Tag: Essay

Contingency Plans

By Sara Marchant

 

My husband recently retired. His anxiety had increased over the last four years (whose hasn’t, right?) and a few months ago he was having a bad day at work, when he abruptly stood up, announced, “I retire,” and walked out the door.

It’s been an adjustment.

At first, he didn’t know what to do with his day. As I was unemployed by the pandemic, not even teaching from home, I was available for him to ask for direction or inspiration. I was available all day, every day. He questioned me like a kindergartener on a long road trip; the situation soon was fraught. This changed when I received a phone call from friends down South making contingency plans for the post-election end times. They were worried; they were scared; they didn’t know where to plan on going if they should have to flee. They know my husband has survivalist tendencies.

We live in a southern red zone of the blue state of California, but we own our acreage, have an artesian well and electrified fencing, and are prone to paranoia. We keep our house well provisioned in case of emergency. It’s known that we like to plan ahead. My friends had called to ask our advice.

Now my husband no longer asks me for direction in the morning. Instead, he gets up every day and prepares to take in refugees from red states. I won’t go into too much detail here. We are all safer that way.

My fingers are crossed for a peaceful, smooth, safe transition of power—power once more in sane heads and hands—and my husband claims he wants and prays (he’s the believer in the family) for that too, but just in case. … Then he goes back to fortifying the property. He wants to be a good host, you see.

• • •

When I was a little girl and we’d go to look at open houses for weekend fun, my mother always told us, “Find the hiding space!” She didn’t say this in front of the realtor or the homeowner; she taught us it was a private game. The hiding space would only safe if we were the only one’s who knew it existed. “Every house should have a space to hide when they come for you,” my mother said. When, not if.

Other games we learned were equally different from our friends’ family pastimes. Our mother taught us to seek out all exits when you enter a building, keep your back to the wall when eating in public, always carry something sharp in your pocket and “aim for the cojones.” Other children played lava floor and we did too, but we also played count your steps with your eyes closed, in case we ever had to escape in the dark.

My siblings and I are surprisingly well-adjusted, considering.

• • •

Shortly after November 9, 2016, my mother made me drive her to the post office to renew our passports. My husband refused. He’s Native American. He belongs to the land, he said. He’ll never leave.

“That’s nice, but short-sighted,” Mom told him. “We’re Jews. We’ve been through this shit before. Always have an exit strategy.”

When the pandemic caused all borders to close to United States citizens, my mother wept. She was born in 1940, but in Denver’s Little Italy; my mother is not a Holocaust survivor. However, her parents didn’t believe in censorship, so her siblings took her to the movies and no one thought to cover her five-year-old eyes when the newsreels showed the camps being liberated.

Now, when reading about the camps at our southern border, the concentration camps committing crimes against humanity in our name, my mother doesn’t weep. She’s too angry. It’s gone on too long, been allowed to perpetuate, descended into genocide. Now my mother curses the perpetrators. Each morning as she pricks her finger to check her blood sugar levels, my mother damns every member of this administration, every enabler, every supporter—even those of us standing by watching helplessly in horror. “We’ve damned ourselves,” she tells me.

“We’ve no longer the right to weep tears of anything other than shame.”

• • •

Four years ago, I didn’t believe it could happen—and that’s shame on me. I was a history major; I’m married to a Native. This country was founded on violence, conquest, cultural genocide, germ warfare; we’ve been ripping children from their mother’s arms from the time the first boats arrived—and kept arriving full of stolen men, women and children. Why wouldn’t I believe it could happen again—only this time live-streaming? How dare we become complacent?

None of us knows what will happen the first week of November 2020, but I don’t believe any of us are still complacent—that’s been burned away. This household’s ballots have been mailed and counted, the pantry is stocked, the fence is fortified, space has been made for our friends.

My fingers are crossed, my husband is praying, and my mom is practicing blood curses with her back to the wall. My most fervent desire is that soon we’ll all be dancing in the space we’ve created for ourselves, but if not … I’ve got a plan. I hope you do, too.

 

Sara Marchant received her Masters of Fine Arts from the University of California, Riverside/Palm Desert. She is the author of The Driveway Has Two Sides, published by Fairlight Books. Her memoir, Proof of Loss, was published by Otis Books. She is a founding editor of Writers Resist. Her website is TheSaraMarchant.com.

Photo credit: Mitchell Haindfield via a Creative Commons license.

Sing the Songs of Our Youth

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt

24 October 2020

Uncle Jack died this morning.

The stroke, the collapse, the surprise mass on his brain? Whichever or all, at least he went faster than Aunt Peggy and Mother. Not as fast as Father—the gift of a heart attack. The comparison? I don’t know, perhaps it’s a futile attempt to lend context to Jack’s death, to the loss of the last of his generation on our closest family branch, my siblings and mine, an attempt to accommodate one loss among many. So many, it’s easier to focus on only one, and it is one that changes us.

My cousins now join us in our adult orphanage—a disregarded subset of parentless offspring. We are left to follow six or seven decades of memories down lanes straight and twisty, dead-ended and endless. To quietly mourn and slowly, slowly recover.

In the meantime, “At least it’s not the COVID,” some will say.

This will enrage me, and not only because of the unnecessary article, but because COVID-19 persists and worsens while too many leaders fail us, abandoning us to the ravages of the virus. But I’m prepared, having practiced my rage for so long—on occasion with Uncle Jack—perfecting it with each onslaught of ignorance and hate and … I don’t know, sociopathy?

Before Uncle Jack lost the strength to place his large hands on either side of my head and lift me to wonderfully frightening heights, before he could no longer deliver his trademark jokes with aplomb, before he was unable to name the seated president, we would share disdain for the corruption of our democracy, revile the sinners and their sins. And when my rage was about to consume me, Jack would swoop me out of its reach with one of those jokes or grab a ticklish, tender knee and draw a giggling yelp instead of a bitter profanity.

Sometimes we would even gather up a friend of Jack’s, the wounded survivor of a Baltimore scandal, and calm ourselves on an early Sunday morning, beside a misted pond. As day broke, we’d fish for bluegills, fry the fillets with hushpuppies in a well-seasoned skillet, and tipsily toast the Fall of the U.S. Empire with Bloody Marys.

That was forty years ago. And that toast was a half-assed joke.

Just a few days ago, Jack didn’t know who I was, but he could still shuffle at least a few feet off to Buffalo, strum an occasional ukulele, and sing our family songs, the sometimes bawdy, sometimes silly songs that have bound us, that overcome schisms and sorrows, that entwine distinct generations and personalities and beliefs into a fun and fabulous choir.

Today, though, the loudest voices we hear are discordant.

Today, I’m thankful for the dementia of Uncle Jack’s last years. I’ve said the same of my parents: I’m grateful they didn’t live to see the corruption that now divides us, that drives people to the polls or away from them, that forces us to don masks or deny they are needed, that keeps us from family deathbeds or exposes family to potential death.

Today, Uncle Jack has died, and I wonder what else we might lose. I don’t know, but I think it’s time to sing the songs of our youth—the cheery songs, the ribald songs—and to hope.

Please vote with love, please encourage others to do the same,
K-B

 

Kit-Bacon Gressitt is a founding editor of Writers Resist and the publisher. Her website is KBGressitt.com.

Poster art by Holy Mole UK, available from amplifier.org.

Artist’s statement: “My 2 cents on the US election, and of course an ode to the amazing Robert Indiana, the creator of the iconic LOVE sculpture (a global symbol for hope in 1960s) and Obama’s ‘HOPE’ presidential campaign (2008). [Indiana] once said ‘I’d like to cover the world with hope,’ and, with sculptures popping up all over the world, he did just that.

“Sadly, Indiana died in 2018, but I think if he were here he would have felt his voice was needed more urgently than ever. My design uses ‘VOTE’ this time (as he did himself in 1976) and aims to encourage voting in the upcoming US election. I wanted the message to be vibrant, to sing with colour and positivity for the future. There is still hope, but we need to make very bold decisions regarding the environment. The US needs a leader that is more focused on global issues than their own twitter feed! US friends, if you are reading this please vote, it is so, so important!”

Letters Then and Now

By Patricia McTiernan

 

A few weeks after a stay-at-home advisory was issued in Massachusetts, I turned 60. As someone with a chronic illness, I felt I had jumped head first into the high-risk pool. With a long-planned vacation cancelled, I reconciled to staying home a lot and tackling projects I had long put off.

There are, for instance, the letters. My father wrote them to friends at home while serving in the Infantry during World War II. I’ve wanted to transcribe them, to share with family. They have faded with time, but his handwriting is clear. With no deadline, I work in the quiet of my suburban home’s third floor at my makeshift desk: a heavy, laminated board set upon two metal file cabinets.

My father used to say, “I was no hero,” whenever he spoke about the war. He did not rush to enlist after Pearl Harbor, as many younger men did. He was drafted, spending the first two years training stateside before shipping overseas. His company arrived at Omaha Beach two weeks after the famous D-day landing, to fight in the Normandy countryside and on into Austria and Germany.

I often think of World War II as the last great challenge that truly affected everyone in one way or another. Certainly some sacrificed more than others, and inequities abounded. But unlike other wars and national crises that followed, in WWII, no one was completely shielded from the effects—whether food and gas rationing or being sent overseas to battle.

In the letters from Europe, my father is 34 years old and single. He is writing to close friends, a married couple who live in the same small town where my father grew up. He is chatty about their shared acquaintances, happy for another young couple expecting their first child.

But when he writes about the Army, which is often, he is frustrated. The best years of his life are being consumed by war. The point system used to determine when enlisted men can be discharged is unfair. He is having no luck in getting an emergency furlough to visit his sick, aging father back home.

When he recovers from injuries sustained in the Battle of the Bulge, he is sent, not to H Company, the comrades he has been with since the start, but to a tank battalion. “I know as much about a tank as you know about running a submarine,” he writes.

This summer marks 35 years since my father died. I’ve spent far more time on the planet without him than with him, yet he hovers as an influencing presence in my life. I knew him as congenial and calm, the peacemaker in our family. He was the brother that his siblings called upon when they needed help, the father who read three newspapers every day and wanted more than anything for his daughters to love the game of golf.

Yet the voice in the letters, for the most part, is not a voice I recognize. He is 11 years away from becoming a father, and 15 years from becoming my father. He is stuck. His life is not his own. He has no control—over the war, over his place in it, over his father’s health.

This summer also marks 75 years since the end of World War II.

Here in the pandemic, I feel a kinship with the lack of control that my father and others must have felt back then. While my comfortable life is nothing like war, I am stuck in a situation not of my own making. I embrace the privilege of staying home to be safe, yet I also feel the constraints of not being able to do much else.

But in the heat of summer afternoons, I move to the first floor. Sitting at the dining room table I work in the present, writing my own letters. Like my father, I am no hero.

Unlike my father’s letters, mine are addressed to complete strangers. I channel my horror at my country’s decline over the past three years into something I have to still believe in: voting.

Through get-out-the vote organizations, I am writing to people in Texas and Michigan. I’m sending postcards to Pennsylvanians.

I write the same message again and again. I’ll never meet the people I am writing to; we’ll never get to celebrate a victory together. And as deaths from the virus mount, I have to wonder: Are they still healthy; are they still alive?

Many will no doubt toss my correspondence in the recycling bin. But it’s possible that my efforts, however small, may be meaningful to some.

In one of his letters to his friends my father wrote, “I am well and have gotten thru a lot and hope to be lucky enough to continue thru the battles that lie ahead.”

That’s the voice I knew. And the hopeful message that resonates today.

For now, I am safe and well. The country has gotten through a lot. But in this time when so much is uncertain, I hope that those who receive my letters will understand how important they are to winning the battle that lies ahead.

 

Patricia McTiernan recently retired as a communications director in the nonprofit healthcare sector. She is an editor and writer in the Greater Boston area. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, The Sun magazine, and The Examined Life Journal. Follow her on Twitter: @AceMct.

Photo by Kari Sullivan on Unsplash.

Dispatch from the Holding Tank

By Nancy Dunlop

 

It is my first day in—  what are they calling it? Self-quarantine? Social distancing? Shelter-in-place? I suppose, for me, it’s isolation.

But unlike many others my age, I’ve been in isolation for almost a decade, due to a disability. Today is really no different than any other day for me. Except that I sense other people are also in isolation. So, in some bizarre way I have company.

But when this virus is controlled, when “the curve flattens,” those who are newly self-isolating, and fortunate enough not to get infected, might return to a busy world. A world where people interact. Are productive. Are externally defined.

Another difference between me, an old hand at this isolation thing, and those who are brand, spanking new at it is that I’ve had a long time to deal with introspection. To look inside myself for answers. I had to re-define myself, by myself, from within. But I’m not particularly good at this. I am not good at loss: no more external validation or respect or job title or credentials or any sort of official auspices; no podium, microphone, cubicle, corner office, daily commutes, or jostling for a subway seat to distract me from any need to get quiet and go within.

If you saw my immediate surroundings, you might say, “How perfect for a writer!” The knotty pine cupboards and thick stone fireplace. Those birds racketing out the window. What the sun does to the afghans my grandmother crocheted for me, draped on the back of the love seat. If you could see what I see from my desk. My framed diploma. The photo of Stephen and me at the very moment we were pronounced husband and wife. My two gentle cats, Piper and Chloe. All the things that can bring comfort. Such a perfect retreat for a writer. A writer needs solitude, after all.

But not isolation.

It has taken almost a decade of being by myself to come to terms with being by myself. With my holding tank. So, to the young and healthy I say, “Welcome to the holding tank.”

I am following the news, social media, the stock market, the hoarding-of-toilet-paper and guns. I am following reports of people denying any problem or defying any precautions. And I get it. I know how difficult it is to go from 100 mph to zero. What it is like to hit a wall. To be told that you need to stop everything. That you’re not really essential. Oh, and by the way, nothing will ever be the same.

