oh theres nothing wrong with them that a thousand bucks can't fix, that 1000 arms can't hold down
fuck yeah i'm done
The Witness
Uncle Jimbilly’s hands are closed and stiff, and “they could not open altogether even if a child took the thick black fingers and tried to turn them back.” In Katherine Ann Porter’s story, “The Witness,” the children try to unfold the isolated, closed spirit of Uncle Jimbilly, but he remains entirely distant from them. Uncle Jimbilly has seen his share of hardship in his life, to the point that he has become completely removed from the children’s world of wide-eyed oblivion to the deepest wrongs of man. He understands that they live innocent and naïve lives and have no understanding of the absolute pain he has endured, the tragic suffocation of vitality that comes with being owned by another human being. He sees that in their youth, bursting with idealism, they could never understand the depths of human horror that slavery entails. Yet he cannot adjust himself to their outlook on life anymore than they can to his, nor would he want to. What they believe and know in their bright-eyed youth, he learned to be false long ago, or perhaps never knew at all, being born into slavery.
The story begins with a description of him that paints a vivid image of a man who has been outwardly broken by many years of hard slave labor and the emotional damage of being treated as subhuman. He is bent double, with fingers so stiff he cannot open his hand, and he hobbles on a walking stick. Even now, he is a servant on the farm, doing hard labor and keeping to himself. The children treat him with a confused kind of curiosity, but also have completely misunderstood his plight in life. They think that “Uncle Jimbilly had got over his slavery very well. Since they had known him, he had never done a single thing that anyone told him to do.” To the contrary, Uncle Jimbilly has never done a single thing that anyone told him to do because he has not gotten over slavery. Slavery is not something that can be “gotten over,” like an illness. Remembering the days when he had no choice in anything that he did, even in whom he married, Uncle Jimbilly has resolved himself to being contrary and refusing to follow orders ever again. He has retained his sense of self-worth and the dignified refuge a man has in free choice, and been so staunch in maintaining this dignity because of the wrongs done to him in slavery, not because he has “gotten over” them.
Uncle Jimbilly “would talk in a low, broken, abstracted murmur, as if to himself; but he was really saying something he meant one to hear.” He wants them to know, even if they cannot yet understand, what he has gone through, and the history of their ancestry, what their not-so-distant relatives are responsible for-the unforgivable cruelties of slavery. He refuses, however, to speak of slavery in personal terms, because doing so makes him vulnerable, both to their blind, baseless, naïve pity and to their understanding of him as someone who was once owned by their own grandparents, someone who was worth no more in society’s view of the world than a horse or a house. Uncle Jimbilly refuses to let them see him as a powerless slave, as someone who was property. He refuses to allow them to try to make amends, when they could never even have an inkling of comprehension of the eternal scar of slavery that he bears. Porter writes, “Nothing could have been more impersonal and faraway than his tone and manner of talking about slavery, but they wriggled a little and felt guilty.” He is very careful not to direct the stories toward them or talk passionately about the personal tragedies he faced in slavery, because doing so would invite unintentionally insincere and meaningless apologies. An apology from the children would be completely rootless, and would bear no difference from an apology for putting their elbows on the dinner table. No one can apologize for the utterly inhuman wrongs of slavery, certainly not children who do not even begin to understand it. To do so would be insultingly too little, and would relieve some sense of the burden of responsibility that they do bear and should bear as descendants of slave owners. They do not deserve any relief from that responsibility, certainly not before they have even grown into recognizing it. He tells the stories loudly enough for them to hear, to make sense of when they are old enough to begin to understand what has happened in their history, though they can never have any concept of what it feels like to be legally treated as the property of another human being.
