I’m one those annoying people who likes to ask strangers questions that I would never answer myself. If approached with anything more than the most superficial inquiry, I’ll avoid and evade and say something dumb like, “Hey, asking questions is my job!”
But on the 7th day of my recent 12-day, 200-mile Camino de Santiago, a passing pilgrim asked me a somewhat intimate question, and much to my surprise, I answered.
***
I was walking down an incline through a shaded fern forest, just about to reach a clearing, when a curly-haired man in his thirties started to pass me on the trail. “Buen camino,” he said, as is the custom on the Way of St. James. “Buen camino, peregrino,” I responded as we started to chat. He was a drug addiction counselor in eastern Germany. Born in Kazakhstan to a Russian father and a Kazakh mother, he migrated to Germany at a young age and seemed to now live between many worlds and worldviews.
“Why are you walking the Camino?” he asked me point blank in fluent English. “To deepen my faith,” I responded. “In what?” he asked. I paused, then answered that faith doesn’t need an object, direct or indirect. He asked me to explain what having faith meant then and tried to find the right word in German so he’d understand better. It wasn’t glauben, which is “to believe.” Perhaps it was best translated as vertrauen, which is “to trust.” Used as a noun, Vertrauen also means confidence, which seems to get closer to what I was looking for.
***.
Simone Weil called prayer “absolutely unmixed attention.” Czeslaw Milosz described it as an aerial bridge that he would continue walking over even if there were no other side to reach. Prayer is a mental act that helps one look forward in an unpredictable world. Anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann says that prayer focuses the mind on hope, thereby externalizing it, something, I guess, like planting a flag on the moon. The mere act can calm the mind and soothe one’s fears. To have faith, then, is to insist, against all evidence, that the world is a safe and good place. It is, essentially, to trust.
Luhrmann calls this affirmative orientation toward life and the world a “faith frame,” a way of seeing the world as more coherent and benevolent than one’s experiences may otherwise suggest. Because sustaining such a view of the world is not easy, stories, rituals, and certain behaviors can help keep us focused. The trappings of religion, she suggests, are tools that help people “superimpose their faith frame upon an everyday frame.”
***
I’m happy I answered the mysterious Kazakh’s question, because our brief exchange helped me clarify what religion means to me. I’ve never understood why so many Americans seem to think religion is primarily a system of ethics or morality or even a set of beliefs. While these can certainly be aspects of religious practice, they are by no means its essence. If anything, they can be tools to help lead one to faith, which, again, is ultimately what religion is about.
To deepen my faith means committing myself more to the activities—like setting off on a medieval pilgrimage– rituals and stories that help me trust in the world.
And where does the supernatural come in? Well, I suppose that one only comes to terms with life—in all its joy and sadness—when one begins to ponder what lies beyond this life. But that is a conversation for another day.
Los Tres Mulatos de Esmeraldas by Andrés Sánchez Galque, 1599
Madrid
On a gloomy afternoon a few days before Christmas, I snuck up to the Museo del Prado to catch another glimpse of an exquisite exhibition of Latin American art that was shipped to Spain during the glory days of the viceroyalties between the 16th and 18th centuries.
Tornaviaje (Return Journey)— a collection of a little more than 100 paintings, devotional objects, and furniture—has a subtle story to tell about the forgotten legacy of mestizaje in Spain. While the story of the mixing of cultures and peoples in the New World has been widely told—including by me—there’s been little attention paid to its influence at the center of the Spanish Empire itself. The exhibition, which closes on February 13, is perfectly timed. Two hundred years after it lost most of its overseas colonies, Spain is now coming to grips with the influx of hundreds of thousands racially mixed, Spanish-speaking, mostly Catholic Latin Americans over the past few decades. Not simply a part of its colonial past, mestizaje is now a firm part of Spain’s present and future. And not only in the big cities but in small towns throughout the country, you’ll meet dark-skinned Spanish citizens who were born in Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.
