Michael A. Smith Visits With The Empty Envelope: Three Words That Were Never Meant to Be Earned

 

The Empty Envelope:
Three Words That Were Never Meant to Be Earned

The terms were stated plainly, and the Cherokee met them

Beginning in the 1790s, under Washington and his Secretary of War Henry Knox, the United States adopted what it called a civilization policy. The offer was explicit and it was made in good faith by at least some of the men who made it. Take up settled agriculture. Learn letters. Accept the Christian religion. Govern yourselves by written law. Do these things, and you may remain where you are.

The Cherokee did them. Sequoyah completed his syllabary in the 1820s and a people became literate in their own language within a few years, which has few parallels anywhere. They founded a newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix, printed in two languages. They wrote a constitution in 1827, modeled deliberately on the American one, with a principal chief and a bicameral legislature and a supreme court. They built farms and mills and schools. Some of them owned slaves, which was itself part of the performance, because the planter was what the Southern states meant by a civilized man.

Then Georgia moved to seize their land anyway, and they did the most civilized thing available to a people under a constitutional government. They hired a lawyer and went to court.

They won. In Worcester v. Georgia, in 1832, the Supreme Court of the United States held that Georgia had no authority within the Cherokee Nation. Chief Justice Marshall wrote the opinion.

They were removed anyway. A treaty was signed in 1835 by a faction with no authority to sign it, and in 1838 the army came, and something on the order of four thousand people died on the road west.

Consider what had actually happened. A people had been given a set of conditions, had satisfied every one of them, had then satisfied the additional condition of using the legal system rather than the rifle, had won on the merits before the highest court in the country, and had been dispossessed regardless. There was no point at which they failed the test. There was no test.

And the terms kept moving after that. In 1879 Richard Henry Pratt opened the school at Carlisle, and civilization now required the child: haircut, language forbidden, name replaced, the whole program summarized in Pratt's own formula about killing the Indian to save the man. In 1887 the Dawes Act arrived, and civilization now required the dissolution of the common land itself into individual allotments, with the remainder declared surplus and opened to white purchase. Ninety million acres left Native hands under that statute. Each redefinition arrived at precisely the moment the previous one had been satisfied.

By the summer of 1893 the descendants of those people were on the Midway Plaisance at the Chicago world's fair, arranged by an anthropologist from Harvard along a graded strip that ran outward from the white neoclassical core, exhibited to a paying public as specimens of what civilization had overcome.

I want to be precise about what that is, because the ordinary words for it are all slightly wrong.

It is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy requires a real standard that the hypocrite fails to keep. The standard remains intact and the man is measured against it and found wanting, which is why the charge of hypocrisy is survivable and why hypocrites reform.

It is not a lie, exactly, because many of the men who administered the civilization policy believed in it. Knox appears to have meant it. A good many missionaries meant it and some of them went to prison in Georgia over it, which is how Samuel Worcester's name ended up on the case.

What it is, is a word that carries the full moral weight of a standard while having no test attached to it. It sounds like a measure. It functions like a door. And because nothing is actually being measured, the word can never be satisfied. It can only be conceded, by whoever holds the authority to concede it, at whatever moment and on whatever grounds he chooses.

Call it an empty envelope. It has the weight and the seal and the official markings of a genuine document, and there is nothing inside it, and that is not a defect. That is the design. A real standard can be met, and a standard that can be met eventually must be honored. An empty one never has to be.

The mechanism was not confined to Indian policy. Mississippi wrote it into its constitution in 1890 with the understanding clause, which required a prospective voter to read a section of the state constitution, or to interpret it when read to him, to the satisfaction of the registrar. Note the final phrase, because it is the whole apparatus. The white applicant satisfied the registrar.

The Black applicant, whatever he knew, did not. The statute never mentioned race and never had to. It simply declined to say what interpreting meant and left the definition in the hands of the man behind the desk.

Every empty envelope works that way. The virtue named in it is real and worth having. The authority to certify it belongs to one party. And the certification is withheld from whoever was already unwelcome.

The second envelope is more recent and less bloody, and I have been on the receiving end of it in a corporate setting, from a supervisor who meant something other than what he said.

The charge was that I was not a critical thinker.

Now, critical thinking is a real thing with a real literature. Dewey wrote about reflective thought in 1910. Bloom's taxonomy gave it a structure in 1956. Educators have spent a century specifying what it consists of: evidence weighed, sources examined and their reliability assessed, assumptions surfaced, alternative explanations entertained, conclusions held provisionally and revised when the evidence moves. Those are criteria. They can be taught, demonstrated, and assessed, and I have spent nearly forty years in college classrooms doing exactly that.

