Caste

by Isabel Wilkerson

  She pushed the bowl of pasta to the center of the table. “The pasta’s cold,” she said. “I can’t even eat it. Her fish is cold. She can’t eat hers. I’m not paying, we’re not paying. I’m telling everybody I know not to come here. This is crap.”

  With all of the ruckus, the manager came out to see what was going on. As it happened, the manager was a petite African-American woman, who seemed cowed by the ferocity of this newly minted anti-racist, anti-casteist, upper-caste woman, standing before her enraged at the unaccustomed humiliation. The manager apologized profusely, but my friend was having none of it.

  She stormed out of the restaurant, and I walked out with her. It took a while for her to calm down.

  Part of me wanted to say to her, “Imagine going through something like this almost every day, not knowing when or how it might happen. You wouldn’t last very long. We can’t afford to be blowing up every time we’re slighted and ignored. We stand up when we need to, but we have to find a way not to go off every time and still get through the day.”

  Part of me resented that she could go ballistic and get away with it when I might not even be believed. It was caste privilege to go off in the restaurant the way she did. It was a measure of how differently we are treated that she could live for over forty years and not experience what is a daily possibility for any person born to the subordinate caste, that it was so alien to her, it so jangled her, that she blew up over it.

  But part of me wished that every person in the dominant caste who denies and deflects, minimizes and gaslights African-Americans and other marginalized people could experience what she did. She had been radicalized in a matter of minutes. She knew full well that this was not how people treated her when she was out with others in the dominant caste. She had come to the realization on her own.

  And part of me, the biggest part of me, was happy to see her righteous indignation on my behalf, on her own behalf, and on behalf of all the people who endure these indignities every day. It would be a better world if everyone could feel what she felt for once, and awaken.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The Heart Is the Last Frontier

  December 2016, One Month After the Election

  He smelled of beer and tobacco. He was wearing a cap like the men at the rallies who wanted to make America great again, the people who had prevailed in the election the month before. His belly extended over his belt buckle. The years had carved lines into his face, and stubble was poking through his chin and cheeks. He let out a phlegmy cough.

  I had called the plumbing company because I had discovered water in the basement, and he was the one they sent. He was standing at the threshold of my front door and seemed not to have expected someone who looked like me to answer. It’s a predominantly white neighborhood, with joggers and cyclists and purposeful moms in yoga sweats pushing baby strollers, ponytails bouncing, maybe a labradoodle trotting behind. Landscapers’ trucks and housekeeping crews squeeze past each other on every side street. I was used to that reaction.

  “Is the lady of the house at home?” a leafleteer or survey-taker will ask me—the only lady in sight, standing right there in front of them. The assumption doesn’t inspire me to indulge them. I could correct them if I wanted, and they might try to play it off, or I could just spare them the embarrassment.

  “No, she’s not here,” I’ll say. They never press me, never seem to suspect.

  “Do you know when she’ll be back?”

  “No, no, I don’t,” I’ll say. “Who shall I say is calling?” They will hand me a card or a flyer, and I will give it a glance as they go on their way.

  So the plumber checked to see if this was, in fact, the right house, then walked in with a let’s-get-this-over-with look on his face. “Where’s the basement?”

  I was reliant on this man and others like him, now that I was both widowed and motherless, having lost the two most important people in my life within a span of eighteen months. I was having to depend on contractors to fix things in this house, people who might resent me for being here and might or might not be inclined to help me or even to do their job. And now the air had shifted after the election.

  He followed me into the basement and stood there as I moved boxes to make space for him to better inspect it. I moved my mother’s portable wheelchair, the one she would not be needing anymore, and a lampshade, stacks of my late father’s engineering books, and an old bucket, as the plumber watched, never reaching over to help. I began sweeping water toward the sump pump as he looked down at the wet floor.

  I told him that there had been three or four inches of water, that the HVAC man had helped get the sump pump restarted to drain most of the water out, that this had never happened before.

  “I hardly ever come into the basement,” I told him. “We had that drought, so I didn’t think about water in the basement. My husband was the one who came down here.” He was the one who checked the filter on the furnace, checked the fuse box, patched things in his workshop, which was exactly as he had left it, the sawhorse and drill bits untouched from whenever he’d last come down to fix something before he died. He died last year, I told the plumber. The magnitude of that statement seemed not to register. The plumber just shrugged and said uh-huh.

  I was sweeping the water with him standing there, and I was remembering what had happened in the last week. I had been trying to get as far away from the grief as I could over the holidays. I would have left the planet if that had been an option, but that was not yet possible, so I had planned the next best, most convenient recourse to detach from the gravity of loss, which was a ticket to Buenos Aires. I had never been to Buenos Aires, so there were no memories to surface there, nothing to make me think of having seen or done this or that with anyone I had lost. As I was preparing to go, the HVAC contractor arrived for the semiannual check of the furnace and discovered water in the basement. He was an immigrant from Central America, and, though it was not his job, he helped to drain it as best he could.

