Author Archives: Patricia Wild

March 10, 2010: What’s the metaphor?

February 16, 2010, Bristol Superior Court, Taunton, MA:

So here we are, in a gloomy, badly water-damaged, second-floor  courtroom: dozens of prospective jurors;  Nesto’s supporters; the African American woman judge; Christopher Tarrant, the prosecutor; Joseph Krowski, Nesto’s attorney; the court recorder; three bailiffs and Nesto Monell, himself.

As the interminable, mysterious, and mostly behind-the-scene jury selection proceeds, there’s plenty of time for those of us not directly engaged to take note of our environment. We stare at the courtroom’s gigantic gas chandelier refitted with energy-efficient bulbs, the intricate green and brown stenciled ceiling, the mosaics on the wall over the judge’s head and wall of law books behind her, the barely-functional window shades, the worn blue-green carpeting, the intricate, beautifully-turned spindles of the courtroom’s railings. We stare and stare again at those bulging, sloppily-repaired water-damaged walls.  We listen to sleet striking the courtroom’s air conditioners and the rackety sounds of a major construction project—a brand new courthouse is being built just feet away.

But we’re here. In the current Bristol Superior Courthouse, a formerly palatial 1895 Greek Revival building, located in the very heart of downtown Taunton—which, BTW, resembles the “It’s a Wonderful Life” ‘s Bedford Falls.

What’s the metaphor?

More importantly (But perhaps the same question): What does the jury make of this setting?

Most importantly: Does what the jury make of this setting work in Nesto’s favor?

The jury pool: Most are in their twenties and thirties, all are white, it seems, most are working-class, I’m guessing; lots of scarves, jeans, jeans with heels; very few suits or dressed-up outfits; only one gum chewer that I can see.

Are they bored? Sleepy? Dismayed to be in this gloomy room ? Impossible to know: their faces give nothing away.

Once selected and seated, the jury hears the judge use words like  “rule of law” and “presumption of innocence.” Staring at the mosaic of a disembodied, muscled arm wielding a hammer, the metaphor comes to me (OK, it’s not strictly a metaphor):

All of us in this creepy courtroom are exquisitely suspended in A Moment, a particularly Present Moment. Taunton’s “Silver City” past is well-represented by the craftsmanship and lofty ceilings of this courthouse—surely the jury appreciates those spindles, that mosaic arm, those stencils. The future can be seen, literally, right out the window.

What are these spindles, that mosaic, those stencils teaching us? (Hint: It’s something about Nesto’s character.)

What do those construction sounds tell us? (Hint: It’s something about possibility)

What will guide us, moment by moment, in this Present Moment? Answer: The timeless rule of law. And a wondrous, far-sighted (get it?) concept: that a defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty.

March 8, 2010: “Is it fair to say. . . ?”*

[How Prosecutor Christopher Tarrant would begin many sentences at Nesto Monell’s trial, February 16 – February 19, 2010, Taunton, MA ]

Is it fair to say that after the factories and mills of Bristol County shut down, drug-dealing became the next best way to make a living in  Brockton, New Bedford and Taunton?

Is it fair to say that Nesto Monell’s skin color is part of this story?

Is it fair to say that juries notice when white people support a defendant of color?

Is it fair to say, as (Quaker; brilliant) Susan Louks noted during the trial, that although the criminal justice system is deeply flawed, it’s the best thing humanity’s come up with; let’s celebrate its desire to do the right thing?

Is it fair to say that this account is highly subjective? And written by a writer, not a reporter? [Answer: Absolutely!]

So let’s begin, as Quakers so often begin, with another question:

Why were half-a-dozen Quakers from Friends Meeting at Cambridge sitting in a once elegant courtroom in Taunton, MA at 9 am on February 16th, 2010?

The short answer: Because of who Nesto is. (Which is, in part, about his mother.)

A longer answer: In support of  Nesto Monell, age 30, who was on trial for drug-dealing and possession of a firearm.

Who is Nesto Monell? What happened the night of March 31, 2005, the night he was arrested? Who’s his mother? What happened at the trial?

Keep reading.

March 5, 2010: On The Green Line:

I’m sitting across from a curly-haired, older woman, completely dressed in black, who receives a phone call just as the train leaves Boylston. She says something in rapid-fire Spanish then, closing her cell phone, begins to weep. She pulls a Kleenex out out her bag, blows her nose, wipes her face, carefully dabbing under her eyes where her mascara has run.

She’s Chilean and has just heard terrible news, I decide.

Don’t be ridiculous, I tell myself, shopping in Copley Square. It could have been anything that made her cry. Anything.

I wanted that woman to cry about Chile’s earthquake, I realize later, walking through the Common. God help me: I needed a connection to that tragedy. She’s it.

February 15, 2010: NYC # 4

February 13th: Watching the news re Haiti with my son-in-law in his living room:

The NYC-based television announcer begins many of her sentences with: “You can imagine. . . ”

Well, no, I can’t. Warm, safe, well-fed and American, no, sorry, I cannot imagine how this earthquake impacts the people of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

I simply can’t.

