Halloween

For some people, the video of police officer Derek Chauvin callously kneeling on the neck of the unarmed, pleading George Floyd looked like many things. A travesty. A horror. A stark reminder of the brutality and injustice of American policing, and an urgent call to stand up, dig deep, and demand change.But for the subjects of an article published in the Washington Post on Wednesday, the video prompted a different kind of deep digging.‘Blackface incident at Post cartoonist’s 2018 Halloween party resurfaces amid protests’, reads the headline, a prelude to 3,000 words of groundbreaking work in the field of offense archaeology.

Halloween is a holiday we all look forward to, and in the correct setting, provides us with many opportunities to express our unique identities. However, it is also a minefield for those of us who have the threat of cultural appropriation looming over us like Harvey Weinstein leering at a casting couch. If you are devoid of progressive sensibilities, you might very well end up stepping on an unseen hazard (because of the minefield metaphor), hearing a brief yet sinister tutting sound, before the devastating explosion of offense erupts around you.

Tall and thin — a little stooped, his moustache and the thatch of his hair starting to show a little white — Lowell Gerry was putting out pumpkins this past week. Dozens and dozens of the things: round ones and flattened ovals. Bright orange ones, as neon as DayGlo, and deeper colours edging toward a reddish brown. A range of albino pumpkins, too, like pale sickly ghosts. Like vegetable lepers. They seem to sell fairly well. Last Tuesday, before the first snow dusted eastern South Dakota over the weekend, two or three other shoppers stopped by in the 15 minutes I was there to look for a few of the harvest’s last green tomatoes. It’s Halloween, of course, that incites the pumpkin fervour. The town of Madison is not exactly tiny, by rural standards.