On Family, War, Reparations and the U.S.A’s Looming Debt Crisis
Attorney Amira Jackmon, a Yale University
and Stanford Law School graduate.
As a debt finance attorney, I feel like I should have something very smart and insightful to say about Russia’s recent foreign-currency denominated debt default. I mean, by no means am I an economist nor an international relations/war-time strategist. But surely, after practicing in this area for 20+ years, one might think I’d have some thoughts about what it portends for the world economy in the near future.
But I don’t.
Likewise, the U.S.’s frequent trips to the edge of its debt ceiling.
Not very interesting to me.
It even takes a lot to get me talking about municipal debt.
It’s an inner dilemma I’ve struggled with my entire career. Something that’s different from the excuse that I’ve always made for it. (Without dare claiming to know Justice Clarence Thomas’s true inner thoughts) I think of it as a Thomas-esque belief that I have nothing important to add to the conversation that someone else won’t say or hasn’t already said.
I’ve only recently been able to properly name it. In truth, it is a nagging sense that none of it really matters. That there is something else — something really interesting and profoundly important — lying just below the surface that really matters. It is this thing that I want to see, understand and talk about. It is this thing on which all of my attention (or at least as much of it as I can spare) should be focused.
Whenever I can catch a glimpse of this thing, all that I’m able to comprehend is very personal.
Like the very personal stories that get told when any discussion of reparations for U.S. slavery comes up, as they did recently when the State of California’s first-in-the-nation state task force on reparations held hearings. I heard the “call” for testimony on the issue about three days prior to the hearing, not nearly enough time to prepare an actual response. But if they had timely asked, what might they like to hear from me? What, if anything, would I have the courage to tell them?
Would I tell them about my maternal great-grandmother Marion “Big Momma'' Swanson, from Palestine, Texas? Despite her name, she was a small, simple woman. Her husband, Ira Swanson, descended from Andrew. Andrew was bi-racial, the son of a white plantation owner in Arkansas — last-named Swanson — and a woman, listed only as “slave woman” on the only census I could find him named.
Marion “Big Momma” Anderson and Ira “Big Poppa” Swanson, as young adults, in Palestine, TX
Big Momma outlived her daughter, my grandmother, Betty, living well into her 90s on a simple life in Palestine and a diet of KFC and pop. Up until the time she died in 2009, she could still be heard uttering, “Oh, white people ain’t gonna let you do that!” to almost any attempt by me to help her order her affairs in what would seem to the average person who didn’t have the memories that she had — let alone this Stanford and Yale educated finance attorney — to be a normal manner. Her youngest son, “Punk”, as he was affectionately called, lived his life rarely leaving the small room in the back of her clapboard home. He would sit there watching t.v. and drinking himself into oblivion, as his father did and as his nickname demanded, just to prove her point.
What about her? Would her children’s descendants count? Or would their white ancestry eliminate them from consideration?
Would I tell them about my maternal grandfather, James Hosea Hall? He fled Texas in the 1950s and never moved back after the local sheriff threatened him with arrest complaining that he was too cocky. He was cocky like his grandfather who, as family lore goes, was born free in Boston, Massachusetts but ventured too far south where he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. On being set free, he ended up in Palestine where he managed to accumulate funds to purchase land and establish a small family compound where he and his wife, Fannie, raised twelve children. The family lore gets told somewhat differently by a distant cousin in this book. The real truth may never be known.
My great-great grandparents William and Fannie Hall, from On the Move, A Black Family’s Western Saga, by S.R. Martin
My grandfather was always full of stories and never short of mother wit. “Bite and get bitten. Don’t bite and get eaten alive!” is one that I always liked. He never drank or did drugs, other than his tobacco pipe, as far as I know or saw. When he died in the fall of 2021 at the age of 94 it was on his own 5-acre compound in west Fresno from which he grew melons and collards just for fun and was in the process of building a small food shack to host community gatherings.
My maternal grandfather, James H. Hall, in his Navy uniform (he was a vet of the Korean War) and near his home in Fresno County, California (April, 2020).
Would I tell them about the life that he fled when he and his brothers came to California’s central valley? Like how he had to drop out of school at the age of 14 and start fending for himself? Like how his daughter, my mother, born in 1950 in Palestine, remembers visiting the local movie theater as a child and being grabbed by family members and scolded for trying to enter the section reserved “for whites only”? Or about us on a road trip back there during my own childhood having racist epithets hurled at us by a truckload of white boys and me genuinely fearing for my life? Or the anger that arose in me when the same thing happened to me on the school yard in California but this time from the mouth of my classmate’s younger brother?
Would I talk about how they came to California and worked the grape, tomato and cotton fields in the heat of the Fresno sun? How did my mother and her siblings shed their field clothes in the alleyway behind their house upon their return to their working class neighborhood to hide the fact that, even in this new land, they had to resort to working the fields, as their ancestors had, to make ends meet? How did they sleep five children to one bed in a two bedroom home that they stayed in — eventually raising 7 children and helping to raise numerous grandchildren — until my grandmother Betty passed away in 2006? This, all while ingesting the mainstream narrative — laced with antagonism from the right and paternalism from the left — that said the Negro is lazy and doesn’t know how to do what they have to do to survive.