Observe, then, what is missing when the phrase is deployed as an accusation in a meeting. No evidence is cited. No reasoning is examined. No alternative account is offered. Nothing is measured at all, because measurement is not the purpose. The phrase in that setting means one thing, and everyone in the room understands it: you have reached a conclusion I did not want.

That is why the charge cannot be answered. A man accused of a factual error can produce the fact. A man accused of failing to think critically can only think harder, in public, in front of people who have already decided, and the harder he thinks the more he confirms that he is the sort of person about whom the question arises. The accusation is unfalsifiable, which is precisely what makes it useful, and the irony sits there unremarked: an appeal to rigorous thinking that is itself the least rigorous move available.

I did not understand at the time that I was watching a very old machine run. The vocabulary had been updated. Nothing else had.

The third envelope I will not define, because everyone reading knows the word, and because the argument does not require me to adjudicate it.

I will point out only what can be observed about how it operates. It began as ordinary language inside Black American speech, an instruction to pay attention to how things actually work. It was taken up broadly for a period. It is now used almost exclusively as an accusation, and it is used by people who do not accept the older meaning and would not use the word in any other sense.

Ask what it measures and you will find the familiar emptiness. There is no set of positions one can hold, or decline to hold, that reliably clears the charge. There is no argument that answers it, because it is not an argument. It attaches to a conclusion the speaker dislikes, and it attaches after the fact, and its function is to place the conclusion outside the boundary of serious opinion without the labor of engaging it. The authority to apply it belongs entirely to the accuser. It cannot be met. It can only be conceded.

Three words, then, across three centuries. Civilized in the nineteenth century. Critical thinker in the corporate twentieth. The third in our own. Each time the same architecture: a word naming a genuine virtue, the authority to certify it held by one party, and the certification redefined the instant someone unwelcome satisfies the terms.

Here is why this belongs in a religious argument rather than a political one.

A lawyer once asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, and was sent back to the law, and answered correctly: love God, love your neighbor as yourself. He was told he had answered right. And then, Luke records, willing to justify himself, he asked one more question.

Who is my neighbor?

That is a request for an empty envelope, and it is worth seeing clearly what the man was after. He was not confused. He wanted a definition of neighbor that he already satisfied. He wanted a boundary drawn where he was standing, with the obligation stopping short of whoever he had in mind, and he wanted it certified by a rabbi so that he could go home justified. The question was not an inquiry. It was a request for a category he could pass.

He did not receive one. He received a story in which a man is beaten and left on a road, and two men with unimpeachable religious credentials pass by on the other side, and the man who stops is a Samaritan, which is to say a foreigner and a heretic, a member of the group whose religion the questioner considered a corruption of his own.

And then the question was taken from him and handed back inverted. Not who qualifies as my neighbor, but which of these three proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell among thieves.

He had come for a boundary and was given a road. He had come for a definition and left with an obligation. Every category he had brought into the conversation was dismantled in the telling, and the one thing the parable refuses to supply is the very thing he asked for.

This is worth sitting with, because it is the single clearest instance in Scripture of the mechanism I have been describing being confronted directly, and the confrontation is not gentle. The two men who pass by are not scoundrels. They are the men with the credentials. They are the ones who could have produced, on demand, a fully satisfactory account of what the law required. They knew what the words meant. They had the envelope, and they walked past the man on the road with it in their hands.

There is a word in current use for stopping on that road, and it is not a compliment.

I am not going to tell you what to conclude from that. Sheldon did not tell his congregation what to conclude either. He put a ruined printer at the front of a fashionable church and had him ask a single question, and then he let the people sit in it.

What would Jesus do?

#ChristianNationalism #ChurchHistory #FaithAndPolitics #AmericanHistory #PublicTheology

I'm always so grateful when I share and learn from this man... In this essay he forces us to think, doesn't he? So I wanted to support his words--you can listen or not to the videos I've added. It really is something that each of us must decide for themselves. Like the last video presenter, a retired Evangelical Pastor who got caught up in just how much has changed since his own group led the voting that got us where we are today... still trying to understand...

Gabby

Letters to Carol - An Extraordinary Memoir-Self Help Presentation - From Blob to Beauty Queen; From High Living to Living on the Street -A Review and Discussion and Featuring Complementary Music Videos!