***
The return journey is not new, however. If you’ve ever been to Asturias in the north of Spain, you’ve seen those gorgeous old mansions built by Indianos. For centuries, Indiano was the term Spaniards used to refer to those lucky few who set off for the Indies, made their fortunes, and returned to flaunt it to all those who remained at home. The mansions standing today, some in better shape than others, were generally built in the 19th and early 20th century. Almost all of them still have a palm tree standing tall somewhere on the property. As if the size and ostentatious architectural style of these casonas were not enough to show off the owner’s status, the tree they planted on their grounds was a symbol of his worldliness.
Many of the items in the Prado exhibition were art works sent back to Spain by Indianos of earlier centuries. Some were shipped to Spain to decorate stately homes or were gifts to religious communities back home. They were commissioned by prominent Indianos in part to draw attention to the prestige they had attained abroad as well as to showcase the wonders of America. Many depict religious themes and iconography that had arrived from Spain and were painted or handcrafted by indigenous or mixed-race Americans using techniques and materials unknown in Spain such as feathers and corn stalk in figurative art. Others document distinctly American events and themes—post-conquest Mexico City, mulattos from Ecuador’s coastal Esmeraldas province, or the Virgen de Copacabana, the patron saint of Bolivia.
With the exception of their American themes, the art works could be mistaken as Spanish. And that’s the point of the exhibition. If you look closely, the items speak not only of conquest but of coexistence, adaptation, and hybridization.
***
Two weeks ago, I met a man named Elkin at a park down my street. We talked as his two pre-teen daughters ran off to play with their friends. An Afro-Colombian who’s been in Spain for 12 years, he told me about his experience as an immigrant. Has he experienced racism in Spain? Absolutely. He gave me examples of the insults he’s endured. But then on reflection, he said it wasn’t so much different in Colombia. So what is different in Spain? Well, the language, the religion, so much of what he’s come to know here is not so foreign at all than what he knew back home. When pressed, he said he guesses the castellanos are a little “drier” and less friendly than Colombians. Otherwise, he’s completely at home here. I guess you could say that he, too, has made a return journey.
Two weeks ago in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a 40-year-old African American woman–I’ll call her Cheryl–told me how lucky she felt to have given birth to three girls. Boys, she said matter of factly, were so much more likely to be murdered.
East Baton Rouge Parish has never been a peaceful place. But this year, its homicide rate has reached the highest in parish history. As of December 6, 2021, there have been 157 homicides, up 29 from about the same time the year before. This year, like all others, most of the victims are black. Most of those are male. And the likelihood of the killers meeting justice, whatever that means, is slim. That’s because the friends and families of many victims would rather take matters into their own hands than appeal to the authorities. Fearing becoming targets themselves, witnesses often don’t tell police what they’ve seen.
Cheryl herself has witnessed a deadly gunfight outside her home. She didn’t contact the police. She knew the murdered man as well as the murderer. She also knew that the latter had seen her watching.
It’s not that Cheryl wouldn’t want to have the legal system hold murderers accountable. She fully understands the ongoing cycle. She has also felt the pain of losing a close loved one to homicide. Not long ago, her boyfriend’s son who was 16 and whom she had helped raise, was gunned down on the street. When I asked her if she knew anyone else who’d been murdered, she paused, then estimated that she’s lost around twenty friends to homicide since middle school. “I’ve been to a lot of funerals,” she said.
Still, Cheryl doesn’t give in to despair. Crime, of all kinds, is a constant. You deal with it. You have to be careful. When she saw how stunned I was by the number of friends she’s lost, she bucked me up playfully, telling me that I’d be alright.
Is she—and all those who have lost loved ones—to gun homicide considered a victim in America? Not really. What about all those who’ve lost their lives? Are they considered victims who deserved protection? Perhaps by gun control activists, but not by the public at large. It’s a tragedy, to be sure. But it’s one most Americans seem willing to live with.
***
The afternoon of the day I met Cheryl, I hopped in my rental car and drove west for an hour to Lafayette, Louisiana, to visit some sights. My first stop was the lovely century-old Romanesque Revival Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. I walked around the back and found the most beautiful cemetery. I wandered around for a while, and as I was leaving, I was struck by the sight of a tombstone symbolically laid in honor to all “victims of abortion.” I can’t recall having seen any other symbolic gravesites for any other groups there. All other tombstones had been set to designate where individual local Catholic residents had been buried. On my drive back to Baton Rouge, I took a detour through Iberville Parish, where I came upon a tiny, unremarkable little village. What was remarkable about it was a home-made anti-abortion lawn sign I passed on the main road into town. On the front it read: Joe Biden-Democrats party have blood on thier (sic) hands. On the backside it read simply: Trump 2024.
