For a number of years, whenever taking leave of a friend or colleague, or sometimes saying goodbye to my sister or me, my father would say “keep the faith”.  I assumed this was a sign passed back and forth between fellow-travelers on the road to freedom.  I thought of it as a remnant of the struggle against slavery, perhaps, or emanating for an imagined African past when powerless people were autonomous brothers and sisters in their own land.   He said it with a smile, and a bit of irony, but I think there was sincerity there too, as he said it all the time for a while.  

He had other phrases he used often, but none that carried even a molecule of the hope and longing of “keep the faith”.  Anytime he was pressed to guess what was in a wrapped box he was handed he’d say “a combination egg and beat slicer.”   Whenever asked how he liked a presentation he’d been dragged to against his will he’d generally say “it was better than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick”.  

He’d sometimes utter nonsense words in response to nothing in particular.  “Tangan-yeeka, Tuskegee, British Empire!” would suddenly burst out of his mouth sometimes, without apparent sense or explanation.  “Lumumba died for freedom,” would pop out of his mouth from time to time, its possible connection to anything recently said completely mysterious.  A line out of context, perhaps from Lenny Bruce, with an arch German accent “haf you rrrrrrelatives in Chermany?”.  “Jonathan Trrrrask,” would also rattle out of his mouth sometimes, rolling the ‘r’ with great relish.   “Up your nalgas with a meat hook,” was another one I recall.  It was only decades later that I learned the Spanish word nalgas meant buttocks.

“Keep the faith” had, among all these throwaway phrases, a ring of truth and sincerity to it.  It was, looking back, almost like he was reminding himself of the vital importance, and extreme difficulty, of keeping the faith, whatever that faith might be, however vital it was to keep it, in the face of a world that seemed designed to destroy all faith.  In the final years of his life it seemed that most of his faith had been turned to bitter dust.

“Well, you watched the trajectory of your father’s faith over the course of your life, and it was a pretty sobering trajectory,” said the skeleton.  “When I heard Malcolm X speak, in his last phase, once he’d come fully awake and cast off the blinders of Elijah Muhammed, there was a faith there so strong you could actually grasp it, you could hear it in Martin Luther King’s speeches.  There was a faith in the undeniable power of truth.  It makes me feel like crying now, even as I’m out of the game, to think of the loss of faith and hope as time marches on without truth amounting to a hill of dung.”  

“Was America’s long persecution of its minorities a Human Rights issue, rather than the more innocent-sounding Civil Rights matter, as the post-Mecca Malcolm insisted?  Of course it was.  Was King going to Memphis to support the striking garbage men, after eloquently opposing the immoral war in Viet Nam a brave, if foolish thing to do — if he intended to live to see his grandchildren?  Once King became a critic of the machinery that keeps everyone in line, rather than meekly getting his head kicked in for the right to sit at a segregated lunch counter, they had to kill him.  Once you begin uniting former enemies around the suffering they endure from their common oppressor your death is inevitable.  The certainty of the murder of anyone speaking too much truth got to me, beat me down in the end.  Not that I was ever in danger of being killed, the worst I experienced was being called a fucking commie kyke and threatened by parents who didn’t want niggers bused into their kids’ school, but I felt the surging power of their hatred, got a nice whiff of it.”  

“You know, looking back over my long life, I had little hope of anything as a child.  My options were about the same as a kid in the projects, only I was a Jewish kid in a small town, part of a little insular minority of kykes, and there was only so much trouble I could get into.  I can only imagine the horrors and dangers faced by poor kids in a city Housing Project somewhere.  Then I had a once-in-a-lifetime stroke of luck, World War Two, my ticket to a larger world and higher education.  I never had any hope of leaving Peekskill, and then, I’m a former sergeant in the Army Air Force that helped defeat Hitler, having deep discussions with Richard Hofstadter about the nature of history.”

“And I had a period, around the time I met your mother, when I felt like I could conquer the world.  I had a Masters Degree in history and a firm grasp of the historical moment, with a sense that I could help bend the world toward justice.   The euphoria of those days is hard to describe to you, since you saw the gradual disappearance of virtually all hope in me by the time I was old.  Picture the world in 1950, Fascism defeated, or so we all believed, a wave of prosperity that was truly raising all boats, a shining era of once every hundred years optimism.  Everything seemed possible.  You got a little taste of that at the tail end of the Viet Nam war years when you’d cut High School and participate in a mass demonstration somewhere against the draft.  Of course, as always, poor kids wound up in a jungle swamp over there getting their asses shot off, but the sense that by uniting, marching together, showing unshakable conviction, you could change the world, or at least political decisions, was palpable.”  

“I remember when you went to Central Park in 1970 for the first Earth Day.  Imagine if those millions of marchers worldwide had actually begun to influence policy makers, oil refiners, war profiteers, toxic industrial polluters, the alternative energy industry then in its infancy, back in 1970.  The first thing Reagan did when he got into the White House in 1980 was rip down the solar panels Jimmy Carter had put on the roof.   The right wing was at war against anything that would curtail its masters’ corporate profits.   It’s 46 years later and amid rising temperatures and escalating natural disasters all over the world, droughts, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes in places that never had them, we have billionaires pulling out their biggest guns to create the false belief that ‘climate change’ is actually some kind of scam foisted on the public by an illegitimate Muslim president who hates our freedom and wants to kill job creation.  The ignorance that is sold to credulous Americans every day is enough to make you take a meat hook to your own nalgas, Elie.”  

You’re singing to the choir, dad.  

“Well, it’s a hateful song.  I was singing another song for many years.  It was a much better song that this one.  The key might be to somehow keep on pushing, though I can’t tell you how.  You had a great idea for that program with public school kids, having them run an autonomous collaborative workshop.  This program really could demonstrate important and heartbreaking things about the potential of kids marked for a life of early death.  You were pushing a huge rock up a steep hill, and I don’t think running out of strength to keep pushing it is any kind of shame.  Still, it’s a shame.  You live in an America with one value: materialism.  I know you don’t need me to tell you that. Still, I see you struggling against it.  I wish I had not been so locked in my own deathly battles for the time we were on the earth alive together.  I know that’s a lame wish from a skeleton on a hill in the countryside, but I wish I could have been less of a hindrance and more of an inspiration to you.  Being a true inspiration is hard work, my brother.”  

I understand that.  I take every drop of inspiration I can get, from wherever I can get it.  Keep the faith, dad.