Dementure
A dissertation presented to
the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University
In partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Rachel Burgess
November 2010
© 2010 Rachel Burgess. All Rights Reserved.
2 This dissertation titled
Dementure
by
RACHEL BURGESS
has been approved for
the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by
Dinty W. Moore
Professor of English
Benjamin M. Ogles
Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT
RACHEL BURGESS, Ph.D., November 2010, English
Dementure (pp. 196)
Director of Dissertation: Dinty W. Moore
Dementure’s overarching theme is the historical and generational losses that have come in the wake of and as a consequence of colonialism, losses that have been maintained through the oppressive heteropatriarchal practices of sexism, racism, classism, and gender- and homophobia. The thematic threads of loss of home, loss of education or educational oppression, loss of equitable work or alienated labor, loss of self or misplaced identities, and the role and place of people of color in the U.S. and the tactics used to enforce and keep them in their correct positions demonstrate the impacts of colonialism, so that Dementure highlights the specific shapes loss takes in the twenty- first century and the decolonial responses to the permanence of this historical disenfranchisement and displacement. In addition, a sub-theme running through the narrative of Dementure is the idea of work and labor—mental, physical, and psychical— involved in living out of a displaced life.
Emerging at a crucial moment in the history of U.S. imperialism, Dementure takes stock of what it means to live out of generations of socio-cultural, economic, and political policies that have come to define the very structure of U.S. society and to shape our interactions with each other. The work also illustrates to what extent some go to break from and interrupt patterns of loss, and, in the throes of attempting this, of living out of colonized identities, what it means to keep one’s sanity. It is a body of work that highlights contemporary threads in a history of generational loss, uncovering new 4 patterns of dominance that rearticulate old practices, all of which speak significantly to ideas about the place of people color in the U.S. and their relationship to a country many call home.
Approved: ______
Dinty W. Moore
Professor of English
5 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………3
Critical Introduction.………...……………………………………………………………6
Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………...69
What She Learned from Home…………………………………………………………..73
A Tracked Girl…………………………………………………………………………...99
Losing Things…………………………………………………………………………..126
The Boat………………………………………………………………………………...149
Dementure………………………………………………………………………………154
Mall of America: The Place for Fun!...... 180 6
Critical Introduction
Dementure: A Decolonial Project
I am writing on the edge of a generation that is grappling with how to disrupt the cultural practices of the past in order to extirpate the pernicious roots of the socio- cultural, geo-political, and economic maladies that imperialism, colonialism, military conquest, and violence have sown in the U.S. over centuries of time. Colonial imperialist enterprises have a long legacy of producing and legislating identities that are commensurate with its idea of empire. I am writing out of two colonizing histories that have shaped the contours of my life, the consequences through which I am currently living. The first of these histories is my family’s experience of living as colonized subjects in both British Honduras, now called Belize, and the U.S. The second history is my own experience of living as a colonized subject in the U.S.
Beginning from birth, my parent’s lives had been shaped by more than three centuries of militaristic spats between Spain and the Britain. These quarrels centered on
Belize’s natural resource, logwood, and who would eventually come to control access to these resources. During the 1700s, logwood was an important component to England’s textile industry. Both Spain, who had arrived in the area in 1528, and Britain, who arrived in 1638, sought to monopolize the trade of logwood. Eventually, the British won out, and it is the British colonial system came to determine my parent’s relationship to their country.
The U.S. is a country steeped in a colonial history, a country whose present historical moment emerged out of the institutions of slavery, tenant farming, Jim Crow, 7 and the enduring persistence of socioeconomic, political, and racial discrimination.
Imperative to this history is the fact that the U.S. was a colonizing force both within its own borders and around the world. Many people in the U.S., particularly people of the dominant culture, forget that the U.S. fashioned itself as a nation by displacing the indigenous peoples of North America through warfare, disease, and unacknowledged and broken treaties; fighting first against Spain and then Mexico to obtain territories in the southwest and thus displacing the indigenous peoples of the U.S. southwest; and forcibly importing peoples from the continent of Africa, thereafter creating justifications for the institution of slavery in order to monopolize the free labor Africans provided for the U.S. domestic and global economies.
These actions have profoundly impacted the lives of people of color living in the
U.S. This internal colonization has a profound bearing on the formation of U.S. institutions, language, and cultural and national identity for everyone living in the country. Though decolonization processes differ across the globe, the same process of decolonization undergone by colonized peoples around the world also has been taking place in the U.S. for people of color who have always sought liberation from U.S. colonial rule and have always fought for the right to live as fully recognized citizens.
The results of what has happened because of colonization and the generational effects of over five hundred years of subjugation and differential treatment have had and continue to have a significant impact on my life. I am writing out of many generations of loss and out of the collective and cultural traumas that have been stacking up for centuries of time. Chiseling through generations of ideologies and the socio-cultural, political, and economic practices used to enforce them, I am writing out of a colonized 8 subjectivity, writing out of several identities that have been shaped by my family’s experience and response to both British and U.S. imperialism. As the U.S. continues with its imperialist agenda, increasing its military might both in the U.S. itself and in other areas of the world, I am writing my own response to a this continuing legacy of imperialism. The voices that come out of these several identities reflect what I have come to understand about my relationship to the place where I make my home. I am making sense of patterns of loss that have remained a persistent backdrop in my life and the lives of black peoples living both in the U.S. and in the African and Caribbean diasporas.
Dementure is a work of creative nonfiction whose overarching theme is the historical and generational losses that have come in the wake of and as a consequence of colonialism, losses that have been maintained through the oppressive heteropatriarchal practices of sexism, racism, classism, and gender- and homophobia. The thematic threads of loss of home, loss of education or educational oppression, loss of equitable work or alienated labor, loss of self or misplaced identities, and the role and place of people of color in the U.S. and the tactics used to enforce and keep them in their correct positions demonstrate the impacts of colonialism, so that Dementure highlights the specific shapes loss takes in the twenty-first century and the decolonial responses to the permanence of this historical disenfranchisement and displacement. In addition, a sub- theme running through the narrative of Dementure is the idea of work and labor—mental, physical, and psychical—involved in living out of a displaced life.
Emerging at a crucial moment in the history of U.S. imperialism, Dementure takes stock of what it means to live out of generations of socio-cultural, economic, and 9 political policies that have come to define the very structure of U.S. society and to shape interactions between marginalized/disenfranchised and non-marginalized/enfranchised groups. The work also illustrates to what extent some go to break from and interrupt patterns of loss, and, in the throes of attempting this, of living out of colonized identities, what it means to keep one’s sanity. It is a body of work that highlights contemporary threads in a history of generational loss, uncovering new patterns of dominance that rearticulate old practices, all of which speak significantly to ideas about the place of people color in the U.S. and their relationship to a country many call home.
The title itself is a play on the word “dementia,” a noun U.S. Western medicine has used to describe my blind mother’s state of mind. My mother vehemently disagrees with this diagnosis, having said more than once, “I don’t have any bloody dementure.”
She has repeatedly commented on how the oppressive forces with which she has been contending all of her life have the potential to provoke people into responding crazily to the repressive circumstances that shroud their daily lives: “Everybody thinks I am crazy,” she says, “but no nobody want to talk about what they do me to make me act crazy.” My mother’s remarks draw attention to how ideas about who is capable of being rational and of having a superior capacity for reasoning is read through a colonial lens, a lens that has coded and classified raced and gendered bodies as lacking the prowess to use reason and logic in ways that are consistent with normative, Eurocentric modes of thought.
Throughout history, colonizing forces have always constructed and interpreted the responses of the oppressed as irrational and illogical, particularly when efforts to resist have used violence as a tactic to fight for freedom from the oppressor. For example, slave rebellions lead by Gabriel Prosser and Nat Turner in the U.S. and by the Colihaut in 10 Dominica and the Coromantees in Jamaica were always met with vicious brutality.
Any and all responses to the oppressor—when the colonized resisted being displaced, losing their homes, lands and ecosystems, and cultures; when they created modes of survival that challenged the colonizing power’s authority; when they opposed unfair labor practices and systems that resulted in alienated labor and unequal pay; when they resisted racist practices that led to public burnings and lynchings—were met with brutal violence and inhumane laws. The colonizer sanctioned this violence through juridical and political practices. Because colonialism is a practice that depends on the interlocking forces of oppression (sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia), the responses to historical disenfranchisement and the generational losses sustained because of this history of subordination calls for multi-faceted decolonial responses.
In The Invention of the Americas, Dussel argues that the Eurocentric perspectives shaping our present understanding of modernity and the world are based on interpretations that only refer to classical European and North American authors and events. This has fostered the idea that Europe is the sole proprietors of all things rational, logical, and modern—the center from which all of the greatest ideas and inventions have sprung. Dussel acknowledges that “modernity is undoubtedly a European occurrence,” but he argues that modernity “also originates in a dialectical relation with non-Europe”
(9). That is, Western Europe was able to become “modern” only after it ransacked the world of its resources, controlled the routes of commerce, and became a rich, world power because of these stolen resources. The “myth of modernity” and its rational concept of emancipation, not only denies the value of non-European cultures, Dussel contends, it is also a myth that justifies the colonizer’s irrational use of domination, 11 victimization, and violence in its assertion of bringing modernity—civilization, technology, rationality, progress, and in the millennium, democracy—to the conquered peoples who need to be removed from their barbarism.
Dussel’s work regarding the “myth of modernity” and “modernity’s rational, emancipative concept” (12) highlights the illogical and irrational Eurocentric epistemologies and ontologies that undergird the way in which the West have come to understand its role and place in the world. Dussel’s work also exposes the baseless justifications that constitute Western responses to the voices and actions of the colonized.
The creation of the emancipatory “rhetoric of salvation and progress” (Mignolo 6), which refuses to acknowledge the darker side of colonialism, also disavows the rational, logical, and intellectual voices that have been challenging colonial powers for over five hundred years.
I use “dementure” as a metaphor to highlight one of the most featured and persistent components of the myth of modernity, its logic, and the ideas that have come to define it: the Eurocentric notion that, lacking the rationality, the science, and the technology to make use of the resources in their homelands and being inferior in mind and body, the colonized needed the colonizers to bring the conquered into humanity, endowing the colonized with good sense and a work ethic. My mother’s response is indicative of this century-old Eurocentric thinking, for what she really is asking is, “How can I be called crazy, my mind demented, when I am living in a culture that, for several centuries, has created rationalization upon rationalization to justify the violent ideologies and disenfranchising practices that have been keeping people of color trapped in the colonized identities Europe and the U.S. have created for them.” My mother’s response 12 to the doctors who have misdiagnosed her speaks not to the “demented” state of her mind, but to her experience of living out of a colonized existence where the colonizers, with their demented mind, legislated, enforced, and practiced the humiliating subjugation of millions of people of color.
In addition to Dussel’s work regarding “the myth of modernity,” my thinking about the impacts of colonialism and the decolonial responses has been influenced by the work of Anibal Quijano whose expression “coloniality of power” has greatly enhanced my understanding of my own relationship to and in the current model of power in which I am living and writing. “Coloniality of power” names the systems of power and forms of control that have emerged in this modern era. It is the driving logic behind the maintenance of a power structure that seeks to control and secure the hegemony of the ruling classes. In the U.S. this hegemony manifests itself through the structural power dynamics that the ruling class has put in place to control which bodies can do what in the nation-state. Functioning through political, socio-economical, and cultural domains, the ruling class is able to maintain their power over the masses by devising laws that dictate the sexuality, for instance, of a people whose sexuality fall outside of heteronormative modes of being. (Clinton’s “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” policy is one such example of this.)
The U.S., having eclipsed Britain after WWII, has become a major hegemon in the world and is now in its neocolonial moment. Amílcar Cabral, writing broadly from his own experience in Guinea Bissau and the Cape Verde Islands, uses the term
“neocolonialism” and “neocolonial situation” to refer to the geopolitical and economic situation colonialism has left for post-independence societies. Cabral contends that the end of direct colonial domination in fact only exacerbates the economic aspects of 13 imperialism. Presently, the U.S. is living out its own neocolonial situation where the peoples the U.S. have colonized within its own borders and abroad (in Puerto Rico, for example) are engaging in decolonial projects to fight for their rights, rights that have been long overdue. When we consider this country’s relationship with its own marginalized peoples, it is of extreme import to extend this thinking to the U.S. neocolonial relations with other decolonized countries. In her essay, “Is the United States postcolonial?
Transnationalism, Immigration, and Race,” Jenny Sharpe concedes this point in her commentary about the way the phrase “postcolonial” is theorized in academic circles.
She proposes that the term “postcolonial”
be theorized as the point at which internal social relations intersect with global
capitalism and the international divisions of labor. In other words, I want us to
define the “after” to colonialism as the neocolonial relations into which the United
States entered with decolonized nations (106).
Such a theorization has powerful implications for understanding the ways in which the
U.S., through its relationship with decolonized nations, maintains its hegemony in its own country. It does so by using the old motif of the “Other’s” threat to U.S. democracy, for it is through the “Other” that the U.S. has always come into being. This not only induces fear in the people living the States, this significantly draws our attention away from recognizing and comprehending several problems facing the U.S. One problem in particular being the decline of this country’s infrastructure (its buildings and roads, its educational system, its environment, and so forth) and a rapid transition into a complete police state. 14 In my lifetime, the cultural and ideological appurtenances of empire have not faded. Though colonies no longer exist, the mechanisms that U.S. empire have put into place and have been maintaining through present imperialist pursuits have only undergone an intellectual revival. In recent years, U.S. interventions in Afghanistan,
Iraq, and in the Middle East attest to the legacy of U.S. empire. As the U.S. continues to seek ways to sustain and support its empire and its capitalistic economic model, the U.S. is now utilizing tools outside of the traditional model of structural adjustment policies that work through the following three global organizations: the International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. Because these traditional tools are failing to secure the global markets the U.S. want to control, the U.S. is more and more using its military to might, employing unilateral, military force to impose policies that will capture the global markets it wants. This, of course, cannot be done without using such liberatory rhetoric as democracy, freeing women and children from tyrannical dictators, and stopping terrorism as a reason to use such unilateral force.
My work is a decolonial response to the myth and the logic that undergird
Western notions of modernity. It is a response to the West’s continual disavowal of colonialism’s reach into the twenty-first century. As my work highlights the present-day impacts and consequences of colonialism and the decolonial responses to the deep-rooted conventions used to subjugate and maintain hegemonic control over the masses, a discussion of colonization and decolonization is imperative to understanding the theoretical perspectives that drive Dementure’s narrative.
Colonization is not a thing of the past; a set of ideas and practices that died when the colonizers emancipated the countries they colonized. It is a form of European world 15 rule that has, since conquest, sought to form a world-power system around a capitalist economic model that maintains hegemonic rule over the masses. Jürgen Osterhammel characterizes colonialism as a
relationship of domination between the indigenous (or forcibly imported) majority
and a minority of foreign invaders. The fundamental decisions affecting the lives
of the colonized people are made and implemented by the colonial rulers in
pursuit of interests that are often defined in a distant metropolis. Rejecting
cultural comprises with the colonized population, the colonizers are convinced of
their own superiority and of their ordained mandate to rule. (16-17)
Colonialism, Edward Said notes, is always a consequence of imperialism whereby the latter is carried out through the former (8). That is, imperialism as an idea, as a policy of expansion and domination, is carried out through the practice of colonialism, for it is colonialism that employs a set of interconnecting political and cultural practices that are used to obtain, secure, and sustain the colonizer’s control over a geographic region for the purpose of securing its markets and capital investments.
Colonialism produces economic wealth to benefit people located elsewhere, and it implements various socio-political apparatuses to impose a rule of law from afar, employing specific cultural practices to both reinforce and replicate itself.
A significant component of colonialism is the cultural logic that pervades the creation and execution of empire “for the enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire” (Said 11 author’s emphasis). In Culture and Imperialism, Said writes at length about the cognitive practices linked to imperialism and colonialism. Both “are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include 16 notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination” (9). For Said, empire is not merely concerned with politics and economics. It is also an ideological formation grounded in the language of authority, subjugation, dependency, and expansion (9).
Colonialism is both a physical, psychical, and socio-cultural force that not only wreaks havoc on the lives of the colonized, but also serves to decivilize the colonizer and to highlight the inhumane methods and behaviors used to subjugate and oppress the colonized. After being displaced from and stripped of their lands, cultures, customs, and identities, the oppressed are forced to take on identities the oppressor has created and foisted upon them through the institutions it has crafted to ensure the oppressed remain trapped in the identities that will sustain its empire. In their attempts to affirm its hegemony both over the colonized, their labor, and their land’s resources, the colonizers resort to diabolical actions and customs that are contrary to their humanist, emancipatory rhetoric.
Aimé Césaire’s 1955 work, Discourse on Colonialism, examines the psychic and socio-cultural damages that have resulted from colonialism. A colonial subject of
Martinique and writing of his own lived experience with French colonialism, Césaire’s work questions the hypocritical rhetoric undergirding European ideas regarding the purpose of colonialism, given the colonizer’s primary argument that contact brings both civilization and modernity to other parts of the world. One of the central ideas in
Césaire’s critique of colonialism is the dehumanizing affects it has on both the colonizer, who concocts rationalizations to justify its atrocious barbarity, and the colonized, who bear the brunt of the colonizer’s inhumanity: “First we must study how colonization 17 works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism . . . ” (35 author’s emphasis).
Césaire’s essay reveals the irrational logic that forms the guiding principle of
European ideas regarding bringing civilizations into contact with each other. Essentially,
Discourse asks how does colonization bring civilizations into contact with each other if the methods used to establish this connection is predicated on violence, subjugation, and domination? For Césaire, he characterizes colonization as a “bridgehead in a campaign to civilize barbarism, from which there may emerge at any moment the negation of civilization, pure and simple” (40). Discourse exposes the actions of the so-called enlightened, advanced colonizer for what they are, and Césaire illustrates how the colonizer’s deeds are diametrically opposed to their ideas of modernity, progress, and humanity. More importantly, Césaire’s work exposes the fallacies underlying the logic of the colonizer’s actions. The colonizer’s actions themselves are inhumane, uncivilized, and barbaric. Césaire’s point, then, is that these same actions, which deprive the colonized of their own humanity, also divests the colonizer of their own presumed benevolence.
Césaire draws attention to the fact that colonialism dehumanizes everyone involved, the oppressed and the oppressors, an important fact the colonizer refuses to acknowledge as part of the equation. He brings to the fore the psychic and psychological effects on the subjugated and the subjugator, noting that the very mentality of the latter should be called into question because of the savagery upon which the colonizer’s ideas are predicated. This dehumanization is a reality of colonization Césaire notes for it 18 dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial
enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and
justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it;
that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of
seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an
animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this
result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out. (4)
In addition, Césaire’s work identifies the specific kinds of relationships that emerge and are established between the colonized and the colonizer after contact:
Between colonizer and colonized there is only room for forced labor,
intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops,
contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites,
degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of domination and
submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army
sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an
instrument of production (42).
These relations of domination are embedded in all facets of life are and are controlled and monitored by the colonial power which fashions “regimes of truth,” to use
Foucault, to preserve the socio-political, economical, and geo-political relationships that will benefit its empire. In each historical moment, as there are shifts in these social relations due to resistance from the colonized, new “regimes of truth” emerge to consolidate the power that is used to control the colonized masses and keep them in their colonized places. These “regimes of truth,” Foucault notes, are invented through various 19 discursive practices, which “are embodied in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns for general behavior, in forms for transmission and diffusion, and in pedagogical forms which, at once, impose and maintain them” (200). From the U.S.’s institutions, to its socio-cultural practices, to its educational and political systems, these practices are implanted in the very structure of the U.S. culture and pervade this country’s way of life.
Thus, what contact has aimed to do through the civilizing, colonialist mission is legislate the identities of both the colonizer and colonized, regulate the spaces both occupied, their social interactions, and their relations with and to each other.
Quijano’s idea of “Coloniality of power” is also a dynamic that highlights the colonial elements, the relations of domination, that are expressed in the current model of power that have been taking shape since the colonization of the Americas and that now have become globally hegemonic (533). For example, under the guise of ensuring
“regional stability” in other parts of the world, for the purpose of maintaining “security” and deterring “potential regional aggressors” and for “economic development and cooperation among nations,” the U.S. government maintains over 800 military facilities in more than 140 countries (Higgs). While the U.S. no longer has colonies that it maintains so many military facilities in other parts of the world speaks to the U.S.’s present neocolonial situation. This fact alone speaks to U.S. imperialism and the manner in which the U.S. seeks to intimidate other nations into giving the U.S. what it wants.
Decolonization involves the transformation of the relations of domination that colonialism has left in its wake, and U.S. imperialism attempts to extend to the rest of the world. Decolonization is more than just a political process whereby colonized peoples and their nations become politically and economically free from the tyranny of the 20 colonizer’s hand, it is also a process whereby the colonized work to obtain freedom from the cultural effects of empire. Decolonization acknowledges that the seeds of colonialism and the “set of cultural forms and structures of feeling which produce” the resulting empire are deeply sown and have been passed on from generation to generation.
In The Wretched of the Earth Frantz Fanon calls for a profound transformation of who we are, how we live, and how our governing structures function. He articulates his framework for decolonization as
. . . an historical process: In other words, it can only be understood, it can only
find its significance and become self coherent insofar as we can discern the
history-making movement which gives it form and substance . . . Decolonization
never goes unnoticed, for it focuses on and fundamentally alters being, and
transforms the spectator crushed into a nonessential state into a privileged actor,
captured in a virtually grandiose fashion by the spotlight of History . . .
Decolonization, therefore, implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the
colonial situation. (2)
Walter Mignolo elaborates on Fanon’s articulation of decolonization, working from Anibal Quijano’s notion of decolonial delinking or epistemic disobedience.
Decolonial delinking, an expression Anibal Quijano formulated in his 1992 “Coloniality and Modernity/Coloniality,” is the act of shifting the geopolitics of knowledge, whereby
Western forms of knowledge are called into question and challenged by the resistant thinking that became visible at the point of contact. Decolonial thinking, Mignolo contends, arose naturally and in response to colonialism. It endeavors to provide answers to the “questions and concerns that emerge from different geopolitical and social 21 positions that are deeply marked by the histories of colonialism and racism”
(http://cpic.binghamton.edu/decolonial.html). Mignolo notes this shift
leads us to de-colonial options as a set of projects that have in common the effects
experienced by all the inhabitants of the globe that were at the receiving end of
global designs to colonize the economy (appropriation of land and natural
resources), authority (management by the Monarch, the State, or the Church), and
police and military enforcement (coloniality of power), to colonize knowledges
(languages, categories of thoughts, beliefs systems, etc.) and beings (subjectivity).
(4 author’s emphasis)
Kevin Meehan’s work about black American and Caribbean cultural exchange in the U.S. asserts that scholars and laypeople alike are better able to understand the cultural aspects of liberation if decolonization is understood as a
project concretized in social institutions and individual expressions that reorient
worldviews, identities, and values previously geared to support the interests of
metropolitan ruling classes. Such reorienting often means reevaluating and
revindicating local realities ignored or devalued by metropolitan power, as well as
reimagining and reconstructing regional and global alliances in ways that oppose,
resist, and otherwise present challenges to the interests of empire. (29)
In Chandra Mohanty and Jacqui Alexander’s work decolonization is essential to their anti-racist feminist projects. Both have elaborated its centrality “to the practice of democracy, and to the re-envisioning of democracy outside of free market, procedural, conceptions of individual agency and state governance”(8). It is important that, as a collective, we recognize that “history, memory, emotional, and affectional ties are 22 significant cognitive elements of the construction of critical, self-reflective” selves (8).
Regardless of how far away many think we are from this history, our social relations and political and educational institutions are so saturated with colonialist practices that the majority of us are wholly unaware of how colonialist agendas have shaped our lives.
Mohanty and Alexander’s work emphasizes the emotional work it takes to delink our selves from frames of thinking and ways of being that are predicated on Western ideologies. If we refuse to do this work, we are merely reproducing, reinscribing, and rearticulating the old “regimes of truth” that have marred our social relations for centuries.
Decolonization is a thoroughly psychical, emotional, and difficult process for it calls on us to reevaluate our lives and ourselves, delink from Western epistemologies, and to, in the face of this new knowledge, understand what our relationship is to his devastating history, what has been done in our names, what continues to be done in our names, and what must be done to change how the past affects our today.
As a decolonial project, Dementure engages in “epistemic disobedience.” The narrative begins by showing the reader what cultural practices I was raised with in my home, a home of immigrants who left one colonial situation and entered into another.
Through narration the work demonstrates how the U.S.’ present cultural practices remain rooted in the cultural norms of its not too distant past. It examines how these conventions—one set emerging out of theories of enlightenment, modernity, and progress; the other a response to traumatic and life threatening circumstances embodied in this progress and its civilizing mission—are not only embedded in our institutional and 23 economic practices but are also articulated and rearticulated in our patterns of behavior with each other.
I also use the phrase “decolonial project” to highlight the active emotional work involved in transforming who we are, how we live in our communities, and how we communicate with each other. At the individual level, this transformation requires that we understand the far-reaching effects of colonialism’s history and its use of oppressive and dehumanizing practices in the creation of the U.S. This history serves as the context from which responses to colonialism’s legacy emerge. This work is intensely psychical and emotional in that it requires many of us, particularly white men, to be cognizant of how our own cultural practices are still based in a paradigm of thought and action that dates back to 16th and 17th century ideas regarding who is intellectually, rationally, and morally superior. In order to “get over it” and “move on,” it is necessary for all of us to decolonize our minds, reconceptualize our relations with each other, and break away from and refuse to collude with oppressive practices. This is active work, involving a refusal to consent to those structures that socially and emotionally oppress us.
Already situated outside of what Walter Mignolo calls the “established loci of enunciation,” the narratives in Dementure are voices of subaltern people of color who have lived with the burden of coloniality for many generations (ix). Mignolo argues for decolonizing and decentering epistemological loci of enunciation in order to privilege the voices of those who, as a result of Western Europe’s and the U.S.’s imperial exploits, continue to be treated as displaced persons. In The Darker Side of The Renaissance,
Mignolo emphasizes the importance of recognizing the loci from where subaltern peoples—whose lives have been marked and defined by colonialism—speak. Because 24 colonialism is not a monolithic experience, there is a diversity of discourses and discursive conventions that deserve to be articulated so as to emend the Western master narratives that have established the meaning and making of our world (xi).
My voice—as teacher, writer, and scholar—speaks from a particular position: the losing side. As we know, tales of the losers are recorded as the successes of the winners.
Along with Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Aurora Levins Morales, and others, Dementure is one example in a long tradition of writing by marginalized people whose narratives illustrate the generational, emotional, psychological, economic, and often traumatic burdens of displacement. Their work engages in decolonial practices in order to counter dominant narratives of reality. Similarly, just as these writers use nonfiction to construct narratives that counter the foundational myths of U.S. culture and history, I use this form to draw our attention to practices of disenfranchisement that have followed my life and the lives of my parents. Moreover, this work shows how the dominant culture attempts to quell voices that speak out against, challenge, resist, and finally attempt to break from oppressive cultural practices.
While I may certainly teach, write, and do research within and in relation to the master narratives that have historically deprived many nonwhite peoples of their inalienable rights, I also engage with the same conventions in order to make sense of my relationship to paradigms of power in this country. Since the arrival of Europeans in the
U.S. in the late 1500s and early 1600s, the U.S. has historically disenfranchised people of color: our humanities have been deemed unworthy and invaluable, and our life stories are continually effaced, covered over, or assimilated into a rhetoric of social progress. The consequences of this recurring dispossession—manifested and expressed in multiple 25 ways—point toward the unwillingness of this nation to acknowledge how the isms of racial, gender, class, and sexual oppression remain at the root of this country’s problems—problems that have been projected onto nonwhite and other marginalized peoples and used to pathologize many of us as inherently inferior, criminal bearers of these troubles. In addition, the U.S. continues to ignore the affects of its history of internal colonization in North America and how this history is currently playing out in the
U.S.’s present neocolonial moment.
Displacement has long been a theme in the U.S.’ narrative of social progress.
There are treaties, there are laws, and there are assimilative, violent, and coercive socio- cultural and juridical practices that document this legacy. The displacement many of us are now experiencing—this discomfort with losing work, losing houses, losing—is not a new phenomenon for many racialized and marginalized groups that have lived displaced lives for generations. Our displacement spans all five hundred eighteen years of the history of the “New World”—beginning with Columbus’s first trip in 1492. On what side one falls determines the narrative of one’s family history. We are all products of this history: some of us descended from slaves; some of us descended from the people who owned, whipped, raped, and lynched, or fought on behalf of, with, and for them.
I was not born a winner, for the roots of my subject formation were long ago extirpated from Africa and replanted in a colony called British Honduras. My family lived many generations as colonial subjects in this colony before their arrival in the States in 1969. I hail from the black diaspora, from a history of chattel slavery: sugarcane and mahogany harvesters; cotton, tobacco, rice, and indigo growers; sharecroppers; the convict leasing system; Jim Crow; and perpetual state violence. I hail from a time of 26 averting gazes and praying for blue eyes and white features to a time of gazing back and shrugging off legislated identities, along with their pathologies, that do not belong to me. I carry all of this in the color of my skin, through which the meaning of my gender, class, sexuality, and very identity come into being. I did not choose to bear the mark of coloniality. Neither did my mother, grandmother, and great grandmother before me; yet, it has haunted generations of my family.
The “coloniality of power” of which Anibal Quijano speaks will continue to haunt generations of people—nonwhite and white—living in the U.S.
“The essence of interdisciplinarity”: Creative Nonfiction
As a work of creative nonfiction, Dementure is anchored firmly in the oral tradition of the griot, the storyteller. This tradition forms the foundation of my own definition of this genre of writing. The storyteller imparts to the listener the lessons, the history, and the practices and the traditions of a culture, of a people. In each specific historical moment, the storyteller offers an account of what is happening in its now, how
“what” is happening, and where “what” is happening. The storyteller changes as times change and adapts to the needs of the people. It continues the tradition of the voice it once heard long ago when the storyteller was just a small child. The story, however, is never the same. It is a living thing, and the storyteller continues its life.
I am a storyteller who is writing her piece at a time when I should be ignoring the obstacles so many other people sidestep. The story I am telling about the long-lasting consequences of colonialism is a story that has been told ever since the 17th century.
Before they had been allowed to learn to read and write black women spoke their experiences. For example, chapter six of William Goodell’s The American Slave Code in 27 Theory and Practice: Its Distinctive Features Shown by Its Statutes, Judicial
Decisions, and Illustrative Facts begins: “The slave not being as a member of Society, nor as a human being, the Government, instead of providing for his education, takes care to forbid it, as being inconsistent with chattelhood” (319). Considered chattel-property during slavery, blacks could not be educated or taught to read and write because they were considered inferior and subhuman, and therefore unteachable. There are several acts that prohibited blacks from learning to read and write, making the act of even teaching a black person punishable by law. In North Carolina in 1831, for example, teaching a slave to read or write or to sell the slave any book other than the bible was punished with thirty-nine lashes or imprisonment “if the offender be a free negro; but if a white, then with a fine of $200” (321). The reason for this, Goodell learned from page 36 of Jay’s Inquiry “is, that ‘teaching the slaves to read and write tends to dissatisfaction their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion’” (321).
When black women began to write and then to be published, they wrote autobiographies about their lives, poetry, fiction, plays—and they also wrote creative nonfiction, the kind that sought to explore the conditions of a country that had so profoundly disregarded the lives of black women and come to believe in distorted truths about these women’s lives. Engaging in epistemic disobedience, their writing challenged the foundational myths of the U.S., calling into question the meaning of the democratic and Christian tenets the U.S. so boldly advanced and in which it claimed believe.
