Wilberforce House

Hull may not have the same international profile as New York City, but I am just as exiting about visiting there as I was about Manhattan.

I went to New York and I danced along the streets of dreams, I was pleasured by the shining lights and humoured by the heavy snowfall. I enjoyed every second of it. I will never forget those five days in New York City.

The trip to Hull holds the same kind of excitement, but with a more somber feel to it. It is more of a pilgrimage than a city break. It is my intention to pay my personal respects to a man who dedicated his life to making the slave trade a thing of the past. He did so against all the odds -- against all the murmurs and scowls of Parliament, and against all the protests of businessmen. And 200 years after his greatest achievement became law, I want to express my gratitude for his actions.

I know very little of the life and work of Mr. William Wilberforce. I am also on a mission to educate myself. Something I'm sure the former slave Booker T. Washington would have admired greatly.

One should not forget the people he helped either. My trip as much about them as it is about William Wilberforce. Lives of unimaginable misery and pain were lived out in a blind gaze. Most people of the twenty-first century have become too detached, too immune, to the existence of such feelings. In the developed world, these feelings do not occur any more. Not really. We only get glimpses of something close to what the slaves had to deal with on our news bulletins. We have become too used to seeing this as a distant issue. But it happened in Britain. The souls of fellow human beings were bought and sold in Britain with the nod of another man's head or the lifting of another man's arm. Ships left our shores with the intention of condemning people to torturous lives of great peril and pain and danger.

We cannot forget this. Only when we come to terms with our nation's role in the transatlantic slave trade can we begin to understand this.Once we come to understand it, and accept it, then, and only then, we might be forgiven. But that is not up to us.

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
Daniel C. Wright

Wall Street

First, I'd like to begin by saying I had an amazing time in Manhattan! With the exception of my sister's wedding, they were the best five days of my life. There wasn't a single moment I regretted going. Thank you to everyone who went, you are all amazing! Thank you to Ross and Morag, and also to Colin for everything he did organisation-wise in Liverpool. New York is an awesome place and I can't wait to go back -- there's so many things left to do!

I've been trying for days to write a decent blog entry. I've given up. What follows is only a brief description of a scene I witnessed on the Friday. Feel free to draw your own meanings and significances from the scene I describe.

After we had got back from Ellis Island, we went down Wall Street. Most, if not all of us, were there. No district of Manhattan is the same as another, and the financial district is no exception to the rule. I really enjoyed walking down there, among all the tightly built skyscrapers. The blustery wind was threatening to seize control of the umbrella Ruth lent me, but we battled on. I love the architecture of the Trump Building in particular:


Not far past the Trump Building, there was a worn out, scruffy, homeless women. I didn't get a good look at her, but she appeared dazed and confused, lost in her thoughts and her bewilderment, disorientated by her fear and drowning in the skyscrapers all around. She stumbled on by us, struggling to walk.

Did anyone else notice this women?

All the major economies of our world look to Wall Street, to the New York Stock Exchange, to the financial district of Manhattan -- they all look because it's the financial district of the developed world. And there's a broken women there. With no where to go. With nothing to eat. With no home to go to. And no bed to sleep in. Wall Street cannot accommodate for this women.

All I can do is make assumptions based upon what I saw. I don't know that women's background, and I don't know the stories behind every self-made man walking down Wall Street. But I saw a homeless women stumbling down Wall Street. That remains the most important most significant thing I saw in New York.

Everything I saw and experienced in New York has a degree of realism. Everything has a characteristic of some sort which made it 'real' to me. Even this:

What I saw reminded me of what Bob Dylan sang:
There's a-mighty many people all millin' all around,
They'll kick you when you're up and knock you when you're down.
It's hard times in the city,
Livin' down in New York town.
This song is also an absolute choon and everyone should have a listen (it's somewhere in the depths of Blackboard).

Yours, wherever you may be,
Daniel C. Wright.

Back To The Future: Living Through The Legacy Of Sir Henry Morton Stanley

July 22, 2005. My sister gets married in glorious sunshine in front of a packed church. After a beautiful service, the two families gather in the church yard, struggling to stay cool under the blazing sun. Those who have come up from Devon have brought flowers to place on the grave of some deceased relatives. The people they plan to honour and spent a few moments remembering are my grandmother and grandfather. But there’s a problem.

