A New Twist to an Old Story

Here’s a new twist for you concerning Columbus Day.

I was in the car with Son#1 and 2. Son#2 proceeds to tell me that today was a holiday, but he was unsure what it was called. I reminded him it was Columbus Day.

This is his version, keeping in mind, I was just as confused with all the pronouns and trying to figure out what they modified. “Columbus left all his people on an island. They (the people he left) took a boat and turned it into a shed. They weren’t very nice to the people who lived on the island. When “they” (don’t know who “they” is) came back everyone was dead. They died from starveness, thirstness, and sickness, and they had been shot and stabbed with forks and knives. They tried to hide in the shed, but the people they were mean to found them. Then they got eaten. (This gets murky… they may have been eaten by the people who left them or by the people they were mean to who then retaliated by the placesetting mayhem.)”

Now Son#1 and I are listening to this in utter amazement. We were first stunned by the whole ship morphs into shed thing. Then the stabbing to death with forks and knives had us passing glances to one another through the rear view mirror (Son#1 and I seem to do most of our communicating through the rear view mirror of my van as of late). Then something came up about the dead people being eaten and Son#1 had had it.

“Eaten?! You mean they were cannibals? The mean people were eaten by cannibals that lived on that island?”, Son#1 exclaimed, to which Son#2 gave much thought and said, “Yes. They were eaten by cannibals.”

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember cannibals in the Christopher Columbus story. For that matter, I don’t remember anyone getting stabbed to death with a fork. And I don’t remember sheds or people hiding in sheds.

Now when the story was relayed to my husband, suddenly the people on the island were African American. My Better Half said, “African American? Are you sure? Maybe you mean NATIVE American”, but Son#2 insisted no, he did indeed mean African American.

So Better Half and I were comparing notes tonight, trying to figure out how this twisted cannibalistic Columbus’s crew is mean to African Americans who retaliate with fork stabbings, came about. It seems that they did in fact learn about Chris today, but also, his story of the week deals with slaves and slave boats. Somehow these stories got glommed together, but we still don’t know how. Interesting. Veeeerrrry Interesting.