odyssey after winning the Trojan War, there was no place like home. He wanted to go back to his loving wife named, of course, Penelope. I would not recommend reading this novel if you have no idea what happens in Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey. Also, please don’t get it mixed up with James Joyce’s Ulysses. Both Ulysseses want to go home even though both Penelopes were getting old and both Ulysseses had almost boundless sexual opportunities by not going home. What a story! No wonder it has persisted two thousand years! Epic stories have contributed to the social evolution of our species; humanity is inconceivable without them.

In the next essay, I will tell about how the slave Ulysses, just like the Greek hero Odysseus, encountered an enchanted path of danger and promise as they went home.

The Incredible Burden of White Guilt

Every human being who has ever lived (except, Christians claim, Jesus) has sinned. We all know this is true, even though we cannot easily define sin. Every culture group, race, and country consists of people all of whom have sinned, many of them in a spectacularly evil fashion. There is no group from which we cannot find a long list of atrocities, from prehistory to the present.

But whites have committed atrocities way out of proportion to their numerical importance in human history, and in human culture today. The example I will examine now is slavery. Every cultural group has had slaves, primarily from among captives from other social groups. But whites have had more slaves, treated them worse, and continue to honor the tradition of slavery, more than any other group.

Take, for example, black slavery in the southern colonies, later the southern states. (These thoughts have been inspired by reading Geraldine Brooks’s novel Horse.) The main reason that southern whites started buying black slaves was that they had killed most of the Native American slaves. Native slaves were cheaper, but they were mostly dead by about the year 1600. So the whites bought slaves from Africa who were captured from their tribes and transported as cheaply as possible (tied up in their own filth in slave ships) to the South. The shrewd slave traders took into their calculations that many of their captives would die while on board.

The Southerners treated their slaves much more cruelly than was necessary or even profitable. The slaveowner men would force not just work but also sex on their slaves. I remember an exhibit of slave artifacts in a museum in Tulsa (which is the reddest red state, but museums everywhere tend to be progressive) that showed a bill of sale for slaves. A 45-year-old man went for about $50, while a seventeen-year-old girl went for $600. What did the girl have that made her twelve times as valuable? Sexuality, that’s what. Not only was it legal rape, but it was the way that plantation owners could keep up their slave populations without having to import more of them, which was theoretically illegal after 1808.

The owners would force the slaves to do whatever they chose, regardless of the strengths and talents of the slaves. In Brooks’s novel, a very skillful slave horse trainer was forced to work in the fields while inept white trainers allowed a champion racehorse to be injured. If slaves were an investment, southern white enjoyed abusing their investments in a stupid fashion. Few slave owners would permit slaves to learn to read and write; illiterate whites would look down upon even the free blacks who could read.

Not only that, but the white slave owners would take credit for any innovations or improvements in land and property that the slaves came up with.

In some cases, southern whites were nearly crazy with their lust for cruelty. A prime example was the Confederate terrorist William Quantrill, who exulted in cruelty not only against blacks but against any whites he suspected of not being racist enough. He is one of the characters in Brooks’s novel.

Whites would find or create opportunities to insult and injure even free blacks, that is, the few that were allowed to purchase their freedom. Any black person could be arrested and detained until their status as a free black could be established. This may sound uncomfortably like ICE detaining anyone they suspect of being in America illegally, but at least ICE once in a while allows claims of legitimate presence in America to be investigated.

Slaves were considered property of their white owners, but they treated their slaves worse than they would have treated any of their other property, whether mules or saddles. In some cases, they enjoyed torturing their slaves.

White racists try to use the imperfection of blacks as an excuse for past slavery and ongoing cruelty. A vendor of Confederate flags, at a roadside market in Oklahoma, told me that it was the blacks who began enslaving other blacks, that’s how the slave trade got started. But who was the market? When I told him that what he was doing was offensive, he called the sheriff, but I got away before being arrested. No, this was not back in the 1960s. This was about 2015.

I am Cherokee. Some of my ancestors owned slaves. But our collective Native guilt is far less than that of southern whites.

What about northern whites in America? Some northern whites, and some Europeans, profited from black slavery, but the entire southern American culture was based upon it.

