Carry

by Toni Jensen

  I did make two friends that day in workshop, a Black woman and the white, Republican son of a wealthy Texas oil family. I learned fast that I would be surprised in this place by who would be good company. The class held mostly white, female faces, and not one of those women looked me in the eye or spoke to me, then or any time soon after.

  Later, more company arrived—queer writers and Latino and Chicano writers and another Native writer—so I had far more company than did Marie, far more voices pushing alongside mine.

  We needed each other. The next semester another white, male student wrote as his comment on one of my poems, “Stop writing the in for the moment but sure not to last Indian poems.” What I was writing, it seemed, was considered a fad, temporary, “sure not to last.” I was writing my life, as had so many generations of Métis before. So then I was, we were, temporary, a fad, “sure not to last.” How can you stay in a place if your very existence is “sure not to last”? If not for my company, I might not have stayed. If not for my company, it could have been a last-straw moment.

  The next year, yet another white, male student in workshop started writing hate stories using all of us in the class as recognizable characters. He put only the thinnest of veils around all the terrible things he thought about each of us, yet mine was the only character he killed off over and over and over again.

  The second-to-last time, the character was run over by a Ford Escort. The Ford Escort then backed up and ran over the character that was me but was not me, of course, of course. It backed up and ran over again and again and again. At the bar, after class, every time my company called me by my name, I shook my head and said, “I now only answer to the name Ford Escort.” I drank plenty that night, despite not having bought a single drink.

  In the weeks after, they called me “Ford Escort” in the halls. They maybe said it too loud because the next story from this writer was a different sort of story, a domestic violence sort of story, featuring my character tied to a chair, a man holding to her head a gun.

  The land on which that university sits was for so many years land lived on and fought over by Apache and Comanche people, who still live there, of course, just not in such numbers. We were all of us visitors. We were all of us invaders—though some more than others.

  “Why—” my friend Marcus asked in that workshop, “why do you think you can do that to her?” He clipped the ends of his words, so that it sounded like someone snapping a towel. I admired how he could do this—make spoken language sound dangerous. I admired the level of control.

  “It’s a character,” said another white man.

  Marcus let out a sound like a hiss, like a deflating balloon or a coiled snake, and the writer began to laugh.

  The writer’s laugh was not believable as humor or comedy, and it went on much too long. I felt such anger but also a little sorry for him, for how long everyone held the silence, after.

  It was in that same workshop where I learned how to shut down these men. When we arrived to class one day, the same white man who told me to stop writing my “sure not to last” poems had written a story set in Mexico City, in the garbage dumps. Locally, the people there sometimes are called Garbage Dump Dwellers, so they are known by location and also for their ingenuity—for making homes and a meager living through recycling everyone else’s garbage. In this man’s story, the people who lived there ate with bare hands after sorting through garbage, their faces were filthy, and their movements were described like those of animals.

  It is not that difficult to see more variety in the people if you are looking. A quick Google search, for example, provides images of men wearing gloves and cowboy hats, children who work and also play, mothers who make meals from what they find.

  One friend in the class, the only Mexican American person in the class, was so angry his voice shook when he told the writer, “They’re like animals. You’ve made them like animals.”

  “I’ve been there,” the writer said, “with my church group. This is how they live.”

  His words were answered with a chorus of “They” and “Who are you calling—” and each voice shouting over the next.

  There are so many ways this place, this South, was and is bad for me, but this day also—like you’re supposed to in graduate school—I learned.

  “What if the kid,” I said. To be heard, I had to pause a moment, to wave my arms around like I was perhaps trying to fly. “What if the kid had a toy?”

  Everyone looked at me like I was a crazy person. The thought was clear in all their eyes, their expressions. Why was I talking about toys when, clearly, we had a racist among us, or why was I talking about toys when we had an accusation of racism hanging above us, beneath us, in between us?

  But then everyone quieted.

  “If the kid had a toy,” I said, “we’d see him playing with it. He’s a person then, doing person things.”

  A few people nodded, but most still looked doubtful.

  “People throw out toys all the time,” I said. “It’s plausible.”

  “What if the mother had a flower,” I said, “just one flower—plastic or cloth or whatever—just one beautiful thing?”

  My friend looked at me now like maybe I wasn’t crazy. The writer still shook his head, but he had stopped talking.

  “Stereotypes are bad because they’re lazy writing,” I said. “I don’t believe this story because I don’t believe the characters. I don’t believe the characters because there’s no teddy bear, no flower, nothing beautiful.”

  “It’s a little boring,” I said, “when everything’s so ugly in a predictable way.”

  The writer, of course, looked like he wanted his friend to resurrect the Ford Escort, but the writer also was not arguing. The professor agreed with me, and we moved on to the next story.

  After, I was shaky but also not sorry. I had gone into that class thinking I already was a teacher, but I left knowing I hadn’t been one before. You can’t teach racists to be less racist by calling them what they are. They remain unbothered by insinuation or even direct accusations of racism, but they are not fine with being told their writing is bad.

