The Human Condition

By W. F. Twyman, Jr.

“This is exactly what would be expected if the Levant had become a no go zone — due to the belief that dreadful flesh-eating monsters lived there…Often accompanied by images of sea serpents and other mythological monsters, would be written, “Here be dragons.” — THEM + US: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans by Danny Vendramini, p. 113

My adult son returned home safe and sound last night. He returned late but only because Carytown in the southern city of Richmond, Virginia rolls up early on Friday night. There were no dragons in the dark of night. And yet my Brooklyn-born wife had primal fears about the South, that I needed to warn my San Diego offspring to beware of God knows what in the Carytown night. Marauding torch carrying bigots? United the Right Rally Screaming white women opposed to racial integration? Little Rock Nine The evil Ku Klux Klan? Our Favorite Racial Villain Due to distant family memories of racial horror in the Deep South (as opposed to the Upper South) and mass media distortion of modern life in the South, my wife’s fears and anxieties about the South are frozen in time circa 1957. Carytown

I was not even born in the year 1957. This mental anxiety about the South and race is part of the reality distortion FAIR Executive Director Monica Harris wrote about in her excellent essay. An American Dilemma Revisited

I told my wife our son would be fine. I did not snark as that would be counterproductive in our marital relationship/double smile. I just said “He will be fine” and he was. Isn’t it ironic that I am a Native of Virginia and yet I lack the primal fears of southern darkness that grip my wife? Strange fruit of my human condition, indeed. Strange Fruit by Billie Holliday. (And for the record, there were no race-based lynchings in my home county of Chesterfield, Virginia since the Civil War. Our human condition in Chesterfield was different from sensationalized violence elsewhere in the South.)

It distresses me that my wife’s conception of the modern-day South remains locked in the 1950s but I fault the distortion of reality on that score.

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If there are over 40 million black Americans, there are over 40 million life stories, experiences and perspectives.

I used to visit my cousin Tina Mae who lived in a green house on Hopkins Road. Something about green houses is primal for me. Exhale (Shoop, Shoop) Tina’s best friend was Betsy, a white blonde-haired girl who lived next door. I was aware Betsy was white but it was as significant to my young mind in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the color of Betsy’s hair. Young friends in southern suburbs did not do race. We did friendship. Radical thought, huh? We ran around and played throughout Betsy’s house and she ran around and played throughout Tina’s house.

There was no consciousness of race amongst us kids.

Tina and Betsy remained friends over the years. We’re now all in our 60s. Tina moved in with Betsy and her husband. They have a farm outside of Richmond. I reached out to Tina this morning. I wanted to get together, catch up, introduce my adult kids to Tina. Tina’s Dad, Uncle Will, was a Southern Baptist preacher. Tina grew up in the church. And so it was no surprise that she couldn’t meet us this morning. She has choir rehearsal this morning. Tina, by the way, is an excellent pianist. She learned to play by ear, never took a piano lesson in her life from what I recall. She is a musical genius. A fancy musical school up North recruited Tina but her parents wanted to keep Tina close to home. So southern and small-town.

What about Sunday? Nope, Tina was tied up all day in church services. This is the Tina I have always known, someone for whom religion is central to life. Sadly, Betsy’s husband is ailing. I hope he recovers.

There is nothing more beautiful about the human condition than a lifelong friendship in Richmond blind to color. A part of me hopes Tina and Betsy pass away at the same time. I think they would be lost without each other. Friends for a lifetime.

No dragons in the darkness of the southern night.

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“I get so weak in the knees.” — My daughter sings Weak by SWV

We all bring into the world ancient worries and anxieties, the predations of old. I am here this morning to tell you we must release ourselves from the monsters of the 1900s and the 1950s. Fear of white predation serves no good purpose today in the year 2024 in Richmond, Virginia. White bigots created a modern Black American culture and consciousness of fear. The Souls of Black Folks

Let it go, please, release the predations of olden times.

I am inspired this morning by the book THEM + US: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans by Danny Vendramini. Theoretical biologist Vendramini reviews the skeletal evidence, evidence of genetic drift, and concludes that we nearly died out as a species around 48,000 years ago. Humans were reduced to a terrified band of 50 Homo Sapiens, traumatized and clinging to survival in the dark caves of the Levant. The monsters in the darkness were the Neanderthals, dark and hairy creatures of the night who feasted on human males and raped human females. Vendramini theorizes we all inherited a genetic fear of the night, of bumps in the night, as the Neanderthals blessed with night vision of wolves descended upon sleeping humans and destroyed human life.

Those 50 humans from 48,000 years ago were all that separated us from extinction as a species. Every human on this planet today is a descendant of those 50 strung out, harassed, depressed, panic-stricken humans shivering in caves and afraid to sleep. I don’t know about you but I feel closer to every human on the planet knowing we all, every one of us, descend from the same 50 ancestors. We are all cousins and should treat each other as cousins.

Those humans survived the nadir of all nadirs. And so did primal fears of those who looked hairy, whose eyes lit up the night, who walked like apes and gorillas, who came for our women and left hybrid Neanderthal/Humans in their wake. The horror, the horror of it all.

By the grace of God, I did not inherit fear of dragons in the southern night in my DNA. I knew prejudice but, more importantly, I knew people as friends and individuals. I knew in the 3th grade it was time for letting go. I had 1,001 reasons to be resentful and mad at the world. Instead, I found the individual in others and that made all the difference for me in life.

I never feared the southern night.