Uncle Jimbilly often makes the children tombstones for various animals whose deaths the children want to honor. However, they have learned that “if you wanted a tombstone, you had to be very careful about the way you asked for it.” He does not like to take orders from anyone now that he is not inhumanly bound to do so. In the story, immediately after describing the tale of a slave who was tortured by being tied to stakes in the swamp and eaten alive by mosquitoes, Maria asks Uncle Jimbilly to carve “Safe in Heaven” onto the tombstone he has just made for a jackrabbit. Whether or not this story is exaggerated is irrelevant; as a child, it is hard to understand the existence of something that is completely irreconcilable. He describes slavery in the most horrific terms possible, even perhaps exaggerating stories, because it is impossible to describe any treatment of a human being that is worse than the subjugation of being a piece of property. No matter the reality of how a slave is treated, the unforgivable and infinitely repulsive element of slavery is that the slave owner can treat the slave as he wishes, that such torture could have happened legally within this Uncle Jimbilly’s lifetime. He simply tells the tale this way because physical torture is easier to describe in impersonal terms than the irreversible emotional damage that comes from a systematic attempt to take away a man’s right to his own life. Yet though he was born into such circumstances, he has managed to salvage his dignity, and his character. When Maria asks him to carve the epitaph “Safe in Heaven” on the jackrabbit’s tombstone, then, he refuses not because he does not want to take orders, but because his sense of the sacred has been preserved throughout his life as a slave. He is a deeply religious man, and has an unbreakable dedication to the morality of his religion. He responds, “To put over a tame jackrabbit, Missy? A heathen like dat? No, mam.” Heaven is reserved for human beings, people who have kept their faith in Christ no matter the hardships they may have faced in life. Uncle Jimbilly is the epitome of a man who has kept his faith, not only in his religion but in himself. Though he has been beaten into a shell of a man, physically, he is not at all submissive or passive in his manner. His strength of will and of faith is as strong as ever.
Despite his resolve to look forward to his afterlife rather than dwelling on the ugliness he has faced in his life on earth, Uncle Jimbilly still holds deep-seated bitterness towards everybody. The children observe that “He was always going to do something quite horrible to somebody and then he was going to dispose of the remains in a revolting manner…the reason why Uncle Jimbilly never did any of these things he threatened was, he said, because he never could get round to them….But some day, somebody was going to get a mighty big surprise, and meanwhile everybody had better look out.” The descriptions of the violence he will inflict upon his victims, however, is just as outlandish as his stories of slavery. The truth is that he wants to be taken seriously by everyone, as he deserves to be. Gone are the days when it was acceptable to see him as an inferior animal. He is constantly dedicated to reminding everyone and himself that he has power over them. He expresses that power and that strength through physical threats, just as he describes the horrors of slavery in terms of physical torture, but in reality his strength is in his character. However, because he is so closed off from everyone, he refuses to speak in such personal terms as describing his own self-worth, which would make his human value vulnerable to evaluation by people who have in the past refused to recognize that designation as an equal person, and to the children who could never begin to understand what he was trying to describe. Rather, he translates his dignity and demand for respect of his worth as a person into a demand for respect of his physical prowess and violent capabilities, which are things the children can understand. By establishing in terms of physical violence both the wrongs that have been done to him and his strength as a person, he remains impersonal, never again vulnerable to another person’s determination of who is worthy of being a part of the human race. He makes the unimaginable emotional damage of slavery imaginable by speaking of slavery in terms of physical torture; in the same way, he makes the important but nearly impossibly complex lesson that he is a force to be reckoned with and a human on his own terms a lesson that can be articulated and understood by children only through continued declarations of his physical capabilities. By forcing them to recognize his superior power and capabilities, he denies them any possibility of thinking of him as inferior. He reinforces to them his self-worth, his dignity, the only part of him that he has salvaged-the part of him that an eternity of slavery could never designate as property. A man can own another man, but when the enslaved man himself no longer sees himself as a man, that is when he is powerless.
haha hell yes son. i have not even read it over. you're welcome.
