“...Love has no awareness of merit or de-merit; it has no scale by which its portion may be weighed or measured. It does not seek to balance giving and receiving. Love loves; this is its nature.”

     —Howard Thurman (A Strange Freedom)

We were, each of us sitting at the table on Thanksgiving Day, at a crossroads of public and private dynamics which had brought us to this frame-worthy moment. I thought of the different currents and crosscurrents of history which had formed, merged, broken apart, and reformed to create the opportunity for us to give something essential to each other’s lives. It was not simply that I had taken time to go get my friends and bring them back to the house. History had given birth to them in a country and time where people with their richly dark skin had been as oppressed as those of the same color in the United States.

(As published in Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah)

None of us mentioned these things as we talked, ate, and laughed; they nevertheless were every bit as present as the jubilant sound of gospel music coming from my portable CD player. Added to the issue of racism was an unstable government given to periodic military coups and an inflation rate during the 1990s that reached a whopping annual percentage of 1,795–2,500 at the same time incomes were shrinking by close to 30 percent. Moreover, while developed and developing countries throughout the rest of the world still tip-toed around the reality of human trafficking in their own backyard, streets, alleyways, and roadside truck stops, Brazil’s then President Fernando H. Cardoso was bold enough to acknowledge outright that some 107 years after its abolition, slavery still existed in his country and had to be eradicated.

The fear, corruption, and desperation created scenes more commensurate with something from Dante’s Inferno than from the enticing colorful ads that invited the world to enjoy gorgeous beaches and exotic holidays surrounded by lush greenery on one side and luxury hotels on the other. As a result of the severe economic disparity in Brazil, Tiago had spoken to me of witnessing a family that made soup out of cardboard, water, salt, and pepper. Conditions of this kind, of course, were not restricted to his homeland. However, they were part of the reason my friends, paradoxically, eventually became guests at my Thanksgiving Day table and brought to it an abundance of joy in the form of both incredibly delicious food and their inspiring demeanor.

That they had been able to settle in Savannah was itself unusual. Their move across the Atlantic had been part of an increasing wave of immigrants from the country reaching 41,000 in the 1980s and doubling to 82,000 in the 1990s. Most of these had settled in the Northeast in places like Massachusetts or New York, or out west in California. Another large group was in Florida, but history is a lover of grand epics as well as small miracles and therefore allows for exceptions. Moreover, it dawned on me that at the very moment when I was considering how blessed I was to have them there making Mom laugh and allowing me to fill my stomach with stewed codfish and coconut-honey-coated peanut butter balls, at that very moment, others from their country were being apprehended at the US-Mexico border for trying to enter the country illegally.

Things could easily have gone a different way for them just as they could have for Mom, our extended family, and me. My intention had never been to remain in Savannah for the decades I inevitably would after separating from the U.S. Air Force. Each day seemed to bring a confrontation with one ghost of the past after another. Ghosts, in fact, seemed to be a homegrown specialty of the city. None loomed more menacingly across the landscape than that of Eugene Talmadge, the four-time governor of Georgia who had enjoyed tremendous popularity driven by his unrepentant passion for promoting white supremacy and for whom the bridge spanning across the Savannah River onto Hutchinson Island was declared a memorial. As much as Savannahians and Georgians apparently liked to believe the kind of racial discrimination that made the passage of civil rights laws necessary in the1960s no longer existed, Talmadge’s name attached so lovingly to the beautiful 1.9-mile bridge made it a virtual monument to racism. 

We were, all of us sitting there at the Thanksgiving table, refugees of a kind. We had escaped from the dangers of pain poured over our lives like molten steel, the threat of imminent abandonment, and fear of an eclipsed future. Out of all of us, I could not help focusing on my mother and wondering about the millions like her who were no less deserving to be surrounded by love as she was right now, but who were not.

Within my research on subjects which fell under the domain of sociological imagination, I had started to come across the term “duty of care,” or sometimes “duty to care.” It meant what it sounded like it did: in situations where the least capable among us were in peril due to extreme adverse social conditions, then societies and individuals not in such peril were ethically obligated to help ease their anguish and reduce their vulnerability. The problem from at least one perspective was that the duty to care did not necessarily equate to a capacity to care—or an ability to exercise empathy.

Aberjhani
from Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah