Mom and Hilda

In the mid 1970s, near the time I was finishing grade school, Hilda and Bernie Heinen moved in next door.  They had retired from the farm in rural Stearns County where they and generations of family had lived and where some still lived: still farmed and some still spoke a form of German compromised by a couple of generations away from the motherland, a couple of wars with which they did not want to be associated and a longing to be able to navigate the logistics required to make it through a trip into town, the stock yard or the grain elevator.  Hilda and Bernie’s English was good with irregularities common in our town that often interchanged the words borrow and lend as well as the words teach and learn and with an accent that hinted at the rural Minnesotan and German.  Lake Wobegon.

Mom and dad came from New Orleans, a different world where a few still spoke the last smatterings of Creole, but themselves spoke English that had no hint of the French that dominated many of the name places and was cultivated to distinguish them as Xavier University students.

Hilda and Bernie moved into town partly uninfected by much of the media bias that tainted most of America’s perception of African Americans.  Mom had learned well from her father and her own experience to meet people like you were meeting Jesus.

Hilda and Bernie were good people and good neighbors.  Mom and Hilda became good friends.  Better than the neighbors across the street who were related.  Better than most would have expected and better than most would have dared or bothered.

And most would not have expected the exchange that happened between mom and Hilda one afternoon while they stood in one of their front yards.

Hilda referred to to a black person using the word nigger.  That, in Stearns County, Minnesota and many other places would not be so unexpected–maybe for reasons other than why, on this day, the word came out of Hilda’s mouth.  What came next was truly unexpected.

Of course, my mom what stunned.  Surprised and stung in a way that hearing the word nigger always stings.  It is America’s ultimate unwelcoming–and we as black people know the unwelcome that comes with this word and a lot of other edifices that loom larger than a passing insult.

But mom was not mad.  It did not change her relationship with Hilda, like so many stinging encounters might.  Mom was hurt, but took a half moment to seek the best way to respond, maybe even asking God what to do.  She decided to do something that she might not have been able to do with many other people, with any other type of relationship and maybe not in today’s social spaces.

She told Hilda what that word meant: what it means in common language and what it felt in her ears and to the ears of someone who is or believes is the humanity of African Americans and other people who walk this earth.  Mom was kind and gentle–because she sensed that Hilda really didn’t know.

And she didn’t.  Hilda faced the biggest shame of her friendship with mom.  She really didn’t know and would not have wanted to hurt mother or anyone with the word if she knew what it meant.  Hilda could not have been sorrier.

What was so remarkable about this exchange was that this is not how we handle this issue in America and not many are willing or really have the honest, safe space to misstep and repair the damage.

What usually happens is that someone shouts “Nigger” to draw a line of supremacy.  The target of the slur either gets out of the way of the unhealthy and harmful verbal assault or responds with either the angry pain of the injury or a rebuttal that falls on the emotionally deaf or dumb.

Or maybe the response it an attempt to say how that kind of language and attitude is hurtful and damaging to common spaces, not much unlike what mom did with Hilda.  Where Hilda showed her exceptional nature was in her response.

Most of the time when we explain that this kind of language and other slights we encounter (and I hate to call them slights because there is nothing slight about systemic degradation and social, political and economic disadvantage), we get a response that complains that is dismissive, that we don’t have any reason to complain, that somehow they are entitled to speaking to and about us with impunity.

Instead, the two women chose to understand each other.

They made a space moved mom to choose Hilda as the person to whom she sent her two youngest after getting off the school bus for tending and a snack before her older kids got home.  It made a space that moved mom to be the primary helper for Hilda, more than her family who lived not far from us, or the once removed cousins who lived across the street when Bernie was dying of cancer.

The two women chose to share a space that most of America will not work to create, for which most of America is reluctant to work and that many do not want to exist.

After Bernie died, Hilda let her hair go white.  She let mom know how sad she was without him.  Mom worried, wiped tears and let her tell stories and shared a few of her own.  They were busy being Jesus for each other and entertain the angel they saw in each others’ eyes.

