Learning to Listen #14 - brown girl dreaming

This week I read "brown girl dreaming" - Jacqueline Woodson's memoir of growing up during the 1960s and 1970s, both in the American south and north. This astonishing work of literature is written in free verse, and paints vivid pictures of life, homes, families, streets, triumphs, trials, joys, pains, and memories.

It is one person's story, one person's experience, one person's memory, one person's voice. Jacquline makes no apology for the fact that this memoir is simply her uncovering and awakening to herself. But it is set against the larger American tale of racial tensions and truths. In reading this, I once again was able to step into someone else's world and begin to understand the nuances of experiences other than my own.

Stories are what move us into the realm of understanding. It is easy to dismiss the experience of others when we listen to it from a distance; to vague news reports and numbers that overwhelm. But when you come in beside someone and listen to their story, a bridge is crossed that makes it impossible to ignore. Reading "brown girl dreaming" was a bridge for me to a time and place and space to which I needed to journey.

"Our feet are beginning to belong

in two different worlds - Greenville

and New York. We don't know how to come

home

and leave

home

behind us."

"If someone had been fussing with me

to read like my sister, I might have missed

the picture book filled with brown people, more

brown people than I'd ever seen

in a book before.

If someone had taken

that book out of my hand

said, You're too old for this

maybe

I'd never have believed

that someone who looked like me

could be in the pages of the book

that someone who looked like me

had a story."

"Even though the laws have changed

my grandmother still takes us

to the back of the bus when we go downtown

in the rain. It's easier, my grandmother says,

than having white folks look at me like I'm dirt.

I look around and see the ones

who walk straight to the back. See

the ones who take a seat up front, daring

anyone to make them move. And know

this is who I want to be. Not scared

like that. Brave

like that.

Still, my grandmother takes my hand downtown

pulls me right past the restaurants that have to let us sit

wherever we want now. No need in making trouble,

she says. You all go back to New York City but

I have to live here."

"Each day a new world

opens itself up to you. And all the worlds you are -

Ohio and Greenville

Woodson and Irby

Gunnar's child and Jack's daughter

Jehovah's Witness and nonbeliever

listener and writer

Jackie and Jacqueline-

gather into one world

called You

where You decide

what each world

and each story

and each ending

will finally be."

Learning to Listen #13 - Red at the Bone

 This week I read "Red at the bone" by Jacqueline Woodson. This is another fictional book by a black female author as I try to get a sense of Black history and culture through modern art (literature). For many years I was a "classics snob", in that I refused to read anything written after about 1910. I felt the modern market was flooded with so many books I couldn't possibly wade through the coal to find the diamonds. So I stuck with tried and true classics.

But over the past 10 years I have come to value modern literature as a mirror held up to ourselves, to our culture and life and politics and ways of living and thinking. The relationship between artist and audience is a thing of beauty - the artist's responsibility of reflecting truth or leading to virtue something to hold sacred.

"Red at the bone" was published last year, in 2019, making it exactly that. Amid the current existence of social tension Jacqueline Woodson pens a story of social classes, identity, gentrification, status, race, history, desire and ambition. It is a complicated tale of generations tugged and pulled by forces in the world beyond their control while they swim with their own strength in the turbulent waters.

The nuances in this book are marvelous - they indeed open a window into a world beyond my neat and tidy white suburban upbringing, and yet many times I realize I'm not actually on the other side of the window at all; I'm standing beside the characters having the same conversations with my own family. We are different, we are the same. Once again I am reminded that for all the historical insistence of the differences between race, the human race is actually 99.9% genetically identical.

And then there are passages, paragraphs, pages, that puzzle me. I cannot unlock the language, the references, the culture. I let them sit with me, acknowledging they are not a part of who I am. Instead they are what I have been searching for: a dinner dish, a twist of the hair, a bedtime story, a childhood superstition - things so intricately woven into the author's being that they emerge effortlessly in the story. Here, here, here are the truths and here does understanding stretch to the next level.

From the author's words (in her book):

"And you keep on rising. Cash some of the gold back into money. Put the money into a house someplace far away from everything your child and you and your husband have always known about Brooklyn. You pack and you rise. You sing the songs you remember from your own childhood. 'Mama may have. Papa may have...' You remember your parents living, wrap the ancient photos of 'Lucille's Hair Heaven' and 'Papa Joe's Supper Club' pulled from the flames...and you rise. You rise. You rise."

