Held to answer

Too bad Gil Scott-Heron didn’t live to see the 50th anniversary of humans landing on the moon.

He could have revisited his angry song-poem from 1970 called “Whitey on the Moon,” where he seethes about all the money being spent on America’s space program, while black Americans are trapped in housing projects:

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey’s on the moon)
I can’t pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey’s on the moon)
Ten years from now I’ll be payin’ still.
(while Whitey’s on the moon) … .

Taxes takin’ my whole damn check,
Junkies makin’ me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin’ up,
An’ as if all that shit wasn’t enough
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
With whitey on the moon
Her face and arm began to swell
And whitey’s on the moon
Was all that money I made last year
For whitey on the moon?
How come I ain’t got no money here?
Hmm! Whitey’s on the moon
Y’know I just ’bout had my fill
Of whitey on the moon
I think I’ll send these doctor bills
Airmail special
To whitey on the moon

Last year the song received a brief reprise in the movie, “First Man” about astronaut Neil Armstrong. In the movie, singer Leon Bridges plays Scott-Heron performing “Whitey on the Moon.”

For many people it may have been the only time they’ve ever heard the song or even heard of Scott-Heron, who died in 2011 at age 62.

The song appeared on his first album “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” which included his most famous work, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” a brilliant commentary about commercialism and the power of media. The album also included pieces like “The Subject was Faggots” making it unsuitable then (and probably now) for mainstream radio stations.

For “Whitey on the Moon,” Scott-Heron was supposedly inspired by Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, who called space travel a “flying circus.”

There were protests before the Apollo 11 launch. Among the 50th anniversary recollections this month was one by The Guardian that recalled Ralph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference showing up at Cape Kennedy with about 24 black families, some mules and wagons, and a sign reading: “$12 a day to feed an astronaut. We could feed a starving child for $8.”

The Guardian tracked down one of the protesters, JT Johnson, who is now an 81-year-old grandfather living in Atlanta.

“I think this country has never really taken care of people here…,” he told The Guardian. “African Americans never got their share; they spread it around everybody else. … It was white people that was privileged in this country and they’d made it like that for themselves.”

Johnson did concede that it was exciting to watch Armstrong set foot on the moon.

“(B)ut here again the next day we were going back to the same thing. How do we feed our hungry?”

It’s an easy question to ask, but even the people asking it don’t have answers beyond, “Give us money.”

Once the money’s gone, then what? More hungry mouths to feed.

The brutal truth is that people are a never-ending source of misery. A moon landing is a glorious, and rare, human victory worth celebrating – even 50 years out. It’s a reminder of what humans can be capable of.

In his own way, so was Scott-Heron. His father left the U.S. to play soccer in Jamaica, and Scott-Heron was reared in Tennessee and New York by his grandmother and mother. They were educated women who made sure he had lots of books, a piano and access to music lessons.

He had rough times in a mostly white school, but he also had advantages many kids (of any color) don’t have. In high school he attended the prestigious Fieldston school in New York. He dropped out of college to write his first novel, “The Vulture, which was quickly published and publicized – giving him a springboard to record his album, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.”

Scott-Heron did not languish in obscurity. His talent was recognized early, and he had plenty of help from whitey – including Clive Davis, former president of Columbia Records who later founded Arista Records.

Journalist Nat Hentoff interviewed Scott-Heron in 1970 at age 21 and called him a “protean phenomenon.” In addition to writing fiction and poetry and singing, Scott-Heron hoped to teach children and also paint:

“I’m an ecology painter. In one I put a telephone pole, with no wires connecting it, in a field of grass. I’m convinced that as our technology becomes unnatural, nature will defend itself and will destroy those products of technology which intrude on her.”

Hentoff asked him how hopeful he was about the future. Scott-Heron replied that whatever hope he had it was in the young but warned, “(T)hey’ve got to get rid of heroin and some of those other drugs!”

A year later he would write “Home is Where the Hatred Is,” about the power of addiction:

You keep sayin’ kick it, quit it, kick it, quit it!
        God, but did you ever try? …
      Home is where I live inside my white powder dreams

By early middle age, most of Scott-Heron’s plans had evaporated in the smoke of a crack pipe. A New Yorker profile described him as avoiding mirrors because of his physical deterioration.

Was it whitey’s fault he turned to crack cocaine and away from his own considerable talent? Did somebody who looked like him introduce Scott-Heron to a drug knowing it would drag him down?

Had whitey never gone to the moon, Scott-Heron would have still ended up a crack addict.

The 50th anniversary of the moon landing happened to coincide with the announcement by the World Health Organization that the Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo is now formally a global health emergency.

The disease has infected more than 2,500 people and killed at least 1,676. In 2014-15, an Ebola outbreak in West Africa infected 28,616 people and killed 11,310.

According to The New York Times, the man who brought the disease to Goma, a city of two million people, was “a pastor who had preached in seven churches in the epidemic zone, laying hands on the sick. He became ill and was treated by a nurse, but got on a bus to Goma anyway. The bus stopped at three checkpoints meant to halt the spread of the disease by screening passengers for symptoms, but his illness was not detected. He gave a different name at each checkpoint, apparently hoping to avoid being detained, local health authorities said. Sick and feverish by the time he arrived in Goma, he went to a clinic there, where the disease was diagnosed.”

So far, more than 161,000 people have received an Ebola vaccine made by the American pharmaceutical company Merck. It is considered highly effective. Merck had donated more than 195,000 doses of the vaccine since last year, has 245,000 more ready to ship and is expected to have 900,000 more in the next six to 18 months.

In 2019, whitey isn’t on the moon. But whitey is in the Congo.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

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