  The commonality in workshop, then, sometimes is not common humanity—it’s a desire to write better. In the South, I decided thereafter I would foreground every workshop I led with talk of how stereotypes are harmful, yes—and also how they’re indicators of bad writing. I would shut down these men and, yes, sometimes also women, before they had a chance to begin, before they could begin to harm.

  That day is the how and why of earning Marie’s trust. That day is the how and why I don’t quit.

  My friend, that semester in Texas, the lone Mexican American student in the class, would not come back to workshop, after. He finishes the class as an independent study with the professor. I imagine everyone in that class passed, as per Webster’s definition number four: “to give approval or a passing grade to.” My friend goes on to finish his degree, to publish another book, to teach writing at a university. He doesn’t quit, either, and I respect his choices, but that semester, I greatly missed his company as cost to his passing.

  III.

  That first year, my first rental house in Lubbock had been rented before me by a man who dealt drugs. It was a small, tidy one-bedroom house, a neat square built on a slab in the middle of a neighborhood everyone I met said I should leave.

  It was and remains true that this neighborhood has one of the highest crime rates in Lubbock, which has one of the highest crime rates, per capita, in the nation. The crime rate there, overall, is 69 percent higher than the national average. Only 9 percent of cities in the country are considered less safe.

  In that neighborhood, when I walked the dogs, I spent our time avoiding needles on the ground and eye contact in general. It was good practice, perhaps, learning to look clear-eyed into the middle dista
nce. I grew more and more practiced, more and more comfortable. I didn’t want to leave—the tidy house or the cheap rent, the neighbors who got my mail when I travelled, whose children called me by name and petted my dogs and laughed loud in their backyards.

  Judging by the customers who knocked on my door after dark, after the neighbors’ lights had gone out, I would guess the previous tenant dealt pot, mostly, but also crank or meth or speed. The men who wanted crank made me the most grateful for my dogs—for Jack, whose giant Chow/Newfoundland head held crazy eyes; for Lucy, who watched and waited with a husky’s patience.

  Huskies generally pass for polite or curious or well-mannered around those who don’t understand dogs. Our neighborhood was all pit bulls and Chihuahuas. Lubbock is all chain link, dirt yard, Chihuahua and pit bull. Even the tweakers seemed cowed by the surprise—nearly 150 pounds of long, black fur between the two dogs. No one came knocking twice.

  I never had much hassle from the men who came to the door. Still, I cited them when I explained my move to the house in the country. I cited them or the night at the bar after workshop when a familiar house came on the TV, on the local news. It was a meth lab. It had blown up. It had sat a block and a half from my house.

  Really, though, I could have moved anywhere in town, but I chose the country. Those boys in workshop—the ones I’ve been calling men—they had as much to do with the move to the country as did the ones who showed up late at night, shaking and glassy-eyed, asking if I knew what had happened to Brett. They called me ma’am sometimes, the younger ones. They said they were sorry to have bothered me.

  Though I had earned some grudging respect with my writing and my thoughts on their writing, none of the workshop boys ever said they were sorry to have bothered me. They were calculated in their bothering. They were not sorry. They wanted me to evacuate the house of workshop like I did the one-bedroom.

  The country house sat on an acreage, a cotton farm, an hour’s drive east of campus, of town, and it seemed most days almost far enough. Out the kitchen window, I had a view of Blanco Canyon, which sits at the edge of the Llano Estacado, a region of stark cliff faces and rolling slopes in all shades of red and brown, dotted with the green of yucca and tall grass. West Texas, as it turned out, was not entirely brown and flat.

  Locals often told stories of how their families came to live in the region in early years—how their people were just passing through but decided to stay because of the wind, the sandstorms, tornadoes. This version of history, of course, ignores how many people already lived there. Webster’s third definition for pass is “3a: to go across, over, or through: CROSS” or “b: to live through (something, such as an experience or peril): UNDERGO.”

  I crossed out of Lubbock and into the house at the canyon and into happiness. The house came complete with a giant red-headed woodpecker, who pecked just outside my office window, and an elderly landlady who drove out from Lubbock after church on Sundays to tend the trees she’d planted, dozen upon dozen upon dozen.

  She brought pizza or fried chicken. Either came with those wedge potatoes that never are cooked all the way through. She brought her granddaughter and sometimes her daughter or husband. I ate the potatoes and drank the Pepsi. I learned about the region, about how hard it was to farm there with so little rain. We planted a garden together that first spring—cherry tomatoes and all manner of peppers and row upon row of okra.

  In this way, I made a life there in my first attempt at the South. I had my company out for hikes and dinners, an occasional party. I wrote the draft of my first book while the woodpecker worked alongside me, providing rhythm and an example.