There’s been a lot written over the past decade on the growing role of victimhood in American life and politics. We generally understand how groups that successfully claim victim status can garner not only special legal protections but also a certain level of political power. That power derives from the ability to claim innocence, which is a precious currency in America. Still, little if anything, has been written on the political significance of championing third-party groups of victims. It stands to reason, however, that if innocence is the currency groups gain through victimhood, victims’ allies can attain a modicum of innocence themselves.
****
It’s been almost 70 years since Reinhold Niebuhr published “The Irony of American History,” in which he warned a newly anointed global power that it can no longer afford to see itself as innocent. It’s not easy, he wrote, “for an adolescent nation, with illusions of childlike innocency to come to terms with the responsibilities and hazards of global politics in an atomic age.” Last year on Inauguration Day, we heard a captivating 22-year-old poet tell citizens of a nation that stockpiles as many as 4,000 nuclear warheads that “If we merge mercy with might, and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.” Not only is innocence as prized as it ever was in American culture, it’s apparently up to average citizens to uphold an imperial nation’s virtue.
But not all Americans can claim the same levels of virtue though. White people are generally granted the presumption of innocence more than those who are not white. (This might explain why it’s harder for the most beleaguered citizens of Baton Rouge to successfully claim righteous victimhood.) White Northerners can more easily claim virtue than their Southern brethren. That’s been true since the Civil War and was only reinforced during the civil rights struggles a century later.
In 1961, the 100th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, Tennessee-born writer Robert Penn Warren published an essay in which he detailed the “maiming liabilities” Americans had inherited from the conflict. While Southerners turned their historic loss into an excuse for their social failings, Northerners wallowed in what he called their “Treasury of Virtue.” They carry in their pockets, he wrote, “a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future, freely given by the hand of history.” The North’s virtue, of course, was largely derived from its relationship to the victims of slavery.
***
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, anti-abortion sentiment was much stronger in the Northeast than it was in the South. While legislators in Maine and Connecticut were passing abortion bans, North Carolina and Georgia were allowing for limited legal access to the procedure. A 1970 survey of Southern Baptist pastors found that 70 percent supported access to abortion when it benefitted the mother’s physical or mental health, 64 percent in cases of fetal deformity, and 71 percent in cases of rape.
The rise of the new Christian Right in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a reflection of the South’s growing demographic dynamism and economic strength. The region’s population was growing and becoming more urban. The upwardly mobile helped finance the building of large modern churches whose pastors preached traditionalism yet employed all means of modern communication. Evangelicals then realized that they had the financial and political power to shift the course of national politics. The rapid expansion of the Sunbelt strengthened their movement. Their emergence as power brokers, however, didn’t mean they stopped seeing themselves as targets of northern condescension. In 1976, Southern Baptist Convention president James Sullivan proclaimed defensively that “A world had thought we were an ignorant, barefooted, one-gallused lot was jarred out of its seat when it found out that . . . our voluntary gifts in a year are approximately $1.5 billion, and that on an average Sunday our churches baptize as many people as were baptized at Pentecost.”
What this suggests is that the subsequent politicization of evangelicalism and the emergence of the Christian Right cannot be understood outside of its Southern context. When figures like Jerry Falwell, Sr., and Pat Robertson spoke of reclaiming America, they were also eager to vindicate the South. A redeemed South would redeem the nation. Not only was the region no longer poor and uneducated, but it would also no longer allow itself to be seen as less virtuous than the North. It wasn’t until 1979, the year Falwell founded the Moral Majority, that evangelical leaders began to focus on abortion as their primary political issue. It was in the subsequent decades that the South became the epicenter of anti-abortion activism.
