“Peter, stop.” I grabbed an empty metal chair and banged its rear feet three times against the floor.
“You guys are all murderers,” he said and pointed at the class. He launched further into his diatribe.
I gripped the chair by its wooden backrest. I raised it high in the air. For a long second, I was fully conscious of what I was about to do. Breathe, I told myself. Put. The chair. Down. I weighed my options. Big mistake. Once I considered the violent act, the urge became irresistible. I needed the release.
I slammed the chair to the floor as hard as I could, twisting my torso, pivoting on the ball of my rear foot. The chair fell to the side, one of its metal legs bent at a sharp angle.
Peter sat in his chair silent, hugging his two-liter soda bottle, fingering the cap. The students wouldn’t look at me. I knew I should say something, an explanation, an apology, but I couldn’t take their faces. They looked petrified.
“Y’all can go,” I said.
They cleared out in record time, not saying a word. I hadn’t checked their notebooks to ensure they’d written down the homework, and none of them mentioned the slip in routine.
I sat the chair up. It was wobbly because of the broken leg, wrecked. No one would sit in the chair again, but I never tossed it out. I’d keep it in the middle of the room, at the table, front and center, a reminder, of what, I wasn’t sure.
church
Hi Dickson,
How are you? Are you enjoying your Thanksgiving break? Last night, we drove your dad to my sister’s place for Thanksgiving. The last couple of times we had our monthly church meetings, your dad seemed very tired and down because he said he didn’t sleep well, and he wasn’t very sober. I told him he needs to go see the doctor and check things out, but he said that if the doctor told him to rest, he couldn’t afford to take time off. Do you call him on the phone often? He said he hasn’t heard from you since you visited. Please send him your love!
Sarah
public shaming
Compared to other landlords, my great-grandmother had gotten off light during land reform. Tortured but not killed. Over a million landlords were executed under Mao’s sweeping land reform. Some condemn him for the bloodshed. He initiated the campaign, but to suggest he orchestrated the results underestimates the rage of the peasants. They ran the tribunals and decided the sentencing, not the communists. For the first time in China’s history, peasants confronted their oppressors without fear of retribution.
Given free rein, it’s not shocking that many peasants, particularly those most mistreated, were bloodthirsty. What surprises me is that the overwhelming majority of landlords were spared from execution. In a nation as populous as China, a million landlords accounted for a small percentage of the entire landlord population, seven to ten percent, according to one study. I cite this not to argue that a million deaths is insignificant—that would be insane—but to point out just how many peasants were not in favor of revenge killings. Public shaming was a preferred form of justice. Villagers could mock and attack the ones they held responsible for their bleak lives. Even kids picked up rocks and hurled them. It wasn’t solely about inflicting pain or even humiliation. Some villagers weren’t seeking revenge so much as a confession.
truth and reconciliation
The Mao unit was the last unit of our yearlong course on world history. The first unit examined apartheid in South Africa. We’d watched the documentary Long Night’s Journey into Day, a film about South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. To help the nation recover from a legacy of apartheid violence, the commission had been authorized to offer amnesty to perpetuators of “gross human rights violations.” Perpetuators had to confess their wretched acts in a public forum, not only in front of television cameras, but also in front of an audience that often included their victims or the families of their victims, a voluntary public shaming. The intention was not retributive but restorative. “This process is not about pillorying anybody,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu says. “It’s not about prosecuting anybody. It’s ultimately about getting the truth, so that we can help to heal and also so that we may know what to avoid in the future.” To be granted amnesty, perpetuators had to meet several criteria including satisfying the commission’s requirement for “full disclosure.” Honesty was a prerequisite for forgiveness.
In the last segment of the documentary, Rian Bellingan, a white officer, applies for amnesty for his involvement in the killing of seven young activists, but during his testimony, Bellingan does not admit any wrongdoing. Self-defense, he claims.
Thapelo Mbelo, a Black police officer, Bellingan’s colleague, also applies for amnesty for his participation in the same case. In Mbelo’s testimony, a starkly different account from Bellingan’s, he admits that he shot one of the activists in the head, even though the activist had approached the officers with his arms up in surrender.
Later, in an interview, Mbelo discusses how he dealt with betraying his own people, “The only time when you think something is going to bother you, the nearest place or the nearest thing to do was take booze. Then you stay drunk, you remember nothing.” As he speaks, his left eye constantly twitches.
Mbelo requests to meet the mothers of the seven slain men, including the mother of the son he killed. He meets the mothers in a private room and asks for forgiveness.
One mother tells him she’ll never forgive him. Her son died for freedom, while Mbelo sold out to the Boers. The camera jumps from the face of one mother to the next. Cynthia Ngewu, the mother of the man Mbelo shot, has taken off her sunglasses, eyes glistening, like the rest of the mothers. Some time passes because when Ngewu speaks again, she has her glasses on, lightly tinted. You can still see her eyes. Something clicks