i'm the king's thirty-second son
born to him a 32nd time
born to him and my hair still on (i think this is what she says, the lyric sites claim she says "the night still young" but no fucking way is that what she says)
born to him with two eyebrows on
and that's all i was wearing
when i woke up staring at the world
my mom had been a rather crazy queen
but not at all like a sex machine
she liked to keep her body clean, clean
thought the world to be quite obscene
so she retired to her chambers
and we remained quite strangers
and to see me made her awful sad
and to touch me made her awful sad
and to see me made her awful
and to touch me made her awful
i'm the kings thirty-second son
man, all it took was 30 seconds time
but a smart little prince i was not
had a chambermaid and a chamber pot
and theres 31 others just like me
theres 31 others i can be
sometimes i'd stand by the royal wall
the sky'd be so big that it broke my soul
and i'd stand on my toes to catch a glimpse
of my mother's eyes and my mother's skin
but she'd retire to her chambers
and we'd remain quite strangers
and to see me made her awful sad
and to touch me made her awful sad
and to see me made her awful
and to touch me made her awful
and then one morning i woke up and i thought "oedipus oedipus oedipus oedipus"
then one morning and i woke up and i thought "rex rex rex"
then one morning i woke up and i thought "oedipus oedipus oedipus oedipus"
cuz 32's still a goddamn number,
32 still counts
gonna make it count, gonna make it count, gonna uh uh
32's still a goddamn number,
32 still counts
gonna make it count, gonna make it count, gonna uh uh uh
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king
long live the...
i'm the kings thirty-second son
theres 31 others just like me
theres 31 others on the way
theres 31 others after that
sometimes id stand by the royal gate
people screaming love and hate
and theyd scream and theyd scream and theyd scream and theyd scream,
long live the king, long live the queen
and to see me made her awful sad
and to touch me made her awful sad
and to see me made her awful
and to touch me made her awful
uh uh
and then one morning i woke up and i thought "oedipus oedipus oedipus oedipus"
then one morning and i woke up and i thought "rex rex rex"
then one morning i woke up and i thought "oedipus oedipus oedipus oedipus"
cuz 32's still a goddamn number
32 still counts
gonna make it count, gonna make it count
gonna uh uh uh
32's still a goddamn number
32's still a goddamn number
32's still a goddamn number
32's still a goddamn number
thirty-two
thirty-two
thirty-two
thirty-two
thirty-two
thirty-two
thirty-two
thirty-two
long live the king,
long live the king
long live the king,
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king...
haha beautiful. i love how i typed every time she repeated a line. i am dedicated to precision.
GOODNIGHT AND DON'T LET THIS NONSENSE DETER YOU FROM COMMENTING ON THE GEM THAT IS MY LAST ENTRY.
The Witness
Uncle Jimbilly’s hands are closed and stiff, and “they could not open altogether even if a child took the thick black fingers and tried to turn them back.” In Katherine Ann Porter’s story, “The Witness,” the children try to unfold the isolated, closed spirit of Uncle Jimbilly, but he remains entirely distant from them. Uncle Jimbilly has seen his share of hardship in his life, to the point that he has become completely removed from the children’s world of wide-eyed oblivion to the deepest wrongs of man. He understands that they live innocent and naïve lives and have no understanding of the absolute pain he has endured, the tragic suffocation of vitality that comes with being owned by another human being. He sees that in their youth, bursting with idealism, they could never understand the depths of human horror that slavery entails. Yet he cannot adjust himself to their outlook on life anymore than they can to his, nor would he want to. What they believe and know in their bright-eyed youth, he learned to be false long ago, or perhaps never knew at all, being born into slavery.
The story begins with a description of him that paints a vivid image of a man who has been outwardly broken by many years of hard slave labor and the emotional damage of being treated as subhuman. He is bent double, with fingers so stiff he cannot open his hand, and he hobbles on a walking stick. Even now, he is a servant on the farm, doing hard labor and keeping to himself. The children treat him with a confused kind of curiosity, but also have completely misunderstood his plight in life. They think that “Uncle Jimbilly had got over his slavery very well. Since they had known him, he had never done a single thing that anyone told him to do.” To the contrary, Uncle Jimbilly has never done a single thing that anyone told him to do because he has not gotten over slavery. Slavery is not something that can be “gotten over,” like an illness. Remembering the days when he had no choice in anything that he did, even in whom he married, Uncle Jimbilly has resolved himself to being contrary and refusing to follow orders ever again. He has retained his sense of self-worth and the dignified refuge a man has in free choice, and been so staunch in maintaining this dignity because of the wrongs done to him in slavery, not because he has “gotten over” them.
