24 hours a slave

My grandfather was a lifelong Republican. He, like so many black men of his generation felt an obligation---almost a beholding---to the Grand Old Party for their part in freeing the men, women and children of African descent that had been enslaved in the United States for 245 years.  Island Lemuel Johns was born on February 2, 1882---not even 20 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and within a stone's throw of bondage.  His father, Washington Johns, was born into slavery in 1851. My grandfather, Island Lemuel, was extraordinary.  In just one small generation he leaped from abject poverty to being one of the first African American physicians in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  He opened his practice in a small downtown office on the corner of Patterson Avenue and 4th Street---an office he maintained until his death in 1970.  He had a great passion for medicine.

We had just celebrated Christmas in our new house. I was only five-years-old and the most vivid thing I remember from that day was a cold snowfall.  By this time in his long career, my grandfather had no real patients; just a collection of long-time supportive friends who would come and sit with him during the week and give him a five-dollar check on their way out.  Still, he would never miss a day of work.  So that Friday morning, the day after Christmas, he coerced my father into driving him into the office. The car ran into a ditch near the bottom of our driveway. My grandfather, at age 88, jumped out and tried to pry the car out of the snow. He broke his hip in the process and after living for only five weeks in the dream house he had just built for his daughter, my mother, he spent the last month of his life in hospital with an infection.

My grandfather was a beat-the-odds kind of man.  Upon leaving the rural town of Auburn, North Carolina, he walked the eight miles to Raleigh were he worked himself through Shaw University, and then later graduating with an M.D. degree in 1908.  So it follows that I have great personal admiration for black doctors---Charles Drew, Daniel Hale Williams, Sara Winifred Brown, Augustus White, Jose English Wells, Vivien Thomas (surgical technician.)  All great men and women. Pioneers. Strong role models.  Books and movies have been written and produced telling their life stories.  My grandfather would have been proud of them all.  Except perhaps one...

Dr. Ben Carson.

And it is not for the reasons you might think. My grandfather was a conservative and he believed in hard work. He was an entrepreneur as well as a doctor.  He and my grandmother owned houses and apartment buildings as rental properties. They owned and operated a florist. My grandmother owned a beauty salon.  If you were black you wore many hats back in the day.  He was a Christian and celebrated strong family values and higher education. He voted for Eisenhower (twice) and Nixon (once).  He would never be on the public dole for any reason. Never. He and Dr. Carson would have shared many values. Even the more controversial ones I'm afraid to admit.  But where he would disagree with Dr. Carson is the notion that President Obama's signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, bears any resemblance to---of all things---slavery.

As of late, Republicans and conservatives seem to have appropriated the language of oppression:  quoting dead civil rights leaders like Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and showing their disdain with the President and his health care law by comparing its effect to slavery. I can't begin to tell you of the disgust I feel listening to these preening, sanctimonious, Pecksniffian ass-hats like Sean Hannity, Rafael "Ted" Cruz, Rush Limbaugh, Michele Bachmann and Bill O'Reilly. Rich, white, well-connected politicians and opinionates, who were born into status or achieved it early; who grow crapulent engorging themselves on the fears and prejudices of the ill-informed masses. From this right wing klatch I would expect nothing less that mounds of total bullshit.  But when Dr. Carson recently muttered to a room of frothing Tea Baggers that the A.C.A. was "the worst thing since slavery" I couldn't take any more.

Dr. Carson, you dishonor my ancestors by discounting the horrors of slavery. You have been afforded things that slaves would not even dream of having access to:  education, money, power and success.  To even make such a comparison, you have disregarded the millions of people who were born and died in bondage, never getting the opportunities you or I were afforded.  My grandfather, who was the son of a slave, would be appalled that a colleague of his would make such a cavalier and diminishing statement. So, once again, I find myself in the role of teacher (I had to school former congressman Joe "You lie!" Walsh here).  For Dr. Carson and all of his soon to be coworkers at the FOX News channel, I will try to explain the difference between slavery and Obamacare.