They did so with their “Is” and with the sensibilities of their “Is.” They wrote creative nonfiction that shed light on the conditions of their people and to offer their reports from a world where living conditions had been vastly different for those who had 28 been living on the other side. They wrote nonfiction to provide answers to questions for the generations after them. They used themselves and their lives as the subjects through which to journey to answers to their most burning questions.
As the black writers before me, I am also engaging in epistemic disobedience for I also do not enter into language (reading and writing) from a position of privilege. I enter from a side that has been blighted and discredited. I am both writing and living out the experiences of my mother and father’s generation and their parent’s generation. Just as the racialized and marginalized women before me, I am writing in an extension of a tradition that excluded me from the practice of reading and writing. For me, this means I am disrupting the old foundational myths—upon which this country has been built (its rhetoric of democracy, equality, progress, and freedom—regarding who should be taught to read and write. I am writing creative nonfiction that rejects the “either/or” and demands the “both/and.” I’m also writing from a space of interdisciplinarity. I do not box myself up when I write because I’m “writing from in-between and overlapping spaces,” writing out “many identities, multiple perspectives, varied ethnicities, several sexes or sexualities, transgendered experiences, layers of locations and/or languages”
(“Writing In-Between: Creative Nonfiction,” 2009 Syllabus).
Nonfiction is the portal through which I enter into my scholarly interests; it is a genre that permits free range. Depending on the way the writer brings their subject to the page, creative nonfiction can be called many things—memoir, travel writing, the personal essay, meditations, literary journalism, nature writing, epistolary, or cultural commentary and critique. It is comprised of an amalgam of knowledge bases and discursive practices that employ memories, experiences, facts, and research while utilizing the style and 29 elements of fiction, poetry, autobiography, and the essay to embody both public and personal history.
Creative nonfiction has been morphing into and out of shapes, merging old and new discursive practices, and shifting just as long as we’ve been speaking and writing.
The creative nonfiction writer can “fashion a text,” as Annie Dillard says: it is very much about the formation of a text, the creation of body of work. Dillard’s description of nonfiction reminds me of the genre’s capacity to take in and to support the infinitude of language.
When I gave up writing poetry I was very sad, for I had devoted 15 years to the
study of how the structures of poems carry meaning. But I was delighted to find
that nonfiction prose can also carry meaning in its structures, can tolerate all sorts
of figurative language, as well as alliteration and even rhyme. The range of
rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle
discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story. It can do
everything. I felt as though I had switched from a single reed instrument to a full
orchestra. (160)
I write from a subaltern position, from the margins. Creative nonfiction allows a person like me—someone who is writing-in-between and from the other side, someone who is competing against a whole host of linguistic realities that attempt to obscure experiences similar to her own—“to fashion a text,” one that includes the awareness of the “I” and provides readers with a sense of someone who is aware of the particular historical moment in which she is writing. 30 An interdisciplinary, decolonial work, Dementure exposes the way historical discursive practices have created “regimes of truth” that have shaped the fabric of oppressive forces that place restrictions on some bodies and not on others. With myself as a springboard, each section of Dementure illustrates how and to what extent displacement remains a reality in my life. Just as the writers before me have fashioned decolonial texts to respond to their lived realities and to expose the fallacies inherent in and the limits U.S. democracy, through rigorous social critique, Dementure uncovers new roots to old weeds and the social and structural violence plaguing the lives of those assigned to the margins.
Tradition
Michel de Montaigne is widely regarded as the originator of the essay—the father, the Shakespeare, some scholars of nonfiction say. He is hailed as the first writer who used the personal voice as the vehicle through which to think about his ideas, his feelings, and his life experience. Montaigne bucked fifteenth-century writing conventions, asking “Que sais-je?” What could he know without using himself as the vehicle for his knowing? Montaigne wrote in a time of religious calamity and civil confusion, outbreaks of vicious violence after Martin Luther challenged Church authority, and the disintegration of religious certainty, and he used his subjectivity, his existence, engendered in experience, to critique the period of his day, speaking of the fallibility of human reason and the relativity of human science. It was through experience that he found reason and science at fault for not cleaving to “nature” and its habit of “surging forth and expressing herself by force.” 31 For Montaigne, the essay provided a platform from which writers could assay—to take stock of, to examine thoroughly—the details of their life experience. In this way, Montaigne and I are similar. I quite enjoy nonfiction’s breadth because it is a form of possibilities. From the conventional linear-structured personal essay to multi- genre/interdisciplinary nonfiction, to film documentaries, nonfiction is broad in its approach to telling stories, to imparting to readers new perspectives from which to recognize and understand the ways lived experience is shaped by forces both obvious and imperceptible. In acknowledging that Montaigne has “given” me this form, I acknowledge that we share the same tradition. We share an idea about how and in what form to express ourselves. I am working in an extension of his tradition. However, the traditions that form my ideas about nonfiction and its possibilities do not begin with the written word.
In this critical introduction, I do not offer an exhaustive account of arguments in the fields of orality, literacy, and linguistics. However, I am aware that Western culture tends to associate the spoken word with underdeveloped and less sophisticated non-
Western cultures. This thinking separates orality from literacy, suggesting there is no relationship between the two. Writing and the written word have been the primary forces that have shaped our modern sense of culture and consciousness. Both have been accorded the highest authority.
For me, orality is both a means and a mode of discourse. In many ways, it informs the language and structural choices I make in Dementure. In my home, people wrote with their voices. Dementure makes use of the vocalized, personal voice to assay life through storytelling, for story is an intrepid traveler meandering through terrains 32 obscure and familiar. It disrupts, challenges, calls into question, redefines. It listens for what’s in between, ever mindful of what came before, what will follow, what was and is. I use the rhythms and syntax of my home language—a language that gave form to the oral accounts of my parent’s and siblings’ lives—to tell the story of where the roots of historical disenfranchisement and the trauma associated with it bear new shoots in 2010.
I was raised in a home where I learned to read and write from listening to the stories my family members told me: “The bird spread its wings and fanned that fire, man,” or “When they hung Nora you could see all she underwear,” and “Hurricane Hattie was no joke.” First, I drew pictures. Then I wrote stories. Then I misspelled the words that told the picture’s story. My older brothers and sisters corrected my work and told me to rewrite the words—and to learn them. I did. In my home, the voice and the written word were important and necessary for imparting the values and cultural practices that would later inform the way I see, move through, and write about the world.
In particular, the stories my mother and sisters told me about growing up, being a strong woman, and speaking up for myself, are what Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe
Moraga have called “theories of the flesh” that “bridge the contradictions of our experience” (23). Without them, I’d have no way of understanding the inconsistencies
I’d come to experience, for these stories often offered lucid examples of the intersectional repressive forces at work in my mother’s and sisters’ lives. Their stories have kept and continue to keep me grounded and ever cognizant of the world in which I live.
In her essay, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought,” Patricia Hill
Collins notes that the sociocultural, political, and economic conditions out of which women’s of color experiences emerge do not align with Western epistemologies and 33 philosophies of lived existence. Living in an oppressive culture gives rise to what
Patricia Hill Collins says are “particular experiences and epistemologies that provide philosophies about realities different from those available to other groups” (Hill Collins
300). In my home, the quotidian conversations I heard from people provided me with my first insights to the world around me. It is through these exchanges that I began to name and theorize the world. In making a commitment to bringing others’ voices to the page as I have heard and continue to hear them, I am honoring the expressions, the reflections, and the analyses their experiences have given me. I am also honoring the knowledge I learned in what bell hooks calls my “homeplace.”
In Yearning bell hooks describes homeplace as the “folks who made this life possible” (45).
Though black women did not self-consciously articulate in written discourse the
theoretical principals of decolonization, this does not detract from the importance
of their actions. They understood intellectually and intuitively the meaning of
homeplace in the midst of an oppressive and dominating social reality, of
homeplace as a site of resistance and liberation struggle. (45)
The idea of home is also very important in this work, for I no longer have one.
However, the lessons I’ve learned from home regarding surviving the pitfalls of this culture have remained with me. This is why I have reached into the big tool bag of creative nonfiction; the tools I find there give me access to a number of avenues to write my piece/peace. Creative nonfiction provides me with a home of sorts, a place where I can grapple with language in order to make sense of why there are still so many snags in the fabric of U.S. culture, why I’m afraid of heights, or why I love to do math problems. 34 The community in which I was born and raised was comprised of a number of
Caribbean people who were from all over the Greater and Lesser Antilles. Some of my first introductions to Caribbean literature were Jamaican, Trinidadian, and Guyanese writers. When I finally was able to read works by Belizean writers Zee Edgell, Zoila
Ellis, and Colville Young, I had already been writing a basilectal-mesolectal variety of
Belizean Creole I’d heard in my home, which included an amalgam of syntactical and phonetic linguistic structures circulating in the writing, language, and life of the Afro-
Caribbean diaspora.
From basilect, to mesolect, to acrolect, the voices in Dementure move in and out of dialects of Belizean Creole and British and American English. Often these voices employ combinations of these idioms to establish who is speaking and from where, showing the mutability of language and the ubiquity of code-switching. The work of the
Jamaican poet Louise Bennett is influential in my manner of bringing the Belizean dialect
I heard as a child—with its vocal patterns, moods, and tones—to the page. Her poetry’s rhythm is indicative of the nuances of Jamaican speech; her orthographic and syntactic choices are consistent with the sounds she heard daily in the streets of her Kingston. For instance, the poem “Pedestrian Crossings” captures both the syntax and rhythm of
Jamaican speech:
If a cross yuh dah-cross
Beg yuh cross mek me pass.
Dem ya crossin’ is crosses yuh know!
Koo de line! Yuh noh see
Cyar an truck backa me? 35 Hear dah hoganeer one deh dah-blow?
Bennett ends the stanza of this poem with a play on words and meaning: “De crossin a stop we from pass mek dem cross/ But nutten dah-stop dem from cross mek we pass/ Dem yah crosses dem crossin fe true!” Bennett captures the ethos of the energy of bodies touching, brushing up against each other, while they walk along the streets in busy
Kingston, a scene one might also find in Trinidad, in Guyana, or in Belize.
Similarly, the work of Jamaican writers Olive Senior and Jean Binta Breeze and
Trinidadian writer Merle Hodge have also been tremendously influential in how I bring oral narratives to the page. Senior and Hodge’s novels and Breeze’s poetry also reflect the multiple dialects of Jamaican and Trinidadian English. For example, Breeze’s The
Fifth Figure is a multi-genred text—part-poetry, part-memoir about her family, and part- novel—that traverses five generations of one family living in rural Jamaica and migrating between the diasporic spaces of home (England, Jamaica, and Africa). Beginning in the nineteenth century, these five women speak their narratives and testify to the circumstances of their lives. In “The Fifth Figure,” Sarah’s voice engenders the cadence, mood, and tone of a young, fair-skinned Jamaican girl whose father wants her “to be a little lady” who speaks the queen’s English instead of a “bush pickney”:
Talk like the queen
And try learn to use
Your knife and fork
For yuh father don’t want no bush pickney
Yuh father don’t want no bush pickney
He want you to be a little lady. (51) 36 The characters in Breeze’s The Fifth Figure move in and out of a mesolectal Jamaican
Creole and talking like the queen, the writing code-switches based on the each woman’s experience as a mixed-raced Jamaican.
Senior, Hodge, and Breeze are committed to creating bodies of work representative of the oral and written traditions from which they come. Their work, like
Louise Bennett’s, also practices a criticism of their homeplaces, Trinidad and Jamaica, a cultural-political tradition that is rooted in the vernacular of the Caribbean. More importantly, their literary work also bridges the Western divide between the written word and spoken text, showing that there is indeed a relationship between oral and written narratives.
The genealogy of writers I name below have established a tradition of creative nonfiction in which I place myself. I am also adding my voice to and am extending this tradition. Their work contains a historically aware “I,” they wrote and are writing from
“in-between and overlapping spaces,” and writing out of “many identities, multiple perspectives, varied ethnicities, sexes or sexualities, […] layers of locations and/or languages” (“Writing In-Between: Creative Nonfiction” 2009 Syllabus). These writers were and are aware of the oppressive forces with which they live/d, and their insights about the oppressive hierarchies with which they have had and continue to contend document and illustrate just where the U.S. and the world is in terms of progress. As decolonial projects their work arises from a marginalized, subaltern loci of enunciation, engaging in epistemic disobedience through narration, syntactical variance, linguistics, and public action to give voice to the experiences of those whose lives have been blighted by the history of colonialism and limited by U.S. imperialist agendas 37 They were and are writing from the other side of the place where Montaigne’s tradition of the essay, of assaying the self, began. These writers’ work is illustrative of what nonfiction is comprised. They asked questions, explored what they did not understand, and sought to find some way to understand the circumstances of their lives, some insight that could bring them closer to answering the questions they asked. These writers are the ones to whom I am speaking, on whose ideas regarding oppression this work elaborates and extends, and with whom I ally myself in the work I do as a writer, teacher, and scholar.
They also were and are writers, teachers, scholars, and activists. Their work has impacted and enriched my writing, teaching, and scholarship, and has provided me with a frame of reference, a language by which to write my own experiences. The writers I name below have been instrumental in affirming the ways in which I take pen to paper and write. Their work confronts the institutions that continue to circumscribe the lives of racialized and marginalized peoples. More importantly, these writers’ work is intersectional in its approach to narrative, theorization of oppression, and resistance to it.
As such, I see the work these writers do as decolonial projects.
Sojourner Truth’s speech, “Ain’t I a Woman,” speaks specifically to the structural subject position of black women in the mid-1800s U.S. Speaking against religious attacks on women and also on behalf of women at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, her short speech draws attention to the intersectional forces at work to keep women, particularly black women, locked into their structural and psychological positions of inferiority: 38 At her first word there was a profound hush . . . . “That man over there say that
women needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the
best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-
puddles, or gives me any best place!” And raising herself to her full height, asked,
“And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!” (and she bared her right
arm to the shoulder, showing her tremendous muscular power). “I have ploughed,
and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a
woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—
and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and
seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's
grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?” (Stanton et al., 115-117)
Truth’s speech directly counters 1850s ideas regarding race and gender. She interrogates the category “woman,” saying aloud to a crowd of white women and men that a differential exists between white women and black women’s experiences. The white women Truth addressed were neither in the field nor bearing the lash alongside black men, nor were their children sold into slavery. White women were not slaves; white men helped their white women into carriages and over puddles. They were women. Even having thirteen children did not make Truth woman enough to be helped over puddles and into carriages or to be given “any best place.” Her gender and her race change the kind of treatment she receives from the white men she addresses in the crowd.
Truth isn’t treated as white women are. 39 Because Truth’s gender is read through the color of her skin, her femininity is masculinized: it is inconsistent with white femininity in 1850s U.S. Look at her muscles, she tells the crowd. She can plough, plant, and gather crop into barns at a rate that is equal to her male counterpart. Truth’s speech highlights the difference between the perception of white “woman” and “black” woman: because of black women’s alterity, they were not accorded the same value as white women. Aware of her audience, Truth spoke directly to both white men and women in the audience. To the white men, she said all women should be allowed to vote. To the white men and women, she said she should not be barred from voting because she is black.
Writing fifteen years after Truth, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper delivered her
1866 speech, “We Are All Bound Up Together,” to the audience at the Eleventh National
Woman’s Rights Convention. Harper recounts her experience of being a recently widowed black woman with four children, left without legal rights and forbidden to ride the streetcars in Philadelphia. Her husband died in debt and hadn’t been three months gone before her “milk crocks and wash tubs” were taken away from her (148). She opens her speech: “I feel I am something of a novice upon this platform. Born of a race whose inheritance has been outrage and wrong, most of my life had been spent in battling against those wrongs. But I did not feel as keenly as others, that I had these rights in common with other women, which are now demanded” (148).
Given the extant inequality of black women’s positions, Harper is aware that white women already had rights that black women didn’t have, and were demanding rights that black women were never going to get. Harper reiterates the same sentiment
Truth did some fifteen years earlier, emphasizing the difference in experience for white 40 and black women. Harper then goes on to call white women to task for believing— without examining their own complicity in sexism and racism—that winning the vote for white women would make right the world’s evils:
I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all
the ills of life. I do not believe that white women are dewdrops just exhaled from
the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good,
the bad, and the indifferent. The good would vote according to their convictions
and principles; the bad, as dictated by prejudice or malice; and the indifferent will
vote on the strongest side of the question. (149)
Thirty years after Harper, Fannie Barrier Williams delivered “The Intellectual
Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation
Proclamation” to the Congress of Representative Women in 1893. Harper’s critique of the white Suffrage Movement is reflected in Williams’s work. Williams demanded that all women, particularly women of color, should have access to higher education. For
Williams, the pursuit of knowledge is tied to emancipating (decolonizing) the mind. She tells the audience that, in 1893, black women who were “once enslaved women have been struggling for twenty-five years to emancipate themselves from the demoralization of their enslavement” (183).
Unable to recognize the lingering socio-cultural effects and impacts of slavery on the lives of black women, Williams’s work illustrates the racial and class divide between white women suffragists who hadn’t considered—as they hadn’t during Truth’s and
Harper’s time—that the rights white women were fighting for were only meant for white women. Just as Truth and Harper’s work drew attention to the racial and class disparities 41 between black and white women, Williams asked white women to consider how their whiteness and class might have left them with several blind spots. Instead of “uplifting a whole race of women from a long-enforced degradation” (181), white women participated in the same patriarchal behavior as white men, treating black women the way white men treat their women. Williams displays the fallacies in the logic of these white women suffragists because their inability to understand the lived realities of black women’s lives meant they were unaware of and had not thought to consider that black women had their demands also.
In 1894 Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s published A Red Record. Written during the height of lynching and mob law in the U.S., this work compiles data from newspapers, testimonies, and various other media to speak against the practice of lynching in the U.S. and to demand its abolishment. Wells-Barnett’s work analyzed the manner in which elite and non-elite white men employed the tools of racism and sexism to legitimize the lynching of black people. This work outlines a major shift in racial ideologies concerning black corporeality and the ways in which violence was used to obstruct blacks’ way to freedom.
Wells-Barnett points us to the three excuses southern white men used to legitimize the outright killing of innocent people: first, “to repress and stamp out alleged
‘race riots’”; second, given the right to vote and “right of franchise,” whites, feeling blacks had no rights they were bound to respect and wanting to maintain their “white man’s government,” killed many blacks to prevent “Negro Domination”; and third to eliminate the alleged assailing of white women (6-7). Wells-Barnett’s work outlines the ways in which southern white men used the law—a system of rules that they were able to 42 create, recreate, and emend in whatever way they wanted—to legitimize the outright killing of black bodies. She shows us how the south sought to use violence as a way to terrorize blacks into remembering their place, and she also shows us that the U.S. allowed this inhumanity to take place and made no attempt to put a stop to mob law and lynching.
This work also reminds us that, as Truth, Harper’s, and Williams’ have shown us, of the permanence of this profoundly inhumane differential established by and entrenched in U.S. culture, perpetuated and maintained between whites and nonwhites.
The black body was of very little worth, especially after manumission, and therefore could not be allowed to participate in the educational, economic, and political institutions of this country. Belief that the black body held no value made it easier to dwarf its soul, keep it from learning, reading, writing, speaking for itself, and being human.
This idea that a nonwhite body isn’t worth putting much effort into permeates our culture and is made manifest time and time again. For many centuries, blacks had been barred from participating in all facets of life in the U.S. Blacks were prohibited from attending school, they could not own land, they could not vote, and they could not amass any wealth. When blacks began to seek education within and outside of their own black communities, government created laws that prohibited this. When they found a way to obtain some property, the government created laws that finagled blacks out of their property and rights to own it. Many were driven from their homes, from their lands, at gunpoint, threatened with murder if they did not leave. When blacks sought the right to vote, there were laws such as literacy tests and poll taxes that prohibited them from voting. 43 Thirty one years later, Marita Bonner’s 1925 essay, “On Being Young—a
Woman—and Colored,” also discusses what it is like to live in a culture that devalues women and keeps them locked in their “natural roles.” This essay looks at the persistence of sexism and racism in her life. In addition to critiquing racism and sexism,
Bonner revealed how capitalism and the economic disparities it produced kept women bound to the conditions and pathologies to which men have sentenced them.
Bonner’s essay also provides insight into the inconveniences of racism and sexism: “You long to explode and hurt everything white; friendly; unfriendly. But you know that you cannot live with a chip on your shoulder even if you can manage a smile around your eyes—without getting steely and brittle and losing the softness that makes you a woman” (1246). No matter the weight of their burdens, women must always weather the burden of these intersectional oppressive forces with feminine repose and grace. Bonner continued, “You must sit quietly without a chip. Not sodden—and weighted as if your feet were cast in the iron of your soul. Not wasting strength in enervating gestures as if two hundred years of bonds and whips had really tricked you into nervous uncertainty” (1246).
Twenty-four years later and writing in the tradition of the Grimke sisters who grew up on a plantation in South Carolina and were the daughters of a prominent judge and plantation owner, a southern white woman by the name of Lillian Smith published
Killers of the Dream. Born in 1897, Smith came of age when Jim Crow had begun to grow sturdier roots. In this work she writes of her experience as a white southern woman, born and raised in the south, showing readers how deeply embedded in southern culture are the practices of racism and sexism. Of writing a work that unmasked the ugly 44 and sinister ways segregation and white supremacy had become indelibly etched into the southern way of life, Smith says, “I wrote it [Killers] because I had to find out what life in a segregated culture had done to me, one person . . .” (13). Beginning with what she learned as a child in her homeplace, Smith’s work takes a sharp and focused look at what it means to be raised in a place that polices ones behavior based on ones race, gender, religion and sexuality and what this means in her own life as a southern white woman who does anti-racist feminist work.
For her work as an advocate for racial reform and social change, she was targeted by segregationists and attacked for her beliefs. In 1955, two young white boys burned her house down, a fire which destroyed much of her writing—letters, works in progress, and manuscripts. In a correspondence to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Smith had said of the incident, “It is hard to believe they did it because of race. But this lawlessness of the young is a direct result of the lawlessness of their elders, many of whom do not hesitate to say they will not obey the highest law of our land when that law does not suit them”
(Smith, 3 April 1956). Smith stood opposite many whites who were also “working” for social change in the south. Many of her contemporaries did not care to intermingle with and live among black people, and spoke only of maintaining the cultural practice of Jim
Crow’s “separate but equal” law. Because Smith understood and was cognizant of the socialization process through which her own white southern femininity was constructed, she was able to examine and to challenge the systems by which race and gender functioned.
Audre Lorde, who wrote during the 50s and up until her death in 1992, began to write eleven years before Smith’s death in 1966. She was born in New York to 45 Grenadian and Barbadian parents in 1934. As a woman of color whose life straddled many borders, Lorde’s cultural work traversed and crossed several boundaries. Her ethos is shaped by her ability to resist the trap of essentialist thinking. Cognizant of how easy it is for her readers and listeners to immediately focus on and then universalize their own issues at the expense of another subjugated group, she always seeks to “examine human differences communicated within a socio-cultural system of power” (Olson 49-50).
Lorde is also one of the first black women living in the States to write explicitly and specifically about the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name,
A Biomythography details Lorde’s connection to the Caribbean and to her own emerging national, racial, and sexual identity, as she came of age in the city of New York. A fusion of biography, autobiography, myth, and cartography, Lorde makes visible the interlocking ways structures of privilege and discrimination function in U.S. society.
Her intersectional approach to theorizing oppression worked against supporting
“symbolic oppositions between white and black, male and female, capitalist and socialist, heterosexual and homosexual, master and slave oppositions,” something “Lorde criticize[d] as simplistic and as useful to dominant groups for exploiting subordinated communities” (qtd. in Olson 50). Lorde’s rhetoric recognized all facets of a person’s subjectivity, including embodiment, illustrating how all components of a person’s identity collide with and are affected by larger power structures. Using her own subjectivity, Lorde’s writing unravels polarities and collapses rigid boundaries that create a space for nonhegemonic and hegemonic identities to explore and evaluate the ways their lives are affected by living in a tyrannous, heteropatriarchal society. Lorde’s use of her own experience highlights the actual realities of oppression in the lives of all women 46 and draws our attention to the importance of recognizing the ways in which women are complicit in this society’s diseases.
Lorde often used chiastic structures in her speeches and essays to move her audience and readers to see the intersections between the ways in which racism and classism, for example, keep women of color and white women from working together against oppression across racial and class lines. Chiasmus refers to a grammatical inversion of two related clauses whose reversal of terms stresses the significance of a larger point. One such example is when the narrator in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes
Were Watching God, says, “Women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget” (1). Rather than working specifically on the linguistic level, Lorde uses similar examples of oppression to expose the false consciousness of her audience, the end result yielding a wide range of ideological possibilities.
In her speech “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” there are several moments where Lorde calls her white audience members to task for their own racist response to the anger of women of color. One chiastic moment Lorde creates is paralleling white women’s racism with white women’s silence and fear of social retribution. She notes this response is merely a way to delegitimize the anger of women of color, keep the anger of white women in the position of power, charge women of color with making white women feel guilty, and castigate women of color as too angry to work with. Lorde uses the example of a white woman academic “who welcome[d] the appearance of the anthology This Bridge Called My Back, a collection by non-Black 47 women of Color,” only “because ‘It allow[ed her] to deal with racism without dealing with the harshness of Black women’” (126).
This typifies the common response women of color receive from white women regarding the way we tell and speak about our experiences of living with racism and other forms of oppression. We are too loud and speak too directly when we speak our truths about oppression and its effect on our lives as women of color living in the U.S.
This white academic’s comment disembodied women of color from their writing and their very own experiences and blamed women of color for her inability to deal with her own racism.
A contemporary of Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa also challenged the dichotomies she saw and resisted in her experience of living on and in between various borders. Writing from the 1980s until her death in 2004, Anzaldúa is one of the first writers to confront the realities of being a Chicana woman in the U.S., explicitly discussing the idea of borders and the U.S.’ relationship with Mexico. Her critique of the border comes from her experience as a border dweller: she grew up in the small Texas town of Hargill. For
Anzaldúa, la frontera entre Los Estados Unidos y México es una herida abierta—an open wound “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country, a border culture” (25).
While Anzaldúa’s work deals with the physical borders of Texas, the Southwest, and Mexico, there are other borders that are specific to all of us. She notes,
the psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands, and spiritual borderlands
are not particular to the Southwest. In fact the Borderlands are physically present 48 wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races
occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch,
where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. (19)
Defying traditional categorization, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestizo interweaves poetry, autobiography, nonfiction, and the history of the Chicana southwest to reveal a psychology of resistance to oppression that contests the Cartesian logic by which Western culture divides up the body and separates it from the mind. The body cannot live without being in relation to the culture that shapes its “individual” self; without language, the body cannot name itself or create its identity; and without the mind, the body would not feel. To deny that there are strict, non-overlapping divisions between these categories is to say a person’s identity is fixed.
Minnie Bruce Pratt, a Christian-raised, white lesbian feminist from the South, learned about sexism, racism, and homophobia at home, through the social interactions between family and community members and the place where she was born and raised.
What she found when she looked beyond the myths she was raised with are the histories and the sites of struggle and exploitation of black peoples. Grounded in the geographical space of the south, the narrative in “Identity: Skin Blood Heart” politicizes the very site of the Alabaman community in which she came of age—from the court house, to the church, to the mill—to reveal the ways her identity was shaped by her relation to these buildings:
Yet I was shaped by my relation to those buildings and to the people in the
buildings, by ideas of who should be working in the Board of Education, of who
should be in the bank handling money, of who should have the guns and keys to 49 the jail, of who should be in the jail; and I was shaped by what I didn’t see, or
didn’t notice, on those streets. (33)
When she expanded her “constricted eye, an eye that has only let in what [she’d] been taught to see,” she became aware of what was left out, of how her whiteness had been shaped by the invisible black bodies who walked into the “other” door of Dr. Nicholson’s office (33-34).
When Pratt moves to eastern North Carolina with her husband and two children, she experiences another instance that sharply juxtaposes the lens through which white and black people see and remember history. Sitting down to dinner at a private club overlooking the market house in the center of town, “the well-to-do folks at the table, all white, chatted about history,” and the items that were sold at the market house. Fruits, vegetables, and tobacco were among the items sold there, “But not slaves,” everyone at the table said. At this moment, their server, a black man, clad in his red jacket uniform, responded,
. . . there had been slaves there: men, women, children sold away from their
mothers. Going to the window, he looked down on the streets and gave two
minutes of facts and dates; then finished serving, and left. The white folks smiled
indulgently and changed the subject. I recognized their look, from home. I was
shocked that he had dared speak to them, yet somehow felt he had done so many
times before, and I knew, without letting myself know, that as he spoke, there
stood behind him the house slaves who had risked whipping or worse when they
challenged with their words the white folks’ killing ignorance. (38) 50 In Pratt’s work the narrative is always holding up a mirror by which to see, with crystal clearness, what home often hides. In this case, the “look from home” immediately tells the reader that the home is one of the first places where lessons about the world and one’s relation to it are learned.
In the same way Pratt’s work speaks her truth and makes public the racism and sexism present in her home, a space of privacy, in the work of Patricia J. Williams, the personal and the public are not inseparable, for the private is already political. Public space is personalized in relation to one’s race, gender, and class. In her writing, Williams connects her life writing with theory, practice, and the law, examining the relations of power undergirding legal rhetoric and law, whereby this culture’s idea of truth remains in some abstract, so-called objective realm. In exposing the way legal language defines whose truth is worth hearing, Williams shows how traditional legal scholarship is raced, gendered, and classed. This scholarship refuses to engage in analyses of truth claims in light of the lived material conditions of everyday, ordinary people.
In her 1992 essay, “The Death of the Profane,” Williams illustrates how ideas regarding objectivity are steeped in subjectivity in U.S. culture. In order to fall in line with Western conventions regarding neutrality and objectivity, race, gender, and class are somehow erased. Recounting her experience with the editing process for a piece she wrote about an incident at a Benetton in New York City’s Soho District, Williams shows how the editorial board’s decision to omit her race in the telling of the incident, speaks to the way “law and legal writing aspire to formalized, color-blind, liberal ideals. Neutrality is the standard for assuring these ideals; yet the adherence to it is often determined by reference to an aesthetic of uniformity, in which difference is omitted” (413). This 51 erasure serves only to continue to disenfranchise black and poor people. Williams offers multiple examples of how the legal discourse in this country endeavors to expunge race in order to preserve conventions of objectivity and neutrality.
Born in Guayguayare, Trinidad in 1953, Dionne Brand came to Canada in 1970 to attend the University of Toronto. Brand’s work explores the depths of the consciousness the legacies of slavery and colonialism have produced. Her work emphasizes the way women have negotiated these legacies and histories. For example, At the Full and
Change of the Moon (AtFaCotM) articulates the histories of the descendants of Marie
Ursule, a Trinidadian, and Bola, her daughter. The novel traverses the time and space of the African Diaspora from the early nineteenth to late twentieth centuries. Bola’s children journey from the sugar cane plantations of Trinidad to the urban streets of
Amsterdam.
