“But, Ada, none of us knew what to do.”
“But I could have poked his eyes out. He was hurting you and I just watched.”
My daughter begins to cry and in the rearview mirror I see Samuel practicing his karate moves on her leg.
“Sam!” I warn as I reach my arm back and grab one of Ada’s hands.
“You were there for me. You and Sam hugged me. You made me feel loved and protected. Now Samuel’s learning karate and you and I do aikido. If this ever happens again, we’ll be ready.”
When we arrive home, I tell Mark about our conversation. Later I find him and Ada talking in her room, Mark’s legs stretched lengthwise on the bed, his feet hanging over the edge. I can see Ada’s blond hair and my husband’s bald head on the pillow.
“I felt helpless, too,” he says. “I wish so much I could have been there to protect you, but I wasn’t with you. Over and over again I ask myself, ‘Why wasn’t I there?’ But I wasn’t and I have to accept that.”
I don’t enter the room. It’s dusk and I need to make lunches. There’s school tomorrow.
Retrogression 32:
September 15, 2007, 7:02 p.m.
A hand shoots toward my eye, blackness, agonizing, spots of light, the way I imagine cartoon stars to be. I jerk, let go of the cart, and fall. The back of my head hits the ground.
Chapter 32:
Relocated Yankees
My aunt and uncle moved from Massachusetts to Augusta, Georgia, in the late fifties, and as a child I heard stories about their trip. It seemed a foreign land and a different time. They described their experiences in the South—different water fountains, bathrooms, and rules for African Americans and whites.
“Things were so bad there,” my uncle Art once said, “that President Eisenhower had to come down South and personally try to set things right.”
Aunt Mary talked about her experience in 1956 working at a hospital where correspondence from local white farmers to other whites was often written at a fourth-grade level.
Aunt Mary’s closest friend from Augusta was well-mannered and kind to my aunt. At the end of their stay in Georgia, Aunt Mary waited for an elevator with her friend on a spring day. When a black man walked in front of her friend and got into the elevator first, this dignified, polite woman used words Aunt Mary doesn’t care to repeat.
“She was a cute girl,” my aunt said, “and did she have manners. I loved her. Then, one day I was waiting for an elevator and this happened. I wondered, ‘Who is this woman and where did my sweet friend go?’ In the South I never felt completely at home, all these rules I didn’t understand, and the southerners liked and hated us northerners at the same time. They often said to your uncle and me, of course with a smile on their faces, ‘You Yankees are like hemorrhoids. You come down here. You won’t go back up. And you’re all a pain in the ass.’”
Years later, I, too, made my trek to the South to take up residence, as Aunt Mary and Uncle Art had, but in different times. In Atlanta, because I worked at a university that was exploring its past, I often had the opportunity to talk about the unfavorable conditions of the South, the segregation my aunt and uncle had witnessed firsthand. One discussion occurred a few years after my attack, when I was participating in the Transform Faculty Seminar. The seminar was set up to give faculty the tools to discuss and explore race at a university setting. The main focus of the workshop was the university’s history with race. The university was originally located forty miles away in a small town in Georgia, and on the third day of the workshop, we boarded a bus and went there.
My favorite part of this visit involved a conversation with T.J. Mannor, Jr., who arrived unceremoniously into this world in 1936. T.J.’s grandfather was born around 1837 in Alabama. According to T.J., his grandfather and his grandfather’s brother were brought to campus as enslaved children. As an adult, his grandfather was a rock mason and his grandfather’s brother, a brick mason. Both brothers provided free labor to help build the town, which included an old church, now a historical treasure.
We heard from anthropologist Joseph Land, who had explored the town’s history with his students through various partnerships with the community. He spoke of how when his class began to interview local citizens, they were reticent to speak. Nevertheless, because of their work together, the two communities became more and more comfortable with each other.