In the U.S., we’re told that we are a strong people. That we are the strongest people on Earth. We celebrate robustness. Vigor. Movement. Staying busy. Underneath all of that, though? I suspect fear. And anger. And a wicked need to blame. Or to scapegoat. But not a whole lot of anything more subtle or gradated. Like patience. Or acceptance. Or empathy. Not right away. Maybe not ever. Such things take work. Work that doesn’t necessarily look busy.

In addition to being strong, we are said to be ruggedly individualistic. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, gosh darn it, and are told to just go for it. Grab that brass ring. We are blasted with seemingly countless opportunities to be on the go.

I’ve noticed this all over social media, a well-meaning impulse to provide ways to stay exactly the way you were before you were isolated. How to work from home. Set up workstations. Put up with your family. Home-school. Learn to draw. Or knit. How to cultivate new interests, immediately. In general, how to stay cheerfully in the world when you are anything but. How to remain unchanging and robust in the midst of a situation demanding change and acknowledging we are not robust.

So, yes, I get it. I understand the sudden burgeoning of tricks and techniques and lists for how to do everything just as before. To do anything but deal with what comes with actual isolation. Like the opportunity—the actual human need—to feel vulnerable. To be soft. Or receptive. Or quiet. To practice not fearing fear. To be kind, despite.

 

Nancy Dunlop is a poet and essayist, who resides in Upstate New York. She received her Ph.D. at UAlbany, SUNY, specializing in Creative Writing and Poetics. She also taught at UAlbany for 20 years. Most recently, she has been curator of Wren, an international online forum for women in the arts. A finalist in the AWP Intro Journal Awards, she has been published in a number of print and digital journals, including Swank, Truck, The Little Magazine, Writing on the Edge, 13th Moon, Greenkill BroadSheet, and Writers Resist: The Anthology, 2018. Her work has also been heard on NPR.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

Not Today, Satan

By David Martinez

 

I was suspected of heresy the first day of the class I’d picked up at the Christian university, which I suppose is valid. This was after I introduced the course, the topics, and how we would focus on critical thinking as a way to progress and achieve in college, and explained we were going to talk about current events, history, literature and philosophy. In essence, we were going to think.

I looked out at the students, smiled wide and said, “To be able to think critically, we need to be able to question everything we believe and everything we have ever been taught. We need to consider what we have been told might be flawed. We have to search for ourselves so we know for ourselves. We need to understand that everything we’ve been taught comes from people, and people can be mistaken. It doesn’t mean that what you currently believe is bad or incorrect. It means that we have to think about it. Question everything: what I talk about in class, what your parents have taught you, what your pastors have taught you, your schools. Everything. Including your faith.”

The room went dead.

This class was required for honors students entering the school, and almost all of them were between eighteen and nineteen and away from home for the first time. I know many had been warned about professors like me. I know because I’d been warned about professors like me when I was a student—by religious and conservative family members. I was the socialist professor who would turn students into bleeding hearts, the reason many of those same students in that Christian university had been homeschooled, the reason that many were going to a Christian school to begin with. And here I was, the man their parents feared they would encounter, spouting dangerous and blasphemous ideas.

A small, teenage girl who came up to me after class looked terrified. With wide eyes filled with the courage of the faithful, she said, “Um, excuse me, sir. I just … I want to know, what do you believe? It’s just that, as I’m sure you’re aware, this is a Christian school, and we have certain beliefs and values and I just … I don’t know. I just don’t know if I’m going to like this class, and I just want to know what you believe.”

She breathed deeply. I could see she had been brooding over what she was going to say. I admired her nerve. She was polite and she was honest, and I respected that.

“Well,” I said, “what do you believe?”

“I just,” she said, “I just believe in the Bible. Everything that’s in the Bible.”

“Ok, good.” I was sitting in a tall, black, swivel chair and I rocked from side to side. “Why?”

“What?” she said.

“Why do you believe in the Bible? Is it because you were brought up in a Christian home, in a Christian society? Is it because that’s what your parents and pastors have told you to believe? Or do you have some deep relationship with the book that you have personally cultivated over time? Why the Bible versus the Qur’an or the Torah or any other texts considered sacred?”

“Well, I mean … I guess … I don’t know,” she said. “The Bible is the word of God.” She was put off.

“It’s perfectly fine not to know,” I said. “This class is not about knowing. It’s about questioning and considering. You want to know what I believe? I believe that religion is not bad. In fact, I think that faith can be wonderful and has inspired many people to do great things. But it has also inspired horrific acts and thoughts. And sometimes, it doesn’t inspire anything at all. What I want to know is what is behind our beliefs and motivations, and do we have the courage to honestly examine ourselves? It’s ok to be religious. It’s beautiful to be religious. But if we are, then why?”

•

I was apprehensive about teaching the class because I knew I had serious difficulties with institutionalized faith, but I still wanted to believe that religion could be beautiful. I didn’t want to augment my growing contempt. I didn’t want to go in with preconceived notions. I didn’t want my spiritual core to become tainted by too much proximity to the type of church people I had been trying to avoid—the ones who preached hellfire and damnation, the ones who preached equality and love, but blinded themselves so they could follow the bile and hate that poured out of recent far-right groups. But it was only one course, the school was desperate, my wife and I needed the money—she’d been diagnosed with thyroid cancer—and I thought it might be a good experience.

Unlike the community college where I work, the university didn’t allow me to create my own syllabus. I had to use a tightly-controlled one with a predetermined course schedule. Everything pre-assigned. I could add nothing. Subtract nothing. I couldn’t give students anything extra to read. The grades had to be put in on time, and, to make sure, the system would be monitored. No shenanigans. If so, Dr. C, who was responsible for the course, and I would be sent a warning. Dr. C didn’t like warnings.

He had a history teacher’s office, cluttered with maps and timelines on the walls. Photos of his favorite students. Photos of family. Bibles and books about the Bible. He kept repeating how the university could pick me up if I worked hard and followed procedure. “Just three things,” he said. “Make sure you grade on time—they hate it when you’re late. Never miss a class—they’re very strict on that here, and they get after me if you miss. It’s very bad. And don’t disparage the Christian faith.”

“I try not to disparage anybody’s faith.”

“Of course,” he said. He ruffled through papers on his desk to find a syllabus for me. “Oh, right,” he said as he handed me the schedule. “Make sure you stick to the syllabus, and don’t do anything too out of the ordinary. The students talk. You know how it is. ‘This professor is great. That professor is boring.’ They complain. Parents call the school to see why little Johnny hasn’t been put in the cool teacher’s class.” Dr. C shrugged. “Once, we had this professor come in and do a jeopardy game in leu of a midterm, the next thing you know we had a load of concerned parents.”

“That happens?” I said. “At a university?”

“Freshmen. You know.”

I didn’t. He gave me a pen drive and Polonius-style advice. “This has all my PowerPoints. Use them. Make sure you blow their minds. Give them plenty of ah-ha moments, but be approachable, too. You have to switch it up. When you read Brave New World, make sure you mention how we’re letting technology control our lives—just like in the book, except through our phones. It’ll blow their minds. You’ll do well. Don’t sweat it. They’re good kids. They’re good students. Just give them As unless what they turn in is really bad.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I didn’t. Instead, I made a conscious decision to make the students bleed for their grades.

•

It was halfway through the semester by the time we hit Brave New World, and I had been parking behind the same car every day. It had a bumper sticker that read “Not Today, Satan.” I wondered more than once if it meant me. But the students and I had developed an understanding of each other. Some of them loved the class, others hated it. There was a group who sat toward the back and off to the side. They tried, but never could, hide their disdain for the questions I asked.

We had already gone over the Bhagavad-Gita and Plato’s Apology and how Socrates was executed. Most agreed that his arguments made sense, that his questions were valid. His courage to take on the establishment of the time was pointed out, and his grace in the face of his accusations of sacrilege. Of course, they said, that was a long time ago. Things were better now. Also, Socrates was a pagan so he couldn’t have been any more sacrilegious than his accusers, plus his accusers were corrupt. When I showed them Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman,” some students said, “What does that have to do with us now? That happened like a really long time ago. Women are equal now. The slaves were freed.” A few students argued against. Most were disinterested. Brave New World wasn’t all that different.

We watched an interview with Aldous Huxley in which he states, “If you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled. … [W]hat these … dictatorial propagandists … are doing … is to try to bypass the rational side of man and to appeal directly to these unconscious forces below the surfaces so that you are, in a way, making nonsense of the whole democratic procedure, which is based on conscious choice on rational ground.” This was when Bolsonaro, Brazil’s own megalomaniac president, had just been elected, and I wanted to show what “bypassing the rational side of man” looked like from an outsider’s perspective.

I showed clips of Bolsonaro telling a female politician that she didn’t deserve to be raped by him, another where he tells a group on TV that if his son were to show homosexual tendencies that he would beat him straight, and an interview in which he said the problem with Brazil’s former dictatorship was that they hadn’t killed enough people. In one of the videos it mentioned how Bolsonaro considers himself the Brazilian Trump, and, like Trump, Bolsonaro also charmed the Christian voters by touting family values.

“The country voted for him,” I said. “They voted for a man who is racist, sexist, and who praises the military dictatorship that murdered countless people. Why? What makes a person vote for a candidate who says those types of things and acts that way? What does this have to do with Brave New World? What does this have to do with you as Americans?”

“Nothing,” one of the students from the back of the class said. He wanted to know why I was talking to them about stuff that happened in some other county. It’s not like Brazil is the United States. It’s a third-world country. It’s not like something that crazy could happen here.

Most the students wanted to stay safe and talk about how sex and drugs and technology are evil. In fact, most the students wanted to stay safe from any topic. “Our generation doesn’t like to talk politics,” one of the girls said.

“Your generation?” I said. “What about Emma Gonzalez? The marches? A couple years back, I taught seventh grade and many of my students walked out in protest over the treatment of DACA recipients. Isn’t that your generation?”

“Well, where a lot of us went to school we didn’t talk politics,” she said. “We just don’t want to make people mad. We don’t want people to think we’re racist or sexist or something. I mean, there are people that always get offended by the facts.”

One student always had the same argument: “The law is the law.”

“What about unjust laws?” I said. “It used to be legal to own other people. It used to be illegal to aid those escaping slavery.”

“That was a long time ago. There are no more laws like that. Plus, laws have to be followed or there would be chaos,” he said.

His classmate turned to him and said, “So, what about speeding? That’s against the law. Have you never sped before? If you speed and no one catches you, should you turn yourself in and pay the fine?”

“I don’t know,” the student said. “That’s different, I think. I don’t know.”

During some discussion, I said, “Jesus Christ was a brown, Middle-Eastern man. He was a Jew. He was a refugee in Egypt, an immigrant there. He preached unbridled love. He told his followers to sell all that they owned and give it to the poor. He rebuked the Pharisees for burdening the people with excessive and superfluous doctrines and regulations. According to scripture, Christ was a critical thinker.”

There were emphatic nods and smiles from the few who spoke out, eye-rolls and the blank expression of disconnect from the hard-right group, and confusion and angst from the silent majority.

•

The next time I saw Dr. C was when I walked into the office to say that I was going to be out a few days while my wife had surgery to remove her cancerous thyroid.

Dr. C was surrounded by papers at his desk. “That’s not good,” he said. “That’s not good. You can’t be missing classes. That’s not good. They don’t like to see people missing classes.”

“You have to know that my wife means more to me than this job,” I said.

“Of course! Of course! Do what you have to do,” he said. But he was irritated.

I turned to leave, hoping I would never have to speak to him again. “Oh, David,” he said when I got to the door, “we’ll be praying for your wife.”

•

At the end of the semester, we had presentations on controversial topics. One polite and quiet girl wanted to talk about gay marriage.

“What about gay marriage?” I asked. “It’s legal. What’s the controversy?”

After some discussion, she wanted to go with whether or not homosexuality and Christianity were compatible. I thought it might be a learning experience for her and I said, “Fine. As long as you focus on the human aspect. Focus more on how certain Christian sects view and treat homosexuality, and the individual stories of those involved. A good place to start would be looking at suicide rates among LGBTQ youth in Christian communities. Make sure to look at the human aspect. Make it personal. If Christianity is about the human, then make it human.”

“Ok,” she said.

In the end, her presentation was about how a person couldn’t be gay and Christian because it was against God’s commandments. She gave percentages and statistics on LGBTQ suicides, but swept over them to make room for dogma. No personal stories. The idea was that homosexuals couldn’t be Christian because it went against scripture.

“What if it were your sexuality that was under scrutiny?” I said. “In many Christian sects, the only options for people who are not heterosexual are either celibacy or marrying someone they may not be sexually attracted to or compatible with. In other words, either a life without an intimate relationship, or a marriage without physical attraction. What if it were you?”

“Well,” she said. “I believe that God would take that sin away from a true believer. A true believer would get over homosexuality.”

The poor girl was terrified and shaking when I asked her that question, as if her eternal soul was at stake. I was depressed. The intense need to clutch onto creeds and doctrines over the human was demoralizing. And for her, her soul was at stake. That was why she detached the human element. To try and understand the other was too threatening.

•

One day, while teaching at the community college, I heard a student laugh while staring down at her computer.

“What?” I said.

She had pulled up my Rate Your Professor page. “Look what this person said about you.”

“What?”

I looked on her screen, and there was a comment under my profile, “Professor Martinez can be friendly some days and very confusing and angry others. … I would not recommend him.”

“I can’t even imagine you being angry,” she said. There were others under my name at the Christian university:

Professor Martinez doesn’t seem to understand what he’s doing. First of all, he’s at a Christian school, and he seems to push his personal political agenda on the students in his class. Second, the class he is teaching is university success. This class is meant to be an easy A for students, and he makes it the hardest class I’ve had this semester.

Mr. Martinez grades harshly… He seemed to utilize his class time to push his political agenda on the impressionable minds of students. Conducts himself in a very unprofessionally manner.

