I thought long and hard on who I would want to trade places with:
1. I would want to be any ONE of my founders as they strived to make DST a reality. This could be from when they first expressed that they wanted to change the scope of AKA or as DST began to become a sharper entity. I would definitely want to participate in the Suffrage March.
2. I would want to be Halle Berry the night she won that Oscar to know how it feels to accomplish what she was not expected to accomplish and to know her secret secret thoughts. I want to know her tears of joy, accomplishment and hugging Denzel and Eric would not be so bad either.
3. I would want to be a slave on the Middle Passage -- laying there knowing that deep within my life was forever changing and to have a better concept of what was TRULY endured on the Middle Passage. Would I have been an agitator or a go with the flow? No one wants to be in a position of degradation but the past few months, I have been face to face with slavery teaching the
Narrative of Frederick Douglass and showing my students
ROOTS. Being so intimate with slavery for this long of a time has caused me to reflect and ponder slavery all over again. I have always been interested in slavery -- all aspects of it. I ADMIRE all of our forbears who stood in the trenches of slavery. I actually would want to be a slave any time in the 48 hours of the hundreds of years of slavery. I know I am always complaining about how tired I am and there is no way my work day even comes close to that of what a slave endured.
I know slavery is one of those parts of out history that leaves a deep scar, physical and emotional, on us as BLACKS but that is one of my choices.
4. Lastly I would want to be my dad as he spent his last 48 hours on earth. Did he think of me and my brother? Did he know that I was calling him? Did he know that I was sorry? Did he know that I was on my way? I want to know what it is like to lay in that bed and know that you will never walk out of the hospice. I want to know how he felt about dying and his life as well.