Brand begins the novel with a genealogical chart that documents the familial and kinship relations of Bola, her thirteen children, and their offspring. This chart is of special importance not only because it is the first disruption in the novel and is the catalyst for the emergence of each character’s story, but also because it begins with the story of Marie Ursule’s rebellion in service of her own agency and the agencies of the members of the Convoi Sans Peur secret society. Marie Ursule—the “queen of rebels, of evenings, of malingerings and sabotages”: challenges the authority of Le Chagrin’s masters and is the charge of the Convoi Sans Peur secret society (5). “But a Drink of
Water” depicts the last revolt Marie Ursule leads. Her final act of defiance is poisoning de Lambert’s property (slaves), fixing a poison the Sans Peur will take at the full and change of the moon. 52 The one child Marie Ursule chose to have—though “she had washed many from between her legs”—was with her lover, Kamena (8). She requests that he takes
Bola to the maroon camp of Terre Bouillante. As she prepares the mixture of curare,
Marie Ursule uses her dreams to call and respond to Kamena, as he carries Bola to the
Maroon camp of Terre Bouillante. If he cannot find Terre Bouillante from the instructions Marie Ursule’s dreams for him, then Kamena is to take Bola to Culebra.
Marie Ursule’s last morning, “the last morning that anything like will would make her rise and live. Those mornings were hard to summon. She could only count a few—the mornings of doing something that was not directed or ordered from the outside. What woke her also this morning was dreaming the thing she had to dream. Dreaming her generations. Dreaming a safe place for Bola” (15).
Marie Ursule’s dual resistance—mass suicide and sparing her own daughter to secret and free places—is an act against the space of colonization and its definitions of black femininity. She has resisted the occupation of her body and endured the physical and maligning punishment of a sliced ear, the pillory, and the iron around her ankle, and is able to pass her legacy of agency onto Bola, who ushers in a another new generation that “would face the world, too” (18). Marie Ursule knew that Bola’s off-spring would land to face the world. She dreamed of that diasporic space where her legacy of rebellion and integrity would play out its many manifestations, manifestations rooted in Caribbean and African diasporas.
Focusing on the same topic, Brand’s creative nonfiction work, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, continues her contemplation on the meaning of the diaspora. She opens A Map with an exchange she has with her grandfather, who said he 53 knew from what people they descended. Brand, thirteen, pestered him so that he’d remember; however, her grandfather never did recall the name of their tribe. She proposes these African tribes to him: Ashanti, Yoruba, and Ibo, but her grandfather never remembered. Of this exchange an older Brand realizes the question of where she came became more complicated and nuanced because this exchanged revealed “a rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being. It was also a physical rupture, a rupture of geography” (5). Brand realizes that her grandfather also “faced this moment of rupture,” of not knowing: “We were not from the place where we lived and we could not remember where we were from or who we were” (5). The desire to know from whence she came drives the narrative of this work for one of its central themes is to where does one trace one’s history back? What does it mean for ones sense of self if this history can only be traced back to colonialism, slavery, and racism? For Brand, the African and Caribbean diasporas become a way of knowing, a way of making sense of where home is in a constellation of histories of displacement.
Born in 1954, Aurora Levins Morales’s Remedios: Stories of Earth and Iron from the History Puertorriqueñas reframes and retells the history of Puerto Rico through the experiences of the women from the “old” and “new” world who have crossed paths on the island. It is a “vast web of women’s stories spinning out in time and space from the small island of Puerto Rico and encompassing some of the worst disasters to befall humanity: the Crusades; the Inquisition; the African slave trade; the witch persecutions; the European invasions of America, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific; and the enclosure of common lands in Europe itself . . .” (xxxiv). Remedios offers the reader new knowledge 54 about women who have been relegated to footnotes and kept out of the dominant narratives that tell the history of the contact and conquest.
One such story is that of Beatrice of Kongo who, in 1706, shook the “very foundation of the colonizing church” and “seized the gospel and made it African,” proclaiming that Kongo “is the Holy Land of the Bible, Christ was born in São Salvador, and the apostles were Africans” (130). The Capuchin missionaries did not like this, of course, because Beatrice, a woman, was a threat to their power; she gave her people back their identities, gave them back their faces. True to the old colonialist practice of divide and conquer, the Capuchin had the rulers of the Kingdom of Kongo (the manikongos, who were fighting among each other) deal with her. The manikongos wanted to send her to the bishop in Luanda, but the Capuchin would rather see her dead. Shortly after the birth of Beatrice’s child, whom she says was immaculately conceived; Beatrice is burned at the stake:
In the public square, the mouth of the manikongo speaks the sentence of the
Church. She is to be burned at the stake. Afraid now, she tries to recant, but the
crowd is in an uproar, and the prophetess and her child are heaped with wood and
burned. In the morning, the missionaries come again to burn their bones, so there
will be nothing left but ash. Still, the believers come and comb through the grey
dust with restless fingers, looking for the woman who, for a while, gave them
back their faces. (Morales 130)
Beatrice engages in epistemic disobedience, subverting Western ideas of the
Church, of god, and religion, in order to resist the Capuchin colonizers. In an effort to erase her from history, the Capuchin return to the smoldering heap the next day to ensure 55 there is nothing left of Beatrice, nothing left of her legacy of resistance. However, for the people she touched, for the woman who gave her people the will to fight for their freedom, they came to look for her in order to keep her memory alive.
In 2010, one hundred fifty-nine years after Truth’s speech, Dementure joins the work of writers such as Wendy Thompson, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarashina, Siobhan
Brooks, and Hadassah M. Hill, whose work embodies the writers’ struggle for the right to live without racism, sexism, homophobia, and no-class citizenship. If I am being a good, happy, compliant “black thing,” fitting nicely into the heteronormative categories for black queer women—in the space of the academy, say—I don’t so much remind my white colleague-peers of this country’s failure to admit the truth about its past and present. More precisely, I’d be a safe “African American” whose presence and way of being do not trigger the residuals of their own racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia.
However, I am one of those “black things” who do not fit or play right. My presence—with or without sound and speech—oftentimes exposes my white colleague- peers’ blind spots, many of whom tend to pathologize my ethos as recalcitrant. Of course, here is the dilemma: outside the comfort of my home, there is no time when I stop shifting my subjectivities, stop code-switching, stop! in order to take into account the context of my colleague-peers’ lack of awareness of the way they, too, have internalized and act out the racistsexistclassisthomophobic practices circulating in our culture.
Knowing this, I shift into an ethos that presents less of an emotional and personal challenge for them. This negotiation is psychologically and psychically exhausting, and there are times when I simply refuse to be the “right” kind of “black thing.” 56 I place my work along that of these writers—since Truth and on into the twenty-first century—because, as a decolonial project, my work speaks from the same disenfranchised loci of enunciation. My work also illustrates the ways legacies of oppression continue to haunt us. These writers are the giants on whose shoulders I stand.
They have left and continue to leave me a language and a number of theoretical tools with which to make sense of my experience. Their work helps me speak for the generation after me. As writer, teacher, and scholar, I continue this work with the intention of leaving alternative possibilities for my niece and nephew, because I do not wish for the younger generation to be without the tools they need to survive in a culture that feasts on the poison it creates and feeds to its own people, without regard to how this poison affects all of us.
Dementure and its parts
Dementure is comprised of six sections. The work begins with “What she learned from home,” which informs readers of the specific place from which I speak. This section weaves my adolescent voice with the voice of the house in Evanston, the house my family moved to from Chicago in 1983. My adolescent voice shows readers what cultural practices I was raised with and what I was taught about the value of education and of having and using a voice to stand and speak up for myself. The house’s voice relays my parent’s experience as colonial subjects in Belize, conveying their experience of crossing borders between Belize, Mexico, and the U.S. and living as illegal immigrants in this country.
Desi Luis, a Puerto Rican transformista, asserts, “Your family is your first school.”
Home is where I learned the cultural practices that taught me to negotiate, to question, to 57 fight, to humble myself, to know the difference between truth and lies, to “act as though I have some sense,” and to survive. Home uncovered the myths of my blackness, my poorness, about whom I’d come to love, to trust, and take solace in. The sounds in my home tell stories of my family’s life before they immigrated to the States, narratives that tell me what or who was left behind, who was missed, where I come from, and why my mother and father came here. Stories about border crossings, hangings, hurricanes; stories about bosses; stories retelling incidents, telling survival—stories teaching me different sets of cultural practices and all the skills that went along with them.
As a queer black woman, Belizean by blood and heritage, I grew up straddling the working class and working poor. What I learned in my home, particularly from my experiences of going to work with my mother and watching her move through the world, is that I am always to be aware of who and where I am in relation to people, particularly white men and women. However, this recognition never means that I need to be complacent, but that I am conscious of the nuances in the social dynamics between me and other people so that I may have the wherewithal to use the cultural practices I was raised with to safeguard myself in a culture that daily presents me with various structural, psychical, and physical barriers.
The second section, “A tracked girl,” reveals the present-day impacts of one aspect of colonialism: educational oppression. It draws readers’ attention to how I negotiate the
“tracking” of my blackness and the misplaced identities I refused to play into because of the tracking system at Evanston Township High School. It juxtaposes two important components to my educational and social experience in high school. On one hand, my counselor and math teacher (both white women), working within Evanston’s tracking 58 system, define my intellectual capacity through the color of my skin. On the other, this section shows how a few of my black teachers misread my person because for them I do not perform blackness in ways that are consistent with their ideas of black corporeality.
In this section, my high school-self enacts the cultural practices I learned at home in order to overcome the racist and classist educational practices that marked my schooling experience at Evanston Township High School. This school’s tracking system labeled me an “at-risk” student because my family supposedly didn’t speak American
English in the home. Later, I figured out that I was also tracked based on the performance of my two older sisters—transfer students from overcrowded and underfunded Chicago schools. At Evanston, both of my sisters were in lower-level classes and both had dropped out of school. The school failed to consider why my sisters dropped out, and the school also failed to see me as my own person, separate from an idea the institution had fashioned based first, on the racist and classist ideas of what makes an ideal student, and, second, on my sisters’ performance in school.
As a result of this misidentification, I was placed me into lower level courses. I understood I was not in the classes that challenged and fostered my intellectual ability. I knew my education was different from my peers’ because we did not share the same texts. I became intensely aware of this difference while I worked in the school’s Math
Department. Both Mrs. Sacks (my teacher) and Mrs. Pentek (my counselor) failed to detach my blackness from the underachiever, at-risk model through which they viewed and related to me—even when I advocated for myself, logically arguing why a particular math class was too easy.
The reader also sees how I negotiate the ways others perceive my blackness. The 59 black math teacher and track coach reads my person as inconsistent with their ideas of a young teenage black girl identity. I juxtapose the way the white and black teachers recognize my blackness because the latter sees the way I am and act as white, but the white teachers do not see this. Neither set of teachers are at all aware that I am not of what they assume blackness is, failing even to see the Belizean roots that have informed my blackness. In this instance, the reader sees me dismiss identities that the two white teachers pull from their grab bag of differential treatments and the two black teachers grab from their bag of identities that are consistent with their own ideas of blackness.
Sections three and four, “Losing things” and “The boat,” reveal the contradictions inherent in the idea of the “American Dream.” These sections both question and challenge the ideas of hard work and pulling oneself up by ones bootstraps, ideas that are at the core of the “American Dream.” Both sections expose the myth in this ideal, juxtaposing the work my parents have done since their arrival to the U.S. with the reality of what is gained from the kind of work they’ve done all their lives.
Throughout history, the only work available to black peoples, the kind of work for which they had been earmarked, was alienated labor work: menial, service sector work and manual labor jobs. Anibal Quijano’s work, “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and
Latin America” shows us how race became the fundamental category used to concretize the relations of domination that Césaire speaks of in Discourse on Colonialism. The idea of race, “a mental category of modernity,” was used to classify the world’s population into social categories and to buttress the creation of the colonial system of world power
(Quijano 534). The geo-political and socio-political power relations that emerged from the use of race rested on two principals: codifying the differences between the colonizer 60 and the colonized around an idea of race, “a supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to the others” and the configuration of a “structure of control of labor and its resources and products” (533-534).
Quijano notes that these “social relations founded on the category of race produced new historical social identities” in the Americas which determined what kind of work the colonized (read nonwhite people) were fit for doing and the kind of work the colonizer (read white people), were fit for doing (536). In the U.S., my parents’ work history was marked by their blackness and their “foreigner-ness.” These two ideas determined the kind of labor to which my parents had access. Already of the working poor in Belize, when they crossed the border to enter this country (both in their thirties), they found their opportunities for work remained the same.
In the U.S. the institution of slavery defined the black body’s capacity to do both physical and intellectual work. Consider Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of
Virginia, with its discussion of how the slave’s physiological, physical, and psychological compositions indicate natural and inherent differences between black people and white.
Black skin is a sign of the slave’s moral and intellectual inferiority.
Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by
the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real
distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us
into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the
extermination of the one or the other race.—To these objections, which are
political, may be added others, which are physical and more. . . . Comparing
them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that 61 in memory they are equal to the white; in reason much inferior, as I think one
could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations
of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. (264-
266)
Londa Schiebinger’s “Theories of Gender and Race” provides a framework for understanding the ways in which scientists of the Enlightenment period sought to make natural the inferiority of gendered and raced bodies. The “great chain of being” placed the Judeo-Christian God above white men, who followed next in line (21). Deeming themselves closer to God and, by extension, the bearers of God’s will and keepers of humanity, scientists positioned white women below themselves, and Africans at the very bottom—in the same sphere as apes. The latter indicates the extent to which racial and gender bias underline these scientific inquiries.
Thomas Jefferson’s ideas about race and class rest on a biological determinist logic where racial and class differences are innate characteristics of the body. In regard to race, he uses the “great chain of being” paradigm to show the ways in which blacks are emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually inferior to white people. While blacks may be “equal to whites” in memory, Jefferson notes, they are “in reason much inferior.”
Blacks can neither read Euclid, nor can they utter “a thought above the level of plain narration” (266). Blacks, then, were incapable of any intellectual capacity beyond what
Jefferson “observed.” Thomas Jefferson used “natural law” to see to it that slaves remained a free source of labor.
Slaves, skilled or unskilled, never received direct compensation for their work.
Only a very few were allowed what wages their owners decided to give them. With 62 emancipation, many newly freed blacks began to migrate west and north to leave behind the memories of their previous lives. However, racist and discriminatory practices in the States kept many blacks from obtaining employment that paid them a living wage. Moreover, the only employment blacks did have access to were the same menial tasks they did when they were, by law, still slaves: house cleaning, cooking— taking care of other people.
When the only work blacks have access to is cleaning up the mess of others, serving them food, or laboring on their property, the chances of achieving financial security and leaving later generations with wealth instead of poverty are very small. My mother and father did this kind of work for their whole lives. Their relationship with their employers were eerily similar to the relationships we see in movies such as the famous Gone with the Wind or Imitation of Life where blacks were portrayed as happy servants to white families.
My mother, in her attempts to find ways to disrupt the pattern of loss she experienced in her life, tried her whole life to seek and also create opportunities for her children that would give them some form of financial security. One of the ways she sought to make this possible was to supplement her income by gambling. Before she lost her sight, the last job she had was working as a live-in maid for an affluent, white Jewish woman. My mother had this job for ten years, and she often expressed that Mrs. Walken was her best employer because Mrs. Walken not only respected my mother, but also paid my mother what she was worth.
After she took a job that gave her some extra income to work with, my mother, who’d bought lottery tickets for many, many years, began to go the boat, using this extra 63 income to gamble. “Losing things” and “The boat” illustrate the lengths one goes to achieve the financial security one is supposed to gain through hard work. This section asks, how is the fulfillment of the “American Dream” possible when one starts out on the losing side? Who is the “American Dream” for? For my mother, gambling became one way to make the money she thought would give her children and grandchildren access to the financial security she never had. In so doing, my mother tried to disrupt the pattern of intergenerational poverty that had been following her for generations.
To this very day my mother believes that before she dies, she will win the lottery so she will be able to leave her children and their children with some form of what she believes is wealth and security. She realized that alienated labor—cleaning houses and other service sector work available to both immigrants and people of color in the U.S.— was never going to cut it. In this way, she also came to understand that the principals guiding the logic behind the “American Dream,” one, means something very different for people of color, and two, was never meant for her, an immigrant woman, to achieve.
This is the point of historical disenfranchisement, to make it impossible for the underprivileged to break the patterns of loss that have marked their existence throughout history.
The voices in “Dementure,” the fifth section in this work, represent various feminine bodied subjectivities that engage in epistemic disobedience. It showcases a range of decolonial responses to a long history of disenfranchisement, differential treatment, and discrimination. Each voice in this section defies the “regimes of truth” that have been prescribed for oppressed, subaltern women. In a world that already reads them as outside its master narrative of intelligible, legitimate bodies, the voices in this 64 section have been repeatedly and frequently displaced into subjectivities (and expected to comply to them) the colonizer and its institutions have deemed fit for us. Our responses to the shifting nature of oppression, our refusals to succumb to these interpellations, are labeled as noncompliant, understood as an impairment of our reasoning, and dismissed as angry and aggressive.
In order to understand our now, we need to understand our past. Take the category of “woman,” for instance. “Woman” in 2010 is not constructed in the same way it was in the U.S. of the 1830s, especially for women of color. However, the labels and functions of “woman” of the 1830s have remained with “woman” even as she disputes these old labels, and even as new articulations of “woman” have emerged in 2010.
History is contiguous. The language (what was said about “woman”) and discourses
(how it was said: through medical/science writing, literature, jurisprudence, etc.) of the past have not stopped informing the way people interact with and understand each other.
These various developments have impinged and continue to have an effect on the lives of many women. For instance, as a child I’d heard my parents relay the story of
Nora Parham’s death and the circumstances surrounding her hanging many times. Nora’s death is very much a part of my mother and father’s memories; her death has also become a part of my memory. Nora, a mother of eight children with another on the way, had been in an abusive marriage with a Police Constable. Tired of bearing the brunt of her husband’s nightly drunken tirades, she waited for him to return home, locked him in the outhouse, and burned him alive.
Her story exposes the limits of dominant narratives (embedded with social, economic, and political power) present in 1960s British Honduras—for they only serve to 65 misidentify Nora’s body, excluding and making invisible other possibilities for her life.
When my mother shares her thoughts with me, she says she would have done the same thing, “after a woman can only take so much beating”; an indication that she not only agreed with Nora’s actions, but that she also understood the context of the events leading up to Nora’s death. For me, Nora’s narrative ruptures the fabric of those narratives that have regulated and naturalized her body: she was to raise the children, cook, keep house, and fulfill her husband’s sexual needs. This was Nora’s natural function. Nora felt she was more than a mother and more than a woman to beat. Exercising her agency, she kills her husband.
Belize’s judicial system did not see the context of Nora’s experience. Nora was married to a man who worked for the state: he was a Police Constable. Who was she to go to for help; and who around her, despite their well-intentioned feelings, would have helped her when her husband embodied the law? The abuser’s horrifying death trumped the reality of Nora’s life: she suffered daily her husband’s physical and emotional abuse.
The victimizer’s narrative and that of the law that protected him sent Nora to her death and left her children wards of the state. In the end, most Belizeans talked about Nora’s craziness, as if Nora lived in a vacuum. But many more of them, remembering the body dancing from the tree, talked of the sadness they felt because “Nora should not have been hung.” This is just one example of the many voices in this section telling their stories and speaking directly to the master narratives that have excluded them.
The last section of the work, The “Mall of America,” takes up this concept as it explores the way the mall cops hear my answer to their question. This section illustrates colonialism’s reach into the twenty-first century and the manner in which imperialism 66 abroad affects bodies of color in the U.S. Ideas regarding how bodies of color move through public space have accrued for over five hundred years. Before emancipation blacks were not permitted the right to assemble; after emancipation and during reconstruction blacks were terrorized in order to be kept in their places; during the long period of the fight for civil rights (30s through the 90s) blacks were constantly facing police threats and brutality; and now that, in the millennium, the U.S. has used terrorism to place fear in the masses, people of color bear the brunt of the increase in militaristic practices that are used by troops overseas and by the police in the States. “The Mall of
America” illustrates the way in which the police state attempts to control populations of color through intimidation, and it exposes the logic undergirding the system of racial profiling in law enforcement in the U.S.
Racial profiling has long been an entrenched cultural practice. Aware that my corporeality has been socially constructed and also pathologized as inherently criminal, I know that the pathologizer’s ideas about how it should respond to me are based on figments of the U.S.’ racist imagination. In this section, my intent is to have the reader gradually become aware of and understand that the dominant culture’s pathologies, which have historically assigned value to bodies of color, are demented and only serve to ensure that nonwhite bodies are kept in their places. Regardless of my response, in the mall cops’ minds, they automatically read me as “man” (because of my hirsute chin), as a
“niggerthug delinquent” (because of my blackness), they already read my body through the lens of their own sexism, racism, and homophobia, a reading that is legitimated by their uniforms and the guns they carried. This section moves the reader to think hard upon the idea of what it means for racialized and marginalized people to live in a culture 67 that insists on believing the lies it has been telling itself and acting out these beliefs in the manner it polices its public and also private spaces.
Each section of Dementure demonstrates the social, psychological, and psychical burdens that come with living out of a colonized identity. It takes energy, intellectual and emotional, to repeatedly negotiate the blind spots and learning curves of members of the dominant culture. There is rarely any reprieve from this work—in writing or in life—as I am already tending to, and attempting to heal from, the old wounds of the U.S.’ collective and historical trauma. I am well aware of the dominant culture’s history and behavior.
The majority of the members of the dominant culture, however, are not aware because most only understand their identities through the myths and lies that have distorted the truth behind the history of who they are and how they have come into being.
Conclusion
Dementure illuminates the collective and systemic problems—in a system of global capital, created by the legacy of European colonization, and sustained by U.S. neocolonialism—that haunt the lives of the disenfranchised and marginalized who are living in the U.S. In many ways, this work articulates the origins of our problems and shows what challenges persist for marginalized groups in the U.S. My writing explores the gaps between contact zones in the U.S. and the gaps between genres, investigating the institutional realities that can and often do thwart my individual responsibilities to walk my talk, to live with integrity, and to challenge the fictions that gather around my notions of collective memories and collective truth.
Dementure calls attention to the systemic injustice that silences subaltern voices.
As a writer, pedagogue, and scholar-activist, I do work that debunks Western 68 epistemologies of knowledge and ways of being by writing my experience and others’ experiences into the narratives of U.S. history and culture. I do not believe that history is a linear, universal narrative. I do not believe that the West is the center of the world, the center from which the tenets of my education, of living as a hirsute queer woman of color, of living as a writer, have emerged. European philosophical and scientific legacies have long offered and legislated interpretations of the world that have silenced and continue to silence the histories of the colonized. Like the work informed by Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness, my work highlights multiple consciousnesses: my Creole
Belizeanness, the black American-ness I inhabit simply because of the color of my skin, my queerness, my working-class-ness, my second-class citizenship-ness—my life of constantly living in and against Western epistemologies and ontologies that have attempted to design my life for me. I resist and disrupt; resisting and disrupting over and over and over.
