I am homeschooling my daughter, and in defiance of all my expectations, I am loving it!

Her two favorite subjects are History and Literature. For our literature class, we started reading "The Witch of Blackbird Pond", but she found it unbearably boring.

"When's something bad gonna happen?" she asked. "I thought this was supposed to be about crazy Puritans and witch-burning."

Well, it was. But it was the child-proof version. My daughter has no interest in, or patience for, the child-proof version of Life. 

This is a challenge to her airy-fairy mother, who still insists that Santa and the Easter Bunny are real. I really do. I believe they are spirits who inspire parents to make magic for their children. They are real, and I  will go to my death insisting to her that they are real.

"You'll understand when you're a mom," I tell her.

So we are now reading Oliver Twist, and she's loving it. Within the first two pages Oliver's destitute mother dies after giving birth to him in the workhouse. It's all downhill from there for little Oliver, and my daughter is gobbling up every page.

For history class, we started out reading a fairly standard child-proof text. Snore, yawn. It was History-Lite. My daughter squirmed with boredom, and I just couldn't stand it. I felt as if I were lying to her by omission.

So I pulled out one of my favorite books: A People's History of the United States, by the late great Howard Zinn.

My daughter is loving history now. But she is learning an awful lot about evil. 

I read an excerpt to her from Christopher Columbus' journal:

" They (the Arawak people who were living on the Bahamian island Columbus "discovered") brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things , which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks bells...They willingly traded everything they owned...They were well-built with good bodies and handsome features ...They do not bear arms and do not know them...With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want."

Hmmm - I remember the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, but I sure as heck don't remember that from History class.

My daughter now loathes Christopher Columbus. 

"We should re-name Columbus Day 'The Big Dirty Trash Head Full of Poop Day.' " she says.

"What happened to the Arawak people?" she asked me. And I had to tell her: the good guys lost. The bad guys won. Through enslavement, torture, and exposure to European diseases, the Arawak people were wiped off the face of the Earth.

And that was only the beginning. I had to share with her that the Europeans' arrival in North America led to the worst plague in human history. Within three years, over 90 percent of the native inhabitants of coastal New England were dead from diseases introduced to them by European explorers.

Three years. Over 90 percent dead. 

I had to share with her that the Pilgrims of New England considered the deaths of all these human beings a blessing from God, proof that God favored them and meant for them to take over the land. I had to share with her that it was not a wilderness the Pilgrims stumbled upon when they arrived in the New World, but a continent that had been settled for  thousands of years, filled with over a million people. When these people died from exposure to European diseases, the Pilgrims took over their villages, fields and farms.They claimed the native people's villages and farms as gifts from God, who in His love for the righteous, committed a sadistic and merciless genocide.

My daughter said, "They were kinda like that Pat Robertson guy - who said  God made the earthquake in Haiti cause Haitians were all Satan worshippers."

I said yes. They were exactly like him. 

We are now learning about the slave trade, and the spread of slavery in America. 

When we first started reading about enslaved Africans, my daughter said, "I woulda fought back. I woulda shot those people and run away."

I didn't argue with her. We just continued to read.

She learned of enslaved people having their ears cut off for merely "talking back" to a white person. She learned of people being slowly burned alive or publicly dismembered merely for attempting to escape enslavement - and being tortured to death very publicly as a method of terrorizing other enslaved people.

She learned of the horrors of the Middle Passage, and of the psychological state African people were in when they arrived in the homeland of their captors.  If they tried to run - where would they run? In what direction? Whom would they ask for help? And in what language? If they hid in the woods, where would they hide? And how would they find food in such an alien place?

My daughter looked up at me with wide eyes and said, "I think I would  keep very very quiet and hope no white person ever even noticed me. I'd be way too scared to run away. I wouldn't even try. I'd just want to shrivel up and disappear into nothing."

But I shared with her that people did run away, that people did fight back - in spite of all of it - in spite of everything. I shared with her that there was never a time throughout all the years of slavery that enslaved people didn't fight back and try to run away. My daughter marvelled at their courage. 

"Even though they got whipped and  burned and tortured and mutilated?"

"Even though," I said.

By sharing evil with my daughter, I believe I am also sharing hope. 

The other day I was talking to a woman - a white woman - who claimed that nothing had changed in this country, that racism was as bad as ever or worse. I agreed with her that racism was still a very serious problem - but that nothing had changed? That racism is just as bad or worse than it ever was?

Nope - can't go along with that one.

I don't know for sure, but I'm willing to bet there aren't a lot of African Amercians who would prefer to live in the 1940's or 50's than today. Things have changed - just not fast enough. Bad things never change fast enough. But they do change.

Historical time is maddeningly slow. Susan B. Anthony died without ever seeing women in the US get the vote. But we got it.

We may all die without ever seeing the changes we want to see in the world. That doesn't mean they won't happen. 

But what about those who were wiped off the face of the Earth? What hope can come from learning about them?

I am teaching my daughter that she is not only a  descendant of Columbus. She is a descendant of the Arawaks, too. 

We all can trace our origins back to the same little spot in sub-saharan Africa. We are all the descendants of everyone. And we can repopulate the earth with Arawak people by embracing the fact that we are one species.

Columbus slaughtered the best of his own kind when he enslaved and slaughtered the Arawaks. The Puritans celebrated the decimation of their own kind when they celebrated the deaths of native people. White people did not kidnap and enslave black people; human beings kidnapped and enslaved their own kind  and debased themselves by committing acts of unspeakable cruelty.

"So we can bring the Arawaks back?" my daughter asked me. 

I told her Yes. We can acknowledge them as our family and grieve their loss. We can make a promise in their honor to remember what was done to them. We can be, as Columbus described them in his own words, "so naive and free with ...possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it...they offer to share with anyone..."

The resurrection of all people lives in the cells of our bodies.  Columbus can still be defeated. The enslaved can still be freed. History is never over.

I share evil with my daughter so she will never be fooled into thinking it doesn't exist.

I share evil with my daughter so she will know it when she sees it. 

But most of all, I share evil with my daughter to expose its weakness.

We feed evil by denying it. When we look it in the face and call it what it is, evil begins to hemorrhage its power. It loses its ability to shape us.

"It's all good," is a dangerous phrase. And it's a lie.

By looking evil squarely in the face, calling it exactly what it is, and yet insisting on embracing Hope and Compassion, we can rewrite the History of the World.

By naming evil, we give the good guys a chance to live again, through us. And we give them the chance to completely and ultimately Win.