Most of the class time was him throwing out random controversial topics or opinions and sitting back as the class had heated discussions. The class became a philosophy and current events course instead of university success. Success? He did everything but teach us how to succeed.

… most of the information given is irrelevant …

I wasn’t angry. I was sad at the dread that acted as a chasm between the students and critical thought. I wondered if I had done my job—not to make it an easy class, but to make them think.

•

Sometimes, exhausted at the end of the day, I would sit in my car, read the bumper sticker in front of me, “Not Today, Satan,” and think of the mythical, red creature with horns, the monster, the inhuman. What was the temptation the car’s owner feared?

James Baldwin, writing about his prolonged religious crisis in “Down at the Cross,” says of Christianity, “The principles were Blindness, Loneliness, and Terror, the first principle necessarily and actively cultivated in order to deny the two others.”

My Christian students were taught to feel terror at critical thought, taught that they were morally alone in an increasingly liberal and immoral world, taught to wear blinders to obscure the humanity of the other, rendering others less than human and therefore easy to disregard or reject—or else risk God’s wrath. Critical thinking must be avoided at all cost.

The surgery came and went, mood swings and tears were inevitable from both my wife and me. Even a small cancer is a heavy thing. It weighs on the back of the mind no matter if the doctors are confident everything is all right. There are some more tests coming up, but it should be fine. From now on, we’ll pay more attention just in case.

But what can be done when a cancer is thread through a nation that refuses to recognize it, thread through people who refuse to look at lives that do not reflect their own, thread through children who are taught that questioning and examining comes from Satan? Whatever it is, it’s not going to come from a system that predigests and distributes easy problems, easy As. It will only come from the kind of rare thinking that is unafraid to confront discomfort.

 

David Martinez writes from that space between worlds that exists for so many multi-cultural and multi-racial people. His essays often explore this space while also investigating his own experiences with displacement, mental health, addiction, and family. His fiction is often strange, focusing on characters who search for the beautiful in inimical environments. David is half-American, half-Brazilian, and has lived throughout the US, Puerto Rico, and Brazil—his places are imperative and central to his writing. David earned his MFA from UC Riverside at Palm Desert and currently teaches English and Creative Writing at Glendale Community College in Arizona.

On Abortion

By Vicki Cohen

 

I am a nurse-midwife.

For over thirty years, I provided prenatal care for pregnant women and welcomed new life. It was mostly happy work, but sometimes I’d find myself worrying about the women who lived in poverty or suffered from substance abuse, the thirteen-year-old who didn’t know she was pregnant until too late to consider her options, or the woman about to give birth to her eleventh child. I often left work feeling jaded and tired.

Now, in my semi-retirement, I mostly do the opposite of what I did before. I help women prevent pregnancy and help them when those plans fail. Which they do.

On social media, in response to an article about abortion, a man wrote that women should, instead of killing the baby, use birth control or the morning after pill. I could not stop myself from responding. I wrote that I am an abortion provider despite the fact that abortions are a fraction of what I do. I wrote that birth control is not 100 percent effective, nor is emergency contraception. I wrote that an unplanned pregnancy never happens without a man. Whoever claims they don’t believe in abortion rights may make their own decision not to have one.

My post received applause and gratitude. It also received more than one veiled threat in which I was told I was going to Hell. I think I do not want to go to their Heaven.

Yes. I do abortions.

I also provide contraception and STD treatment and preventative care.

Many days, I pass protesters who block my car from the clinic parking lot, who engage the women who are coming to see me or the other clinicians I’m proud to work with. What I think about these people—holding pictures of dead babies, handing out business cards for fake clinics, pamphlets filled with inaccurate descriptions of what we do, and propaganda such as the claims that sperm protects against pre-eclampsia or that birth control pills cause cancer—is: How dare you? This is not your business.

I can dismiss them. But my patients? Maybe not.

The second time I saw the rape victim was a month or more after the assault. The first time she’d asked me to look at a small bump that turned out not to be the herpes she was worried about. But this time, after sitting at her side while she tried to catch her breath long enough to tell me why she’d returned, to describe the pain of sitting, the torture when urine hit her skin, the agony caused by the multiple eruptions on her genitals, I had to tell her that this time, she was not so lucky. I sat with her as she sobbed, distraught over the thought of being reminded of the rape every time she has an outbreak of an infection she will never be rid of. This woman was not pregnant. Still, before getting inside, she had to walk past people who called her a murderer.

The day before, while deciding whether to renew the state’s last reproductive health clinic’s license to operate, Missouri’s health department passed a requirement that clinicians do a pelvic exam prior to the already mandated three-day waiting period before a woman has her constitutionally protected abortion. There are few situations that would make this exam medically necessary. This is punishment, pure and simple. Punishment for the women—some of whom, according to news reports, feel obliged to apologize to their clinicians for this prerequisite—punishment for the providers who, I imagine, feel as if they have guns to their heads.

In Oregon, where I work, we’re lucky to have a liberal governor and liberal laws. It is easy to convince myself that whatever the federal government does, we will be safe. And yet.

The federal Title X gag rule has been upheld in the courts. This rule tells health care providers they may only discuss prenatal care or adoption with their pregnant patients. It tells us, if we continue to provide education about or access to abortion, that we will lose Title X funding. What will this mean for the adolescent requesting chlamydia screening? For the married woman who learns her husband has been having sex with men? For the recovering addict who wants to be sure they don’t have HIV? Or the woman with the breast mass, the one asking for her first cervical cancer screening in ten years, the one with bleeding that could be controlled by a hormonal IUD even though she’s never been sexually active? The trans-man who feels rejected everywhere else or the cis-man who wants condoms, a vasectomy, or testing for STDs? Besides being a question of choice, this is a public health issue, pure and simple.

Sometimes the protesters outside my clinic are women. Head-bowed women holding prayer books line up along the sidewalk singing hymns. The woman in the headscarf, when she’s not pushing brochures, lies prostrate at the entrance to the property. I would like to tell them about the women who start out just as convinced of the morality of their views as they are, but who end up inside, making a choice they never imagined they’d make.

Sometimes, the protesters are men, to whom I want to say: You, too, bear responsibility. The only thing that guarantees no unplanned pregnancies is not having intercourse with a man. So why is the onus on women? It’s simple. Men can walk away. We cannot.

During his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Brett Kavanaugh was asked to come up with just one law that regulates what a man can do with his body. I couldn’t stop thinking about that question, couldn’t stop thinking about the decisions being made about my body and the bodies of every woman I know and those I don’t. I wrote the senator’s question on a cardboard sign and carried it to a Stop the Ban rally where a stranger informed me that in some states a man still needs his wife’s permission to have a vasectomy, but in fact, such a requirement would constitute not only an ethical lapse, but a violation of patient privacy law that prevents health care providers from discussing a patient with anyone without permission. The person who felt compelled to tell me I was mistaken, was mistaken.

I left the rally with my sister, both of us wondering what made these protests feel so less potent than those we attended when we were young. Demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Fighting for civil rights and the passage of Roe vs. Wade. I couldn’t stop seeing the sense of fatigue reflected back in the faces of those who now protest at our sides. Does it come from the barrage of stories about children in cages, starving polar bears, and mass shootings that flood social media and feed our sense of helplessness? Is it a manifestation of the slow, deliberate cutting away of our rights so that by the time we realize they’re gone we’ve been exhausted instead of energized?

It’s easy to convince ourselves that lives are not on the line, but they are. I am overwhelmed by a pervasive and palpable fear of returning to a time when women died and doctors were assassinated for trying to help.

So, every day, moving forward, I will remind myself of the health care providers in Missouri’s last clinic who, after three weeks of state-mandated pelvic exams—a decree that amounted to nothing short of state-mandated assault—stood up and said, No. We will no longer do this. We will not let you tell us how to do our jobs. I will remind myself of those clinicians who forced the state to stand down. I will remind myself of what is possible.

What if my patient with herpes had been pregnant, if her attacker had given her not just a chronic disease, but had also impregnated her? Who has the right to tell her whether or not to raise a child created by rape? Or to tell the woman who struggles to feed her children that she must have one more; to tell the teenager, who conceives the first time she has sex because her partner removed the condom, that her dreams have just died; to insist that the woman with a damaged fetus give birth even though the fetus won’t have a chance at the kind of life every one of us wants for our kids?

Who has that right? I don’t. And you don’t either. Our opinions don’t matter. We should keep them to ourselves, even, sometimes, when we’re asked to share.

Reproductive justice is about one thing and one thing only. It is about who controls my body and who controls yours, even if you are sure you’d never terminate a pregnancy. Please remember the women I’ve had in my office who, until they sat there, were absolutely certain, too.

 

Vicki Cohen is a nurse-midwife, a writer, and an activist from Portland, Oregon. She received her MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars in January 2018.

The image is by Lauren Walker for Truthout.

 

Going Gray: A Woman’s Right to Choose

By Dorothy Rice

 

In a 2005 essay, Nora Ephron wrote, “There’s a reason why 40, 50, and 60 don’t look the way they used to, and it’s not because of feminism or better living through exercise. It’s because of hair dye.” She went on to say, “In the 1950s, only 7 percent of American women dyed their hair; today there are parts of Manhattan and LA where there are no gray-haired women at all.”

The same could have been said about Sacramento, where I live.

That 2005 essay coincided with the first time I grew out my gray. After decades coloring, high-lighting and straightening my hair, it had begun to fall out in clumps. I went cold turkey. When my swath of graying roots had widened to a few inches, I hacked off over a foot of dark-brown hair, leaving little more than a salt and pepper helmet. As if by magic, I acquired a new super power, invisibility. Walking the streets of the city where I’d lived and worked for thirty years, acquaintances rushed past without a glimmer of recognition.

I’d become a ghost. I considered a career as a jewel thief or spy—there was no chance I’d be identified in a lineup.

Thankfully, my hair grows fast. Within two years it was long enough to weave a decent French braid. Multi-hued strands twined between my shoulder blades like colorful embroidery threads. Holding a hand mirror and considering the effect from all angles, I was pleased. No more helmet of shame. Women of a certain age began to sidle up to me on the sidewalk and in the super market produce aisle and whisper that I was brave, that they would never have the guts to go gray. They all assured me that while I looked great, it would look awful on them.

The first few times this happened, I was flattered. Brave beat invisible. But when the reaction became routine, I had to wonder. Was I brave because I’d stopped coloring my gray or because I dared to go out in public?

Then came the coup de grâce. I was out to lunch with my sisters, all three of us hovering around sixty. As she took our orders, and without a moment’s hesitation, the twenty-something waitress congratulated me on my beautiful daughters.

“Mother, daughter lunches are the best,” she added, beaming down at us.

A lifetime of sibling rivalry reared its head. I’d weathered invisibility and being lauded for unearned heroism, but I could not abide being mistaken for my sisters’ mother. I returned to the salon.

Fast forward five years. At another lunch with my sisters and our partners, my older sister announced that she was ready; it was time for her to go gray.

“Wouldn’t it be fun if the three of us did it together?” she said.

My younger sister’s boyfriend—also in his sixties, with lovely white hair—blinked at his beloved’s cascade of chestnut curls, pushed back his chair and blurted, “I didn’t know you dyed your hair.”

“Awkward,” my older sister said.

“My sister went gray,” the boyfriend added, in a sober tone, “I think it makes her looks old.”

I’ve met his sister. She doesn’t look old. She looks her age.

I didn’t say anything. No point starting a family feud. But inside, I fumed. Why are men allowed to age gracefully, to own their years, without being labeled old? And what’s wrong with old, anyway?

This pressure for mature women to masquerade as girls is blatant sexism and ageism, and I wasn’t having it. At past sixty, my inner 60s activist roared to life.

I went gray, again.

That was two years ago. I now have half a foot of mixed gray, white and gunmetal up top and another six inches of dyed brown at the bottom. A reverse ombré. Younger women pay good money to flaunt their dark roots in the name of fashion. I flaunt my lighter roots with no effort at all.

The hair color landscape has changed since Ephron’s 2005 essay. According to the fashion magazines, gray is now the number one hair color trend. Of course, the photos accompanying these articles often show younger women—celebrities and style icons—whose dramatic ashen locks contrast with their youthful complexions.

This time around, my hair garners complements from young twenty- and thirty-something women, often with pink, blue or gray hair. The reaction from my female peers has changed too.

“I love your hair,” they say. “It’s so sexy.”

I’ve yet to receive any comments from men. I imagine they look at me and through me. Perhaps they see their mothers and grandmothers, rather than someone they might conceivably have sex with.

Don’t they look in the mirror?

 

Dorothy Rice is the author The Reluctant Artist, an art book/memoir published by Shanti Arts in October 2015. Gray Is the New Black, a memoir of ageism, sexism and self-acceptance, is forthcoming from Otis Books in Spring 2019. After raising five children and retiring from a career in environmental protection, Rice earned an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside, Palm Desert, at 60. Her essays and stories have been widely published in literary journals. Learn more at www.dorothyriceauthor.com.

Photo courtesy of the author.

The Cancer of Misogyny

By Pam Munter

 

Longtime Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill famously said, “All politics is local.” But for me, all politics is personal, especially when discussing the circumscribed role and demonization of women in society. The current spate of misogyny, with its soaring rise in the public forum, has uncapped an ineptly sealed lid on the sexism that has always been dominant in our society.

