It was a busy week for Ahadada Books! Jesse Glass flew from Japan to attend the Carroll County Human Relations Commission’s public presentation of slave registry documents Monday at the Board of Education headquarters, delve into research at the Carroll Country Historical Society and meet with the University of Maryland. Daniel Sendecki joined him to help out with a very busy schedule that encompassed forums on slavery, japanese poetry, and American folklore.

Glass was featured in a March 14th piece entitled "Historian says Carroll should apologize" Courtesy Kelsey Volkmann of the Baltimore Examiner. Volkmann followed up with a piece entitled "Historian calls for construction of monument about slave trade" appearing in the March 15th issue of the Examiner. For further context feel free to consult other Examiner articles, "Carroll Country Free at Last?", "Apologize for slavery?", and "Critics: Slavery apology is move to reparations".

Ashley Reams of The Westminster Advocate provided an overview of the Haiku Workshop that Glass put on for the Carroll County Public Library in a piece entitled "Haiku Workshop focuses on English approximation" (appearing in the March 21 edition of the advocate).

For the full text of the articles referenced above, click here.

Glass was featured in a March 14th piece entitled "Historian says Carroll should apologize" Courtesy Kelsey Volkmann of the Baltimore Examiner.

Carroll should publicly repent for enabling slavery, a historian said after the first public presentation of the county’s slave registry.

“I think Carroll should apologize,” said Jesse Glass, a Westminster native and history professor at Meikai University in suburban Tokyo.

Glass flew from Japan to attend the Carroll County Human Relations Commission’s public presentation of slave registry documents Monday at the Board of Education headquarters.

In addition, Annapolis became the first port city in the nation Monday to adopt a draft resolution to apologize for allowing slave ships to dock there, said City Alderman Sam Shropshire, who introduced the resolution.

Virginia became the first state to apologize last month, and Maryland is considering an apology that Democratic Sen. Nathanial Exum and Del. Michael Vaughn, both of Prince George’s, introduced.

Commissioner Michael Zimmer said he would be open to the idea of Carroll apologizing, but doesn’t plan to introduce a resolution. He suggested Carroll support the state’s apology.

“I think we should embrace all aspects of history and not just the positive,” said Zimmer, whose desk displays a card with the Sykesville Colored Schoolhouse on the front.

Commissioner Dean Minnich said he was against the idea of Carroll apologizing.

“It’s a non-issue,” he said. “My ancestors didn’t own slaves.”

Minnich also said some blacks living in Carroll are probably not descendants of slaves.

Commissioner Julia Gouge did not return messages seeking comment.

Jeff Korman, manager of the Maryland Collection at Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore City, and Vivian Fisher, manager of the library’s African-American department, participated in the slave registry presentation to show how the documents now appear at www.mdch.org and give pointers on how residents can research their family histories.

Kelsey Volkmann followed up with a piece entitled "Historian calls for construction of monument about slave trade" appearing in the March 15th issue of the Baltimore Examiner.

A historian called Wednesday for the construction of a monument on the same steps where slaves were sold at the old Carroll County Courthouse in Westminster.

“We need to acknowledge the enormity of slavery, because it hasn’t been acknowledged,” said Jesse Glass, a Westminster native and U.S. history professor who left Meikai University in Japan this week to attend the Carroll County Human Relations Commission’s public presentation of the county’s slave registry. “We need a plaque, obelisk, something substantial to mark where it all happened.”

Carroll’s Civil War history runs deep, with many of its 19th-century buildings still standing. “It’s wild that it’s all still here,” including the courthouse on Court Street, Glass said.

Just a block away, on the corner of Main and Court streets, where an auto repair shop now sits, the Main Court Inn once hosted lavish balls only a floor above the cellar’s slave pens.

Confederate sympathizers danced above the heads of slaves shackled below.

Glass is soliciting volunteers to comb through newspapers at the Carroll County Historical Society to help research the post-Civil War Reconstruction era for a black oral-history project he proposed.

“Reconstruction was a failure,” Glass said, and led to the generations of segregation that followed it.

The project will involve a documentary capturing stories as told by Carroll’s black residents. The Community Media Center plans to use a $5,000 state grant for the oral-history movie. The project will include a companion book Meikai University will publish.

