As a gift during the recent holiday season, my kids received a book of hangman puzzles. You scratch away a little silver circle near each letter you’re guessing at, to reveal either a number corresponding to where that letter should go in the blank spaces below, or a little man’s face with the tongue jerked out, like he is being choked. If you get the little man, you gradually fill in the dotted lines on the stick figure to the left. As far as challenging kid-level puzzles go, it’s a clever appropriation of this game, which in my day required two people: one to think up the word and set up the puzzle; the other to do the figuring.
Funny how this harmless little word puzzle is so emblematic of violence, ignorance and prejudice. I found myself in such a peculiar conversation with my son Paolo about it this morning when we had a few moments to ourselves before school. Ever since the book had entered our possession, I had managed not to explain what the hangman concept meant—instead I just focused on the goal of the word puzzle in my explanations. Today was different. Today Paolo asked, while pondering the book cover, “What does ‘hangman’ mean, anyway?” He often knows the right questions to ask.
I told him briefly of the technical components of hanging: the reason for the trap door under the little red guy on the cover of his book is because it jerks the neck, likely (and hopefully) breaking it, thus bringing an efficient end to life. Without the trap door, you can certainly hang there, but you die by eventual suffocation, which, I reminded Paolo, was a thoroughly miserable way to go. (Not that I imagine standard hanging-by-trap-door to be any kind of picnic in the park either.)
To put this in context, I found myself telling Paolo about how governments have used hangings as a means of execution for years. Maybe I went in this direction in order to be able to show that it is not a totally illegimate means of mere murder, as I tend to think of it, for lynchings always come to mind. But rather than talk about executions alone, I found myself telling Paolo about Bahá’í martyrs in Iran, specifically a group of women who were hanged as a group in 1983, specifically a 17-year-old among them named Mona Mahmudnizhad. They were arrested for teaching Bahá’í children’s classes, and then hanged for not recanting their faith. I told Paolo about how Mona asked to be hanged last—so she could pray for the others.
Then I started to explain how sometimes people have used hanging as a means of killing others without government sanction, specifically in our country’s own history. I told him about the meaning of “strange fruit” hanging from trees in the South, about the meaning of lynchings, about the conflict between white and black people, and from there about Shoghi Effendi’s cautions that white people must work on humility (eliminating their inherent sense of superiority), and black people must work on trust (eliminating their inherent sense of suspicion). I told Paolo, it’s pretty understandable why, don’t you think? Then I went on to tell him how Bahá’ís are encouraged to marry interracially, and why that helps humanity: bringing together people with a history of conflict, into harmonious marriages, and perhaps also bringing children into the world, is one of the most powerful things we can do to contribute to peace.
“So why didn’t you marry a black man?” he asked me.
“Well, I thought I was going to,” I told him. “I was very much in love with someone when I was younger and I wanted to marry him. But it didn’t work out. We went our separate ways.” I also told him about River’s interest in marrying interracially, and how that didn’t quite work out for him either. “When I met your papa, I couldn’t resist,” I told Paolo. “And I think that love truly does not depend on skin color. I think your papa sees it the same way.”
He seemed almost disappointed.