Over the last several decades, religious conservatives have successfully adopted liberal political strategies—from developing rights-based legal arguments to Saul Alinsky-style organizing. They’ve also learned the power of victim politics. As liberals have continued to identify new victim groups in need of government protection, Christian conservatives in the South have intensified their commitment to their chosen victim group: unborn babies. There’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of their activism, but the redemption they seek is not only in the eyes of God, but also in those of their fellow Americans.
St. Joseph Abbey Cemetery, St. Benedict, St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, USA
Covington, Louisiana
Walker Percy said he chose to live in Covington, Louisiana, because it “falls between places.” Compared to nearby New Orleans, which is “very much of a place,” this little town on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain, occupies what Percy called “a kind of interstice” within the South, a region we all know takes great pride in its strong sense of place. That’s because Covington is also part of a distinct smaller territory with a history all its own, a collection of southeastern Louisiana parishes that for 74 days in the early 19th century was part of the independent Republic of West Florida.
More than two hundred years later, there are still signs of the region’s rogue history. In St. Francisville, the little nation’s onetime capital, there’s a monument on the beautiful grounds of the West Feliciana Parish courthouse that boasts of the republic having its own constitution, governor, and small army. Presumably, that was the same army that led an insurrection against the region’s Spanish overlords on September 23, 1810.
The republic’s Bonnie Blue Flag, with its single white star on an azure field, can be seen on signs along Interstate 12 between Baton Rouge and the Mississippi state line, a stretch of highway officially called the West Florida Republic Parkway. Under Louisiana state law, the courthouses in the so-called Florida parishes must fly the flag over their courthouses.
On a bluff of the Mississippi in downtown Baton Rouge, near the State Capitol, you can find a neglected old historical marker that tells the story of the capture of Spain’s Fort Carlos. The Florida parishes were not part of the Louisiana Purchase. Both Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison schemed how the U.S. could steal the territory from Spain. Jefferson hoped that one day a critical mass of new American settlers would take up arms against Spain. When that did happen, Madison made up a spurious legal argument that justified acquisition of the territory. He did so by way of a proclamation on October 27, 1810. Six weeks later, on December 10, American troops raised the Stars and Stripes over Baton Rouge, thereby ending the existence of what Walker Percy’s biographer called a “small, spunky, and short-lived nation.”
Three decades before the Anschluss, West Florida had been something of a haven for Tories running from victorious—and vindictive—American revolutionaries. It was also the place where the likes of David Bradford, one of the leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion in Western Pennsylvania, found refuge. The region’s great advantage to all variety of fugitives, renegades, and outlaws was that it wasn’t under American control.
Percy loved his town’s “tradition of orneriness and dissent.” He credited it to the region’s early nonconformist settlers. But political refugees were almost certainly outnumbered by the rough-hewn frontiersmen and shady small-time land speculators who came down from the upper South. William C.C. Clairborne, the first governor of the American state of Louisiana, which absorbed the Florida parishes in 1812, is reported to have said that “a more heterogenous mass of good and evil was never before met in the same extent of territory.”
While Americans are all too familiar with the scourge of placelessness—of one suburban town feeling like any other—what Alabama-born Percy was running from was the crushing conformity that can come with belonging unquestioningly to one place and its attendant tribe.
The great humanist geographer Yi Fu Tuan has argued that people experience the world sensing the ever present tension between place and space. “Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to one and long for the other.” The same principle holds for our intellectual and political lives.
Yes, it feels good to belong. There is, indeed, safety in numbers. But too much safety can be stifling. And as America becomes ever more polarized—both politically and culturally—each camp tolerates less internal dissent. There is less and less room for nuance or complexity let alone outright heresy, which one would think are prerequisites for intelligent debate. Likewise, there are fewer in-between places where belonging is still ostensibly voluntary as opposed to coerced. This polarization makes navigating social life in America a rather fraught endeavor. Conversations are becoming more boring, stilted, predictable. But I, for one, am committed to finding the interstices wherever they exist, the small pockets between monocultures where heretics stand a slightly better chance of survival.
