Swallow

Many things have crossed my mind this week. Some of them, I am still not sure are worthy of the space they might take up here or your time. Or this may be a Minnesotan excuse not to share. Or maybe the best ideas came to me on the edge of sleep and I neglected to keep my journal by my bed and they have since been forgotten.

One thing I remember from the past week is meeting writer Patricia Anita Young. We met at an informational meeting about a writers' retreat and workshop to which we are both applying. We are writers, so I guess we talked about stories. Our stories. Stories of our people.

I don't know how we got on the topic, but we spoke of the stories of the civil rights era. She talked about her mother and relatives who lived through the Jim Crow south, and her visits there as a young adult. She talked about the difference between the “Colored” restroom and the “White” one. Not equal, she said. Just like everything else.

She talked about how the common story of discrimination and segregation was not one all African Americans wanted to speak. She said that one of her elder's favorite words was “swallow.”

“Favorite.” So many of us are required to shut up. Pat spoke of a relative who was raped by a white cab driver with whom she had to work each day. When a white man raped a black woman, what gets said? What could she say? It was a generation and a half ago, in the segregated South. What could she say today? Who would listen? Who would be on trial? Or would her plaint even register as a sound on the tin ear drums of racial and gender injustice with which we still live?

Her family elder had words. Not just words, but a scream. I suspect that they were just left as tears on a pillow or a boiling blood rage in a night that had to be turned down in the light of the day in front of the ruling class—in front of the man whose privilege allowed him to touch her most sacred places, a place that is only for her to decide who goes in, not him, not her priest, not a law, not anyone. Allowed him to do it with absolute impunity.

She could not say. She had no voice. She had the words, emotions, understanding of what happened to her, what happened to that space that she might share with a love or at least someone with whom she consented to share, what happened to her body, what happened to any sense of safety or security she might have each day when she went to work. Instead, her words were swallowed.

But we swallow everyday. Some of us more than others. We talked about another local African American writer who had a book published a decade and a half ago about her experiences working in a very male, white dominated occupation, as a “lineman” for the phone company. It was supposed to be one of those what-it's-like-to-be-black-and-female-in-America stories that tells it like it is. Instead, every time she got to one of those places where it need to be acknowledged that what described what we face and how and why it is hurtful and destructive, she would pull her punch. She would say, well, it wasn't so bad. That it was just an interesting, funny story, ironic and silly, maybe even absurd. But not speak to the substance of what we live day to day that has left us with a caste, apartheid system enforced with terror.

She swallowed, just like we do so often. Whose comfort was she protecting? Who do we protect?

We swallow, because the hurt and anger of our speaking would hurt those to whom we direct our words that must be said. We swallow, not out of compassion, but for the knowledge of the consequences of speaking that is feeling that rage powerful enough to create that terror and apartheid.

We are trained to swallow that mouth full of dirt, instead of spitting it out back to the place from where it came. I do it every day. So do most women and most people of color. And those who will not be quiet often do not survive long, even doing so in the name of justice and self respect.

Maybe as we write, Patricia and I will spit out the words that we've swallowed for so long, that our foremothers and fathers swallowed, words that we swallow and words that we hope our daughters and sons will not swallow in the future. And maybe the people who care, care about us and care about our society, will get to hear the stories they have longed for.

And maybe some of those words will be worth your time. Some day, if not now. Some how. I hope so. 

LEAVE COMMENTS AT http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/swallow/ 

stolen kiss

what was your first kiss like?

was it happy?

sad?

did it make your toes curl

a smile all the way

into the next day?

or did you hide it

in darkness where

no one would know

what he did?

because it is not love

that takes a first kiss away

forever

into scary depths

that will not surface

for a thousand kisses

you tell him

“this is not love”

he is angry

should you be angry?

should i?

i already am

or am i

projecting my own anger?

about what, I won't tell

don't know

happy. sad.

smile or hidden shame

are remembered or forgotten

because neither is to be believed

for “the questions of a thousand dreams”

spout the answers of a thousand fools

who, like me

think our kiss

could be the one

to fix it all.