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My basement flooded whenever it rained; water seeped right through my stone, even with the drain cap on and no matter how tightly I squeezed. There was always a fifty-fifty chance I’d flood whether or not the cap was on. Later, the percentage became seventy-five/twenty-five when the new people figured out that flooding was sometimes a matter of clearing debris from the sewers in front of the house and keeping my drain covered when big rains came. The thirteen hundred block of Darrow was a quiet enough street. Couched between one of Evanston’s busy east-west arteries, Dempster, and the smaller side street, Greenwood, an assortment of people lived here. When people were walking north and away from Dempster, I was the sixth house on the block, right next to the alley. To my right were the Jamaicans who lived across the alley from me. Directly in front and across the street was one of two apartment buildings on the block. Heading back to the busyness of Dempster: on my left were the Lords, Belizean like their new neighbors. Their house was next to the black American people’s house. The old fair-skinned woman with her long graying braids sat diagonal from me, spying from her porch. She was sandwiched between the Lairds and the Swaffords. The Haitians lived in the house down the block from them and across from the Mexicans. This corner was melodious: the Haitian men played their guitars. The Mexican men blew their horns. The kids loved running up and down the two alleys on the block, playing catch or those hiding games they liked to make up: a bunch of kids running from one another, 74 trying to get to base. They played kickball on their front lawns, making sure to play only when Mr. Lord was not at home. He saw grass differently than the kids did and didn’t want them ruining his lawn. Except for those very hot summers that parched the grass, Mr. Lord took great pride in keeping his grass nice and green. As for Mrs. Lord, she didn’t complain very much about the grass. They were, all of them, a bit of a rag-tag bunch. I was a rag-tag house, so we fell into each other immediately. The youngest boy got his own room; the two youngest girls shared the room by the bathroom; the two oldest girls—the Geminis—shared the back room, which was connected to another room, where the grandmother slept. In warm- weather months, the parents slept in the basement; in the winter they piled their bedding on the green-carpeted living room floor and slept there. The mother and father had more children than the five who showed up with them. The eldest son had been deported back to the country where they all, save the smallest three children, came from. He had become entwined in others’ bad business. The boy after him lived somewhere in New Jersey doing construction work. Their eldest daughter still lived in the city, having moved out before their big move to Evanston. She often came with her two children to visit. Altogether there were seven people living in the three-bedroom house. They were foreign, from somewhere in the Caribbean or some country attached to some landmass south of the United States. I knew this from the things they did, the way they did them, the way they talked and laughed among themselves, the way they fought. In the summer they fried their fish outside on the fire hearth the father had built with some bricks and extra pieces of wood he found along the routes he walked to and from 75 his job at Northwestern. The mother sometimes baked her johnny cakes and sweet little brown breads they called “powder buns” out there. They had a black handled machete that they used for everything: to chop the shell off of coconuts, to fight, to quarter and section their meat, to garden. The machete was to them, it seemed, just another knife. Even the children knew where it was; they were sometimes summoned to take the machete outside to their father. They were always sending some child of theirs off to Bill’s Corner Store to return an item. If it wasn’t one of the children, then it was the old “Coolie” man who stayed with them occasionally. Sometimes it was the grandmother, but mostly it was the unfortunate child who had originally bought the no-good item. Everyone, right down to the kids, did a funny thing with their lips, teeth, and mouths—somewhere in that region—I’d never heard before. All of them took air into their mouths and expressed, in varying lengths, in varying tones, a sort of “tsking,” except it isn’t “tsking.” This kissing of the teeth, I’ll call it, expressed anything from anger, annoyance, and irritation to incredulity, to talk back to, and to challenge. They kissed their teeth to foolish or impossible acts, laughing at another’s silly antics and humorless jokes. The mother did an array of jobs. About four times a week she drove the old station wagon—the front left end smashed in—north on Sheridan or Green Bay Road to Winnetka and Highland Park, where she cleaned houses. When she was done, the mother returned to Evanston to her cooking job at Northwestern, where she prepared lunch and dinner for the Delta Gamma Sorority girls and offered some her counsel. 76 The father worked as a third-shift janitor at the university, too. He left for work at four o’clock in the evening and returned home at one in the morning—if he wasn’t working overtime, which he did during the university’s winter and summer breaks. He, too, did odd jobs. On the weekends he went to the Millers, where he did anything from cleaning the gutters of the house to ripping out old carpet from rooms slated for remodeling to shining silvers, spot-cleaning the house, and running errands. He was allowed to take Mr. Miller’s Mercedes to run these errands. Before the grandmother died, she lived with them on and off. She worked the seven-o’clock-in-the-morning shift at Arens Control, where she worked on an assembly line manufacturing push-pull cables for airplanes, agricultural equipment, and cars. We began to learn each other gradually: the father waking up in the middle of the night to cover my drain; the sisters telling stories to the neighborhood kids; the loud, strident way they all spoke; the way my walls shook when they laughed. We should have kept the claw-footed tub, but this loss made up for the flooding, the roaches, and the hoodlum crooks across the street, who, once on a snowy evening, stole the family’s holiday dinner from the trunk of their used car. … One of the first things Daddy does is call his pest control friend because the house is full of roaches. Floyd works with Daddy at Trinity Bronze (before the job relocates to another state faraway). The roaches are the first ones to greet us at this new place. For one day, I collect a few of them in an old cigar box. I trick them into crawling onto a piece of paper, carefully shake it so they land into the box, and close the lid. They aren’t 77 the cleanest insects, these roaches. So I don’t touch them. The moms are cute with their tiny, crinkly tan bags tucked under their wings. Floyd sprayed the apartment when we lived on Jonquil, and, despite the awful chemical scent wafting through it, all the roaches either died and left or lived and moved out—or upstairs. I don’t know where roaches go when they start to smell that toxic-smelling spray. I can’t imagine they like the way that stuff smells and tastes. We think roaches are the worst of the filthy worst and carry all kinds of germs, but, actually, they don’t like it when humans touch them: they clean themselves as best they can when we do. Roaches don’t like the oils from our skin. Before long, I start to kill them off. I squish the mother roaches between toilet paper, but decide later to flush them down the toilet because drowning does the same thing squishing does. As I watch them settle on the water, circling around the bowl, I think about that movie I saw about this little white boy who flushed a baby alligator down the toilet. The alligator grew several feet long and wide and terrorized the city’s sewer system. If that happens to these roaches—if they survive and grow to be a colossal colony of brown-striped monsters—they’ll eat all of the people they can. As the roaches shuffle through the streets, their skinny legs will squash the running, screaming people. If it’s not the roaches, then it’s the red ants. The first time my grandmother, Mamá, tries to bake, she leaves her bread to rise. She returns to see a mass of red ants crawling toward the doughy spot where she has kneaded; she dashes away every single loaf she has made. Mamá is that way with food because, for her, cleanliness is next to godliness: it’s not good to give people dirty food. After the ant incident, Mamá and Mommy do not bake anything until Floyd comes over with his two plastic tank devices 78 and their long, brass- colored sprayers. After the spraying, all of us get buckets of water with some Pine Sol and wash down the walls in our rooms. We eat only in designated areas. If we are caught eating or sneaking food elsewhere, we get it from Mommy and Daddy. My younger brother and sister and I play together a lot. We’re all we have unless we are at the summer daycare program the city of Evanston does. Kids who can afford to go to expensive overnight camps or sports or swim camp for the summer go. Since we’re the kids of parents who have two, three, and four jobs, Mommy finds us a free camp with the district. We spend the summer doing the district sixty-five summer program for the kids who don’t do Camp Echo or sports arts camp. At Dewey Elementary School, we make art out of construction paper and popsicle sticks, play kickball on the black asphalt, have beach days, and go to the Lincoln Park Zoo—Chicago’s only free zoo. Later on in the day, when parents are on their way and we’ve eaten our snacks, we play on the playground while the grown-ups talk among themselves. We three spend all day there until Mommy picks us up as close to seven as possible—the last and final hour of summer daycare—without being late. Sometimes our two sisters pick us up. When summer camp’s done, we spend the rest of the summer going to work with Mommy, using our weekends to make up our own music videos, singing lyrics to our favorite B96 songs, or we’re outside playing running bases, tag, kickball, and, occasionally, double-dutch with the neighborhood kids. Sometimes our older sisters and their friends let us turn on the hose and we pretend we’re at the beach. Other times, when our sisters’ friends come to visit from the city, they tell us stories. We get to run around 79 the house pretending monsters are after us, or we circle around my oldest oldest sister with our legs crossed, listening to her tell us stories about Megawulla—some kind of monster who ate children who were too smart and spoiled for their own good. If we can’t quickly answer a question about Megawulla’s whereabouts or what its favorite food is, my oldest oldest sister says, “You know very well Megawulla has wings and feet.” We giggle and squeal with delight. Inside we play shark, pretending that the dark brown carpet in the room is riddled with them. Baiting them, my sister and I dangle our feet over our used bunk bed, and my brother splashes up from the cold, deep ocean to snap at them. On Sunday evenings, when we’re done reading from the Bible and the Ann Landers book about etiquette and when mommy puts us to bed, we play dodge. Since Mommy and Daddy’s room is in the basement, she can hear if we’re out of bed running around or playing one of our games. The floors creak, see. Avoiding the creaks is part of the game. We know she is coming because we hear her clogs pounding up the basement stairs. We make a run from wherever we’re hiding just in time to not get caught. Upon catching us the first time, Mommy gives us a warning. The next time she catches my little sister (her bed is on top of mine; she doesn’t always climb up fast enough), Mommy gives her a few whaps: “Stay in bed.” We tease our little sister and go on challenging each other to dodge again. Mommy gets us once, though, because, she tiptoes upstairs, her clogs in her hands, and catches us playing hide and seek. Our little mouths, agape, are in “O”s as she asks, “Why are you all out of bed?” After putting her clogs on, she clomps back downstairs. 80 So many Sunday evenings we spend around the table in the back of the kitchen while Mommy listens to us read some Psalm or passage from either of the two books. None of us likes this at all because we are bored to death of reading the Ten Commandments over and over again, repeating the important ones twice. “What does that mean?” she asks, all stern. “Not to be disrespectful to…” and one of us trails off on an answer to which she’s “uh huh-ing” and “what else–ing.” She knows we’re getting the Ann Landers stuff when we set the table for Sunday dinner, big holiday dinners, and whenever we’re around other people. This means anywhere—the sidewalk, stores, trains and busses, at her job. One day we’re on the bus—each of us with our share of bags—and this old man with gray, stringy hair and a teardrop of snot about to fall from his nose needs to sit down. I’m tired and want to sit. Mommy eyes me to give the man my seat. I make a mistake and suck my teeth. Sucking your teeth to Mommy, well, that’s like saying, “F- you,” even if it’s not meant in the “F-you” way. Mommy looks at me so hard, I don’t sit down for rest of the ride home—even when there are empty seats and a few grown-ups direct me to them. Anytime someone speaks to us and we act “simple,” Mommy says, “Do you hear the man talking to you? Answer.” If we’re not fast with our words, she reminds us, “Whenever people talk to you, don’t stand there like a bloody fool. SPEAK when people talk to you.” When one of the three women she works with tells her once, “You’re kids are so well behaved,” Mommy says, “That’s because I beat their butts.” That Mommy does do—whip us. If first we lie and then we tell the truth, we still get whipping. “Do you know why you getting beat?” Mommy asks in between blows. In 81 tears we answer, “Yes,” and Mommy’s big booming, “WHY,” then our meek, soft answer, which we always have to repeat again, louder and with vigor, until Mommy is satisfied and feels we understand why she took a belt to our palms. If I bully up my little brother and sister, I get whipping. If we don’t stand up for each other in school, we all get whipping. If we make tricks on the other that cause hurt, we get whipping. After putting a toy school bus in our sister’s pillow case once, both my brother and I hedge bets to see if our sister’ll do her nighttime thing: she bangs her head softly on the pillow; it helps her fall asleep. We goad her to do it—much more seriously than she normally does—a little harder: “You’re doing it wrong; that’s not how you normally do it.” When she does it again, she bangs her head hard, BAM!, and begins to cry. My brother and I plead with her not to tell because she didn’t have to listen to us. We each have one of her arms in our grasp, but she wriggles loose and runs to go tell Mommy. We get a whipping for that. My little sister gets a few whaps for “being foolish and listening to other people” tell her what to do. We three are to stick up for each other—in school, in church, whenever, and all the time. We are to mind our manners, remember to be humble “because there is always somebody badder than” us, and “speak up” for ourselves. Mommy says not to fool around, especially in school, where we must do our best because she only went “as far as the sixth standard,” and she “woulda love to get a chance to go to school” like us. Since we three were “born here, we are citizens” and we should “take advantage of what this here States offer us.” Whenever Mommy uses the word “citizen” and talks about 82 “rights,” I know that she and Daddy have been to see Bobby. He’s the white man at the immigration place who is helping Mommy and Daddy to “fix their papers.” These trips into Chicago take about half the day. Mommy and Daddy take the train to the Wilson stop to go to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Building on Broadway. Both of them carry a big brown envelope stuffed with important documents. Bobby’s the public defender, and he’s going to help them get their green cards so they can become legal. He says since they’ve been in the States for well over seven years, Mommy and Daddy can apply for their citizenship. They have to prove that they’ve never been involved with the law, and that they pay their bills, and they must have receipts to prove they’re being honest. That’s what’s in the brown envelopes sitting on the table between them now. Having tea with each other, Mommy blows the light brown liquid in her cup before she sips and recounts the day. “You see how rude that security guard was to that Spanish woman and her child?” The woman didn’t understand what the security guard was saying. He stood in his blue uniform and fake, gold-plated badge speaking like the woman was deaf. “You can’t stand here,” Mommy kept repeating. “Just because she didn’t speak English, the man think he was bembe and could talk to people so bad.” Mommy and Daddy had just arrived at the building and were waiting for Bobby in the lobby. Just as Mommy was going to tell the woman what the security guard was screaming, Bobby came out of his office. Seeing the commotion and the alarm on the woman’s face, he walked over to her while saying, “Por favor Señora, tome un asiento allá.” 83 Daddy sucks his teeth before he bites into his johnny cake. “It’s as though we are not people,” he says between chewing. Bobby treats all his clients well, though, and my parents say he “fights for all of his clients.” He doesn’t think the people applying for their green cards are stupid, or because they are black or brown or don’t speak English they shouldn’t be treated like human beings. Seeing Bobby is stressful for them. Sometimes they have to wait a long time to see him, sometimes they need more proof, and sometimes they forget to bring an important piece of paper. Their faces are long, sullen, and both are awfully quiet for a lot of the day. There’s nothing illegal or alien I can see about my parents. Belize is only about seventeen hundred miles from Chicago. There’s only one body of water to fly over and maybe only at thirty or so thousand feet. We all live in the same stratosphere, scientists call it. The tallest mountains don’t even extend past this atmosphere and planes never fly higher than fifty thousand feet. Aliens live on other planets, in different solar systems. E.T. probably passed through the earth’s atmosphere—the exo-, thermo-, meso-, and stratopheres—to get here. My family, being human and all, walked on and bussed over land, on this planet, in this solar system to get to Evanston. They don’t look like the Daleks in Dr. Who or those green aliens with the bulb heads and black, beady eyes. My family came to this country because it’s supposed to be the “Land of Opportunity.” There’s a green woman holding the torch in New York Harbor; she’s not an alien. This white woman, Emma Lazarus, calls this green woman the Mother of Exiles in her sonnet “The New Colossus.” Lazarus even hears her say (though “with silent lips”), 84 Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door! … The parents were illegal aliens for fourteen years. They moved from the west and east coasts, met in Chicago, and lived in various places—they moved up, up, and up, south to north—until they arrived to live with me. Before then, they were working to get educations and green cards. The two took evening classes at Truman Community College, learning what they needed in order to obtain their GEDs and pass this country’s constitution test. After trying her hand at nursing, the mother earned certificates to show how fast she could type and how well she could file. Later, the mother received a few more credentials from the state of Illinois, proving she could run a daycare. Before they crossed into Evanston, the parents sometimes held classes downstairs in the apartment building on Jonquil. There was a blackboard around which friends, family, and associates sat learning words and a sundry of linguistic habits they needed to know in order to write and talk their way through the tangle of cultural rules. Understanding these rules meant making their lives in the U.S. easier—if only in spurts. Strongly to mildly to lightly accented voices spelled out words in syllables and looked them up in the dictionary everyone shared. 85 Before the mother and the father began to get their papers fixed, they thought to have their three American children file for them. To take this route, however, meant they had to wait until their children came of age. Both agreed they couldn’t wait for the eldest to reach the age of eighteen and began the trip to naturalization sometime in 1977. By the time they had moved up from the south side of Chicago to Howard Street to Evanston in 1983, the mother and father had received their GEDs and plastic green cards. Both carried their cards in their wallets. I suppose they had to prove they were working on becoming citizens, in case they became entrapped in the judicial system and threatened with deportation—leaving the three children who were actually born here without parents. Those immigrants who, for a number of reasons, fell prey to the police system were exiled and never ever allowed to come back to this country. In their stories I heard the phrase, “They ship he home” or “She got ship back home.” This had happened to the mother’s first child. She had been very young when she had had him, so for those who enquired, he was the mother’s little brother. Mamá, the mother’s mother, mostly raised him. This teenage boy crossed the border into Brawley with the rest of them. He lived with his family for a time on Jonquil, until he outgrew the apartment, met a woman, and moved to Texas. Errol was the fall guy for someone’s substandard drug deal—or so the story went. Since he automatically trusted his girlfriend’s people, he was the one who got caught, didn’t snitch, landed himself in prison, did his time, and, upon his release, got shipped back home. … 86 On the weekends, Daddy mostly works in the yard. With bowed legs and lanky frame, he bends at the waist to trim the grass. All I hear is swish, pause, swish, pause. Before we get a push mower, Daddy mows the lawn with his machete. In straw hat and blue jeans, Daddy swipes, swipes, swipes with his skinny veined arms. Clippings fly into the air, get into his ears, stick to his sweaty face, and collect on the rim of his hat. The grass must grow high, high for this. In our family, we do a lot of things with the machete. Dig up dirt to plant our gardens, to prune trees, and to chance people when they mess with us and we have to fight. Chancing meant we pretend to want to use the machete in hopes that this intimidation will make people change about wanting to fight. We fought a lot in Evanston since moving from Chicago. There are four people in the family who can wield the machete like a ninja: Daddy, Mommy, Mamá, and Mr. Ramsey. They all have their own way of using it. I like to watch Daddy chop the casing off a coconut in three strokes and one breath. Sunday is usually rice and beans and stew-meat dinner. And that means the coconut need to get its shell off, get grate, and trash get turned into milk for rice. Sunday is also quiet time, big people time. Daddy plays music, mostly country so he can hear Mommy sing along to Jim Reeves and Ray Price. Dinner cooking starts early. Around noon, Mommy calls me to take the coconut to get chop. I take it out to Daddy: “Mommy said to do the coconut.” If the machete isn’t already outside, I go get it. For a few minutes, I study the blade, wishing I could brandish the machete like a bush fighter, pretending to fight off foes. Most of the time I don’t get to be a bush fighter because the machete is already outside. 87 Daddy’s arms have vein after vein. They look ready to bust open when he tightens his grip around the machete’s handle. One runs right through the tattoo on his right forearm. It’s a picture of a heart resting on an anchor. He stops what he is doing, his face hidden by the straw hat, and with three mighty strokes the coconut shed its shell. “Huh,” he hands me the coconut and throws the brown coverings in the fire heart. Inside, Mommy nicks a little hole into the fruit and pours the coconut water into a glass. “Go and get the things to do the coconut,” she says in between singing and seasoning the chicken. I get to drink the coconut water but never before getting the dented, metal bowl and the grater Daddy made from leftover wood and scrap tin. Mommy sits, legs splayed, the bowl propped between them, and starts grating the whole coconut at once. Handling coconut is one of my food chores. I am the best coconut grater in line behind my three oldest sisters, and I love most things about doing the coconut: watching Daddy’s wrist fling; watching Mommy turn one big oval coconut into little triangular stubs, placing them on a napkin for me to eat; and rice made with coconut milk instead of so so rice made with regular old tap water. The picking-a-good-coconut part, the cruel factor, is what I detest. A game of sound, weight, and chance: Choosy, come and pick a coconut. Choosy must first shake for water, Choosy must then weigh. Choosy must pray for luck, then Choosy must pay. 88 Mommy has taught me how to pick good coconuts. So well, as a matter of fact, that fright freezes my body when it’s time to go buy coconuts from Bill’s, the corner store down the street from the house. I walk to the store, not with the sure steps of going to buy toilet paper or lottery but with sandbags slowing my pace. Even though Mommy tells me time and time again how to pick a good coconut, I always find myself standing over a box of them, sweating worry of choosing a bad one. Bad means the coconut water is sour because the fruit is beginning to rot; or there’s no water because the fruit’s beginning to rot; or the coconut is good, but the meat isn’t very sweet. Usually, I pick a good one, but a discomfort soaks my thoughts and makes coconut deciding an unwelcomed chore. I don’t like taking things back to stores, see, especially to Bill’s. The one time Mommy made me return a rotten coconut always bursts out of my shed of memories: still, to this day, and always when I have to buy coconuts. I can pick ripe avocados; healthy, fresh fish; good ground foods; but cunning isn’t steady with me and coconuts. Everyone at Bill’s knew me, too—our whole family, actually—because of the one tracing match Mommy and the owner got into. When Mommy saw the green fuzz covering a large part of the coconut, she’d told me, “It’s Rotten, Rach. Take it back. Take the receipt.” No one listens to little girls, or so I felt, and when I opened the doors to Bill’s Supermarket and told Yolanda, the heavy set cash register woman, that I wanted to return the coconut because it was rotten— something she could plainly see—her normally soft eyes slid into squints, and she said “No can do” because it was already “opened.” And little old me, ten, didn’t disagree. I walked back home with the receipt and coconut and happily recounted for Mommy why I 89 couldn’t return it. “Well, I be a bitch.” She dropped the knife into the boiled potatoes she was peeling. “Go back to the store and take back the coconut.” I didn’t. I walked out the door, down the street, through the alley, and back into the house where I again told Mommy that they wouldn’t let me return the coconut because it was opened. Mommy went back to the store with me this time, and one big yelling ensued. First with the register ringer, then owner, then two owners: “Store sell all kinds of rotten shit. I’m right to call it shit. This isn’t the first time I get rotten food from here.” There’s a vein in my mother’s neck that bulges with blood whenever she gets angry. On and on with insults. When island people trace, or argue, each other, most don’t curse. Instead, they tell their foes all kinds of hurtful things. In between insults about how the store “Take advantage of poor people” and “You think you big cause you own store,” she also said, “You should go and fix your bloody teeth—look like shark live and walk on land.” That wasn’t the first time I’ve seen Mommy tell people a piece of her mind. Sometimes she embarrassed us with the loudness of her voice. Mommy gets LOUD!— just like that. Half the time, standing next to her when she’s telling people a piece of her mind, we three never know whether to laugh or to be serious. My brother, sister, and I stand there and listen, trying not to giggle, because if we do, she turns to us and shouts “It’s not funny.” Right in front of these people’s faces: she can’t believe this, she just can’t believe it—some funny people with their peel head, greasy face, and lumpy nose. “Bloody nincompoops.” Mommy doesn’t have any problems telling the people she works for—or the people who teach her children, the people she gives her money to— 90 what she knows is right. This isn’t an everyday thing because there have been tons of times when Mommy says nothing at all and ignores the slights, the stuff nobody notices but us—especially when people ask silly questions about her accent. Mommy gets a lot of people asking her where she’s from. Sometimes she says British Honduras, sometimes she says Belize, but a lot of times she tells people, “I’m from the Virgin Islands.” That answer gets people to stop right there because she doesn’t have to spell out where Belize is or explain anything about her accent—which is really not an accent at all but how she talks. It’s often something big like the motorcycle boys or even something like the one time this cash register ringer at Dominick’s asked her what a plantain was. The black American girl got huffy because we had two carts filled to the brim and were paying with food stamps. “What is this?” the cashier “tsked” loudly, holding up a plantain. “It’s plantain,” Mommy said. Plantains do not at all look like yellow bananas. They just don’t, and if people paid attention, they’d see that the skins on plantains are tougher. We three were waiting at the foot of the checkout station; Mommy was standing between our two carts. She had worked all day cleaning two houses of very well-to-do white people who make their homes in the suburbs of the North Shore. Today she had given a good chunk of her emotional and physical energy to Mrs. A’s husband, who’s dying of cancer, and had sprayed Spray n’ Wash on Mrs. A’s stained underwear. We knew this because we’d gone to work with her today to help her clean and wash and fold the people’s laundry. Everything seemed fine until the cash register worker asked, “What did you say?” I saw the vein, pulled my little brother and sister toward me, and we moved a few steps 91 away. “What do you mean, ‘What did I say?’ You don’t understand English? You must clean your ears. All full up with wax. Is plantain I said. P-L-A-N-T-A-I-N.” The cashier let out a curt but soft sigh, punched the appropriate buttons, and moved on to the other groceries. “Does this look like any bloody banana to you?” The whole time the ringer rang up the rest of the items, Mommy continued to express her disappointment that the girl didn’t know “banana from plantain,” and chided her for being “simple.” … About in his mid-thirties, the father was a young man when he traveled from southern Central America to the northern border separating the U.S. from Mexico. He got caught and landed himself in a Mexican jail where he spent a few days planning how—without money, without anyone knowing his predicament—he’d get out. The cell was damp with piss, the smell of shit in one corner drifting over to the men. With only one bunk bed among them, they held their urine because if one got up, the bed was immediately taken—the next man got it. One night, two white American men in their vacation shirts—the colorful muumuu shirts with flapping lapels, the shirts some big- bellied men wear on vacation—came crashing into the cell, drunk with weeks of vacation beverages bashing and bulging up their brains. Rowdy and demanding, the Mexican police had to use force to drive the two men into the cell: “We’re Americans, damn it.” Tussling with the policemen, one of the men dropped his wallet. Only the young Creole man’s keen eye noticed the leather had fallen to the excrement-covered floor. Waiting for things to settle, the father gave up his spot on the bunk bed, walked over to the wallet, 92 stooped, and snatched it up. The cell’s wall held him up for two more days, whereupon he bailed himself out and headed back to Belize to tell his wife he had to try again. The mother’s life was hard. When she yelled at her children, corrected them, reminded them of their manners: “You all don’t know how HARD I have to work to keep this house.” She had come of age in the Crown Colony of British Honduras—a country carved out of Guatemala, whose historical tensions between pirates and imperial world powers had shaped borders, politics, economics, and social life in Belize. For about eight generations her people had lived in this sliced-out country as black Creoles, colonial subjects of Britain. The mother and her husband; her mother; the Coolie man, Ramsey; and the five children had been colonial subjects when they had crossed the border into the U.S. Hard. The mother never used any other word when speaking of her life: “We had it hard.” This is why, she told her children, she had such a good and close relationship with God—because he knows her well. He knows why she had borne the scalding heat of hot bread upon her breast so she, her sister, her brother, and her mother could have most of their own bread to eat. Sometimes the mother had lifted food from the local Baker Woman by having her sister distract the baker, while the mother had quickly placed piping-hot powder buns in her bra. She believed the mole on her chest had come from these stealing episodes. … Since Mommy and Daddy work at Northwestern now, we don’t go to Dominick’s or Jewel as much. They bring home all kinds of food from the Delta Gamma house. We 93 get our milk in a big plastic bag thing; we have to put it in bottles or old milk jugs. Bagels, blocks of Muenster cheese, little personal-sized pizzas, hamburger patties— “American” food. We still go to the Chinese people’s store on Davis Street to buy our silver bass fish, ox tail, plantain, and coco, or sweet potatoes—not the orange “yams” that’s here in the States. The orange potatoes people here call yams are not in the same family as the white yams from Belize. The skins on the yams are medium brown and a little rough to the touch. Our yams are white inside and so are our sweet potatoes. Shopping is smooth sailing at their store. The owners know Mommy very well— she has been shopping there for a long time—and always tell her which bin of what ground food, coconut, or okra is freshly stocked. Mommy sends me there to buy fish and oxtail. As soon as I walk into their store, it’s nice to have the owners ask right away, “How’s your mother? The oxtail and fish. Fresh. It’s pretty cool to walk to the back counter where her husband has chosen the best silver bass for me and “three pounds” are already bagged up. I feel they know how we divide up our meats during any given month. Next Friday, when Mommy and I come together, I will watch him pick up three oxtails—about fifteen inches long, maybe—turn on the meat cutter, and slice them into just the right sizes for five people. They both know we’re eating soup for most of the weekend. With my two bags, I turn to nod at the husband while the wife holds the door open, walks the short distance with me to my bike, and ensures I’ve got everything balanced. “Careful. Say ‘hi’ to your mother, ‘kay.” She smiles as I bike away. After school, I sometimes ride my bike to Mommy’s job. We share a meal together in the basement of the sorority house. Mommy is sure to inform me what to 94 expect when her boss enters the kitchen. Mrs. Cox will be entirely too nice, extend the handshake into a hug, and ask too many questions. “Be prepared to talk to the woman. Don’t tell her nothing she doesn’t need to know,” Mommy says. Sure enough, Mrs. Cox comes striding into the kitchen. She is a tall woman with a humped back. My mouth is full of what Ella, Mommy’s coworker, calls “rabbit food.” When Mrs. Cox sees me at the table, she is “ohhhing” and “awwwing”: “It is so nice to meet you!” I swallow what food is in my mouth and stand up to shake her hand. “Why, you have such rough hands,” she observes, as she moves to touch my face. Mrs. Cox squeezes my cheeks. My first instinct is to grab her hands and tell her not to touch me because Mommy told me to never let anyone touch me without my permission, but she’s an adult, and I have to mind her. “So what do you do?” Mrs. Cox asks, studying my face. What answer she’s looking for, I do not know, but when I smile, she says “Ohhh my, you have such a pretty little smile.” My lips promptly close to cover my teeth. I go to school. What do you mean what do I do? I’m just a growing child. Mommy has always told me: “We all work in this house. You all work at school, and I work doing this.” I can’t wait for the woman to leave. Mrs. Cox is staring at me, staring. I feel ashamed to eat because her presence makes me feel as if I’ve came only to get free food, not to spend time with my mother. I answer her question: “I’m a freshman at Evanston Township High School. I came here to see my mother and do my algebra homework.” “Oh, that’s hard, that algebra.” Mrs. Cox continues, “Are you a smart girl?” 95 I’m searching the industrial appliances in the kitchen, looking for my mother. I hear Mommy suck her teeth, but I don’t see her. I want to answer, “Yes. I’m smart.” However, I know if I were, I’d be in the correct algebra class. Tapping my courage reservoir, I’m just about to answer, “No, I’m a satisfactory student,” but my mother chimes in, “Of course, she’s smart, Mrs. Cox; after she’s my daughter.” Mrs. Cox seems a bit put back but has picked up she needs to go and do her housemother sorority duties. Great, now Mommy’s going to get on me about not speaking up. Already her voice is prickling the back of my head: “I told you when people speak to you, don’t go on like you no have sense.” Mommy likes the Delta Gamma job; she likes cooking for the “girls,” she calls them. Some of the DG girls share their private things with Mommy. This one Indian girl says she doesn’t all the time feel pretty. I understand exactly what she means. I know she doesn’t feel pretty because there only three people with skin the color of her own, and all the white DG girls look perfect: no bumps, no blemishes, no scars. Nice teeth. Pretty, perfect toes. Soft heels and hands. The Indian girl also has no bumps, no blemishes, and no scars. When Mommy makes her smile, her face brightens, but she covers her mouth until she’s done. Mommy tells her, “Go look in the mirror and see. You’re a human being just like them other girls” and “only you one know how hard you have to work to be at a school like this.” Occasionally, some of the girls ask if I want to see their bedrooms. Depending on Mommy’s mood, I am allowed to go. In the movies I saw about sororities—Nerds and HOTs—the girls lived in big houses with manicured lawns. There were plenty of little 96 contests among the girls and over fraternity boys; there were lots of characters performing some silly humiliating act just to be in with the right people; and there were also lots of attempts at necking, petting, and licking. The first time I see the upstairs of the DG house, I am led past a piano into a decked-out living room with a fireplace and up two sets of stairs. We enter a messy room. She’s in the middle of getting ready, of going somewhere. I stand still for the longest time. The girl feels uncomfortable. “It’s okay to sit down,” she says softly. I see the sun sparkle the makeup powder on her cheeks. Why she wears cosmetics, I don’t know because all this does is clog the pores so the skin can’t breathe. When I say she has perfect skin, that’s what I mean. She has never had zits in her life; she certainly isn’t as hairy as I am—why put all that nasty stuff on? Flawless. As if she has never fallen off a bike, scraped a knee, done yard work, carried groceries—the kind of girl everyone’s attracted to. The super pretty ones. I see the women in my family wear makeup only for special times. “Wearing makeup everyday ruins the skin.” That’s what my parents and sisters say. She almost looks like she wants to put some on my face, but I’m quick: “I don’t wear makeup.” The DG girl uses Sea Breeze for her face, a pimple blocker cleanser I’ve seen only in stores and commercials. “We use alcohol at my house,” I say proudly. She’s so shocked. Doesn’t it burn, she wants to know. I tell her, “Yeah, but it does wonders for keeping bumps from growing on my face.” At my house we use alcohol (and sometimes salt) for scrapes, cuts, blood-gushing moments, and on our faces after a good loofa pad scrub. “Bumps,” she says. Yes, bumps, especially the nasty ones with all the white stuff 97 inside, ready for popping, or the blackheads that are so deep under the skin that sometimes my sister has to use a hairpin to get at them. The DG girl says something about “zits.” She wants to know if I’d like to try the Sea Breeze. “Yes, please.” She pulls a square cotton pad out of a little box. I rub the yellow, Mountain Dew-looking liquid all over my face. I like the tingling, burning sensation it leaves behind but still prefer the burn of alcohol. Besides, alcohol doesn’t leave a residue on my face. This cleanser does. When Northwestern is out for the summer, Daddy brings home trash bags full of clothes. Sometimes there are some shoes and a few bras in the mix, but mostly these are clothes the DG girls consider garbage. Their clothing really fits only my little sister; she’s built differently than I am. Her legs slide into the used pants, and the shirts fall on her shoulders nicely; the pants feel too tight around my thighs, and the shirts don’t fit my shoulders. Daddy also brings home furniture, then, because the university takes out the old stuff and puts in some new stuff. The bunk bed my sister and I share and the gigantic sized drawers come from the DG house. A lot of the furniture we have at home comes from the people my parents work for, from Northwestern, or from thrift stores in the north shore area where Mommy sometimes goes after work to put money down on a layaway item. Our house is furnished with lots of things Daddy gets from the garbage during our Sunday trips to the North Shore suburbs. We drive out on Sheridan Road, winding our way north to Wilmette, passing the Baha’i Temple, onto Winnetka, and into Highland Park where we begin our furniture hunt. Daddy only goes to the suburbs where he and Mom work, so 98 that when we park our raggedy station wagon in front of someone’s big house, he doesn’t frighten anyone. Sometimes the mommies and daddies stop what they’re doing and wait for Daddy to walk past an unbroken and perfectly fine piece of lawn furniture on his way to greet them. He asks if he can lessen their curbside trash by taking what he wants. I sit in the car with the window down, waiting for him. All I can see are lips moving, hands gesturing, and then my father points. I’m guessing toward the direction of the Millers or the Alexanders. Then he walks back to the car and says, “Come and help me with this stuff.” I see him fix up much of what he gets from the trash. To walk into our house, no one would ever know that half the stuff in there is from rich people’s garbage. 