Come Out of Her: The Revolution at Home

 

I revised this essay after the President's eulogy to Reverend Clementa Pinckney.  I reviewed my reaction and thoughts on Kiese Laymon's (Guardian) piece on the teachings of the black church.  Why?  Because I think it vital to get at the what I see as the core questions of each text; which is not possible without briefly speaking to each perspective.  The President told the truth.  Laymon told the truth.

While white America thankfully and finally begins to look inward and take some responsibility for the concomitant effects of its racism (which is not my subject), black America shakes its peanut basket in search of whole un-cracked kernels of nourishment.  How do we sustain ourselves, move our families and communities forward, knowing what we know:  that no one is more interested in our nourishment than we?

I focus on Obama and Laymon specifically because together they embody a bit of the conundrum we face as a community.  Two black men raised in polar American environs.  One, Obama, seemingly starved of his blackness growing up in a white family in Hawaii.  And Laymon, seemingly overfed his blackness growing up in Mississippi.  I, of their same integrated generation, can identify with both, having been raised partly in California and partly in Arkansas.  As I read both, I wonder how each thinks of home.  

I wonder how many Hawaiian Saturday nights Obama tried to close his eyes that refused to shut over his want of a black church to sit in and be stirred.  How many Mississippi Saturday nights Laymon grudgingly set that 8:30 am alarm?  

           
My daughter has graduated now, so I can speak of the trepidation I felt dropping her at Vassar.  I worried about Vassar's whiteness.  Would my child experience the aggressive hate my brothers and I experienced in Steinbeck country and later in Reagan country?  I worried, but consoled myself knowing my daughter knew who she was and knew her people.  You see, she had formed her black self enough to play black three truths and a lie impeccably:  She and her sister were born in Atlanta, raised in Oakland, enjoyed trips home to Pine Bluff, attended predominately black, mostly African-centered elementary schools, churches, mosques; slopped syrup with biscuits from two of their grandmothers' and grandfathers' country tables, been perched in the laps of two great-grandmothers, rode in the cars of their constantly jaw-jacking mama and daddy; watched their grandma fly back and forth to Cote d'Ivoire, played in a Bahamian steel drum band, danced at Carnival, visited old Spelman professors, finished homework at Clark Atlanta University, retold their grandfather's Panther days and grandma's days in SNCC, ate plantains at Karijamba and the Malcom X festivals, trained in capoiera, poured libations to revered and remembered and thirsty ancestors, sung the South African freedom song, donned their African dresses, studied Imotep and Egypt's Nubian middle kingdoms ... both daughters know their people enough to ward off the slickest onslaught of white supremacy.    

My daughters also know their people well enough to get tired of them.  That happens.

                    

We get tired of our people and wish everybody would just do this or just do that and all the pain and trouble would go away.  Upon the slightest infraction, we begin to lay the predominance of blame for our often trying, often frustrating, often cyclical condition, on each other instead of placing the condition ahead of the infraction.  We fall into examining surfaces instead of underlying causes. We want to qualify with too many justs.  Mona T. Phillips told me years ago to pay attention to what comes after the "just":  that's a dismissal, an oversimplification.  

I recently almost had a debate with a woman about not calling out a famous athlete over repeated domestic violence charges--a topic about which, in this particular case, I knew nothing.  I had congratulated the athlete on his victory.  The woman who wished to debate me, questioned my "respect" for his victory.  She wanted me to denounce this black man.  I refused.  I offered to sit down to talk out this complicated topic in private as I am not interested in shaming black folks, black families, not now or ever.     

I wanted to explain to her that I could not denounce him

because I have known so many male and female perpetrators of violence and other forms of abuse ... some whom after they let go of intoxicants, changed for the better.  Some, whom after a medical or psychiatric exam, diagnosis, and treatment--changed.  It's too easy to condemn, denounce, dismiss, especially the most broken among us.  But I am weak in a way.  An appreciated weakness that keeps me less at war with the people of the world.  More convinced of human possibility.  (I feel both sorry and elated for the conservative politicians who get caught in the woods with their

gay pants at their ankles).  

