Category: Ben H. Winters

Ben H. Winters

There was some little local controversy too, about a fundraising effort called Suzie’s Closet–folks getting together in church basements to make care packages for the plantations–blankets and candy bars…..first they interviewed a local advocate for the homeless, asking why our attention shouuld be down there, “when there’s so much suffering right here at home.”…it was the usual stuff –all the new stories and just the old stories again.

Ben H. Winters

The song just started again, and now I sang it, too. “These strong hands belong to you…” I found a place between two men. The first was about my age, maybe a little younger, with high cheekbones and small eyes. The other was middle-aged, with a wide forehead and bulb nose, and beside him was a man with a striking face, a square, dimpled chin and high cheekbones… and then there was another, and another–all the kinds of faces in all the colors the world calls black: brown and tan and yellow and orange, copper and bronze and gold. “These strong hands belong to you…” They sang–we sang–with no enthusiasm or joy. We used to sing at Bell’s, crossing the yard or working on the pile, just like slaves used to sing in Old Slavery, spirituals and work songs, sly lyrics, silly lyrics, yearning for freedom or roasting Massa in nonsense words he couldn’t understand. This, though–this was a different kind of singing. I looked from man to man, and they were singing mechanically, eyes front, mouths moving like puppets. Singing this dumb refrain about how much they loved their bosses and loved their work.Nothing spiritual about this. This was something else altogether.

Ben H. Winters

Sometimes it’s possible, just barely possible, to imagine a version of this world different from the existing one, a world in which there is true justice, heroic honesty, a clear perception possessed by each individual about how to treat all the others. Sometimes I swear I could see it, glittering in the pavement, glowing between the words in a stranger’s sentence, a green, impossible vision–the world as it was meant to be, like a mist around the world as it is.