Me, second from left, with cousins enjoying happy times in Fresno in Black America, B.C.
Would I tell them about growing up in a loving, happy black community, in Black America, B.C.?
That is, before crack. Because everything changed after that, including even the mundane. Like my sister’s sleepover for her 13th birthday being interrupted by a knock on the front door. We excitedly opened the door thinking it was another friend joining the party. Instead, it was a blood covered crackhead woman standing there seeking help from some unknown act of violence. It felt like a scene from Friday the 13th…only it wasn’t. We did the only thing any self-respecting black kid in the ‘hood in those days would do: screamed, slammed the door and ran as fast and as far away as we could.
Should I mention the countless other stories? My stories and the stories of others: of fathers, brothers, sons and uncles absent — whether as a result of drug addiction, jail, or a simple inability to rise up to overcome their circumstances — of failed attempts to secure bank loans, of properties lost, of innocent young girls ushered into unmarked vans to receive abortion advice from Planned Parenthood without the knowledge or consent of their parents...
The personal stories were told by others recently when the City of Berkeley, California, considered the same subject.
“So I’ve always wondered who figures I might owe them just for why, really,” wrote Slumjack, a commentator on the Berkeleyside newspaper article about the Berkeley city council deliberation.
You know, the “I wasn’t there. Don’t blame me,``''My parents were immigrants,``''I had a hard life too,” comments that are made.
I understand these comments. No matter that we didn’t choose immigration or that they know their last names and where they came from (or, if not, and if they chose to, they might be able to find out where those last names originated). In fact, I get very personal too, when I read about aid being given from my tax dollars for a problem I had nothing to do with.
Like the war in the Ukraine, for instance. “To whom, for what and why, really do I owe the Ukrainians any part of my future tax payments?” I wonder. Is it because, “[t]his is going to be a multiyear humanitarian nightmare,” or due to the “asymmetric threats” being levied according to Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut? Don’t ask anyone in the ‘hood if we should give $10 billion in aid, including $4.25 billion in “funding for economic and humanitarian assistance for Ukrainians.”
Ten billion AND you want me to pay more for gas at the pump? How about “No!”
But then I have to admit that nobody asked me.
The personal weighed especially heavily on my mind the day I drove from home to pick up my father who was being discharged from Summit Hospital. As I drove through West Oakland observing the remnants of the neighborhood that used to be there, I thought of the anti-gentrification/anti-displacement fight that has been going on here (and in communities like it across the U.S.). Though I was born in the heart of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, I was raised in Fresno with the mentality of a simple, country girl, like my mother. As a central valley girl at heart, I thought to myself: “How could anyone feel such strong allegiance to what appears to be a barren wasteland to spend any part of their life fighting for the right to remain here?”
I arrived at the hospital to pick up my father and soon I had my answer. “Did you hear about the black people they won’t let on the train?” “Did you hear the black basketball player is going to spend the next three years in prison?” It took me a minute to realize he was talking about the war halfway around the world. For him, everything started and ended with the battle he’d been raging since he was 24 years old in 1966 and joined with others to form Black Arts West Theatre and the Black House in San Francisco that became the center of the West Coast Black Arts Movement. Interspersed with news of “the war” were snippets of “that war” intertwined with his own personal battle: with his declining health, with the hospital staff trying to help him; and with the reality of how vulnerable he’d become to the very system he had been fighting to free himself from his entire life.
Upon leaving the hospital, we drove to the pharmacy to collect his prescriptions before heading to his home. On the way, he updated me on his fight to support the presence of Black vendors at Oakland’s Lake Merritt. As we passed the lake, we noticed a handful of vendors who were still coming out in spite of the City’s attempt to crack down on their selling. There were even fewer buyers. I looked and only saw war-torn survivors of a battle that had been lost a long time ago. But my father beamed with pride. He looked at the same scene through the eyes of a young black boy growing up in Oakland who had been very intentionally made to feel that his presence at the Jewel of Oakland was not welcome. That the very idea that someone like him would go there and relax would disrupt the beauty of the California sun glistening off the still waters flowing from the estuary.
I returned him to his building. He had only recently moved there about a month before being admitted to the hospital. It was across the street from the school he attended as a child and where, just a few blocks away, my grandfather had lived, worked and died. I asked him when he moved there how it made him feel to move back to his childhood neighborhood in the sunset of his life. He said someone else had asked him the same question. It was one of the few times in my life that my father had nothing to say.
I led him inside his apartment. He could barely make it a few feet before losing his breath. We went over the instructions for the numerous medications he had been given (all at a cost of just over $5). His doctor said he had narrowly averted death and been given another 10 years of life with the new bioprosthetic valve they’d inserted into the leaflets of his heart. Yet after a week of hospital food, all he wanted was a piece of KFC. We laughed. Noted: KFC and pop might work for a simple life in Palestine but not as fuel to fight an urban war.