Uncle Jimbilly “would talk in a low, broken, abstracted murmur, as if to himself; but he was really saying something he meant one to hear.” He wants them to know, even if they cannot yet understand, what he has gone through, and the history of their ancestry, what their not-so-distant relatives are responsible for-the unforgivable cruelties of slavery. He refuses, however, to speak of slavery in personal terms, because doing so makes him vulnerable, both to their blind, baseless, naïve pity and to their understanding of him as someone who was once owned by their own grandparents, someone who was worth no more in society’s view of the world than a horse or a house. Uncle Jimbilly refuses to let them see him as a powerless slave, as someone who was property. He refuses to allow them to try to make amends, when they could never even have an inkling of comprehension of the eternal scar of slavery that he bears. Porter writes, “Nothing could have been more impersonal and faraway than his tone and manner of talking about slavery, but they wriggled a little and felt guilty.” He is very careful not to direct the stories toward them or talk passionately about the personal tragedies he faced in slavery, because doing so would invite unintentionally insincere and meaningless apologies. An apology from the children would be completely rootless, and would bear no difference from an apology for putting their elbows on the dinner table. No one can apologize for the utterly inhuman wrongs of slavery, certainly not children who do not even begin to understand it. To do so would be insultingly too little, and would relieve some sense of the burden of responsibility that they do bear and should bear as descendants of slave owners. They do not deserve any relief from that responsibility, certainly not before they have even grown into recognizing it. He tells the stories loudly enough for them to hear, to make sense of when they are old enough to begin to understand what has happened in their history, though they can never have any concept of what it feels like to be legally treated as the property of another human being.
Uncle Jimbilly often makes the children tombstones for various animals whose deaths the children want to honor. However, they have learned that “if you wanted a tombstone, you had to be very careful about the way you asked for it.” He does not like to take orders from anyone now that he is not inhumanly bound to do so. In the story, immediately after describing the tale of a slave who was tortured by being tied to stakes in the swamp and eaten alive by mosquitoes, Maria asks Uncle Jimbilly to carve “Safe in Heaven” onto the tombstone he has just made for a jackrabbit. Whether or not this story is exaggerated is irrelevant; as a child, it is hard to understand the existence of something that is completely irreconcilable. He describes slavery in the most horrific terms possible, even perhaps exaggerating stories, because it is impossible to describe any treatment of a human being that is worse than the subjugation of being a piece of property. No matter the reality of how a slave is treated, the unforgivable and infinitely repulsive element of slavery is that the slave owner can treat the slave as he wishes, that such torture could have happened legally within this Uncle Jimbilly’s lifetime. He simply tells the tale this way because physical torture is easier to describe in impersonal terms than the irreversible emotional damage that comes from a systematic attempt to take away a man’s right to his own life. Yet though he was born into such circumstances, he has managed to salvage his dignity, and his character. When Maria asks him to carve the epitaph “Safe in Heaven” on the jackrabbit’s tombstone, then, he refuses not because he does not want to take orders, but because his sense of the sacred has been preserved throughout his life as a slave. He is a deeply religious man, and has an unbreakable dedication to the morality of his religion. He responds, “To put over a tame jackrabbit, Missy? A heathen like dat? No, mam.” Heaven is reserved for human beings, people who have kept their faith in Christ no matter the hardships they may have faced in life. Uncle Jimbilly is the epitome of a man who has kept his faith, not only in his religion but in himself. Though he has been beaten into a shell of a man, physically, he is not at all submissive or passive in his manner. His strength of will and of faith is as strong as ever.
