W.heatley
The weekend of March 12, I took advantage of the unseasonably warm day and took a walk through downtown Boston where I found many sites and sounds. Three days before, the people of Japan had been hit by an unprecedented earthquake and Tsunami. This was on my mind as I strolled through historic downtown Boston, on the rare sunny day in March.
My first stop was the Granary Burial Ground, the third-oldest cemetery in Boston and the resting place for many notable Bostonians including Phillis Wheatley and Paul Revere. I'm always surprised, sadly, to find the occasional notable Black Bostonian buried amongst more familiar Boston figures, mostly of European descent. One wonders where all of the Black folks were buried over the last many centuries. I did learn at the Granary that it was common for slaves to be buried in the same grave or tomb with their former masters, even freed slaves. Boston African Americans have a longstanding history, but I must admit that growing up in Detroit and Los Angeles, this history largely went untaught.
Phillis Wheatley was an exception. I read about her in my high school advanced literature class and later in college. I remembered that she was a famous writer of her time, which was unusual because she was a slave who had been taught to read and write by the Wheatley family. She was eventually emancipated after her work was published and she visited London but she died young. It was gratifying and touching to find that she was buried in the Granary along with Paul Revere and others.
Q.uake F.undraiser
The good people of Boston don't forget their fellow travelers, and on our walk we came across a group of musicians raising money for the quake. Their music lifted spirits but also reminded us that we are bound together on this planet, from birth to death and what blooms will decay. But that we are also bound to find joy in the most unlikely of places and circumstances. What the world can hold. It holds us all -- famous, infamous, forgotten, young, old, grieving, laughing, dancing, loving, dying. It's all here.
List of places for donating to the victims of the Tsunami. I found this on Google's Tsunami Relief Page but I'm sure there are more: http://www.google.com/tsunami_relief.html.