99 A Tracked Girl I enter the big high school in the fall of 1988, wearing the same clothes I wore when I was in eighth grade—T-shirts sporting Delta Gamma logos and used blue jeans. I’m in the ninth grade now, taking classes where I feel I’m on the cusp of average and above average. Classes range from lower level to average level to honors to AP, or advanced placement—a system of tracking that puts “stupid” kids with “stupid” kids and “bright” kids with “bright” kids, each following a particular course set out for her. Tracking means being judged about what you can and can’t do based on some tests you took or, in my case (and in addition to not being “bright” enough), the shortcomings and failures of older siblings who went to this high school before I even showed up. I’m one of these “at-risk” children. I think it’s because we don’t speak “English” in the home or because both my sisters dropped out of high school or because my third oldest sister had a child at fourteen. I guess they are afraid I’ll drop out of school and have kids, too. It’s probably some made-up thing. I certainly don’t feel at risk. As a matter of fact, dropping out of school is not an option: Mom’d give me a good-ass whipping. There’s really no likelihood I’ll drop out of school. Why risk disappointing my parents? Then I’d have to hear Mom’s ear-piercing speeches about her whole life: the trip up from Belize, which also includes the story of my older siblings and Mamá’s and Mr. Ramsey’s journey to the States; her dead mother; her shitty, haughty bosses; and an assortment of topics she’d relentlessly rail up about (she’d take breathing breaks here and there, I’m sure) that’d serve only to remind me that I should have stayed in school. But I 100 do feel awkward and out of place. “This is normal, right?” I ask myself often to take the edge off of feeling inadequate, feeling behind, and feeling like something’s not right. I shuffle up and down the halls and stairs of Boltwood toward my classes. Boltwood is the freshmen school, the part of the high school where the walls have thick orange stripes that run parallel to the ceiling. It’s named after this white guy, Henry L. Boltwood who became the principal in 1883. Back then Evanston Township was all about a classical, college prep education. Boltwood came along and added stuff like drama, calisthenics, shorthand, typing, and astronomy. This fresh start is going to be full of new growing pains, right? High school’s supposed to be the best years of my life, right? Or is that college? At any rate, I’m slowly figuring out what the big school is all about. There is one thing I know for sure: I can’t wait for school to end for the day so I can go home. One thing that’s way cool and comforting is that my history teacher actually had one of my sisters in his class, like, six years ago. I found some of my sister’s old homework with his name on it. Mr. Taylor teaches the history part of the freshman humanities classes (it’s called 1 Humanities 2—two standing for average). Instead of doing history stuff about the Greeks and English people, we learn all the countries in Africa and the Middle East. We watch some of the Planet of the Apes series and all of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and talk about what the films say about civilization, humanity, and the world. He leaves the other stuff up to the English teacher, Mrs. Oberman, who’s right across the hall from him. 101 I don’t ask him right away if he knows either one of my sisters; I wait until he brings it up one day—way into the semester. “Burgess,” he says, peering over his glasses, “don’t you have a sister, two of them?” Yes. He knows the older of the two— the two everyone called the Geminis because they were always together—“she was something else. They both were.” I have his class later in the day, right before I go to the work portion of the Work and Career Exploration Program—better known as WECEP. I start my weekdays with the math for dummies class. It’s not called that, really; it’s just taught that way. I must be spoiled or something because from sixth through eighth grade, I’d taken math classes with teachers who I thought were way better than Mrs. Sacks. I thought teachers were supposed to love what they do, be able to teach what they’re good at. Mrs. Sacks—she’s a horrible teacher. First of all, the teacher’s not right. She walks into the classroom with an attitude—like she’s doing time. There are no “Good mornings” or “How are yous?”—no hint she loves math or loves to teach it. This makes all of us uneasy, of course, and we respond with attitudes of our own None of us like her; we don’t like her approach. She reeks of a strange mixture of anger and superiority, like being in our presence makes her lose some very special part of who she is. It doesn’t help that she’s got that spittle collecting at the corners of her mouth. It’s hard to pay attention when we’re worried saliva will land somewhere on our faces, our papers, our clothes. She’s always drinking pop, too. Pepsi. When she’s trying to teach us something, she talks at us instead of to us—the way a dog trainer’d talk to a dog. The only time we really learn is when we’re in groups and a test is coming up. It’s 102 not like we don’t want to learn because we do. It’s more like Mrs. Sacks couldn’t care less. When we’re misbehaving, passing notes, or ignoring her, she cracks the palms of her hands on the desk, claps shut her book, or does some drastic body movement to express how fed up she is with all of us. When we’re at each other’s throats and she can’t get us to back off, she calls the security guards. Like the time Larry called my mom a bitch. Why Larry’d call someone else’s mother a bitch beats me. But he’d broken the one rule all kids knew better than to break: The only person who’s allowed to call family out of their names is the one in the family. At first, Larry had been laughing, showing nice, straight, white teeth. Blinded by hot tears, I’d jumped from my seat, picked up my desk, my skinny arms holding it over my head, and threatened to throw it at him. I’d yelled at him, daring him to say it again. Some in the room fell quiet, eyes wide; others quickly offered a “Larry, you better apologize.” His back against the wall, I’d chanced him with the desk, pretending I was going to throw it his way; he winced in anticipation. A slew of phrases flew from my mouth: “Say it again, motherfucker,” “Apologize motherfucker,” and “APOLOGIZE or I will throw this desk at you.” I’ve been trying to tell my counselor, Mrs. Pentek, about this math class from day one. I’ve told her it doesn’t make sense that I’m in this class. I spot Mrs. Pentek in the hallway one day. We’re walking in opposite directions, her blonde hair billowing in the stagnant air of that long corridor, her skinny self click-clacking down the halls. That’s when I stop her and suggest switching classes—mid-semester. 103 We’re standing about even in height. In her heels, she’s about five feet seven inches to my growing five feet five inches. So we’re not quite eye level, but she gets to look down at me, and I, up to her. There we are for just a few seconds: “Mrs. Sacks’s math class is too easy for me.” Plus—she’s totally nasty with that white shit at the corner of her mouth, like she doesn’t get that maybe she ought to wipe it off. My counselor doesn’t seem to notice that I see reddened surprise on her face. She flutter-blinks her eyes. Over the bulge of the eyeball, lid to lashes, and over the bulge again: “How can you take the second part of algebra without taking the first part?” she asks, after finishing the blink I’m not supposed to notice. I tell her it’s not going to be that hard for me. I mean, here’s what I don’t understand—even though I took pre-algebra in the eighth grade and took an algebra class this past summer—how can I not be prepared for regulars algebra? This is what I’m thinking about when she goes off about maybe this “is the right level math you should be in.” I go see her another time with that very same pre-algebra class argument, but she talks about the test scores, which takes me back to that claustrophobic day in the auditorium at Nichols Middle School. All of us eighth graders were shoveled into the auditorium to take the California Achievement Test. To me, the test just popped up— suddenly, so urgent, so important. My test scores betrayed the real math classes I took and the real grades I got. Maybe the district sixty-five people—the ones in charge of grades K through eighth—sent something to our parents about it. Maybe they sent the letter, and it was misplaced and put in the garbage with the other junk mail. Besides, 104 Mom and Dad thought the school ought to know what it’s doing with their children’s education, since it’s not like they had a choice to send me anywhere else. Apparently, these C.A.T. tests screw people over—and that’s why we’re sitting in Mrs. Sacks’s class, bored to death or annoying her to explosion. If she were really smart, she’d see that she’s the one who can’t adapt her teaching to our needs—with her transparency-writing self. Each time we try to ask her a question, she acts like it’s some kind of an affront to her. There’d been this one time a few of us raised our hands to ask about word problems—which are hard for some of us—and Mrs. Sacks sighed so loudly before repeating what she’d said only once. We looked at each other like, “Damn, is it too hard to repeat yourself?” She’s the one who treats us like we’re damaged goods— and that’s saying it politely. My counselor’s supposed to be looking out for my best interest, but she’s telling me “maybe modified algebra is the right level” for me. Since I’m a freshman, I have to stay at Boltwood. But I see kids leave this school all the time for their science and math classes. I’ve taken to covering my math book— like I’m still in grammar school—because mine is thick and red, and I’m noticing friends have different colored math books than me. Blue is for algebra honors, and the red and white one is for algebra regulars. I see that the kids in lower level classes have math books with larger type. I guess the lower the class, the bigger the book’s type. During the first few weeks of school, “When do you have _____?” was everyone’s favorite question. This irritated me because some of the kids who went to the same middle school I did and had the same classes with me at Nichols listed classes like one humanities honors (history and English classes taught back to back), honors algebra, 105 honors science—every class was honors or regulars. I took to listing the regular classes first, then lied and said, “algebra regulars.” My locker partner asked once why my book was different if I were in regulars algebra. I told her “that’s the book the school gave me.” It’s not like I’m taking all lower level classes because I’m not. The Work and Career Exploration Program class I’m taking has seniors, juniors, sophomores, and even two freshmen in the class. I picked this class during the orientation thing a year ago when I was still in the eighth grade and Mom worked part-time as the lunch server at Chute Junior High School. She was still in her white uniform and her white shoes when she arrived at the field house to meet me. From afar, she passed as a nurse; I watched the way some people looked respectfully in her direction. But then we saw the principal of the school where she served lunch. As we walked from different directions to meet each other, Mr. Schaffer, the Principal of Chute, acknowledged my mother with a big mustachioed smile and a handshake. He was the only one in the fieldhouse who knew my mother was not a nurse. The woman at the WECEP booth sold it pretty hard. Mom and I walked around the green-turfed field house, doing what everyone else was doing: looking at what classes offered what and talking to teachers at each table. The whole meet-and-greet was a way to get us kids ready for coming to the big school. There were poster boards advertising this club, that club, and the Booster Club was there—I had no idea what those people did. All I knew was that they got up early on the weekends to make breakfast for people 106 before football games and that people had to pay to eat. We didn’t stop at their table. Mom worked. She didn’t have time to be a booster. We made our way over to the table to look at pictures of students smiling at the camera—images of student workers happy at their bright and shiny sterile places of work. The class looked to me to be open to any student. There were black, white, and brown kids in the picture. The woman selling the class to us talked about employment opportunities; she had lots of smart things to say when I asked questions (was it going to fit into my schedule or mess with my other classes?), and she said something about acquiring skills for something or other. I’d get two credits, one for the actual class and one for working a job. The perks? For two periods out of the eight, I’d be out of Boltwood, where most freshmen spent the majority of their time. Now, at the end of my freshman year, I kind of feel I was finagled into taking this class because it’s not half what it was cracked up to be. I mean, most of the time it’s like a study hall, and sometimes there are movies to watch or some work-related worksheets to do, or we work on building our communication skills. People even practice making change with a plastic register—it comes with toy change, paper bills, and all. I’m convinced that the skills I’m supposed to learn make only service-industry work a possibility for me. When eighth period rolls around, we head off to our different jobs. Some students work off campus at Osco Pharmacy, Jewel Supermarket, or McDonald’s. I go to work in the Math Department, spending eighth period running errands, stuffing confidential carbon copy forms into envelopes, and watching and listening to the chair of the 107 department eat his little snacks at his desk across from my designated work station. Mostly, the math chair eats, I do work the secretary doesn’t have time to finish, and I check out who’s getting recommended for honors math or some high-level math like calculus. A lot of kids who went to middle school with me get recommended for this or that class. Mostly they’re white kids, but the occasional black or Indian or Chinese student’s name comes up, too. He’s a portly man, the math chair. He crunches his bagel chips, snaps open his pop, and reads the paper—all but putting his feet up on the desk. I never see him wash his hands. The longest conversation we have is about a T-shirt I wear to school one day. “It’s inappropriate,” he says. The kids I’ve shown it to all day hadn’t been too offended but he is. Even the security guards have laughed, though they’ve quickly straighten their faces and asked in that grown-up tone, “Where’d you get that shirt from, girl?” It has some pictures of a penis with captions like “see dick run,” and the dick’s running. It was my older sister’s. I’d like to tell the math chair about my math class, but it’d be rude, so I don’t mention it. I just sit there, reading or doing paper filing, listening to him eat like a squirrel, crunching, while I pull in my stomach to stifle growling sounds. He offers me food once, but I don’t accept it from him. I don’t really trust the gesture because, even though he’s nice, he’s also condescending—like I’m supposed to look up to him because he can eat his garlic-salted pita chips (on the clock) and read the sports section, chill out before he leaves for home right on time at 3:30 p.m., whisking his rotundity through the 108 big student rush to make it to his car. In a few months, after summer school’s done, he’ll be the one to sign the carbon-copied paper that says I can take geometry regulars. Since I don’t want to waste another year sitting in a class that’s too easy for me, I’m missing a trip to Belize, the place where my whole family comes from—except the youngest children and the nieces and nephews. In the months of July and August, Mom, my little sister, and little brother will fly from O’Hare to spend a month with my mother’s sister and her husband and their kids. I’m not going; I’ll be spending the whole summer taking another algebra class. If I don’t, in the fall I’ll have to continue on the modified math track. I figure Belize will always be there. I’ll go another time. … It’s 1989, the summer of Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorns”; Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” video is called out for the burning crosses she dances in front of (and probably because the Jesus-figure is black); Anita Baker is giving me the best she’s got; and Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance” video draws some criticism because she dances suggestively and is several months pregnant. This black guy, Mr. Bazille, is teaching the Algebra Upper Classmen math class. Some of us are taking this class cause we’re seniors who just can’t get math and we need it to graduate next June. There are a few of us who’re taking it so we can get back on our right tracks. It’s just us kids of color in the class, all of us looking at this tall, stocky guy with designer eyeglass frames and his button-down summer shirts. On the first day of this four-hour class, Mr. B, we’ve come to call him, tells us that all summer long, all we’ll be doing is math problems. Over and over and over again 109 until he’s sure we understand how to solve every kind of algebra problem there is. Standing in front of a gray cart with two small stacks of brown books, Mr. B notices that the book department hasn’t given him the required number he needs for us. He runs his index finger down the stack, counting under his breath; looks up at us, counting each student in sets of two; and says, after sighing deeply and shaking his head, “I told them how many books I’d need. I’ll be right back.” When Mr. B returns, his eyes tell us something must have happened. “We’ll have to share books and work from Xerox copies.” There are properties of real numbers, equations, exponents, radical expressions, properties of radical expressions—and of squaring both sides of an equation. None of which we really get until our wrists begin to bug us, we begin to dream numbers, and we use words like “polynomial” and “quadratic” in our daily conversations with family and friends. We all intend to pass this class. Having Mr. B as a teacher is what’s going to help us. Number one, he uses the board—the whole board. He starts the problem on one end, showing us how to solve for X each step of the way. He never makes mistakes while explaining how to solve an equation. For some reason, Mrs. Sacks made mistakes all the time. Sometimes we let her figure it out herself, and other times one of us raised a hand to ask if she was sure about the route she’d taken. To correct her mistakes, she’d simply stick her index finger on her tongue, smudge the wrong answer into a small cloud of bubbly, blue ink, and write in the right answer. Other times, if her marker didn’t work, she stuck that on her tongue, too. Mr. B doesn’t like transparencies, never drinks Pepsi while he teaches, and never blows 110 up at us if we begin to get antsy because of the summer heat. His directions are straightforward; he’s kind as he explains the importance of showing how we arrive at our solutions. It’s clear to us he loves teaching math; we’re not a waste of his time and he’s not a waste of ours. All summer long we add and simplify polynomials (8x2 – 4x – 9) + (2x2 +9x – 9); multiply and simplify monomials (-5ab3)(4a5); exponential expressions r8t6/r7t; divide polynomials by monomials 6x3 – 3x2 + 9x/3x; factor monomials from polynomials 6x3y = 2· 3· x· x· x· y; factor polynomials of the form ax2 + bx + c; simplify rational expressions 5/z, x2 + 1/ 2x -1, y2 = y -1/ 4y2 + 1; graph points in a rectangular coordinate system; graph equations of the form y = mx + b; and find the x and y intercepts of straight lines— five days out of the week, in addition to homework problems. The word problems stump some of us, though, and we have to find our patience and not give up. We figure things out together. If one of us doesn’t get it, Mr. B doesn’t move on until that one kid does get it. Sometimes he has one of us show the class how we’ve arrived at an answer. He does this when he has repeated himself at least four times. Mr. B takes his seat and asks one of us to come to the board to become the teacher for a few minutes. We come early to check each other’s homework; some of us stay in the classroom during the ten-minute break. We don’t have to worry about Mr. B. yelling or getting so pissed he bangs himself and objects around. Most of all, I’m not distracted by collections of cloudy spit forming at the corners of his mouth. … 111 When school begins in the fall, I’m issued the big red geometry book, just like all the sophomores in regulars and honors geometry. Its front cover is splattered with a burst of angles and parallelograms, and a few theorems. The differences between the two levels are the pace and amount of work. Honors students cover more of the book than regular students do. I carry the book in the crook of my arm, showing it off and cheesing it up because it’s been proven (I’m proof myself): when students aren’t being kept back, they’re happy to be going to school and even happier to be challenged. Like Lou Rawls says, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” I still take regulars English, history, and science. I’ve spoken with Mrs. Shah and Mr. Hein about switching into honors classes. They are team teaching the 2 Humanities 2 and Honors courses. Mrs. Shah teaches the history part; Mr. Hein teaches the English part. In Mrs. Shah’s class we’re learning about the history of South Africa and how the Dutch and the Huguenots came to the southern part of Africa, imported slaves, pitted the local tribes against each other, and then took over the Cape—maybe not in that specific order. But there’s this thing called Apartheid that the black South Africans have been living with since 1948. We talk about what Apartheid is—whether or not it’s any different than the racial discrimination in the States. “It is the same thing as racial discrimination in U.S.,” a lot of us say. Ms. Shah asks us to tell her why. “Because,” a lot of us say, “we have a history of treating blacks the same way they are treated in South Africa.” We watch clips of Cry Freedom, fill out maps of the countries surrounding South Africa, and go see a play, Born in the Republic of South Africa. One of the actors, a white woman, stands on the edge of the stage, telling the audience of how she was 112 beaten and jailed because she defied her own white people in order to stand up for the blacks, to stand up for what she knew was right. In Mr. Hein’s class, we spend a whole period talking about drugs by way of listening to Joni Mitchell’s “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire” and analyzing the lyrics, and we read Siddhartha and Cry, the Beloved Country. I share with everyone in class that I think it’s easy for a Brahmin to give up his high-caste and everything that comes with it so he can be an “ascetic”—a word I always have to keep looking up. “I mean— he’s totally rich. So he can totally make that kind of choice.” Some of my classmates say, “Yeah, but Siddhartha gave all that up because he wanted to follow his heart.” When we discuss Cry, the Beloved Country, I keep my comments to myself. Throughout the whole read, I hope so hard that I cry at times because I don’t want Absalom to be hanged. My sophomore year, my locker’s on the third floor of Beardsley Hall, the red striped school, down the hall from Mr. Bazille’s classroom (my favorite math teacher now). Most mornings, I come early and hang out with him and the other students. Some of us eat breakfast, some do their homework, and some students talk and laugh. I listen. Geometry’s the first class of my day. I’ve lucked out and am assigned to Mr. Townsell—the black wrestling coach. The class is on the fourth floor of Beardsley Hall. There’s a mix of us kids in the class. Mixed, like, it’s true that there are blacks, browns, and whites in the class. But there’s like a range of different kinds people who are good at math. I mean, some of my classmates are in honors English or history, but math is a little tougher for them, so they’re in geometry regulars. Everything in this math class is smooth sailing. Mr. Townsell’s explanations about finding proofs for that angle or this 113 angle are clear and many of us come early to stay on top of the geometry game. It’s fun besides. I see all kinds of angles every day and it’s fun to draw and write proofs— indirect, paragraph, geometric, and two-column proofs. I’d been sitting in Mr. B’s classroom working through a problem, listening to a conversation about clothing or some such. In between observing that lines AB and AD are equal in length and share the same angles (Given: line AC bisects angles BAD and BCD. Prove angle B is congruent to angle D), Mr. B calls me into the conversation—as if I prove his point exactly. He harps on my clothes, says my braids and my clothes and my ways are just for style—not because I have any cultural roots or have any understanding of what my blackness is all about. I flash him my squinty eyes. I breathe and remember he’s older than me; his years and experiences have brought him wisdom. I should show him respect. I certainly wouldn’t want anyone talking to my father in any old rude way—though my own father would never say such a thing. I clench my teeth until my jaws get tired. “Interesting,” I say, completely hurt. Blinking back tears, I look at Mr. B while I feel my body trembling. You don’t know nothing, old man. I missed a trip to Belize to take your class. A whole year and a whole summer it’s taken me to get right with math. I’m being raised by black people, by black immigrants, by black people who came to this country from the West Indies. I have been wearing braids all of my life. Don’t come and tell me about culture and style. Besides, what is dressing black? What is the black look? Whether jokingly or spitefully, I’ve been called an Oreo Cookie before, but only outside of my home. I’m supposed to be black on the outside and white on the inside, a 114 black person who “acts” white but has black skin. It has never occurred to me that my “ways,” as Mr. B names them—how I sound, what music I listen to, and my behavior, I guess—brand me as “white.” What does that mean? Perhaps Mr. B feels I like “white things” too much, which, for him means, I’m not black enough. I don’t know where the black students or teachers like Mr. B get this phrase from. Nevertheless, I continue hanging out with who I want—an array of people who are black, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, white. How is it possible for me to “act white” when “acting white” is not what I see at home. I mean, white on the inside? Am I sick now? Do black people not have red blood? Nabisco, the creators, introduced the Oreo to people in the U.S. in 1912. Forty years later this guy, William A. Turnier, made the cookie we know today. Did he have black people in mind when he created this cookie? My third-oldest sister once told me some of the names they called her in school: “foreigner” and “jigaboo.” The total opposite of me. As much as being called an Oreo Cookie bothers me, I have to laugh. It’s funny because I used to ask Mom and Dad how come they didn’t go to England. What would Mr. B say about me if I spoke with an English accent? It’s an identity thing, a cultural thing, the students in the classroom say. And I appear to have—what with the clothes I wear, the music I listen to, the few friends I have—an identity crisis and no culture. I know Mr. B’s not the only black teacher who sees me as some white-acting clueless black chick wearing braids. I’m almost sure of it. As a matter of fact, there’s this unfriendly black teacher I had as a substitute way back during freshman year. To this day whenever I see her, I smile and say “hi.” She can’t smile at me for nothing, can 115 barely bring herself to acknowledge me. I’d heard from others that she has issues with black students who act “white.” From the black kids I get this whole acting white thing. From the white kids I get a lot of the other questions. Some of the white girls ask about my hair—a lot. It’s the coolest thing that my hair can stay put the way it does. Why, way back when I was a freshman on the wrong track, a white girl in the modified algebra class remarked, “Eeewwweee, you have a glob of blue greasy stuff on the top of your ear.” “Oh, that’s grease,” I said. She was like, “Grease? Grease like for cars?” Hair food, I tried to explain to her, but she doesn’t get it. The black girls first tell me how nice my hair is; then some ask, “Why don’t you get a perm?” or tell me to “Press it!” Still, Mr. B acts like I don’t have blacks parents—like I’ve been adopted by white people. If they really want to get technical, I’m Creole, like all my family members are. We have black skin. Mom, Dad, Mamá, Mr. Ramsey, and my older brothers and sisters were born and raised in Belize. In the States we are treated like black people. This guy has some nerve. I gave up a trip to my parent’s country—a country that’s also mine—to take his math class. Is that acting white? I like listening to Metallica and the Dead; Whitney Houston and Midnight Oil; Sparrow and Lord Rhaburn. My mother loves country music. She can tell you all about Haggard, Reeves, Twitty, Cash—would he ever dare to say that to my mother? As for sounding white, Mr. B has no clue. Shit, I used to have a “stuttering problem.” I was in a “special class” to remedy it. The class wasn’t comprised of children too smart for their own good. It wasn’t one of those classes. Kids with varying disabilities, physical and mental, were all lumped together—even with people who were said to have “speech” 116 problems. I never did understand why I was in a class with people who I thought were retarded. This, of course, was when I was eight. We’d just moved from Chicago to Evanston, and I had never been in any special classes before. Where I’d lived, people understood me when I spoke. Like I said, I only went a few times to this class. I managed to read well enough that the teacher, listening intently for a “speech impediment,” figured out that I didn’t belong there. At home I speak with an accent. We speak variations of British and American English at home. I eat serray, johnny cake, powdabuns, boil up, plantain, coco, cassava, sweet potatoes, pig tail, ox tail, cow foot soup, conch, mackerel. The white people I know think food like that is “foreign,” odd. When I eat Sunday dinner with my family, we don’t eat Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. This black thing is not just Mr. B’s bone of contention. It’s also my track coach’s. He comes at it from a different place. He calls it dressing nice and combing my hair, which sounds like why don’t you dress like them other black girls on the team? Coach is saying something similar to what Mr. B has said, but for completely different reasons. Seeing as I’m on the track team, I need to be a neat, clean representative. Maybe wearing clothes without holes in them, or a different sweater than the one I’ve worn all week. Sometimes my pants have holes in them, and sometimes they don’t. I tend to wear just about the same thing every day—a throwback to the days when I was allowed to change my pants only twice a week and my shirts three times. This saved us electricity. My mom basically wears the same thing I do. I wonder if Coach’d consider suggesting the same thing to her. People can’t be ragging on my clothes and stuff just 117 because they want me to be the black girl they think I should be. The man is really getting on my nerves, anyway. I don’t say anything, though. Track is supposed to be my sport. I’m supposed to have to put up with and listen to the coaches who tell me what to do. Me and Coach have an earnest talk one day. He tells me to wear some “nicer- looking clothes” starting on Monday or else he’s going to put me with the Distance Girls. Says the day I stop dressing nicely is going to be the day I no longer am a sprinter. This idea doesn’t go over well with me. Sometimes Coach and me get along just fine. When we’re both doing our jobs, we get along great. I’m running good and shaving seconds off my time, and he’s coaching. That’s his job. He seems to think track and personal mix; to me, work and play don’t mix. “Don’t you have nice clothes,” and “Do you ever comb your hair?” I don’t see nothing wrong with the way I dress, but apparently he does—and I do comb my hair. Just not as much as he’d like me to. So I do this dress-up stuff for maybe four or three days. I manage to wear unfrayed, cleaner-looking clothing: a plaid long-sleeved shirt, with a T-shirt underneath, and some black jean pants. I get tired of this immediately because it requires me to make more dirty clothes than is allowed at home. Then today, just today, he calls me out. “Burgess,” when I walk into the field house, “You’re with the Distance Girls.” My stomach sinks; my calves cramp a little. Running my ass off with the Distance Girls is supposed to change me. On the coldest day, it seems, the coldest. I can barely fucking breathe. It is so cold out here. The whole time I’m running, I repeat to myself, “Coach better not try to 118 talk to me after this.” I say this again and again while I run and gasp. I can’t even slow down because the Distance Coach is running with us. After all this, he cannot think I’ll to talk to him. My ears catch the air and send the cartilage freezing; my lobes feel like they’re falling off. We have one more “fence” to finish. I keep up for a while, but my lungs are burning; I feel they’re bleeding. I can taste the blood in the back of my throat. I lag behind. I fall behind. But I don’t stop running. “I’m so not a Distance Girl. Fucking asshole.” “Burgess,” Coach calls to me when we enter the field house. Before I can even warm up, he’s telling me, “Go do your baton work.” I’m still chilly, I’m hungry, I’m angry. The last thing I want to do is practice standing in relay line formation—one two three four—passing a yellow baton. “Hand.” Murphy, the hurdler, snaps that sucker in the meat of my palm. This—next to her perfect hurdler form—is her trademark. When runners receive the baton from Murphy, everyone hears the CRACK! This constant slapping enrages me even more. Tears stream down my face; I’m sizzling, knowing for sure that what I’ve just experienced is unfair. I mumble under my breath: He’d just better not talk to me. And Murphy better not crack that fucking baton in my palm like that again. Murphy keeps smacking me hard with the yellow baton. I’ve already asked her more than once: “Not so hard, okay?” She only giggles like it’s funny. Tears flood my face; every part of me burns. “Hand.” Coach just better not talk to me. He will, though, because he wants to teach me some kind of a lesson or whatever is supposed to justify 119 this blackmail shit. Yes, it’s blackmail. He can’t say if I don’t dress nice, then I run distance. That’s a threat. When we finish with our baton work, Coach asks us to circle up to talk running business. I trail behind. I’m tired, hungry, hurt. “Burgess.” Before he can order me to do another thing, I bark at him. “Don’t talk to me.” He’s steady, trying to talk to me like he has no memory—all gone in a big poof. “Don’t, talk to me,” I turn to him. I’m crying very hard now. I’m so furious. All kinds of thoughts whip and zip through my mind. None of them are polite. Now what if I clocked this guy, a firm fist to the face? Not cool. Obviously. He’s steady with his “Burgess, Burgess.” Because I don’t dress right, I get a lung-burning lesson in what it feels like to run with the Distance Girls? “Don’t fucking talk to me!” I scream. I almost lunge at him. Almost. I have this funny thing with track and field. Coach doesn’t know this—it’s none of his business—but my dad ran track. He ran for his country. British Honduras. He went as a one-man team and he was good, but Belize was such a poor country at that time (still is) that he never was given the things he needed to become some world champ runner or jumper. He did the high jump and the pole vault. He went to the British West Indies Championship in 1957. This was the big event that was supposed to inaugurate the creation of the West Indian Federation. Even though British Honduras was not part of the federation it was invited, along with the Bahamas, to participate in the games. The British West Indies Championship lasted only from ‘57 to ’62, but my father, the one- man team from Belize City, received a bronze medal in the pole vault and a silver medal in the high jump. 120 All that is good and well. I figure since my dad ran, I’ll try my lot at it—see if I like it. I’m kind of good at it. Not fast, rapído, but steady-paced enough to become a decent 400-meter runner. I actually like running, and I like all the girls on the team. We’re a bad-ass bunch of runners. I mean, it’s the coolest thing to go to a track meet in some western suburb, and just because I’m an Evanston Girl, that gives me extra muscle on the starting line. Instant scare tactic. Most of the time I’m scared shitless anyway. We beat a lot of the other schools we run against, but the Sprinters from East St. Louis Lincoln and the Distance Girls from Sterling always give us a run for our money. But Coach can’t do this, though. He can’t tell me what to do with my own body. Coach doesn’t see my face back at practice for several months. As a matter of fact, he tracks me down in the hallway and asks me to consider coming back. … When I sit to take the PSATs my junior year, I’m baffled and bored by the booklet and bubble sheet in front of me. They say this is just a preliminary scholastic aptitude test; I think they’re lying. Even though this is just for practice, I come to understand how important it is for some of the other students. I sit in one of the big classrooms used for study hall in a sea of