February 8, 2010: New York City Story # 3

  1. [Note: These stories happened while I was staying in Brooklyn for much of January. As with much of this blog, these stories deal with race.]

January 9, 2010, Brooklyn Museum:

My dear friend Lynne has taken the train from Boston early this morning so that she and I can go to the Brooklyn Museum—she especially wants to see Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” part of the museum’s permanent exhibit since 2007.

It’s a Saturday; the place is packed. As so often happens in NYC, I am again struck by how many more people of color are here (the same thing happens on the subway, in the supermarket, etc, etc.) . That we’re in a museum begs me to consider how often I see anyone except white people in Boston’s cultural institutions. Answer: very, very few.

After Lynne and I sate ourselves on Chicago’s sumptuous banquet (Overhead: a little girl, wisely held in her mother’s arms, asks: “Can I sit there?” “We can all sit here,” her mother tells her.), we wander through other exhibits, opting out of the “Who Shot Rock and Roll” show because it’s so packed.

We find ourselves in a large exhibit hall adjoining a glass and steel storage area containing shelves and shelves of beautiful stuff. Already reeling from taking in so much—”museumitis”—although I’m curious to see what’s in this sort-of-displayed-but-not-really gallery, I don’t walk in.

But I reflect, as I did re the treasures I’d once found on Lynchburg’s Legacy Museum of African American History shelves: What gets displayed in any museum? And who decides?

February 2, 2010: New York City Story # 2

January 8, 2010, Greenwood Park, Brooklyn:

My grandson Dmitri arranges clumps of icy snow  in the dead-middle of the paved, spacious, open area of the park: “You’re building an igloo,” I say. He looks at me quizzically. So I realize he doesn’t know what an igloo is.

When we return to his family’s apartment, he sits on my lap and, together, we watch a 7-minute segment of “Nanook of the North” in which Nanook and his family build an igloo from scratch.

Which reminds me of a time maybe 40 years ago in the Central Park zoo when a peacock had unfurled his magnificent tail and the grandmother standing next to me had commented to her grandson: “Look! Just like TV!” ( A word of explanation for those too young to remember the early days of color TV. The NBC logo had been a stylized peacock opening his segmented tail, one color/segment.)

How I’d sneered at that grandmother! For right in front of us, in all his glory, had been a real peacock. Yet she’d referenced something fake, cartoonish, as seen on TV.

40 years later, I show my grandson a UTube video to illustrate the world “igloo.” And, I realize as we watch together, many of his references will be understood by his staring at a computer screen. And, indeed, as my time in Brooklyn progresses, he and I will watch many videos illustrating something that he and I had talked about. “Gram,” I realize, means the person who loves to google videos.

But  one thing Dmitri does experience in living color: He knows, hangs out with, plays with a “rainbow” of people—as he would say. Very unlike my lily-white childhood.

Praise be!

I understand something else: “Nanook of the North” was the first documentary I’d ever seen (Yes, I know there’s controversy re its staging; I’m not denying that), i.e. my first experience of watching people whose lives were utterly different from my own.

January 29, 2010: New York City Story #1

[I’ve been in Brooklyn for the part 3 1/2 weeks tending grandchildren. Here’s the first of 11 stories, most of them having to do with race, from my NYC experience.]

January 7th, Park Slope, Brooklyn, about 9am:

It’s really, really cold, I’m staying in a wonderful apartment with iffy lighting and I’ve lost my gloves. So while buying light bulbs at the CVS on 9th Street, I think: “CVS sells everything. I’ll bet they have cheap, warm gloves.” But where?

I see a young man of color in his early twenties, maybe, stocking shelves. One glance at his rounded, doughy, vacant face and I decide: “Don’t ask him.”

“Hey,” I scold myself. “Don’t be so quick to judge. Give the kid a chance.”

So I ask him where to find gloves.

“Follow me,” he says authoritatively. But where does he lead me? To the large, open area at the front of the store in front of the cash registers where five or six people wait to be served. Standing a good ten feet from the cash register counter, behind the waiting people, he yells over their heads, “Where  the gloves at?”

“What kind?” shouts one of the cashiers. Also young. Hispanic, perhaps. (Whether or not Spanish is her first language has nothing to do with this story, BTW; but since, in these stories, I’m talking about race and my own interactions around this charged subject, feel as though I am obligated to identify everyone’s ethnicity.)

At first I wonder why the hell she’s asking what kind. Later I wonder if she had been thinking I might need rubber gloves.

“Warm,” I shout, feeling very, very silly. Exposed. “Cheap.”

“Naw,” she shouts. “We ain’t got none.”

All the waiting customers turn to look at me. One older white woman says, “There’s a discount store at the end of this block. You’ll find just what you need.”

And she was right.

Wearing my new warm, cheap gloves, I walk back up 9th Street passing the CVS on my way. An older white man calls to me: “Dja get your gloves?”

I beam back at him, wiggle my snuggly-warm fingers.

Lessons:

1. New Yorkers sometimes do act like friendly villagers and, I suspect, yearn for little, pleasant interactions with other people—just like the rest of us.

