I had a weird dream last night again. I’m at someone’s house, and their living room is covered in these strange mayflies. Only, they’re some kind of white and pink hybrid between mayflies and mosquitos. They keep crawling towards me, but when I blow, they puff away. But they keep crawling. The walls, the carpet, are covered in them. Not enough so that you could only see the strange mayflies, but enough that they were everywhere you looked. The couch also had these weird kind of cockroaches that wanted to crawl from under the cushions. They were more like black beetles than roaches, but everyone called them roaches.
The host had a huge house fly, without any wings, about the size of a house cat. He was holding it, and fed it some water. He explained that he had a special procedure for producing its bowel juices. I got distracted by a black beetle cockroach, about the size of a cocker spaniel, trying to crawl out from under the cushions. I asked it to go back to its house, and it crawled back into the cushions. When I looked back, the host had made the fly vomit up this kind of green, pussy ooze. The mayflies disappeared.
I was sitting next to Mr. Provo, then. He looked really strange, like he didn’t want to be there. He said, “Did I ever tell you about slave masters? And the white people who were polite to them?”
I said, “No, I don’t think so Mr. Provo. I remember a lot of what you taught me, but not that.”
He said, “Why are there so many bugs in this room?”
I said, “I don’t know, but what were trying to tell me?”
He said, “Slave owners, the ones doing all the oppressing, they’re oppressed too. It’s not just the slaves that suffer when people own slaves. It’s not a human thing to do. We all know it’s not a human thing to do. Oppression hurts the people doing the oppression, and sometimes, they don’t even realize it.”
I said, “So, we should reach out to the slave masters, to help them understand, to free them.”
Mr. Provo frowned at me. “Why would you do that?”
I said, “I thought that’s what you were saying.”
Mr. Provo shook his head, “If you want to free a slave master, an oppressor, from a system of oppression, and if you want to free a slave, or someone oppressed, from a system of oppression, you ALWAYS free the slaves, the people who are being oppressed. Freeing a slave always frees the oppressor. But trying to free an oppressor before the slave? That never works. Because the slave owner will try to convince you that they aren’t a bad person, and you may be reasonable and agree, and they’ll WANT to keep their slaves. The only way to free them both is to free the people being bullied.”
I said, “Of course, I know that.”
Mr. Provo looked at me, then he said, “I thought you did. I know you know that. You told me that. I just wanted to remind you, because I think you may have forgotten. Don’t forget it.”
I said, “Thanks Mr. Provo, I appreciate it. Do you know where you left your lesson plans?”
Mr. Provo then said, “Why are there so many bugs in this room?”
I looked, and the mayflies, and the host trying to make a giant house fly vomit were all back. But Mr. Provo was gone.
I woke up. The sunlamp in my room was almost at full strength, and the alarm had just started to go off.