  In the end, then, because the workshop boys ran me out of town, I was able to stay. I drove the hour to workshop grateful to be going and grateful to be returning. In between, I passed a historical marker that bragged about “the eradication of the Indian menace” in the region. It became part of the day-to-day, passing that sign, thinking, not quite. That’s how I stayed—good company and not quite, fried chicken and overgrown okra, Blanco Canyon and the way the sun set into it. It’s the dust in West Texas that makes the sunsets so stunning—how it never leaves the air entirely, how the rain doesn’t come to wash it away, how it lasts.

  IV.

  I’ve been a student or a teacher for so many years in this region we call the South. I’ve worked so hard to make the four walls of my classroom a place where all the Maries are welcome, where all the Marcuses know they can ask the question, where all conversations are possible, where everyone knows where we are—the limitations of it, alongside the possibilities.

  In my neighborhood, just off the Trail of Tears, the day after the last day of class, I’m writing at my desk when I see a familiar motion in the yard. The backyard woodpecker on the fence post out the window is so much smaller than the one in Texas that, to make sure, I have to crack the window, to listen for the sound it makes while it works. Since I’m already on a break, I walk the dogs around the block to see if we’re flooding, to see whose yards or houses have taken on water. That’s how I think of it now, this place—a we rather than an it. I’ve acclimated far enough to feel a measure of belonging.

  But how much of that is on account of my ability to pass? How much grace is it possible to give others when you move through the world with more than a small measure of safety—when this is safety you own but have not bought?

  Where my family is from, where some Métis are from, on the southern prairies of Canada, we were once known as Road Allowance People. Between 1885 and 1945, Métis got this name after the Canadian government decided to dissolve our land base, to sell 160 acres for $160 through scrip certificates, which were easy enough to forge or transfer, which were often forged or transferred through impersonation. If Métis sometimes could pass for white, whites could sometimes pass for Métis. They could sometimes steal our land through this passing.

  Without a land base, some Métis became squatters on our own land, became Road Allowance People. We lived in shacks made from logs or leftover lumber, covered rough with tar paper, not much different than the homes of the Garbage Dump Dwellers. We lived like this through prairie winters.

  Back in my neighborhood in Arkansas, the water has flooded the street and the sidewalk as the dogs and I round the corner. This walking route also sometimes becomes the driving route when the main street is blocked by the police, when the mentally ill son of a neighbor threatens his father with a gun.

  Across the field a crow pecks at a full, intact pineapple washed up through the drainage system and landed here at the intersection. A neighbor pushes mud from her sidewalk with a wide broom across the street and into the drainage opening by my yard. “There’s mud on the sidewalk,” she says, shaking her head, but no word on the pineapple lying a few yards behind her.

  I know the South is not the only place capable of irony, capable of rough treatment, of racism and threatened violence and worse. I know I have spent so much time considering the safety of my students within my classroom walls, but I have not considered enough the limitations of this place, of this South, of this history, outside my classroom walls, outside my own defining of it.

  I know my own passing to be a complicated crossing.

  Contagion

  I.

  The Walmart shelves stand emptied of all paper towels and toilet paper, all canned goods, save for six lone cans of cannellini beans. It’s March 2020 in Arkansas, and this Friday, my last day before I begin social distancing, I go to one Walmart, my fiancé to another across town. He reports there’s no toilet paper there either, but the gun section holds a cluster of men, waiting for the cashier to return.

  According to Webster’s, cluster can mean many things, including “to collect into a cluster,” “an aggregation of stars or galaxies that appear close together in the sky and are gravitationally associated,” and “a larger than expected number of cases of disease (su
ch as leukemia) occurring in a particular locality, group of people, or period of time.”

  After Walmart, I go to my hair appointment. My hairdresser makes a string of what she thinks are funny jokes about how no one’s eating at Meiji, which is a Japanese restaurant in town. It’s my favorite restaurant in town. She clarifies several times that she hasn’t, you know, really been in the mood for Chinese food lately.

  It’s possible, then, the cannellini beans are left on the shelf because cannellini is an Italian word, because people here and everywhere in this, our America really are that terrible, really are this odd mix of dismissive toward and terrified of this newest contagion, coronavirus or COVID-19.

  My hairdresser keeps saying, “You know,” and I keep giving her my blank face, and she keeps saying, “No one wants Chinese food right now,” and I feel unprepared for this conversation, for explaining how Japanese and Chinese are not actually the same, for explaining racism right now. I’m so rarely surprised into silence, but I am. I’ve known her two years but apparently have not, not really. I’m also unprepared for walking out with chemicals on my head, with foil strips and color mid-process. I’m so rarely quiet, but I don’t say anything, not one word, and she finally grows quiet, our soundtrack thereafter becoming the metallic click of foil meeting foil.

  * * *

  —

  Before this coronavirus contagion, we were, a good many of us, talking about the contagion of gun violence. Now, too, after George Floyd’s death and the subsequent uprisings across the country, police gun violence more and more is part of the day-to-day conversation. Even before the coronavirus or the uprisings across America, though, members of the media began, in summer 2019, to talk about gun violence as potentially contagious.