New Year’s Baseball Glove

The best Christmas gift I received this year was the reaction on my son Sid's face when he opened the box containing a new baseball glove. It was a look of joy and appreciation. Not at getting a new possession. The glove meant more: it meant hope promise, joy and opportunity.

During Fall baseball this past October, Sid's glove disappeared in a case of mistaken identity. During batting practice, he glove went missing. What was left behind in the batting cage was a glove that looked a lot like his, slightly older and smaller, but at first glance and even at second glance, looked enough like Sid's to mistake the two gloves.

We are guessing that the glove left behind in its place was itself a borrowed or second hand glove because the name on it did not match or resemble the name or family name of anyone signed up for the league or clinics that autumn and the numbers I called from the phone book matching the name were not missing a glove nor had any children that age playing baseball.

Still, we both handled the grief over the loss quite well and Sid finished the season with my glove, a worn, slightly larger, Derek Jeter model, which worked quite well for him, even though he prefers second base to Jeter's short stop.

It was sad to lose the mitt regardless. Sid had taken a couple of summers to completely break it in and, as many of us will remember from our childhood, baseball gloves are the kinds of precious things we sleep with at night and that fuel our fields of dreams.

The lost glove sadness was overtaken as Sid continued on with a conviction like the Whos of Whoville after their Christmas presents had been taken. Each inning, he ran out to his position with dad's beat up but more-than-functional glove and played the game he loves the most. He was not going to let the loss of his possession ruin his chance at celebrating on the green grass and ag-lime base paths.

With the help of his aunt Jennifer and my good fortune at finding the last of last year's models at one of the sporting goods stores, which meant that it was about 40 percent of the price of this year's model, Sid has a new glove to break in. We started the process the day after Christmas, in this rare warm-aired and brown-grassed winter.

On the 26^th, we went over to the park near grandma and grandpa's house with two of Sid's cousins and his uncle Michael and played catch, hot box—and we played long enough to make it official.

We played long enough to stir our hot stove dreams of the coming season, which have been spliced with a smattering of newspaper pieces about players and for whom they will play in the upcoming season. And roused by activities like Sid's school History Day project that is largely about baseball's free agency and the biggest hero of that piece of history, the late St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curt_Flood)

Sid presenting 4th grade biography project to Biography Day guests.

Sid is learning that baseball isn't just about the game, which it is. It's only a game, but it is also about life; it is about the politics that we cannot avoid and it is one of our strongest parallels to American culture and history. It is an ongoing lesson about small-and large-scale justice, on and off the field. It is about how to care who wins and what we win—and what we lose; how to love those things in the right way, appreciating them when we have them and letting go when they are gone.

I think deep down, these must be lessons that we, as kids, yearn for and maybe are as much a reason we play so hard as for the fun of the game. Maybe that is why Sid has done three class projects on Jackie Robinson, one on the 1919 (Chicago White Sox) Black Sox scandal and now Curt Flood.

Not long ago, Sid took his Brooklyn Dodgers replica baseball hat to a chess tournament. We originally got it to go with a costume he had for his Biography Day presentation several years ago, playing Jackie Robinson, of course. During one of the rounds of chess play, it got lost.

He's not a little kid anymore, and it seems that losing the hat did not phase him as he continued to play. At the end of the chess tournament, we looked all over the tournament area for it, finally finding it at the officials' table in the gym. As he and I walked out, I noticed that he was a little weepy. He wasn't going to cry. He does not cry easily these days, but I had to ask him if something was wrong.

He said, “Well, the hat really means a lot to me.” At that moment, my idea of what the hat meant to him turned into a strong mental and emotional knowledge. I knew it was an important hat, even wearing it during Little League when he was younger instead of the team issued hats of the same color. One of his grandmothers remarked that baseball season how proud he was of it.