I have learned to recognize my own brokenness as well as that of others.   If we can't work to listen and acknowledge and mend the brokenness in each other, how can we ever get to the kind of love that doesn't run off when loving turns impossible?  I mean the kind of love that drove Ida B. Wells Barnett and Mary McLeod Bethune and Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.  The kind of love that makes one commit to inglorious, diurnal, heart-work.  And more work.  Looking for possibility and seeing all the ever-present beauty in one's own people and those peoples' memories and in their foibles. 

                    

That's what struck me most about Obama's speech.  I wanted to lean through the television and ask him to tell me about the longing I had seen and read about in him, longing I've known whenever separated from my home, my people.  What was it like to finally get home?  I saw him carrying a song ironically written by slave-trading preacher, John Newton, "Amazing Grace". 

                   

Obama sounded new.  He didn't sound apologetic.  He said what I wanted to hear.  He made me wonder if he was done making white folks comfortable at the expensive of his own voice and community.  

                   

I also wondered what he saw in the rows of pews before him.  Did he appreciate the stayed beauty there?   Season in and out.  A beauty that remains home delighted in the complicated reflection of itself in the morning mirror.  

                      

In his essay, Laymon asks why we so easily digest the church's push to forgive white folks over and again,"for they know not what they do."  A beautiful sentiment of compassion in the face of death.  A beautiful sentiment when true; but what about when they know what they do?  Do we still allow ourselves to be crucified?  We want to be like Jesus.  But how can a community build generations when full of willing martyrs?   

                    

Forgiveness is emancipatory; but silent forgiving is a mistake.  We have not quantified our grievances.  We have demanded little.  We have taken scraps in place of full garments.  We are owed billions of dollars in reparations for the generations of free labor and property beaten and bamboozled out of us while we sneaked away to feed our souls on books of Exodus and Psalms and the gospels of John and Luke.  But we stay quiet.  We have been taught not to attract too much attention to ourselves or we might be picked off next.  Those of us in positions to speak have been silenced by a conditioned old timey desire to stay hushed because we gotta eat and somebody, who don't like us in the first place, got the keys to the breadbox.  We have let them say what they like.  Portray us how they like.  Seduce our children into the most destructive behaviors possible to human beings.  They've profited while we have paid a stiff penalty.  

             

I hold both Obama and Laymon up in the quest for solutions.  They both work (with few breaks) to build humanity, period.  Between them, I believe is the shared love of their own culture and people.  This week, they both asked us to speak up for ourselves, to build with each other with compassion, humility, and unwavering conviction.  More than anything, however, they both asked us to continue to demonstrate love for ourselves by living a faith in ourselves.    

   

                                          

                     

                                                      .                   .                 . 

                                          

                     

I was eighteen when I left Southern California for Atlanta.  The first time I breathed easy since at twelve, I sat at the foot of my grandmother’s white chaise, listening intently to her tales, mundane and apoplectic (albeit, always instructive) about the people we lived among and the place we called home. 

Atlanta, hot sweaty and calm, felt to me like my home in Pine Bluff, Arkansas:  a place overflowing with black people and black peoples’ memories.  I think of these memories as alive, breathing of the same air I breathe; these memories meander quiet (though tuning toward raucous), waiting for their descendants to come sally alongside them; they have secrets to tell. 

(“I know you.  You Miss Thorns’ grandbaby.”

“Yes, Ma’am, I am.”) 

My plane landed at Hartsfield Airport and I walked down the runway, my feet planting deeper into the ground with each step.  I’d lost the burden of my integrationist spacesuit: the one that had created in me a sort of otherworldliness.  An alien, limb and trunk floating among grounded others. 

Away from home, I present in an intolerable body—one that is at once pornographically desired by powerbrokers, as well as corrupted, throttled and made to swallow the world’s refuse.  

Mules have it better.  They are not met with confusion and seduced into lapses of hemming and hawing according to the their master’s mood.  Mules do not forget yesterday’s beating.  They do not deny the memory in their bodies.  They’d remove their bindings if they could.  They’d hoof off to a remembered high lit place where they could plant their feet.   They’d search for home. 