One project stands out for me. A segregated cemetery has existed in this town for over a century. The white section of the city cemetery has always been maintained and manicured, but the African American portion was once overgrown with weeds and underbrush. There had also been a clear cut by a pulpwood merchant around 1990 that only affected the black section of the cemetery, damaging many of the headstones. The students learned of this problem from the local black community, and in collaboration with its members, began working at the cemetery to unearth the gravestones and beautify the land. The most surprising gardener was a Vietnam veteran, somewhat of a loner, who, after learning about the project, became an avid participant. Through his work with students and local African Americans, he found his way back into the community. When he developed pancreatic cancer a year into the project, it was the black community and a handful of students who spent his final days with him.
At around the same time as the cemetery project, students also created an oral history of the town’s black inhabitants. Joseph Land told us about Cecelia Smith, who felt extremely uncomfortable revealing personal details about her experiences as a black woman. But one day she did open up, quite surprisingly, during the most mundane of demonstrations.
The students were at her house. Ms. Smith showed them how at nine years old she had ironed the clothes of white men and women from the area. “Back and forth, back and forth,” Joseph remembered her saying. And then she said something they almost didn’t catch. “When you ironed a white garment and there was a crease that just wouldn’t iron down, that’s how you knew.”
One of Joseph’s students blanched.
Another student asked, “Knew what?”
“Think about it,” she told them. “When you ironed and ironed, but you couldn’t iron away a crease.”
They imagined Klansmen, burning crosses, and white, pointy hoods, the type of point impossible to iron away.
“You think of the Klan as a secret society, but they had servants and they had to get their clothes cleaned, too. And who do you think did these things for them?” Joseph asked us. “So there were moments like that when my students were stunned at what they learned.”
In the afternoon, we had a chance to talk with Margaret Ashton, an associate professor of history. Margaret spoke about two historical figures at the university, Atticus Greene Haygood, who was elected president of the Board of Trustees in 1875, and Andrew Sledd, a turn-of-the-century professor. Both men were controversial figures. Sledd wrote an essay for the Atlantic Monthly denouncing lynching. Haygood supported full citizenship of former slaves and the idea of harmony between the races. However, both men, when writing about their ideas, which were quite progressive for the time, peppered their thoughts with the common beliefs held in the Old South, such as the idea that blacks belonged to an inferior race.
At a certain point I commented, “When I read these two men, I wonder what they really thought. I wonder if they had to work within the codes of the time in order to obtain a certain readership, to protect themselves and their jobs, or to get people to listen to them. Maybe little by little they had hoped to change people.”
Margaret looked at me and paused. I could tell she was struggling to find the right words. “I can’t go there,” she finally said. “I don’t feel like making assumptions that aren’t on the page. Yes, they were progressive, but there are things I can’t really forget.”
Margaret’s comments sobered me. There were so many issues I had glossed over during my lifetime, so many things I had wanted to forget.
At the end of our visit, we were asked to create a list of assumpti
ons we had held before the workshop, ideas we wished to let go of, bury. Optimism, I wrote. It had always been my coping mechanism. But how could racism, violence, rape, abuse, any of this, be viewed through an optimistic lens? Perhaps I could still be optimistic about the future, while keeping a more realistic understanding of the past. I would try. I buried my old approach to life under a tree with the others and boarded the bus.
Retrogression 33:
September 15, 2007, 7:01 p.m. and 43 seconds
The man has my purse in both hands and tugs harder at it now. We lock eyes. “You’re a prick,” I say.
Chapter 33:
Missed Opportunities
“Every child should take Omega 3,” our pediatrician had said to my husband and me; so I was in the health food store during a cold rainstorm buying fish oil for an astronomical price.
The health food store had a spicy warmth about it that enraptured me. I could stay here all day looking at the wonder products and how they would improve my life, I thought. I walked by a woman with braided black hair, light brown skin, and a bright yellow dress that illuminated her face. I smiled at her. “How are you?” I said.