2. I also suspect that young CVS shelf stocker is developmentally delayed. But I, so very, very yearning for, ya know, Truth, Beauty, World Peace, Racial Justice et al, was not able to act upon what my first instinct was telling me. Oh, no. “We thought she was just another guilty white woman,” Reverend Owen Cardwell once said of me. Sometimes I still am.

December 29, 2009: Oughts

A bitterly cold wind rattles my study window; warm and cozy, I send out a prayer for all who must be outside on this frigid day. In these last, chilled days of the “Aughts,” like lots of people, I’m thinking about next year and what—besides losing holiday poundage—I ought to do more of in 2010.

And I think it comes down to a major theme of Way Opens: trying to “stay awake,” i.e. trying to be ever-mindful of the unfair, layered, systemically racist world I so comfortably live in.

And, as someone I know recently observed, someone who really is amazingly mindful, staying awake is exhausting. So the other major “ought” is taking better care of myself. Yikes.

What are your oughts?

December 22, 2009: Glad Tidings

Christmas preparations are 95% under control (next year I really do have to figure out how to simplify this thing—for real) so am going to try to say something, here:

First Off/Let’s be Clear: I am not saying that Barack Obama is Jesus Christ, okay? In this season of both glad tidings/hope/ “Oh, come let us adore him,”  and seriously compromised effort (the health care bill, what didn’t happen in Copenhagen), however, my president and my Inward Teacher have weirdly blended together in my mind.

I’d been hoping to bring this confusing co-mingling to meeting for worship this past Sunday but the big snowstorm and very few people showing up meant I played one of the Wise Men for our Meeting’s Christmas pageant instead. So bear with me; I haven’t gotten very far.

Re Obama: Like the “Jesus Christ Superstar” song goes: “He’s just one man.” Again and again while campaigning, Obama told us: “I am not going to do this (whatever promise he was taking about) alone.” But I, weary at heart, was oh-so-yearning to worship and adore. (And, let’s be honest, the fact that he’s our first president of color means my belief in the guy verged on hero-worship. As readers of Way Opens know, I do this.) So when President Obama commited 30,000 troops to Afghanistan and didn’t single-handedly pull off a Christmas Miracle in Copenhagen, I was crushed.

Re Inward Teacher: My take on the Good News is this: Again and again Jesus was telling us, reminding us that God/Spirit/Higher Power is here, is now, is present. His followers, then and now, weary at heart, yearned/yearn for him to take away the sins of the world, to give us rest, to comfort, to save us. But I believe he was trying to say something quite different: God’s love is within you. Open your heart to that love. That love, that power is your salvation.

What the world learned from Copenhagen is the same message that our former community-organizer president is telling us and what Jesus—and Ghandi—taught: Change happens inwardly first, it happens when two or more are gathered, it often happens in spite of elected officials—and, might I add, when women and children’s voices are heard and supported. “When the people lead, leaders will follow.” A global response to climate change will happen because voices from non-super powers will make it happen.I truly believe this.

Our Inward Teacher, aka the Prince of Peace, brought us glad tidings. Spread the Word.

December 14, 2009: “Best of Both Worlds”

A stellar, all-black cast, a sexy, talented, gorgeous male lead—Gregg Baker—with the most amazing voice, R &B and gospel music, clever, clever staging, the modernized retelling of one of Shakespeare’s weirdest plays; you’d think I would have loved American Repertory Theater’s  “Best of Both Worlds.” But I didn’t.

“Why not?” my husband wondered. “You usually love everything. Even when they’re mediocre!”

Here’s what really, really bothered me:

Having seen another version of “Winter’s Tale” recently, I knew that in the second  act, the love affair between a young man (a prince) and his beloved (really a princess but no one knows that, yet) is threatened by the young man’s father (a king, obviously.) The issue? Class. The prince is a prince and his love is, gasp, poor. (A shepherd’s daughter, it would seem.)

How does this play at ART? The king/father objects to this romance because his princely son has fallen in love with a pretty, young whore whose pimp is her own father!

And, sure, the (originally shepherd) father-daughter et al whore house scene makes for some typically ART (read slapstick) theater: lots of sex, lots of mugging, lots of steamy singing and dancing.

Did ART (read white) decide that staging such a scene just too delicious to pass up?

I’ve read that some African Americans object to the movie “Precious” because it “airs the black community’s dirty laundry.” My understanding, however, is that thoughtful people of color were very much a part of the movie’s history. And that’s what makes me very uncomfortable: If white people chose to tell an all-black story, they must do so very, very carefully. I think ART went for the easy laughs, easy sex.

My discomfort was confirmed when, at the very beginning of the scene, the pimp daddy addresses the audience, telling us that he’s now in business, a business that didn’t require a whole lot of capital.

“Can you guess what it is?” he asks coyly.

The woman sitting next to me muttered,”Drugs.”

White people have enough crazy, crazy stories running in our heads re people of color already. I know I do.  I don’t need other white people to reinforce my craziness, thank you very much!