A week ago I was in Copenhagen! October was a challenging month so it was nice to get away even if only for a couple of days. I’m trying to write a fairy tale inspired by the color wood cuts of Walter H. Williams, an African American artist who moved to Denmark in the 1960s. Copenhagen today is very different from the city Walter would have encountered but I wanted to get a sense of the culture that seemed so welcoming to a Black man sixty years ago. I found some black and white films from the 1960s and I watched a Danish documentary about Bornholm, the Danish island that seems to have inspired Walter to start depicting Black children in his work. This morning I watched Danny Kaye in Hans Christian Andersen—a 1952 American technicolor musical I remember watching as a kid. It was and wasn’t surprising to see half a dozen Black men suddenly appear near the end as guards (?) in Orientalist attire. I found myself counting Black people during my two-day visit to Denmark but I didn’t get a chance to speak with anyone. Most of what I learned came from my two tour guides, one of whom was Danish and Kurdish. Growing outside of the city was challenging—everyone in her school was blond—but she feels less conspicuous in multicultural Copenhagen and can’t imagine ever leaving Denmark. Their immigration policy is controversial yet Palestinians are their largest minority group. I have a lot to learn and Edi let me know that 60 Minutes will be reporting on “Denmark’s sudden wealth” tonight…

I picked up several collections of Andersen’s fairy tales and think I’ve found a way to weave strands of his stories into my own. Not going to worry about permissions at this point. It has been months since I’ve written anything new so I’m just going to focus on crafting a tale that picks apart the tangled histories of Black people in the US, Denmark, and St. Croix. My friend Rosa was just there doing research on Queen Mary; her statue is no longer on display in Copenhagen but a woman who helped lead a labor uprising that saw fifty plantations burned should definitely appear in my story…