“What do you care how I am?” she asked as she picked up a product off the shelf and put it into her basket. “Sometimes people say things they don’t mean.”
I can’t tell you her words didn’t sting or that after she walked away, I didn’t cry. I did; but I managed to say before skulking off to a less-trafficked area of the store, “How do you know I didn’t mean it? I really did.”
I had meant it. I wanted her smile to lift me up as her brightly colored clothes had. That deep yellow had beckoned me to make a connection, to comment on the crappy, rainy day we were having and how the warmth of the health food store and spicy smells enveloped us, made us smile at strangers and ask them how they were.
Shortly after the attack, I was driving my son home from school and we were stopped at a red light. My son wanted Cheerios so I reached back to hand him some. The next thing I knew, I had tapped the car in front of us with my bumper. A black man jumped out of his car before I even registered what had happened. I opened my door.
“I’m sorry,” I said to him. “I was giving my son Cheerios and my foot must have let up on the brake.”
The man didn’t say a word, just stared at me as though I had killed his best friend. He inspected his vehicle, looked at me again, and then walked slowly to his car door. I wanted to ask him if he was angry about the bumper or something much less obvious. By now the red light had changed to green and he drove away.
A colleague sued my department because she hadn’t been compensated well for a project. When Arlene did this, I couldn’t believe she would ask for so much money when nobody else involved in the project had been paid a cent. Academics research for the love of their work, right?
“Is this how the daughter of a man who went to jail for his beliefs behaves? Would your father be proud of you now?” she had asked when I failed to understand her rationale.
Eleven months later another colleague accused two policemen of racial profiling when they pulled him over on his bicycle for not having a taillight. Years before, he had been blindsided by the gun of an undercover cop, who thought he was stealing his father’s car, and also arrested for no good reason while walking to a bus stop. These two events set him up to be wary of the police, to protest for civil rights, and to recognize racial profiling almost before it happens. Talking with this friend helped me understand both his and Arlene’s actions. Despite the many risks they took, both colleagues were hoping to change a system that wasn’t fair to begin with.
One weekend toward the end of spring, the children, Mark, and I went to Fort Mountain in North Georgia with twelve Unitarian Universalist families. It was a beautiful day and as we descended a tree-covered hill, we spotted a lake with a beach in front of us.
My children were fully clothed—pants, shoes, socks, underwear, long-sleeved shirts. They began to take off their shoes and socks before we even arrived at the beach, and within moments, my children, clothes and all, were in the water, pushing off the sandy floor with their toes, gliding into the cold lake, coming up for air, floating, wiggling, touching hands for a moment, opening their mouths, laughing, exploring every inch of the bottom. Most of the other children stood looking at mine and then at their parents for permission to join them, but my children hadn’t asked. I stood watching them, proud of their recklessness, amazed by their desire to experience everything so completely. I wanted to join them, fully clothed, but stood on the sidelines with the others.
I have spent years admiring my brothers from a distance. They are artists, writers, actors. They are kind, humble, outgoing, shy. What always strikes me when I see them is how they know exactly who they are. Their voices seem to inhabit their bodies and their true selves spill out into everything they do. I long to ask them how this is possible, how they do it, but usually, in their presence I feel like their groupie, a teenager standing quietly next to the boy band she loves. I try to decide if this tongue-tiedness is a missed opportunity, a failure to communicate with them fully, or if this state is simply the result of the opportunity I had to grow up with people I admire. When I think about my childhood, if I go back far enough, I realize they don’t entirely know me. I’ve never been completely honest with them about my experiences.
My niece Charlotte lives who she is. She expresses herself beautifully—in person, on canvas, through narrative. When reading her stories, I realize Charlotte and I are both grappling with how to best be ourselves, only from different stages of our lives, for I am a forty-two-year-old woman and she is fifteen.
