There is a Native American village in northern Michigan very near where I spent the summers of my youth. It has improved much in the past twenty years, but when I was a kid it was a very poor collection of shacks and rusted automobiles. The houses were small, and falling apart, the windows broken or boarded up. Doors hung crooked on broken hinges, and in some places you could see sunlight through the gaps in the walls. I remember being very young and seeing happy children in dirty clothes playing in the yards of those places.
When I was 16, I dated a girl who's parents had a lot of money. I mean, my family was not exactly poor, we were fortunate to be able to spend our summers on Lake Michigan, but her folks had REAL money. She grew up in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the Detroit area, but she went to boarding school in northern Michigan, which is where we met. We had been dating for about 9 months and she was riding with my parents and I when we passed through the Indian village one day.
I can still see the look on her face. It was incredulous. Her eyes were wide, looking around her, but then she started to laugh. She made a few jokes, the kind that a teenage girl might make at the expense of another girl who's sweater does not match her skirt. And I remember I just wanted to crawl into a hole, I couldn't believe that my parents were hearing my girlfriend behave like this. That relationship did not last long beyond that moment.
I know now that it wasn't entirely her fault, she didn't understand American poverty, she had never seen American poverty. It had been hidden from her all her life. That day the veil was drawn back and exposed to her the world of poverty and race in America.
That's what hurricane Katrina did too. When the hurricane ripped apart the gulf coast it tore away that long black veil that we hide poverty behind, and brought the public attention to the problems of class and race in America. President Bush's reaction was, at first, like that 16 year old school girl. He seemed incredulous that people chose to live that way. Even his mother seemed to feel that some of them were lucky to get to improve their situation and live in the relative luxury of the Houston Astrodome for a while.
The death toll of the catastrophe was not just the result of stubborn people refusing to leave their homes. Many simply could not afford to leave. For people that struggle to put food on the table and keep the roof over their heads from falling in, an automobile, and the gas to fuel it, are a faraway dream.
That is the reality of life for many people in communities all over America. That is reality for many here in Michigan. In places like Flint, Detroit, Benton Harbor, and Muskegon Heights, people live in an impoverished situation created by this nation's history of discrimination.
But they are there, obscured behind the long black veil of public indifference, waiting for us to draw it aside.
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The Long Black Veil
Original Lyrics and Music by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin
Ten years ago, on a cold, dark night
Someone was killed beneath the town hall light
There were few at the scene
But they all agreed
That the slayer who ran
Looked a lot like me
She walks these hills in a Long Black Veil
She visits my grave when the night winds wail
Nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but me
The judge said, "Son, what is your alibi?
If you were somewhere else,
Then you won't have to die."
Well, I said not a word
Though it meant my life
For I'd been in the arms
Of my best friend's wife
Oh, she walks these hills in a Long Black Veil
She visits my grave when the night winds wail
Nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but me
Oh now, the scaffold was high
Eternity is near
She stood in the crowd
And shed not a tear
Oh, sometimes at night
When the cold winds blow
In a Long Black Veil
She stands over my bones
She walks these hills in a Long Black Veil
She visits my grave when the night winds wail
Nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but me
She walks these hills in a Long Black Veil
She visits my grave when the night winds wail
Nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but me
Nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows but me
Nobody knows but me...
Nobody knows...
Nobody knows...
Nobody knows... but me.
what's sad is that for many of these people who survived, they're getting more attention from the gov't and charities then ever. for some the hurricaine is the best thing that's ever happened to them economically. i can't but wonder how long it's going to take the poor, in the places the katrina refugees are in, to start to resent it all.
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