I grew up in a time when white women of privilege were proudly seen as appendages of men, had few legal rights, couldn’t own property in their own name, were unable to adopt as single parents or even have independent credit cards. Comedians—both male and female—evoked predictable guffaws about the cartoonish consensual roles. Women, who inevitably stayed at home with the kids, were seen as shopping-oriented, recklessly spending the husband’s hard-earned money if she weren’t leashed. Women were parodied as motor-mouthed and too emotional. In comedy routines and in the media, women characters were just short of being harridans, commonly viewed as the natural enemy of men. Henny Youngman’s famous quip, “Take my wife … please,” brought roars of laughter from both “henpecked” husbands and the oppressed women who were the subject of the joke. Quips about men related to their domestic coping styles were often restricted to the hostile one-liners husbands used to shut out their talkative wives. It was a matter of human nature, it was thought. Men were stoic, consensually superior—smarter, more accomplished, better educated. Women were helpers, facilitators and, of course, unpaid domestic servants. There was no escaping one’s fate. If women weren’t married by their early 20s, they were “spinsters” or “old maids.” There was no equivalent indictment for unmarried men.

Heterosexual relationships were about seduction, gamesmanship, indirect communication, covert lying. “A man chases a woman until she catches him,” went the clever cliché. Honest disclosures were not prized or common, unless they were inadvertent slips in the heat of anger. The relationship between men and women has been characteristically adversarial and hierarchical.

I first noticed this normal combativeness as a kid, while watching movies and TV. The legendary feminist Katharine Hepburn might have adroitly sparred with Spencer Tracy, but in the last reel, she gave up her whims, acknowledged defeat, and married him. Repetitive plot arcs of the ubiquitous sitcom “I Love Lucy” involved Lucille Ball trying to put something over on husband Desi Arnaz. When he got wind of her schemes, he would nonverbally threaten her with his rage-filled countenance and a raised fist, causing his wife to comically cringe. Ralph Kramden engaged in similar threatening behavior with his wife, Alice, in “The Honeymooners,” all mirrors of the pathology in our culture.

From my earliest memories, I was advised by well-meaning adults to keep my IQ points under wraps and never, ever comment on any of my accomplishments. The conversation should always be focused on the boy. As I grew into adolescence, my mother cautioned me to be careful around boys because “they’ll take advantage if they can. You don’t want to get pregnant.” She made them sound like barely restrained animals, requiring vigilance else I be consumed by their inevitable sexual demands and ruin my life.

Home wasn’t any better. During large family gatherings on holidays, the women would cook all day for the men, then encourage them to eat copious amounts of lovingly prepared food, as if gluttony were a testimonial to their worth as women. As might be expected, conversation at the table centered around the men and their sons. When there was an uncomfortable silence, one of the men would seize attention and tell a joke, a well-timed antidote to any meaningful conversation. After the meal, the women repaired to the kitchen where they cleaned up and often good-naturedly complained about the idiosyncrasies of their husbands. The men moved toward the living room to sit in front of the TV, observing a sports event, intermittently cheering loudly to display their knowledge as if it were admission to a special, secret club.

You can probably tell from this brief summary of my childhood social education that I was angry even then. I didn’t understand why women were complicit in allowing themselves to be the butt of the joke while the only common generic slam against men was their unwillingness to ask directions when lost, a poke always done with levity. In fact, the sex wars were always painted with humor, as if a light touch would cover the sense of umbrage and pique lurking just below the surface. I knew then that I would not be like them—not like the women and not like the men. I would have to chart my own personhood even with the disappointing dearth of role models. It would be my responsibility to search and reflect, constructing and assembling the values and beliefs that fit who I was and who I wanted to become. That meant risking going against the norms, engaging in dangerous rebellion that often brought me in conflict with authority.

While in high school, I didn’t use illegal drugs or drink too much, didn’t get in trouble with the law, didn’t drop out of school (though I briefly considered it as a junior in high school). My mouth got me in trouble often enough with my “inappropriate” questioning while actively challenging the sex-role rules. For me, however, it turned out that the best way to resist the misanthropic status quo was through education, choosing fields that were unusual for a woman at that time. My family—especially my tradition-bound mother—and teachers often sought ways to warn me about what might lie ahead. Early on, any act of rebellion was met with, “Girls shouldn’t/can’t do that.” When I followed my dreams through education, I was advised, “You’ll price yourself out of the market. Men don’t like women to be smarter than they are.” The implicit message was, you don’t have value unless you are with a man.

In fairness, men were schooled in the same rigid ways we were, even though they had more behavioral latitude. They, too, were modeled after two-dimensional stick figures, and provided an unwritten list of desirable characteristics for manhood. “Locker room talk” was a tribal merit badge, a way to bond with other men, reinforcing their sense of supremacy over women. The male teenager’s goal was demonstrable macho dominance and sexual conquest. For women, the list of “desirables” was headed by compliance and deference. As we know, it is extremely difficult to undo early training, especially when it’s universally reinforced.

The 1960s was the decade in which I reached adulthood. It coincided with the dawn of the second wave of public feminism. As a result of a series of lawsuits, a new generation and the morphing of society, women began approximating the rights and privileges of men. Evangelical groups ranted about “permissiveness” and the threat it represented to the hallowed family unit as women evolved into the workplace. But then, there was a stronger boundary between church and state than there is now.

Although I was teaching political science at a university in the 60s, I joined in the fray, ran “consciousness-raising groups” and even marathons to help women rise above the oppressiveness. Much later, when I earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and taught at another university, I instituted a Psychology of Women class and served as a mentor to students, both male and female. It was a time when women were exerting their power, perhaps for the first time. Though I was the only full-time female faculty member in the psychology department, I carved out a small niche where my feminism and political activism were “allowed” by the men. And in my clinical private practice, I enjoyed working with both genders, helping to release them from the institutionally imposed limitations.

Another topic, essential but perhaps the subject of another essay, are the significant dues paid by those of us who realized we are LGBTQ. It is only marginally safe to identify with this group now; in the 1940s and 1950s it could be a lethal choice, both figurately and literally. There was only one mainstream and those who did not conform were ostracized and far worse.

Just when we were all thinking there was progress on these fronts, along came the election of 2016. Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape and his repeated pejorative remarks about anyone who did not worship him were warning signs that obviously went unheeded. He was elected, not in spite of his womanizing, but because of it. He was a “man’s man,” conquering all in his wake. What happened? This is a complicated question and not the subject of this essay. The point here is that some things have not changed. At the head of our government is a man who espouses those toxic, anachronistic 1950s values about the roles of men and women. On the plus side, his loose-cannon tenure has inspired the #MeToo movement, along with overdue revelations about men in power who routinely victimize women. Trump has selected mostly white men as his sycophants, those who reflect his provincial and barbaric values. Who knew there were so many Trump clones in public service? And such a wellspring of misanthropy?

I am very fortunate that I have never been a victim of physical violence. However, chronic indignities, ridicule, blocked professional advancement and bombardment by derogatory jokes on a daily basis affect one’s life, too. What strengthens us is self-esteem, and we cannot delegate it to others, even to well-meaning people. Doing so renders you vulnerable and drains your power. The most predictable and efficacious means of resistance to sexism is to build an internal self and develop trust in your own judgment, giving you the confidence to assertively address sexism whenever and wherever it appears.

Because I am in a late decade in my life, I have a longer-term view. My perspective, of course, is limited, coming from a privileged white woman’s perspective. Women of color and others relegated to the fringes of society are victimized many more times than I was and in different ways. But the relentless malignancy touches us all. There is no escape. Having lived through familiar oppressive times for women, I am saddened and angry that this cancer has found renewed footing in our culture. I no longer march in the streets, but I can write a check to organizations that support equal rights and to candidates who advocate for women’s equality. I can write letters, send emails, call lawmakers. It’s not enough, but it’s what I can do. We can never eradicate this pernicious virus completely. Like a cancer, it will only go into remission, emerging again when permission is implicit.

 

Pam Munter has authored several books including When Teens Were Keen: Freddie Stewart and The Teen Agers of Monogram (Nicholas Lawrence Press, 2005) and Almost Famous: In and Out of Show Biz (Westgate Press, 1986) and is a contributor to many others. She’s a retired clinical psychologist, former performer and film historian. Her many lengthy retrospectives on the lives of often-forgotten Hollywood performers and others have appeared in Classic Images and Films of the Golden Age. More recently, her essays and short stories have been published in more than 90 publications. She is the nonfiction book reviewer for Fourth and Sycamore. Her play Life Without was a semi-finalist in the Ebell of Los Angeles Playwriting Competition and was nominated for the Bill Groves Award for Outstanding Original Writing, along with a nomination for Outstanding Play in the Staged Reading category. Her second play, That Screwy, Ballyhooey Hollywood, will open the new season for Script2Stage2Screen in Rancho Mirage, CA. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts. Her memoir, As Alone As I Want To Be, was published by Adelaide Books in October 2018. You can find much of her writing at www.pammunter.com.

Food and Shelter

By Melissa Reeser Poulin

A week before Trump’s inauguration, I began bleeding, miscarrying a baby just shy of ten weeks—my daughter’s little brother or sister. While women marched on Washington and in my city’s streets, I huddled in bed, losing this new life and the last of my false impressions of my country. I wanted to protest, but felt consumed by necessary grief. The baby had died weeks earlier without my knowing; Trump’s election was a mirror held up to centuries of racism, violence, and greed. That January was a time of reckoning for me as a white American, and as a mother.

I planned to join the second annual Women’s March the following January. But I became pregnant in the interceding months, and spent the day of the protest in bed again, healing my body as I nourished our newborn son.

It’s summer now and my son is eating. Sweet potato, banana. Some rice cereal, an avocado. Watching us from his booster seat, he smacks his lips. With great purpose, he moves his hands over the pieces of soft carrot on his tray, raking them, pressing them clumsily between fat palms.

I put him on his belly in the middle of our bed. He folds in half, moves like an inchworm to the edge, laughs as he pitches headfirst into me. Time is ticking by. But it doesn’t tick—it glides, drips, rushes, sweats, streams, pounds. Swells in the plums outside the window. Collects in the folds beneath my son’s chin. Ripples at the edges of my eyes. Sifts into the lines on my husband’s palms. Hides between strands of my daughter’s hair.

This time, when women gather in the streets, I gather my children and join them. I wrap the baby on my back, and my husband hefts our preschooler onto his, and we ride the bus downtown carrying simple burdens: children, diapers, wipes. Goldfish crackers to delay the inevitable tantrum. A hastily-scribbled sign: Families Belong Together.

Of course they do. It’s a phrase inadequate to the rage I feel at the Trump administration’s so-called zero-tolerance policy—an extreme reduction in the admission of immigrants and refugees, including asylum-seekers, that uses children as tools to generate fear of separation in people fleeing violence in their home countries. Families belong together, but more than that, families do not belong in prison. They belong in a place of welcome and compassion, as I thought the United States once aspired to be. They belong in a country that offers rest, that responds generously to the tremendous courage required to leave one’s home and resources in order to protect one’s children.

We stand at the edge of the crowd, holding our children. It is a small act, but the size of the crowd makes it larger. It makes the shrunken lump of hope in my heart grow larger, too. Leaning against a building, I nurse my son with one arm, and with the other I snap a photo for the mother next to me, her stroller festooned with balloons and crayoned posters: Please don’t hurt kids.

My daughter tugs on my sleeve. What are we doing, Mama? Why are we here? I say we are here because we are sad about the way families are being treated. Someone is hurting others, and when you see that, it is your job to try to stop it. Fear leaps in my belly. Will I be able to follow this myself, to set an example for my children? What if it means putting my own children in danger? To myself and to a handful of close friends, I had confessed anxiety over showing up today, at a peaceful rally made up primarily of mothers, fathers, and children. Now that I am here, I don’t feel fear. I feel love. Here, it seems so clear that we are dependent on one another. Interdependent, interconnected. The border is artificial.

A clock is artificial. My son studies it along with his paper mobile, shadows on the wall. The generic light fixture at the center of the ceiling in each room in our house. My face. His hands move in circles from my mouth to my eyes and hair. He grabs fistfuls, shoves them into his mouth.

Breath and heartbeat, simple rhythms. I listen for his breath in the nursery, put my hand to my chest at the stoplight, take a full inhale. What passes for silence, for stillness. Here’s a sundial where things collect: fragments of speech, frames of sunlight, the thing my daughter said that I want to remember to tell my husband. A stem twisted off the top of a thought, in a hurry to pass a granola bar over the seat. Hmm? Almost there honey.

My little guy in the bathtub, laughing and chirping around his washcloth. Through the speed and noise of our lives together, he has somehow arrived here, on the brink of crawling, at the edge of new freedoms. But where is here? There are no real edges in childhood, no clear lines between phases of development. Every second, he is working, his body taking in food and sound and light and turning it all into a self.

At the border, they are taking children this size from their parents, children who can’t yet crawl. Our government is detaining toddlers taking their first steps, imprisoning three- and four-year-olds. My three-year-old wakes in the morning singing, and doesn’t stop asking questions until she falls asleep at night. She is a bundle of insatiable curiosity. On the radio it said the detained toddlers are quiet and still in the cages—in the cages—behavior so opposite my daughter’s it makes every hair on my body stand up.

The park is all filtered light and she’s swinging on her tummy, pretending to fly, her yellow hat floating off like a butterfly. When I was not looking, her legs turned muscular. Her attention shifted toward big kids, playing big kid games. Why are they playing a sword game, Mama? Is that a bad game?

The questions I don’t answer nestle beside the ones I answer seventeen times a day, and beneath those, my own questions, like boulders: How can I send her to school? What do I tell her about guns? How do I protect her? My animal heart can find no shelter, my chest a forest floor exposed.

Motherhood has made me permeable, my body etched with the children I’ve carried, so that their survival is my own. It has changed the way I see others’ children, knowing the weight and cost of having arrived, together, in the present moment. Knowing the feat of having kept them alive.

2,500 Families Separated at U.S. Border. Some Parents May Not See Kids Again. They seem so close, these terror-stricken faces just beneath my fingertips on the screen.  My hands put the screen down to soothe the tantrum, mash a banana, spread peanut butter on bread. My stomach rumbles and I ignore it. It’s bedtime and dishes, lunches packed for the next day, then night fractured with my son’s cries for milk. A bread trail leading toward sleep or something like it, somewhere to put down the weight.