Dear Carol, Let’s go back a little in time. Your grandmother had died. Madea lived in Watts. By this time, she told neighbors she was moving and not to tell your father she was moving to Scottsdale City. Dane was still traumatized over your grandmother’s death. This is when Madea placed the burden on him to father his own brothers and sisters, which was a huge mistake, because the monster Dane allowed him later to perpetrate familiar child abuse tragedies on his own kids, later in life. Carol, because you are such a nice person, subliminally, you understood the pressures Madea placed on your brother, Dane. You knew more after Dane married Perry. She defended his heavy abuse of his siblings. That is why you wrongfully believed tolerance was love again. Notwithstanding, and on top of the pain you endured at home, at school it was worse. Following tortuous hours of “Girls Punishment” with your neck cracking, your body tired, and after hours of abuse, you had to straighten up to go to school for more abuse. It’s important to state that at eleven-years old, a child is not mature enough to know what compounded abuses can do to the maturation of a growing child’s mind. This is why the child internalizes dangerous emotions that can ruin a child’s emotional maturity, much later, in life. This is another reason why by the time you were in your mid-sixties, your inability to find and or handle housing matters had a lot to do with the interruptions of your now fragile emotional stability, which began a huge pile-up from 1955-2023. In 1966 you were in the Black schools, like Mark Twain and Ralph Bunche, where it was normal to be a dark-skinned child. When Madea moved to Scottsdale City in 1966, your dark skin was not accepted by the white kids in Scottsdale City. 