Despite his resolve to look forward to his afterlife rather than dwelling on the ugliness he has faced in his life on earth, Uncle Jimbilly still holds deep-seated bitterness towards everybody. The children observe that “He was always going to do something quite horrible to somebody and then he was going to dispose of the remains in a revolting manner…the reason why Uncle Jimbilly never did any of these things he threatened was, he said, because he never could get round to them….But some day, somebody was going to get a mighty big surprise, and meanwhile everybody had better look out.” The descriptions of the violence he will inflict upon his victims, however, is just as outlandish as his stories of slavery. The truth is that he wants to be taken seriously by everyone, as he deserves to be. Gone are the days when it was acceptable to see him as an inferior animal. He is constantly dedicated to reminding everyone and himself that he has power over them. He expresses that power and that strength through physical threats, just as he describes the horrors of slavery in terms of physical torture, but in reality his strength is in his character. However, because he is so closed off from everyone, he refuses to speak in such personal terms as describing his own self-worth, which would make his human value vulnerable to evaluation by people who have in the past refused to recognize that designation as an equal person, and to the children who could never begin to understand what he was trying to describe. Rather, he translates his dignity and demand for respect of his worth as a person into a demand for respect of his physical prowess and violent capabilities, which are things the children can understand. By establishing in terms of physical violence both the wrongs that have been done to him and his strength as a person, he remains impersonal, never again vulnerable to another person’s determination of who is worthy of being a part of the human race. He makes the unimaginable emotional damage of slavery imaginable by speaking of slavery in terms of physical torture; in the same way, he makes the important but nearly impossibly complex lesson that he is a force to be reckoned with and a human on his own terms a lesson that can be articulated and understood by children only through continued declarations of his physical capabilities. By forcing them to recognize his superior power and capabilities, he denies them any possibility of thinking of him as inferior. He reinforces to them his self-worth, his dignity, the only part of him that he has salvaged-the part of him that an eternity of slavery could never designate as property. A man can own another man, but when the enslaved man himself no longer sees himself as a man, that is when he is powerless.
haha hell yes son. i have not even read it over. you're welcome.
i'm the king's thirty-second son
born to him a 32nd time
born to him and my hair still on (i think this is what she says, the lyric sites claim she says "the night still young" but no fucking way is that what she says)
born to him with two eyebrows on
and that's all i was wearing
when i woke up staring at the world
my mom had been a rather crazy queen
but not at all like a sex machine
she liked to keep her body clean, clean
thought the world to be quite obscene
so she retired to her chambers
and we remained quite strangers
and to see me made her awful sad
and to touch me made her awful sad
and to see me made her awful
and to touch me made her awful
i'm the kings thirty-second son
man, all it took was 30 seconds time
but a smart little prince i was not
had a chambermaid and a chamber pot
and theres 31 others just like me
theres 31 others i can be
sometimes i'd stand by the royal wall
the sky'd be so big that it broke my soul
and i'd stand on my toes to catch a glimpse
of my mother's eyes and my mother's skin
but she'd retire to her chambers
and we'd remain quite strangers
and to see me made her awful sad
and to touch me made her awful sad
and to see me made her awful
and to touch me made her awful
and then one morning i woke up and i thought "oedipus oedipus oedipus oedipus"
then one morning and i woke up and i thought "rex rex rex"
then one morning i woke up and i thought "oedipus oedipus oedipus oedipus"
cuz 32's still a goddamn number,
32 still counts
gonna make it count, gonna make it count, gonna uh uh
32's still a goddamn number,
32 still counts
gonna make it count, gonna make it count, gonna uh uh uh
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king
long live the...
i'm the kings thirty-second son
theres 31 others just like me
theres 31 others on the way
theres 31 others after that
sometimes id stand by the royal gate
people screaming love and hate
and theyd scream and theyd scream and theyd scream and theyd scream,
long live the king, long live the queen
and to see me made her awful sad
and to touch me made her awful sad
and to see me made her awful
and to touch me made her awful
uh uh
and then one morning i woke up and i thought "oedipus oedipus oedipus oedipus"
then one morning and i woke up and i thought "rex rex rex"
then one morning i woke up and i thought "oedipus oedipus oedipus oedipus"
cuz 32's still a goddamn number
32 still counts
gonna make it count, gonna make it count
gonna uh uh uh
32's still a goddamn number
32's still a goddamn number
32's still a goddamn number
32's still a goddamn number
thirty-two
thirty-two
thirty-two
thirty-two
thirty-two
thirty-two
thirty-two
thirty-two
long live the king,
long live the king
long live the king,
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king
long live the king...
haha beautiful. i love how i typed every time she repeated a line. i am dedicated to precision.
GOODNIGHT AND DON'T LET THIS NONSENSE DETER YOU FROM COMMENTING ON THE GEM THAT IS MY LAST ENTRY.