I do everything. I do nothing. With my mother hands, I care for my children. If I had to, I would take them and run, too.

Like any mother, my body’s deepest hunger is for their protection. This hunger is there when I wake in the morning, when I buckle them into their car seats, my mind flashing on an image of where the clasp should rest, high on their chests. It’s there as I watch my daughter climb the tall slide, lanky limbs wobbling. My heart swerves in tempo with my thoughts, a constant calculus that tries to balance my fear of the unknown with her need to learn, explore, and experience risk. It’s there on a drowsy day at the pool, where danger is a ripped Band-Aid, a honeybee kicking next to her water-wings. Together we raft it to cement where it crawls, drips away.

Tonight, my children sleep safely down the hall, while a 19-month-old has died after detention in an ICE facility without proper medical care. Families like hers are finding pain and suffering here, and the deepest loss imaginable, instead of relief from the instability and danger in their countries of origin. These families flee with the intention to apply for asylum as part of the legal process, to protect their children. As I would, fiercely, protect my own children.

But I am a United States citizen. The many ways in which I am privileged insulate me from this treatment. I am an educated, middle-class, able-bodied, straight, married white woman in a single-income family. My children are never hungry. I don’t fear racial profiling against them, my husband, or myself. We are in no danger of being deported or imprisoned indefinitely at the edge of the country, far from the eyes of those willing to look away.

I won’t look away.

Protecting the children of asylum-seekers isn’t just about this moment, and this issue, but all of the actions and structures in place that have led to this point. Just as Trump’s election wasn’t an aberration, but a continuation of our country’s racist history, so this policy is upheld and quietly expanded because of entrenched, unexamined racism in individuals and systems, and because those who hold privilege and power—white people—refuse to see the connection.

Protecting my children means not sheltering them from the truth. It means seeing with my own eyes and helping my children to see the realities of injustice that might otherwise be invisible to them, helping them to understand the ways in which they are unfairly advantaged, and teaching them to see what their country’s current leaders cannot: that we are all human, deserving of respect and dignity. It means teaching them to speak up and stand up when their government is committing inexcusable crimes. It means teaching myself to do all of these things.

For now my son cannot yet stand, cannot yet speak, but soon he will learn to run like my daughter, and they will fill the house with their voices, with the bright whirring of their youth. It would be easy for me to take the ease of their childhoods for granted, to pretend that that ease is disconnected from the childhoods shattering at the border, to look the other way. That’s what this administration is counting on.

 

Melissa Reeser Poulin is a poet and writer. She is co-editor of Winged: New Writing on Bees (Poulin Publishing 2014) and author of the chapbook Rupture, Light (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming January 2019). Her most recent work appears in Hip Mama, Coffee + Crumbs, and Relief Journal. Visit her website at melissareeserpoulin.com.

Photo credit: A Stoller via a Creative Commons license.

 

Life on ICE

An essay by Jorge Antonio Millan, illustrated by Christopher Woods

 

“With liberty and justice for all.”

To some, the morning pledge of allegiance was a formality, routinely required. For me, it was something different altogether. As I remember it, I could sense the somber notion of being part of something bigger. The pledge harnessed in me feelings of safety, affirmation and equality.

Now in my mid-thirties, I lay here on my bunk, on my 1,718th day in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention and wonder where all that palpable justice went.

Although my beginning was in Mexico, my principles of Americanism began early: I arrived in the United States an infant. Growing up, I never gave my citizenship much thought. I knew I was different; I just didn’t feel it.

Do I feel it now? Yes, yes I do.

In our looking-glass world of immigration enforcement, ICE can decide, for any number of reasons, to detain a noncitizen for weeks, months, or in my case, even years. To my family, my detention excites indignation, astonishment. To the legal system, perhaps little alarm.

Courts and commentators have long assumed that ICE detention is a form of civil confinement merely because the proceedings of which it is part are deemed civil. But how can they know what we detainees are going through? We are experiencing it—they are not. Likewise, as immigration activists and lawyers argue the dangers of prolonged detention, they, too, can only speculate.

To set the foundation, I want to make it clear. I may be on American soil, but the American solidarity I grew up in stops at the locked steel doors of my detention facility.

ICE detention—as I see it and live it—is nothing more than outright racial antagonism.

Although the most punitive features of penal confinement resonate through these walls, ICE detention runs on a different frequency. Here—you can feel it in the air—detainees are placed on the lowest human level. Whatever your race, the color of your skin, or the nature of your beliefs, you can’t help but feel the mixture of indignities. It’s not just the fact that most of our basic freedoms are taken away, it’s the whole process itself. Our lives are being dissected at every stage, and we are often criticized for past behaviors that don’t reflect who we are today.

This has made me question my self-worth and personal identity. What is to become of me? Do my life-long history in the United States and my family ties mean nothing? And while this psychological warfare runs its daily course, my living conditions are tightly regulated. I am truly an alien to the free world.

During my detention, I’ve been the recipient of many bond hearings. Let me tell you, as I’m sure my fellow detainees will agree, at these hearings you are on trial. And when the Immigration Judge denies your release, it might as well be a jail sentence.

I know how this all sounds, but I don’t bear any ill feeling toward this country. After all, I am an American—at heart. I suffer here not just for my livelihood, family, and children, but for the way the American flag made me feel when I pledged allegiance to it. Yet I truly believe I will someday experience those feelings again.

So, I definitely would not use the word “civil” to describe ICE detention. Whatever cloak or disguise ICE detention may assume, this place tests the deepest notions of what is fair and right and just.

Thus, it is critically important to consider the question Immigration Judge Anthony S. Murray once asked me, “How long can ICE hold you?”

 

Jorge Antonio Millan entered immigration custody in 2013, where he remains to this day. To level the playing-field, Millan has undertaken comprehensive paralegal and criminal justice studies while in immigration detention. Millan wrote “Life on ICE” to provide acute insight into our immigration system.

Christopher Woods is a writer, teacher and photographer who lives in Texas. He has published a novel, The Dream Patch; a prose collection, Under a Riverbed Sky; and a book of stage monologues for actors, Heart Speak. His work has appeared in The Southern Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Columbia and Glimmer Train, among others. View his photography gallery at Christopher Woods.zenfolio.com.

 

Soup and Democracy

By Susan Swartz

 

I took a day off from the news and made soup. No NPR. No New York Times. No local paper. No TV. A lot of curry.

I took shelter from Syria and Parkland in my sunny kitchen. Had it not been for two teaspoons of neon orange turmeric I might have entirely dismissed thoughts of His Awfulness, too.

I made the soup for my book club. We call our club Foxfire, named for the title of one of our early choices, the story of a gang of teenage girls by Joyce Carol Oates. Sometimes in emails we address each other: Dear Foxies.

We take turns choosing a book and hosting each month. Tonight, we will be talking about Democracy, by Joan Didion. I expect since we are mostly of the same generation we will recall where and how young we were when we first discovered Didion. The writers in our group will say something about how we wish we could write like her. We will all likely praise Didion’s way with words and some will surely argue that Democracy, published in 1984, is not her best.

The title is ironic since no one in this novel really believes in democracy except as a way to sell American superiority to the rest of the world. Democracy is just the brand. The Americans in Democracy believe in power and money and other rich people. Didion doesn’t much care for any of them except she is somewhat sympathetic to the heroine, Inez. I doubt anyone in my book club will find any character they’d like to be friends with.

I’m pretty sure that no one in my book club would find Didion herself likeable. She’s the bony, brainy one with oversized sunglasses and unsmiling face on the back of her books. Joyce Carol Oates is also bony and brainy with big eyes. Both would be too intimidating and intellectual to invite into my living room. And Didion, who reportedly feeds largely on diet Coke and nuts, wouldn’t appreciate my soup.

My book club friends often make soup for winter meetings. Sometimes minestrone or butternut squash, last month leek and potato. Mine is lentil with curry and cardamom and cinnamon and cloves. Stir to release the fragrance says the recipe. In the crockpot it is already perfuming the house and putting the dog to sleep.

The soup has carrots and onions, winter vegetables with hard skins, tough outsides. I think of peasant women in wintry places digging into the frozen ground to find a carrot or an old potato to put into a pot to simmer all day, to fill bellies and calm the heart. Many of us had peasant ancestors and grandmothers who lived on farms and cooked what they had in the root cellar and what they had put up from the summer. Our mothers’ generation was liberated by soup in a can. They made the Campbells family billions.

The recipe says to sauté the carrots and onions in unsalted butter. I follow the recipe except for the French lentils. My grocery store has only the humble brown-green variety. There are no luxury ingredients except for maybe the coconut milk and organic chicken broth.

I’d hoped the grocery store would have had tulips to brighten the table. Imagine that, tulips in the winter. But all they had were stiff bouquets of tight-faced roses.

The news walks in with my husband. He’s storming over the man with the turmeric hair and says I need to read one of the columnists. Krugman or Brooks. I’ll read it tomorrow.

Democracy is about the geo-political military industrial corporate rulers of the world who are living the country club life in Hawaii while they orchestrate the destruction of Vietnam. Of course, the women are secondary. Bored, stuck, rich women who smoke and drink cocktails and make lousy mothers and let their servants make the soup. The women in my book club are one generation away from those in Democracy but we remember when a lot of mothers were bored and stuck.

On my refrigerator I have a newspaper photo of a string of refugees walking single file against an orange sky. It’s like Inez says in Democracy, being American does not exempt you from history.

 

Susan Swartz is an author, retired journalist and columnist in the Bay Area (Sebastopol, California). Her books include The Juicy Tomatoes Guide to Ripe Living After 50 (New Harbinger).

Photo credit: Steven Jackson via a Creative Commons license.

Out of Brokenness

By Kathy Lauderdale

 

December 25, 2016 finds me in Richmond, Virginia, trying to put a festive face forward while feeling stark desolation and heartache. The election leaves me questioning the values of my neighbors. Everything I know to be true has shifted, resulting in an odd sense of being off balance.

My sweet daughter-in-law, Katie, treats me with the tenderness one bestows a loved one suffering the loss of a close relative. My son, Shin, holds me at arms length until the five o’clock hour provides him respectability. He touches my shoulder and asks if I would like a shot of Rye.

And so we navigate Christmas.

One grey December morning we find ourselves at the entrance of a newly constructed pedestrian bridge crossing the James River. It was built to memorialize a Civil War era bridge burned long ago by Confederate soldiers, an act designed to slow the advancement of the Union Army and the eventual fall of Richmond.

With the rock remains of the original bridge in clear sight, I step into a moment of days past. I make my way very slowly as I read quotes, sanctified in steel, on the floor of the new bridge. Words uttered by various people before and after that fateful battle.

“All over, goodbye; blow her to hell.”

“Sir! I think Richmond is burning. The Sky is Red.”

“Smith, I may feel like a woman, but I can act like a man.”

I set aside, for a moment, the history of the Civil War and allow myself to feel the full sorrow of the people as their homes burned and their lives forever changed. In my grief, I weep.

December 23, 2017 I find myself once again visiting my children and this beautiful city of Richmond. As we discuss events for the next two days, we agree to again walk across the Civil War pedestrian bridge. Somehow, I think, revisiting this site might help me understand my frame of mind after a year of activism, an emotional state that leaves me feeling whiplashed at times. I am awash with feelings ranging from hopefulness and pure joy to barrenness and total failure.

I hesitantly step onto the bridge and the familiar quotes surround me; sadness creeps in. A few steps further and a sentence stops me short. I catch my breath as one who witnesses a burst of sunlight in a summer rainstorm. How did I miss this last year? Surely, I read it; I read everything.

At my feet lies a proclamation. A proclamation by an African American woman. An enslaved woman, I presume. A proclamation made in a crowd surrounding President Lincoln at Capital Square after Richmond fell. A woman who rose up out of the ashes and pronounced, “I know that I am free, for I have seen Father Abraham.”

Faces of the past year rush my consciousness. Faces of the Women’s March. Faces of people who stood up and said Doug Jones will be our next Alabama Senator. Faces willing to call, visit offices of representatives, and protest this new reality in which we find ourselves. Faces of women and men with the courage to rise up and say, “Me, too.” Faces of my children, my brothers and my nephews and nieces. Faces of my new extended family from every corner of this vast country coming together to lay down their bodies in peaceful civil disobedience to protest the repeal of the ACA, assault against Medicaid, and the new immoral tax law.

Not a perfect one among us. Each of us broken. But out of this brokenness, I am able to raise my face to the sky and proclaim, “For I have seen Father Abraham, I too am free.”

Peace,
Kathy Lauderdale

 

Kathy Lauderdale is a retired Nurse Practitioner from Northeast Alabama. The majority of her career was spent working in federally-funded, rural health clinics. Many of her patients were uninsured and faced impossible healthcare decisions. Against this backdrop, she became politically active in resisting the repeal of the ACA and the passage of the latest tax law. She attended numerous marches and protests and was arrested four times in Washington, DC, while engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. “Out of Brokenness” was previously published by Tennessee Valley Progressive Alliance.

Photo credit: Richmond burned from the U.S. Library of Congress collection.

Wednesday’s Child

By Sara Marchant

 

On Wednesday, during peer review, a student waves me over to say something in a voice so low and hoarse I strain to catch the words.

“ICE went into Cardenas Market and took people away.”

“What?” I say. I must have misunderstood.

The students are reviewing papers with topics like Foucault’s panopticism, patriarchy’s rape culture, Snowden’s leaks, and The Hunger Game’s inversion of the love triangle. I have to rearrange my thoughts.

“ICE went into the grocery store and took people away. They were buying food and got taken.” He’s still whispering.

Abruptly, I’m sitting at the desk next to him. He raises his voice.

“People are afraid to buy food. Food.”

All the students go quiet. His words reach them, my selfie generation sweethearts. He looks around, uncomfortable with his new audience, then back to me.