At home, my body is welcome.  At home, my body is grounded. 

On the north side of Pine Bluff, beside what has been renamed Lake Ceracen (in honor of the native man who refused to step one toe onto the Trail of Tears), beside immodest blackberry brambles and hundred-year-old-trees secreting pecan buds; splayed out over twelve acres of rich delta soil, scan left, then scan right, close your ears to the deafening cicada roar, and discover, if you dare, the oldest black college in America, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (formerly AM and N, founded 1873). 

Over the years and as the college spread throughout the north side, my grandparents refused offers to sell their property because as my grandma said, “This y’alls property.  Your granddaddy built this house and when we dead and gone, ya’ll can come home.” 

Last night I dreamed lucid of horses chewing grass in a field, of cheap housing, of quiet nights, of the sweat rising off Bayou Bartholomew, of cars filled with uncles and cousins driving across country or back down the river from Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, Detroit, Gary, Milwaukee, and Los Angeles to drop black boys and girls off for a ferociously black, toe-rooting education.  Last night I dreamed of home. 

The Duel: Black, White and Everyday Implosions

I hate to lose friends.  Close friendships develop over time and with care.  I lost one friend several years ago because my newly radicalized white friend assumed she needed to teach me about my own blackness.  I had, over months, chalked up several of her statements to me as an expression of her chronic and debilitating health problems.  I re-imagined the prayer of Saint Francis, tried to "understand" rather than be "understood."  But dig it, I'm not a saint.  We parted ways.

My former walking and laughing buddy and I began, after her initiation into Oakland's occupy movement, to crash into each other.   Her awakening to the mechanics of unfettered capitalism and its effect on her white middle-class experience, repeatedly clashed with my entire being.  It clashed because she made so many assumptions about my understanding of myself and my condition.  She insisted three times, "You should read The New Jim Crow."  Then she instructed twice, "You should read the Black Jacobans."

With each utterance, I breathed deeply and said, "Uh huh,"  the way my mother slyly does when she thinks what you're saying is nonsense.  I didn't say, "I've been black my whole life, Honey." or "Do you think I ever thought Jim Crow ended?" or, "You should read Labor of Sorrow, Labor of Love and How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America like I did twenty years ago at Spelman College."  I've been studying my culture my entire life.  "Stop."  I didn't say that because she had been a good friend.  I didn't want to hurt her feelings or shut her down.

I tried to respond when she said, "My other black occupy friends hate Obama.  He's a neo-liberal.  He's like Bill Clinton.  He's a sell out... ."   

"Can we not talk about Obama?  I don't agree with many of his policies either.  And I think I am looking at this from a more racial perspective."  Now I've offended her.  And I didn't want to do that.  But, I would be damned if I was going to sit back and listen to her trash Obama.  Why?  Not because I think he's right.  I cannot defend many, many of his policy positions---BUT---I can defend his personhood and my right not to denigrate this black man with a white woman who's just recently begun to think of herself as at odds with the American mainstream.  I've been black my entire life.  I am keenly aware of my condition.  A complex condition, personally:  southern and Californian; middle-class, sometimes broke; educated; both urban and rural.  Both old school and modern.  Both socialist and libertarian.  Privileged sometimes.  Black, always.   I tried with my friend.  Tried to change the subject.  To respond thoughtfully.  To bite my tongue.  What I finally accepted was that she was invested in changing my thinking--which she had no real knowledge of in the first place.  She never asked me anything.  We had never talked about race.  I don't think I ever quite thought of her racially because that's how friendship, real friendship works.

I felt an ease with her, that upon reflection, may have developed over her familiarity with black expression.  She pronounced her ex-husband's old school name, Willie, the way I would pronounce it when at home with my children.  That's an unstated invitation into my unconscious heart.  Heart invitations know little of race and other sublunary realities.  But when we are forced to reckon with the borders erected to keep us separated, many of us fail.  Our friendships fail. Because in reality, we know so very little about each other.  We know what we are shown and told.  We don't go deeper.  That takes work. And the work has to start by leveling the listening field.  That means we toss assumptions.