But what he carried home with him after the tournament, wore on the baseball field and for his history day project was more than just a floppy piece of sewn Dodger Blue cloth with a bill; it is a badge of so many things he and other young people need and want to learn about the joys and sorrows of our stories—of life. It tells us we have something to unwrap every day, things that will elate us and bring us tears.

Maybe that is the lesson for the coming year—a lesson from the last one. I am still learning, and maybe this coming year will be better, smarter and more joyful than the last. I hope it will be for you.

(Please leave comments at http://theclarencewhiteblog.wordpress.com)

One Reason Poetry is Important

Last night, my son Sid and I went to a poetry reading. I will go blue in the face trying to explain why it was important to be there. I am glad that I did not have to explain why to Sid, that for some reason, he knew, that he would go there for more than the several out-loud laughs he had or for the treats that did not come until after the reading.


It was important to be there. It was important to learn, remember, and respond to and from those words, the ideas, the emotion. How much can we learn from poetry?

Last night's lessons: They are about poetry, art and life, and why humans need all three.

We learned that there are things that we will say in poems that we won't say to our parents, won't say if we are shy and won't say if we are pretending to be polite at the expense of telling the truth. That there are things that “people” will say in their sleep, and you can make wonderful verse by just capturing those words. We say, “people,” but in the poem, it reads true, reads “lover” or “the one I love.” Sometimes we are so shy, but how else do we learn what people say in their sleep?

I was reminded that the devil so someone who will ask you to accept a deal that he himself would never accept. And that such men will call themselves gods in order to justify their carnivorous appetite for human mortals and their love and their souls.

I was reminded of what it takes—what factors must be in place—for a grown man to take the life of a boy: how he gets to take the safety of other children and women to whom he is privileged to become too close.

I was reminded that the collection of people with whom I share last night's event is a sufficiently rare collection in that we all understood that to take things like this is wrong.


We learned that we had a place where we could talk about it, even if changing the world would require us leaving that comfortable space. We were happy to know that just as those snippets of art moved us, we, too, could move people and the world will change just a little.

And it is time to write. For all of us, it is time to write, and share. And we won't have to explain why poetry is important, because, today, even though I put them to paper, I am at a loss for words.

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/ 

Chicken Along the Mason-Dixon Line

I had a deja vu moment this morning as I bit into a piece of chicken that was left over from last night's dinner.

The bite of chicken was a memory flash as brilliant as the memories invoked by our sense of smell. It was a memory from childhood and like so many, it was fond, but the realities behind it are less pleasant.

At first taste, I was brought back to a two-lane highway, somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line on a very hot summer day when all of us, the whole family of six, were glad to be out of the confined quarters of the station wagon, even to be baked by the sun at the picnic table of a wayside rest.

Years ago, I had the opportunity to spend some time in my son's fourth grade class. One day, I pulled read-out-loud-to-the-class duty. The book was The Watsons go to Birmingham—1963 (Bantam, Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers, 1995) by Christopher Paul Curtis. I read the scene of the Watsons' trip south to visit grandparents. As I read, I felt as if I were reading the story of the trips that our family took most summers of my childhood to New Orleans.

The Watsons took cold fried chicken with them. They ate out of their cooler. Not in restaurants.

Most African Americans of a certain age whose families traveled know this drill. Cold fried chicken, because it will keep for the long haul. It is cheaper than most other things that could be packed and much cheaper than buying meals on the road. On a hot summer day, with a can of soda to chase it down, it is delightful passing the lips. We didn't know—or care that other people were stopping into a local diner to be served their bite to eat.

As kids, we didn't really know that those road-side diners existed because my father was not going to bring his family into one, especially one south the the Mason-Dixon.

When we, or most other African American families, traveled, we packed provisions because there was no guarantee that we would be welcome in any establishment; that basket of chicken was vital. So were the wayside rests where we knew we could stop. Regardless of whether other people were happy we were there, they had little authority to tell us to leave.

