Category Archives: Race

My oldest daughter suggested I post this. So I am.

True Confession:  Every winter, I randomly pull down a Dickens novel from a set my grandmother once owned. This past winter I read—with some gritting of teeth—my least favorite: Martin Chuzzlewit. So I read this past week’s Jill Lepore article in “The New Yorker” re Dickens, which gave deep background to much of the writer’s oeuvre, including MC, with great interest.

Another confession: I’d like to believe that I dislike MC for its tedious structure, its weak plot and the unconvincing redemption of its main character. But maybe Dickens’ novel, in which he unabashedly and vigorously bashes the United States, makes me very uncomfortable. (Go figure!)

Curiously, although Lepore, as usual, wrote a fascinating article, she only peripherally elucidates one of the most compelling reasons why Dickens was so disgusted with this country. Slavery. (Not difficult to understand that, is it?)

Last confession: Sometimes I fear that the toxic and soul-killing effects of slavery will destroy this country.

But as Hurricane Irene pounds my windows with rain, I again muse on how we collectively and metaphorically wash ourselves clean. And again am reminded of this poem:

Empire

by Susan Lloyd McGarry

Guaman Poma, native to the Andes, wrote to the King of Spain in 1615: If you knew what they are doing

in your name, you would cry such tears, enough tears to cleanse the world, to start again.

The King did not reply.

Brothers and sisters, friends and children, neighbors: if you only knew what is being done in our name, the suffering, the hunger— but you do know and so do I. But we don’t know how to stop. And now there’s more talk of war.

Maybe if we really heard the stories, let them into our bodies, we could let our tears fall and fall, we

could be clean, there might be a way to start again.

Wednesday afternoon I needed to do errands in Porter and Davis And Union Squares (distance ultimately walked–three, four miles) so got to pass a series of Somerville/Cambridge summer scenes at a leisurely, on-foot pace. It had poured the night before, a glorious thunder and lightning show, which had driven off the heat and mugginess; being outside on an August afternoon proved joyful.

In my travels, however, I witnessed three people of color in terrible shape: Two men, one on Summer Street a block of so away from where I was walking, another in front of the T station in Porter Square as I passed by on the other side of the street were, apparently, having psychotic episodes. They screamed, cursed, yelled, roared, paced; the man at Porter Square was so upset he kicked a sign over. The woman, in a straw hat and cotton dress, sat motionless on the sidewalk across the street from Central Hospital—half a block up Central Street as I walked past on Somerville Avenue—while a slew of para-medics and firemen swarmed around her.

What’s going on, I wondered. (Things in three always seem significant to me.) My astrology-touting friend had told me that Mercury would go into retrograde Tuesday— the day before. So my first attempt to make meaning of these events was, shall we say, something Shakespeare might have wondered about? There’s something in the stars, perhaps? My second  attempt to make meaning of this trinity was ridiculous—and when I say ridiculous—well, judge for yourself: “Oh,” I thought. “Their behavior is a delayed reaction to yesterday’s debt ceiling drama!” (See what I mean?)

But maybe I had to think stupid before I could think smart. Because I finally realized what was really going on (and, surprisingly, the debt ceiling drama does play a role.): Right now, the incredible mess this world is in environmentally and economically is most felt, most experienced in communities of color. Ditto: violence and mayhem and incarceration. Black people are truly suffering. Some are going crazy. Some sit motionless on the sidewalk. If lived in Roxbury or Dorchester I would witness that suffering daily. But Wednesday, simply because I was in more neighborhoods that I usually walk through, I had more opportunities to witness my brothers and sisters.

Random. And yet not.

In Way Opens, I talk about a much-needed history lesson on the back of a segregated bus in 1961. But, like everyone else, these Oh-My-Goodness/You-Mean-What-I’ve-Always-Thought-To-Be-True-Ain’t-Necessarily-So? lessons have continued. In an American History class in college a couple of years later, for example, I first learned how, in the earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Quakers had been brutally persecuted by the Puritans.

Really? Who knew?

These lessons have taught me, like the bumper sticker advises, to “Question Authority.” Much as I fight it, however, like many white Americans, I frequently lapse into a blind acceptance of what the mainstream media, dominated by other white Americans, tell me.

But when The Boston Globe reported this week that Manny “Junior” daVeiga shot himself in the head while struggling with Boston police, even I, so often clueless, muttered, “Yeah, right.”

The Globe’s unequivocal support of the police and the Suffolk County district attorney’s version of what happened continues: In a classic blame-the-victim piece, the 19-year-old DaVeiga’s mental health history and his association with a Cape Verdean gang made the front page of the “Metro” section the day after his death; an ominous photo of a tanked-up Hummer  now being used by the police in that neighborhood appeared the following day.

My dear friend Lynn Lazar is asking white people to stand in solidarity with the Cape Verdean community—bless her.

This blog’s my way to do so.

The current controversy regarding the use of the word “Negro” on the US Census forms reminds me of an exchange I had with Chauncey Spencer, now deceased, in June of 2002. Son of Harlem Renaissance poet (and Lynchburg resident) Anne Spencer, ninety-six years old at the time of our meeting, Chauncey Spencer had been a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, our country’s first African-American fighter pilots. In fact, he’d help to found the Tuskegee Airmen (with a little help from a guy named Harry Truman).

” ‘People! We’re all just people!’ My mother always said that,” the World War II hero noted re whether or not to use the word “Black” or “African-American.”

The word “Negro” wasn’t mentioned—I think even to a ninety-six year old African-American, that word was passe.

Our conversation continued: I’d felt compelled to amend Anne Spencer’s statement.”White Americans need to understand more of African-Americans’ experience, first,” I said, before we can all agree that such words don’t matter. And the former Tuskegee Airman readily agreed.

* from “White Things” by Anne Spencer: Most things are colorful things—the sky, earth, and sea /Black men are most men; but the white are free!

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.