All the Silent Spaces

by Christine Ristaino

  “Ahoy there,” Sam said, looking at the boy with the Band-Aid.

  “Ahoy there,” he replied, and I realized I was breathing again.

  Retrogression 7:

  September 15, 2007, 10:54 p.m.

  We turn onto my street. My neighbors are all in their houses, soft lights poking through their blinds. Mark pulls into the center of our driveway. “You left no room for my . . .” I begin to say. But my car is locked shut in a parking lot, the keys in someone else’s hand.

  Chapter 7:

  Dreamy Girl

  Ada is a dreamy girl. She’s similar to me, especially when I was her age—completely in her own world, trusting, sweet. She often looks out into the distance with a smile on her face and I know something’s going on inside, but I’m never sure what. An event or thought finds itself on a page of her notebook hours later in poetic, drawing or story form: two girls sit next to each other on a bench in elegant dresses that bunch to the side; a mom pushes a shopping cart and her blue-eyed daughter skips next to her in a fanciful, colorful dress; a boy steps on a bumblebee and cries; a woman, covered in blood, lies on a cot in an ambulance.

  When she was two, Ada attended preschool three days a week. She didn’t say a word the entire year until the last day of school. But she knew how to swing for hours on the playground and she could draw her heart out, Dante’s visibile parlare. We love Ada’s dreaminess, her broad strokes of the pen, her faraway gaze. The fairies she creates with their magic dust are just what we need most of the time.

  Sam has a dreaminess, too, but it’s tied to a practical quality. “Sometimes I wish I were smaller so I could sit on the car wheel and ride it like a Ferris Wheel,” he once told me. “You could take me to school that way.” Sam’s practicality grounds him and his tree-trunk strength and stubbornness mean he can accomplish anything he sets his mind to. He dreams big, but he also knows how to avoid the pitfalls. Ada retreats into her drawings and only through them do we know she is suffering. The night in the parking lot plays out in the background of almost every drawing now.

  Shortly after the attack, I overhear my children talking about Polly Pocket, a doll that fits into even the smallest of pockets. Ada is showing Polly to Sam, holding the tiny doll in her hands.

  “And you named her Polly Pocket?” Sam asks.

  “No, the world named her Polly Pocket,” Ada responds in a dreamy voice.

  Retrogression 8:

  September 15, 2007, 10:40 p.m.

  The sound of the car engine is melodic. I can’t hold on to my thoughts long enough to resolve them—the grant application that’s due next week, Ada’s and Sam’s dental appointments, my body’s achiness, exams that need grading. I wonder if I should tell my mother about what just happened. I turn and look at my kids. They are so quiet. And Mark, he keeps taking his hand off the steering wheel and touching my shoulder.

  Chapter 8:

  Fatherhood

  “What’s happening to black men in this country?” Mark said one evening when I arrived home from work. His New Zealand accent seemed particularly strong, as it often does when he is agitated about something.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He pulled up a news story online. A University of North Carolina student, president of her class, had been shot to death by two black men after they had abducted her from her home and driven to as many ATMs as they could with her cards.

  After reading the article and acknowledging out loud what my husband hadn’t mentioned, that this could have been me or the kids a few months earlier, I commented, “Look, just as many murders are committed in this country by white men.”

  “True,” my husband said. “But if you look at the population, the proportion of white men in this country and the proportion of black men, it’s very different. A much larger percentage of black men are committing murders.”

  We looked online for some figures. Approximately the same number of white and black men committed murder in the United States in the year 2000. What didn’t match up, however, was the percentage of white people in relation to black in this country: 75 percent to 12.3 percent.

  “When is this country really going to talk about race? You are participating in two discussion groups on this topic, but do you ever talk about these things? Every day I go to school and most of my white students have a contact number for their fathers and most of my black students don’t. Where the hell are they? And if I said this to anybody but you, I’d be called a racist.”

  We went on to talk about how most black men who do commit murders kill somebody who is also black (90 percent), but the most talked about crimes, the ones that make it to the news, are when black men kill white women or men. Nicole Simpson’s blond, blond hair contrasted with the dark skin of O.J. Simpson took up two years of front-page news.

  “And the North Carolina student . . . Are the lives of black women and men any less important?” I asked.

  “I see what you mean,” my husband said. “But that doesn’t change my point. There is a problem here in the United States, and it involves the fact that black men aren’t raising their children and young black men often don’t have role models. But nobody will talk about this side of things. I agree it’s unfair but how can anything change if we are only talking about half the problem?”

  I couldn’t disagree with my husband, yet I felt uncomfortable agreeing. I was more at ease talking about black disadvantage, how slaves must have passed on an intolerably low sense of self-worth to their children, which continued to affect black people for generations. How black men were made to feel about themselves and all that followed must be taken into consideration during discussions on race. And although Mark was comfortable with the language, often agreed and understood the landscape, he could no longer passionately defend it.