They wander around aimlessly. They can’t find the grave. The grave is unmarked. There is no headstone to mark out the dead. When they died, my grandparents were the last to be lowered in the family plot. At the time they died, in the early 1990’s, we could not afford a headstone.

Eventually my dad emerges from the church, one of the last to do so. As he shakes hands with well-wishers who tell him how beautiful his daughter is, he sees the Devon relatives searching uselessly. He hurries over to point them in the right direction. I am stood a good distance away, but I can see the displeasure written across his face as he leads the way to the Wright family plot.

Later, I speak to him about it. He takes it personally. He takes it hard. His mother and father are resting peacefully, but there is no headstone to show where they lie. He feels he has done them a disservice, and vows to buy a headstone to honour the dead if it the last thing he does. But there is another problem.

Edith and Thomas Wright are not they only two people buried there. My dad suspects Walter is in there, and Sarah Ann might be as well -- oh, and Aunt Jen, what about her? Suddenly I am confronted with names I know nothing of. I have never heard them before, but I am curious to learn: who are all these people? How are they related to me?

My sister’s wedding was the spark. Within a few months, genealogy is the buzz word. My dad and Uncle Dave are well into it, sending off for birth certificates, searching censuses, and visiting some place called Mobberley. They talk for hours at a time on Skype about what they have found out, what they need to find out, where they might be wrong, where they are definitely right......

Before long, it is Christmas time, and festivities take over. But by the spring of 2006 the hunt is on again. The original research project to find out who is in the family grave seems to have been swallowed up by something bigger -- something even more important. A family tree is emerging, and there is over 100 names on it. I recognise only a few.

I am curious as to whether there are any semi-famous people in our family. As far as I am aware, no one in my family has ever done anything significant outside of the family sphere. I ask my dad. It turns out there aren’t. But there is one person, my dad says. This man’s son, John Rowlands. The family tree shows the name John Rowlands, with no marriage to anyone and no child. Well, I ask, if this guy had a son, why is he not on the family tree?

My dad informs me very politely he does not deserve to be. He says this in a roundabout way, but I get the message. His name was the same as his father, John Rowlands. Well, it was until he fled to the United States and changed it.

He was born a bastard -- a very serious thing back in 1841. The workhouse is where he spent his early years, before he ran away. Eventually, he landed in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he settled upon the name Henry Morton Stanley. Soon, the American Civil War was well under way, and this brought with it Stanley’s first mistake. He fought for both the confederate states and for the union. As someone who despises the horrors of slavery with unbound utter contempt, I have found it hard to come to terms with the fact that someone I am related to fought for slavery. What is worse, this would not be his final brush with slavery. But at this point in his life, he was willing to make the ultimate sacrifice to keep the chains of slavery locked.

Once the civil war had finished, he went to work for the New York Herald, a now defunct but formerly very popular newspaper. In under a week now, I go to New York. It is going to be strange walking the streets of New York City, knowing that at one time, Henry M. Stanley lived and worked here. Over 100 years ago, these were his streets. While he went on to commit a great many atrocities during his time in Africa, he has my respect as a journalist. Family folk law has it he murdered more Africans than he helped on his trips through ‘the dark continent’. For a long time, I despised him as much as everyone else did. Tales have also been passed down of how he traded the Wangwana into slavery as well, when passing through the land of troublesome kingdoms. Of course, none of this is recorded in his official books.

I had respect for Henry Morton Stanley only as a journalist. That changed for the better when I read Booker T. Washington’s autobiography ‘Up From Slavery’. This is the greatest book I have ever read. I already held it in the highest regard before I read the following passage: ‘In the House of Commons, which we visited several times, we met Sir Henry M. Stanley. I talked with him about Africa and its relation to the American Negro, and after my interview with him, I became more convinced than ever that there was no hope of the American Negro’s improving his condition by emigrating to Africa.’ Maybe, just maybe, I had got this all wrong.

I still find it hard to believe that my hero met a member of my family. And in such grand settings! If Booker T. Washington could take a shine to Henry M. Stanley, then surely I could as well. I have begun to read more of his work, and I am currently half way through the first volume of Through The Dark Continent.

