So already, late last Saturday afternoon when I turned on my television and began channel-surfing, I happened upon the Freedom Summer episode of Eyes on the Prize. I'd seen it before, but I kept watching because I had recently finished reading Omo Moses' The White Peril: A Family Memoir. The book quotes Bob Moses, Omo's father, at length, and I was definitely feeling immersed in Bob Moses' philosophy of change, his metaphors for empowered and empowering activists, and his ideas about leading and organizing.
That Bob Moses* was the first person I saw when I came upon that episode had clinched my decision to watch it: I wanted to hear the voice of the man who wasn't yet Omo's father, whose ideas about supporting groups to self-determine as Americans, to organize, to insist, and to persist are alive and well.
I first met Omo when he was a teenager in an English language arts class I taught at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. In January, as the release date for his book drew near, I marveled at its
timeliness--one day after Donald Trump's inauguration. Since then, Trump
has been confirming that we stand at another moment in our country's
history requiring "we the people" to act for the sake of freedom and justice for all. Members of Omo's family have long known how to do this.
And at the same time, despite its place in American history, the nuclear family of Omo's formative years was also "just a
family"--in his case, composed of four children and their two parents who were intent on raising them to thrive and realize their dreams in a
world too often structured and inclined to obstruct their paths.
The White Peril captures Omo's experience of navigating the relationship between the public-political and private-familial aspects of his formative years. Presenting his journey from childhood to young adulthood, it offers the beginning chapters of the story of how Omo came to carve out his place in and in relationship to his family's public legacy as it continues in the present moment.**
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| The extended Moses family in front of a mural featuring Bob and Janet; Omo and his kids are on far left. |
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Consequently, The White Peril can be accurately described as a personal and political coming-of-age story. But it's not a conventional linear one representing just one life journey. It's multi-generic, multi-generational, multi-voiced, and multi-faceted, weaving together others' stories with Omo's own--as its subtitle, A Family Memoir implies. Essentially, it offers a mosaic of defining events, life-shaping ideas, and influential people that float in the non-chronological narrative of Omo's first decades.
It can be described accurately in other ways, too. It's a migration story: Omo and his family move from Tanzania to New York City to Cambridge. It's an exploration of masculinity and being male, especially as relates to black males growing from boyhood to manhood in the city. It's a portrait of a "progressive" city and its broken and kept promises over time. It's the story of the birth and first steps of a new youth-lifting educational initiative.
It's also a tribute to rock-solid familial love in all its complexity. It's an exploration of what it's like to live not only with one's own vivid memories of stories lived and heard, but with other people's vivid memories of them--and the hopes and expectations that often accompany them. It's a tribute to ancestors whose voices and wisdom are not only presented in this book, but meditated upon, internalized for present and future reference (not to be confused with swallowed whole), and, above all, appreciated for their contributions to the spiritual, communal, and deeply considered intellectual place in which Omo's life is firmly rooted--and from which it draws so much strength and inspiration.***
So how does this book hold together, given its many facets? I believe the answer lies in Omo's own writing, so often poetic and dramatic, even when its aim is simply to lay out the contexts that surround particular events and situations that Omo recalls and recounts so vividly. Omo's capacity to create mood, character, and place through the physical details he chooses to share, the diction and imagery he uses to render them, and the metaphors he creates and sometimes repeats makes the world of his youth physically and emotionally immediate.
Take for example, his description of his family's trip from Tanzania to America: the almost staccato presentation of the political/historical context in which it occurred--certainly what Omo learned much later--is followed by his account of the nearly endless trip itself, as experienced by his four-year-old self.
We were torn from the road. From the red dirt**** that stretched to the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, transplanted onto America's glacial concrete. We would learn that our home in Same, like most of the homes of African American expatriates in Tanzania, had been searched by soldiers and police. That it had been reported that blacks from America had arrived by boat with guns and were headed to President Nyerere's village in the build-up to the Pan-African Conference to be held in Dar es Salaam in 1974.
We would learn that in 1975 President Jimmy Carter was offering amnesty to the citizens who had refused to fight in the Vietnam War.
We would learn that we'd been denied Tanzanian citizenship, that the political climate had shifted, that we couldn't become Tanzania's children.
'We're going to visit Bibi,' Mama said.
