The Eleven

In 1973 God called my sister to liberate some Haitians from the West Palm Beach police department.

Betty died this month. I am studying the texts my sister left behind, her two books, and this is how our relationship continues for now. I wish could talk to her now.

Her memoirs unearth my own memories.

I am reading her first book, Operation: Devil’s Garden. She published it in 2005 and when I first read it I found it was full of stories she has told me and in the voice that is her voice. I hear her voice when I read them and I think the stories are true, if embellished, and she might get that from Dad, who was a Baptist preacher who followed the standard practice of evangelical preachers like Dad and Aunt Betty and Papa — our Grandfather Weakland — to embellish true stories to better deliver the message of the sermon.

My sister’s two books carry a mystical/mythical approach to meaning but an essentially compassionate, courageous approach to her kind of activism, or ministry.

The first story in my sister’s first book is called “I’ve come for the Haitians.”

Betty tells the story from memory that isn’t always accurate, but we also have a newspaper clipping with the story that provides some details:

“Housewife Aids Refugees”

“Betty Luckey Helps Haitians in PB Gardens”

Betty’s husband, Gary Luckey, was a cowboy and also a technician at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft, a defense contractor that also built rocket engines. My mother also worked there. Lots of people in Palm Beach County worked there.

Betty had been praying all day, she said, and her praying grew in intensity until she was face down on the floor.

She asked God if He was trying to tell her something.

Her words:

“I was hardly prepared for what happened next. He spoke to me in a clear, audible voice (at least in my spirit, it was audible). He said to me, Go to the West Palm Beach jail and say, ‘My name is Betty Luckey, I’ve come for the Haitians.’ I asked Him to repeat the message and He did, and then I heard myself agree to do it!”

Betty got in her pickup truck and headed to West Palm Beach. She didn’t know any Haitians. All she knew about Haitians were that they were from Haiti, she said. She wasn’t even sure where the West Palm Beach jail was located but she found it. She went straight to the dispatcher’s window and said, “My name is Betty Luckey. I’ve come for the Haitians.” The dispatcher asked her to repeat that and she did. She had Betty sit down and eventually a cop with a clipboard appeared and asked her how he could help her and Betty said, “My name is Betty Luckey and I’ve come for the Haitians.” He gave her an intense look and then left to get a higher ranking cop.

This higher ranking law enforcement officer appeared in the doorway and called, “almost as if he knew me, ‘Ms Luckey, what can I do for you?’”

You know what she said.

“I’ve come for the Haitians.”

I am pretty sure this higher ranking officer was familiar with the name Betty Luckey. The year before her name was often in the news for various actions. She and our cousin Eraca Cleary organized what I think was the first major antiwar demonstration in the county, The Unarmed Forces Day Parade  (I drew an eagle clutching broken arrows for the flyer). It was the first peace march I participated in.

The plainclothes policeman told her to wait and then left and another cop came and took her somewhere else in the building. They led her to a counter where a different officer had her sign a paper she didn’t read, or read it and forgot what it said.

Eleven Black men, the Haitian prisoners, were brought in, and she led them to her pickup truck. They couldn’t speak English and she couldn’t speak French. They were excited and she was in shock and everybody was talking.

“I knew what they were wondering, who was I, how had they been released, where were we going now, etc. Actually, I was wondering the same thing, but all I could do was shrug my shoulders and finally I said, “Jesus!” 

This reassured them.

One of those Florida rainstorms hit and then a Community Action bus pulled up they all got in and Betty led them to our church in Palm Beach Gardens, and showed them the pews they could sleep on and the eleven cans of soup and eleven blankets that had coincidentally or miraculously been donated a couple of weeks before.

The press immediately got wind of the story. TV cameras and reporters were in the church parking lot. Betty Luckey was up to something again. Involves Haitian refugees.

The newspaper story says the eleven sailed into Jupiter Inlet New Year’s Eve in a 35 foot open boat from the Bahamas. The Haitian dictator Baby Doc Duvalier threw them out of the country because they had been preaching a subversive message. 

“They were all preachers”, Betty said. 

They were tired, scared, hungry, strangers in our strange homeland.

“We all be killed if we go back to Haiti. We said words against the government. We want to stay in America. Get jobs. Become Americans,” one of them, Joseph De Graff said.

“These people placed a great deal of hope in America,” Mrs. Luckey said, “It just didn’t seem right they should be put in jail as soon as they reached free soil.”

The US government considered Haitian refugees to be mere economic refugees, as I recall, while Cuban refugees were political refugees. Also, the Haitians are generally much darker than the Cubans, and that distinction was important in Florida when I lived there, important to both the native crackers and the nouveau crackers transplanted from the North. I transplanted myself to the North. I had assumed that things were slowly getting better down South, but now I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure about our country, now on the brink of full blown fascism, with a man every bit as petty and dictatorial as Baby Doc Duvalier favored by about half of the country. 

