You are currently browsing the daily archive for February 14th, 2008.
What the difference?
Well, I got one of each. 
Bill gave me a Valentine’s Day card with a picture of a toad on the front. Inside I read, “Have I toad you lately that I love you?”
And my gift was a huge stuffed frog, holding a heart that said, “I love you!” The frog, whom I named Oliver Wayne but who’s better known by his nickname “Waynie,” sits in the living room, where he takes up a whole chair.
This frog is totally not “Waynie”!
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For more information about frogs, see Frogland.
A LOVE NO LESS: MORE THAN TWO CENTURIES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN LOVE LETTERS. By Pamela Newkirk. Doubleday. 208 pages. $19.95.
Pamela Newkirk’s collection of African American love letters is an outgrowth of two loves: history and letters. The letters, written over more than two centuries and dated from 1858 to 2000, are divided into five chronological periods. Newkirk introduces each section, and sometimes various couples or individuals within a section, with brief historical insights. This material shows the social, political, and literary issues involved in each era and indicates the amount of prevailing optimism in the minds of African Americans at that time. The letters themselves bear witness that love has “sustained” African American couples, although the history of black people in America is “turbulent.”
Of the letters, only the first few, written by sold slaves to their spouses from whom they have been separated, are filled with sadness. But even they are “bittersweet,” contrasting declarations of deep love and devotion with the harsh realities of slavery. Abream Scriven pens his desire to send various items to his wife, Dinah Jones, but doesn’t know who to “send them by,” who to trust. Ann, a Missouri slave, asks her husband for money to clothe herself and “our child,” but warns him not to sent letters with money to “Hogsett,”—probably her master or overseer—who “will keep the money.” Both slaves close with loving salutations, expressions of the writer’s determination to remain faithful for life. Newkirk quotes John W. Blassingame, who stated in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies that slave letters contain “a baring of the soul,” when they were intended for family members but not their masters.
The letters—housed in the National Archives, various university archives, including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, or private collections — are written by both famous and unknown people. Among the well-known are literary legend Paul Lawrence Dunbar, women’s rights activist Mary Church Terrell, James Weldon Johnson, the Harlem Renaissance writer who wrote the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” poet Countee Cullen, and Derrick Bell, a contemporary lawyer, activist, author, and scholar. Others, such as Booker T. Washington III and A’Lelia Walker, daughter of Madame C. J. Walker of hair care fame, are known by association with their relatives.
Letters throughout the book contain high poetic language to describe the pain of separation from one’s beloved. In 1869, Harvey Moore describes his devotion, even to the written words of his wife Nicey, as “entwined” in his heart “like the vine with its tendrils to the verdant oak of the forest.” Roscoe Conkling Bruce tells his fiancé Clara Burrill that her photograph “smiles” at him. Dr. J. Arthur Kennedy expresses his wish that his lover’s trip be like a “road strewn with fragrant crimson flowers” with its conclusion in the “circumference” of his arms.
The lovers describe longing for home, the affection of the beloved’s “honeyed lips,” the anxiousness while waiting for a the “event” of a letter’s arrival, the joy in reading and rereading it, and then “sleeping” with it under one’s “pillow.” Often engaged couples refer to each other not only by pet names, such as my “dear loving darling” and my “little chicken,” but also address each other as husband and wife, although the “blending words” have not been spoken. And in the letters of Grace Nail Johnson and her husband, both parties refer to her as “Mudder” and him as “Son.” Some letters even include romantic objects, such as the one with the pressed pansy.
In addition to letters, the book includes telegram and postcard messages, including a flirtatious one from chorus girl Fredi Washington, who was in Winston-Salem. in 1932. A Western Union Telegram from Charles Drew to Lenore Robbins reads, “Still in a dream I walk like one entranced and think of you.” One writer quotes Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but the book ends with an original love poem by Daphne to Tim Reid, written during their courtship.
This attractive volume—printed in sepia—includes copies of letters and photographs. It is well researched, yet tender and believable, filled with insights from lovers, who discover and express what many of us already know: Life “suddenly” becomes wider and takes on “new meaning,” when it is shared.
first published in the Winston-Salem Journal
Do not loose your fearlessness now, then since the reward is so great. You need perseverance if you are to do God’s will and gain what he has promised. Hebrews 10: 35-36
“Everything we know about Jesus indicates that he was only concerned with one thing: to do the will of the Father. . . . Jesus is not our savior simply because of what he said to us or did for us. He is our savior because what he said and did was said and done in obedience to his Father. . . . Our lives are destined to become like the life of Jesus. . . . Not only did Jesus come to free us from the bonds of sin and death, he came also to lead us into the intimacy of his divine life. . . . All that Jesus does we may do also.”
to read the rest of this devotional see Show Me the Way: Daily Lenten Readings by Henri Nouwen
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