It ended as inconspicuously as it had began:  I stopped walking as she prattled on, insisting I denounce Obama.  I stayed my feet, slumped my shoulders and rolled my eyes upward, convinced.  I told her as I turned one last time, skipping backwards toward my car, "I'm not able to do this anymore.  I just wanted to walk with my friend."

I drove home disappointed.  I felt the divide between us grow as I drove away from the pithy waves bumping into the Berkeley Marina.  In my rear-view mirror I saw her face, her eyebrows raised in bewilderment.  We lost each other as she became more aware of things I'd known my whole life.  And I became more aware of my own hurt over this big society infringement on our little relationship.  I asked my friend to toss her desire to instruct me and she, for whatever reason, could not hear me.

This is too often the case with the well-intended, liberally instructed white person who mangles herself into a trope (not always white, actually).  I once asked an urban teacher-friend of mine, "Do you think the children you teach are unaware of their condition?  That they don't know their own reality?"  They've lived their conditions.  It's deep in their bones.  Your students feel insulted when outside folks, especially white folks, try to teach them about their own identities.  Why?
First, you assume your own expertise about people whom you've studied, but who are not you.   But, more than anything, it's the fact that it's you.

Ask Lisa Delpit, who has written and taught extensively about power dynamics within American classrooms.  What Delpit understands and what my friend didn't imagine, was that as a member of a community under siege (by my definition), my agency cannot come through anyone representing my oppressor. There is an automatic resistance.  The affective filter is sky high.  And in this case a justified resistance to paternalism and condescension.  And there is an unspoken knowledge within groups of color:  whenever white folks get in a room with us, they readily assume to take the lead, to talk out of turn, to direct the natives, to share their infinite wisdom.  We see this as white supremacy in action.  And because we don't speak it, out of politeness, they don't know they are fulfilling a stereotype.

It's the dynamic represented in Toni Cade Bambara's "The Lesson."  The do-gooder, come down from the mountain to save the savages from themselves.  That's the lesson.  And the instructor is a young black woman -- representing the same condescending paternalism.  It's not about teaching the students what's wrong with their world.  They know economic inequality--that's why they won't tip the taxi driver!  The students in the story had common sense and knew how to navigate their environment with agility.  They made brilliant transactions representative of what they'd lived.  They acted out on their field trip.  They didn't trust the teacher.  They didn't identify with her and were automatically resistant to what she had to say.  And they knew what she thought of them!

I couldn't understand why everyone in my workshop read that short story as a piece solely about economic inequality.  But of course, I thought.  That's the jargon of the day.  The fall back.  The easy answer that keeps us from looking more inward.  Looking inward is not easy.  It hurts.  It occurred to me to check myself one summer evening about twenty-five years ago that I carried with me biases, behaviors and a persona that I didn't think possible:

Every summer I returned from school in Atlanta to work my job at Sears Service Center.  Eight hours a day answering a phone for three summers almost blew my head off with boredom.  It was the late eighties and each summer as I returned to work, my hourly wage increased.  I was making more money than women who'd been on the job fifteen years.  I drove my dad's van to work or my super beetle--before I blew up the engine.  One day I ran out of gas.  I pulled the van to the side of the road and stepped out with my pearls (literally) and pumps and trip trapped over to some workers coming out of the strawberry fields I had to pass on my way to our house on Bluebell Place.  They wore bandanas across their faces and gloves and yellow mud caked boots and baseball caps.  Men and women.  I needed a lift and approached a woman not knowing what to say except, "Do you speak English? I need some help."

She measured me from head to toe, rolled her eyes, then said, "No." She turned to her crew and they all laughed and headed to their cars.  I wanted to cry.  I didn't know what I'd done.  But her no made me think.  A lot. I don't remember how I got home that day; but I remember my ideas about myself shifting. I will never forget that no.  My question and I represented a lifetime of experience for that woman that day. And her rejecting me meant something so deeply powerful to her, she couldn't resist it.  We crashed into each other that day in the same way my friend and I crashed so many years later walking along the Berkeley Marina.  Only today the difference is libraries and a couple decades full of work on culture and pedagogy and power and politics and resistance.