I did not contribute to any of this. I am not responsible for the sins of my ancestors. But part of my white privilege has resulted from the oppressions of the past. Maybe nothing can be done about it now, but when I look a person of color in the eye I feel a level of guilt that goes beyond the calculus of legal liability. I cannot simply pretend that it is not there.

White guilt is a heavy burden, but the only people who feel it are those who, like myself, are trying very hard to live in a redemptive fashion and contribute to a fair and just society. I love people of color (with a few individual exceptions) even if they do not, and cannot, know it. In contrast, racists do not feel any guilt.

The burden of white guilt continues today. In Brooks’s novel, the twenty-first-century black protagonist gets shot by police who assumed, at a glance, that he was a criminal. His white friend was very upset by this, but his black friends said he should have expected it. If a black man sees police, he should just assume that he is likely to be shot. I hate to admit that this is true.

The black protagonist from the nineteenth century in Brooks’s novel chose to live in Canada, and explained why: even after emancipation, he could feel white hatred all around him.

I live in France. I am embarrassed to be an American right now, with unabashed racists in charge of the country of which I am a citizen. I am always instantly ready with an apology on behalf of my country. What can I say to the Lebanese woman in my French language class, whose cousin was just killed by an Israeli, or American, bomb? I can see in her eyes that she does not blame me, but I have to go further and assure her of my sympathy, and that I do not support Trump’s war, nor was I or American citizens in general consulted before He chose to start it as if He is God who can decide everyone’s fate.

President Trump's Columbus Day Proclamation

President Trump has proclaimed that on Columbus Day, 2025, Americans should honor Christopher Columbus as “the original American hero, a giant of Western civilization, and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the earth.” 

What followed Columbus’s encounter with America in 1492 was a legacy, not of “faith, courage, perseverance, and virtue” but of conquest, disease, and slavery. While I will admit that Columbus probably did not intend the entire Native population of two continents to be slaughtered and enslaved, and all their resources grabbed by force, he certainly began the process. While we may not necessarily condemn Columbus, neither should we revere him. He was NOT the original American hero, as if the indigenous people who were already in America did not even exist—there is no mention of them in Trump’s proclamation.

To listen to Trump, you would get the impression that the white domination over Native America was a completely good thing. This is false, as I explained in my recent book Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-ColumbianNorth America and What We Can Learn from It. My book is not a vicious liberal attack on Columbus, but a scientific evaluation of what America was like before Columbus and what happened after him.

 

 

Native American history has, in the popular mind, largely been erased. Most Americans know nothing about Native Americans, other than as dark inconvenient people who stood in the way of white progress, and continue to do so today, as explained in detail in Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America.

We had been making progress so that even in many red states the Monday nearest to October 12 was recognized either as Columbus Day or Indigenous People’s Day. Under Trump, we have gone back to exclusively the white version. In this as in many other ways, Trump is leading us fearlessly into the twentieth century.

If you agree with Trump that Columbus was inspired completely by the desire to “spread the gospel of Jesus Christ to distant lands”; that evangelism consists of killing some of the people who had not yet heard about Jesus, enslaving others, and taking their land, then you are welcome to join President Trump in celebrating Columbus. And you should get out your guns and go on an evangelistic expedition into whatever hotspots of anti-Christianity you might choose.

Gutenberg and Printing: A View from Strasbourg

 Strasbourg, France, where I now live, is justly proud of Johannes Gutenberg (about 1406-1468), who invented the printing press. He was born in Mainz, nearby in what is now Germany, and returned to it later, but his crucial first steps in developing the printing press were taken in Strasbourg, where a statue and a plaza commemorate him. I have posted a YouTube video, from Strasbourg, France, about Gutenberg.

One would think that Gutenberg’s idea for a printing press would have been a flash of insight that everyone would have immediately appreciated. But he did his initial work as a sideline and without funding from other people, as far as we know. His main work seems to have been as a goldsmith, polishing gems, and making mirrors. He got his idea for the printing press from another kind of press: the wine-press, which removed juice from grapes. Perhaps if he had just stuck to his polishing and mirrors, or had gone into the wine-press business, he might have had fewer financial setbacks. At least, the return on investment was very slow. His few major investors sued him. But, if Gutenberg had not persisted, the world would not have had what is now widely considered one of its most important inventions.