Last summer, I spent a wonderful Saturday night in a back-alley garage bar in New Philadelphia in East Central Ohio, a town that straddles the Cleveland and Pittsburgh media markets. On the left side of the horseshoe-shaped counter sat hardcore Browns fans. On the right side were the snarkier Steeler fans who hurled the occasional insult at their cross-bar rivals. Without knowing of the divide, I sat smack in the middle, where I was able to escape both the insults and the forced kinship. After convincing the fellas that I knew the slightest thing about football, I was eventually excused from their rivalry for being an out of towner. Don’t think it didn’t help, however, that I had camped out in a space between.
A week ago today, I found myself in a little village in Spain called Garganta la Olla, not far from the monastery where Charles V lived out his last years in the mid-16th century. I was struck by the pride people expressed in being from northern Extremadura. I was told that because of the greater amount of water there, the crops were better and the cuisine more delicious than you can find in the south of the region, which blends into the very dry Andalusia. 2500 km east, here in Graz, close to the other end of Europe, locals like to think of their region, Steiermark (Styria in English), as the “Mediterranean” part of Austria, because it’s generally drier, warmer, and spring comes earlier here than in other parts of the country. They even compare their wine region to Tuscany, and on sunny days I think they like to imagine that they’re a little bit Italian. These regional identities are not simply drawn along contemporary jurisdictional lines. Nor are they shallow or aggregate identities invented by a central government or the marketplace. They’re much smaller and rooted in history and nature. Styria, for instance, was once a duchy with its own dialect and bleeds beyond national borders into Slovenia. Its collective sense of self comes from climate and topography in addition to a still living awareness that this area was once a part of a cosmopolitan empire. Ask a Bosnian student why they chose to study in Graz, and they will likely mention the historical links between the regions. In his book, “The Future of Freedom,” Fareed Zakaria argues that European ethnic, linguistic, and cultural pluralism was one of the primary sources of modern Western notions of liberty. In the early 16th century, the imperial machinations of the Hapsburgs notwithstanding, Europe had within it more than 500 states, and the variety, Zakaria writes, had “two wondrous effects.” One, it allowed for diversity in ideas and art. What was unpopular in one place might thrive in another. And two, diversity nurtured competition between regions, which spurred innovation in political organization, technology, and economics. In short, it was, in part, Europe’s long history of cultural pluralism that made it difficult to centralize and control. The continent’s many rivers and mountains allowed for the existence of interstitial spaces between power structures, where notions of freedom were born and grew like grass in the cracks in concrete. By contrast, the more easily controlled, centralized empires of Asia didn’t allow for this sort of competition and leeway. It was more difficult for smaller groups to take refuge from centralized power. Centralization is not conducive to pluralism, and pluralism is a primary ingredient of freedom. And while democracy can flourish with diminished freedoms, it isn’t worth as much and ends up being merely a method of leadership selection. Of course, exclusionary movements demanding conformity can arise anywhere and from any part of the political spectrum. (Memories of Nazism also still linger in Styria.) But it’s important to remember that pluralism is always the antidote to any and all forms of coercion, and that on a sunny day you, too, can imagine that you’re Italian.
Joaquín posing as El Caballero de la Mano en el Pecho
We walked 194 miles in 12 days. It was difficult. It was joyful. It made me feel muscles in my legs that I didn’t know I had. With each passing day, I realize how magical it all was. The last day was a blister-inducing march. Our final leg to Santiago de Compostela clocked in at a little more than 28 miles. Oddly enough, of all the emotions I felt on arriving at the Cathedral in Santiago, the dominant feeling was that of gratitude. The people, the climbs, the rain and hail!, my boots, the focus, the faith. I finally learned the fundamental distinction between what it means to vagabundear and perigrinar. And after my first Camino, I’ve decided that a pilgrim I must and will remain.
Last month, I had the pleasure of interviewing and photographing the two surviving members of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, James Smith, 96, of Simi Valley, California (top photo), and Samuel Coleman, 93, of Las Vegas, Nevada (bottom photo).
While the two men had very different temperaments, they were both decidedly outgoing, happy people, grateful for the full lives they have lived. They both recalled the universal respect accorded them when they wore the Pullman waiter uniforms in their youth. Those starched white jackets, black ties and trousers left no doubt that these men demanded respect.
But both Smith and Coleman said their personal sense of dignity and self-worth had been instilled in them as children by their parents. The power of their Pullman uniforms, then, was as much a reflection of something deep within them as it was an external social validation. It’s not at all clear whether they could have achieved the latter had they not felt the former.