Even today—especially today, people take for granted public accommodations. (Certain political ideologies are not keep on paying for them, those most associated with dispositions that will have little trouble being welcome at every place to eat.) Some of us know that there are just places we cannot go, are not allowed or where we must at least endure the hot glares on the backs of our necks in order to do things as simple as use a restroom or eat at a restaurant. There are places in this country that are tacitly declared off limits. Those places are closer and far more numerous than most of us, even I, are willing to admit.

Our trips to New Orleans were to visit grandma and grandpa. On most of our trips to the south, we stopped in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. It was close to the midway on the two-day trip to the Mississippi delta. There was a more important reason for stopping there for the night. Past this point, we were entering the American South, where we could not be sure which establishments would “have a vacancy” for US. Would mother and father be able to find a place that would welcome our patronage?

We were kids. We looked forward to the hotel stay. We looked forward to Cape Girardeau, where we knew we would get our treat, a motel stay almost as wonderful as the two or three weeks we would spend at grandma and grandpa's. The stories of danger and trepidation that lie just off the thoroughfare were just stories that were tucked neatly in a package of lore that we should not forget, cautionary tales to be heeded by little black children, but that we should not fret about, because we were just children and we were on vacation to grandma and grandpa's.

Meanwhile, my father worried, only slightly as a wise and brave protector. My mother worried, because that is the job of mothers. We set worry aside, opened the cooler and pulled out the cold fried chicken and maybe potato salad. We jumped from bed to bed until mother said, “You kids are driving me crazy,” and “Get in the tub,” and wondered when the motel staff would bring the folding bed for the younger siblings.

Soon, we would be in New Orleans. We would eat well and mostly forget how wonderful the cold chicken seemed. We would have a mountain of red soda (or cold drink, as they called it) that grandma tried to make as big as her of love that could more than fill the Gulf of Mexico. We ran around in the sweltering heat of the city, again only slightly aware of the dangers that lurked in the craziness of that place and which mother and father tucked away in their own childhood memories.

One of Many Thoughts on a MLK Holiday

It has been more than once that someone asked me whether I prefer to be called Black or African American. What is distressing is being asked which one is “correct”: Negro, African American or Black. “You're asking me?”

I remember being asked by a woman who came to me, like I was the authority on cultural correctness—or because she felt superior enough to me to confront me as if her confusion was the fault of someone who at least looked like me and that I did not have the power to deliver a scorn that she felt from some source that had criticized her for being “incorrect.” I'm not sure why she cared what was “correct.” I can guess and I am sure there are several reasons why, but I'm not sure which.

When Martin Luther King was killed, we were often called Negros. It was something more essential than pride or self esteem that brought us to call ourselves Black and that created the evolution to the term African American. Pride or not, regardless of the label, the reality is that being characterized as any of these things is a function of being “raced,” that some aspect of culture determined that they would be dominant and would give names to others, assigning them names like they were the Adam (and sometimes the Eve) naming the animals of their little world as far as their myopia could see.

It seems that some of us have taken up the challenge of seeing further—seeing farther. Years ago, Bruce shared one of his frustrations in a conversation. “You know what the problem with my son is?” he said. “He thinks he's white.” He's not, I thought? “He can pass as white if he wants to, just like a lot of us,” Bruce continued, “but me—I'm Irish” (and the millennium of history that goes with it).

If we want to know what term to use, we have to realize that Negro, Black and African American all mean something different. And each term has its important history. If you are an arbitrarily supremacist, anthropological categorist, Negro probably works. If you heed someone who says, “Well, they like to be called African American, now, maybe you should listen if you know who “they” is. Black: who's black? The term puzzled me as a preschooler. Whose skin is black? But Black is something that I share with people all over the globe, not just in the Americas or just in the United States, which is what is usually meant by the term African-American.

It is something I share with Desmond Tutu, as surely as I share it with Bob Marley, Barbara Jordan, Barack Obama and everyone else in the Sub-Saharan diaspora. So, what should you call me? Call me Clarence. If you don't know my name and who need to know who I am, meeting me would be a good time to ask. I won't mind. I will try not to criticize, even if you don't want to know my name.