“It’s important that everybody’s story gets told,” Josh Mackley said, the center’s operations manager, of the black oral-history movie.

“As a county, it’s something we need to gather,” said Laura Rhodes, the commission member who organized the slave registry’s presentation. “It’s a wonderful treasure.”

Shifting gears, Ashley Reams of The Westminster Advocate provided an overview of the Haiku Workshop that Glass put on for the Carroll County Public Library in a piece entitled "Haiku Workshop focuses on English approximation" (appearing in the March 21 edition of the advocate). Wrote Ashley Reams:

Eight people sat in a meeting room at the Westminster branch of the Carroll County Public Library, quietly thumbing through picture books.

At the front of the room, Jesse Glass told the group what to do.

“Find a picture that speaks to you, and write about it,” he said.

Dan and Katie Sendecki flipped through their book, stopping every so often when they found a picture they liked. Dan Sendecki wrote a couple of lines about one of the pictures, then scribbled through them and started over.

By the time the exercise was over, each person had written his or her own haiku.

On Thursday evening, Glass, a writer, folklorist, teacher, historian and former Carroll Countian, led the Haiku Workshop at the library. Attendees learned about the history of haiku, famous Japanese haiku poets, the English haiku movement and how to write an English haiku.

Haiku, a Japanese style of prose poetry, is often taught to American children in elementary school, Glass said. Children are taught that haiku poems contain three lines: the first line having five syllables, the second having seven syllables and the last having five syllables.

It’s true that older Japanese haiku poems followed this general pattern, Glass said, but Japanese syllables are not the same as English syllables. Writing a haiku in Japanese is much more difficult, he said.

“We’re taught here that anybody can write haiku — it’s so easy,” Glass said. “But it’s not. I try to stress to writers in English that they’re not writing haiku. What we’re essentially doing is writing approximations.”

Compared to English, Japanese is a much more emotive and contextual language, he told the group.

He read a haiku by Taneda Santoka, a Japanese poet, then translated the poem:

Push apart, enter
Push apart, enter
Blue-green mountain

“What does that mean?” he asked the group. “What is he pushing apart? Bushes? Tall grass?”

A Japanese person reading this poem would completely understand it, Glass said.

“We have to invent a story, don’t we?” he said. “I want you to think about images."

Once you create a story in your mind, perhaps of Santoka walking through tall grass and pushing it apart until he can see a mountain, Glass said, the images become more clear, and you are able to perceive them through your senses.

“This is what haiku is supposed to do,” Glass said. “It evokes your senses.”

Glass, 52, grew up on a horse farm near Westminster. He began writing at 16.

“And I haven’t stopped,” he said.

As a high schooler, Glass wrote “Ghosts and Legends of Carroll County, Maryland,” a compilation of folklore he gathered from stories older county residents told.

The Carroll County Library System published the book in 1982, and it became the basis for yearly ghost walks. In 2001, the Library of Congress deemed Glass’ book and the ghost walks a local legacy.

Glass began his teaching career as a substitute teacher for Carroll County Public Schools before moving to Milwaukee in 1980. He taught creative writing there until 1991.

In 1992, Glass participated in a professional exchange program in Nagasaki, Japan.

“I gave away all my things and went there,” he said.

He has lived in Japan ever since and is now a professor of Literature and History in the graduate and undergraduate programs at Meikai University in Chiba, Japan.

He’s studied haiku for about 12 years, he said.

Glass handed out a small anthology of English epigrams, and he read through the poems with the group.

English epigrams, he said, are similar in concept to Japanese haiku.

Glass then asked them to write their own English haiku and read them aloud.

He had a suggestion for Mary Middlekauff. Middlekauff wrote about nature and included the phrase “full moon beams” in her poem.

“Instead of saying ‘full moon beams,’ why don’t you just say ‘full moon’? I think that’s enough,” Glass said, pointing out the simplicity of Santoka’s haiku.

“With haiku, the really important thing to remember is understatement,” he added.

At the end of the workshop, Dan and Katie Sendecki said Glass’ presentation broadened their knowledge.

Mary Middlekauff and her daughter, Kristina, said writing their own haiku was challenging.

“It made me appreciate haiku a lot more,” Kristina Middlekauff said.