Carol, by the time you entered Junior High School, you were dealing with the pain of an enlarged heart, Post Traumatic Depression, abuse by your brother, Madea and a sister that hated you. It was the end of three-years of being called, “The Blob.” You were tired mentally. You have now stored over a decade of abuse in your emotional cache. The personalities are tired. We have all waited decades for you to be ready to tell your “real” story. To that end, we are all proud of you. At home, things worsened when Madea called you lazy. Getting up to do household chores was dangerously killing you. One day on the track at Garey High School, where you attended for three years, you ran the track. This occurred late in the afternoon. The football field where the Vikings practiced was empty. On that unusual eve you collapsed. As a child without guidance or love, you took care of yourself. You lay on that track, with horrific pain in your chest. On that ground, you prayed to heaven for your grandmother. You knew at any moment you could die, but this was to you another challenge you had to get through. You lay where one of your personalities showed you how to breathe. There, you clutched your heart, not knowing what a dangerous situation you were in. All you knew was there was a lot of chest pain. You laid on the tarmac of the racetrack until the pain subsided, having no clue that your heart was attacking. Later, at home you performed your household chores, including washing walls in the house on Fowler Avenue. You tired easily, but you washed the walls anyway. You did not have support from family to even tell one soul you had a heart attack. A few weeks later, when the school district ordered a physical, their medical staff wrote Madea a shocking letter. In it they told her you had an enlarged heart. Back then, instead of Madea checking all this out with emergency doctors, she continued to ignore the matter not caring about the outcome. “You have an enlarged heart,” she said to you one day when you were sixteen. Giving you this information, did not include following up. In fact, Madea simply waited for you to die. If you can’t accept this information about Madea, your end-of-life maturity will be heavily compromised, Carol. You are not writing this all down for brownie points, or to impress anyone. This is being said correctly now because this is your life. This is a moment of clarity, which will in turn, save us from being on those cold/hot streets, again. We must get this all out. You must cry. You must embrace this pain with the knowledge you never afforded yourself to engage longer than a fly before. I love you, Carol. I know this is hard for you. If Madea thought so little of you to not take care of your mental or physical health; then why would she care about your having an enlarged heart? I am sorry that you are crying. Cry. You must cry to release these feelings from your wreckage of memories of the past. These are the things about your upbringing you refused to face in the past years. You are facing these issues now. This is the most important information of your life. We hated being on the cold streets not knowing how we got there. This information is being given to you, through me, by God. Moreover, Madea was more vicious towards you than you are willing to talk about Carol. What mother allows her older son to daily punish and molest a child with a life-threatening medical condition? It’s time to purge the pain Carol, please ask God to forgive your demons, Carol. You must see Madea for what she was; instead of what you wanted her to be. Carol, this is a must. When people criticize you…When they say leave it in the past, surge forward. This is your life. You are already being freed, as you tell your story through me. Here is where the truth will not be a stranger. Here is where nothing will hide. All human beings deserve to be heard. Listeners will be educated. History will be informed, while this time potential publishers will know the real you. I want them to know that Carol Denise Mitchell is an honest, amazing, smart, beautiful woman, who is at last owning the rights to her safety. Carol deserves love. Carol is for the first time becoming whole. Carol’s story is one of sheer survival!

~~~

I have read several books by Carol Denise Mitchell but none like her latest. Nor have I read a similar book by any other author.  It is, quite simply, unbelievable and  extraordinary, yet, for many, it may be quite confusing. Carol has chosen to declare this a fiction book; however, in my opinion, this is a disservice to potential readers. Carol is protecting herself legally--for she has self-taught about employment discrimination, civil rights, et.al.--by claiming fiction. I, on the other hand, believe she should be broadcasting the truth of her life and what she is, even now, still dealing with. For, as some of you know, I, too, am also dealing with and trying to write my own story... So, if your early life was full of pain, confusion, hate, abuse, or other negative things that can happen to any one of us... I highly recommend you spend some time reading Letters to Carol..." For believe me, as you finish reading, crying for words shared in this book, you will know you are reading Truth...

And the way she presents her story is through the voice of one of her inner selves, who still remembers what happened, and guides today's Carol through each and every single incident where she was abused in some way... is the extraordinary part. Letters to Carol is Carol writing the book, but as if it were dictated by another individual... That part deep inside Carol where all of those memories that she could not confront ever again, had been pushed so deep that, physically, and of course, mentally, she had chosen to live and move forward.

Until that day, maybe she snapped, maybe her body could no longer handle the pressure and...collapsed. Some of you may recall this is what happened to me when the first thing that happened was that I could not stop crying... Only by reading books was I able to escape... One of those books was Whatever Happened to Suzy? Reading this story by Carol was the first of many of those who share childhood pain through their writing...

For me, I found parts of me inside her memoir story... Other readers might also find parts of you, or others in your life. What do I mean? Well, think about how you might represent yourself at your job, as opposed to how you are with a close friend, or better yet, in a crowd. I know that I "put on a face" not literally but figuratively, in each of those scenarios. On the job, I put on my face of a professional, dedicated to doing my job from the first step into my office. I rarely stop for breaks, rather sipping tea while I continue to work. And, most of the time, expecting much the same from others... Get the idea? Most of us have ways to act in different life situations. While Carol calls these different personalities, diagnosing herself, "One day, inside my bedroom closet, I developed dissociative identity disorder, better known as Multiple Personality Disorder. I began hugging myself, promising to develop protective mechanisms to help me deal with daily trauma.  

Now I knew exactly what she meant. In fact, I have used one of the oldest affirmative statements known from the time of Socrates, as my guiding mantra, as I've gone through specific time periods, or traumatic experiences with an inner eye that watched, and remembered... In fact, Carol begins with a first statement of her learned life realization : “No two lives are the same, such is the spice of life!” --CD Mitchell

Also at the beginning of her book, she includes a note that I might have written, from my perspective, if I were to write a book with a dedication: I dedicate this book to anyone that loves the power of God. Many individuals have relied on the love within to get along in life. You are special, you are somebody. We all need to discover the sanctuary within our souls to rest, to be good to others, and more importantly, be good to ourselves. Your health is your wealth, your success is imminent!

Now in my life, I was early involved with the church and quickly learned about the Holy Trinity: God, The Son and the Holy Spirit. I honed in on God as Father since my early father was killed in a mine accident while my mother was carrying me. It was easy to see that I still had a Heavenly Father, who made it clear to me to remember:

All I had to do is know that I know that I know that if I am still then God is there with me... 

He is the Great I Am!

```

Before I go any further with the book content itself, I want to use a present day illustration of what happened to Carol... Have you noticed that many Far Right political people will repeat over and over and repeat again and again, things that we KNOW are lies. Yet some of us have learned from the study of psychology and other communication processes, that, for many people, if you hear the same thing over and over and over, you will possibly come to actually believe and accept it as truth, even though you can do the research and discover that it is a lie--but you're still not totally convinced because you've heard it pounded into your mind day after day after day?!

At a time when we are seeing more and more hateful actions due to , politics, social media and television, etc., it is still hard to realize just how cruel one individual can be to another. 

Carol was a smart little girl, but coming from a large, poor family she was overweight. (I know the feeling, but my story was a small not hidden memory)  compared to what happened to Carol which had been pushed down deep, forgotten, but still an unresolved abuse.  We don't know how much she weighed... What we learn is that her teacher gave her the nickname, Blob! And, of course all the kids also called her by that name!!!

