Forget 'Once Upon a Time'

“ONCE UPON A TIME ...” We like that. Four words signal to our colonized brains: “It’s story time!” We’re gonna go on an adventure! We’re gonna meet mice and pumpkins and fairy godmothers and wicked stepmothers and oppressed blonde women wearing baby-blue peasant wear and neat white aprons. And we’re gonna fall in loooooove. Ahhhh ...

July 2003. Rolling across the northern South, I follow a story, from tourist trap to tourist trap along the Cherokee Trail of Tears. “Watch the metanarrative,” says Randy Woodley, our guide on the journey. What do the museums, the plays, the tourist shops want Americans to believe about themselves? “God guided us West.” “It was destiny.” “Those featherheaded people became our friends.” Or: “They were dead before we got here.” Or: “They just left. Sure, they were ‘removed,’ but we had a hoedown for the ones who hid in the hills and stayed.”

“Bear witness,” the peacemaker says. Say the things that happened, the things that could happen, the things that are happening.

Listen to the story of the little black boy who fights off roaches the size of his toes and the rats that follow, nibbling on his lips in the middle of the night. Shrieks of horror from his mother standing beside herself upon the revelation that her baby has been eaten, consumed, because that’s where we pushed them—that’s where the collective us, U.S., pushed them—quarantined in dilapidated Northern filth after fleeing the terror of burning Southern crosses and swinging feet twitching, suspended from the same bloodstained tree his grandfather planted on the Aiken plantation.

That story.

And the story of the 20 or so Chinese men from Guangdong province in southern China, who boarded a ship in the 1860s to escape poverty and persecution only to be mutilated and lynched by a mob of 500 white men in the “Calle de los Negros” in the City of Angels, 1871.

And the story of the Tongva people—the original people of Los Angeles. Removed by conquistadores. Missionized. Separated. Exploited. Christianized. Colonized. Put in their place.

These stories.

And the story of the moment it sank in and the expression on Maria Anita Jose’s face when she learned she was no longer Mexican—that los blancos had declared her “Californian.”

And the story of the European immigrant fleeing drought, plague, religious persecution, and the feudal caste system of Europe in search of a new way of being in the world—a noble dream that plowed a wake of recurring nightmares to the four corners of the Earth.

Inside there is a whisper rising: “Forget ‘Once upon a time’ ...”
It says, “This happened!”
This ... happened.
Let the stories be told though the heavens may fall.

This was originally presented as a performance poem at The Summit 2017 in Washington, D.C.