Charlotte’s parents, Cooper and Olivia, are both from New Zealand, and they are grounded, attractive, real. Cooper is a pathologist and after spending the day with dead people, likes to come home, have a glass of wine, and talk about books, music, art, photography. He is a fabulous photographer. One of his best photos is of Charlotte wearing a tribal mask swinging on a tire from a tall tree in their backyard.
Olivia has a business called “Bold Girls” and Charlotte used to model sleek, sparkly girl-power skirts, capes, and crowns for Olivia’s website until she became a teenager. The message behind Olivia’s designs: dress up as your boldest, most wonderful self, not as somebody else. Olivia stands under a Bold Girl sign on her website, in red, red lipstick, large earrings, and a black shirt with red trim. “Every Girl is a Bold Girl!” she says. Olivia tells us how observing a three-year-old Charlotte, a girl who swung to the highest reaches of the earth on her wooden swing, who dressed up in skirts and capes and became anyone she wanted, and whose books brought her to faraway places every day, inspired her to start a business. Even at three, Charlotte knew who she was, infinitely aware of possibility.
Charlotte is a fencer and her coach is an Olympic coach, the type you always hear about—strict, personable, explosive, demanding. He loves Charlotte and is grooming her for the 2012 Olympic games.
The day I finally went to a fencing match, I had been babysitting a friend’s son for the weekend. He was at my house when I left, but I went anyway since every time Charlotte mentioned her competitions there was always some kind of conflict—a birthday party, a work obligation, dishwasher repairman, exhaustion—two years of missed opportunities. I felt credibility slipping each time I told her I really did want to go.
“Shit,” I said when I realized there was yet another conflict.
“It’s fine,” my husband told me. “I’m okay with the kids.”
So on the day of the match, I left my house, climbed into my car, and drove the twenty miles or so to her gym.
It was a quiet Sunday afternoon. The highways were still dark from a fresh rain. I could see trees on the side of the road and the rain made me believe the air in Atlanta was fresh and clean, as though I should take in large, full breaths.
As I entered the gym, I felt an energy not much different from that of high school swim meets long ago. I didn’t see Charlott
e when I first arrived, just lots of high school girls and boys in slick, blue fencing uniforms. They talked, laughed, and ate bagels from a table in the center of the foyer. I walked past a long stretch of offices and moved into a clearing filled with mats and fencers. My brother-in-law was on a mat in front of me, keeping score for a match between two older boys. He nodded at me and continued his work. Charlotte was over to the side, involved in a conversation with two teenage girls. She was beautiful—tall with long, blond hair, clear skin, and animated blue eyes. She stood gracefully, falling easily into conversation. I could see her smile, gesture, lean intently to listen, think for a moment, respond.
I looked up at the warehouse ceiling and spotted old banners announcing the Olympic debut of two girls from the gym. I had watched them on television as they stood on the podium wearing third-place team medals. Charlotte was almost as good as they were, I remembered Cooper telling me. I thought of Charlotte leaving us, heading to a foreign country in less than four years to fence as an Olympic athlete, and tears filled my eyes. This place was part of Charlotte, a place that, until today, I had never experienced with her. I wiped my tears and fresh ones replaced them. Then I wiped those away, too.
I sat alone on bleachers and took in the action around me. When we first moved to Atlanta, my husband and I had spent afternoons with Charlotte in the city center eating ice-cream cones, at Six Flags amusement parks, at bookstores. But after my children were born, we stopped bringing Charlotte out. I missed these afternoons with her.
Charlotte looked up, saw me, began to walk in my direction, and I put my hand on her arm when she arrived. I will come to all her competitions from now on, I thought. But then I remembered, life has a way of changing things just when we feel we’re in control, and I revised my plan—well maybe some of them. I hugged Charlotte and then Cooper was standing next to us, too, and there was a man with a Ukrainian accent, white hair, self-assured, wearing a blue Olympic jacket over a white shirt, walking in our direction, his hand outstretched.
All the Silent Spaces Page 11