As a result of the printing press, ideas could now be publicized through a large number of copies, rather than copied by hand or by meticulous engravings that were affordable only for illustrations. Gutenberg developed an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that could be melted and re-used. The greater number of copies allowed the written ideas to spread more widely and gain a recognition that they would not otherwise have had, or had only after a long delay.

 

Some examples of such ideas, themselves changing the course of history, are depicted on panels on the Gutenberg monument. One of them shows the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, with a Gutenberg press squarely and symbolically in the middle of the Continental Congress. Copies of the Declaration then spread around the world, where they stirred the ideas of liberty and democracy more than any handwritten document could have done.

Another example is the idea of emancipation of slaves and the end of the institution of slavery. Were it not for the printing press, relatively few people would have been aware of how cruel a system slavery was. Anti-slavery documents stirred the hearts of good people and embarrassed those who owned or profited from slavery. This plaque graphically depicts the cruelty of slavery.

 

Another example is education. The ideas and works of all kinds of intellectuals, from Descartes to Kant to Mozart to Milton to Newton, might have been lost had it not been for the printing press making their creations widely available. As the plaque shows, it was almost entirely white male creators who benefited from this, but the spread of knowledge was a process which, once started, could not be restrained.

Who knows what great ideas might be lost even today because, even if published, go unnoticed. How much worse it would be had there been no way to publish them. This shows the important role that chance plays in evolutionary adaptation (in this case, cultural evolution).

Evolutionary Altruism and Human Genealogies

This is a letter I mailed to Tiya Miles, a Harvard professor, minority activist, and novelist, regarding her most recent novel, Cherokee Rose. I wrote on paper to her academic address, since she must be flooded with emails.

Dear Tiya Miles,

My name is Stan Rice. I am an emeritus professor of biology at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. I am the author of five popular science books about evolution, botany, and scientific thinking. I have also had a long scholarly interest in Cherokee history, due to my tribal membership, but I have no credentials in Cherokee or Native studies. I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed reading your novel, Cherokee Rose. I immediately recognized the James Vann character. It is a story that needed to be told.

The irresistible lure of family history, of mixed racial ancestry, has recently been an important part of my life as it was for one of your main characters, Jinx, and I assume for you also. Like Jinx, my interest in Native ancestry exploded long after the death of the last person who knew much about it, my mother. I remembered and wrote down everything my mother told me about our family’s past, but I did not seek further information from her. She was not interested in asking her Cherokee father about our family history either. She and all her siblings, long after the deaths of my Cherokee grandfather (the last one to speak Cherokee) and white grandmother, wished that they had asked them about everything they knew. I have reconstructed an historical framework and filled in the rest with imagination. As with you and Jinx, my ancestry is a major part of my identity today.

Human interest in ancestry is somewhat hard to explain from my scientific point of view. My evolution books deal with the evolution of altruism. My Ph.D. advisor was on the faculty of Harvard University, your institution. Among evolutionary biologists, altruism extends in primarily one direction, forward—an animal helping its offspring and indirect descendants—and is proportional to the degree of genetic relatedness. Parents care about offspring because they have a genetic relatedness of one-half, and their nieces and nephews because they have a genetic relatedness of one-fourth. Against this background, why should anyone care about ancestors? My Cherokee genes are 17/256, just a smidgin’ over one-sixteenth. Which is, biologically, nothing. My fascination with the story of Cherokee experiences, and the nearly universal interest in genealogies, are inexplicable from the biological viewpoint. This is one reason, of many, that I not only liked your novel but strongly identified with Jinx.

