Storming the Gates of Paradise (29 page)

Perhaps my friends were frightened by the homeless because the sight of dirty, deranged people was so unfamiliar to them. Or maybe they couldn’t distinguish between suffering and danger, and the homeless are often portrayed as dangerous. In all my years of walking the city streets, often alone, often at night, I’ve never been menaced by an evidently homeless person (as opposed to, say, careening luxury cars). Some of them become landmarks: the older man in the wide felt hat who was always on the park bench when I went running, seeming more like a country squire than a desperado; the sad woman sitting cross-legged on the same
corner near city hall for years, day and night, rocking back and forth and holding a stuffed animal amid all her tattered belongings.

The homeless may indeed be a danger, but only to our idea of ourselves. They represent how deranged, how desperate, and how dirty human beings can become, something that most of us would rather not know. They represent how wide the spectrum of human nature is and how fragile our own civility is—though many of them are among the most polite and gracious people I encounter every day. Some of them seem to be homeless because they lack the initiative and cunning to survive in a world where security—long-term employment, unions, blue-collar jobs, affordable housing—is vanishing and we must all fend for ourselves, not just by working but by calculating, by planning, by competing, by abandoning and reinventing our sense of self. They are anachronisms, the people who might have done well in stable jobs that no longer exist, and when I give them food or money, they say, “God bless you,” a lot of them, an old-fashioned response.

In parts of Asia, beggars are necessary to society because they allow others to honor their obligation to give. The Buddhist monks of southeast Asia, for example, take a vow not to deal with money and allow nonmonks to receive the spiritual benefit of giving: poverty and spirituality have a long acquaintance. Gavin Newsom, the restaurateur-businessman who is now San Francisco’s mayor, built his career by beating up on the homeless (though he has since somewhat redeemed himself). John Burton, who represents San Francisco in the state Senate, was disgusted enough to fight back. “St. Francis was a beggar,” said the signs he put up on the streets, and “Jesus gave alms to the poor.”

In cities around the country, the homeless are most often treated primarily as an eyesore for others. Policies often focus on moving them away or making them invisible, as if they were a problem of aesthetics, not ethics, as if our comfort, not theirs, were all that is at stake. The homeless also signify that the distribution of wealth in this wealthiest society the world has ever known is itself an atrocity against humanity as well as against the environment, for the armies of the homeless were produced in large degree by decisions made by the affluent. Their decisions to defund mental health programs and dump the patients, to turn basic
human needs for housing and health care into speculative commodities whose upward spiral has enriched the few and burdened the many, were decisions to break the social contract and try to buy their way out of it.

More and more often, the wealthy try to buy replacements for a functioning society—armed guards and gated communities in place of social justice, bottled water and expensive cancer cures in place of unpolluted resources, private schools in place of the good public education that was once a backbone of this nation, the stock market in place of social security. From Franklin Delano Roosevelt through at least Richard Nixon (who was considering universal health care and passed the Clean Water and Clean Air acts), the United States became more of a society, a place that recognized interdependence and obligation toward each other. From Ronald Reagan’s presidency on, we have dismantled that social contract. The homeless are frightening because they are a mirror: in their fear, in the uncertainty of their predicament, in their hunger, in their desperation, we see that we have gone feral.

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves
, by Adam Hochschild (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 480 pp.

Mark Lombardi’s art consists of colossal drawings of networks of power, connecting politicians, capitalists, and corporations into intricate maps, like medieval cosmology or Kabbalah diagrams, whose huge arcs and circles linking the small handwritten names are as visually beautiful as they are politically daunting. His most famous work was about the BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International, also known as the Bank of Crooks and Criminals) banking scandal. It linked up the bin Laden and Bush families long before the film
Fahrenheit 9/11
, even before the 2000 election and Bush’s illegitimate apotheosis as president.

New York critic Frances Richard wrote of this work:

Lombardi’s drawings—which map in elegantly visual terms the secret deals and suspect associations of financiers, politicians, corporations, and governments—dictate that the more densely lines ray out from a given node, the more deeply that figure is embroiled in the tale Lombardi tells. . . . The drawing is done on pale beige paper, in pencil. It follows a time-line, with dates arrayed across three horizontal tiers. These in turn support arcs denoting personal and corporate alliances, the whole comprising a skeletal resume of George W. Bush’s career in
the oil business. In other words, the drawing, like all Lombardi’s work, is a post-Conceptual reinvention of history painting.

After September 11, 2001, the FBI visited the Whitney Museum to examine Lombardi’s drawings for clues they might yield about the conspiracy that gave rise to the catastrophe.

Lombardi committed suicide in March 2000, for complex reasons, but it’s easy to imagine him as a character in a Jorge Luis Borges story dying of Borgesian reasons, for Lombardi’s drawings recall Borges’s library of Babel, his Garden of Forking Paths, the Zohar, Zeno’s paradox, or the Pascal aphorism that Borges loved, “The universe is a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere.” Borges’s parables and stories are attempts to grasp the infinite complexity of the world, and his version of Lombardi would have died of despair of ever approximating the reach and intricacy of these networks.

Lombardi’s work is often regarded as evidence of sinister conspiracies by people who assume that “they” are thus linked up but “we” are not. We are, actually, at least when we try to achieve anything political. Politics
is
networks, rhizomes, roots, webs, to use a few of the popular metaphors from the increasingly popular studies of complexity. A more cheerful Lombardi might have charted the links that connect Naomi Klein, the Argentina Horizontalidad populist movements against neoliberalism, the Zapatistas, the Yucatán campesinos who opposed the WTO in Cancun in 2003, the internationalistas who joined them, the U.S. campus-based anti-sweatshop movement, the Sierra Club, Arundhati Roy, anti-Monsanto agriculturalists in India and Europe, on to Nigerian activists now shutting the operations of Chevron (based in San Francisco) and San Francisco activists against Bechtel Corporation (also based here), which links us back to the Bolivian activists who beat Bechtel a few years ago. (Thanks to the Internet, speaking of networks, the global justice movement has been able to link causes and confrontations into an unprecedented meta-community able to act in concert internationally.)