But for a short time, before being dispatched to ‘find Livingstone’, in the words of Bennett, a member of my family called New York City home. He lived and worked there, in what was slowly becoming the world’s first modern metropolis. I keep thinking about how much New York has changed since then. What would Henry M. Stanley recognise of today’s Manhattan? Would he be surprised by the disappearance of so many mastheads from the newsstands? The American newspaper which financed his search for Dr. Livingstone is gone. I would love to tell him that it merged with its bitter rival the New York Tribune before going out of print. But he probably wouldn’t believe me.

My ultimate goal in life is to be a journalist. It always has been, even before I knew who Henry M. Stanley was. Stanley was a true English gentleman in New York, but I feel his character was tainted by inherited racism, as so many other people of his generation were. His crimes against humanity on his travels through Africa are shameful. For example: as his caravan sailed down a river through Central Africa, the locals organised a welcome party on the river bank. They had never seen a white person before. They were dressed impeccably, wearing traditional garments of the finest materials, reserved for such rare and special occasions. Stanley panicked and slaughtered them all. Or so legend has it.

In a way, Sir Henry Morton Stanley lived my dream 100+ years before I could dream. He wrote for a great New York newspaper, he lived in the most vibrant city in America and he saw the world. Moreover, he made my dream happen for himself. I admire his drive and his determination, his will to succeed in all circumstances against all the odds. I also admire his whit. When he met Dr. Livingstone, he had not seen another white person since the Navy sailed away some two hundred days ago: ‘Dr. Livingstone, I presume?’ I try to focus on the good things he did, but sometimes he makes it very hard.


The family grave still has no headstone.

Yours, wherever you may be,
Daniel C. Wright

The Second Amendment

I just sent out a quick, basic search on Facebook groups. All I searched for was 'second amendment'. Page after page after page was filled with pro-gun, pro-NRA, pro-second amendment groups. I could not find a single group that wanted to take guns away from Americans.

Firearms, like the second amendment to the United States Constitution, have no place in a civilised, modern society. The United States has more homicides than any other country anywhere in the world. Over 11,000 Americans each year are shot dead. There is concern in Great Britain at the moment as the number of gun-related killings topped 200 a year.

Regardless of what the 200+ year old document says, no civilian needs a gun. If nobody has a gun, then no one can be shot dead. One argument says that civilised citizens need firearms for protection. If the criminals did not have guns, then the law abiding citizen does not need one either. Another argument states that guns do not kill, people do. Guns do not kill, but they sure do help. The right to bear arms was necessary when the Constitution was drawn up, but this is 2007. The Wild West is no more. It has been tamed and is a completely different place. Utter lawlessness, utter anarchy does not exist with the United States anymore. Towns are no longer run by gangs of criminals. Elected Governments, Sheriffs, and Governors run the show and are held accountable through checks and balances. Guns do not even enter the equation.

So many Americans claim they have a 'right to bear arms'. What lunacy! Americans have the right to walk down the street without fear of being shot. Americans who argue against the NRA and the pro-gun lobbies are branded as liberals. What is liberal about wanting to walk down the street without wondering who is carrying a gun, about who could shoot you dead at any time?

Like a lot of anti-gun campaigners, I feel the need to make the point that I am not a hater of the United States Constitution. I believe a written, entrenched Constitution should govern every country. I wish we had one in Britain. I do, however, loath the second Amendment. It is unnecessary, it causes more problems than it solves and it portrays the United States to be arrogant on the world stage.

An America with guns is not the land of the free and the home of the brave. There is nothing brave about shooting someone dead from 500 yards away. To shoot someone is the most cowardly way to kill them. Some of the twentieth century's most inspirational characters have had a bullet put through them: John F. Kennedy; Martin Luther King, Jr; Malcolm X; Abe Lincoln; John Lennon However, Winston Churchill, Bob Geldof, William Gladstone and Margaret Thatcher have all spent the majority of their time (or all of their time) in the United Kingdom. Not a single one has been shot dead. Think about it.

Yours, wherever you may be,
Daniel C. Wright

Sales Assistants Are Just That: Sales Assistants!

The following is written for the benefit of sales assistants across the United Kingdom. After two days of persistent, soul-destroying abuse, enough is enough.

Retail is a fast-moving, quick paced industry, with a high turnover of staff at the bottom. Sales assistants come and go in the blink of an eye. Their job is self-explanatory: to assist with the sale of goods in any way. Yet there are difficult complexities within this wide-ranging brief.