I unfortunately, didn't know how to respond other than to quit the relationship with this friend.  Walk away.  She had refused to hear me.  I saw her the other day and am very relaxed and certain in my decision.  I tried.  And remember saying, as I turned around on our walk path, "I'm not doing this again." -- A simple no to condescension, ignorance, assumption and lack of reflection on personal power.

Post Script:  I've come to appreciate the council of time and experience and friends who know all of me.  

Thanks to Miss Herbert in her Flowered House Dress

My daughter sent me a text before we came to stay in parent’s graduation accommodations:  “and btw, the bathrooms in this dorm are gender neutral.”  I thought, no big deal—until I thought more about this bathroom being more than what I still call a potty.   Showers plus toilets is what they are. 

I pressed down an adverse reaction (like I usually do), thinking, I don’t know what all the fuss is about.  I don’t know how anybody gets to be a particular age without the benefit of gaining a gender-fluid friend.  Without learning to run headlong into what at first makes them uncomfortable.  I ain’t never had a problem with what others fear or can’t quite adjust to—scared somehow their god will punish them for being kind-hearted or scared they might have to open their hearts again and again if they do it just this once (what a calamity that would be). 

I’ve been bound to different all my life.  Been taught to cry over other folk’s pain—to the extent of ignoring my own.  At six, Mama sat me and my brother in front of I Shall Fight No More Forever.  We boo hoo hooed, the sympathies of Janis Ian and Ritchie Havens compositions planted deep in the in our stereophonic memories.    

I can roll with just about anything.  Gender-neutral bathroom—ptsshh—ahhhh.  No biggie. We’ve been trans friendly! 

My first gender-non-conforming friend lived with my cousins and her name was Miss Herbert.  A family member.  Herbert talked with an intractable stutter and wore thin flowered housedresses and lived with my Aunt Mary’s whole family—(special close friend to my cousin Tanda).  Herbert’s parents threw her in the street.  There was my sweet-hearted Aunt Mary there to take her in.  Hallelujah.  The brave keep opening their hearts and their doors.  Cowards stand in their righteousness, trying to keep the world easy to understand.  Black and white.  This or that.  Most sensible folks realize everybody has to grow up eventually and accept what actually is.  Adjust.  The world is much bigger and more interesting than those Hollywood films wanted us to believe.  Most of us come to realize (when we imagine the billions of people and experiences in the world) that what we once thought was true can’t be true for everybody, neither for all time.  We get over ourselves.  We decide to be happy.  Let others be happy too. 

That was how I decided to handle my experience with gender-neutral bathrooms.  But, when physically confronted with my decision, my gut response went straight back to Mrs. Hoffmeister’s kindergarten class, in 1973, where I was taught if a boy came in the girls’ restroom—something was terribly wrong.  My eyes bucked when I saw that dark haired, middle-aged, smiling man stumble out of the bathroom stall.  “Oh, snap.”  Then I remembered.  We are here together by re-design.  Relax.  He’s not here to attack you or sneak a peak. 

“Hi!’  My hand flew up.  Awkward. 

He said hi, looked at the floor, and scurried out. 

This man and I bumped into each other in the bathroom three separate times over the weekend.  We never got over our awkwardness.  Once, I saw his leg ease out of a shower stall as I exited the restroom stall.  I turned my head and shot out of that bathroom.  My mother refused the gender-neutral shower experience altogether.  “I’ll shower in Menen’s suite.”  Mama and Miss Herbert had been good friends; but she wasn’t ready to give up her bathroom space to a man.  Gender-fluid, gender-neutral, gender-non-conforming.  Didn’t matter to Mama.  I rolled with it—doesn’t make a difference to me.  But her actions said, “That’s fine for y’all.  I’m not ready yet.” 

We all let each other decide.  We all made our own decisions.  I have to think of and thank Miss Herbert for that.  Wasn't any confusion about everyone's autonomy, nor our acceptance.  

Now, I must add:  I warned my daughter’s father (a black man) to be completely aware of the situation he was walking into.  Society is changing; many aspects of it however, remain reflexively familiar.