  * * *

  ——

  The plumber was now surveying the boxes and stepped around a few of them, knocking a lampshade and wreath to the wet floor and not reaching over to pick them up. I kept sweeping. It appeared as if there was nothing further for him to do, or at least I would say he wasn’t doing anything.

  He pointed to the sink. “That’s where the water is coming in,” he said, looking to wrap this up.

  “But the sink’s never overflowed before,” I said. “It had to be more than that.”

  “How long’s it been since the water came?”

  “Maybe since the rains last week. There’s a drain here somewhere. I wonder if it’s clogged.”

  I started moving boxes and was feeling more alone with him just standing there. I lifted a heavy box, and he watched, made no gesture to help. He merely said, “You got that?”

  I had moved enough boxes to see where I thought the drain would be and still didn’t locate it. It seemed this should be part of the troubleshooting, but he showed no interest.

  “Maybe it’s the sump pump?” I asked.

  He went to look at it. “Nothing wrong with the sump pump,” he said.

  I now noticed packing popcorn floating in it. “Could that have kept the sump pump from working?”

  “No,” he said, “but the sump pump needs clearing out, though.”

  Why was he not doing that? Wasn’t that what he was here for?

  Instead he offered to write an estimate for a new one. But why buy a new pump if this one was working? I had called him in to fix whatever caused the water to build up. Since he’d arrived, I was the one sweeping water, moving boxes, searching for the drain. He was doing less than the HVAC guy had done.

  I was steaming now. All he was doing was standing there watching me sweep (as women who look like me have done for centuries) and not fixing anything. He had come up with no a
nswers, shown no interest, and now it appeared I was going to have to pay him for doing nothing.

  Since he wasn’t helping, I felt I had nothing to lose. Something came over me, and I threw a Hail Mary at his humanity.

  “My mother just died last week,” I told him. “Is your mother still alive?”

  He looked down at the wet floor. “No…no, she isn’t.”

  Somehow I had sensed that already, which is why I brought it up.

  “She died in 1991,” he said. “She was fifty-two years old.”

  “That’s not old at all,” I said.

  “No, she wasn’t. My father’s still alive, he’s seventy-eight. He’s in a home south of here. My sister lives nearby to him.”

  “You’re lucky to still have your father,” I said.

  “Well, he’s mean as they come.”

  I contemplated the significance of that. What might his father have exposed him to when it comes to people who look like me? But I kept it to the present.

  “You miss them when they’re gone no matter what they were like,” I said.

  “How about your mother?” he wanted to know. “How old was she?”

  “She was way older than yours, so I can’t complain about that. But she was sick a long time. And you never get over it.”

  “I have an aunt in her eighties who still smokes and will ask you for a taste of beer,” he said and let slip a laugh. “She’s on my daddy’s side.”

  I smiled and tried to look at the positive. “So your father’s side is long-lived,” I said.

  “Yeah. I guess they are.”

  His face brightened, and he went over to the sump pump, bent down, and reached into it. A minute or two later, he stood up.

  “Okay, sump pump’s cleared out.”

  He turned to the area where the drain was likely to be.

  “It’s probably under this coffee table,” he said. “If you get one end, we can move it and see where it is.”

  Together, we moved the table and, sure enough, there was the drain.

  “Drain’s not clogged, so that’s not the problem,” he said. “Lemme go get my flashlight out of the truck.”

  Once back, he trained the flashlight along the floor, inspecting the perimeter of the basement, past the sink and the washer and dryer hemmed in with boxes, past the sawhorse, along the base of the furnace, every corner up and down.

  “I found it!” he said, jubilant.

  I ran over to him. “What was it?”

  “It’s the water heater. Water heater’s gone bad.”

  He shone the flashlight onto the top of the heater, onto the corroded pipes and the steam rising from the gaps. Water had been escaping from the broken heater and had risen into a low flood on the basement floor, which explained why the floodwater was clear and why my water bill was high.

  I stepped back in relief. “I knew it had to be more than the rain.”

  “You’ll need a new water heater. This one’s gone.”

  How different things had been just minutes before. “My mother must’ve been talking to your mother,” I said, “and telling her to get her boy to help her girl down there. ‘My daughter needs your son’s help.’ ”

  We smiled at the thought of that. He shut off the water to the heater, which meant no more hot water in the house for now, but, more important, no more water escaping to the basement floor. He gave me the estimate for the replacement heater and charged me sixty-nine dollars for the visit, which I thought was fair. We wished each other a happy holiday, and he left.