Each of her stories begins with a scripture reading. Her account of this story is introduced with Luke 4:18 and 19:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has appointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

I wish I could talk to Betty about the prophetic call to provide for the strangers, the refugees, and to seek justice and the state of things now, as well as Isaiah’s call, cited by Jesus, to deliver good news of liberation to the oppressed, and to claim that the time of liberation is NOW.

The Community Action Council and some church members helped the eleven strangers to purchase bus tickets to Miami where one of them had a friend. They spent the night at the church, sleeping on the pews, and the next morning they had breakfast with Mom and Dad and Aunt Betty at our house. I remember meeting them before I hid in my bedroom, freaked out about the whole thing.

 

What is Endarkenment?

 

Break free from the bonds of what you’ve been taught to believe and think for your self. Think anything you want to think. Free your mind! Follow your own rules. 

With some constraints, of course. 

I mean, when you’re driving I’d appreciate it if you are in the correct lane, stop when the light is red, go when it is green, and when it is yellow proceed with caution and not close your eyes and floor it. There is a social contract in effect, after all.

We’d been living in an age of enlightenment for the past few centuries, although not in an enlightened age. We sought enlightenment. We looked for lights to light our paths. Light of all colors, but mainly lights that will help us find our way and not lights that only project movies that show us things that are not there, and situations that never occur, and behavior that is unlikely.

We cast off many traditions that misled us or harmed us, beliefs and belief systems, entire meaning systems collapsed around us, and even some cognitive categories are no longer relevant.  

We’re dizzy and disoriented and grab onto the first hand that is offered and steadies us. A strong hand that is attached to a powerful arm which hangs from broad shoulders on which a thick neck stands like a mighty oak that lifts a beautiful head with an open mouth from which a confident voice speaks sentences that sound plausible enough.

He — yes, he is a he — claims God has told him what is going to happen. He has an explanation for the weird things going on. You no longer trusted the fake news and your parents meant well but they didn’t understand everything you are going through and how the situations in life are different today, the old authorities lost their authority, so you were susceptible to a charismatic prophet.

So you follow your new guardian, safe at last on a path as you stride confidently together, hand in hand, over the cliff, falling into a deep deep deep pit of ignorance and grief where you are robbed of everything you value and love, whether you know it or not, and you still may not be aware and may never be aware of how lost you were when you pulled us all down with you into this pit of stupid suffering.

You are absolutely free. Your mind is free, to some extent, and free enough to choose to do the right thing.

What is the right thing?

Let’s say you are faced with an ethical decision.

Immanuel Kant offered this useful rule of thumb:

Act only on that maxim which you can at the same time will to be universal law.

What in the world does that mean?

You know, treat each person as an end, not as a means to an end, but as an end in themselves.

That is rather abstract.

Well, here, let me recite the entire Torah while I stand on one foot:

“That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow.” ( a famous rabbi said that).

Oh, you mean like the Golden Rule. Like: 

“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” (another famous rabbi said that).

What about, “Mind your own damn business,” or “We’re all in this together?”

Don’t those contradict each other?

I don’t know.

What about you are faced with a decision you are forced to make, a decision only you can make because only you understand what your existential situation is, what you think your life’s purpose is, or what your, let us say, moral position is, which you can’t really articulate, but which positions you nonetheless so that you say, No, I can’t go there. This is where I draw the line. I can’t cross that line and you can’t make me. But your state legislature has determined it is really their decision, or that of their base, and THEY know what you need to do, because your body belongs to them, to the fine, honest, wise men who managed to get elected to office once, because they had the financial backing to dominate the media that you depend on for your information.

No, it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there, as the poet said. We don’t yet live in the Dark Ages, but we do live in an age of endarkenment. I am not the first to use that term, and, yes, it is a joke about Kant’s essay, “What is enlightenment?” 

Kant argued that enlightenment is humanity emergence from self=-imposed immaturity, meaning a childish inability to use one’s understanding, to think for oneself, without submitting to the opinions of others, without questioning those who claim to be authorities.

We don’t question these authorities when we lack resolve or courage to use the ability to reason that we are born with. Laziness and cowardice, in the Kantian view, keeps us intellectually immature.

I’m not sure that Kant’s view is still adequate. Facts are still facts, and the public use of reason still requires that one distinguish what is true from what is false. But we have become dependent on a powerful information technology that is also used to misinform and to shape public opinion. You check a notification on your phone and release a Niagara of false data from an unknown source, often passed along by someone you trust, who received it from someone they trust, but that ultimately came from some manufacturer of a Big Lie.

We live in a new age of endarkenment because the new technology of disinformation is all pervasive. Not everybody is fooled, but enough people are fooled, and in our current non-democracy it doesn’t take a majority of votes to win an election, just a majority of electors to win the electoral college.

When you finish reading this, I want you to read that essay, or watch a YouTube video about it.

“What is Enlightenment?” by Immanuel Kant. 

I want you to write a short essay on what you think about it or if you prefer, you may write a short satirical piece, similar to this one I am reading to you now, that demonstrates your own confused musing on the issue of truth and moral authority in the post-postmodern condition.

You will not be graded and you will receive no credit.

Learn to educate yourself.