“What are we supposed to do?”

What am I supposed to tell him? To say to all of them? Am I to tell him that I am as sad, scared, and confused as he? I stand up from the desk and address the entire class.

“What are we supposed to do?”

“Vote?” Crystal says.

I’d offered extra credit to anyone who registers.

“Do the shopping for people who can’t,” Reyna offers.

“Shop at the white people grocery,” Rigoberto throws in.

Everyone laughs, including our one white student, Penny. The rest of us in the class are people of color in our varying shades of not-white. We are anxious people, but united in our sentiment, our goal: What do we do when our people are targeted while engaged in activities of daily living? There are no answers, we decide, not yet. We promise each other to keep asking and trying.

•   •   •

On Friday, in another class, a student asks to speak to me privately. “You can walk with me to the copy center,” I say. Because we live in the world we do: As adjunct faculty, I don’t have an office. I’m not paid for office hours. I try never to be alone with male students.

We walk across campus and my student tells me he has to be absent the next week, for his work.

“Fine,” I say. “Keep up with the assignments. Nothing is due next week anyway.”

“Everyone thinks I’m a cop,” he says. “I’m not. I’m asking you to keep this between us because everyone in class hates ICE so much.”

I trip over nothing and, worried that he’ll try to assist me, take a sideways step so he can’t touch me.

“See?” he says, as if I’d said something or done something overt. “I need you to keep my job between us.”

Never mind that he doesn’t need to share this with me at all. I’ve forgiven his absence. Did he want me to forgive his profession as well? Perhaps because I am silent, he keeps talking.

“I’m not ashamed of my job,” he says. “I’m not a traitor to my people. I was born here. The illegals are not my people.”

“No human—” I begin from habit. I am not allowed to finish.

“I know, I know,” he says. “No human being is illegal.”

You’d be surprised how often my male students feel entitled to interrupt me. Unless you are a woman, then you’re not surprised at all but merely as tired of it as I am.

“If you’re not ashamed,” I ask, “why must it be a secret? When we are discussing the subject in class, why don’t you join in? Present another side for discussion? Another view?”

“Because everyone will hate me. My peer review group might kick me out. Or they’ll get that look on their faces.”

Like the one on mine.

“Don’t believe everything you see on the news,” he says. “Most of what they say isn’t true.”

“Did you just say that to me, your critical thinking professor?” Enraged, I draw strength from the anger. “Do you think I share anything in the classroom that hasn’t been vetted and verified? Have you not heard anything I’ve said about checking sources?”

“I apologize!” he says. “I apologize. I forgot who I’m speaking to and you’re right about one thing …”

One thing. I’m right about one thing.

“Every ICE office, every station, every television is on the FOX News channel. We’re not allowed to change it. You’re right about the feedback loop.”

We are almost to the copy center. It’s a beautiful Southern California day. The jacaranda trees are in purple bloom; the lawn is being mowed. There are hummingbirds strafing the rose bushes. Everything smells fresh and clean and safe. This interview is almost over. I can see the end in sight.

“If you know that much, can recognize that …” I don’t know where I’m going with this thought. Haven’t I told my class, his class, over and over, that you can’t argue against irrationality? There’s nothing to grab onto. When people aren’t capable of critical thought, arguing against their emotions is not only futile, but dangerous.

Now I’m thankful this student, this ICE agent, isn’t in my other class. I hope no one in this class, his class, has inadvertently let slip their undocumented status. I let my last attempt at a sentence go and start over.

“I’ll only keep your secret,” I say, “if you promise never to report on any student at this school.”

He looks genuinely hurt. I shrug at his pain. It’s good he should feel something. Even if it’s only for himself.

“I’d never,” he says. “And I’m about to graduate.”

This is cold comfort. We reach the copy center. In silence I make copies, in silence we begin the return walk. Why hasn’t he left me to walk back alone? More confessions are coming, oh lovely.

“My family asks me how I can live with myself. A Mexican man with an accent, no less.”

“Good question,” I say. I always praise good questions in my classroom, questions are the basis of critical thought, after all. And I’ll grant him no absolution.

“If 80 percent of the people I’m arresting are criminals and the rest are innocent mothers and fathers, I can live with that.”

Whatever he sees on my face stops him. There’s a woman’s restroom up ahead and I point to it.

“I’m going in there,” I say, “and you should go back to class.”

He turns with a martial pivot and walks away.

The restroom is empty and after I vomit I stand for a moment with the cold water running over my wrists. The second half of the class must be taught, my copies spilled on the bathroom floor need to be picked up. I have two hours until the privacy of my car and a good cry. Thinking about my mother’s Jewish family—were they innocent mothers and fathers or criminals?—doesn’t help me. Thinking about my Mexican father’s family—would my student consider them murderers and rapists?—only makes me angrier. What does he see when he looks in the mirror? I wonder as I look at myself.

Then I shut off the water, pick up the papers, and I return to my classroom. I keep his secret, he keeps his side of the bargain—as far as I know. I never look him in the eye again.

•   •   •

Wednesdays and Fridays pass by, two months of them. The school year ends; my students say goodbye. Every time I shop for groceries, I think of my Wednesday child. When Jeff Sessions orders the separation of children from their parents and ICE puts them all in different camps, cages and tent cities, I email my Friday child:

What happens when the innocent mothers and fathers and the breastfeeding infants become the criminals? What then?

He never replies.

 

Sara Marchant received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California Riverside-Palm Desert. Her work has been published by Full Grown People, Brilliant FlashFiction, The Coachella Review, East Jasmine Review, ROAR, and Desert Magazine. Her essay, “Proof of Blood,” was anthologized in All the Women in My Family Sing. Her novella, Let Me Go, was anthologized by Running Wild Press, and her novella, The Driveway Has Two Sides, will be published by Fairlight Books in July 2018. Sara’s work has been performed in The New Short Fiction Series in Los Angeles, California, and her memoir, Proof of Blood, will be published by Otis Books in their 2018/2019 season. She is a founding editor of Writers Resist.

Art credit: ¿Donde Esta? by Laura Orem, a Writers Resist poetry editor.

Playgrounds and Politics

By Ryane Nicole Granados 

 

“Nobody would pass me the ball. Even kids who I thought were my friends wouldn’t pass me the ball.”

These words from my nine-year-old, after another round of recess, Darwinism style, bounced around in my head like a bright orange basketball stealing my sleep at 2:00 a.m. and making me despise a group of four-foot tall fourth graders.

“I blame Trump,” I tell my husband (also at 2:00 a.m.).

In mumbled sleep chatter, he reminds me that childlike cruelty existed well before Donald Trump became the president. I know if my husband were fully awake he would share yet another tale of the bullying he experienced as a child, which is supposed to make me feel better because look at him now. But I’m a fire sign, I’m a fighter, and, even though he has fallen back asleep, I continue this fight with the cracked plaster on our ceiling, wondering what the world would be like if we all simply believed in passing the ball.

It’s not as though I’ve ever played in a basketball league before, but as a native Angelino I did grow up in the era of the Showtime Lakers. By default that makes me a Chick Hearns-style sideline expert on the benefits of passing the ball. Of course, most of the Lakers back then were known for their dynamic running game and flamboyant offense, but then there were players like Coop. If you called him Michael Cooper you clearly didn’t grow up in Los Angeles. Cooooooooop, heralded for his defense and his beyond-belief Coop-a-loops, he would slam-dunk on his rivals after retrieving a perfectly timed pass from Magic Johnson or Norm Nixon. Even NBA all-stars of a basketball dynasty recognized it: To win the game they needed to pass the ball.

It seems if you’re not open it makes more sense to pass the ball. It also seems a team would get more open shots the more times they moved the ball. But 4th-grade asphalt antics aren’t about the open shot. They’re about taking the shot whether you can make the shot. They’re about ego and arrogance and power. They’re also about a pack mentality where one group of kids endeavors to dominate the other, especially if the “other” is different from the pack.

But it’s 4th grade and the kid who doesn’t pass the ball to your kid one week may be the very person your child shares his lunch with the next week, because it turns out that kid is going back and forth between the homes of his newly divorced parents and someone forgot to pack lunch for the leader of the 4th grade pack.

I’m trying to raise the kid who shares his lunch. I’m also trying to refrain from screaming expletives out my car window in the school valet line.

“Hey kid? Yeah you. The one with the ball. The one who always has some quick wit at my child’s expense. If you don’t stop your shenanigans you’ll grow up to be Donald Trump!”

•     •     •

Could it be that our president’s growth was stunted at fourth grade? Is he the leader of a new pack that believes any attention is worthwhile attention thereby throwing tantrums on Twitter and threatening those who cry out for inclusivity and tolerance?

Following his election win, by which I wasn’t very surprised, I expected to feel angry, but instead I just felt numb. There was a distinct void where my fervor was supposed to be. With deeper introspection, it actually began to trouble me. Have I become so cynical that I don’t appreciate the gravity of what has just occurred? Has my recent stint as a mom of a fourth grader hardened me? I’m a fire sign. I’m a fighter. I have debates at 2:00 a.m. with cracks in my ceiling.

Later that day, on November 9th 2016, I found myself unsuccessfully comforting a stranger in Target. She was still proudly adorned in an “I’m with Her” t-shirt and our eyes locked sharing a mutual gaze of melancholy. We met again in the laundry detergent aisle, but at this point our reunion just felt awkward. As I worked to wedge my cart beside hers, she looked at me, revealing irises the hue of cornflower blue welling up with tears. I have never been one of those people who can watch someone cry and not feel a tinge of responsibility. After all, I made eye contact with her and gave her the obligatory “What the heck just happened?” shake of the head.

“This is just so terrible,” she mumbled. “How could he possibly win?”

“Hmm, pretty easily it seems to me.”

The words came out far more cavalier than I intended them to, and at this point we were in a full blown traffic jam stuck behind a twenty-something man-child appearing dumfounded by all the options presented to him for washing clothes.

The woman began to wipe away her tears with such force I could almost make out the sound of her mascara smudging across her face.

She was angry at my affect of indifference. I was becoming angry too.

I tried to explain that I wanted to cry, but this election had revealed something I instinctually knew. A campaign run on themes of racial resentment, misogyny, ableism and fear, paired with a dash of nostalgic “good old days” mentality can indeed be won if you speak the loudest to people who feel they haven’t been heard. And that’s what Trump did. He talked about jobs and trade deals, even though many of his goods are produced overseas. He talked about taxes, although never releasing his own filings, and this above-the-law mentality appealed even more to his followers. He talked about punching demonstrators in the face, which was received like lines from a patriotic call to arms, and he made people feel like they were part of his elite pack. He levied vicious attacks at anyone who dared to challenge him. He behaved like the toughest kid on the blacktop. He convinced his voters he would pass them the ball.

By the time I processed my perceived aloofness, the young man and my Target aisle acquaintance had both moved on. I wanted to scream out, “He has no intention of passing the ball and you’re right to want to cry,” but what I also know about playgrounds and politics is you can only cry for so long.

As a ringleader, Trump is good at making select people feel included; however, he has already shown his character and his corruption. He has already surrounded himself with more of the same. And as for his voters, still holding out hope to be welcomed into his in-crowd, they won’t emerge as exceptions to his rules, especially because he doesn’t abide by rules.

But could there be a bright side to this upset? A Hail Mary when all else has failed. Can we overcome four years of Trump like I implore my nine-year-old to push through fourth grade?

I’m holding out hope that we can. There is progress in that people are suddenly seeing what “others” have been seeing all along. With this increased commonality with the “other,” which the hateful rhetoric of the president has so effectively unearthed, a veil has finally been lifted. People are wiping the dust or crust or mascara from their eyes and they are mobilizing against an assault on democracy. It’s “Nervous Time” as Chick use to say when the Lakers were involved in a tight game. In order to move the ball, you have to know and trust your teammates. This newfound willingness to march in each other’s shoes could very well be the one thing that turns this country around.

A week before the inauguration I picked my son up from school. With bated breath, I awaited his detailed update of the day. It turns out an unassuming classmate finally passed him the ball. Despite berating from peers, one kid passed him the ball. My son dribbled and was immediately surrounded by flailing arms making sure he didn’t take a shot. As a result, he tossed the ball back to that same kid and they continued this exchange tiring out the other players while inching closer and closer to the basket. It was a passing game that finally placed them in the position to shoot a layup.

“We were so close Mom. He looked at me, and I could totally tell he was gonna pass me the ball. I was ready for it. And I caught it. And I bet if we do the same thing tomorrow we will score.”

“I believe you will score, son. I believe tomorrow if you and this friend of yours keep assisting each other, you both will win.”

•     •     •

It seems that’s the thing about playgrounds and politics. The very tactics a bully uses to isolate you, he is surely utilizing to isolate others. There will always be more people on the outside of his pack than on the inside. And when the outsiders come together with a shared sense of outrage and a ball movement offense, anything is possible. Before you know it, the bully will be the one eating all alone. The only question that remains is, will you still be charitable enough to share your sandwich?

 

Ryane Nicole Granados is a Los Angeles native. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in various publications including The Manifest-Station, Specter Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, Scary Mommy, The Atticus Review and LA Parent Magazine. Ryane is best described as a wife, writer, professor and devoted mom who laughs loud and hard, even in the most difficult of circumstances. When not managing her house full of sons, she can be found working on her novel, grading student essays, or binge watching TV shows while eating her children’s leftover Halloween candy.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you like what you’re reading, please make a contribution to the cause. Give a sawbuck here.

Photo credit: Francisco Anzola via a Creative Commons license.

This essay was previously published by The Nervous Breakdown.

What You Need to Know

By Kristi Rabe

 

My 11-year-old son tried to stab me with his fork.

This was 5 seconds after calling me a stupid bitch.

15 seconds after I told him to go to time out.

33 seconds after I found he had played with a lighter and snuck candy from the cupboard.