  My husband had been thinking about fathers long before the kids and I were attacked. He was born in Los Angeles. His New Zealander mother had fallen in love with and married a California pharmacist, then moved to the States. When Mark was three months old, his mother moved back to New Zealand and left her husband because he had become addicted to amphetamines. Mark loves to tell how at the airport a sympathetic Marlon Brando purchased a stuffed animal for Mark’s older brother, who wouldn’t stop crying.

  In America, Mark’s father tried to remarry without ever having divorced, while in New Zealand, Mark and his brother lived in a foster home for three years. When he was four, Mark remembers looking through the car’s back window, tears rolling down his face, as his foster family receded from view and a new life with his mom, brother, and mother’s new husband began.

  At four and a half, news came that Mark’s father had died from a drug overdose. It was this idea of his father—addicted, absent, and dead—that influenced how he perceived fathers throughout his lifetime, and it was no surprise that in graduate school he wrote a three-hundred-page dissertation on the father figure in nineteenth-century American literature before he settled into his occupation as a high school English teacher.

  When I met Mark, I was living in Seattle. It was a slow seduction neither of us recognized. We were both involved in other imperfect relationships and would often talk about the dreariness of it all over a bottle of wine. The day we went to an Al Gore speech in ’91—full of hope that the young presidential front-runners, Clinton and Gore, could change the world and make the nation feel young again—was the first time I understood something could happen between us. Mark towers above me and so I gave him my hand and let him steer me through the crowd of students and faculty, almost to the front.

  It was not his New Zealand accent I admired when I first met Mark. I was attracted to his nonmainstream views of America, his cynicism about the world coupled with an optimism about what it could become.

  My husband is balding, but when I first met him, he had lots of fine, blond hair, the kind of hair nobody in my family ever has. He is tall with blue eyes. He often frowns when he is thinking. When we started dating, I would push his pati
ence, at times to the point where most people might have exploded. But Mark always came back with a cool, rational answer that considered my perspective. If he reconsidered his ideas, he told me why. If he still disagreed with me, he explained why, too. I often asked his opinion when it came to politics, religion, and many other topics.

  Mark and I left our jobs and lives in Seattle in ’95 to attend graduate school in North Carolina. During our graduate school years, we participated in open debates with our peers about presidential scandals, women’s rights, racism, literature, and freedom of speech. My husband’s views always sat to the far left.

  After graduate school, Mark began teaching sophomores and juniors at a public high school in Atlanta, Georgia. Early on he remarked, after collecting student information cards, that most black students in the class didn’t list contact information for their fathers. He had viewed this as a commentary on society’s horrible treatment of black men in the past, which had led to a terrible struggle, awful feelings of inadequacy, and low self-worth.

  Then I was attacked.

  “Do you know how much I love my students?” my husband said. “Do you know how much I want more for them? I am ready to find their fathers, grab them by the scruff of their necks, and tell them how they’re sticking it to their kids. I’m their children’s teacher. I see their sons for an hour and a half five times a week, but some students see more of me than they do their own fathers. Many of them give up. They don’t try. They say they’re victims, that they don’t have a chance. But if I let them use that as an excuse, then I’m agreeing with them, confirming they don’t. And they do. They all do. No excuses.”

  “And what about you? Did you have a chance when your father left you?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course I did,” he said.

  Retrogression 9:

  September 15, 2007, 10:30 p.m.

  Beth Orton’s “Pass in Time” quietly states, “So much stays unknown till the time you are strong.” My children are in the backseat of the car, far away. I pull down the visor and look at my eye in the mirror. Orton sings, “This time is whatever I want it to mean” and nobody else says a word.

  Chapter 9:

  Fatherhood, Take Two

  Shortly after the teacher’s strike that had landed him in jail when I was ten, my father sat us down and told us that under no circumstances were we ever to say the N-word. He described what black men and women had experienced and why the word was offensive. I don’t recall a specific event that provoked this family meeting, but I assume he had been reminded of how much he hated the word after hearing it used while he was in jail.

  More than thirty years later, I was charged with talking about the book Nigger by Randall Kennedy. The Transform Project group I led was small. In addition to four college students, our group was composed of a thirty-seven-year-old woman who worked at a hospital, my student leader, and me.

  We began by discussing how we would address the word itself in our conversation. Adrianne, a black freshman, said she had heard the word so often she felt the need to tackle it right on—use it without shame. Thirty-seven-year-old Ruth, a white woman, said she would say it, but she would understand if others didn’t. My coleader agreed with Adrianne. As a black student, James had heard the N-word too often not to say it. Ellen, a student from Japan, and Lester, a white male student, said they were okay either way. I was the only person who would have trouble saying this word. As a result of my discomfort, nobody said it for the remainder of the conversation.

  I decided to facilitate discussions for my university’s Transform Project shortly after I was attacked. Not only was I tired of answering questions about the race of my attacker, but the idea of learning something from this experience became the driving force behind my existence; if I could learn, it might not all be for nothing.

