505. Killing

 BROWDERBOOKS

In the past week I held a contest online to create a logo for myself and my books; designers offered me 35 designs.  I consulted some friends, showing them two runners-up, but in the end I chose a different one entirely.   

I 

I have also found a tag line or slogan: 

BROWDERBOOKS: Wild New York

So now I have to figure out how to use them, the logo and the slogan.  Stay tuned.

                            KILLING

In this country executions have often been public.  As for lynchings, by their very nature they were public events, and even celebrations.  Postcards often showed the dangling hanged bodies of the victims, usually  black males, with a host of smiling white witnesses, including even women and children.  One wonders at the state of mind not only of those posing proudly near the dangling bodies, but also of those who sent the postcards by mail.  Who did they send them to, and with what scribbled message?  One appears online, on a postcard from Waco, Texas, dated 1916: “This is the barbecue we had last night.  My picture is to the left with a cross over it.  Your son, Joe.”

         The postcards were also kept as souvenirs and in time became collectors’ items.  It is worth noting that the Nazis never stooped to selling souvenirs of the death camps.  In the U.S., by 1908 the postcards had become so common, and to many so repugnant, that the U.S. Postmaster General banned them from the mails.  After that they continued to be sold in antique stores whose proprietors whispered to prospective buyers that they were available, though not on display.  These souvenirs so offend me that I cannot reproduce them here.  Nor would they be appreciated today by the residents of the communities involved, which were by no means all in the South.  These celebratory killings occurred also in Cairo, Illinois (1909), Anadarko, Oklahoma (1913), Duluth, Minnesota (1920), and Marion, Indiana (1930).  They are accessible online at Wikimedia Commons, for those who want to see them.  I have seen them once and received their message, and that is quite enough.

         I have told elsewhere, and more than once, how my father was a hunter and fisherman, and raised his two sons to be the same.  With me, it didn’t take.  Though he taught me to use a shotgun at age 16, I had no desire to kill the blackbirds that he hoped would appear overhead in autumn fields where we patiently waited, or the occasional rabbit that scurried away from us.  And I hated the pain in my shoulder from the recoil of the shotgun, when fired.  Though in his will he left his guns to me and my brother, we were quite happy to sell them.  Sad.  In this regard (and others), we were not the sons he had wanted.  The guns involved, by the way, were shotguns used for trap shooting and hunting.  He had no interest in handguns, much less automatic weapons (unheard of in his time), and would be dismayed by their availability today.

The legendary Annie Oakley shooting a shotgun before spectators
in Pinehurst, NC, date unknown.  What she's shooting at isn't clear.

  
       So I am not a killer?  Wrong.  Under certain circumstances I can kill with gusto.  But only the roaches that at one time infested my apartment, in an old building whose cracks and crevices – too many to ever be filled – provide them with nesting spaces where they can rest up by day and prepare for their nocturnal forays.  When, heeding the bladder imperative, I went to the bathroom at night, I surprised gangs of them in the wash basin and tub and either chased  them into a waiting glue trap, or – BAM BAM BAM – pounded them with the smooth cap top of an empty medicine bottle.  Many escaped, but not all.  Still, I am not an indiscriminate killer.  Roaches, yes; spiders, no.  Spiders I always spare, though I may relocate them to a green plant or release them to the world outside.  Any bug that kills flies and mosquitos is a friend of mine.

© 2021 Clifford Browder