juniors who are busy blackening little circles. I don’t feel very capable right about now. The verbal section is kicking my ass, and I’m running out of time. I know how to read, but I keep losing time on the reading sections. I think I have to read the whole passage. I’m to determine the relationship between words; I can’t say I know what the majority of them mean. I begin the math section with confidence because I know how to do algebra and geometry, to find the area of rectangles 121 and squares, and to read graphs. But the questions get harder and harder, and now I’m just filling in bubbles just to fill them in. Some of the other students can afford to take those Kaplan classes. Walking through the hallways, I overhear so-and-so telling a friend she won’t be able to come over on Saturday until she’s done with the SAT class she’s taking. I’d like to take a class like that. I’d like to get a high score on a test I feel the high school hasn’t prepared me for. At the Career Counseling Center, I inquire about these classes and find they run about a thousand dollars. The house mortgage is two hundred dollars less than this; my parents can barely afford to keep up with that. There is no extra money in their budget for anything other than survival. The woman hands me an SAT booklet, says something about the Evanston Public Library having books to help me. There are little discrepancies between what I ask about and what I observe. Why do I feel so unprepared for this test? If the test measures my aptitude, then how come the classes I’ve taken in high school don’t seem to match up? The verbal section consists of no questions about Odysseus, none on India’s partition, none on Apartheid, and none on Grendel. The test is a self-contained thing; I am not to use my “outside” knowledge to answer the questions. I am to work with what’s before me. What’s the point, then? I do begin to see—though I cannot express this very well—a difference between the kids who are tracked into higher and lower level courses. The kids in the higher-level courses seem to have most of the support they need. Their teachers seem to care more about helping them get to the next level. The kids in the lower level classes—below the “regulars” track—are largely left to fend for 122 themselves. Sure, there’s one or two or three who pry themselves through tiny cracks to figure another route out of their holes; but by and large, we are left to go at this process alone. I’m a little turned off by tests at this point, anyway. The more I think about this, the more I come to realize: these tests do not necessarily show what I know and how I use what I know. It’s all about knowing how to take a test. The summer going into my senior year, when I sit to take the SAT test and receive my scores, I’m totally devastated—not in the kill-myself kind of way, but wowed. The total SAT score is sixteen hundred points: eight hundred for both the verbal and math sections. I score a 320 on both sections for a total of 640. Embarrassed, I don’t share my scores with those who ask. All around me students are buzzing with college talk: applications, the essay, the visit, and the choice. No one in my family has ever gone to university. Figuring I can read and follow directions at least, I realize the application process calls for more than this. I have absolutely no clue about how to do it. I do my best—which is what’s expected of an at-risk, off-track student like me. I go to the Career Counseling Center again. Strewn on the table are thick books with tons of colleges to choose from. The woman who runs the center asks what I think I want to study. I don’t have an answer for her. I can tell she’s uninterested in assisting me: she’s curt and she sighs when I don’t answer her questions with confidence. She leaves me alone for a bit—“to think about it”—before she moves on to help another student who knows what he wants to major in. The woman is very nice to him: “That’s a great school!” This guy’s looking at the University of Michigan, University of Chicago, 123 and Brown. I don’t even know what I want to study, let alone what school I’m interested in. College costs money, something we don’t have very much of in my family. I flip through the thick book of schools, confused, my body’s sizzling (again) with shame. Over her shoulder, “It’d be helpful if you had some kind of plan or some kind of goal,” the woman says. Maybe she whispers this, maybe she doesn’t, but the suggestion is loud enough for the few students in the center to hear. I leave before the she can return to see if I’ve come up with an idea. A few of the people I hang around with suggest what they call “liberal arts” colleges: Antioch, Hampshire, and Reed. I don’t know these are very expensive private schools. They say I’d love it at these schools because these colleges look at the whole package, like, the whole person (seriously) not just test scores. A lot of them say I’ll like the way the school is set up. There isn’t all this “structure” like, going to point A to B to C in one long, straight line like more “traditional” colleges. And there aren’t any grades at some of them. I’ll fit right in, they say. There’s a thing called financial aid and that’ll help me afford college. I do not return to the Career Counseling Center. Instead, I bike to the Evanston Public Library to look at the college handbooks there where, on my own, I feel much more comfortable figuring all this college stuff. I devise a plan to retake the SATs, which means checking out those thick study guides from the library. The Princeton Review has all these tricks to help me raise my score. I must learn new words and use them in sentences. I mustn’t read the whole reading passage, just the first and last lines of each paragraph. The answer’s always 124 going to be somewhere in those lines. The book tells me how to make an educated guess by canceling out what I know to be wrong. There are all these ploys I can use for each section. In the fall of my senior year, October ‘91, I sit to take the exam again. The results: V 330, M 390 for a total of 720. Not much higher than my first time but much better. Nothing to cheese about, though. These are the scores I ask the Educational Testing Service to send off to the schools that need them. If I could afford to take the test again, I would, but I still have to pay the admissions fees, and I don’t know how that’s getting done. I have very brief conversations about all of this with my family. My oldest oldest sister helps me pay for some of the fees. My father asks about Northwestern. He works there and communicates to me I “can go for less.” Like “free?” I spurt out. Nothing’s ever free; he’d be responsible for paying about twenty percent of the private school tuition. Thing is, my scores and my grades are not good enough to get in there. When I drag myself to Mrs. Pentek’s office to ask for recommendations, she asks me what schools I plan to apply to: “Antioch, Reed, Hampshire, Northwestern, and the University of Idaho,” I say. She has less than two cents to say about the choices I’ve made, the cost of these schools, the financial aid applications, the application fees, or the essay. She only says, “That’s good” or “That’s nice”—cordial phrases like that only indicate she’s less than enthusiastic about me sitting in her office. Mrs. Pentek agrees to write recommendations for me. I don’t know what they say, and I don’t care. I get into Antioch, Hampshire, and the University of Idaho. I’m on the waiting list at Reed and rejected from Northwestern. My father is sad to hear this, but he is glad 125 to know I get into somebody’s school. When financial aid offers arrive from each college, I’m knocked down a flight of stairs. I’m unaware of what financial aid is really all about; the money my parents will have to shell out for me to attend any of them is nonexistent. I get on the phone with Hampshire—the school I really want to go to—to ask how I might find more money. The woman on the end of the line says that once I “matriculate” into the college, I can apply for more scholarships. “Are they need-based?” I inquire, using the language I learned from all the material I’ve read. Some are and some aren’t. As graduation approaches, I feel more and more that I won’t be going to anyone’s college. 126 Losing Things For the first few years after we lost the house in 2002, I couldn’t bear to talk to my mother. She didn’t like anything in Bloomington, Minnesota. Her moods were foul, she breathed fire, and she was a bit of a terror to talk to on the phone. As a matter of fact, there were whole months I refused to call my parents to inquire after their new apartment-based living situation because she’d go off: “Everybody think I gambled away your father’s money. Well what about all the things he done to me?” “The woman” this, your doting father” that.” “You all don’t know your father.” Holding the phone away from my ear at times—rolling my eyes, trying to not suck my teeth—I checked myself over and over and over again: Do not even think about telling your mother to shut the fuck up. One day I went there. I’d called to ask after their well-being, after my own had been jostled by work all day. My father had called a few days ago, asking if I could send some money for them. My mother was just about to go into the same litany of grievances. I’d sucked my teeth, took a deep breath: “Well Mom, I’m not trying to be mean or anything, but you did gamble out Dad’s retirement money.” What had I said that for? I could feel her opening up her furnace to blast me with some licks: “You don’t know all the things your father did to me, Raychel. You think I gambled away the fucker’s money.” Feeling ballsy, I’d had the audacity to tell her that my relationship with my father is different from hers, what did she expect. I wasn’t fucking the man; I was only his daughter (of course I don’t know all things that went on between them). I knew what I knew and that was it. “Do you know all the things I was able to do with the 127 money I won? Did you forget who finish pay-off Antioch for you?” She’d complained incessantly about not having money for this or that, and she’d go on her compare-and- contrast trip: “Chicago got better plantain, got better fish, got better everything.” Well why’d you guys move to that cold-ass state to live with your “most unfortunate child,” then? My younger brother’s words verbatim. … I lied to my father when he needed me the most. It was the fall of 2002. I’d just finished the first semester of a new teaching job at a school in upstate New York, turning in grades the day before. My elderly parents were being ousted from their home of thirteen years, and here I was lying to my father’s face. I almost ignored the ringing phone, choosing instead to sit in the cool dark of the apartment, oscillating between fretting and “Well, it’s not my place to bother in grown people’s business”—especially if they refuse or can’t get their business right enough for even themselves to figure out. It was my father on the other end, his voice soft and low. At first, we exchanged pleasantries. “Fine, how about yourself?” He asked after the new job, and “Do you think you can come and help me and your mother?” My answers were immediate and terse: I hadn’t yet quite finished grading, and grades were due soon. “It’s a new job and all, so.” He said he understood. The disappointment in his voice furled itself into his next breath. When my father exhaled his deep sigh, it slammed its fist into the middle of my gut. I covered the mouthpiece with my right hand, shoved a few knuckles of my right fist into my mouth, and bit down to hide that I was crying. “Oh, brother. That’s too bad,” my father said after a long silence between us. He mumbled an “Okay, then.” I hung up and 128 burst into a paroxysm of weeping that crescendoed into bawling. I crashed onto the bed and pounded my fists into the mattress, my stomach quivering, snot sliming from my nose. I wasn’t balled up, crying like some chick in the movies lamenting about how such a horrible thing could have happened, least of all to someone like her. Heaving sobs, I laid in the fetal position while my mind wandered all over that house—from the basement to the attic with its loose boards; to the backyard; to under the porch, where sat the doghouse my father built out of old lumber; to the fire heart we used to cook on—and all I saw were things. The basement was full of things: books; industrial pots and pans for my mother’s never-materialized restaurant idea; clothes hung on the piping, many of which I thought should have been given away long ago—or sent “home.” Every space of that house was filled with things: two used buffets with an assortment of antiques collected over the years; my mother’s little owl collection, birds of prey she admired for their beauty and grace and the luck she felt they gave her; a disheveled linen closet filled with fitted and flat sheets, towels, washcloths; two brown barrels that were never sent to Belize. … Expellable. That’s what old, broke people are. The ones who hail from the wrong side of the border, the wrong side of history, doomed from birth to climb their rickety ladders up and out of their caverns. My people were born in what European and Spanish conquistadores and cartographers named Central America, in a country once called British Honduras. My parents immigrated to the States, separately and illegally. 129 First came my father—on his second try—in 1969. My mother arrived a year after him. Two years later, after working several kinds of odd jobs to obtain enough money for their crossing, my mother sent for her five children, my grandmother, and a Coolie man by the name of Mr. Ramsey. It was Ramsey’s savvy and his little of Spanish that helped the seven of them as they traveled by bus through southern Mexico, up to Mexico City, then up to Brawley, California. They had all come the wrong way, without papers and green cards—illegal aliens from planet earth. Now, my parents—in their seventies, naturalized American citizens—were houseless, living in an apartment complex in cold-ass Bloomington, Minnesota, less than one mile away from a mall called America. As a young girl, little and naïve, I believed passionately in the possibility of having a home for keeps. Driving to work with my mother, passing all those big houses on Sheridan Road, I’d peer out the window, thinking of how much better our lives might be if there was space enough for everyone and we didn’t all have to share rooms. The houses in Highland Park and Winnetka looked like mansions to me. They probably weren’t, but I pictured my whole family living in some of these large houses—all eight- plus of us. We might still have had to share rooms, but at least our parents could’ve had their own. Some of the people my parents worked for only had two children. I often wondered why four people needed Amityville Horror-type houses for just them. Even though realtors listed the house on Darrow as a cozy, brick bungalow and our parents slept on the living room floor in the winter and in the basement in the summer, I still thought it was way cool that we could have this piece of property in our family and that we could (might) be able to pass it down and share it. This is the kind of stuff kids think 130 about as they watch the big people in their lives shuffling around, taking them in tow. As I got older, I dug the house more because home had become a place where I could go to check out and fight off my depression. There were always clues that my parents might have bitten off more than they could chew. The electric and gas got shut off on several occasions, all of us huddled in one room with a heater, dreading sleep because leaving the warmest room meant going out into the Arctic of the living room to our gelid beds. There were fights between my parents and the people they owed money to. I ignored them. As I got bigger, the clues got bigger, and I became more aware of the complexities of owning a home. For instance, I was unaware of such concepts as property taxes or homeowner’s insurance— some basic fundamentals of house owning that came to light in the months before tax time, when there were conversations about who was going to put which grandchild on whose 1040s. After all, no one could tell me that my mother wasn’t among the strongest women of the world. I saw her. I went to work with her. She cleaned other people’s houses and counseled the white women—close to her in age—whose bathtubs she scoured, silvers she buffed, and laundry she’d do. Sometimes she had to work in their kitchens over celebrations and holidays. At one point, she also worked the third shift at the Solo Cup factory, running machines to make red and blue plastic cups. She even tried to go to nursing school, but she never made it because work took priority over school. My mother took care of old white people who called the cops on her because their memory failed them and they forgot that the “black thing” who had crossed the threshold into their 131 house was the same person who bathed, cooked, and cleaned for them. Years after that event, my mother had told me she didn’t do her best for that woman: “How can she call me ‘black thing’ and still expect me to wipe her butt?” The woman forgot who took care of her, who kept her clean, washing private parts and clipping toenails. “After I’m not a black thing,” Mom chided, as she relayed her experience to me. “I’m Creole.” I went to work with my mother all the time—particularly to Mr. and Mrs. Alexander’s. She worked for this family for twenty-plus years and even helped Mrs. Alexander out as her husband was dying from terminal cancer. Going to work with Mom was fun because I got to explore the spaces of these big houses. If there were a piano, I’d play around on it until Mom told me to stop and do the downstairs bathroom. When I cleaned Tommy’s bedroom, I’d jump on his waterbed, wondering why, if he loved his pet python so much, he didn’t just take it to college with him. I used to count the number of Guess jeans and Tretorn gym shoes Mrs. Alexander had in her big closet. I even tried on a pair to see if they fit. I even thought to steal a pair. I devised a plan to thieve a pair by wearing them under my purple jogging pants, but a nagging, resonating, “Thou shalt not steal,” convinced me to be happy with the jeans I had. This booming voice wasn’t God’s. It was my mother’s. I might have stolen a pair had the voice belonged to God. Mom and I both liked it better when Mrs. Alexander was away playing tennis or just not home. This meant we could clean in peace. One of those days, after cleaning one of the upstairs bathrooms, I went downstairs to the laundry room to get some clean rags. Noticing Mrs. Alexander in the kitchen, I hurriedly passed the entrance so she wouldn’t stop to talk to me. She seemed lonely, this woman, with her two boys away at 132 some above-average good college, with her husband now sick and dying. All I ever saw her do was play tennis, come home, shower, and then eat a huge bowl of salad, which she washed down with a glass of water she poured from a bottle. That day, Mrs. Alexander came home and thought to do some baking. She was just pulling an apple crisp out of the oven when she glanced up and caught the tail end of my foot leaving the frame of the door. “Rachel,” she called, “would you like to try some apple crisp?” My mother always told me not to take food from other people, but, skimming the stairs for her, I decided to say, “Yes, please.” We ate in silence until Mrs. Alexander asked if I thought about what I might be when I got older. See, there was a catch. I couldn’t eat the apple crisp in peace and not be asked questions that I felt were unnerving and intrusive. That’s a big question for a little twelve-year-old girl. This is probably why I wasn’t supposed to take food from other people. Conversations I had with my parents’ employers were laced with condescension. None of which was at all noticeable to them. “What are you going to be when you grow up?” is the only way the grown-ups in the huge Highland Park and Winnetka homes we cleaned related to my mother’s children. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a personal question. What if I named some job that worse than my mother’s? “I don’t know yet,” I answered. All I wanted to do was eat the apple crisp because I didn’t eat sweets like that at home. Her question drew embarrassment up from my foot bottom to behind my ear lobes. I heard the spoon scrape my teeth each time I pulled it from my mouth; my shoes were ratty, and I could smell my feet between tastes 133 of cinnamon and nutmeg. My shorts were made from old hand-me-down jeans. I felt her eyes move over parts of my body judgmentally. I tried to reduce the clicking sounds of metal to teeth while wondering just what my mother was doing and when she was going to come down here, glare at me over Mrs. Alexander’s back, and walk into the room and change the situation. The woman went on to ask if I thought about it because “You don’t want to clean houses like your mom.” I shoveled the last bite into my mouth, fixed my face, and excused myself. I saw what my mother had to do in the houses she cleaned. She ironed Mr. Alexander’s shirts—the last thing she did before taking her two twenties and going to her next job. She cleaned way too many bathrooms, scouring tiles, using bleach and whitening agents to give the bathrooms that newly remodeled look. Anything brown and made of wood needed to be polished with the toxic spray that smelled like lemon juice. She never used those yellow rubber gloves either. The kitchen she took apart, cleaning the inside and outside of the stove, scrubbing, sometimes digging with the tips of knives to get hardened food out of tight spaces. When the refrigerator needed its bi-weekly cleaning, my mother would drag the garbage over to the opened fridge and begin sifting through shelves and throwing away food. This never happened at our house. We were scolded when we wasted food. Mold spots on bread were sliced off and cut out—it seemed like my grandmother’s favorite treat was to eat old, hard bread dipped in tea, which she’d chew with her gums. Her dentures were always white and immaculate because she rarely ate with them. From the block of the orange cheese that once grew a mass of dark green mold, my mother sliced 134 off all the bad cheese, threw the pieces away, and proceeded to make her famous cheese eggs that we three loved to eat with tortillas or johnny cakes. Not that day. The eggs tasted funny to us; we nearly had to be threatened to eat. If none of us had actually seen the green stuff on the cheese, we agreed, we might have eaten the eggs. Mrs. Alexander wasn’t interested in my future or what I wanted to be when I grew up. She didn’t have any expectations for me—not like she did for her two sons. But she just thought she’d ask. I had been going to work with my mother for a long time at that point, and Mrs. Alexander never thought to ask this until I was eating her apple crisp. The woman otherwise didn’t have very much to say to me. Perhaps I was supposed to become her grown children’s domestic engineer. I’d watch their children, clean up their filth, and help to run their household—just like my mother. My father was also among the strongest men of the world. Who else can work overtime all summer long and go without sleep, plus go the Millers’ on the weekend, plus endure back pain almost every day, and besides the few operations and the eye cataract operation, he never missed work? Right after that operation—about two or three days, my father drowsy from drugs—Mrs. Miller called to inquire if he’d be coming in. “He’s sleeping, Mrs. Miller. He’s just had an operation; he won’t be able to come today. May I please take a message?” Mrs. Miller continued asking if he might be able to come a little later in the day, disregarding the information I’d given her. Trapped in my throat was He can’t fucking see out of one of his eyes. He can’t come clean your house or do whatever he does for you and your husband, today. “Mrs. Miller,” I paused before continuing, “my father just had an operation—on his eye. You can’t expect him to come 135 to work.” The woman continued to ask if there was anyway she could just briefly talk to him. She succeeded because she wouldn’t let it go. I took the cordless phone to my father, who sucked his teeth and cleared his throat before he spoke to her. Mrs. Miller was the woman that my father said was frightened to bring him all the way home. If the weather was nasty out, then Mrs. Miller sometimes brought my father only as far as the Davis Street train and bus hub. She drove the same Mercedes Mr. Miller let my father drive to run his errands. My father told me Mrs. Miller was afraid to bring him all the way because “She ‘fraid a get rob.” I asked him if Mrs. Miller actually said that. “Yes!” he exclaimed, kissing his teeth. My father, the same age as Mr. and Mrs. Miller, knew where to find the key to their house. He spot-cleaned the house, he climbed ladders to clear debris from gutters, he pulled up wet rugs from their basement and took the sodden carpet outside to the curb—and Mrs. Miller’s horrified to bring the man home? … Seven years have passed since my parents moved to Minnesota. They’ve gotten the place figured out now. My father knows the bus routes, food banks, and senior citizen transportation services. My mother doesn’t complain—as much. Sometimes she’ll even ask if I’ll be coming for a visit. She knows our conversations comprise the ballast of my dowri, my dug out canoe, her stories a joyful welcome to the daily distress of a doctoral program. Often times my raucous laughter brings on a coughing, at which point Mom quickly reminds me: “It’s not funny, you know. It’s not funny a’tall, a’tall. The little bitch, like myself, no mess wit me no more after dat.” The end of my laugh 136 sighs into the phone. During a small silence between us, I imagine a younger Mom getting a hold of her adversary’s finger, biting down, and not letting go. “Nobody ever call me double-row teeth again,” she says. I bet. After they saw her dilated pupils and the mouthful of blood she spat onto the marl road. She’s supposed to have what the Medicare-Medicaid Minnesota doctors call dementia. I guess, she’s supposed to be demented. Losing her mind. I think she’s only suffering from blindness and the challenges that sightlessness presents to a seventy-year- old woman who’d lived her whole life with sight. I’ve asked her if she agrees with the doctors, a question she kisses her teeth to: “You ever know me to be crazy? I look like I crazy to you? People only say I say crazy things—as though I’m the only one who is crazy. If I have dementure, as they say, then your father is fucken sicker than me.” She did have to be taken to the Hennepin County Psychiatric Ward a few times. They’d come, the ambulance people, and strapped her to the gurney. My mother had fallen into one of her ranting moods—my father calls them. The frumpy nurse who’d come to check in on my mother and the state ILS helpers had listened to my mother go on and on: “Your doting father. I know he brings her in this house. He take all kinds of things from here for her and her children. All my things he takes for her.” They heard “throw boiling water on his rass,” and, feeling that a threat, according to the rules of their state-funded jobs, the helpers had to call it in. She’d resisted when the ambulance people had come to strap her in, screaming “but this is my house, I can talk as loud as I want about what I want.” She spent two weeks there. 137 When my mother feels like leaving the apartment and being around other people, she and my father take the bus to the mall near their apartment complex and walk around inside. It’s good exercise for my mother, who rarely wants to leave the apartment. She hasn’t accepted her blindness: “I’m kinda ashamed of my eyes,” she’s shared during our conversations. Because she doesn’t want anyone to know she’s blind, my mother never has learned to use the seeing-eye stick. My father thinks she’s stubborn—and afraid because she’s fallen a few times. We all think she’d feel more independent if she tried to use the cane more. At least. I never thought my mother would be getting meals on wheels; my father getting the majority of their food from food banks, searching for what’s the freshest among not so fresh items. But they do. My father goes to a place called Creek Side to get a sealed box of food for everyone living in the apartment. There are cans of juice, Pet Milk, boxes of cereal, some oatmeal, and people also get a box of cheese. He backs the bags he has accrued in a day’s outing home, sometimes trudging through the snow, bracing himself against the bitter, biting Minnesota wind. Sometimes he rides his bike to the food bank and walks it back, carrying four bags, two on each handle. Fresh food arrives on Tuesday. My father already knows to call ahead to sign up for a Wednesday slot. The food will be fresher then, and he will have first dibs on his choice of nonperishable and perishable foods. There are foods he can take as much as he wants of and foods he can only have a limited number of. My father is on a point system. Each item he takes costs a certain amount of points. Some things are free: lettuces, tomatoes, and breads. There’s all kind of breads, he tells me “bagels, raisin bread—you 138 get a variety of bread.” My father calls the food bank, “The Organization.” It is better of the food bank choices because it receives donations from local stores in the Bloomington and Greater Minneapolis area. People with children go there, old people go there, and my father goes there, too. … I’d begun my second year of an M.A. program at some school in New Mexico in the fall of 2001, a year before losing the house. Three months into the semester my father had called me. “Your madda gambled out all of my retirement money.” He’d lost his job at Northwestern a year earlier; he’d been “fired for stealing,” his boss said. After inquiring twice about a painting someone threw in the garbage, my father brought it home. Informed the painting was not garbage, he’d taken it back—immediately. His boss, Michael Schwartz used this as a “reason” to fire the Steward of the Service Employee International Union, Local 46. My father wasn’t very friendly with his boss. He disliked that Schwartz contracted out the janitors’ work even when Schwartz knew the employees could do the job. Schwartz despised my father for rallying the workers and uncovering his blind spots. My father also didn’t let Schwartz treat him as though “inferior” was all my father was or had been all his life. Schwartz liked to talk to his subordinates about sports and other superficial, surface subjects. Conversations about the Bulls, Jordan and Pippin, or Armstrong and Kerr were supposed to play up the boss’s “nice” qualities. My father didn’t care for sports as much as Schwartz assumed and had very little to say to his boss that was not about the job. My father used to tell me that Schwartz liked trying to talk at 139 him all “nice” during those times of tension about union stuff, as though “Schwartz forget his own behavior.” Schwartz didn’t like my father’s attitude and his tone either—unaware that my father speaks to him as he does everyone else, i.e. the same way he talks to Schwartz. His boss read my father’s deportment as always being disrespectful—whether my father responded to Schwartz’s greetings in kind with a “Good morning,” or stood with the others during grueling negotiations. My father was supposed to remember his place and remember that Schwartz did the promoting and demoting and firing and hiring. Schwartz never gave my father the days off he asked for (well in advance)—to do family things, say, attend graduations and scholastic and sports events—because Schwartz felt my father deserved to miss these events for causing so many waves at the workplace. My father attributed his boss’s actions to poor memory: “Seem like he forgot his roots. He’s Polish you know.” My father’s frank statement, “Your mother gambled out all of my retirement money,” had disquieted me. I’d been waiting for my father’s reaction, waiting for him to cry. If he’d wanted to cry right then he could have. But he didn’t. He listened to me go over the scenario a few times in order to help me understand how my mother could have gambled away more than twenty-five thousand dollars in one night. “So, help me to understand something, Dad. Mom gambled out all of your retirement money?” I don’t want to wait for his answer. “Well, you really need to put the house on the market.” Like today, right now, I’m thinking—as soon as you get off the phone with me you’ll have to get on the ball. 140 When my father lost his job, he’d ask after my advice about the house. “Should I try to hang onto it,” he’d asked. Yes. I figured with his social security check and Mom’s check, they could manage without touching his retirement money—if that’s what they wanted to do. I warned him, though, that both he and mom needed “to get way more serious” about their plans because his children were broke—the kind of people who needed to be prepared for when bad things to happen. I’d spoken sternly with him that day he called, conveying the seriousness with which he and mom needed to address their changing situation. My third oldest sister and I had been telling our father, “Dad, put that money in a different account. One mom doesn’t know about.” He kept saying he’d do it—“Ok, honey, I’ll look into it—but he was the kind of person who couldn’t do that to his wife without having a conversation with her first. … I was angry, too, because I felt my father asked for my help a little too late. When I’d returned that summer, between desperately looking for work and trying to assist my stubborn parents, I’d kept asking them what they were going to do. My father had said, essentially, he didn’t know: “It depends on your mother.” My mother had acted as though asking were an affront to her, an immediate criticism of what she’d done, to which she’d respond with a glare or a “humphhh.” It’s very difficult to tell old people they ought to do something for their own good. There’s a tension between knowing that my parents are adults and are capable of doing what they need to do, and knowing that they’re totally incapable of doing what needs to 141 be done without someone else’s help. Agency isn’t the only complexity. In the midst of turbulence, attempting fairness, not blowing up, remembering who it is I’m talking to— it’s tough to remember my parents can still make their own choices and are grown up enough to deal with whatever consequences. It’s even thornier when there are years and years of “badness” between the old people who need the help. For a while, I was in the Nike “Just Do It!” mode. “Okay. She’s gambled out the man’s money. Next step. Let’s go, folks, let’s go!” I forgot one very important thing: All of this must have been tremendously difficult for my parents. No, they couldn’t just “Go!” They’d never been ready for that race. Like I said, I didn’t know the first thing about putting houses on markets, but I was determined to read some books to find out. Wasn’t that why I went to college and racked up so much debt? So I could read the fine print on all my parents’ important documents? Make sure they weren’t getting shafted because they were old, or black and old, or foreign, black, and old? I was literate enough to peruse those dummy and idiot guidebooks. I figured that’s all I needed to do; my parents wouldn’t lose too much that way. That’s why I went to college. But my being able to read those books didn’t mean I had what that guy Ben Bernanke called “financial literacy.” In April of 2009, this guy traveled down south to Atlanta to speak to the students, faculty, and staff of Morehouse College about race, wealth, and intergenerational poverty. Or—how to pass wealth on to the next generation rather than poverty. Bernanke ascribed racial disparities (gaps, economists and scholars call them) in wealth to blacks’ lack of financial literacy and their saving behaviors and strategies. He said this 142 aloud through a mic at a college that has historically not received the same funding as white universities, to a group of people who have historically been attempting to save ever since they began to get paid for their labor and knew saving money might buy their freedom. The story of poor people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps has always effaced the reality of those who have been systematically kept from participating in this country’s financial arena. Even those poor white folks of Old Hickory Jackson’s 1830s United States—most of whom worked for the elite, wealthy white folks and who, through hard work, some of them hoped to become—were able to step into the ring and contend. They might have been poor, but their skin wasn’t black. In the States we like to separate “ism” and “ists” into categories: race is only for nonwhite people, class is only for poor folks, gender is only for women, and so forth. These categories are not so clear-cut for any of us, least of all for those whose colored skin defines the very meaning of their class, their gender. There are tons of narratives of people of color who have been intentionally and consciously deprived of the right to buy, own, and keep the land and homes they’ve managed to buy. There have been plenty of government frauds and seizures. The first three decades of the twentieth century provide us with so many, many accounts of poorer, less elite white men—employed by their wealthier, landed, government-connected white male peers—who have ravaged, razed, and destroyed many communities of color. Trail of Tears, forcing people to leave their homes at gunpoint—who did Bernanke think he was talking to? 143 The ugliness that doesn’t fit seamlessly and beautifully into this culture’s foundational myths—democracy this, freedom this, liberty and justice for all—always gets covered over. Plenty of people of color have been working hard and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps for generations. Work hard, work hard, and work hard some more, and, eventually, hard work will teach me enough about financial literacy so that I save properly and appropriately. From the time my parents came to this country, the work that was available to them was no different than the work available to the black people already here, the work they’d been doing for centuries: cleaning other people’s homes, taking care of other people’s children and other people’s parents. Menial labor: fieldwork, grunt work, service-sector employment. This is the work poor people do. Some work incredibly hard at these jobs, using their bodies, lifting, bending, sticking bare hands into hot water, stooping. This is not the work that makes it possible to survive, let alone save. What ran through Bernanke’s mind—a Yale graduate, a man whose Jewishness is hidden by the color of his white skin—as he told a room full of mostly black people that they basically needed to change their saving behaviors and strategies? A room full of black people who, for generations, were deprived of their social, legal, and economic rights. By Law. With a capital “L.” In 1853 there was this Mr. Reverend William Goodell, a white abolitionist, who took an extensive look at the laws comprising what he called The American Slave Code in Theory and Practice: Its Distinctive Features Shown by Its Statutes, Judicial Decisions, and Illustrative Facts. In this book, Goodell calls attention to something 144 Bernanke and so many others willfully ignore: the way the great laws of the United States became the vehicle through which nonwhite people, particularly black people, have been kept from their inalienable rights. Even the Honorable William Jay’s (a white guy) letter, which prefaces Reverend Goodell’s text, notes, “Surely, never before has mischief been framed by law, with more diabolical ingenuity, than in this infernal code [the American Slave Code]” (xii). In chapter six, Goodell draws our attention to laws that indicate that black people living in the U.S. were perceived as good for nothing, as non-persons without feelings, souls, and minds, who can neither reap what they sow nor own any possessions. At all. The Civil Code Article, number 35 states, The humanity of the [black] is denied, by denying to [them] any share in this original right of human nature or capability of its exercise. [They are] “not ranked among sentient beings, but among other things.” A chattel cannot be the owner of a chattel. The [black] “can possess nothing nor acquire any thing but what must belong to his master.” They “cannot take by purchase or descent.” “Cannot take by purchase or descent.” This obviously means what it says: anything black people worked for did not belong to them. They could not purchase