  African Americans had worked at my university since its inception, first as slaves and then as wage laborers. Although the university had been a leader in the desegregation of higher education in the South, it also had a very troubling racial past and things had come to a head during the 2003–04 academic year, when a white professor had said “a nigger in the woodpile” at a departmental faculty gathering. The fallout was explosive, further complicated when two international students showed up at a university-hosted Halloween party in blackface. The Transform Project was developed in response to the escalated tensions from these two events, which proved to be just the tip of the iceberg.

  My history with the Transform Project went back to the summer before my attack. Fortunately, when I was attacked, a support network was already in place as a result of our lunch discussions on race. When I confessed to the group I had told my children the man was probably poor and stole my purse because he needed money, a black woman said my children could extend this description to all black people. “I have a job,” she said. “I don’t steal.”

  I told my current group that when I first read Kennedy’s book, I began to cry when I realized the child’s poem “Eeny Meeny Miny Moe” originally used the line “Catch a nigger [not tiger] by the toe.” How many times had I used that rhyme to settle a dispute on the playground without ever knowing its origins? How many other offensive things had I said in ignorance during my lifetime? I probably didn’t want to know.

  As our discussion continued, I began to feel old. Having recently turned forty, I realized I was a generation ahead of most people in the room. James and I asked our group what the N-word meant to each of us. When it came to me, I responded that during my childhood the N-word was absolutely off-limits. The success of the strike my father took part in—the school instituted a maternity leave policy for teachers, allowing many women to keep their jobs after having babies—had spilled over into other justice issues. When my father saw how easy it was to talk about his beliefs with his children, how we had rallied around his decision to break the law and strike because, as he had put it, “laws were made by people and sometimes people make mistakes,” he began to tell us about other wrongs.

  I explained to the group that even when I went to college and ate lunch at a table where most of our school’s black students sat every day, I did not hear this word tossed around. Perhaps, I said, it was because I was there that the black students didn’t use the N-word, but I also assumed it was still taboo in 1985.

  My students explained that as rap music became more popular, so did the N-word. The black students in my group said they heard the N-word daily. Adrianne was sick of the N-word. James spoke of the idea of reclaiming the word, redefining it, and using it in a better way. As a child, Lester had called his father the N-word casually one day, not knowing what it meant, after hearing it at school. He remembered his father’s face, the punishment that followed, the sting of his father’s words. Yet overwhelmingly, the sentiment of my students reflected James’s desire to take back the word, a process that had already begun through the efforts of his generation.

  Our conversation flowed easily, and I forgot the tension that seemed to arrive every time I led my group through this murky territory. In the past I had always asked myself if I had been too blunt or insensitive. Did I say the right thing? Respond in the right way? Could I have offended or slighted anyone? This day I didn’t worry. We were all hearing each other, connecting. So much so that before I realized, I was recounting a conversation my husband and I recently had about his students, most of them black, fatherless men. Was there a correlation between these statistics and crime? I found myself asking my group. Just the other day, my husband had wondered if there was. The room became silent.

  I waited for the silence to diminish and when it didn’t, I said, “I don’t know what to say to my husband. I’m sure there are blind spots, but I don’t even know them. I’m blind, too. I suggested my husband go and talk to his principal. He’s African American and perhaps he could get my husband to see things in a different way. But he didn’t think it was a good idea—it would be embarrassing, racist even, to single out this one guy and assume he could be
some kind of spokesman for his race.”

  Nobody looked up. The ease of the conversation just a few minutes before had been replaced with a dull ache. I suddenly felt younger than my students. What was I, a white, Italian American woman, doing leading a discussion on race? Why did I ever think I could do this?

  We had a half an hour left when Lester looked at me and said, “What would the administrator say to your husband? He could go into his office and say, ‘Look, most of my black students don’t have fathers.’ And the administrator would look at his figures and say, ‘Yes. You’re right.’ And then what? What would he accomplish? Perhaps your husband needs to do more research. Perhaps all of the white families come from one part of town, the part with two-parent households, and the black students are from a poorer area, where, if there were white students, they would be from broken homes too.”

  True, most of the black students took the bus from a poorer area of town. Still, I didn’t feel comfortable equating poverty with single-parenthood. I thought of my husband’s comments about making his principal a representative of his race. There was always a good reason for not talking.

  I, too, resented being a representative of the short woman’s club. Friends constantly said to me, “You’ll like her. She’s short like you, has a lot of spunk, and she’s loud!” But usually this preface soured me to the meeting.

  And I had done the same thing to a gay friend one time. “You’ll love Don and Ray. They’re a great couple.”

  “Do you think I’ll like them because they’re gay?” my friend had asked me.

  Yet once, at a workshop, three short women and I were put together in a group and asked to make a list. What did we want others to understand about short people? What did we want them to stop doing?