There are Masks, Then There are Masks

Writing with prescience in 1895 that stupefies125 years later, Paul Laurence Dunbar penned:

"We wear the mask that grins and lies.

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes---

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

And mouth with myriad subtleties."

 Labeled "Negro," Dunbar presented as an anomaly---son of former slaves born in 1872, seven years after Emancipation Proclamation, he became a first among Freedmen, published as poet and novelist.  "Jim Crow" laws, enacted five years after his birth, ushered in and enforced punitive, debasing, and dehumanizing laws that virtually suffocated the South in hatred. 

Paul Laurence Dunbar died decades before "Jim Crow" ended (1877-1965); yet, he daily witnessed the indomitable spirit, the dissembling, and cunning of former slaves during his 34-year earthly sojourn in the "free state" of Ohio.   Thwarted in his desire to become a lawyer and eventually securing work as an elevator operator, he must have carried a strong prophetic gene.  

How else could he have intuited wars that would be waged against rights to education, enfranchisement, and employment? 

"We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries

To Thee from tortured souls arise,

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

Sadly, we still wear the mask, except we now wear at least two.  And for equally pernicious reasons: systemic racism whose roots won't die because they're still being watered with Crusade-like ferocity and regularity. AND an out-of-control, seemingly uncontrollable novel virus that appears more artful than surmountable.

A descendant of mask-wearers, I reject the notion of banditry as a cause 125 years ago.  Nor will I issue a blank-check indictment today of protestors who have been forced to wear dual masks now.  The reasons entwine and drain breath from bodies based now on color and a pandemic.  Heaven help us!