At the weekends, many people who do this difficult job are still in full-time education; they are 16 to 22 year olds who are still at school, college or university (Where I work is no different). For five days a week, these people stress, strain and worry about exams, assessments and coursework. These are the primary concerns of these people.

For two days a week, they seize the opportunity to earn some money. Many, like myself, do this through the retail sector. And for most, this is their first job.

I personally like my job. I am happy to work for the amount of money I am paid. I think the working conditions are good. I like my boss. My good relationship with my manager means I want to do a good job not only for myself but for him as well (it was not always like this). If I fail in some way, I let myself down, and I let him down. I do not worry about the company because we are part of a chain. The company does not exist on a day-to-day basis.

What makes the job difficult is the customers. Very often, it is they who determine how difficult the job is. While they have the ability to make the job easy, they can also make it near impossible.

My workplace caters for the upper echelons of our society. The people who shop there are wealthy, affluent, successful people with a large amount of disposable income. The middle and upper classes are our target market. As a result, our prices are staggering. A tin of coke: 75p Seeds that you can get from a market stall for 99p: £3.00. Chocolate bars that are 30p elsewhere: 55p. My personal opinion is many of our products are overpriced. But there are people willing to pay these prices, and as long as they keep coming through the doors, we will continue to charge them over the odds. One gentlemen came and complained to me about the price of one of our products. He was a pensioner, and he struck me as being a smart man. But he kept complaining to me about the prices. I tried my very best to explain that it was not me who set the prices. I was just the person who had to charge them. But he could not understand that. He persisted. Quite what he wanted to achieve, I still don’t know. If he wanted me to feel bad, he succeeded. All customers should remember that the sales assistants are just that: sales assistants! We do not set the prices, and we cannot change them. I don’t mind customers who come and say to me “oh, these are a bit expensive, aren’t they?" because that implies they do not expect me to do something about it. Customers should not persist with probing questions about the prices of small goods because it is not us who set them -- it is either the manager or the company!

A gentlemen came to my till with two bags of compost: the first was a 75lt multipurpose, PLU code 106; and the second a 25lt John Innes number 02, PLU code 132. ”It is not £3.99!” he bellowed. I was absolutely certain the multipurpose was £3.99 because it was also on offer, three for £10.00. I explained this to him politely.” It bloody well isn’t,” he cursed, “it says £2.99 outside!’ He slapped his credit card on the counter.

“If you’re disputing the price,” I said, gritting my teeth, “I’ll get the manager.” He crossed his arms, furiously. He was not going to be overcharged by some punk, I could see it in his body language. I am a calm person, but I wanted to give him a swift right hook. “Here, hold on to this a minute,” I said sliding his credit card back to him. It lay openly on the counter for all the customers behind him to see. He turned his back.

In a way, that made me laugh, but it also made me cry a bit inside. I was crying for his stupidity. He was making a scene about one pound, but he was quite happy to abandon his credit card -- his entire bank account -- on a shop counter, with no sales assistant present.

Thankfully the manager was not very far away and came and dealt with him. He eventually agreed to pay the £3.99 for the multipurpose compost, and after he had taken it to his car, he came back inside and insisted he showed the manager the sign that said £2.99. The gentleman had been looking at the wrong sign. He made a fool of himself. But he was not very humble about it. He walked past me on his way out. I glared at him. He did not apologise. He did not apologise for raising his voice, for shouting, or for using abusive language. He did not apologise for being incredibly rude about the small matter of one pound. He had more money than sense, and I hope he never sets foot in our store again.

Customers like this man are more and more common. The customer is always right, apparently. This is nonsense. Why is it acceptable for the customer to abuse sales assistants? Why can we not give as good as we get? I fear one day I might just speak my mind to a customer. I might just let them know what I really think.

Without the customers, we would not have jobs. And without us, they would not be able to spend their money. Respect needs to be a two-way thing as well. If someone shows you respect, you should show them respect. I always greet my customers with a pleasant smile. They usually just grunt or sneer. Sometimes I wonder why I bother. I had no pleasant customers over the weekend. No one discussed the weather, and no one engaged in phatic talk. It may have been just phatic talk to them, but I would have been glad of the interaction.

Yours, wherever you may be,
Daniel C. Wright

New York City: A Lonely Old Place?