On the way out, I started his car so that the battery wouldn’t die during the coming days when, it was hoped, he’d try to be still. I looked at the rear of his car, strewn with stacks of the latest edition of his self-published community newspaper “The Outlaw”. It was a battle that my grandfather had begun, as the publisher of his own newspaper serving the Negro community in Fresno where my father was born. It didn’t seem to matter to my father that most of his papers never seemed to get distributed (though he assured me that all the nurses and doctors at the hospital had clamored for their copy). The real battle was for some future mark: some evidence to say to the people who someday might never know that we were here. We lived. We wrote. We breathed. We mattered.
The same battle that indigenous Americans had nearly completely lost.
“Give shummi,” the signs read. Is it just me, or does it feel too late for that?
A September 13, 1949 copy of the Fresno Voice, a paper started by my paternal grandfather, Owendell Jackmon.
My paternal grandfather led the Jackmon exodus from Fresno to West Oakland. His gambling and something else that nobody in my family really speaks about led my grandmother, Marian, eventually back to Fresno where she established herself as an independent business woman in real estate.
I thought of what that unspoken something may have been. Was it what led him to change his name, from Oliver Wendell Jackson to Owendell Jackmon?
Oliver Wendell Jackson was born in Kentucky on March 10, 1900. I thought of his family still there and the stories I don’t know about his upbringing. I thought of his service in World War I and subsequent activism as a war veteran. I thought of his life as the first “race” florist in Oakland, as he referred to himself in the local papers of the time. I thought of him and my grandmother at the 1945 “Peace Conference” in San Francisco that would help lay the foundation for the United Nations. I visualized the life they aspired to live. Though they themselves never entered the promised land, they saw a glimpse of it and hoped that someday their children might.
My paternal grandparents, Owendell and Marian Jackmon, at the 1945 Peace Conference, in San Francisco, CA.
Like my father, their second oldest son (because their first born son would live nearly his entire life in prison). As an activist, one might argue that my father had chosen to engage in this battle. He could have aspired to live a quiet, simple life in Fresno, piddling around the yard and raising a family and rarely leaving Fresno, like the rest of my family does today. He could have avoided crack and taken better care of his health. He could fast in observance of Ramadan, according to the Muslim faith he chose to embrace (because we can’t even be sure that the Christian god we were given by our slavers to worship is the same one worshiped by our ancestors ). He could fast and cleanse his body of the righteous but toxic anger he’d been seething in his entire life.
Three generations of Jackmons stand outside of my grandfather’s flower shop on San Pablo Avenue: Owendell, Marvin X and my older brothers, Marvin K and Darrel. Darrel died of suicide at 39, after years of combating mental health struggles.
But then again, on some level, maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he can’t. He has to continue the fight for war and for peace started by his father. It had been couched as a war for “black people” “black culture” or for “‘da hood” but really it was a very individualized fight for his man-hood, his person-hood. For his humanity. For the humanity of his father.
Who am I to say he didn’t fight it the best way that he could?
As I drove back home, I drove past the rest of the war’s victims. They were on every corner: hobbling through the streets, un-housed, half-clothed, many very clearly out of their right mind. As I drove, I thought of at least two other wounded soldiers — survivors from the war on us — that I had committed myself to see in the coming days: one, a cousin who, after spending the first half of his life in special education classes in San Francisco, had just re-surfaced from decades of drug abuse and homelessness with one eye and maybe half a brain; another who was in mourning over the death of his son — the good son, of course — who, days earlier, was shot at close range near his home in Sacramento. When I visited, I would find him in his apartment with the shades drawn. After spending 30 years in San Quentin, this one lacked the guts to face his family at his son’s funeral.
While driving, I spoke on the phone to a cousin who was doing the same on her end, holding down the fort in Fresno. “We might have to leave some of the injured behind,” I told her.
“No,” she said. “We can’t do that. I can’t do that.”
I felt tired. If only I could click my heels and go home. I most certainly did not sign up to fight.
Or maybe I did. Dammit. Relief for my shift should come soon…I hoped.
At the end of the day, whether or not I agree that the use of funds for the war in the Ukraine is justified, whether dissent to the expenditure of funds is voiced or not, whether funds are paid directly or indirectly, there is no doubt that they will be paid. “Humanitarian aid?” Pshaw! There is a worldwide reorganization happening. A “great reset” they say. Large sums of money are moving around for reasons that I probably will never fully grasp. Is it service on some unstated debt? We all may never know. But I know that bills deemed important enough to be paid by our government get paid. Period. (“Full stop,” according to our Vice President). Apparently, sending funds for this war on the other side of the world is one of them.
Other bills get to go unpaid. For a time. Until the debt collector comes, that is. Make no mistake, in these parts — among the survivors of the “us war” — we know that, though we may employ tricks to try to avoid him, eventually, the debt collector will come.
Something just below the surface demands that debt be paid.
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