It was 1976. We were six, four, and two, and Malaika was getting ripe in Mama's belly, when the plane left the surface of the earth, its wheels folding into its guts. The engines roared like a pride of lions. We took off down the runway like a tortoise at first, and then a cheetah and then an albatross, wings abruptly rejecting gravity. Taking off felt like the car trips we'd made to the Indian Ocean, five, six, or seven of us in a vehicle yo-yoing on dirt and rocks until we reached the paved road, black and smooth. And then the plane was floating. On our way to forty thousand feet like on our way to the beach, . . .. We treated the plane like the road. Inspected the arms of each chair as if a bush or an anthill, ran up and down the aisle unaware that an umbilical cord had been severed, that we were being delivered to the other side of the planet.
We landed in Nairobi and took off again.
We landed in Paris and took off again. Remained between the surface of the earth and the sun and the moon for twenty hours.
We landed in the South Bronx, unaware that we had reached the shores of hip-hop. (35-36)*****
The very first sentence telegraphs that this move to America will be traumatic, even though the next sentences convey the excitement of the multiple plane rides, the pleasure with which the first plane ride recalls the movement of various animals, and the ease with which the children transfer their exploratory skills from the road in Tanzania to the airplane's aisles. In the last sentence, the language of landing shifts to mean "finally ended up." Africa is destined for memory, and the safety of the "we" whose experience is reported in this series of paragraphs that begin with "we," many only one sentence long, cannot erase or protect against the pain of the loss soon to be comprehended by Omo and his older sister.
I particularly like Omo's evocation much later in the book of time spent with an influential friend after days spent working with students at the Brinkley Middle School in Mississippi.
I spend evenings on Mr. Figgers's porch, just talking about things. I enjoy listening to how his words run a marathon around a point, stuff time with his hopes and provocations. I enjoy time passing, with no apparent destination, along the tenor of his voice. If there are fireflies, I enjoy witnessing the call and response. (201)
Again, the reader encounters the sensuous, imaginative quality of Omo's writing, a direct reflection of his strong response to the actual places and moments in which he finds himself. In this case, it's the slow moment--always suitable for deep listening and deep thinking. In Omo's imagination, words
can run marathons, and time is a hollowed sacred space capable of being filled
not only with hopes, but with unanswered questions and speculations
deserving further consideration during future evenings on the porch. The fireflies******, if present, contribute to the warm night's natural rhythms, recapitulated by the repetitions of "I enjoy."
It was in a similar spirit of unrushed listening that I read The White Peril's many excerpts from interviews, sermons, and books that are also an important part of the book. For those who want to read only the action parts of Omo's own journey from childhood to manhood, these excerpts might seem like an intrusion, but to know Omo is to know that he is and always has been a quiet observer, absorber, listener, and thinker. By providing these other voices, he shares those viewpoints and personalities that were critical to his development "back then" and "since then." The White Peril is a family memoir, and Omo does family--nuclear, extended, and writ beyond DNA--the courtesy of letting them speak for themselves.
There's a lot of water in The White Peril--next to the beach in Tanzania where Omo and his siblings play, in the Harvard swimming pool where they swim and compete, beneath the frozen surface******* of the Charles River that Omo 's mother cautions him and his brother not to trust, in the ocean and waves to which his father compares the civil rights movement and those active in it.
At a moment when many of us feel like we might drown in our country's deliberately churned-up rough seas, this book reminds us we can swim if we swim together. Simultaneously, it tells the moving story of a young man growing up with dreams that he adjusts over time in response to new realities and understandings. Fortunately, those dreams are good for other people, too, especially young people. I highly recommend The White Peril.
* Images screen-shot from PBS website. https://www.pbs.org/video/eyes-on-the-prize-mississippi-is-this-america-freedom-summer/
** Screenshot of photo by Nick Surette/Central Square BID accompanying Levy, M. (2021, July 25). Bob Moses, educator and icon of civil rights, 86; he inspired generations to both learn and lead. https://www.cambridgeday.com/2021/07/25/bob-moses-educator-and-icon-of-civil-rights-86-he-inspired-generations-to-both-learn-and-lead/
*** The title of Omo's book is proof of the Omo's strong connection to the ancestors: Omo's great-grandfather's book has the same title.
**** Screen shot of photo on Flickr by Anna & Jorge--C@jig@ https://www.flickr.com/photos/spartan_puma/781637442/in/photostream/lightbox/
***** Moses, O. (2025). The white peril: A family memoir. Beacon Press.
*(6) Screenshot of photo posted on the following: Mississippi Firefly Tours. (2023, May 20). Photo credit: Louisa Simmons. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=212214484891558&set=pb.100083090241019.-2207520000
*(7) Screenshot of photo on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1i64pld/people_walking_on_frozen_charles_river_again/#lightbox
