R.I.P. | Elijah Cummings, 1951-2019

Your blogger received this tribute to Elijah Cummings from Douglas M. Clemmons, an attorney whose life was changed by his interaction with the late Congressman:

I am sad at the passing of a tireless warrior for the rights and aspirations of all Americans, the Honorable Elijah Cummings. 

In 2010 I met him when I was a volunteer coordinator for the Democratic Party campaign in Maryland. 

The numerous candidates, especially incumbents who had acquired gravitas, made a great impression on me – I was a young person with no previous political experience and few ties to the State of Maryland.  

During the campaign I was given significant responsibility and opportunity to meet political leaders at every level of government. One was  Rep. Cummings’ chief of staff, Mr. Vernon Simms. 

After the 2010 election, which of course went badly for the Democratic Party, I was greatly discouraged. Fortunately, a good friend suggested I push back against my discouragement by looking ahead and volunteering for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. Fortunately, that’s what I did. 

One evening at a phone bank in Baltimore, where I now live, Mr. Cummings appeared with several local, state and federal candidates to give the 50 of us a pep talk. The speakers established the local atmosphere, an interesting blend of animus and optimism. Baltimore is a closely knit place where people know their political representatives. 

Then Mr. Cummings spoke. He did not need to campaign, given his immense popularity. He was the last to speak to us. I had not heard him before. 

He told us how he grew up blocks from where we were in South Baltimore, in the heart of the inner city. His parents were sharecroppers. He told us about his infamous high school career adviser, who told him not to bother applying to college, because “You won’t ever amount to anything.” He told us about his years in college, and then in law school, and his rise through the ranks in Congress and the tasks that faced him and the nation. He enjoyed showing why that high school adviser was not doing his job, and that we need to do our jobs even though others fail us.

When he finished, the crowd rose to its feet with applause, and no one sat down again.  Suddenly, strangers became the closest of friends. You could feel the intensity of their hopes of an all-inclusive, well-run government that transcends race and class.  

In the warmth of the moment, there was Mr. Simms again, still the Congressman’s chief of staff. He had remembered my face and my work with the campaign and he asked what I was doing. I told him of my discouragement. He said that because the Democrats lost the House, he couldn’t put me on his staff, but he said he would “throw your name around and let’s see what happens.” 

Then Mr. Cummings himself came by, his suit damp with perspiration, brow furrowed from exhaustion. It was well past 11:00 pm. Mr. Simms introduced me. Mr. Cummings shook my hand and said a few things about the campaign. Then he took my hand and looked me in the eye and said: “We are living in marvelous times, with President Obama. People will read and write about this moment in history for years to come. But what are you going to do?” The entire time he did not release my hand. I was too awed to answer his question, and just smiled and thanked him, as he moved on to attend to the others waiting to talk with him.

That night I thought about what he said. The word “marvelous” struck me as an interesting word, since on the surface it seems frivolous. Being a child of the 1980s, I thought of Billy Crystal, but then I considered that to “marvel” is to look at something with appreciation and respect and then I realized that this moment was indeed worthy of capturing the imagination of any young man uncertain of his future in America. To this day I remember that moment, and its echo of President Kennedy’s inaugural speech (“Ask not…”). The onus of facing the future was placed where it belonged, in my hands. I felt a sense of empowerment that had been missing from my life for a while. I found out later, as I did the rounds, that Mr. Cummings left this feeling with many others who came in contact with him. 

In the next few weeks, as I looked for a paid position by following leads from Mr. Simms, I told people about the campaign and how impressed I was with Mr. Cummings, though I never did work for his Congressional office. It didn’t matter. One person interrupted me mid-sentence and said, “Son, we all work for Mr. Cummings.” I finally landed an internship with another prominent congressman. 

In those days, being in the minority was a contentious time for Democrats and Mr. Cummings took the brunt of many attacks. However, he never failed to give a voice to the needs and hopes of those who did not have his eloquence or power. His voice combined the fervor of a southern Baptist minister with the knowledge gained from his seniority on powerful House committees.

Never, during my time in Washington, did I hear one ill word spoken about Mr. Cummings, from either side of the aisle. And though I eventually left Washington to work in the private sector, my association with his name, his legacy and many of his friends has continued, and will continue, to nurture and guide my path. Knowing that the Honorable Elijah Cummings was on my side, and was for a great moment in time my friend, has sustained me. May he rest in well-earned peace, or keep doing his great work from a new vantage point.

POET BORN | July 28 – John Ashbery

Ashbery Receives National Humanities
Medal from President Barack Obama in 2011.

This day in Rochester, NY in 1927 was born John Ashbery. He is a time traveler in the way people thought of it before Einstein's followers started to think of it in scientific terms.

Ashbery grew up on his family's fruit farm near Lake Ontario. He went to a small, rural school, where they read some poetry, all of it classical.

Then he won, as a prize in a contest, Louis Untermeyer's anthology, Modern American and British Poetry. He said he didn't understand many of these contemporary poems, but he was fascinated by them – poems by Auden and Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

Ashbery attended Deerfield for his last two years of high school, from which he went to Harvard. He started writing poetry seriously and published his first book, Some Trees, in 1956, when he was 29.

I first met John Ashbery in the early 1970s, when I became a neighbor in Chelsea, NYC. His newest book was Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). Subsequently he published A Wave (1984), Where Shall I Wander (2005), and Planisphere (2009).

Garrison Keillor describes Ashbery as having been helped by a generous neighbor. As neighbors in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York, John Ashbery and David Kerman  have themselves been generous.

