We Return...Fighting

To hear David Levering Lewis tell it, this is how it started:

"On a clear, sharp February morning in 1919, on New York's Fifth Avenue, the men of the Fifteenth Regiment of New York's National Guard marched home to Harlem...

These men and others like them had gone and bled on the major theatres of World War I for the  cause of democracy and freedom, and somehow thought that the rewards of that sacrifice would be extended to them. To them especially.

It didn't happen. 

They demonstrated.

Nothing changed.

They sent delegations to city fathers and political heavyweights.

It still didn't change a thing. 

A young man--yes, at the time he was still relatively young--taking the ironic trajectory of the events in, decided to give vent to his angst via the dual vehicles of poetry and prose. He wrote in the Crisis:

The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.
   
        We return.
        We return from fighting.
        We return fighting. 

Make way for democracy. We saved it in France, and by Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.

The writer of the immortal lines above is, of course, W.E.B. Du Bois. And man, did he fight...amidst the circles of gloom, right to the end. If indeed his story ever ended. Because over at that silent grave of his in Accra, even today, it is the insistent voice of struggle that bursts through for all those with ears to hear.

Nadine--sweet Nadine Gordimer--tells us that a writer is selected by his subject, that subject being the consciousness of his era...and how he deals with this is the fundament of commitment..." Nadine spoke of writers. She may as well have been talking of all humans. Especially humans of our era. This early 21st century. An era in which many still insist on abusing on our wills to be human in the pious confidence that we won't know.

We cannot know.
We are not conscious of drawing the lines.
 Between what we want, and what they claim we want...

Sometimes I think of Nadine, or Kenzaburo, or Minh, or Rosa Parks, or Father Romero, Yaa Asantewaa, or Neruda, or Nkrumah, or Malcolm, or King, or Nelson...Any number of the men and women who, like Du Bois at the beginning of the 20th century, saw the tall odds in stark relief, and yet kept to the spirit of the fight. The good fight which must go on so long as injustice still exists anywhere.

And in thinking of these good fighters, I am inspired to re-member why we, too, must:

          Return.
          Return from fighting. 
          Return to fighting. 

For  we will to retrieve our humanity. At all costs. By any means necessary.