Of all the cats that alone walked There’s none like Tabby Toro; He is the sweet of my heart And he likes to sleep at my feet. There’s no cat in the world is half so sweet as Tabby Toro; He is the sweet of my heart And he likes to sleep at my feet.
The soft furs are like a great fluffy pillow his little heart pounding at my feet with the brilliant eyes riveting billow bright sparkles of emerald secret he keeps from the faraway star where he was once a little prince; He is the sweet of my heart And he likes to sleep at my feet.
My mother tells me all the time that I love Tabby Toro too much, And, but for him, silent I am Smiling at the taunts and sighs such; But pity not, for I am fine as long as I feel the little heart at my feet, And I know there’s Tabby Toro He is the sweet of my heart
If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be and why?
I would like to meet Jane Austen, George Eliot, Mary Seacole, and Francis Barber, whose backgrounds and personal aspects interest me not as celebrities but as persons from my knowledge of their extraordinary lives birthing from the ordinary milieu.
1. Jane Austen – Today, Austen is one of the most revered writers of world literature worldwide. But her novels were not regarded as a lofty tome of literature in terms of academic value in her days. Austen was not of blue stockings, but a woman attending the household cares that feminists call drudgery. She took care of her elderly father, and writing was a means of her creative outlet to express herself. Also, she was weak at spelling, just as Leo Tolstoy was. (What a relief that perfect grammarians are not necessarily great authors!) She was also unmarried, so she and I would have many things to discuss as a single woman taking care of her family with a love of writing.
2. George Eliot – a great intellectual writer, Eliot used to churn butter out of milking the cows on her family farm. But her family denied it because it would mar her image of an intellectual as if doing chores were considered unfit for a woman of her literary status. She was a strong-minded, independent-willed woman with the power of words to compensate for her lack of physical beauty.
3. Mary Seacole – I want to ask her how she upheld her confidence and determination to care for the wounded soldiers during the Crimean War after Florence Nightingale rejected her application to volunteer for her Nurse Corps. Her love of humanity and keen observation of societal norms and behaviors have impressed me, and I want to ask her for a word of advice.
4. Francis Barber – Born into slavery in Jamaica, Barber was a loyal servant of English essayist and author of A Dictionary of the English Language, who took him under his protection against racial injustice and mistreatment. Johnson even bequeathed him a small fortune after his death, so Barber set up his small business and started a family with an English woman. His descendants still live in Lichfield, England. I want to meet him and ask him about what Johnson was really like – as it is the best way to know the character of one’s boss – and how his life became after the death of his master in the time when the blacks on the British Isles were conspicuously existent in small numbers. Was he treated like his counterpart in the U.S.?
It would be best never to meet your heroes or idols in real life because you will be disappointed with their actual characters. But my list of people will not be a disappointment because they were not from the highest estate of the ether and seem approachable and relatable. Or so I should think.
I first learned of the author from a Korean television documentary about her search for a natural mother in Korea. A successful food editor of a cultural magazine and a writer, Kim returned to the land with the tears of the past and the hope for the future in realizing her ideal figure for the unconditional love she longed for, which piqued me to read this book to know more about her story, hoping to acquaint another kindred spirit.
So I hoped it was, but her story betrayed my hope. It was about her affair of the heart with the CEO of a famous French beauty product, L’Occidante. Kim seems to have the magic power of charming men – the higher and the smarter – without effort, and she’s never alone, although she wants to think she is. She has never been in poverty of love, money, and opportunity, yet she complains about a lack of love and total freedom. Her parents, who adopted her, have taken care of her, and her sister is also a Korean adoptee. They may not be perfect, but no one is perfect, and they certainly didn’t burden her with the weight of economic support or, worse, the total abandonment that happens to some of the other adopted children. And that’s not it. Kim always escapes from the responsibility of love when the further half showers with love and warms her with kindness. You can’t treat love as it is a business deal. Unconditional love is altruistic and agape. Love is giving and sharing, not owning and demanding. A sense of abandonment envelops Kim like a wandering ghost wailing in perceptual disappointment and howling in forever resentment. Ultimately, Kim finds herself alone, and it’s too late to regret the ancient bliss of love.
To think that jealousy resulted in such an acrid train of thought is to miss the accurate impression of my heart on the narrative itself. My power of empathy wallowed in the sympathy of humanity and propelled me to read it, in addition to the Korean heritage the author and I shared. The tears I saw from the program pleading for help to find her natural mother in Korea were heartfelt, so I wanted to hear the cry from the heart to know about the death and breadth of her soul. Yet, her story resonates with the outcry of her never-ending angst and constant chasing of mirages springing from the imaginary ideal of love.
I have always thought of the Catholic Church in the U.S. as a league of immigrant churches founded by the faithful of the old world diasporas uprooted in the New World. The American Catholic Church is, in a way, an outpost of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, with its offsprings sprouting and flourishing in their ethnic enclaves, thus resulting in less spiritually cohesive, culturally solidifying characteristics in the form of different ethnic Catholic communities within the Church in the U.S. Perhaps that might be one of the reasons that there are so few black Catholics, excluding the immigrant blacks from the overseas because the Church ignored their existence as human beings except for their labor as a lucrative resource to expand their organizational dominance.
Swarns is also mad and sad about the cruel truth about the Jesuits, whose motto was to educate the souls to train as God’s soldiers were the leaders of the slave trading in 19th century America in efforts to create America’s finest Jesuit high-education establishment called the Georgetown University. The number 272 signifies the number of blacks traded as slaves to fund the university’s administration in zealous ambition to build the Jesuit Empire in the New World. While Pope George XVI condemned slavery in his apostolic Church in 1839, blindsided by the expansionist vision, the American-born and bred Jesuits continued to ship out the blacks in their care to Louisiana by disintegrating the black families and communities to form their cultural identities and heritage.
Catholicism is a family religion because it is usually inherited through generations. Mothers teach their daughters to say the rosary prayer and the First Communion is a family celebration. But without the secure bond of family in a stable environment, Catholicism is complex to thrive and faces discontinuation of legacy with no parents to teach it to their children. Consequently, the disintegration of black families is the sine qua non of the decline of black Catholics in the U.S. to this date. Even if the American Jesuits, including the present Georgetown administration, have expressed their regret and condolence to the 272 black people they sold for profits, the American Catholic Church should continuously endeavor to reconcile with the racialism within the Church by making all races of people welcome when they come to the Church by reaching out to the concerns of each that are universal to all of us.
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