An article in the NY Observer says that when Ashbery grew up on a farm, he didn't like it. He preferred living with his grandparents in the city to attend school. His grandfather was a professor at the University of Rochester. When he was 12, Ashbery's younger brother died of leukemia. Ashbery spent most of his time by himself until a wealthy friend of his mother (the "generous neighbor") put up the money for him to finish high school at Deerfield. Ashbery explains:

By that time I had already discovered modern poetry. High schools used to have current events contests sponsored by Time, if the class subscribed to the magazine. They were quite easy. I won the prize of a book. Of the four that they offered, the only one I was vaguely interested in was an anthology of modern American and British poetry by Louis Untermeyer.

Garrison Keillor in a bio of Ashbery in 2014 gives us two quotes from Ashbery. One is about the fact that Ashbery's poetry is not easy. People say they don't understand it. Especially freshman students in college or high school who have to read it for their English courses. 

I don't quite understand about understanding poetry. I experience poems with pleasure: whether I understand them or not I'm not quite sure. I don't want to read something I already know or which is going to slide down easily: there has to be some crunch, a certain amount of resilience. [Italics added.]

Dorothy Parker once said: "Millay did a great deal of harm making poetry seem so easy that we could all do it but, of course, we couldn’t." Ashbery tries not to make poetry too easy because he believes it should stop you in your tracks – he wants his poems to stop you and make you spend some time. Keillor cites Ashbery's poem "At North Farm", which follows. It has a time-travel aspect. 

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,
At incredible speed, traveling day and night,
Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.
But will he know where to find you,
Recognize you when he sees you,
Give you the thing he has for you? 

Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

The basic problem with the science of time travel is that in order to travel in time, we would need to travel "at incredible speed" – incredible because weight is a function of speed. We would need to be very light, preferably weightless. The only way that science knows how to time-travel so far is in the mind. But that gives us an important degree of freedom.

Physicists have been driven by unexplained phenomena to come up with a hypothetical fifth dimension that could unite the dimensions of space and time. Until they tie up the loose ends, we will have to rely on time-travel in the mind. We will have to rely on poetry.

KENYA | Olga Marlin with Mboya Family (Updated Apr 10, 2017)

At birthday party (photo says 1975) with Alphonse, brother of Luo Leader
Tom Mboya (1930-1969) and Tom's widow Pamela and children, behind
whom is Olga. (Another Luo leader's son was U.S. President, 2009-2016.)

Tom Mboya was a fervent apostle for Kenya's freedom, following Jomo Kenyatta. However, Mboya sought to achieve independence without violence, and did not join in the Mau Mau uprisings against the British. Mboya led Kenya's second-largest tribe, the Luo, which included many Catholics and Anglicans and some Muslims like Barack Obama's father.

When Pamela Odede was engaged to be married to Tom Mboya, she attended classes at the Kianda cooking school. A graduate of Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio (now part of Miami University in Oxford) — also attended by Donna Shalala who now heads the Clinton Foundation — she decided to convert from the Anglican faith to her husband's Catholic faith. She came to several classes in Catholic doctrine with Olga Marlin.

Olga and Pamela became friends and the Mboya children called her "Auntie Olga".

JFK and Tom Mboya, assassinated six years
apart. JFK was 46 in 1963, Mboya 38 in 1969.

In her memoir, To Africa with a Dream, Olga writes about getting to know Tom Mboya. He told her several stories of how he was treated during pre-independence days (pp. 124-125, 2nd edition).

Prior to independence, Mboya worked on major documents for a future independent Kenya, including its constitution.

He also pleaded eloquently for a Marshall Plan for Africa and was appointed Minister of Economic Planning and Development in the first coalition government led by Mzee Kenyatta.

On July 5, 1969, a quiet Saturday afternoon, Mboya, was shopping downtown. He stepped into Chhani's Pharmacy to buy a bottle of lotion. When he came out, an assassin opened fire, escaping in the ensuing confusion.

Mboya was struck in the chest. Blood soaked his suede jacket. He died in an ambulance on the way to Nairobi Hospital.

Grieving Kenyans soon gathered in such numbers at the hospital that police with batons were called out to keep the crowd under control with batons.

In her memoir, Olga vividly describes how Tom Mboya's death affected her (pp. 160-162, 2nd edition).

Only 38, the handsome, articulate Tom Mboya embodied many of the qualities so urgently needed by the fledgling nations of black Africa. He saw beyond his tribe to Kenya's detribalizing urban classes. He made them his constituency. His loss was a big blow to Kenya.

OBAMA IN KENYA | Letters

Barack Obama Sr. (L) and Jr. (R), c. 1969. This photo was
sent out by the Obama Presidential campaign.

The New York Times today has an interesting story on letters from and about Barack Obama, Sr., from his time applying for a scholarship in the United States and then requesting funds from his base in Hawaii, where he earned a degree in economics and gave birth to the man who would become President of the United States for two terms.

In his application for scholarship and travel money he provides a résumé of his early training and work experience as an engineer in Kenya. He was a surveyor for a while, like George Washington. He refers to working with a "theodolite", a tripod-based tool of surveyors, allowing measurements of elevation, longitude and latitude.

At the same time that Barack Obama, Sr. was figuring out how to get to the United States, my sister Olga–two years older than him–was studying in Trinity College, Dublin and then training to be a teacher. She then prepared herself to travel to Kenya to create the first integrated (European, Asian and Native African) school for girls in Kenya, what became Kianda College.

Olga and her fellow teachers would replace the European teachers who were leaving because of fears created by the 1952 Mau Mau uprising and independence movement. The British colonial government engaged in mass arrests, 180 leaders at one time, and one of the men jailed for seeking freedom became the leader of an independent Kenya, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta.

My sister went to Kenya in 1960, before independence. Her story is told in her memoir, To Africa with a Dream. She became a Kenyan citizen and was recently awarded an honorary doctorate from Strathmore University, the first such honor the university gave to a woman.