In fact, right-wing think tanks are probably lining up these affiliations and solidarities right now and portraying them as a conspiracy, as they have before. That’s the rule of thumb: when we talk, it’s a network; when they talk, it’s a conspiracy.
The sinister thing about Lombardi’s BCCI drawing isn’t that all these people, banks, and governments are linked up, but that they’re linked up to screw you, me, and the world. That is to say, it’s complexity that makes the drawing itself overwhelming, but intent that makes the denizens of the drawing scary.

One can imagine the characters of Adam Hochschild’s wonderful new history,
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves
, as they might have been drawn by Lombardi, such is the complexity of the network Hochschild depicts while tracing the British antislavery movement from Quakers in London to slave rebellions in the Caribbean, from the 1780s when the movement began to the final, long-delayed abolition of slavery in the British Empire on August 1, 1838. The book is both a gripping history of a particular movement and a beautiful embodiment of the erratic, unlikely ways movements unfold—an unfolding that consists of multiple kinds of linkages. If Lombardi’s is post-conceptualist history painting, Hochschild’s book is likewise a kind of post–Great Man history writing, one with crowds, coincidences, and ocean currents looming up behind the key activists he delineates.
*

One kind of linkage is coincidence. Another is friendship and the affinities of interests and emotions on which friendships are based.
Bury the Chains
begins, in
fact, with two remarkable series of coincidences that deliver up as their results two of the principal activists against slavery. Granville Sharp was the youngest of eight siblings who played music together and shared an evangelical piety. King George III believed that Sharp had the best voice in England. His brother, William Sharp, the king’s physician, provided free medical care to the London poor. Jonathan Strong, a slave whose owner had pistol-whipped him viciously about the head and then thrown him out on the street to die, came for treatment. Granville happened to be visiting that morning, and the brothers got Strong into a hospital. After his months of convalescence, they found him a job with a pharmacist. One day on the streets of London, his owner encountered his former property healthy and fit, seized Strong, and sold him to a Jamaican plantation owner, arranging for him to be jailed until he could be shipped to the West Indies. The Sharp brothers intervened and managed to free him. “With this case,” writes Hochschild, “the thirty-two-year-old Granville Sharp became by default the leading defender of blacks in London, and indeed one of the few people in all of England to speak out against slavery. And speak he would, vehemently, for nearly half a century. The fight against slavery quickly became his dominating passion.”

Only one coincidence, the meeting with Strong, made Sharp an activist. But the string of events that brought the most pivotal activist into being was far stranger and more Lombardian. An antislavery activist, Olaudah Equiano, a former slave from what is now Nigeria via Barbados and Virginia, whose autobiography later had a huge impact on the movement, saw a letter in the
Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser
on March 18, 1783, which recounted a case involving the British slave ship
Zong
. Equiano called on Sharp, and Sharp made the case a minor cause célèbre. It was an insurance case, on the face of it. The insurers challenged the claim of the
Zong’s
captain that he had ordered 133 African captives thrown overboard alive in the mid-Atlantic because the ship’s drinking water was running out. Jettisoning slaves insured as cargo would have led to compensation under those circumstances.

Human rights were never a consideration in the case. But the chief mate, afflicted with pangs of conscience, testified that there had been plenty of water. The murders took place to collect insurance on slaves who were sick and dying
and therefore would not be marketable commodities when they reached land. The court found in favor of the captain and the ship’s investors. Sharp then wrote indignant letters to several prominent clergymen, who mentioned the case in their sermons and writings.

The case of the
Zong
was far from over, and as the concerns it raised migrated onward throughout England, linkages began to build that would spark a potent antislavery movement. One Church of England clergyman who took up the case was Dr. Peter Peckard, who soon after became vice-chancellor of Cambridge University. When it was his turn to set the subject for the school’s prestigious annual Latin composition prize, he chose
Anne liceat invitos in servitutem dare?
—“Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?” It was by no means a particularly likely choice. The Church of England’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, governed in part by divinity professors from Oxford and Cambridge, derived significant revenues from Codrington, one of the biggest Barbados plantations. The place relied on branding, whipping, murdering, and constant terror to maintain an intensity of labor that worked the slaves to death. Slavery was outside the moral universe that even those propagating the gospel concerned themselves with, as Hochschild points out; the former slave trader who wrote “Amazing Grace” worried about all sorts of minor sins long before he noticed that slavery might be a problem.

A scholarship student, Thomas Clarkson, won the 1785 Cambridge Latin Prize after devoting two months to researching and writing about slavery. But the winning mattered little, except that it drew attention to the essay and its writer, who would publish it in English as an antislavery tract. The publisher Clarkson found was a Quaker who introduced him to the few others, also Quakers, who not only believed that slavery should be abolished but were willing to work for the great unlikelihood that someday it might be.

This chain of encounters and awakenings steered Clarkson away from a religious career into a passionate championing of the rights and humanity of the slaves in the British Empire. He quickly became the most effective activist the movement would have, one who gave over the rest of his life—nearly half a century—to the
cause. Writing, investigating, talking, riding tens of thousands of miles on horseback, he recruited, inspired, and connected the recruited and inspired into a movement. The Quakers, who had organized a little earlier to abolish slavery, had long needed a mainstream Anglican champion. In Clarkson, they found a superb one, in close sympathy with them; he was by the end a Quaker in all but name.