I had this book when I was a kid. It was one of those children’s books, the kind that sometimes pass for actual history because it washes over the blood and broken bone of human history. It was a book about Gandhi and Martin Luther King,Jr. I want to say it was about John F. Kennedy, too, but that might be a different book. The book talked about how these men wanted better for their fellow men, wanted freedom and self-determination. It was one of those books that ignored Jim Crow and only referred to the British Colonial power as having eventually turned cruel, not that it was cruel from the beginning. It was one of those books that referred to the death of martyrs in passive voice; not that someone murdered them,but for their good works they were killed, worded in a way to rob it of violence, because there was some notion floating around that still is floating around that it doesn’t matter what words you use as long as you “get the point across.” Facts without teeth. Erase the colonialism. Erase the racism. At the end of the book there was a drawing in black and white of King and Gandhi holding hands with Caucasian Jesus, standing atop a hill with a rainbow overhand. They were holding hands and singing

“Free at Last, Free at Last.”

I thought of this book the first time I watched Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.

the
tooth
less
af
fair
his
story
with
out
bl
bl
bl
oo
d: wh
ite
noi
se