1 minute after he said, “I love you, Mommy.”

20 minutes after I hugged him while we made lunch together.

An hour after he finished binge watching Pokémon Season: 1 on a lazy President’s Day morning.

A few days after he received no Valentines at school—even though he had spent the evening before making special cards for everyone.

One month after he was last stable and completely lucid.

Six weeks since the onset of the dreaded flu in our home and three weeks of bedrest.

Six months from being released from residential psychiatric care.

One year after the first time he was violent towards others—me.

Eighteen months from the onset of self-harming behaviors.

Two years after diagnosis of rapid cycling bipolar-I, with psychotic effects.

Three years from the onset of hallucinations and voices.

What you really need to know, though, is it happened four days after a man shot 33 children and staff in the halls of a Parkland, Florida, school. And, with almost clockwork precision, the white gunman was outed by news and media as being a lone wolf with mental health issues—not a terrorist or a criminal. Words like deranged and delusional became his signifier, his adjective. Survivors interviewed were not surprised; they talked about his weirdness, temper, obsession with guns, and violence.

I recognized his condition immediately, even before the list of red flags appeared in articles—before the debates on gun laws, mental health, the lack of organized prayer in school, society’s broken family values, bad parenting, and video games.

I am not trying to perpetuate sympathy for this man. His actions are inexcusable. I don’t have sympathy for him. I have empathy for his adoptive mother.

She spent her years not only as his mother, but also as his advocate through special education and problems transitioning to mainstream. She took him to doctors and battled the maze of the mental healthcare system. In the final two years of her life, she made more than two dozen calls to police, dealt with suspension and expulsion and defiance. She had to work at forgiving her child, who was apologetic and remorseful after throwing things across rooms and threatening her—and she was his only advocate until her death, from the flu.

I know exact the vacuum of guilt, fear, pain, and worry where she lived.

It took eight weeks from the onset of severe symptoms for my son to be seen by a doctor. Mild symptoms from prior years were ignored after countless tests showed no physical disease. It took six months of being seen by a doctor and therapist for official psychological testing to be ordered, and another six months before the testing occurred.

Then there are the medications. While many claim the medications the Florida man took are responsible for the carnage, because they’re given freely to stop symptoms instead of helping the root disease, this is not my experience. These medications are highly regulated down to the exact dates I can pick up new prescriptions for my son. Insurance companies also have a say and have rejected prescribed medicines, because they aren’t on their formulary. These medications were prescribed only after every other possible option was explored and years after I first sought medical help.

Medication has never been the focus of his treatment and it is a battle each time his dosages are adjusted, with the withdrawal and lethargy it causes. I would love if this were not my parenting technique, but with the very little we know about how this disease works, the trial and error of powerful narcotics is my only option for keeping my son from hearing and seeing demons, cutting himself, cutting me—stabbing me.

But even in acute care, doctors have tried to stop the medications—despite a cardiologist’s warning that suddenly ceasing the meds could cause cardiac arrest due to my son’s backwards breastbone.

The nurses, like those blaming the dead mother of the gunman and broken families as the cause of America’s shooting epidemic, believed my son’s issues were my fault.

“Stays at our facility are usually a good way to scare children into behaving,” the intake nurse said while I signed his paperwork.

“Well, there’s more to his situation,” I said.

“Do you have limits at home? Kids need stern limits.”

She didn’t hear me. “Like I said, please read the diagnosis paperwork from his psychiatrist.”

She actually laughed. “Oh, we never look at those.”

I persisted. “We came to your facility a year ago and were told you couldn’t help him because you didn’t have the resources. That was before we had a diagnosis. The social worker insisted he come here when we committed him at the ER, even though you previously rejected our application.”

“We know what we’re doing.”

“I am sure you do, but the testing he has been through is extensive. With the possibility of schizophrenia—”

The nurse took a phone call and directed me to sit in the waiting room. Five minutes later, she seemed surprised I was still there.

“Sorry, do you have more questions?”

“Do you think perhaps a transfer to UCLA with their pediatric schizophrenia unit would be better suited for his needs? That’s what the ER doctor thought was best, and the social worker said you could place him correctly after intake.”

“We don’t transfer patients.”

When he was released, I was promised a continued care plan. I didn’t receive anything but a CPS investigation. My son had told the therapist at the acute care facility—who didn’t read the information about his paranoid delusions—that we kicked his butt, literally, when he was in trouble. After hours of interviews, the complaint was dismissed, and I was given a packet of parenting classes and organizations, and a list of domestic violence shelters.

•   •   •

I don’t want to stigmatize others with mental illness. My son is a rare case, having symptoms of not only schizophrenia and bipolar, but also paranoia, OCD, ODD, ADHD, anxiety, and some autism spectrum disorder symptoms. Most do not deal with more than two or three of these illnesses. I know firsthand that the American mental healthcare system is completely broken in a way most cannot comprehend. Every service, every treatment is a battle with bureaucracy or insurance companies or both. We have been rejected from all but a few care centers out of the hundreds I’ve contacted.

So, why write about my son’s mental illness?

Because correlation does not equal causation, but society’s stigmas are not just a vague PC problem.

Because due to his condition, I censor his entertainment. He doesn’t play violent video games. He doesn’t watch violent movies. He is still obsessed with death and destruction.

Because I cannot teach him religious stories. The rainbow of his logic twists the black and white of religious dogma into paranoid delusions.

Because I have to count the positive comments I make to ensure they outnumber the negative comments. I sometimes must search for nice things to say about my own child.

Because he has to be on a formal system to understand how he is behaving. He has no sense of self-control, no impulse control; he doesn’t understand the concept of following rules.

Because my days are mundane drills of routine to save myself from battles and meltdowns. There are no day trips to a park or museum or carnival.

Because after a meltdown, I hold him in my arms and he cries and begs God to not be this way.

Because he has no friends and is considered odd.

Because his fondest wish is to be a minority so he would finally belong to a group.

Because he is convinced if he were somehow someone else, he would be okay.

Because I only get to see the real him, lucid and stable, every few months for a brief week or two.

Because his mood can shift as quickly as his bright green eyes in a storm.

Because I lock my bedroom door at night—out of fear.

Because I watch with jealousy as friends raise children and celebrate milestones.

Because I have to convince myself each day it is worth it to leave my bed and fight again.

Because I do, most days, for him.

Because I love him.

Because I lose my temper more than I like to admit.

Because I sometimes do not like my child.

Because my guilt is my personal, lonely hell.

Because I don’t want my son’s teacher to have a gun near him.

Because I contemplate his possible crimes in the future more than the possibility of his becoming a victim of violence.

Because, if he cannot control his impulses with a fork, I do not believe he has a right to a gun—no matter what men wrote on a piece of parchment more than 200 years ago.

Because I see my son in descriptions of a gunman who murdered 17 people.

Because I feel utterly alone and weak and frustrated and tired and judged.

Because I know the gunman’s mother felt the same.

Because those who use her life and parenting as an argument for or against gun control need to know how it feels.

 

Kristi Rabe is a freelance writer and construction project manager in dreary Moreno Valley, California. She is also the adoptive mother of a child with serious mental health issues and special needs. She received an MFA from UCR Palm Desert, Low-Residency Program in 2014. Her work has been published by Bank Heavy Press and Verdad Magazine. Most recently, she was featured on the Manifest Station’s literary website.

Photo credit: North Carolina National Guard via a Creative Commons license.

Brown, Orange, and Beige Like Caramel

By Alexander Schuhr

 

“Maybe you want to play with him,” the woman says, leading the little girl toward a toddler sitting in the sand. The boy doesn’t need anybody to play with. He is completely absorbed with his task of shoveling sand into a bucket. Nevertheless, this woman seems terribly eager to see her girl join him in this endeavor. She proceeds to drag her child away from my daughter.

For my daughter, the fact that everybody has a different color is as self-evident as mundane. Her stuffed dinosaur is green, her plush duck is yellow, and she has a pink teddy bear. Similarly, mommy is brown. (A more accurate description than “black.”) Daddy is orange. (Inaccurate, as far as I’m concerned, but so is “white.”) She describes herself as “beige like caramel,” sometimes clarifying “like Leela,” an Indian-American character in Sesame Street, portrayed by the actress Nitya Vidyasagar. (Comparable complexion, though different ethnicity—but why would she care about that?) In the protected world of our home, I have a comparably innocent approach to skin color. In the outside world, however, a different reality imposes itself.

In the two years of her life, my daughter has undergone a complex transformation of racial identity, unbeknownst to her. For some time after her birth, her complexion remained very similar to mine, and her hair was straight. People considered her Caucasian. On more than one occasion, my wife was asked, with an insolent tone of disbelief, if she was the mother. Then, there was an extended period of ambiguity. The child’s hair became curlier. Her once milky skin tone turned into café au lait, still with lots of milk but just enough coffee to keep people guessing. Few would guess out loud, of course. People feel much too uncomfortable talking about race. I’ve seen them several times, the relieved expressions on faces, like when a bothersome puzzle is solved, when either my wife or I appeared next to the other, thus clarifying my daughter’s race.

Her skin became only slightly darker. At some point, she must have crossed a threshold, though, and the “one-drop rule” went into effect. Then she was no longer “ambiguous” but “black.” Suddenly it was an overwhelming majority of black people, occasionally other “people of color,” who would interact with her, call her cute, and tell me how beautiful she is.

Along with her apparent transformation to “blackness,” came my worry that she may be subjected to the same vicious, sneaky forces that I’ve seen too many times applied to my wife. Social scientists call them “new racism” or “racial microaggressions,” these subtle traces of racial bias in everyday situations. They are faint symptoms of a social disease, well known to virtually any minority group, yet often unacknowledged by the Caucasian majority. They are harder to spot than the hateful slogans of the white supremacist with the swastika tattoo, the degrading slurs of the hooded clansman, or even the thinly disguised attacks of the populistic demagogue that are effortlessly decoded by his intended audience. No, new racism is subtler, less identifiable. It is conveyed by the flight attendant whose cheerful demeanor becomes cold and distant when serving an Asian passenger, by the group of giggling co-eds that turns silent when the Hispanic classmate enters the lecture theater, or the motorist who, while waiting for the green light, feels compelled to lock the car when he spots the Black pedestrian on the sidewalk. The ambiguity of these signals makes it difficult to identify their nature. Each isolated incident may be vague and open to alternative interpretations, but their aggregation makes all doubt vanish.

And now there is that woman, who pushes her daughter away from mine, toward the deeply absorbed toddler with the shovel. She gives me a nervous smile, which reveals uneasiness as well as defiance. I don’t smile back. While I feel offended by her action, I cannot be certain of its meaning. Part of the viciousness of subtle racism lies in its obscurity to the recipient, and sometimes even the perpetrator. Consequently, I find myself wondering whether I am too suspicious. Maybe it’s innocent. Maybe she knows the little boy and fears he is lonely or bored. Maybe she fears older kids (my daughter is not older than hers, but unusually tall for her age). Maybe she fears me, the only dad on the playground. I try to find other explanations, but cannot ignore the one reason that seems to be an obvious possibility, and I dread the day this reason may appear equally possible to my little girl.

Yet, it is a bitter truth that she will become aware of racism in its subtle and not so subtle forms. And it is my duty to prepare her, so that she will be able to identify the deficiency in the senders of such messages and never attribute it to herself. It is a duty I face with the utmost determination, but also with profound sadness. I cherish our protected world, where people are simply brown, orange, or beige like caramel.

 

Alexander Schuhr is an author, essayist, and scholar. He was born and raised in Munich, Germany. Before coming to the United States, he lived in various countries in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. He holds an M.A. in political science and a Ph.D. in economics. He writes fiction and creative nonfiction.

Photo credit: Kevin Pelletier via a Create Commons license.

This essay previously appeared in Brain, Child Magazine and The Good Men Project.

Letter to Santa

By Anne Anthony

 

Dear Santa,

You disappointed me. I was (mostly) good last year. Maybe I cursed, but I was frustrated and baffled. Somehow my family (?), my friends (?), my neighbors (?) voted in a president who—and I’ve got to be honest here—terrifies me.

Did you even read my letter?? I quoted Pope Francis, hoping his words would make a difference.

“Anyone who is too attached to material things or the mirror … should avoid going into politics.”

I didn’t ask for material things; I just wanted a redo. A mulligan, my husband would say.

And you ignored completely my backup ask: peace on earth goodwill to men! Still waiting for some sign of that one. You make it hard to believe.

Guess I’ll light a candle next Sunday.

Confused,
Anne

 

Anne Anthony has been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Dead Mule School for Southern Literature, Poetry South and elsewhere. She holds a Masters in Professional Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. She lives and writes full-time in North Carolina. Visit Anne’s website at anneanthony.weebly.com.

Image: Trump hair gift wrap by American Vinyl.

Midwest Activism: What I Learned from Marshawn McCarrel

By Jaime Gonzalez

 

I remember it in sequential order, in the same way, no matter how or when I think about it.

It was a month into the 2016 winter term at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, and we were on a five-minute break from my history class. Consistent with every other break, the first thing I did was look at my phone and scroll down my Facebook newsfeed. It was one of the first posts on my feed, a news link. I read it.

His name was Marshawn McCarrel, an Ohio activist who organized around police brutality and homelessness in his community. He was 23 years old.

The headlines read, “Black Lives Matter activist fatally shoots himself in front of Ohio Statehouse.” At around 3 p.m., Marshawn took his own life after tweeting, “My demons won today. I’m sorry.”

So many emotions and thoughts filled my mind, body and soul, the most evident, a selfish despair. I questioned my own activism and the toll it had taken on me. A couple of months before, near the end of fall term, students of color at Lawrence University submitted a list of demands to the college president. As the lead organizer, it was my job to ensure that students of color were included in the decision-making process, that the university heard their demands.

