Yeah, I know that’s a heavy title. I only styled it that way because I took the song very seriously when I wrote it earlier this century. I wanted something mythic and epic, something that captured the intensely tragic nature of the relationship of two people tied together by slavery, in the sense of Booker T. Washington (who grew up within a mile of where I grew up in West Virginia) when he said, “You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.” Continue reading
Tag Archives: slavery
A very interesting piece in Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette marks the 30th anniversary of African American programming at Colonial Williamsburg by delving into the cousine of enslaved blacks, a combination of European foods, African techniques, and American ingredients.
The rough conditions and harsh schedules in which the slaves had to prepare food are striking, made all the more so by the technological gulf separating even the best-equipped kitchen of the 1700s from the electronic luxuries of 2009.