LEAVE COMMENTS AT  http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/23/stolen-kiss/

The Lingering Aftermath of 9-11

The day after the 9-11 attacks, many of the food court vendors at Union Station in Washington, DC, sported American flags at their counters and stands. Most of them were immigrants. Many of them middle eastern or Asian. So many were non-white. Looking at their faces, I could tell that they were more afraid in those days than I was, than the threat that most of us realistically faced in those days.

The flags hung like door post lambs blood, begging that the plague of scorn would pass by their houses. They remember the days of collective accusation from the Oklahoma City bombing that lasted until it was discovered that the attack was more associated with fair Christianity than Islam. “We are believers,” their flags said, as if they were more familiar with Christian Identity than much of America.

In the mean time, there was a quiet that hovered over a city that was usually busy with air traffic crisscrossing the sky and the hustle of the town that seems to think it is the most important city on earth. We had an excuse to be something other than ourselves for a while, and to be even more ourselves as we attempted to conceal who we had been all those days behind the tragedy and our facades of solemn sorrow.

So many points on our day-to-day walk were covered with flags. It was like seeing the streets of my childhood on Flag Day or the Fourth of July. Flag lined streets, house after house. We did not have a flag. But the grandsons and granddaughters of the German immigrants that dominated the city's population—some of whom had kin folk in the outer reaches of the community's geography that still spoke German, or something closer to that than the English of their brothers and sisters who moved into town—decided on the flag on their front step.

I was envious. One day, I asked my dad if we could get a flag for our house. I am sure he asked me what it meant to me to have a flag at our house—what did a flag mean, in general? What did it mean in front of the homes of so many of our neighbors? I am not sure I had a good answer to any of those questions. But in the quiet that hovered over the holiday streets, with no self-important traffic crossing in front of us, he had an answer to mine. “I don't need a flag,” he said. “Everybody here knows I'm American.”

Most days, I do not need a flag. As this past week demonstrates, after ten years full of days after 9-11, we are still waving loud stripes and lonesome stars as if we do not know who we are. We will wave them until our arms are tired and then we will truly know.

LEAVE COMMENTS AT http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com/2011/09/16/the-lingering-aftermath-of-9-11/

is this how my love grows?

tears hover
over sod lying dry
limp and brittle
in long rigid fingers
forearms of sweat

moist eyes
too little to
bring this clump of
promise
back to life

sod cutter’s mark
shows how it is so easily
pulled away
from the ground on which it was
planted

and how a grandfather’s hand whose
hubris and old
naivete
made him think it would be there
forever

muddy cheek streaks
I will not wipe them
with stained hands

that only smear the
sorrow
from its graceful trail
down my face

like a sad irrigater with
broken main and a
futile attempt to
water a field
already sewn with salt

Veronica and Ivan: Civil Rights Leaders

I love my friend Jennifer’s blog, My Life on Mars. She does not live on Mars. A few years back, she moved to St. Cloud, where I grew up. Her jaunt was from the hipness of the trappings of the Hungry Mind Bookstore to the confines of the place where I grew up, the place I left and soon after landed at… the Hungry Mind, after a couple of sessions at the Minnesota State Senate and odd jobs and avocations that almost used my talents.

She is back in St. Paul and in her latest blog post, “Dog Days in Frogtown,” she talks about her children’s end-of-summer experience—the one that comes just before school starts and the summer programs have run out and you really need something compelling and constructive for kids to do and a good place for them to do it. Her kids encountered and embraced an experience that most of us avoid: being a racial minority of one or a couple and having to navigate being the “other” and maybe finding out if there is even an other in spite of the fact that our social structure tends to enforce that otherness, especially on the less privileged and less powerful.

Her kids, Veronica and Ivan, had an experience that reminded me of two things: one, what it was like for my siblings and me to grow up constantly being the other and being a minority of one, two or a few. The other thing it reminds me of is of Bill Bradley. Some of you will remember him for his run for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2000 and for his years as a U.S. Senator. Others will remember him for his years as a player for the New York Knicks NBA basketball team. I remember both, well.

Bradley had a unique experience which he met with the totality of his exceptional intelligence and his education. He tells the story much better than I, but he, as a white male who came from more privilege than even most white males, found himself at the top of his profession which was largely populated with exceptional African American athletes. He was, numerically, a minority. 

