I just thought about this today and dug through my pictures to find it: a letter from a black soldier in the Civil War to the person who owns his daughter. “The longer you keep my child from me the longer you will have to burn in Hell and the quicker you will get there.“
photo text (with corrected spelling and broken into sentences, paragraphs):
Letter from a Black Soldier to the Owner of His Daughter
Spotswood Ric, a former slave, writes to Kittey Diggs, 1864:
I received a letter from Cariline telling me that you say I tried to steal, to plunder, my child away from you. Not I want you to understand that Mary is my Child and she is a God given rite of my own.
And you may hold on to her as long as you can. But I want you to remember this one thing, that the longer you keep my Child from me the longer you will have to burn in hell and the quicker you’ll get there.
For we are now making up about one thousand black troops to come up thorough, and want to come through, Glasgow. And when we come woe be to Copperhood rebels and to the Slaveholding rebels. For we don’t expect to leave them there. Root nor branch. But we think however that we (that have children in the hands of you devils), we will try your the day that we enter Glasgow.
I want you to understand Kittey Diggs that where ever you and I meet we are enemies to each other. I offered once to pay you forty dollars for my own Child but I am glad now that you did not accept it. Just hold on now as long as you can and the worse it will be for you.
You never in you life before I came down hear did you give children anything, not anything whatever, not even a dollars worth of expenses. Now you call my children your property. Not so with me.
My children is my own and I expect to get them. And when I get ready to come after Mary I will have both a power and authority to bring her away and to exact vengeances on them that holds my Child.
You will then know how to talk to me. I will assure that. And you will know how to talk right too. I want you now to just hold on; to hear if you want to. If your conscience tells that’s the road, go that road and what it will bring you to Kittey Diggs.
I have no fears about getting Mary out of your hands. This whole Government gives cheer to me and you cannot help yourself.
Source: Ira Berlin, ed. Freedom, A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1982, 690.
I wanted to find out what happened (DID HE GET HIS DAUGHTER BACK?) and the answer is that not only was he reunited with his family, but went on to be a successful minister and his daughter was interviewed in the 30s for the Slave Narratives Project.
What’s up it’s 12:30 a.m. and I can’t stop thinking about how after T’Chaka is killed in Civil War, T’Challa tells Natasha their culture views death merely as a stepping off point, but then explains that he doesn’t hold those beliefs himself, though his father did.
That little piece of dialog means this scene from Black Panther is far more significant than it first appears, without that context:
T’Challa didn’t believe in the afterlife or the possibility that he would ever see his father again.
When he comes back from the ancestral plain, smiling and laughing, out of breath, telling Zuri, “He was there, I saw him, my father was there,” the triumph of his joy comes from the fact he didn’t believe it was possible. He knew what was said to happen during the ceremony but he never expected it to be true.
T’Challa’s uncertainty at the beginning of this scene along with his pure elation following the first conversation with T’Chaka now have a totally different meaning for me.
T’Challa realizes the truth behind his people’s beliefs, understands that his father was never truly gone, and knows that one day he’ll be reunited with his father, his ancestors, and all of their loved ones – that death won’t be the end.
And yet despite that “safety net,” as it were, all he wants is to be a worthy king for the living.
Anyway, thanks for reading my Ted Talk, this is why I’m crying at almost 1 a.m.
Are we going to talk about the fact that Erik Stevens is a genius who graduated Anapolis at 19 and did postgrad work at MIT? (Or, by Shuri standards, not a complete dummy.) Imagine how the technological advances in Wakanda would have been jump-started if little N’Jadaka had been brought home where he belonged. Imagine him teaching little Shuri and glowing with pride to watch her shoot past him. Imagine him in a friendly rivalry with T’Challa, pushing each other to be better.
You wanna hear an idea about this AU that made me pause and go “well, shit?”
N’Jadaka is with his uncle and cousin at the UN. He is one split second ahead of T’Challa, and saves his uncle T’Chaka’s life.
After the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, many
Civil War soldiers’ lives were saved by a
phenomenon called ‘Angel’s Glow.’ The
soldiers, who lay in the mud for two rainy
days, had wounds that began to glow in
the dark and heal unusually fast. In 2001,
2 teens won an international science fair
by discovering the soldiers had been so
cold that their bodies created the perfect
conditions for growing a bioluminescent
bacteria, which ultimately destroyed the
bad bacteria that could’ve killed them. SourceSource 2Source 3
wtf life is cool
that’s so incredibly specific, what luck!