Being a slave you had no rights. No rights to wages for the hours you work. No rights to food. No rights to property. No rights to health care. No rights to make decisions about your own body. No rights to travel about the country without permission. No rights to marry whom you love. No vacation, sick or paid time off. No dental or vision plans. You were not allowed to gather in groups larger than three. You were property. Cattle. A commodity. You worked six days a week. Most Sundays you didn't work unless it was harvest time and then you'd work a half-day. You lived in a cabin and slept on a dirt floor. There was no heat, no running water, no toilets, showers or bathtubs. You may have a change of clothes, if you were lucky. You couldn't read and you couldn't write and you'd be beaten severely if you tried to learn either. You had a name but you were mostly just called "nigger" or "boy" by the overseer and Master.

So imagine Mr. Cruz waking before sunrise. You are given a bowl of grits.  (Eat well because its harvest time and you have an 18-hour day ahead of you.) You and Dr. Carson and the other men are led by the overseers under threat of the lash into the fields. If you lived in North Carolina you picked tobacco. You would start between 5:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. The sun would soon rise and the heat and humidity would set in. Three hours into your labor, your back is hurting, your hands are cramping, but at least they're not bleeding; they've grown tough as leather over the summer. You're sweating profusely but you dare not wipe the sting from your eyes because it will slow you down and that's bad.  You're told to work as quickly as possible. If you don't meet your quota you won't eat, or, depending on your overseer's mood you may be beaten. It's now 10:00 a.m. You get a break where you are allowed to eat dried cornbread. After a few minutes of conversation you must go back to work. Don't slow down because you will be punished if you do. You can remember a few weeks ago when you fell sick and you had to throw up and you asked the overseer for leniency. He gave you 20 lashes in response. You were sent back into the fields and you knew you'd better vomit in your shirt so it wouldn't get on the tobacco.

At about 1:00 you are allowed to return to your cabin to eat with your family. But you sit and eat salt pork alone because you wife and children have been sold to the family down the road. You have only seen them once since they left several months ago. Only because Master gave you permission. A slave cannot leave his master's property without written permission. If he does he could be maimed or killed. You hear the bell and it's back out into the fields for another six-and-a-half straight hours of picking. Eventually, 8:00 p.m. arrives and the overseer allows you to stop working.  He's not happy with the day's yield so he cuts your food rations in half. You're not too upset because you have a few tomato plants that you have grown in your little patch beside your cabin. You smile as you think about how your wife loved tomatoes. You are told to stay behind to help finish baling the tobacco. Your arms spasm almost immediately struggling with the hundred pound bales. Others have tied them together and because you are young and strong you are forced to carry them. Your body aches and you see the pain and anger in the eyes of the other men working along side you. In their eyes you see thoughts of escape and though you have never run you wish them luck, but you know that most slaves are captured and punished severely for the attempt.  After two more hours everything is tied up and taken to the drying houses. You pick up your paltry rations consisting of a piece of salt pork and  dried cornbread. You return to your quarters and help the family in the cabin next to yours tend to their meager little garden. By this time it's 11:30 at night so you go and lay on the dirt floor of your cabin. You think about your family. Tomorrow is Sunday. Maybe, just maybe, Master will let you go to see your wife and children.  You finally fall asleep about 1:00 a.m. and you dream of that 4:00 a.m. bell and wonder what freedom feels like.

So Dr. Carson as you live your patrician life, walk into your well-appointed home, sleep on soft high-count sheets, bathe in bathrooms with marble countertops, drive your luxury vehicles, glad-hand with fellow Ivy alumni, fly first class to wonderful and exotic locations, speak at big-dollar campaign rallies and cash that fat check from Roger Ailes, remember and thank God that you live in a time where you could lend your voice to causes your hold dear. The Affordable Care Act will take none of that from you. My grandfather taught me to never speak in hyperbole.  So comparing health care reform to slavery is not only reprehensible--its irresponsible. And irresponsible is something my grandfather said doctors should never be.