#nelson peery

[kkoraki]

The train was gathering speed. I slung the sack across my back and lowered myself within a few inches of the ground. Pacing the train for a moment, I let go, plunging headlong into the brush and stones. When I got back to my feet, I looked ahead to the three young faces leaning out of the boxcar. They waved. I waved good luck and turned back toward Paradise. The second train pulled out. I climbed into an empty car, closed the door, curled up in my overcoat, and slept. Who does not know the beauty of Oregon? I sat in the doorway of the boxcar, watching its splendor unfold before me. There on the western slopes of the Rockies is a land I love. We crossed the Great Divide and rumbled down the mountains toward the sea. The jumbled rocks of the highlands began to disappear; the scrub growth gave way to tall, green, stately Oregon pines. They seemed to march confidently up the slope of the mountain, saying to me, "Eighteen? You're only eighteen? God, you're so young. If you're going to grow old like me, you have to do as I have done. Sink your roots into the earth. Then you will grow as tall and sweet-smelling as I am." And I said back to them, "You're a pine tree and the earth is your home. I'm a black boy and I ain't got a home. I'd rather be a tall pine tree than a black boy. I'd look down from the mountain upon the freight train and the hungry hoboes. I'd stand there for a thousand years and shake my head at the crazy people who fight over crumbs when there is so much. God was good to you."

"Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary" by Nelson Peery

[thebookwrightsbooks]

"The New Press is thrilled to publish the autobiography of a hitherto unknown hero, adventurer, and rebel - Nelson Peery. This remarkable and highly dramatic memoir was finished when Peery was "old enough to be honest with [him]self and the typewriter." But it was started when Peery was only twenty-four, and it retains all the innocence, sauciness, and hope of a young man who fully expected the world to live up to the promises and values he fought for in World War II. Raised during the Depression, Peery is the second son of the only black family living in a rural Minnesota town, where he quickly learns about race and class. Fleeing a life of limited opportunity and following an innate sense of adventure, Peery boards a train heading west, where he is taken in by a group of hoboes. Rarely have we seen - and never through the eyes of a young black man - the extraordinary resourcefulness and camaraderie that enables these men to survive the hardships of the Depression. When the war begins Peery joins the all-black 93rd Infantry Division: he is stationed first in the Jim Crow South and ultimately in the South Pacific. Frustrated by the hypocrisy of fighting abroad for opportunities denied blacks at home, Peery prepares to do battle, with both his mind and sword. Culminating in his increasingly insurrectionary acts, this is the classic story of the making of a revolutionary. It tells of the climate and experience that convinced Peery to war against racism and classism. Though he will be compared to Eldridge Cleaver and Malcolm X, the world Peery describes is a different one - that of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. Like Wright, Peery was eventually drawn to communism, but one of his owninvention: a worldwide revolution of people of color - which in the heady days of 1945 Peery thought would be the way of the future. Whether he's raising hell in Minnesota, fighting racism in Louisiana, or being seditious in the Philippines, Peery's adventures, coupled with his wry,"

[nihilhumani-blog]

Nelson Peery on value theory, The Future is Up To Us (Chicago: Speakers for a New America, 2015), 28-29.