Another fun thing: the bacterial that causes this, P. luminescens, lives inside parasitic nematodes and releases a toxin that kills the host caterpillars. The gene that creates this toxin is called “makes caterpillars floppy”. That’s it. That’s its official name.
“The confederacy of planets and moons that formed the Independent Faction was doomed from the start.”
“While leaders among the scattered outer worlds expressed concern over the formation of the Union of Allied Planets, most folk didn’t much care, figuring it wouldn’t affect them.”
Note the use of the terms ‘confederacy’ and ‘union.’
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“A CIVIL WAR NOVEL INSPIRED THE FIREFLY UNIVERSE. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels from author Michael Shaara was Joss Whedon’s inspiration for creating Firefly. It follows Union and Confederate soldiers during four days at the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. Whedon modeled the series and world on the Reconstruction Era, but set in the future.”
~ Rudie Obias, “23 Fun Facts About Firefly” [source]
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Note similarities between Malcolm Reynolds’ character biography and the biography of actual confederate general Jubal Anderson Early.
When the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered on April 9, 1865, Early escaped to Texas by horseback, where he hoped to find a Confederate force still holding out. He proceeded to Mexico, and from there, sailed to Cuba and Canada. Living in Toronto, he wrote his memoir, A Memoir of the Last Year of the War for Independence, in the Confederate States of America, which focused on his Valley Campaign. The book was published in 1867.
Early was pardoned in 1868 by President Andrew Johnson, but still remained an “unreconstructed rebel”. In 1869, he returned to Virginia and resumed the practice of law. He was among the most vocal of those who promoted the Lost Cause movement.
From the Malcolm Reynolds entry on the Firefly Wiki [link]:
His contempt for the Alliance never completely disappeared (although he once said that he “wouldn’t mind makin’ a buck off ‘em”, and was shown in multiple episodes willing to steal Alliance supplies for a job, as long as it doesn’t affect the people), and, although he was on the losing side of the Unification War, years later he still wasn’t convinced it was the wrong one. Mal expressed what seemed to be his manifesto—"[The Alliance] will swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. So no more running. I aim to misbehave.“[1] His anti-government attitude was reflected in his choice to live on a spaceship, drifting from world to world, as far away from Alliance interference as possible.
Yes, that’s right. Joss Whedon asked a black actor to play a lunatic rapist bounty hunter named after a real life confederate general. Joss Whedon has even stated in an interview that he “loves that character.”
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Now I mentioned “cowboys vs injuns reavers” earlier:
In the unaired pilot Simon Tam explicity refers to the reavers as “savages” – one of the more popular Native American slurs used by settlers in the North American “Old West.” In the same episode we see Mal and Zoe riding through an open plain on horseback wearing chaps and carrying shotguns. Right from the get go we have protagonists dressed like cowboys in a spaghetti western, shit-talking an entire culture of supposedly “mindless savages” (yet not so mindless they can’t still practice guerrilla warfare in a fairly organized fashion).
The episode “Bushwhacked” features a character – the lone survivor of a reaver ambush – who’s “gone native” and become a reaver himself. He completes his transformation from sane pilgrim into savage reaver by “cuttin’ on himself’ to making himself “look like one of them” – which he accomplishes by giving himself facial piercings which I, for one, found oddly reminiscent of those warn by certain Native American and Pacific Islander cultures.
He proceeds to attack the Firefly crew using guerrilla style tactics.
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People want to believe that they can weed out the Orientalism, shovel off the bastardization of the Chinese language, and jackhammer their way through the thick crust of cultural appropriation to reveal a better, purer show buried underneath.
But they can’t.
Firefly’s bedrock is racist.
Firefly is racist all the way down to its molten core.
Just go watch Killjoys already.
Fuck’s sake.
None of this registered with me, maybe because I’m not from the US so my knowledge of Civil War stuff is limited (I only found out what ‘Manifest Destiny’ was after you know which movie brought up a discussion) I obviously thought the lack of Chinese characters in a future where everyone speaks Chinese was…fucked up? But this??
How the fuck.
I want a reboot of Firefly that has nothing to do with Whedon, and which corrects his bigotry, racism, and misogyny.