In a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, in July of 1991, “Race and Civil Rights In America,”Bradley said this about the many times he was confronted by, as he says, mostly white Americans about how his understanding of race evolved:

       “Listen,” I’d say “traveling with my teammates [mostly Black men who had given their life to be at the top of the elite in the world] on the road in America was one of the most enlightening experiences of my life.”

       And it was. Besides learning about the warmth of friendship, the inspiration of personal histories, the powerful role of family in each of their lives and the strength of each’s individuality, I better understand distrust and suspicion. I understand the meaning of certain look and certain codes. I understand what it is to be in racial situations for which you have no frame of reference. I understand the tension of always being on guard, of never totally relaxing. I understand the pain of racial arrogance directed my way. I understand the loneliness of being white in a black world. And I understand how much I will never know about what it is to be black in America.

Read Jennifer’s post (and her others; she’s funny and smart) and Bill Bradley’s speech, and you will see how Veronica and Ivan have begun that transformation that, I hope, is a more common social evolution and not just that of two smart kids or a smart Princeton grad cum U.S. Senator and Presidential candidate. Below is my response.

**********
Growing up in St. Cloud, part of one of three black families that moved there AND STAYED, I can give you a clue about walking into the all-white room of strange kids, made even stranger by the fact that the apartheid was of cultural intention if not by the design of the parents who filled the room with their kids. My sister and I were Veronica and Ivan’s ages in the late 1960s and early 1970s. EVERYONE was white or at least hid the fact of their Native American past–the relative(s) that don’t get mentioned, left behind.

It was hard knowing that everywhere we went, there were children who had learned form their parents and elders not to like or want to be with us. It was also hard that the kids who had not learned that destructive lesson yet had no clue about our tentativeness at letting our feelings run freely into a fray of barbed wire hostility hidden in a few meager hay stacks of fun. 

We did not dive in. I carefully poked around, tested each pile, checking to see if it was okay to plop down and almost relax. Even with an invitation from someone who was not versed in the racism, I needed to tentatively walk through that door, look to all corners of the room and poke around for land mines of hate.

It was different for my sister, who was more extroverted, a born dancer who dared (me and the rest of the world) to accept her dancing at the bus stop, so conspicuously–and even more so as a deep-brown skinned child. Meanwhile, I lived with the illusion that we could ever be so inconspicuous. 

Having fun in those situations was an issue of navigation and management: finding and navigating sources of hostility and unwelcome (more than the “We’d rather not hang out with you—you are not cool enough for our club.” It has a tone more like “We don’t want your kind in our parts and it is only our Minnesota nice that lets us wait for your ‘other’ to be uncomfortable enough to leave”). Manage emotions, mine and theirs; manage perceptions; prove I’m a good person, better than they expect, better than the picture that was painted by their parents’ fears or base hatred.

Ivan is lucky. He is young enough to have escaped that lesson of reflexive hostility, one that is so pervasive and gets to people as they begin to merge into adult-like (and often immature) consciousness. We were not so lucky, maybe because our lesson was so stark, immediate and too often uncloaked, even in that Minnesota Nice. I knew it before I went to pre-school. My sister, if she did not know before, learned it the next year when the woman who we suspect is a relative-in-law of a current Congresswoman who will not be named here decided that my sister could not ride in her car with the other four-year-olds to the Bethlehem Lutheran Nursery School with her grandchild. Her “Christian” attitude created more than just an inconvenience of car-pool disintegration. 

Dis-integration. Segregation. Yes, it is easy for us progressives to say we have not problem with race, gender, ethnicity, religions identification, gender issues, social views, class, privilege and the rest when we don’t have to deal with it: when we are in the comfort of ourselves; when our nice German Catholic town was suddenly “overrun” with THOSE Vietnamese refugees who came to our school; before a transformation of economic realities that ended the days when a dad’s high school, college or professional diploma was enough to support the family, and mom was supposed to stay home and wait for the bacon to fry; and before we even knew what gay was.

And the legacies of that fueled the car pool complications have been ushered in nicely to present day.
Today, Veronica and Ivan are a mile ahead of us, better equipped to deal with the real world and the people in it–their lives, feelings, rights and dreams. Not that they will have it easy—for them and the other children on this journey. But being a civil rights leader never is.