what they needed to survive. They were not allowed to participate as citizens in the United States. They could not, through their labor, ensure that their families would have more than the generation before them had. 145 George Stroud, a white abolitionist writing during the same time, says of the relationship between un-owned (white) people and owned (black) people: “[Blacks] have no legal rights in things, real or personal; but whatever they may acquire, belongs, in point of law, to their masters.” Goodell references pages twenty-four and forty-five of Stroud’s work. Note the emphasis Stroud places on in point of law. It’s a bit odd—incredibly odd to me—that Bernanke seemed to have forgotten his own history: King Edward banished Jewish people from Britain in 1290; Cromwell readmitted them, 366 years later, in 1656; pogroms in Tsarist Russia; and the Spanish Inquisition, which forced many Jewish people to pretend to convert to Catholicism. Britain created plenty of myths about Jewish people—their culture, tradition, and religion—to define who British people were not. In this man’s own legacy there is a history of trauma after trauma after trauma. Where did his memory go? Maybe Bernanke’s still pretending. Black people have been losing their homes for centuries. The whole housing market crash is nothing new to poor black people. The whole “things are getting worse,” “people are getting poorer,” “people are losing their jobs”—none of this is new to poor black people. Surviving is nothing new to people who’ve had to survive for generations. They are also not the only people who have suffered at the hands of a government run by elite, God-fearing (so some claim) white men. History, so we’re told in our classrooms, is one universal account of all the necessary evils that have made the U.S. what it is today. It has winners and losers. Typically, the losers’ stories aren’t recorded in the winners’ narratives. Typically, the 146 winners expect for the losers to rejoice and be grateful; after all, not all of the losers have died. Many of them have become famous, have become presidents. Even more typically, when losers engage in what Arturo Schomburg called, “digging up the past,” winners decry the losers’ words as revisionist. … I am from a family where I learned to save in jars, under pillows, and in secret hiding places. My parents didn’t know what NASDAQ or anyone of those Dow Jones things stood for. My father didn’t know how to invest the money he worked for, or the retirement money he’d acquired over time. He asked me, once, if he ought to invest his money in something. “Invest?” I couldn’t help him there. All I knew how to do was balance my checkbook, pay bills, and try to save—but investing? I certainly knew how to get into debt. Can’t buy a car because one has appalling credit? No problem. Want to go to school for a trade or for some second-rate, unvalued, four-year degree from a not well-endowed-enough institution? Stafford, Perkins, and Sallie Mae are there to help. That’s what a lot of us have got going. Debt and credit. Some of us get into debt trying to pay off other debts. That’s a good chunk of people in this country. It’s no wonder people gamble, go on shooting sprees, sell drugs, and engage in other thieving activities. How do people become financially literate if they never make enough money to become financially literate with? “Poor people can’t really save, you know,” my father said to me one evening on the phone. “You try to save a twenty dollars here or there; next thing you know, the money gone!” It never seemed as though my parents could save any of the money they 147 ever made. There was always some imminent incident that was on the verge of going to happen and the stashed-away fifty bucks or twenty bucks had to be used for something else: pay Peter to pay Paul, and (hopefully) Mary gets her money after she sings. My father’s Northwestern janitorial job had given him an opportunity to amass the largest amount of money a black immigrant, in his early thirties, coming from Belize, might have ever have. That’s pretty much what he said: “That’s a lot of money for a black man like myself.” The small thirty thousand dollars he was able to garner over his eleven years of working at the University had only been possible because his job gave him access to financial structures that otherwise would’ve remained unknown to my father, had he taken some menial, laboring job that was not at a private research institution. I was infuriated with both of my parents, particularly my mother. Not because of her gambling but because she lost her strength. She lost her strength and wanted to blame it on other people, on “the women” my father had romantic relationships with, while she remained chaste in her commitment to him as wife and partner. She refused to accept that she was losing her sight and her house. I’d go into her bedroom and sit down to talk to her while she watched her westerns. When I drummed up enough courage (or maybe patience) to ask, “So, Mom, do you and Dad know what you’re going to do?” She’d curtly say, “I don’t know.” Neither my mother nor my father could manage to get it together enough to tell their own children they needed help. My parents have eight children—seven, really, because one is already dead. Only two out of the seven are capable of helping in times of dire need. Of those two, one is more able than the other. I wasn’t that one. 148 … I had a lot of “I can’t believe this is happening” moments. All that my parents have been through in their lives—still to this day—and their house was now in foreclosure. Or eviction—whichever of the two. Foreclosure is different from eviction, a friend of mine reminded me one day. I use the terms interchangeably because, whatever the deal, those who are unable to pay their mortgages still have to leave their properties. Move out, leave the premises, and so forth. My parents were people who’d lived in what many going to Belize for a vacation call third-world conditions. They backed water in buckets, they cut down huge mahogany trees, they stood in line for food after Hurricane Hattie. They had before been ousted from other homes—by my father’s own sister, by hurricanes with human names. My parents were old. Old in a country that privileges youth and beauty. Old in a culture that treats its elderly poorly. Old in a place where television shows such as Reno 911 make jokes about old people who have been taken advantage of. Several months before we lost the house, before the stress of sleepless nights and unease, I called my big sister, bawling into the phone about this cascade of loss. “Girl,” she said, “you have no idea how many nights I’ve lost to sleep. Waking up crying.” Here I thought she was all tough and faring very well, immune somehow to what I felt as a catastrophic loss. Why had I thought that? As her little sister, I’d watched this young, teenage single mother work her ass off at shitty jobs, to eventually become the school nurse at a severely underfunded K through five school in Georgia. I thought she was stronger than me. 149 The Boat I don’t know when “the boat” became a part of our conversations, but it did. If I called home on a weekend when my mother was supposed to be there, I knew there was chance she’d be at the boat. I didn’t have to ask and no one had to explain. “She’s at the boat,” said it all. Going there had become something my mother did for fun and pleasure, and, while she was there having fun and doing something for herself, she was also there to try to win money. Not just for herself, but for us, too. Most times, when I’d ask her what she had planned for the weekend, she’d say, “I don’t know. Properbly go to the boat.” My mother had always “gambled.” Gambled is in quotes because I don’t think selling and playing Boledo, which she did back home in Belize, and or playing lottery, as she had done in my childhood, are the same as playing slots. Lottery and lotto tickets are always bought with cash, not credit cards. If the boat goers run out of money at the boat, there’s a credit-to-cash place somewhere around to turn non-existing money into real money. This set-up gives gamblers more chances to win back the money they’ve been losing all day. My grandmother and mom had been playing lottery for as long as I can remember. I recall hanging out with one of my sisters and my grandmother one evening when we lived in Chicago. We were waiting for the lottery to come on the television; Mamá always bought her lottery each weekend and always played the same number. It was summer, and the room was dark because the shades had been drawn all day. I was sitting on the floor, leaning against my grandmother’s knees, as though she’d been 150 braiding my hair. When the lottery person called “Oh-four-two,” we sprang from our seats, congratulating Mamá, singing our, “You won. Mamá, you won!” Mamá was very lucky that way. My mother was lucky, too, but I believed her luck began to run out after a while. I never asked my mother what “the boat” was. I’d imagined it as a big ship, like the one in the Titanic, mixed with layouts from all the cruise ship commercials I’d seen, mixed with the ones I’d seen docked in Belize City, and mixed with the people who worked on the ship on the television show The Love Boat and on the island in Fantasy Island. I don’t know why the people from Fantasy Island figured into my images because the guests who visited the island arrived in those little planes that can land in water. I associated “the boat” with islands, for some reason, not with Gary, Indiana, where the boat was docked. I seriously thought it was a working boat, the kind of vessel that carried people and cargo across thousands of miles of water before the invention of airplanes. That boat never sailed anywhere. I wondered what “the boat” was and what it had been used for before it became a gambling den. My mother had taken most of her kids to the boat with her, even her husband. My third oldest sister said she’d never go again. She’d taken a pretty thick book with her and had almost finished it by the time she realized that her whole day had been spent in some lounge on the boat. “Mom and them were still in front of those machines after all that time,” she’d said. 151 She’d only asked me once. “I just don’t see the point, Mom,” I’d said. “Why would I go waste a whole day on a boat that doesn’t sail anywhere?” She never asked me to go with her again, but often made comments reflecting how much fun I’d been missing: “If you went with me, you’d see.” I’d once asked my mother if there were any pool tables on the boat. “Now, I’d go if there were pool tables.” There’s this one picture of her with short hair and shades standing on the deck of the ship. She’s not smiling; she’s just there. My mother didn’t appear to be having any fun at all. My mother began to go to the boat right around the time she found the job at the Walkens in 1992. I’d lived at home during what I called “the beginning” of my mother’s gambling phase. I matriculated into a school in Chicago to finish undergrad three years after my mother took this job. My younger brother and sister, my father, and I had established our own patterns for living with each other. During the day, while my father slept, we all went to school. At night, the three of us manned the fort. By the time Friday arrived, the house was in tip-top order for Mom’s arrival, because she didn’t like coming home to an unclean. I wasn’t down with this boat business because it got to that be my mother’s moods and how she spent her entire weekend at home were based upon whether or not she won or lost. It seemed as though my mother had become accustomed to living in a “nicer feeling” house. I’d gone a few times to visit my mother, to see where she worked. The Walkens lived in Highland Park, on lakefront property. My mother’s room was in the basement, replete with a television and two beds. There was a long staircase that led from the house down to the lake. The back windows were huge; one could see Lake 152 Michigan go on for some distance. I entertained going down there because I wanted to count the steps and to see how deep the water was. I asked my mother if she’d ever gone down by the water. “No,” was all she said. “One of the daughters was supposed to have drowned down there.” Taking this job shifted our family dynamics. It’s one thing for a worker to have to work all the time and still be able to come home to a bed that belongs to her. To stay in another person’s house and come home from Friday noon until Monday early morning—that’s a huge change. The kind of work relationship my mother and Mrs. Walken had has existed in the U.S. for a very long time. Of course, I didn’t have the language I do now to explain this centuries old phenomenon, then, but in my growing consciousness, I knew my parents were bound to this kind of work because of a dishonest and iniquitous socio-political and economic structure set in place well before our time. This type of employment—working and living in the homes of employers—was no different than the work black women have been doing ever since the late seventeenth century. That’s very eerie to me, because their relationship says a lot about who works where, and for whom. My mother and father are not the only people of color who’ve had to do this kind of work for generations. Generations. “It’s just a job,” an acquaintance of mine said once. We were talking about hard work and working hard. The she shared with me how hard her parents worked, “A job is job as far as I’m concerned.” Plus, the acquaintance’s parents were corporate-working people. 153 “But it’s about the kind of work,” I’d said. It’s the same work blacks were doing when they de-boarded the ships that brought them here—after they were auctioned off and sold. “Hmmm…,” the acquaintance said, “I never thought about it that way.” I’m almost positive that, had my mother not gone blind, she’d still be working for that woman. It’d be some kind of bullshit, post-post-modern day Driving Miss Daisy the 1989 film starring Morgan Freeman. Instead of an old black man and white woman, there’d be two old women, bickering like sisters about shrimps and dog shit. My mother telling Mr. Walken the difference between the tone he used for his wife and the one he used for her. My mother smelling Mrs. Walken’s breath to make sure the Scope Mrs. Walken gurgled with sufficiently hid the odor of her gin and tonics. Over the span of ten years, my mother became a stranger in her own home. She could never find simple things like her pots and pans. We’d established our own system of storing dishes and pots and pans. As Friday rolled around—all of us, our father included—changed the pots around so my mother could find them. We didn’t devise this plan together; rearranging things just became something we all knew to do. We got so used to her being gone that we prayed she was in a good mood when she came home. If things weren’t just right—and we never knew what “just right” meant for her—she’d complain: “I can never find my things”; “I don’t know why people have to move my things.” Under our breath and among us we thought, “Then go back to the Walkens.” 154 Dementure The woman I was seeing him when you all lived in Chicago. I knew him from Belize. I met him down at Monkey River when he used to do his policeman job. Belize people talk too much and that’s how your mother found out. Some bitch in the building spread open her lips; next thing you know, I heard a knocking on the door. Had the nerve to come over to the apartment, banging on the door, talking about “come and get his things, then.” I acted like I wasn’t home. Went right along with my business. I was greasing up the man’s hair, getting ready to braid it. He didn’t make to move at all either. He sat there and leaned back even more, while I massaged Blue Magic into his scalp. He stayed with me a couple of days more. We’re together on and off—but your father could never leave that woman. I even went to get him once. He wouldn’t leave with me—the fucker. 155 Mimi, the 1920 Rat Destruction Campaign, and the four-bucket woman I live my whole life in Belize Town. After when it rains the roads are so rutted, lone mud is on everybody foot bottom. People hike up their pants and dress hem, stepping tee-tie-toe to avoid the mud holes. Is not everyone can afford shoes. No let the people with shoes trick you cause lone cardboard make up them soles. My madda and fadda live through rough times. My ma had was to take in washing to make money. My pa had was to work cutting down them big, big mahogany and logwood trees. She and my pa do all kind of dutty work to make it. See them nice, nice mahogany chesser draws and them bookshelves, them? Well, my pa bruck his back, get his hands smash up, mosquito bites scar up the man leg—all so them rich people in Britain can have them nice brown “chest of drawers,” as they say. Them trees so big around it take about three or four man to wrap them arms ‘round the trunks and even more to bring it down. I ‘fraid the man might loose him leg or never come back home again because a lot of them man who does do logwood or mahogany work no come home sometimes. But my pa come. This Belize govament does continue to do fool fool things. Now they have the pickney them catching rats for ten pence a piece. Used to be five pence per animal cause the people who whole life is politics didn’t even want to raise it that much. Must be sake of the riots them that the govament feel it is their duty to give the youth them some work. Aye gyal, I was so embarrassed for them pickney walking barefoot and hunting rats for money, with them li crocus sack and dutty string, planning together where to catch the most rats. 156 If the govament no want more riots, no must build some schools for the children? Free schools. None of this pay such a such for uniform and books. Look at how many people had schooling, but no have no work. No mind, I no like have them dutty things darting in and out of cracks and floor boards becausen I tired of ‘fraid of them rodents. But the govament no have brains. Stead of them do something that have some kind of longevity like build betta sanitation order, fix up them roads, feed the people them, and see to it that the people have work—they do this short term thing call the Rat Destruction Campaign. The working people riot, yes. We is a working people and we have demands that the govament must take heed of. How my pa work all his life, killing up himself for other people happiness? He never one day get any kind a pension. No pension. That man work. he work till all his skin look like the bark pon them trees he chop down. When I tell you the man body all gnarl up and twisted—look just like one of them buttonwood branches. If I see him walk through them trees there, I swear believe is a tree moving. We is a working people and we does have our rights. We riot, yes. After is our very bodies that make this country. Our own sweat and blood, our mangled hands and crooked-toe feet—all of we make this country have it gains. And look, nothing. So we riot yes because da we who wash them people dutty ass clothes, da we who take care of them people rude pickney, da we who the govament must respect and stop treat like we just born yesterday and no have no sense. 157 Now they want shut-off the water a certain time in the day. Gyal, I never hear of such foolishness. Shut-off the water like children no need bade, people no need cook, and we no get thirsty. You see the govament shut off any rich people water? One day I went to the standpipe with Ferron, my granddauta. This broad, broad woman with four buckets is there sçhubbing her finga in people face, and sçhubbing the pickney out of the way like is she only need water. Time ticking, I gone over and tell the woman she wrong to push the pickney them aside like that. What did I tell she that for. When I tell you that woman cuss me, she cuss me bad: “Yuh barren, Yuh tink yuh bembe. Yuh ma and pa raise cow for children.” No mind the woman no know me. Time is ticking, now. I stand there and look pon she, her chest heaving up and down, throwing insults. I no want argue becausen I no like that a’tall, a’tall. A big crowd come now; Ferron squeeze up in between the people. I try reason with the woman: “Instead of one person fill up all them buckets at once, is betta to fill one at a time so everybody get some water before they shut it off.” Then the woman made a grave mistake, gyal. She did purse she lips to spit. When I say the glob of saliva move through the air and everybody could hear it—that is what I mean. The crowd get quiet, quiet. After they know me. Nobody push Ms. Mimi around like I some dutty, mangy, flea-ridden dog. They know I butt man off them bloody feet. As the rancid spit pass me, I drop me bucket, grab the woman’s shirt collar, and “beng, beng, beng” three time with my head. The bitch drop down, laying there with her bloody head bust open and gushing blood. The pickney them just cross over she and fill them buckets. Want come and fool around like she the only one who need water. 158 Ferron, the little creole woman who ran through the streets of Belize City Me neva have no problem in school. My bradda—the kids them used to beat up my bradda, but he wouldn’t fight. I fight, but you have to do something to do me first before I fight. One day when I come out of school, I see some boys have a person on the ground. I was coming from St. John’s School in Belize and I cross the street. My mind say, “Let me go see who is this.” When I look, the boys them had my bradda, holding my bradda down, and stuffing sand in his mouth. My poor bradda who won’t fight. One boy hold down Bernard’s hand and the next one hold his leg. I run over there and I kick both of them in their butt. They fall over—I wasn’t a strong woman, but I remember my granmadda, Mimi, say when you fighting throw yourself with your punch. Both of them fell down. I tell my bradda, “You get up. You don’t let nobody do that to you.” I tell him “to get up and fight for yourself.” Then you know what that stupid Mr. Blockett did, he was the headmaster, then. J.L. Blockett. He was looking outside of his window and he saw me: “Boys, boys! Catch Ferron.” And I remember what my granmadda always say: since my leg so skinny, I could be as swift as a horse. You think any of them boy they catch me? I run all the way from—yes! Catch me—and they don’t even remember what they were doing to my bradda. The boys they chase me from the St. John’s School there. They chase me from there, baby, and I run like hell. I run from the school all the way to West Street. Them boy they chase me and chase me and chase me and chase me. I run all the way from that Albert Street. I run through Rocky Road or Berkeley Street. I run. I want 159 you see me scale them bridge—just like I was flying. The bloody fool boy, they chase me and chase me until I get home. When I reach, my granmadda was right there. “What happen to you, Sylvia?” Them boys was stupid because they run right into my granmadda hand. Mimi just grab one of them: “What happen, what happen?” My granmadda just shook up the boy—I had liked that—and tell them: “You go home and don’t come through this yard again.” They was so eager for catching me they didn’t even know they were running into a nest. My granmadda didn’t jump and beat me without me explain anything to her, but my madda, Curley, she used to want to grab me and beat me. Mimi say, “Explain what happen,” and I tell my granmadda everything. Then Mimi say, “Curley, no beat Sylvia because you don’t know what’s happen out there. The girl is not crazy. She no going to jump and hit no body if they didn’t hit she first.” My granmadda always give me the benefit of the doubt because she let me explain. Mimi took me to school the next morning to the J.L. Blockett; my granmadda think she was bembe. He was the kind of teacher who like to whip the children them. He used to have them boys bend over and he whip them on their butt with a switchy cane. Some of the teacher them, they so mean, too. If you go to school with a dirty feet— because you know how the boy they walk barefooted—they want to shame the boys them. If your fingernail dirty, they want to you put out your hand and whap you with that skinny cane. “Clean your fingernails,” the teachers them say while they whapping you. We gone right to the Mr. Blockett’s office. Before he could say anything, Mimi told him, “Let the girl explain. Tell the story and tell it straight, Sylvia.” We never lie to 160 Mimi because she give us a chance to explain, see. After I finish explain how I see the boy them have my bradda on the ground, stuffing sand in his mouth, she just tell Mr. Blockett, “Please, don’t ever send any boys after Ferron again.” Ms. Bow-Legged Lilly Ms. Lilly wasn’t busy spying for young men or burning black candles—her usual activities. She saw the double-row teeth, mauga leg woman walking to go sell Boledo tickets, smiling and humoring with a bally sitting on his front stoop. When Ms. Lilly saw this, she spat, “Whore,” then waited patiently for the mauga girl to pass her. She just knew, just knew, that her brother must could find a better woman than that there long- legged girl. See, the woman was incorrect. She wasn’t good enough to be with Ms. Lilly’s Police Constable brother. She already had two kids for two different men already, and three more who Ms. Lilly fervently believed were not her brother’s children. Ms. Lilly never liked her brother’s decision to maintain this mauga woman. None of the brother’s sisters liked Ferron. Never. They made the girl’s life a miserable, miserable hell when she had come to live with them. Calling her all kind of names, constantly berating the girl, mistreating her when their brother was at work. Ms. Lilly enjoyed sitting, passing talk and pointing fingers; seasoning and stewing gossip and lies. She had any number of concoctions, her sauces, her brines, and she savored and saved them. Ferron didn’t notice Ms. Lilly rocking on her veranda, and, as she passed, Ms. Lilly left her seat to follow after her, hissing, “Whore,” as she trailed behind the woman. 161 “You no good whore.” With a new hint of vigor, she stepped surely and surly on the road, the sound of gravel highlighting the silence between them. The skinny-ankled woman had taken to ignoring the mocking caws of her husband’s sisters. She strolled cool remembering her bible lessons and her manners. She must mind her elders—including this bow-legged, wide-nosed, bunion-foot bitch whose tracing began to wear on the girl’s patience. The last “bloody bitch” and “bloody whore” that came out of Ms. Lilly’s mouth, choked her to a standstill. “Gwan with your patchwork children,” she said, straightening her hat. Anyone standing on the same Belize streets with the two held their breath to witness a rebuke that ground Ms. Lilly into sand: “If I am whore, you are the bigger whore. You older than me, Ms. Lilly. You been here on this earth longer than me, so who is the bigger bitch?” Ms. Lilly’s legs must have corrected themselves, if only for a minute, for she stood straighter and taller, with her lips pursed to say nothing to the back of the whore. The bitched walked on, thinking, I want to tell you more than that, bloody wicked. Chase after young man when she have a man her age at home. Love to see man fight over her. Burn candle, talk lie, and then want to turn around and tell me all kind of bloody things. 162 The little creole girl, rachel, and her coolie grandpa Mr. Ramsey did things like fall head first off the porch, stagger to a stance while sucking his teeth, blood rushing all over his face, and say, “I alright, man.” He’d been drinking all day. Everybody, also drinking and enjoying themselves, jumped up because we surely thought Ramsey must have been dead. “Ramsey, Ramsey,” Mamá exclaimed. “Drink too bloody much.” My dad’s “Goddamn it,” with a long drawn out kiss of teeth, indicated we were all having a good time until this happened. When Mom finally stopped the bleeding, we all tried to coax him into not drinking another beer. But with a bandaged head, Mr. Ramsey now sat on the steps, back against the railing, holding a Heineken. Mr. Ramsey was a Coolie; that’s what they called him in Belize. He had nice hair, handsome salient features (nice nose, lips, forehead). His mother was from India and his father a black Creole man. He had been a sailor and he helped build the Panama Canal. He was hopelessly in love with my grandmother, who, in addition to Ramsey’s drinking, was also not attracted to his dark features—she favored light skinned men who didn’t love liquor. When he was not drinking he could fix anything, build anything, and finish tasks. By blood he bore no relation to us, but I knew him as the person closest to being a grandfather. He was a part of our family; my mother would have never left him in Belize. He helped get my grandmother and my older brothers and sisters across the border and into the States. They had all taken the bus from Belize City to Brawley, California. Mr. Ramsey had been the navigator and language person. 163 I was afraid of him sometimes because he’d stagger through the apartment saying, “Begarueganey”—I don’t know what that means, but he said it often, and it always felt as though he was warding something away from him. Hungry, hungry once, when I’d visited him and Mamá one weekend, I watched him stand before the stove making something to eat. He called me when everything was finished; he’d already been stuffing his face with food. When I actually saw that the man was eating raw ground beef with ketchup, I thought, how can he not know this meat is uncooked—and it smelled so good to me. He was fun, but he drank entirely too much. Everyone in my family knew Mr. Ramsey was an alcoholic. No matter the age, all of us knew, to some extent, what we were getting into when we went out with him. He was instant adventure. He gave all of us cause to fret, but could immediately perform adult responsibility when anyone needed him to. He took me to a Chicago Cubs game once. This was the early eighties with Jodi Davis, Keith Moreland, Leon Durham, and the Cubs’ best relief pitcher ever, Lee Smith, made up the team. It was fun. At first. He’d turn to me and ask if I wanted anything. I’d nod and he’d come back with a Coke and fries for me, and a beer for himself. He’d do this frequently during the course of nine innings. All I could do while I ate fries and watched Bill Buckner, Leon Durham, and them play, was hope that this man would not get too high and cause any kind of hardship for us. By the time we were ready to go—I could not leave this man’s side. He was drunk, drunk. He and I stumbled through the bleachers, my little seven-year-old hands clutching the fabric of his shirt. Not the waist or his arm—the fabric. I struggled with 164 Mr. Ramsey as we tackled a long flight of stairs at the Addison Stop. We’d walk up a few steps, wait to the side, and start again. People watched us. Most city folks were used to scenes like this, taught by experience to pick and choose who they helped, becoming experts at invoking blindness. But some of the white people heading home to their suburban enclaves, they thought these moments were reasons why “these people” couldn’t get ahead. Not an assumption, especially when their body language said so. Rolling their eyes, obvious gestures of whispering, “tsking” and refocusing their children’s gaze—disturbed by the spectacle because it caused them discomfort and blemished the memory of their family outing, because it made them worry about their safety. Mr. Ramsey and I feigned sightlessness, blocking out passengers’ attempts to displace their anxiety onto us. I had seen much worse: people throwing up on themselves, which was nothing compared to a “crazy” who once entered the train car with a large wrench. He walked up and down the length of the moving train slapping it against his palm. His footsteps remained steady and balanced even as the train lurched from start to stop. He had amazing balance. So, when people asked, “Do you need help, Sir?” Mr. Ramsey straightened himself up, suddenly no longer drunk, looked into those good Samaritan eyes: “I look like I need any bloody help? Mi grandauta right yah di help me.” This was just on the stairs. On the platform—it was everything I could do with my little strength to keep him away from the edge. All the while I had to pee. I held my urine, made sure he didn’t fall off the platform and get electrocuted. Mr. Ramsey and I stood side by side, breathing 165 heavy, bodies propped against billboard signs. The weight of urine against my tiny bladder needled my pelvic muscles to relax; I’d almost wanted to wet myself. I waited for him to pull a half-broken Winston cigarette from his crumpled pack, tugged on his shirt, “Mr. Ramsey, I have to go to the bathroom.” “Okay, then.” He took my hand. We stumbled through a sea of staring eyes to a wooden box that stored salt for the winter and train tools further up the platform where he told me to “stoop down and urine.” He stood, smoking, body perfectly still, facing east, while I faced north and watched my urine puddle up around my feet. Mr. Ramsey handed me a yellow-stained handkerchief—which I definitely did not want to use because he’d blown his nose with it—but didn’t say anything and used anyway. Finishing his cigarette he asked, “You done?” and then noisily plopped himself down on top of the wooden box. The alcohol returning to his bloodstream as a gust of a foul spirit flees into an unsuspecting person, we resumed the positions his intoxication sanctioned, both taking off our blinders and opening our ears. We overheard voices mentioning something about indecent, where is this child’s parents, such a burden to bear, such responsibility. Mr. Ramsey performed his instant moment of adult responsibility; only I knew I could count on this. He wasn’t going to let me piss my pants. “You alright?” I asked, scooting closer to him and wrapping my little, right hand around the bulge of his upper, left arm. “Yes, pet.” I never went to another game with him again. I always heard him say that nobody could fire him because he was the best worker at the job. When Mamá told him, “Ramsey, pay your rent,” he yelled, “Mr. Walkie can’t 166 throw me out of my own place, Curley. I live here, he can’t do nothing to me.” He continued in this same vein even after the eviction notice had come and Mamá had moved out. Mr. Ramsey was a man who, when he went to work, was a great worker, but only went to work when he felt like it. By the time he actually went to work, there wasn’t any. Just like that he was evicted, his belongs strewn across the front lawn. I remember being embarrassed about seeing his things on the front lawn. I’d walked home from school. Gale School was just down the street and we lived in the same apartment building as Mamá and Mr. Ramsey. His things lay on a white sheet with some green looking flowers polka-dotted over the sheet. A radio, some tools, an upturned ashtray with a few of his Winston butts still stuck to the bottom. I remember Dad had come from work, and I watched through the window as he gathered the corners of the sheet and carried the bundle into our apartment. 167 One of the patchwork children, rachel, meets her bow-legged aunty I’m supposed to favor that bow-legged Ms. Lilly, with her wide nosed like my own. She’s mean as a bull whose bound balls are bubbling with pain as it waits for the chute door to open. My mother says I walk like my Aunt Lilly. My voice starts, “Really! No, I don’t Mom, that woman is mean.” I met Ms. Lilly one rainy night in 1996 when she had come to Chicago to visit her sister’s children. My mother forced me to “go and talk to your aunt” and left me standing in the doorjamb, leaning against the door. She actually left the apartment and went with Ms. Lilly’s children to run some errand or take care of some business. While I figured out which way to sound and what to call her, we looked at each other. Should I speak Creole? Call her Ms. Lillian, Aunt Lillian, or Ms. Lilly, Aunt Lilly? She was in her signature outfit. A hat upon her head with fake flowers, and looking like she just arrived from 1920s Belize with her long white skirt and blouse. She looked exactly like my father: the size of her nose, the way her cheeks set upon her face, the way her bunions pushed out the side of her shoes. “Hi, Aunt Lilly,” I said, showing some teeth, thinking to step forward to shake her hand. Silence. “How are you doing today?” trying to move the conversation along and a little louder, should in case she was deaf. Aunt Lilly said not a word. She gazed at me, straight faced. She didn’t even crack a small smile the way some old people do when they don’t like the children of their in-laws. All I’ve heard were stories about the way this woman treated my mother, with her cunning, crooked ways. Her stare began to make me sweat. We were locked into each other, both studying our own faces. Coursing 168 through my mind: Can’t say hi; you look like my father; shit, we all have bunions; we all have the same full cheeks; and I hope I don’t look like you too much. Please say something. “Well, it was nice to meet you, Aunt Lilly, have a good night.” When I returned to the living room, my own Aunt had me wondering what it was about me that caught her tongue. I hadn’t shaved: and she wondered about my chin hairs. Her poise in the dimly lit, paneled-in-brown room said: I was the skin left around the tub after a good loofah scrubbing bath. Ms. Lilly’s glowering gaze burned discomfort onto me. Don’t think “bitch.” She will know. Where the fuck is Mom—? 169 When the patchwork child, rachel, met her aunty in Belize in 1999 So this is one of that bitch’s patchwork children, Ms. Lilly said to herself, as she reached for the girl’s hairy chin and cupped her worn hands around the girl’s straggly haired cheeks. Ms. Lilly was beaming while she looked the girl up and down, and said, “What a gift the Lord has brought me today.” Squinting out the Belize sun, scratching off her aunt’s touch from her chin, “Hi Aunt Lilly, how are you?” the patchwork girl asked. She was glad the sun’s light gave her a reason to scrunch up her face and not smile. The patchwork child could have stood in her aunt’s shadow, but she didn’t want to get any closer, for fear her aunt might want to kiss then. The girl steadied herself for the old woman’s reticence. “I am fine on this glorious day that the Lord has made.” Church people are funny. I am fine on this glorious day that the fucking lord has made. It was only but for a little while longer, before the patchwork girl made mention of not wanting to take her auntie away from her church “stuff,” and she was going to be there for a while and perhaps she would see her again. This woman has some fucking nerve. I told my cousin me no wan see she. Come tek me to visit some pipple who she say is relatives of me. She no done until she come bring Ms. Lilly, bow-legged still and favoring mi pa, to come hail me. No she did not just cradle my face her with bad deeds hands. Look, she de study me and smile. This is weird—“She favor Roy”—no fucking shit. Look at our feet, look at our noses, the color of our skin, how the sun changes our skin similarly. This woman have some fucking nerves—ohhhing and ahhhing like revelation find she. You better be fucking glad that I 170 am minding my manners because I don’t know who the hell you are coming out of this church touching up my fucking face, acting like we’ve never met before, like you neva see me before. Yuh no in church fi no odder reason dan you no wan die with dem spiritually crippling tings pan yuh hand—you have some bloody fucking nerves. 