A little black girl, a lover of Sir Walter Scott, Shakespeare, warriors, I first saw the beauty and power of power in lances hurled by knights on horseback, in sleek rifles aimed shoulder-high at bad guys or "injuns."
I was young then, and TV images of young Black boys gunned to death by white cops or Southern lynchers or by other Black boys --although they registered on my mental screen-- as yet had not tainted either gun or lance. Because power was beautiful and so intrinsically interwoven with male beauty. For me, anyway.
My hormones fluttered, my vagina throbbed, at powerful men with guns, and noble knights with lances.
When I watched Gary Cooper in High Noon, I did not think then that this hero -- like all the heroes of my teen Saturday afternoons-- would not like me. . . Although it did faintly register that the cowboy-hatted hero had tossed aside the dark-haired passionate woman for the purer blonde. Although I dimly saw that Ivanhoe's story was as much about racism as nobility.
Although I had discovered by then that the Baptist preacher who created the KKK had gotten his inspiration of the flaming cross from a Sir Walter Scott novel. Although cops kept shooting young black kids, and young black kids kept shooting each other. Cultural knowledge and racial carnage still had not tainted the gun.
Even now, I do not instintively draw back when I see guns. I have no hatred for the thing itself. Some folks do, I suppose, but I suspect their gun images are purer than mine. Not so multi-faceted. They either love the gun or they don't. For me, though, the images are too full, too many. Race, sex, power. For me, the upheld gun is a mirror. It reflects the heart that wields it.