I spent my life ignoring the question of Cherokee freedmen. But I know firsthand about Cherokee hostility toward Blacks. Both sides of my family, especially the Cherokee side, was strongly racist toward Blacks. I was fortunate to have escaped this influence, as far as I am aware. I think this attitude is changing in the Cherokee tribe. I heard Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., whom you seem to have met, give a presentation at a little rural library in Oklahoma (before I moved to France). He had just discovered that one of his ancestors was a freedman. His message was that Cherokees need to face up to the fact that some of our ancestors were slave owners. (Mr. Hoskin is the kind of positive and empathetic leader our tribe has not had since Chief Wilma Mankiller.) My sixth great grandmother, Nancy Ward, one of the most famous Cherokees in history, was apparently the first Cherokee to own slaves. As I understand, she was a little unclear on the Southern concept of slavery; she did not abuse her slaves or treat them as chattel, but as employees who could not quit their jobs. Which does not alter the facts of the case. For me, the plot of your novel (about freedmen) is a personal one.

I have written, separately, to your assistant (as per your website request) to ask if you might be interested in writing a jacket endorsement of my upcoming book, Forgotten Landscapes, about the Native American transformation of the “wild” landscape of North America. I hope this request is forwarded to you. But even if you do not have time to look at my book, I wanted you to know that I, as an informed reader, appreciated your novel not just because of its superior fictional qualities but from a personal space in my heart.

Natural Selection and Slavery

I have been reading the book about runaway slaves by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger. It is an overwhelming book because it contains literally hundreds of stories of runaway slaves in nineteenth century America, with names and whatever scant details may be available from the historical record. The authors attempt some generalizations, but it is very clear that each slave’s story was individual and unique. And the documented brutalities are unspeakably painful.  I considered myself knowledgeable about American history, but this book took my breath away. No wonder the late John Hope Franklin is so famous among scholars and non-scholarly readers alike. This is the painting by Thomas Moran, who lived during this time, which is in the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, where I live, and that was on the cover of the book.

And here is a photo of John Hope Franklin.

As a biologist specializing in writing and educating about evolution, I noticed a generalization that even the late great John Hope Franklin did not, and it has directly to do with evolution by means of natural selection.

Slaveowners and hunters believed passionately that slaves, and black people in general, were inferior in intelligence. Despite this, the racist whites of the South did their best to subject their slaves—and even free blacks, whom they sometimes kidnapped—to deprivations that were clearly intended to keep them physically and mentally inferior. In particular, they seldom allowed their slaves to learn to read and write (a literate slave could write out documentation that said they were free, for example), or to learn simple arithmetic, or to learn to read a map (which could help them to escape, if they should happen to get hold of a map).

Despite this, the runaway slaves proved themselves to be extremely intelligent and clever. As a matter of fact, the deprivations forced upon them by the whites selected for the most intelligent and clever slaves. The only way a slave could be successful was by outplaying their white overlords at their own game. One example that sticks in my mind is the slave who, on his escape route, asked a white train operator which train went to Raleigh. The slave knew that word would soon get around about his escape, and with his description. Asking the train operator how to get to Raleigh was a trick. The slave had no intention of going to Raleigh, but his question would mislead his pursuers into looking for him in that direction. Clever!

That is, the very ways in which whites oppressed slaves were in fact an evolutionary pressure leading to greater intelligence, over the generations, in the slave populations. Not only were black people equally intelligent to start with, but the evil efforts of the whites pushed black populations into even greater intelligence.

It doesn’t take any intelligence to be cruel or to be an oppressor. It takes intelligence to escape oppression. To this day, we are left with the image of stupid racists trying to belittle intelligent minorities.

January 6 and the Legacies of Slavery

Can you believe it, I have only now read Uncle Tom’s Cabin? This was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, which began serialization in 1851, about the many ways that black slaves suffered in a country that was still the United States. It is a novel that is today not taken seriously enough, and most of the issues that the book raised remain unresolved. Among the modern consequences of slavery was the domestic terrorism of January 6, 2021.

It is common now for readers to look down upon Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And it is true that this novel could not be published today in its current form. But it played an important role in American history at that time. Stowe pointed out many things that even most northerners did not know about slavery, for example, that slaveowners could abuse their slaves, with no limits, because slaves were property, not people. Few slaveowners killed their slaves, but for those that did, there was no legal consequence. For example, in 1847, a slave owner’s wife murdered two female slaves by bashing their heads in. She was brought to trial. The prosecution, representing the state of South Carolina, called it murder. The defense called it “ordinary domestic discipline.” The judge found in favor of the defense. This was one brief shining moment where slaves might have been considered human beings, and the moment passed.

