To the editor:

At Roger’s Free last week, I was searching for Town Historian Catherine Zipf’s page-turner, “The Architecture of American Slavery: Teaching the Black Lives Matter Movement to Architects,” when I saw the three models for the Back Passage Marker.

Three years ago, after the Floyd of July Parade, in a brilliant letter which little criticules dubbed “mean-spirited,” I wondered in whose image we’d be uncreated. Now we have some indication.

First, Deborah Baronas and Greg Spiess offer us some gigantic coils riddled with cookie stencils. In the spirit of wokeness, it’s entitled “A Space to Embrace the Future,” while it actually cramps and constricts the present.

Second, Deborah Spears Moorehead gives us “Journey’s Passage,” which has two qualities to recommend it. It prominently features an agreeably American motif, an eagle, and according to a to-scale mockup photo, it might be the smallest of the three.

However, I don’t get the birdwatchers clamoring below the raptor. Apparently, they’re getting crushed to death under a large rolling tube. Perhaps it’s a runaway piece of “A Space to Embrace the Future.”

Third, Spencer E. Evans presents “Our Ancestors Come With Us,” which clearly does not refer to Bristol’s Portuguese diaspora at all. Instead, it depicts a flapper shrew pulling away a togated galoot who is just about to warn a little punk not to spit into the wind. My alternative title for it is “Don’t Make a Scene, Algernon,” or “She’s Not Our Responsibility.”

After my heady encounter with Back Passage art, the Phoenix published Marker Frontman Stephan Brigidi’s recent letter: “We residents of Bristol,” he writes, “are direct and indirect descendants of the European colonists who benefited by the slave trade, and we have a debt to account for.”

Mr. Brigidi has some cheek to claim all of us Bristolians are indebted at birth to his current pet cause. (Did you see the size of that “DONATE NOW!” bib on the models’ display table?)

“Debt” is the wrong word, of course. A “debt” can be satisfied.

Let’s put aside the Civil Rights Act, affirmative action, and the state’s very reversible name change. If $25,000 in student loan forgiveness (per head) for “teachers of color” in Providence—combined with $3 million in grant money from the Rhode Island Foundation to employ others — on top of Providence’s $10 million reparations budget — does not satisfy this debt, then we’re not talking accounts payable, but rather, gluttony for punishment. Not finite “debt,” but “original sin.”

The usual nags have insisted that opinions like mine are why the port marker is necessary, as though white liberals could otherwise resist memorializing their feelings of moral superiority. In reality, whether or not some Wokesutawney Phil pops out of his hole and recoils from his unchanged complexion shouldn’t determine how much more white guilt the rest of us are in for, even on a municipal scale.

But without greater pushback from townspeople, expect more public monuments throughout Bristol to trendy, lefty, ethnomasochist social clubs.

Zachary Cooper
Bristol