Hi. OP here. I wrote this post because I saw people on my dash saying exactly what you’re saying – “We want a non-racist, non-sexist Firefly reboot.” I wanted them, and you, to realize that racism and sexism is so intrinsic to every single aspect of Firefly’s composition that by the time you take out all the bigotry, racism and misogyny, there’s nothing left to reboot.
Look at the show’s core team dynamic, for example:
Mal is a reboot of Rhett Butler.
Zoe is nouveau!Rhett’s loyal hand (notice she doesn’t call him by his name as one would a friend, but instead always refers to him as Sir – and then consider what it means for a black woman to be constantly referring to her white confederate superior by a title that signifies dominance).
Wash, Zoe’s husband, is the nerdy self-insert though which Joss racially fetishizes Gina Torres and projects his sexual/romantic insecurities (remember how Firefly devoted an entire episode to Zoe reassuring Wash that her relationship with Mal wasn’t a threat to their marriage?) (remember how Wash spent a scene sexually objectifying his wife’s body parts to an audience of Alliance interrogators).
River Tam is a whitewashed anime archetype.
Inara is a whorephobic westernized caricature of a geisha. I’m not going to go into that here but there are plenty of essays that describe the problematic Asian elements of Firefly in greater depth
And that’s just the main protagonists. That doesn’t even take into account the minor characters, villain archetypes, politics, narrative tropes, worldbuilding, etc. of the Firefly universe, all of which are also racist and misogynist.
Also, consider that Joss Whedon thought “rebooting” colonialism as men vs. zombie freaks was less racist than honestly representing the exploitation and genocide of Natives by colonizers.
Racist history needs to be told. Erasing the racist truth of a historical situation doesn’t “take out the racism.” That’s whitewashing. Whitewashing is in and of itself a form of racism. Firefly is racist because it tries to whitewash a racist history. Any Firefly reboot that attempts to whitewash Firefly’s racist premise will only be perpetuating the cycle of whitewashing and erasure.
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I think what people really want is another show about a quirky band of leather wearing gun slinging rebel merchants with snappy dialogue going on adventures in outer space. You don’t need to reboot Firefly for that. Killjoys fits that description, and it’s not a Firefly reboot. Cowboy Bebop and Farscape both fit that description, and they both pre-date Firefly.
Fandom doesn’t need a Firefly reboot.
Fandom needs to give Firefly the boot.
It makes me sad to realize everything you say, @lierdumoa, is true. You have a brilliant analytical mind for sniffing out this sort of thing.
All the conversation lately about Confederate statues and Civil War history made me go back to find this series of posts.
It also led me to read this interesting piece that really gets one to re-examine the narrative of American history that even those who grew up in the North were fed.
Turns out that General Sherman’s often-criticized “total war” campaign in the final weeks of the war – which finally put down the rebellion and saved the nation – might not have been the atrocity it’s depicted as in movies, and was far from the brutality exhibited by the famous American generals of the 20th Century who waged campaigns of true total war.
Yet Sherman’s still considered a villain by many modern Southerners, while our much-worse recent generals are considered heroes.
And this Confederate propaganda has been so successful in shaping our view of the Civil War that douche-canoes like Joss Whedon can get away with creating much-loved shows based on glorifying the villains of US history, and few notice until later.
I feel ashamed now that I once adored this show so much. I blame my lack of knowledge of US history at the time, and I was far from alone among ignorant Northerners who loved it.
A positive conclusion: Gonna have to find Killjoys!
This stuff really does fly right over your head if you’re not from the South. I learned most of what I know about the confederate imagery/storylines/politics of Firefly because I was researching to make a fannish songvid for Firefly, back when I was still a fan, and I fell down a wikipedia hole.
We’ve definitely hit a turning point in politics where Americans living in the North and on the coasts can no longer afford to remain ignorant of confederate history, or remain oblivious to confederate iconography/ideology/propaganda in the media.
What pisses me off the most is that Firefly has such cult status in fan communities – Whedon essentially made it acceptable for racists to cosplay as confederates in fan spaces.
Nick Spencer (what is up with dudes named Spencer being nazi apologists?) has control of the Captain America comic. Now HBO is making an alternate reality genre show where the confederates won and I can only imagine it will get worse. It’s getting to the point where I don’t know if POC will be able to feel safe at Comicon anymore.
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