Carol had hoped to escape the significant mental and physical abuse that she was given at home. Her mother also belittled her, used hateful words when addressing her...and, possibly, stood by while her brother raped her. We do know her brother raped her, we don't know definitely whether her mother knew about it. The key point that the home environment was full of children and Madea instructed her son to be like their father (a little short of 20 children by her mother) and, given that her mother ridiculed Carol, all of the other children did as well...

During this time period, Carol fortunately found one counselor who worked with her for three years. While her self-esteem was raised, still there was so much happening, that the good never quite overrode the bad that was happening.

For instance, Carol was able to lose weight and became interested in entering a beauty contest. She won Miss Congeniality! Note that I found this a quite affirming thing. Even though she was the only black girl in the contest, it was Carol's personal interactions with everyone which brought about her selection. Take note of the praise that was made in the book when she realized that even with the things in her past, she was still bringing light and good wishes to others...

Too bad she lost her trophy. She had placed it in a paperbag... But, when Carol graduated from school, her mother kicked her out with the few clothes she had and a paperbag that was soon lost in the shuffle of accepting that the only thing she had to sell was her body and she began to prostitute herself. After all, she wasn't a virgin, right?

See My Review!

But one thing that her counselor had pointed out to her and that she realized herself was that she was a good writer! She wrote her first book, What Happened to Suzy and a new anniversary edition is out now!

She studied hard and became involved in helping individuals with job discrimination, writing another book about what employers don't want us to know! She became well known because of this nonfiction book which was used by employers and employees alike.

It happened to me not long after my official leaving of a long-term career at West Virginia University, when I discovered that I was no longer able to keep my mouth shut, even in sensitive meetings... For Carol, you'll find it was a cumulative experience, much longer than I had...It was years passing as Carol got married, more than once, had children, more than one and had many different jobs beside a significant career as a published writer.

What we do know that is at some point, Carol was homeless and even at that time, none of her family would respond to her need. About that time, I'm sure she began to think, "I don't need you; I don't need anybody!" But that's a lonely existence and scary especially when you are homeless...

When that last straw was broken. Carol had begun to go to counseling and almost immediately, the man who she had gone to for help, promptly took her to a motel and forced sex as part of her treatment... Yeah, right! Carol knew all about that, but, when it happens with a professional to whom you sought help, it creates a response so deep that one can begin to feel that nothing and nobody would ever be trustworthy enough to help me!

While the style of writing is indeed like creating a letter to another person, you will find quite a bit of repetition. Some may see this as what some people do...routinely repeat over and over what they've talked about in the past. This is not that type of repetition. Consider, if you would instead, that one of Carol's grade school abuses was being called "blob" over and over, primarily by white children... As mentioned above, if you are told something day by day, even though it hurts you greatly (or even if it is lies that are not true), there is a tendency for us to believe it "must" be true since it has been said over and over... Breaking the tight bond of abusive language is extremely difficult and you will see that Carol, in trying to move forward without facing her early reality, created a period of so much confusion that it is hard to even consider what exactly is the truth by which you are living.

Fortunately, I would guess from her grandmother who had named her, Carol found a relationship with her Heavenly Father. And, as I read each of the individual letters, I felt that I was reading a God Incident--a book given to Carol Denise by The Holy Spirit. I believe that God through His Son loves all children and grieved for the little girl who was never called by her real name--a child of His... Carol mentions in several videos that she sometimes doesn't know what she is typing--such as the time she needed to share with others about her attempt at suicide. For it is the Holy Spirit that often brings up to us exactly what we need to hear, think about, and possibly act upon. Or perhaps it is both! My above concept of putting on "faces" for different events or people... and a very real awareness that The Holy Spirit has often been using my fingers to write when I allow myself to open to God's Words.

God Bless you Carol

and all the other children hurt by somebody who should be doing just the opposite. I've come to know and love you through this latest book in particular. Thank you for writing it... Many will find themselves in these pages and...find...hope!

Gabbie

 

Irving A. Greenfield is Back With Literary Thriller!

Snow Giants Dancing 


by Irving A. Greenfield

I was honored to be a first reader of Snow Giants Dancing! That was quite some time ago since this prolific author is busy all the time, so I was happy to learn that this novel is now available as an e-book. I bought it right away since I had developed a small library of Irving Greenfield's books, some of which are no longer available in print. Hopefully, with the rise in e-book popularity, many of his earlier books, such as Tagget, that was made into a popular movie, will once again be made available to today's audience!