Slaveowners could break up slave families and sell husbands, wives, and children separately. In fact, there was no such thing as marriage for slaves; slaveowners could dissolve slave marriages and force new ones, just like breeding livestock. Matter of fact, most Americans probably do not know these things even today. Stowe’s mission was to shock America into caring about the slaves and stopping the institution itself. All of the novel’s almost insufferable sentimentality had a direct purpose.

In addition, the title character, Uncle Tom, was completely subservient to his white masters and prayed constantly for their redemption from sin. This is not the image of slavery that we want to believe. We want to believe that slaves were proudly angry at their masters. And most of them probably were, as documented in the writings of historian John Hope Franklin. Slaves like Uncle Tom were rare. Personally, I prefer the slaves who fought back, like Nat Turner. But remember that there were other slaves in this novel who were not so subservient. The way Cassy manipulated Simon Legree was brilliant and heroic. You may pity Uncle Tom, but the way Eliza crossed the frozen Ohio River was worthy of a superhero.

Perhaps most of all, the issues raised by Uncle Tom’s Cabin were not resolved by the end of the Civil War, nor have they yet been. Oppression did not go away, and still has not.

Through most of the history of the United States, the racist South has gotten everything their way, by threat of force against the North. Here is my list:

• When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he included a paragraph against slavery. When someone pointed out Jefferson’s hypocrisy as a slaveowner, Jefferson said that he intended to free his slaves. The southern colonies forced the removal of this paragraph, thus giving birth to a United States in which it was legal to own slaves.
• Slaves were not given rights as citizens or even as people, but the Southern states insisted that slaves be counted in the census as three-fifths of a person, thus giving the Southern states a bigger representation in Congress than they would have otherwise had, when the Constitution was ratified.
• For the Southern economy, thus for the American economy, slavery was essential. The economy simply could not have functioned without the use of slave labor, in two ways. First, the slaves worked for free on the plantations themselves. Second, their owners hired them out to work in factories and shops, then kept the wages that the factory and shop owners paid to the slaves.
• This amounted to a big pot of money, without which the South would have gone bankrupt. And it was not just slavery that was essential; it was slaves as an expendable resource that was necessary. The slaves on the southern plantations, “down the river,” lived only a few years before they were worked or beaten to death. Had the downriver slaves lived full lives, however miserable, the slave market would have dried up.
• The northerners did not own slaves, but they were required (by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850) to turn in any fugitive slaves that they knew about, and certainly not to harbor any fugitive slaves. This is the reason that the Underground Railroad took slaves to Canada, not just to the North. The southern love of slavery forced the north to support slavery.
• When the South lost the Civil War, their economy was devastated. But they did not lose all of their money. The fortunes previously made, and which escaped battlefield destruction, were kept. This was the foundation of Southern corporations and banks. Today, many corporations and banks descended from those of the postwar South remain wealthy and have a major role in the modern American economy, because of the money they got from slave labor.
• Largely because of the direct influence of Southern states, justice has not yet been done regarding the lynchings of black people (in both the North and South) or the Tulsa Race Massacre. Even as late as the centennial of the Massacre, in 2021, most Americans (even me, a Tulsa resident) had not even heard about the Tulsa Race Massacre. Southerners have supported a conspiracy of silence about our recent past affliction of black people.

The flag of the Old Confederacy still flies in America, mostly in the South, and was the direct inspiration for attacks on modern democracy, such as the January 6 attack on the Capitol exactly two years ago today.

America remains tarnished by the legacy of slavery.

"The Bible says..." about Slavery

Fundamentalist Christians universally claim, “The Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it.” But this statement is, even from a literalistic view of the Bible, incorrect. What they really mean is, “The Bible says it, I interpret it, and that settles it.” The fundamentalist, therefore, puts Himself or Herself blasphemously into the line of authority. They expect us to believe their interpretation as if it were the very words of God. Literalist Bible believers should not do this. Many of them do, which is why I turn away whenever I hear them preaching.