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What does it mean to be a southerner? I can’t claim to be a William Faulkner. I know not the experience of the Deep South. I have never stepped foot one day in Mississippi, the scene of so much Neanderthal-like racial horror in our national past. I do not know the South as Faulkner knew the South. Richmond, Virginia was not Oxford, Mississippi. Richmond was never James Meredith.

The South I knew, and I hope to share this nuance and complexity with Ian V. Rowe next week, was filled with contradictions, part of a greater unity. One can drive along Broad Street in Richmond and pass a sign for the Black History Museum and a sign for the White House of the Confederacy within the same block or two. We were always two people in Richmond becoming one people through it all. My third cousins are descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. My children are descendants of property-owning former slaves and Peter Montague, the first colonial school teacher in Virginia. The promised land has always been unity of a past.

I am a child of public segregation but it is more truthful to my life to say I am a child of the New South. My wife only knows the monotone southern story of fear in the night, the night riders and all (which is funny because her real past is far, far more rich and complex).

For me, the South is the colonial charm of Monument Avenue, the grand architecture of the Main Street train station, blacks and whites in equal number in Richmond, the ubiquitous red brick buildings every where, the names of Broad Street and Main Street, the traditionalism undergirding civic life. There is always a sense that what has been frames what is. The American Dream arguably began in Chesterfield in the year 1613. The progenitor of the American Dream? Thomas Dale after whom my high school was named. To be southern was to be blessed by what has been while striving for the coming of a better time.

The South was the kind of place where streets were named after families, everyone knew Grandma and one’s family, generational privilege to use a modern term in the Academy. When we are blind to generational inheritance and legacy in black American families, aren’t we dehumanizing black American families? Just asking as I bask in the afterglow of a joyous breakfast conversation with my adult children in the land of the South…no dragons in sight.

I am native to the South. The South left its neural imprints on my young self. One can take the small-town kid out of the South but can one ever take the South out of the small-town kid? I doubt it. I really do.

We need a jazz song like Autumn in New York to capture Summer in Richmond. Maybe some creative reading my words will craft an ode to a New New South in the shadow of Monument Avenue. How does music convey home, the promise of life beyond race? I am a dreamer and I sigh for that exotic place.

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Like our human ancestors who inherited a fear of the Neanderthal, too many Black Americans, Old Americans who can trace their ancestry in this blessed country to the 1600s, bring inherited fears of Southern monsters into today. While understandable and arguably a reflection of genetic drift in psychology, there are no dragons in the southern night today. Fears of the southern night are maladaptive in 2024 in Richmond, Virginia. One of my adult children mused about moving to Richmond for the southern charm and colonial vibe. In my day, it was all I wanted in life, to escape all I had known for something new and it wasn’t home. I wanted to engage the larger world and now my home engages my children.

I encourage scholars and writers to consider the parallels between human fears of Neanderthals arguably embedded in human anxiety and fears about creatures of the night and the native Northern black fears of white Southerners arguably embedded in outdated and maladaptive fears and anxieties about the South today. As I walk through Carytown, I fear no man or woman. Even in the 1970s, I feared no man or woman due to race. This is how it should be. I call for more people native to the South to write about the South. It will not do for readers to learn about the South from non-natives of the South (Glenn Loury native of the South Side of Chicago, John H. McWhorter V a native of Philadelphia, Coleman Hughes native of New Jersey, Thomas Chatterton Williams native of New Jersey, Adrian Piper native of New York City).

We need more insights and perspectives in race literature from non-conforming natives of the South.

Where can native insights come from? How about a delightful breakfast at The Fancy Biscuit where there is zero race consciousness in the heart of Carytown? What about the splendid tour of Agecroft Hall where the white tour guide native to Richmond lacks any southern accent, has massive tattoos up her right arm and is the daughter of a Dad from Brooklyn? She could easily have been a fixture at a museum in Napa Valley or Cambridge, Massachusetts. Consider the lament of a cousin who regrets the loss of respect for our founding family at the family church founded in 1871. Sure, these are Old Family problems but isn’t that the point, that many Black Americans have been in Virginia like forever? Legacy is not a white thing.

Here is a native insight — I grew up in my formative years on an all-black street. Today, in the New New South, my boyhood street is well-integrated. I spent some time conversing with the white neighbor next door who checks in on my Dad from time to time. No self-consciousness of race, just a good neighbor. Maybe, public school desegregation came before neighborhood desegregation in my South. And you know something? I like the trend I see on the ground. And did I mention a relative married a white guy? Next stop, desegregation of the Twyman family.

Conclusion: I came across no racial monsters in my day down South. Instead, I discovered once again the evolution of a New South I knew in the 1970s. Once upon a time, there were dragons out there. In the Green House, my Mom once put me to bed and said I should be good. If I was not good, the Ku Klux Klan would get me. I was probably five years old. I have that singular memory of the predation but a lifetime of memories has buried that recollection.

Night terrors and fear of the dark are no more for me. I am on the old side of life as the South approaches something new, the absence of race consciousness on the ground. It is time for letting go of the bogeyman. The Neanderthals are gone. Welcome to human evolution in Richmond and surrounding suburbs. White bigotry and prejudice may have created modern black fears of racial dragons.

The dragons are no more. It is past time for letting go of the 1950s.

I don't care who's wrong or right
I don't really want to fight no more (too much talking, babe)
Let's sleep on it tonight
I don't really want to fight no more
This is time for letting go — I Don’t Wanna Fight No More by Tina Turner