Neither seemed to have much sympathy for—or understanding of—post-Civil Rights-era grievance politics in which minorities are encouraged to define themselves by the barriers they face. In fact, for these gentlemen the secret to overcoming the aggressive racism they encountered was to never allow themselves to be defined by it. “We were always ducking and dodging whatever insults or slights came our way,” Smith said.
“A black man is always a threat in America,” said Coleman, whose father, a Mississippi sharecropper also named Sam Coleman, was lynched in 1929 when Sam, Jr., was 15-months old. “I was taught as a child to stand tall.” And throughout his life, that is what he did.
The other day, an old friend asked me what I liked most about being back in the U.S. Without skipping a beat I said: the libraries and the faces. No matter where I am, I make an effort to engage with the people around me. Much more often than not, it pays off in smiles and surprises. It also helps me balance out my days, which are generally spent buried in books that I find in, um, libraries. As I head back to Europe for a spell, I thought I’d post a few photos of some of the kind folks I’ve met while walking the streets of Los Angeles.
I recently returned from an extraordinary 2,200-mile research trip that took me through 9 states and at least four centuries. For the past 11 months, I’ve been reading books, journal articles, maps, and memoirs in preparation for my next essay, which centers on conflict, competition, and racial identity formation in mid-18th century Pennsylvania. I had an opportunity to see the landscapes I had been reading about for nearly a year: Easton, Bethlehem, Lancaster, Carlisle, and Burnt Cabins. I got to grapple with the strange topography of the Allegheny Mountains and imagine the paths along which Lenape warriors traveled from Kitanning to what is now Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. The trip helped me make sense of the contours of the Upper Ohio River Valley. And Pittsburgh, that critical site in the French and Indian War, was much more than I’d ever imagined it to be.
The trip’s detours were just as enriching as its primary destinations. Washington, Pennsylvania, spurred my imagination, as did towns like Sugar Creek, Ohio, or Horse Heads, New York. All were related to either the current essay or others I’m planning. But one stop was completely unexpected, and it has already launched me on another intellectual journey through the American past. By happenstance, I ended up in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, a town founded in the 1630s by Anne Hutchinson and her followers after she was banished from Massachusetts. As soon as I arrived in Rhode Island, I borrowed a digital copy of Eve LaPLante’s astonishingly clear and fluid biography of Hutchinson entitled “American Jezebel” from the library. The same library just alerted me that they’ve put the latest biography of Roger Williams on hold.
I don’t plan on sitting down to write the Pennsylvania essay until at least October. All the reading is done. And the notes I took on the trip put me over the research finish line. But I have other obligations and some more travel in the next two months. Meanwhile, Rhode Island has already set me on a new—not entirely unrelated—course. Since I returned from the trip, I’ve started reading historian Brad S. Gregory and the late Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. I’ve also had the pleasure of discovering the work of military historian John Shy and the late Southern literary scholar Lewis P. Simpson. The reading list is growing. I wish I had three or four clear, consecutive months in which to write now. But first things first.
It’s a beautiful springlike day in Madrid today. We had a meeting at City Hall this morning, and I walked home absurdly proud to have successfully navigated another layer of Spanish bureacracy. I’m back on this page earlier than I had imagined, because I wanted to share an episode of a podcast an old friend and I are starting. It’s his idea, really, and it emerged last year after a marathon discussion he and I were having by phone. He said, “You know, you and I have great conversations. I bet some people would want to listen in.” It’s still a work in progress, and it hasn’t been properly launched, but we’ve started to Zoom once a week with a vague idea of the topic in our heads. To keep the content fresh, we don’t talk beforehand. The podcast is called “Americanata,” which is the disparaging–-yet sometimes admiring–-term Italians use to describe anything American that’s over the top, kitschy, or ridiculously overblown. So far, it’s been really fun, and it forces me to think about the present, something that my daily reading doesn’t encourage. The question for the episode below was whether the Trump era taught us anything about the American people. We had some thoughts. And, yes, the photo of me is an homage to the late Los Angeles radio great Gary Owens.