Examples abound and I have written about many of them, both here (about their attacks on science) and in my religion blog. But the example I am thinking of now is slavery; in particular, black slavery before the Civil War in the United States. I have just finished reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, the novel that, according to Lincoln, was one of the major causes of the Civil War. In addition, Harriet Beecher Stowe was the brother of Henry Ward Beecher, a famous preacher who stirred up great audiences in the north, and in England, against slavery. Some historians have said that Henry Ward Beecher’s message was an important reason that England supported the north instead of the south, which was a profitable source of cotton, sugar, etc. The southern states had ample reason to hate both of the Beechers.

This novel was written in the hortatory, preachy style found in so many novels of that period. Some of my liberal friends will roll their eyes at it. But it was the novel that captured the attention of most Americans to show that slavery was a complex system of evil that pervaded the economy. This was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s challenge: So, you don’t own slaves? Fine. But you may have invested in businesses that get their money from slavery. And your national laws require you to betray runaway slaves to federal authorities. Slavery was an evil deeply intertwined with the American economy. Many northerners, who could not own their own slaves, supported policies that maintained slavery in the south. These people, Stowe made it clear, were as cruel in their thinking as the slave owners themselves, even the slave catchers.

Many people think that the federal government could not have stopped slavery. The constitution did not delegate that authority to the federal government. It was a state’s right to have, or not have, slavery. This is stupid and evil. Of course the federal government could have done it, via the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution. That is, unless slave owners and sellers could prove that slaves did not cross state lines. As soon as a slave was transported from, say, Alabama into Georgia, the feds could have said, federal anti-slavery laws now apply.

And now consider how slavery relates to fundamentalism. The Golden Rule, as stated in the New Testament, is do unto others as you would have them do unto you. You wouldn’t want someone to whip you, or to steal your wages, or to take your child or wife or husband from you; so don’t do that to anyone else. Seems pretty clear.

But antebellum fundamentalists had some contorted arguments that they considered to be absolutely Biblical. Stowe mentions three, and I have added a fourth:

• One is that Paul told the escaped slave Onesimus to return to his owner, Philemon. This is explained in the Book of Philemon. Never heard of it? Prepare to be surprised.
• Another is, in Genesis, God said, “Cursed be Canaan,” and said his descendants, whom the fundamentalist preacher in the novel said were African, would be slaves.
• Paul also told Christians to be content in whatever state they find themselves. The Southern preachers used this to tell slaves that God wants them to be contented with being slaves.
• Finally, some Biblical scholars came up with a theory that the black race was not really human and found some way or other to justify it with the Bible. This one was not in the novel. But I have known people, within recent decades, who believed this. Of course, this would mean that the black race had to be housed with the animals on the Ark. Fundamentalists don’t have an answer to this. As an evolutionary biologist, I am particularly bothered by this argument, which contradicts all we know about human biology.

To fundamentalist preachers in the antebellum South, these fragile arguments were enough to negate the Golden Rule.

Yes, twisting scripture to make it say what you wish, in utter contradiction to what the God of Love would want, has a long history within fundamentalism. It continues today. I will have more to say about this very soon.

Fourth of July, Celebrating What? Part one.

Celebrating white supremacy, that’s what. Count me out.

Supposedly, slavery and the wars of genocide against Native Americans were over in the nineteenth century. Lincoln declared slavery to be illegal in 1863, even though the slaves in Texas were not told about it until “Juneteenth” in 1865. And, officially, the last massacre of Natives by whites in America was at Wounded Knee in 1890.

But, even with the official ending of slavery and of Native massacres, the slaughter continued in other forms. You could even say that the peak year was 1921, and the best place in the world to be a white supremacist was near Tulsa, Oklahoma, where I live. I am writing to you as an almost-white man in Tulsa in 2020.

The year 1921 was when the Tulsa Race Massacre took place, in which whites killed blacks with a ferocity and determination that they would never have used against slaves. The 1920’s were also the peak of lynching, of which Tulsa was a local capital. I will say nothing more about this.