You know, I read so many books that often I cannot remember the plot unless I refer back to the book; but with Snow Giants Dancing, I could remember the entire story, except the names of the characters. Greenfield not only entertains in this novel, he presents such an intimate look into the lives of his characters that, in some cases, it may force readers to look into themselves. There is prejudice, there is hatred and murder--there is also love...

"In the gathering twilight, Eric looked down at the mount of his
mother's unmarked grave. He stood very still. His hands were
thrust deep into the pockets of his hooded winter cloak. A biting
wind came off the snowfield on the mountainside above the
village. The mound had already lost much of its convex shape.
When covered by the summer grass it would hardly be
distinguishable from the rest of the earth surrounding it.
"Eric remembered telling Max how beautiful his mother was. He
and Max were having a discussion about childhood...
"With memories of his mother running through his head, Eric
was not immediately aware of the ragged cross-like
arrangement of stones in the center of the mound. When he
became conscious of the shape, he could not believe his own
eyes. He knelt down to be sure, of what he was looking at...
"He stood up and looked toward the village. Someone else
remembered his mother. Someone took the trouble to mark her
grave with the Christian sign of forgiveness...
"The sun was far down in the west. Its light touched the snowfield,
where the wind was lifting great veils of snow high into the air.
Eric could not ever remember having seen such strange wisps of
snow coming off the top of the snowfield. They looked like the
tentacles of some beast..."

But there are also...the Snow Giants Dancing...

And when they do, good and evil may both fall to their mighty power...

Come with me, now, and visit Oberfest, a small village far up in the snow-covered mountains where the population is small and the traditions, the buildings and many of the families have been there for generations. They are self-governed, where a Bourgomeister is the leader of the community. But as sometimes happens, it is his wife, behind the scenes, who is the powerful one who really controls much of what happens there.

Eric Muller is the main character and had been the son of a prostitute, who claimed didn't know the father. After fighting in many wars, not caring on his side, he had returned to home, taking up residence in one of the towers of an old fort. Having grown tired of wars, he had taken up sculpture and had been commissioned to create two figures who would stand on either side of the entrance of the new church. Everyone in the village had contributed with either work or money. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprising, it had not been religious fervor that had been behind the construction--rather they had decided that it was something that they could do together--a tangible purpose.

Eric had not yet decided what those sculptures would portray, but The Bourgomeister and his family had come to find out why they were not yet finished, since he had already been paid for them. He promised they would be done by Easter...

Hilda, the wife of the Bourgomeister, was an invalid who never left her bed--but she always knew what was going on in the village. So after the talk with Eric, Hilda demanded to know what had been said and when the statues would be completed. Always claiming to be near death, she wanted the church completely done since the priest had submitted to Rome to have her name in the church as a major contributor.

All of the village attended the same church except for Chayym Zimmer, a Jew and his daughter, Shulamith. She was a very beautiful girl and was favorably looked upon by certain men in town, but it was Eric with whom she was in love. Prejudice again them by town residents had begun when they had first moved there and rumors flew about the two young people being lovers.

The people in the village were individuals, who mostly kept to their own activities but Hilda and her two nephews began to scheme related to Eric and the sculptures. And even the priest began to talk to Hilda, indicating that once the church was completely done, then the people would be idle and God might not be as protective as He was while they were all working together. And with so much depressing discussions, Hilda prayed and felt she had been given directions from God--by divine inspiration she was chosen to lead the people...

The story may be set in a strange land and the people may sound as if they lived long ago--but this story is really ageless. It speaks of those emotions that are still alive today and the drama that happens can be analogous with any location, any race, or any religion. When good and evil come face to face, we can be sure that a major event will result...

But nobody knew that the Snow Giants were dancing...

Fascinating in its content, this novel is not like the thrillers he wrote through the years that you might have read. This is a serious work that demands that readers realize what happens when man turns against man... Greenfield has provided us with a literary masterpiece that will haunt you...in many ways...for the rest of your life... I consider this a must-read...


GABixlerReviews

SOMTHING ABOUT ME

My latest project is a play within a play based loosely on the life and writing of Friedrich Nietzsche. This will be a full length drama with five or six players and a very simple set. While working on the play, I also continue to write short stories. These works represent some of my interests; namely, philosophy and human relationships at a particular time of an individual's life.

I was born in Brooklyn. I now live in Staten Island with my wife Anita, to whom I have been married to for well over 50 years. I spent many years teaching at Wagner College; I am still associated with college and hold the title of Research Fellow. My expertise is in the field of English Literature and in Composition. I was awarded a PhD for my work in fiction.

I found this site that has the entire library of this author...http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/g/irving-a-greenfield/