Whose Side Are You On?
The man in the above photograph is known to history as “Whipped Peter.” In 1863, he escaped his enslavement on the Louisiana Plantation of John and Bridget Lyons. The Lyons family held Peter and 40 other human beings in bondage as forced, disposable labor in their cotton fields and onion fields. His wounds were administered by Artayou Carrier, the overseer.
Peter, also known as Gordon — which may have been a surname — ran for ten days with bloodhounds and slave-catchers on his trail. To mask his scent from the hounds, he rubbed onions taken from the plantation all over his body. He carried them in his pockets, and each time he crossed a river or a stream, he’d reapply their scent. By doing so, and traveling under the cover of night, he evaded his would-be captors, and eventually reached an encampment of Union Soldiers near Baton Rogue.
For several months, he served as a guide for Union Troops in the region. Then he was captured, beaten and left for dead in the woods. He survived and once more made his way to Union lines. Thereafter, he joined the Corps d’Afrique, a Union military unit organized by the Louisiana Native Guard — a former militia organized by property-owning, free people of color. With the Corps d’Afrique, he fought bravely with the rank of Sergeant at the Siege of Port Hudson, playing a leading role in the assault.
This famous photograph was taken by a Union Army photographer, and helped to personalize and demonstrate the graphic cruelty of slavery in the United States. I do not know the end of his story, but like to think his spirit still walks the land.
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Back when I was teaching in Brooklyn, I’d often ask my kids a deceptively difficult question. I’d cover the history of someone like “Whipped Peter” or, for that matter, John Lewis — whose head was caved in on Bloody Sunday as he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama in 1965. I’d run through, with my classes, a brief personal biography — and note their struggle for freedom and what it cost them — and then ask who they would rather be?
Would you rather be Whipped Peter, or Artayou Carrier?
Would you rather be John Lewis, or the officer who smashed a billy club into his skull with enough force to kill a man for the audacity of wanting to vote?
It is, at once, the simplest and hardest question in the world: Whose side are you on?
Most of my kids — after a moment of considering what they could of the physical terror and psychological trauma that would come from whipping, beating, enslavement, and the denial of basic human rights, and then weighing that with the moral impact of being the son-of-a-bitch who laid on the brutality — said what I hoped they would.
They would rather be the rebellious upstart, the person fighting for freedom and dignity, than the hand that holds the whip, club, or gun.
That one moment in class was generally worth all the others.
It was an instant in time when my kids came to a moral conclusion that the role of the oppressor was not for them.
I trust that most of them still hold true to those early proclamations of liberalism and moral righteousness. From what I’ve seen over the years, they have. Not all of them. But most.
That makes me proud.
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A few days ago, 26-year-old Donavan LaBella was standing on a Portland street, holding a boombox over his head, as part of the continuing protests against police violence and in support of the Black Lives Matter movement that have surged across the nation in the wake of Whipped Peter, Emmett Till, Bloody Sunday, the murder of Fred Hampton, the murder of Malcolm X, the murder of Dr. King, the firebombing of the MOVE collective in Philly, the murder of Eric Garner, the Murder of Philando Castile, the death and likely murder of Sandra Bland, the murder of Freddy Gray, the murder of Elijah McClain, the murder of Breonna Taylor, the murder of George Floyd, and ten-thousand other crimes against people of color that remain unmentioned.
If you watch the video from which the third picture is taken, you see the police phalanx across the way, as Donavan LaBella lifts the radio above his head. As he does, some kind of munition — apparently a gas canister — skips off the ground near him. He kicks it away. Seconds later, he is struck in the head by what was almost certainly an intentionally aimed shot. So, somewhere in the frame of that picture — or just outside our view — a police officer makes a choice. And in my mind, he makes the same choice as Artayou Carrier before him: He decides what side of history he wishes to be on.
In my mind, the police officer who lined up that shot made the exact same moral choice as did those who came before him on the plantations of America’s past, and on the bridges of all our Bloody Sundays.
In my mind, the officer who lined up that shot — and EVERY officer who knew he did it, and yet has said nothing to internal investigation or to the press about the crime — made the same choice. They chose the whip hand.
In my mind, just as Whipped Peter, John Lewis, and Donavan LaBella are part of the same bolt of living lightning that shows us what it means to fight for justice, so are those police officers — who either committed or covered up a crime — links in the historical chain that bind us to the crippling burden of our nation’s original sin.
See. It’s all about that one question: What’s your choice?
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Choosing to be on the right side of history is always easier in the classroom, obviously. It’s always easier in abstraction. The past has a way of erasing the pain of our own choices. In the present, we often need to look hard for the truth, as it hides beneath a thicket of competing interests and beguiling political messages. But, like Whipped Peter, it’s there down there, struggling in the underbrush for liberation, if you wish to see it.
On this day, a century after Whipped Peter either went back to the soil or chose rather to inhabit the living spirit of the land; a day after John Lewis passed on to glory; a moment during which Donavan LaBella still lays in a hospital bed with a shunt in his skull, pull back the perceptual lens and ask yourself what side you’re on.
And if that’s too hard, if you’re confused about what’s going on in Portland, or anywhere across the nation in this challenging year, ask yourself a slightly different version of that same question: Which side of the street would Whipped Peter be standing on? Where would John Lewis draw his last breath, if given the choice? Then ask yourself again: Where do I belong?
It’s all the same fight. It always has been. It always will be.
And history will never stop asking you where you stand.
Onward.