But 1921 was also the official start of the Osage Murders just west of Tulsa. The Osages were the richest people in the world at that time. The U.S. government had forced them to live in dry, rocky hills that were considered to be of no value. But the Osages managed to keep, in writing, their control over the mineral (including oil) rights to their lands. When it was discovered that the Osage Reservation had the richest oil reserves in America, the Osages became very wealthy. They even had white servants. But then white men began killing Osage Natives, after marrying into their families in order to get control of their mineral rights.

The most famous example was five Osage sisters, who died one by one (by gunshot or poisoning) until only one remained, as explained by David Grann in Killers of the Flower Moon, one of the most gripping books I have ever read. The white murderers killed their own Osage family members. This started in 1921. By 1926, the murderers (led by the richest white man in Osage County, William Hale) had been identified and the case appeared to be closed. This photo is of the surviving Osage sister, Molly Burkhardt.

But Grann’s book also presented evidence that there were a lot of other deaths that were never recognized as murders. The murders orchestrated by William Hale were simply the most spectacular, culminating in blowing up a house with dynamite. But there were many other cases in which white courts appointed white guardians for Osages, who were considered incompetent to handle their own affairs; and in scores of cases, the Osage wards died at a much higher rate than the general population. These were probably poisonings.

These were not just isolated instances of bad white people. They were indicators of a widespread and murderous hostility. The Osage Murders were not simply a few evil white men. The Oklahoma soil is drenched with the blood that whites have shed from black and Native victims.

(In case you have heard of Osage County before, let me tell you where. Tracy Letts’s stage play about the incredibly dysfunctional Okie family was August: Osage County.)

It wasn’t just the Osages. My own tribe, the Cherokees, had our land allotments taken away from us by white judges and swindlers. This included by grandfather’s land. Today, hardly any Cherokees have their original land allotments. I have always borne resentment toward the governments of the United States and of Oklahoma ever since I learned this aspect of my family history.

But, at least, the Cherokee land grab was peaceful. It happened in courtrooms and bank boardrooms, and did not involve murders, as it did with the Osages. Or, at least, that is what I always thought, until I read Grann’s book.

Grann describes, among many other things that whites did to the Osages, cases in which doctors would pretend to treat Osages for ailments by giving them injections they claimed were insulin but turned out to be poison. Murders by poison were undoubtedly much more common than by more violent means. Usually, no inquest was made. In some cases, the victims died of “consumption.”

“Consumption” is tuberculosis, or TB. In the early twentieth century, lots of people had TB. One of them was my grandfather’s brother William. He died at a sanatorium in 1917. My family has always accepted this version of his death. But what if he was actually poisoned? And what if his white overseers got his land as a result of it? The photo is of Great Uncle William Carroll Hicks.

Another aspect to the white oppression of Native Americans is that maybe my grandfather was lucky to be swindled. If he had managed to hold onto his land and whatever oil it might have contained, might he have been murdered? Maybe the swindle that took his land away from him was what allowed his family, and ultimately me, to exist.

Presumably, such murderous oppression is no longer going on today. But maybe it does continue. The American government used Vietnam War military equipment against the Pine Ridge protestors in 1973, and had them ready to use against the Standing Rock protestors in 2016. Native Americans are considered to be enemy combatants by our own government.

This is the background against which white police shootings of black men take place. It is impossible for us humans to be so logical as to see each shooting independently on its own merits. It is inevitable that the world—everyone except white Americans—see this as a potentially murderous oppression of black people. But it isn’t just blacks. The rate at which Native Americans are shot by white police is greater even than the rate at which white police shoot blacks. Each year, white police shoot an average of 2.9 Natives per million population. For blacks, it is 2.6; for Hispanics, 1.7; for whites, 0.9; for Asians, 0.6. See here for more information. Every time a Native or black person is shot, we inevitably see this against a background of slavery and genocide.

You don’t even have to be completely black or Native to suffer oppression. My grandfather was only one-quarter Cherokee, but he had no more rights to his land than did the full-bloods. And don’t forget the famous civil rights case of Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the “black man” Homer Plessy was seven-eighths white.

Go ahead and celebrate freedom, if you are completely white.

This essay has appeared in a blog about evolution primarily because, from an evolutionary viewpoint, human races do not actually exist.