171 Nora Parham, the creole woman My name Nora Parham, and I hang, June 5th 1963, right on the Belize City prison’s Gallows. Walk right by Goal and Gabourel Lanes, and then you go see what is left of me. I know Belize have develop by now, but you go walk where they kill me, a cold feeling might just slip right through the heat. After I wasn’t the only one hanged there. You know how many bally them hang in that yard. A lot a them hang wrongly. Lone bad manners people is there in that justice hall. Bad manners! When I tell you the man beat me. He beat me and beat me and beat me until I say, “Lord Jesus this man don’t know how he is pushing me.” Then he want come and have sex. You know how many pickney I have for this man? He come home drunk, drunk many a night. When I tell you the man high, he so high he no know to find the bathroom. The man don’t know what it is to watch these pickney and no have me own money. The man no want me work, he no want me leave my house, he no want me miss him supper—and he no raise him kids, you know. I want you hear how he boast about his children them. One of them, right now, need one of his teeth pull. You think the man brag ‘bout how he ‘fraid fi pull him son own teeth? He no say that—he just say: “Ehhh, Nora, you know the size of my hand.” And the bloody man stand there, he eye stone, stone col’: as if I no know the size of him hand. Of course, I know the size of the fucka hand—he beat me so bloody much. Everybody know, too. Every single person who does live in proximity to this house does hear he and I rail up. They does hear when I claps one of them pickney ova they ears. One man come one night. So he come, so he leave. The bally just get done 172 cuff me up. The man knock right as I grab the man plate from in front of his face. “Who dat,” my bally say: “Is me, Euclid. I come to talk to you.” My bally ask, “About what at this time of night?” Look man we tired a hear this. What did Euclid go and say that fa? My bally raise up from the rickety wooden stool. He glide quiet, quiet over to the door, grab his nightstick, and tell the man “come in. You right.” And one whapping my bally put pon de old Euclid. With each slug: “. . . in my house,” “…none of your bloody business,” and “get your rass from off a my property.” They ‘fraid. He da a police constable—you know how the govament people go. Some of them thief, some head fill up big, some of do anything they want. So the people ‘fraid yes. Sure I wait one of them days when he come home blind in him drunkenness. I take me pickney them to me friend house, and me wait for Mr. PC to come home. He stumble through the front gate, him uniform shirt unbutton and him cap twisted. He call my name, “Nora, Nora.” Me no answer. He gone straightway to the outhouse. When that son of bitch get in there, me take mi broom and sçhub it through the door handle. Me get the kerosene oil and douse the entire two gallons container around the thing. I make two ring a oil: one close to the outhouse; the other maybe one foot away. The bloody fool’s last words: “Ehhh Nora, what smelling like the kerosene?” Me light that match and that outhouse bust out in flames. All people could hear was the Police Constable shrieking, crying like a bloody bitch: “Nora, help. Nora, Nora.” Me stand firm and watch the fucka burn. Is that they hang me for. 173 Ferron. The live-in maid everyone called Sauce “Sauce! You’re fired.” Since 1992, when she first took the live-in job, Harvey had always been threatening to fire Sauce, and she had no problem getting fired—after all, Highland Park, Illinois, isn’t where Sauce really lives in the first place. They argued fiercely, the two. More than once Sauce reminded him, when she thought the conversation reached its end, “You can talk to your wife that way, Mr. Walken, but you can’t talk to me that way.” Sauce lived in the carpeted basement of a Highland Park north suburban home. Each morning, Tuesday through Friday, Sauce awoke in her furnished room: two twin beds, a television, and a dresser for her things. Dressed in her uniform whites, wearing away from old age and bleaching, she walked up the steps and into the kitchen where she fetched Harvey’s newspaper, fixed his breakfast, and did what she was hired to do: keep house, stock the kitchen, cook, and do cleaning, counseling, and chores. She worked with them for ten years and had grown used to Harvey’s eruptions. She and the wife argued like sisters, over meat, dog shit, and, when they were not arguing, Sauce had to do weird things. Once Sauce had to stand in the hallway, while Mrs. Walken walked by, breathing heavily through her mouth. Her employer wanted to make sure her breath still held no traces of the hard liquor she drank all day. It took years for them to get to this, though; otherwise, the wife generally sprang uncomfortable things on Sauce. That’s how she learned the specifics of her employer’s daughter, which Sauce assumed was the reason why the woman drank. 174 There are maybe a hundred or so steps down to the lake. Sauce never bothered to go down there, not so much because she didn’t like water, but because her boss’s daughter’s dead body was found floating on the surface. There’d been some kind of party, and the girl just walked down the steps and into the water to die. She was drunk, depressed, and struggling with anorexia. Despite taking on the burdens of others, Sauce finds this is the best employer she has ever had since she arrived in the States more than twenty-five years earlier. Mrs. Walken has never called the cops on her or anything. Sauce’s pay is the best she’s ever had and the woman is paying into her social security, which Mrs. Alexander never thought to do. All the years Sauce worked for Mrs. Alexander, she was only paid forty dollars a week. Though they quarrel like sisters, Mrs. Walken likes Sauce. She respects her and listens when Sauce tells her she’s acting improperly. Take the time Mrs. Walken came home, sniffing her way into the kitchen, becoming enraged when she saw that Lee, the black groundskeeper (who shouldn’t have been in the kitchen trying cook in the first place), hadn’t cooked her shrimp correctly. Mrs. Walken told Lee off every which way to Sunday—right in front of Sauce. When Mrs. Walken was done, a humiliated Lee slunk away to go buy more shrimp. Feeling discomfited herself, Sauce looked Mrs. Walken straight in the eyes and said: “Mrs. Walken, you’re wrong. Mrs. Walken, Lee is a man. You should not have done that Mrs. Walken. You should not have cussed Lee in front of me. “Mrs. Walken, I’m telling you this: Don’t you ever do that to me because I don’t know what I would do to anybody who come and cuss me up the way you cuss Lee. 175 Don’t tell me nothing in front of your daughter-in-law, don’t tell me nothing in front of Lee. You just remember that Lee is a human just like you and me. He’s a man, Mrs. Walken. How would you like anybody to do that to your kids?” Mrs. Walken stood without moving and listened to Sauce. “If I were you, as soon as Lee come back, I would ask him to forgive you and to tell him that you’re sorry. Because what is a shrimp to a man when you cuss him up? That’s not good, Mrs. Walken. Don’t do that to me by cussing Lee in front of me. How would you like somebody come and do that to your kids? I’m going downstairs now, and please do not come and knock on my door.” Before descending downstairs, Sauce reminded Mrs. Walken again of what she had done. “Shame on you Mrs. Walken. Remember what I’m telling you, Mrs. Walken, because I hate people to let me feel embarrassed in front of another person.” 176 The little creole girl who lived in southeastern Ohio with her reversible voodoo doll Her neighbors were the kind of old people who had fallen for God and become born again Christians. The little girl knew this because she used to go next door to make sure they were still alive (these folks were always sick), and sometimes she borrowed sugar when she had the hankering for baking sweets. Every once in a while, when she was feeling melancholy, the little girl would go over to ask them questions about God and about who they were. Jim was in the war; he was a veteran. He used to drink a lot and was an alcoholic. Helen saved him because she put her foot down and said that he needed to come to God. So he did. Jim did stupid things when he was drinking, and, well, since that was in the past and he came to god, his slate had been wiped clean. The little creole girl asked how they had come to love God so much that they could be born again. They told her, “It was a feeling.” Helen was a diabetic; she had Parkinson’s disease. She never spoke much to the little girl, but made sure Jim gave her fresh tomatoes from their small garden patch. Helen had been a Christian all her life, and she was proud of the work she’d put into Jim. The little creole girl was in doctorate program; she was a teacher. She did not understand how one becomes born again anything. They had a good relationship as far as the girl could see. Jim had a tendency to tell the little girl too much about how sick he and Helen were, though. At one point, the girl knew when they went to the doctor, when they had surgery, and what kind of meds the couple had been taking. Jim showed their neighbor the scar on his stomach once. 177 She didn’t even ask him to. The old man just lifted his T-shirt up and said, “See where they cut me.” Jim had fits about the way the lawn-man left the clippings on the grass, which made the grass turn brown and die. The little girl opened her front door one day to Jim huffing and raking and looking like he was going to die. She went out to relieve him and finished where Jim left off. Sometimes the little girl got their mail. Sometimes, if she went away during those long breaks from school, she’d ask Jim to take in her mail. Jim and Helen shared their Thanksgiving dinner with her. Helen brought over a rank turkey leg, a noodle dish people love to eat around southeastern Ohio, a bun, and a slice of pumpkin pie. Jim jumped the girl’s car a few times. They were neighborly, the three of them. The little girl treated them the way she wanted people to treat her old parents—the way old people should treated. That’s why she was surprised when Jim and Helen told her she’d been doing voodoo. Jim and the little girl had had some argument about noise, three cars in the driveway, and three people living in a two-bedroom unit, and the doll appeared on the fence a few days later. The little girl’s last words: “You should mind your own fucking business. You don’t pay my rent.” Jim ordered a couple of his friends to come over right away to take a look at the doll. When no one was home, Helen had stolen it and later returned it, pretending it had fallen due to the wind. But it hadn’t been windy for days. 178 “I’ll tell you what it is,” Jim panted, holding his heart, “It’s a voodoo doll is what it is.” That’s when a few of us decided to steal the doll again—for the little girl put it back on the fence, reversed the doll (because it been on of those dolls), and used some rope to ensure it wouldn’t fall off the fence because of the wind. Finding the doll gone again the little girl went next door to retrieve it. She remembered her manners and remembered her neighbors were old, “Could you please return my doll?” “We don’t know where it is,” Helen said in a grammar school, playground voice. “What do you mean you don’t know where it is? You guys took it.” Then Jim, all worked up and red in the face, spoke up from his place on the couch, “It’s a voodoo doll is what it is.” The little girl’s heart sank, for she was shocked into hurt by what she’d just heard. She’d been living there since the summer of 2006, had been in their house, had listened to Jim recount all their medical ills, and had watched as the ambulance workers placed an semi-unconscious Jim into it. “Voodoo,” the little girl’s voice rose in pitch. “Just because the doll is not white and isn’t made by Mattel doesn’t mean it’s a voodoo doll, for one. For two, the doll doesn’t even look like the both of you. And for three, my white friend went to Jamaica for a vacation and got me this doll.” The little girl didn’t continue. Had she gone on, she’d have told them they had just stolen something that was not theirs, and the eighth commandment forbids Christians to steal. 179 “Well, where is my doll,” the little girl asked again, even though she knew it was lost forever. Helen gave the little girl the same response and made to close the door, but the little girl put her foot in it. And that’s when they threatened to call the sheriff. “Over a doll?” the girl asked. “Are you fucking serious?” The little girl returned to her side of the property and waited for sheriff’s arrival. There were two of them, one went over to Jim and Helen’s side; the other went over to the little girl’s. The sheriff, adhering to protocol, asked a few questions, one being, “Would you call that a voodoo doll?” The little girl told the officer, “If I could only do voodoo, sir, I wouldn’t have nearly as many obstacles to deal with.” 180 Mall of America: The Place for Fun! In the spring of 2009, I decide it is against the tenth commandment not to honor my mother and father all the days of my life. I use my whole spring vacation to visit my parents. I call to let them know—because they really do worry, even though they try to hide it—I am coming for a week’s visit. Arrival time’s Friday, minutes before ten a.m. No, I’m sure I don’t need to be picked up. “No, I’ll take the bus. Minnesota has public transit, right?” I should have known something was wrong when I got on the bus and dropped my hat and no one offered a “You dropped your hat.” In Chicago, someone would have directed me to it, and we would have exchanged gratitude. But Minneapolis is not Chicago, not Oakland, not New York City. At least the bus driver’s nice enough to talk to me—if I stay behind the line. I keep forgetting: just because a place is a city doesn’t mean its ethos is city-like. The bus is so quiet—the people all contained in their seats, trying not to touch thighs—that I begin to feel really, really uncomfortable. “What kind of place is Minneapolis?” I ask the bus driver as he drops me off at the transit station in the basement of what most Minnesotans call the “Mall of America.” Built in 1992, the mall sometimes runs a page-length ad in Midwest Living, one of those better-homes-and-gardens type magazines with recipes, ideas for trips, and gardening tips. All the faces are happy faces. Even the stripped-of-skin, pink-fleshed skeletal body from the Bodies exhibit seems to be smiling. The ad clearly illustrates that the mall is a place for fun. Eat. Play. Enjoy. A mix of theme parks and marts, the place 181 takes up a lot of Bloomington’s city blocks. I can see it from the window of my parents’ apartment. The Mall of America Transit Authority protects the bus hub in the basement. They’ve been employed—by some private agency, perhaps—to maintain the safety of the space and to keep their eyes alert and keen while they scan the area for strangers who don’t fit. There are cameras all over the place, which I’m sure come replete with various stations where someone sits all day monitoring every single person’s movement through the huge mall and bus hub. The “don’t fit” part is up to their discretion, for there are lots of things that can easily tip this “don’t fit” scale. When I get off the bus and walk into the bus hub, I am carrying two heavy bags, sweating under the pits, tired, and annoyed from flying, I want to make my phone work, and grade some exams while I wait for bus number 539B. I don’t expect not to fit. … Before Officer Shepard begins to write, he cracks his knuckles, arranges his walkie-talkie, and in all caps and perfect penmanship fills out the #4 Mall of America Security Form. He Xs the Supplemental box, takes a deep breath, and begins his summary: ON 3-21-09 at 11:08 HOURS, I, Officer Shepard #2891, observed an unattended duffle bag on a bench inside the Transit Center (8240 24th Avenue South MOA LRT). In the body of the report is the following AT 11:08 HOURS ON 3-21-09 I, OFFICER SHEPARD #2891, AND SERGEANT HINZ #120, OBSERVED AN UNATTENDED BAG INSIDE THE TRANSIT CENTER (8240 24TH AVE SOUTH MOA LRT). WHEN WE WENT TO ASK THE GUESTS AROUND THE BAG IF THEY KNEW WHO IT BELONGED TO SUSPECT BURGESS, RACHEL S. (11-30-74) APPROACHED AND IMMEDIATELY RAISED HER VOICE SAYING “THAT’S MY BAG YOU KNEW IT WAS MINE!” BURGESS 182 WAS LOUD ENOUGH TO CAUSE A SCENE AND REFUSED TO LOWER HER VOICE. DESPITE BEING ASKED BY SERGEANT HINZ #120 TO CALM DOWN BURGESS USED PROFANITY AND CONTINUED TO BE NONCOMPLIANT. AS A RESULT SERGEANT HINZ ASKED BURGESS TO LEAVE MALL PROPERTY. BURGESS REFUSED TO LEAVE MALL PROPERTY EVEN AFTER SERGEANT HINZ GAVE HER OPTIONS AND CONFIRMATION. AT THAT TIME WE PLACED HER UNDER ARREST AND I STATED PLEASE STAND UP, YOU ARE UNDER ARREST FOR TRESSPASSING.” BURGESS DID STAND UP. He shakes his head and drops his writing utensil atop the form. He extends his arms, interlocks his fingers, and stretches his wrists out. Looking left and right over his shoulders, Officer Shepard picks up his pen, Xs the Continued box, and resumes writing his Review. He is thinking, “Why do black people have to act out like that?” before writing in the Reporting Officer/Badge Number box: HINZ, JESSICA #120. He signs his partner’s name, not his own. The fax machine blackens the legal page of #5 of Officer Hinz’s report. No one can see what it says in the dark. Before sitting to write her version of the suspect’s behavior, she takes her private-company-state-issued cap off and, with perfect penmanship, fills out the #4 Mall of America Security Form. She Xs the Incident box: Then I asked Burgess to leave Mall property for her conduct. When asked to leave property, Burgess immediately became uncompliant and stated, “Leave me alone and go back to your post, I’m not leaving!” I then gave Burgess several options including going to the 28th Avenue transit station, or going to the nearest Mall. Burgess stated, “No I’m waiting for my bus here!” I then confirmed with Burgess twice by saying, “Is there anything I can say to get you to go along with the program today, I’d like to think so.” Burgess stated, “You can arrest me, I don’t care.” She, too, shakes her head, drops her writing utensil atop the form, clasps her fingers together, and stretches them. Wiping the sweat from her brow, Office Hinz Xs the Continued box, no doubt wondering why black people have to act out like that, why 183 can’t they just go along with the program? When she’s done, Officer Hinz sighs loudly, Xs the End of Report box, and writes her name in the Reporting Officer/Badge Number box: HINZ, JESSICA #120. She signs her own name. Since there is never just one report, since they always call for backup, Backup Officer Gizzi, #64030—listing his officer-helpers Officer Constance Fillipi, #65040, and Abraham Torrez, #67287, respectively—fills out the Metro Transit Police Department’s Incident. He creates an Incident Report #09002422, for AGENCY ORI #MN0274300, appropriately listing the suspect’s Eye Color: BRO; Hair Color: BLK; Skin Tone: BLK Facial Hair: Both; and Glasses: Y. Officer Gizzi titles his Supplemental Report: “Trespassing/Disorderly Conduct.” At 14:51 hours, Constance Fillipi sits down to write her report. Because her colleague, Officer Gizzi, has used a government-issued x-26 Taser, Michael Johnson (the officer manning the radio) also has to fill out his own Supplemental Report on 03-21- 2009 16:39. He duly notes: “I was notified via radio by Officer Gizzi that he had used his Taser to control a suspect at the Mall of America Transit Station and would be contacting me via phone when he finished processing the suspect at booking.” … When the sympathetic nurse looks at the woman in her bright orange clothes, as though #200902182 has killed someone, she says, “Sounds really fishy to me.” That a visitor from 773 miles away, resident of another state, gets arrested for simply answering a question. The nurse discharges #200902182 to the next station, where the woman doesn’t smile for the cameras. Fingerprints, wait. Phone call, “You need to keep your 184 voice down.” Walk down to the hall and turn left for more questions: do you have scars, marks, this, that? Pats up and down the thighs, quick pat in the crotch area, pats in the pits. Searching #200902182 as though, generations before, some other inmate left a tool she’d found to scrape her way out of concrete, just like the guy in Shawshank. “Just doing my job,” the guard says, chewing gum, her hands in latex gloves. After filling out the paperwork, she’s told to sit in a cell where she will wait again for what seems like a very long time. There’s another woman in there, too. They exchange stories before falling silent. After waiting, both women will be taken to a module with twenty-four other women, where both will be assigned to a top bunk. Within minutes of settling in, #200902182 and a few other women will be taken to another module reserved for those who are on short-term stay. … There are twelve of us in the module. A television that comes on and goes off throughout the day, Bibles-for-books, a place to play cards. A keep-your-uniform-on at all times, don’t-sit two-to-a-bed place. Our favorite color is bright orange: our underwear, sheets, and towels come in shades of it. We’ve been picked up for warrants, for protecting a drunk, under-aged sister, for disorderly conduct. We’re all waiting for bail, for Monday, for court—so the judge can look at us and drop the charges, get us for DUI, or transfer us to Shakopee. Our lips are dry, we need maxi pads, we want cigarettes, we are worried about our children. We sleep on twelve iron beds bolted to the cement floor, with blue mats for bedding our backs, our naps, and our card games. All day in our orange clothes, we sit or 185 pace in Module 7F, each of us with her thoughts. We play cards, read, sleep, eat saved snacks. We wear our plastic bracelets to show we’ve been photographed, dated, numbered, serialized, coded as black or white. We notice that the Native women aren’t coded as colored. We “hmmm…” about it and look at each other. “That’s because they’re their own nation,” bed one says. Our scanning codes begin with the date of our first appearance in the sheriff’s system, tracking our beautiful, wonderful moments spent with law enforcement officials, making new friends. We must wear the bracelets all the time. This rule is printed in the Adult Detention Center Inmate Handbook (#HC6002 [(5/08)]), page three. The information on our wristbands is for identification, administrative ease, and phone access. Intentional destruction or removal of our wristbands will delay our release from custody or result in disciplinary action. Incorrect information on our wristbands should be immediately brought to a deputy’s attention. The woman in bed one has been told by a Dept. (a nickname for deputies) to “keep this on.” It has been a long time since woman #200902182 has been in jail. She lies on her blue mat, remembering the last time she sat in a barred cell, waiting for judges to judge her. Even though she hadn’t eaten since the two muscled officers came to get her, she didn’t want to eat the Burger King food the state bought for her. She slid the unwanted fast food down the hall to the other inmate. She neither recollects jail maxi-pads chafing her vagina nor people telling her rules about picking up little soap pieces and wiping off tables. She doesn’t recall people telling grown folks to “shut up.” 186 The woman in bed five says, “Shut up”; says, “It was quiet before those people came in”; asks demandingly of the others, “Should we tell them the rules?” “Look, I’m grown,” says the woman in bed seven, big and tall and baldheaded. She talks across to bed twelve, next to bed six, and over to bed eight. We settle into bed when lights-off-time comes. Some sit up listening. How can we be tired when we was up in here all day? We are hungry right after we eat, we are bleeding, our vaginas are chafed—we are not that sleepy. We don’t want to be quiet: we speak softly, pretend to sleep, or listen to bed seven’s loud whispers. … The pretty girl in iron bed five is outside of the group. When she was booked, coded, and pictured, she had to unbind the birth-present from her father and mother from around her neck. Jewelry is not allowed in jail. The gift, a tiny prism stored in a silver case, was handed down to her. It’s an heirloom from time immemorial, a time she recalls only faintly, if at all. The prism came with a matching silver chain. It was given to her as an atlas, one that would guide her toward a safe and predetermined life because it was never going to get rough, and her little white-girl religioned frame—imbued so with lies, circumcised-‘n’-tailored to fit—was never going to get racked and lashed and racked and slashed, and she was never going to need any Band-aids or Neosporin to spread over the slits left in her flesh. Now here she is in jail, the woman in bed five without her prism, demanding that another grown woman lower her voice. In jail, of all places—just because the pretty girl is used to the presence of the prism and doesn’t know how to act in a place with iron 187 beds, a bin-of-books, and cameras all around. We are talking too loud, talking about sex and survival. We are not saved. We are not God-type people. We are way worse than she is. This is why she can still, in jail and without her heirloom guide, press a button to excuse her for reasons the other eleven women don’t know. We are glad she has left; we all know she left to tell on bed seven. “Snitch,” some say and others think. The Snitch wants to know what has happened while she was away: “What did they say about me?” upon her return, not even through the metal doors. “What did they say?” she asks eagerly. “Bitches who snitch wind up in ditches.” She immediately raises her voice; she is loud enough to cause a scene. Then she starts in: Those people have threatened her, she feels unsafe, they’ve said they are going to cut her—to the deputies she says this. “You don’t know what I’ve had to put up with,” the Snitch says. Number seven’s big mouth and multiple personalities. She just wants a little democracy—what’s so hard about that? The Snitch wants everyone to get along. “Everything was fine until those people,” she says. Then she screams: “those people!” And then we know. “What?”—says bed twelve. Bed eight: “Just go ahead and say it: ‘Everything was fine until the niggers came in’.” Bed eleven sucks her teeth: “Nah, nah she mean until the niggers and the native bitches came in.” The Snitch doesn’t have her prism. She longs for it. She stretches her memory and says, “What? I’m not racial. I’m not trying to be racial. I’m part-Indian.” Now The Snitch has made herself part Ojibway, Cree, Indian, thinking she’s saving herself from the charge of “being racial.” She knows her technical foul has forced her own foot in her mouth. The Snitch insists she is not being racial; she begins to gurgle in her own saliva, blood, and spit. 188 Number twelve is more than agitated, “Yo, Dept., if she feel threatened, if she feel unsafe, then she need to leave.” The woman in bed twelve is standing as she says this to the Depts. (There are two. There are always two or more when someone is acting up.) “How she get cutting out of a fourth-grade saying? How she feel unsafe and threatened out of some schoolyard shit?” We all know she went to a different school. They didn’t talk like that there. The Snitch has said “Impervious”; she has said, “Go read a book, bitch.” She is smarter than the niggers, the native bitches, the woman who speaks no English, and the poor white woman. She wants democracy for the broken soap pieces. She wants to be recognized for the hygienist she is and the nurse she’s going to be. “I have a career, bitch!” she says—and so haughty, too, because she knows most of us want to knock the part Indian out of her white-looking ass. The Depts. are there, see, and others are still looking at their television screens at the commotion in the concrete blocks—just doing their jobs. Bed one’s blood is boiling, What the fuck is your tribe? What is your FUCKING tribe, bitch? She has said nothing all day. Now she’s burning to tell this suddenly part Indian woman about a student she had once who said the same thing. Said he was part Indian. Maybe you two share the same tribe. Maybe you two are related, bed one thinks. Part Indian in Module 7F, Part Indian who is not racial in Module 7F, Part Indian who is feeling threatened (and attacked) in Module 7F. Scared for some shit she has started. We are all just shooting the shit, talking about roughnecks and sex, talking about us, so we know that no one is “badder than the other,” so we know we are all cool in Module 7F. Part Indian has a career, bitch, and she wants democracy! 189 The Snitch goes to the hole. So does bed seven. At 12:05 a.m., reviewing Prosecutor Deborah A. Styles-Brown raises bed one’s bail from fifty to three hundred dollars. The judge’s signature is unintelligible, a quick flick of the wrist and an “m” with three humps. She’s working around the clock, apparently. … Edina, Minnesota was once a sundown town; it probably still is, for all I know. There were sundown towns all over the States that posted signs telling niggers, chinks, injuns, and spics to get gone by sunset. It was the sort of thing where people knew their place. During the day, “those people” came to town to do what they had to: work, shop, drink in designated spots, maybe. But by dusk, “Get out.” Edina, Minnesota is a little over two miles northeast of where my parents live. In 1964, I’m thinking, the really entitled, money-endowed men (Council Elders) of Edina (and their wives probably) wrote this covenant. Covenant is a strong word, I feel, but this is what James Loewen, author of Sundown Towns, calls it. No lot shall ever be sold, conveyed, leased, or rented to any person other than one of the white or Caucasian race, nor shall any lot ever be used or occupied by any person other than one of the white or Caucasian race, except such as may be serving as domestics for the owner or tenant of said lot, while said owner or tenant is residing thereon. All restrictions, except those in paragraph 8 (racial exclusion), shall terminate on January 1, 1964. 190 Loewen gets this from Deborah Morse-Kahn’s Chapters in History: Edina. According to “local legend,” as Morse-Kahn has called this story, after the Civil War, this white southern landowner and his six freed slaves traveled to Minnesota. They stopped in Richfield—three miles east of Edina and north of Bloomington—and bought the six black freedmen some land, upon which they could build a life for themselves. In freedom. Between 1890 and World War II, Morse-Kahn notes, black and white lived, worked, and played in community with each other without much racial strife. She got this information from reading the writings of the neighbors of the first black residents of Edina: “ . . . many of the neighbors point to a true colorblindness, naming Black family members but not describing them in any other way except by profession (‘berry farmer,’ ‘stabler’) or by proximity (‘from the next farm over’)”. The years following the First World War, a white guy, Samuel Thorpe, began developing the area by creating restrictive covenants (better known today as zoning laws) that imposed various constraints on the land. The Edina Covenant explicitly stated that blacks were disqualified from buying property in the district. In the 1920s, the Supreme Court found the deed unconstitutional, but written law never overrules spoken law, and that’s why Edina has largely remained a sundown town. Edina is where I find myself on Monday, March 23, 2009, sitting in another cement-made cell, waiting for the frizzy-haired PD (public defender). She has to study the paperwork before asking me to explain my side. I’ve spent all weekend long in a gray-painted cell with other “criminals.” We are black, brown, and white women who are in the Minneapolis Adult Detention Center for variations on the same themes: 191 trespassing, disorderly conduct, defending ourselves, and resisting arrest. When the women in orange asked me to tell my story, by the time I finished explaining all the details, they already knew what the judge would say. “Ssshhhooo, as long as it’s not a felony, you’ll be all right. He’ll probably reduce the charges or something.” Their stories are no different than mine. One wasn’t even doing anything, just protecting her little sister, grabbing her arm, telling her, “Let’s go. Let’s go before the cops come.” One was in there for protecting her child and herself from a man who used his fists and feet to beat her. I have to shake my head. All of us are in the state’s system for bullshit; all of us have a paper trail leading to records that indicate how we’ve become criminals, how we’re tracked. I’ve come to Minnesota to visit my parents; now I’m in this state’s system. All of us have been pent up for the weekend (some for longer), eating shitty unsalted food, trading bread, trading veggies; playing cards, playing Scrabble (that was surprising); talking, testifying, and telling. Through silence, with words—we know jail is a place we’ve all been before—if not us, then someone we know. By the time the PD is ready to speak to me, ready for me to speak to her, the first thing out of my mouth is, “I came up here to visit my parents and do some research for my dissertation.” I did not come up here to get arrested and spend a fucking weekend in jail. It is very clear to me those things noticed me the very first time I walked into the transit hub. There was no crowd. There were only two women sitting on the wrought- iron benches, my two bags resting on the bench between them. The officers saw me. They pegged me. As soon as I walked to the outlet, still facing my stuff, the two things walked directly toward my “unattended bags.” I tell her “I am not even from here. I’m 192 leaving in five days, and I do not plan on coming back before it’s necessary for a court case of any kind.” So do your fucking magic. At first, they can’t find the paperwork from the Mall of America police brigade. Yes! Then the report comes—“You should take a look at this,” the PD says. Their reports are written in accordance with the others: Gizzi’s and Fillipi’s restate what Shepard’s and Hinz’s reports say; Michael Johnson, at the scene via radio waves (i.e., not physically present), corroborates Gizzi’s use of the Taser. When read one after the other, each report merely repeats elements of the others; each account legitimizes, for security’s sake, the cops’ actions. Their explanations are based on figments of their imaginations. … On the day of the hearing, my father and I sit on the benches in front of room 229, the Big Room in the domain of Division Four, the Fourth Judicial District Court for the State of Minnesota in the County of Hennepin. We are here to deal with court case # 27- CR 0914153. While we wait, I see who has become in entangled with the state. The people who are most ensnarled with the law for both large and petty crimes are poor blacks, poor Indians, poor whites. Those who’ve experienced a “small mishap” come dressed sharply, ready to rock-n-roll. They’re chummy with their public defenders (or lawyers?). The public defenders are mostly men and mostly white. There’s the guy with gray dreads down to his ass. I’d seen him in Edina when I stood before the judge. I had hoped he’d take my case, but I snapped myself out of assuming that his dreads meant more than they did. I don’t suppose these PDs read over these files, exhale deeply, and 193 sort the clients out among themselves. Play a few battle games of rock-paper-scissors. There’s the woman with a cane she has bought from an “African” store in the States or has traveled to the continent to buy. Then there’s my frizzy-haired public defender. “I’ve written a letter to the judge,” I tell her when she calls me to follow her to her office, where she offers me a seat and reads the letter. March 25, 2009 Senior Judge Stephen D. Swanson Hennepin County Fourth Judicial District Court 7009 York Avenue South, Suite 214 Edina, MN 55435 Honorable Judge Swanson: I write this missive on behalf of myself, Rachel Burgess, the Defendant in Court Case # 27-CR-0914153. Your Honor, before I announce my plea in your court today, I ask that you allow me permission to speak. The Sergeant’s and Officer’s reports provide detailed information about my response to Sergeant Jessica Hinz, Officers Shepard, Gizzi, Fillipi, and Torrez on March 21st. I know that September 11th has created the need to institute new safety measures to strengthen and protect this country’s security. As a citizen of the United States whose colleagues lost loved ones in the Twin Towers that day, I understood that this Sergeant and these Officers were merely doing their jobs. I understand they are employed by the state to observe and also to protect the innocent citizens who traverse the halls of Bloomington’s Mall of America. However, the report does not disclose to what I was responding. I understand these officers are to monitor and guard the Metro Transit Station at the Mall of America and thus are not employed to remain standing in stationary positions with their line of vision confined solely to a frontal focal point. This is why, after I told the officers that the two black bags were mine, I raised my voice, no louder than my voice is now, and said, “You saw me. I know you saw me.” I know the videotape, if it has not been tampered with, will show this. My two black bags had not just instantaneously appeared. I walked into the Metro Transit station after taking a bus from the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. I came to Minnesota 194 to visit my elderly parents and to explore this part of the state’s natural attractions. I know the officers saw a brown-skinned woman, whose gender presentation falls outside of this culture’s notion of femininity, with two black bags walk into the station. I know this because it is their job, as security workers, to be fully cognizant of who, what, when, and how a body enters into a space they are to protect. It is their job to be aware. I told them the bags were mine and said, “Now that you know they are mine, please walk away and leave me alone.” I said that more than once. Recall briefly, your Honor, the trajectory of events that led up to the American Revolutionary War. The citizens of the American colonies thought the Stamp Act Resolves of 1765, the Declaratory Act of 1766, and the Revenue Act of 1767 extremely unfair. Samuel Adams and Benjamin Franklin, among many others, spoke up on behalf of what they knew to be the truth: It was unfair that Britain raised taxes and passed laws prohibiting its colonial subjects from participating in the formation of tax and tariff laws. Many citizens of the American Colonies defended themselves against Britain’s attempt to exact complete control over the welfare of the colony. Britain’s inability to hear the voice of its colonial subjects led to the creation of the United States we know today. In the face of this tremendous power, the citizens of the American colonies refused to remain silent in the face of injustice. I did and still do not understand, then, why the Sergeant and Officers did not heed my voice, when I answered their question and said, firmly, calmly, and without profanity, contrary to their reports, “Now that you know that the bags are mine. Please walk away and leave me alone.” That was the first phrase out of my mouth it was not an eruption of expletives. Again, the tape will show, if it has not been tampered with, the exact manner in which I responded to the Sergeant and Officers and the events that ensued thereafter. Honorable Judge Swenson, I hail from a long line of people who have served their countries: My father was a Police Constable. My niece, Officer Jennifer Adams, is currently in Iraq. I am a member of American Amvets Post 53 in Chauncey, Ohio where I daily work closely with WWII, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and Iraq War veterans who have proudly served and protected this country. I respect those who wear uniforms of authority. I do so because they respect me. Although I strongly feel Sergeant Hinz and Officers Shepard, Gizzi, Fillipi, and Torrez violated my rights on March 21st, I am pleading guilty to the charge of trespassing. I am pleading guilty to the charge of trespassing only because, as a citizen of the United States, I have been taught the importance of being accountable and taking responsibility for my actions. As I am a person of integrity, I am obligated to abide by the laws of this state. Therefore, I do not wish to shirk my responsibility to do so. Respectfully, Rachel Burgess 195 When my PD has finished, she’s done, she looks up at me: “I don’t think the judge is going to want to be bothered with this,” but she’ll see what can be done. In a court that deals with numerous cases on any given day, this turns out to be the best thing the public defender can do for me. She makes the judge take the time to read this letter. The judge is supposed be retired; I guess he still works part-time. Before he can even touch the letter, the prosecuting attorney must review the letter to ascertain whether it’s worthy of his attention. This is the first thing the judge asks: “Has the prosecuting attorney reviewed the letter?” “No,” answers the dark-haired prosecuting attorney. She is forced to skim the letter before handing it to the judge; she rolls her eyes as she reads it. Thereafter, she walks the paper over to the judge, who takes his glasses off to read the letter as well. It’s quiet in the courtroom. “You understand this case very well.” The judge looks up at me. Of course, I understand the case very well. Now put the letter in my file. The verdict: Two charges are dropped. Defendant pleads guilty to trespassing. Defendant pays a one hundred dollar fine—the only spending money she has brought with her.