  The phone rang. It happened to be Bunny Fisher, whose father, Dr. Robert Pershing Foster, I had written about in The Warmth of Other Suns. She was calling to check on me, having kept in close touch over the years and even more so with my recent losses. I told her about the encounter with the plumber and the minor miracle that had happened, as we began to catch up.

  Just then, the doorbell rang, the call cut short. It was the plumber again. He said he had driven back to shut off the gas to the water heater so it wouldn’t be heating an empty tank. He knew his way around now, made his way to the basement, was lighthearted and chatty, momentarily family.

  “This thing could have been much worse,” he said. “Water could have burst from the top, destroyed everything, and scalded you or anybody else who tried to fix it. I’ve seen way worse.”

  As he headed back up the basement steps, he caught a glimpse of some old Polaroid photographs that I had salvaged from the wet boxes and had pulled aside to air out.

  He paused in the middle of the staircase. “Oh, you want those,” he said. “That’s memories right there.” Then he bounded out of the old house and into the light of the day.

  EPILOGUE

  A World Without Caste

  We look to the night sky and see the planets and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand, and are reminded of how small we are, how insignificant our worries of the moment, how brief our time on this planet, and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow as more than the dust that we are.

  Even the longest lived of our species spends but a blink of time in the span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life or life’s potential, when our lives are so short to begin with?

  The species has suffered incomprehensible loss over the false divisions of caste: the 11 million people killed by the Nazis; the three-quarters of a million Americans killed in the Civil War over the right to enslave human beings; the slow, living death and unfulfilled gifts of millions more on the plantations in India and in the American South.

  Whatever creativity or brilliance they had has been lost for all time. Where would we be as a species had the millions of targets of these caste systems been permitted to live out their dreams or live at all? Where would the planet be had the putative beneficiaries been freed of the illusions that imprisoned them, too, had they directed their energies toward solutions for all of humanity, cures for cancer and hunger and the existential threat of climate change, rather than division?

  * * *

  ——

  In December 1932, one of the smartest men who ever lived landed in America on a steamship with his wife and their thirty pieces of luggage as the Nazis bore down on their homeland of Germany. Albert Einstein, the physicist and Nobel laureate, had managed to escape the Nazis just in time. The month after Einstein left, Hitler was appointed chancellor.

  In America, Einstein was astonished to discover that he had landed in yet another caste system, one with a different scapegoat caste and different methods, but with embedded hatreds that were not so unlike the one he had just fled.

  “The worst disease is the treatment of the Negro,” he wrote in 1946. “Everyone who freshly learns of this state of affairs at a maturer age feels not only the injustice, but the scorn of the principle of the Fathers who founded the United States that ‘all men are created equal.’ ”

  He could “hardly believe that a reasonable man can cling so tenaciously to such prejudice,” he said.

  He and his wife, Elsa, settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where he took a professorship at the university and observed firsthand the oppression faced by black residents who were consigned to the worst parts of town, to segregated movie houses, to servant positions, and were, in the words of his friend Paul Robeson, forced into “bowing and scraping to the drunken rich.”

  A few years into his tenure, the opera singer Marian Anderson, a renowned contralto born to the subordinated caste, performed to an overflow crowd at McCarter Theatre in Princeton and to rapturous praise in the press of her “complete mastery of a magnificent voice.” But the Nassau Inn in Princeton refused to rent a room to her for the night. Einstein, learning of this, invited her to stay in his home. From then on, she would stay at the Einstein residence whene
ver she was in town, even after Princeton hotels began accepting African-American guests. They would remain friends until his death.

  “Being a Jew myself, perhaps I can understand and empathize with how black people feel as victims of discrimination,” he told a family friend.

  He grew uncomfortable with the American way of pressuring newcomers to look down on the lowest caste in order to gain acceptance. Here was one of the most brilliant men who ever lived refusing to see himself as superior to people he was being told were beneath him.

  “The more I feel an American, the more this situation pains me,” Einstein wrote. “I can escape the feelings of complicity in it only by speaking out.”

  And so he did. He co-chaired a committee to end lynching. He joined the NAACP. He spoke out on behalf of civil rights activists, lent his fame to their cause. At a certain point in his life, he rarely accepted the many honors that came his way, but in 1946 he made an exception for Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania. He agreed to deliver the commencement address and to accept an honorary degree there.

  On that visit, he taught his theory of relativity to physics students and played with the children of black faculty, among them the son of the university president, a young Julian Bond, who would go on to become a civil rights leader.

  “The separation of the races is not a disease of the colored people,” Einstein told the graduates at commencement, “but a disease of the white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.”

  He became a passionate ally of the people consigned to the bottom. “He hates race prejudice,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “because as a Jew he knows what it is.”

  * * *

  ——

  The tyranny of caste is that we are judged on the very things we cannot change: a chemical in the epidermis, the shape of one’s facial features, the signposts on our bodies of gender and ancestry—superficial differences that have nothing to do with who we are inside.