New York City. The home of multi-million dollar movie sets, home of movie stars, stars of television, stars of sports, -- the much mythologized place where dreams are made, broken, and (if you’re lucky) made again in the blink of an eye. Things, cultural things, things beneficial to humanity, things in the name of democracy, things in the name of America, things to commemorate September 11 -- things happen on a phenomenal scale in New York City. It’s a big city a big distance away, full of big buildings, big stadiums and big people, with big personalities, big jobs, big salaries and bigger egos. Size matters and I don’t.

I have never been so far away from home before. I’m looking at a map on my wall. Three thousand miles of solid water between me and where I grew up. The furthest I have ever been away from home is Valletta, Malta. That seems just a stones throw away now. Getting to the Unites States is a serious business. 7½ hours, maybe 8 hours, sat in the same seat across ‘the pond’, after getting up at stupid o’clock to leave Liverpool at 06:00. The journey there and the first day is all I can think about. I can’t sleep on an aircraft. How can you sleep when you’re ‘cruising’ at 10,000 feet with what can one can only describe as a bloody deep pong below?!

John Denver’s version of Mother Nature’s Son just came on my iPod. The opening line has stuck in my mind: Born a poor young country boy. I remember my dad a few years back saying that line put his childhood into perspective for him. To a lesser extent, it does for me, too. I only know of one other person in my family who has been to New York City, and experienced it in some way. He is not talked about in my family, because of hidden truths that are not yet commonly known. I, however, admire him for the positive things he did and what he achieved. I’ll write about him in a separate post when I get round to it.

Eventually, I will get there. But what then? What happens when we are all settled in to Manhattan life for five days? Is it possible to settle in to Manhattan life? I am a shy person, in a country (and a city) that doesn’t seem to ‘do’ shy! I suppose I am mentally preparing myself to be completely overawed by the sights, sounds, smells, highs, lows, pains and pleasures of a dominating metropolis. I think I’m ready to feel small.

Yours, wherever you may be,
Daniel C. Wright

Technical Difficulties

Due to current on-going technical difficulties, this blog is unlikely to be consistently updated for the foreseeable future. Once said technical problems have been solved, blogging will continue on a regular basis as per the first three weeks, but a solution seems a considerable long way away. :-(

Sorry.

John Howard Griffin’s ‘Black Like Me’: Essential Reading

About twelve months ago now, I went into the Aldham Robarts Library at Liverpool John Moores University and stood in front of a large selection of books. I scanned the titles as quickly as I could, my eyes jumping from one part of the shelf to another. All the books appealed to me. I did not know where to start reading.

I wish I could say this book jumped out at me, but I picked it up at random. I read the title. Black Like Me. I read it over and over in my head. Black Like Me. Black Like Me. The book was a lot smaller than many of the other books. It was the same size as my New Testament. There wasn’t very many pages in it, and it was quite battered. It was ragged, and worn.

I made the assumption this was an educated black academic writer, putting pen to paper and explaining (or at least, trying to explain) what it was like on a day-to-day basis to be a black man.

I was wrong.

I was very, very wrong. This book goes beyond that. It draws attention to the part of American society that officials claim does not exist, but everyone knows that it does. John Howard Griffin first highlighted it, then drew a line underneath it, and then got ten, 4,000 watt light bulbs and pointed them all directly at it. Everyone could see. The problem was clear, and there was no disputing it. It existed, it was real, and it was American: racism. It could not be denied.

But Black Like Me is more. It gets under your skin. It eats into you, though you, and leaves you empty. There is nothing left in you. What remains is a hole. You are incomplete. Your soul is incomplete. How can you be complete when someone tells you that the black man is equal, but he is not? He is just the same; the only thing which is not equal is his relationship to society, and this is different because society treats him as different, but Griffin confirms what educated people already know -- that he is not different. He is just the same. You cannot be complete if you have a soul and you know that people just like you are in trouble. They are the brotherhood of Man. They are my brothers, they are your brothers, they are our brothers.

Some whites will say this is not really it. They will say this is the white man’s experience as a Negro in the south, not the Negro’s. But this is picayunish, and we no longer have time for that. We no longer have time to atomise principles and beg the question. We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues. The Negro. The South. These are the details.

That is John Howard Griffin speaking. In the preface, he abolishes the primary concern of the reader. And he is right. I wish he was wrong. But he was not. He was not wrong in 1959. I doubt he would be wrong in 2007.

Rest at pale evening…
A tall slim tree…
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

Yours, wherever you may be,
Daniel C. Wright