Paul Revere was Woke

Would that my words, my knees and elbows
Proved durable clumsy, like Old Hank Longfellow’s.
But if homage and acclaim are all that we seek
One might long for a song by some boys most beastie.

Paul Revere isn’t here, nor the slave in the swamps
Nor the Nazi, the Fascist, the jackbooted stomps
Just us, in this moment, injustice to note
In a world full of blather, I’d rather be woke.

© 2023 by Tom Tordillo. All rights reserved.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash No, that is not an authentic photograph of Paul Revere riding to warn the Minutemen about the British. First, he didn’t wear a cowboy hat. Second, he didn’t ride on the beaches. Third, the American flag hadn’t been invented yet, and even if it had been invented, it would have had far fewer stars than that. But it’s still a great photo of a lady riding patriotically, and few poems have the same patriotic resonance as Longfellow’s ode to Paul Revere.

Ron DeSanctimious published an article defending his stand against Disney. Disingenuous much?

Disney World was born in Orlando because Florida scam artists sold swamp parcels to Wall Street dupes in the 1920s. The speculative market collapsed. The value of those swamplands was wrecked for decades. Disney bought cheap land, and hence, the resorts were born.

In the 1920s, Florida’s politicians also banned the Theory of Evolution, while Florida’s white supremacists burned down the town of Rosewood. They aligned with Florida’s speculators trading swamp land and collectively impoverished most of the state of Florida.

So anti-woke nonsense Florida Ron seeks to mobilize for his presidential gambit has deep roots in Florida swamps, decades older than Disney World.

How old? In 1842, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s mostly forgotten poem, “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp” looks to Florida:

Engraved image of “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp” from the Royal Academy.

My poem was inspired by searching the term “swamp” on Project Gutenberg, and discovering Poems on Slavery by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I’d never heard of this collection.

Feeble is a word you often see, describing Longfellow’s poetic gifts.

Quote by Lawrence Buell, as quoted by Jill Lapore, How Longfellow Woke the Dead, The American Scholar

Longfellow may get a bum rap — but he also got one hell of a rap from the Beastie Boys. Sure, “Paul Revere’s Ride” is poetry rather than history, but it seems credible to read it as a wakeup call for Abolitionists.

Florida’s Ronnie prefers people sleep until the next massive crash (or flood) in Florida. He’ll shrug and leave others stuck with Covid on a death ship.

Longfellow was a better man, who spent much of what he made from selling his poetry emancipating slaves. His own son fought in the Union to crush the Confederacy. Wouldn’t have known that if I wasn’t pissed at Florida’s Ron.

Photograph of Longfellow by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1868 from Wikipedia

This verse of Longfellow’s bothered me:

On him alone was the doom of pain,
From the morning of his birth;
On him alone the curse of Cain
Fell, like a flail on the garnered grain,
And struck him to the earth!

Longfellow, “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp” (from Project Gutenberg)

For those who never studied Black history (or American history), the “curse of Cain” refers to a race libel prominent among slavers who asserted that God marked Black people with the “curse” imposed on Cain for murdering his brother Abel, as told in in Genesis, Chapter 4.

Now anyone who claimed to believe in the ‘literal truth’ of the Bible — esp to justify slavery due to the mark of Cain — forgot to read just two chapters later for the Genesis account of Noah’s flood. The humans bearing the ‘curse of Cain’ were ‘literar-ally’ impossible. But logical consistency proved as easily dispensed with in the 19th century as in the 21st.

Longfellow’s next poem in his collection, “The Slave Singing at Midnight,” rejects the “curse of Cain,” instead linking enslaved people with legacies of both Zion and of early Christians, Paul and Silas.

In “The Witnesses,” Longfellow presents the horrific trans-Atlantic slave trade from the vantage of skeletal witnesses testifying against ‘markets for men’s lives.’

In “The Quadroon Girl,” Longfellow acknowledges the legacy of rape from the perspective of a White Planter selling his own daughter to a slaver —

…for he knew whose passions gave her life,
Whose blood ran in her veins.

Perhaps this isn’t ‘grade school’ poetry after all.

Finally from this collection, Longfellow’s parting poem “The Warning,” prophesied the US Civil War:

There is a poor, blind Samson in this land,
Shorn of his strength, and bound in bonds of steel,
Who may, in some grim revel, raise his hand,
And shake the pillars of this Commonweal,
Till the vast Temple of our liberties
A shapeless mass of wreck and rubbish lies.

We had all best wake up.