We received echoes of support, yet these were overpowered by the opposition, which quickly escalated into death threats against students of color. For many of us, what initially felt like a victory—creating positive change on campus—was quickly burned to the ground by blatant racism from in and outside of our campus community. We gathered in the Diversity Center because we felt a sincere attack on our safety, like bombs were going off all around us and we were left to defend ourselves. We—students and a handful of staff and faculty—felt betrayed. It took all we had to finish finals, grasping for winter break only days away. Then we’d be free.

This entire experience is one I have yet to fully reconcile. It was a violent time that broke me down physically, mentally, and spiritually. Everything happened so quickly, so unexpectedly. As the hate poured in, I felt love, empathy, and humanity leave my body and take my internal flame with it. I went home for that winter break with little sense of hope and with a fear of never regaining what was taken from me. It felt as if my demons were going to win, and I had no agency over my body.

Returning for winter term was difficult. I had to be both a full-time student and the intermediary between the students and the University. It was a position I had gladly taken on—without being fully aware of the associated risks. This was my senior year of college and I was the Chair of the Committee on Diversity Affairs, a sub-committee of our student body government. I was also serving full-time through an AmeriCorps term of service, providing programming assistance at a local nonprofit for ten hours a week, and babysitting on the side. The last thing on my mind was, ironically, classes. And now I had to see the faces of all the people on campus who had opposed us and pretend as though everything was okay.

I asked myself one question: Is it worth it?

When my history class was over, I went straight to my counselor to talk through what I had just read about Marshawn. Although I am not black and will never be able to fully understand his experience in this world, I found many connections between Marshawn and myself. We were both young men of color, in college, and had been organizing in the Midwest around issues we were passionate about. We understood we had a responsibility and a need to spread love to those around us.

I spent some time reading more about Marshawn, changing my cover photo in his honor, and praying the ancestors would care for him in the next life. I didn’t know Marshawn, but I took his story as a sign to reconsider my activism, the energy I was channeling, and the time I was devoting to the movement. I was ready to disconnect and dedicate myself to my studies so I could graduate and move on to bigger and better things.

It took me two weeks to find an answer to my question. I was grateful I had a community of support from other people of color on campus, a counselor checking in with me weekly, and fraternity brothers who offered their support. If it weren’t for them I’m not sure I would have made the decision to continue working with the President’s Committee on Diversity Affairs to create viable solutions to the concerns of students of color.

As odd as it sounds, it was Marshawn’s second tweet that put everything into perspective for me: “Let the record show that I pissed on the state house before I left.”

That statement—the last declaration of resistance, the refusal to submit to injustice—lit the match and rekindled my internal flame. Marshawn reminded me of something so easily forgotten: We are only human. As people of color, especially, our lives are constantly centered around violence and pain, but we should remind ourselves of how we actively resist, invent, and transform all of that into something more.

The poet Rupi Kaur said it best:

the world
gives you
so much pain
and here you are
making gold out of it

– there is nothing purer than that.

It was Marshawn’s story that allowed me to make gold, to reconnect with the essence of my activism, grounded in love, joy and resilience. He provided me with hope when I had none, strength when I had lost it, and love when I needed it most.

Author’s note: As of today, Lawrence University has progressed in the realm of diversity and inclusion by offering diversity trainings to faculty and staff, hiring a Diversity and Inclusion Coordinator, renovating a new space for the Diversity Center, hiring various faculty and staff of color, and implementing a bias incident reporting system.

 

Jaime F. Gonzalez, Jr. is an independent Chicano scholar-activist whose work centers around queer people of color and the ways in which they transform the world around them. He is currently the Assistant Director of the Cassandra Voss Center in De Pere, WI, an innovative gender and identity center whose mission is to foster transformative thinking for a just world. He has also presented at local and regional conferences, including the 2017 Midwest Bisexual, Lesbian, Gay, Transgender and Ally College Conference (MBLGTACC).

Say It Aloud

By Jamie Davenport

 

Something entirely disturbing happened last night on my commute to rehearsal. Bear with me. It is a long tale. But one that is necessary to read and digest.

I was sitting in the corner of the Red Line T, closest to the conductor, when a group of about eight black kids from the ages of 12 to 16 entered.

I automatically noticed their presence because of how loud and rowdy they were being.

Smiling to myself, because of how crazy they were all acting, I turned up the music in my headphones and bounced along with the train.

I noticed the boy sitting across from me. He’d entered the train with the other kids, and although also black and about their age, he clearly did not know them. From his body language it was obvious he desperately wished he had sat in another section.

At around the South Station stop, the conductor’s door swung open and through my oversized headphones I could tell she told the kids to quiet down. The kids mouthed off to her and she called the MBTA security.

At this point my headphones are off and I am listening with full intent. The MBTA guard, a white man, walks on and within ten seconds announces that he is calling the police and that the train will not move until they come. He is greeted with a resounding, “Are you kidding me?” from just about everyone on the train.

I automatically zone out and think about what I was doing from 12-16.

I think about breaking into my old elementary school and stealing ice cream.

I think about joyriding my boyfriend’s lifted, bright green, Chevy blazer without a permit or a license.

I think about getting caught drinking in a friend’s backyard.

I think about trespassing on private property and swimming.

I think about getting pulled over twice in the same month, on the same road, in the same place, by the same officer, in the same car, for the same reason, and waltzing away from the scene with nothing. And I mean nothing, but “a get home safe.”

I think about every single actually illegal thing I have ever done and realized one harrowing fact:

I have never been touched by a police officer.

I have never been handcuffed.

I have never been to jail.

I have never even gotten a ticket.

I have never left an interaction with the cops with anything other than a “have a nice night.”

I wake up from my reverie and we are still parked at South Station. I tune into the conversation around me and hear the kids. Let me emphasize kids. Kids making a game plan for what they will do if the police start to shoot them.

I glance up at the boy across from me. He is squirming. He wants off. He is texting fiercely. I’m assuming he’s telling someone what we are both observing.

The girl next to me notices my presence and says,

“Sorry for messing up your ride.”

I say, “Don’t worry about it.”

My voice catches on the last word. My throat starts to sear.

She asks, “Are you upset?”

I respond, “Yeah, I guess I am. I just don’t understand why they are calling the cops.”

She says, “Because we are black.”

The 12-year-old turns to the group and quietly says, “Black lives matter.”

They all murmur in agreement.

The police arrive and everyone remains very calm. Eerily calm. Everyone is walking on eggshells. The cops step on the train and tell the kids if they get off quietly they can get on the next one and go home. The kids accept the offer and begin to clamor off. At long last the boy across from me and I are left alone.

As I begin to put my headphones back on the police reenter the car. They look at the boy and say, “We said everyone in the group has to get off.”

The boy says, “I don’t know them.”

The cops say, “It’s an order. Everyone in the group has to get off.”

I jerk a little, as if to collect my bags.

The police look at me and one says, “Not you. You’re not in the group.”

The policeman places his hand on the boys shoulder and guides him toward the door. In a moment of temporary rage blindness I stand up and scream, “He doesn’t know those kids.”

The cop looks at me and says, “Is that true?”

To which I say, “Yes, and it was true when he said it, too.”

The police release the boy and he sits down across from me again. We share a moment of blankness and then tears well in my eyes.

He waves me over to the seat next to him. He says, “That was because I am black, wasn’t it?”

I nod. He looks down sheepishly at his shirt and says quietly, “I’m just happy they didn’t hurt me. That would kill my mom. And she is not someone you want to mess with.”

I say the only thing I can think of. “I’m so sorry.”

He says, “With all that’s going on in the world, I am so scared all the time.”

We sit in silence for a moment and I decide to change the subject. I ask him about himself. He tells me he is entering his junior year of high school and spending the summer working for an organization that aims to help people learn how to have healthy relationships. He says he wants to help stop domestic abuse. He tells me he is passionate about gender equality. He asks me if I know there is a difference between sex and gender. He says he wants to educate the public on that topic.

The train rattles into my station, and I shake his hand. He says, “Thanks.”

I mumble, “Don’t mention it.”

I exit the train and watch it pull away. And then I weep. I weep in a way I never have before. My breath shortens and I begin to crumble.

I weep for Trayvon Martin.

I weep for Mike Brown.

I weep for Sandra Bland.

I weep for Alton Sterling.

I weep for Eric Garner.

I weep for all of the names I do not know but should.

I weep for their families.

I weep for their friends.

I weep for the innocent blood shed all over this country.

I weep for that boy.

I weep that I cannot remember his name because it is not as familiar to me as James or Tim or Dave.

I weep for those kids.

I weep for all of those kids.

I spend the night replaying the whole scenario over and over again in my head, and realize that three words keep running through my mind. Three words that, until I heard a 12-year-old black girl say them aloud to her friends as they awaited the police, I did not understand. Three words that are so little, but mean so much.

Black Lives Matter.

I stop crying. I become resolute. I make a pact with myself to help the world become better for those kids.

I make a pact with myself to spread this story like wildfire.

I make a pact with myself to be an ally to that beautiful boy.

It starts here.

Before you read on make a pact with yourself to join me.

Before you read on commit yourself to this cause.

Before you read on openly admit that racism is alive and thriving in this country.

Before you read on promise yourself you will say the following three words.

ALOUD:

Black Lives Matter.

Didn’t do it? Here’s another chance:

Black Lives Matter.

Still can’t say it? Ask yourself why?

Black Lives Matter

Here’s another chance:

Black Lives Matter.

Here’s another chance:

Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter.

Black Lives Matter.

BLACK. LIVES. MATTER.

 

Jamie Davenport is a Boston-based writer, poet and playwright. She graduated in December 2015 from Emerson College. Her work has been published in The Independent and performed at Arena Stage in D.C. She runs a poetry Instagram account called @davenpoems.

This essay was first published by The Independent in 2016.

Women in Parking Lots

By Sara Marchant

 

My hands were full in the post office parking lot. I held out-going bills, my car and postal box keys, my purse, and a heavy manila envelope containing a manuscript destined for greatness (one can always hope, right?). When I heard a loud car horn and a male voice yelling “Votes for Trump!” it was awkward to turn and look over my shoulder.

But we live in times when a male voice yelling and a horn honking in a government building’s parking lot signify danger. This might be Southern California, blue state, home of Kamala Harris and Jerry Brown, but my town is rural, poor, and red with baseball caps and Trump bumper stickers—and my mother always preached situational awareness to her daughters and sons. So, being a Jewish woman of color, I stopped walking and turned to locate the danger.

What I saw was an old, fat, cotton-headed white man hanging out of his truck’s window and gesticulating with one hand as he worked the horn with the other. He was parked illegally, across three spaces, and he continued to lean on the horn as he yelled out the window. “Votes for Trump! Votes for Trump!” Honk, honk, HONK. He seemed pleased that everyone stopped, turned, and stared. He yelled louder.

One woman did not stop. A small woman, not as old as the yelling fat man, but at least twenty years my senior, she was still moving across the hot asphalt. She wore a turquoise blue, Mexican-embroidered shift and sandals. I’d have admired her dress but I was already admiring her stamina. For she kept walking, even as the man continued his harassment, and it was obvious that she was his primary target. The rest of us in the parking lot were standing and staring, but she kept her back to him. She just kept walking.

She was halfway to where I had stopped on the sidewalk when her hand rose over her head. The honking paused for a moment as her fist unclenched. When her fingers folded down and the middle finger shot up, up, and up, the yelling renewed and intensified. Laughing, I headed down the sidewalk to join her, and walked with her to the post office door. I held the door open for her. She nodded thank you regally, turned and entered the building, her hand descending to her side.

“What was that?” I asked.

“My friend’s husband likes to tease me,” she said. “At least, he calls it teasing. I call it something else.”

An older woman was sorting her mail at the counter. Her long gray hair was unkempt, she wore a shabby t-shirt over hot pink spandex pants. The stack of mail at her elbow threatened to slide to the floor. My new heroine in the turquoise dress addressed this bedraggled lady.

“Your husband is harassing me again. This nice lady stopped because she was worried about me,” Turquoise Dress Lady said.

Pink Spandex Lady turned wearily from her task, and peered around her friend’s shoulder to speak directly to me.

“I’d like to put a bag over his head and beat him to death.”

She wasn’t joking. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t making light of her friend’s harassment at the hands—and horn—of her husband. She was obviously tired, hot and too fed up to prevaricate.

We were all women in the post office lobby that afternoon. We were alone with no one to censor us, and she paid us the compliment of speaking her honest truth. She wanted to put a bag over her husband’s head and beat him to death. I paid her the return compliment of accepting what she desired in silence. I bowed my head, nodded, and walked away as the two friends huddled in conversation. Before I left the building, however, Turquoise Dress Lady shook my hand in thanks, and we wished each other luck.

That night, when my husband and I recounted our day as married couples do, I told him about the man in the parking lot harassing Turquoise Dress Lady. I told him about her silent middle finger response. I told him about joining the lady in her walk for safety and solidarity. I told him about the wife who wanted to put a bag over her husband’s head and beat him to death, and then I started to cry.

I had to explain why I was crying over a stranger I’d met in a post office and a type of situational awareness that I couldn’t even imagine. I couldn’t imagine sleeping every night next to a man I wanted to beat to death. I couldn’t imagine being that woman.

I couldn’t have imagined any of what took place in that parking lot, that post office lobby. But it happened. It happened because these are the times we live in.

 

Sara Marchant received her Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside / Palm Desert. Her work has been published by The Manifest Station, Every Writer’s Resource, Full Grown People, Brilliant Flash Fiction, The Coachella Review, East Jasmine Reviewand ROAR. Her nonfiction work is forthcoming in the anthology All the Women in My Family Sing. Her fiction is forthcoming in the anthology Running Wild. She is the prose editor for the literary magazine Writers Resist. She lives in the high desert of Southern California with her husband, two dogs, a goat and five chickens.

 

This essay was originally published by Roar: Literature and Revolution by Feminist People.