"Some of those white men were part-time friends of people. Separate as Tulsa was, people found ways to live their lives with each other in it. Until it got to be too much and black folks got to have more than white folks felt was right."

Learning to Listen #12 - Washington Black

 This week I read the novel "Washington Black" by Canadian female author Esi Edugyan. When I made my first reading list, most of my books were non-fiction books directly addressing racism. But early on I heard a Black voice plead that white readers branch out in their reading to include books by Black authors as well, to understand the Black experience through arts and culture also.

"Washington Black" is about the experience of a young Black save from Barbados. It starts on a plantation but moves through other locations as the main character is liberated from slavery but still dealing with the lasting effects throughout the world. We get to see into a brilliant young mind wondering how to make his mark in the world, how to have his voice heard, and how to navigate interracial relationships in a post-slavery world.

It would take a much closer second and third reading to discover the nuances in this story. The differences between a white author and a black author writing about slavery will be stark. There is something about digging into your own past that changes the voice from someone who is simply narrating someone else's past. I could sense the tone of the book was different from others I've read on the same subject, and I wonder if it could be attributed to this sense of authorship.

A few quotes that stood out, and some thoughts on them:

"It happened so gradually, but these months with Titch had schooled me to believe I could leave all misery behind, I could cast off all violence, outrun a vicious death. I had even begun thinking I'd been born for a higher purpose, to draw the earth's bounty, and to invent; I had imagined my existence a true and rightful part of the natural order. How wrong-headed it had all been. I was a black boy, only - I had no future before me, and little grace or mercy behind me. I was nothing, I would die nothing, hunted hastily down and slaughtered."

(Passages like these are what stood out as different from previous stories I've read on the subject of slavery. It made me think about how the author as a Black woman relates to these feelings, 200 years later. How many generations passed down feelings of inadequacy? How many Black voices feel today called to something more and then beaten down by the systemic racism in which they live? How many purposes are sidelined? How many souls are crushed? How does the legacy of slavery still affect people today?)

"Such were the times. I saw myself grow flint-like, and bitter, and fill with a restlessness beyond all sleep. Out walking one afternoon, I picked up a discarded piece of tin in the street, and peering at my reflection there, I saw in my eyes a lightlessness, a methodical will for violence. I knew I must move on, or kill, or be killed."

(This description of what it is like to be constantly hunted by a bounty-hunter scarred my heart. I began to contemplate the physiological changes that take place for people under such great stress and duress. There seems to be to be an echo of this today: while the duress is not physical in the same way it was for slaves, the constant fight for emotional existence must have consequences.)

" "You took me on because I was helpful in your political cause. Because I could aid in your experiments. Beyond that I was of no use to you, and so you abandoned me." I struggled to get my breath. "I was nothing to you. You never saw me as equal. You were more concerned that slavery should be a moral stain upon white men than by the actual damage it wreaks on black men." "

(This passage rang through from characters 200 years old; it rang through from the author's heart and pen across a country. This passage leapt from the page and I knew it wasn't about the characters within the story. As white people struggle with the reality of the Black experience in 2020, we are struggling to recognize it as a human experience apart from our own. To be able to detach ourselves from the picture is something we have never had to do; to this point, the entire world has revolved around the white voice. The White Savior complex is an easy default, in that everything we do can still appear to be reaching down to an inferior collective that need saving. This passage is a reminder that the real struggle is to view all humanity as equal yet different. To acknowledge the importance of variety in our world and yet resist the human urge to place hierarchal order on that variety.)

Learning to Listen #11 - Separate is Never Equal

 This week I read another picture book, called "Separate is Never Equal" by Duncan Tonatiuh. It tells the story of the Mendez family's fight for equal education in America. Their fight in the justice system happened seven years before the Brown v. Board of Education ruling (that ended segregation in schools in America).

A beautiful untold history is unfolding before me. I am ashamed at how racist our surface retelling of the past is - how we tell one story (Brown) to wrap up decades of pain, trying to point to a single moment in time when we can pat ourselves on our backs for the enlightened decisions we make in shaping society.

The truth is so much worse. Before that singular event, we ignore the real life pain and injustices inflicted on real people and cemented in our systems. After that singular event, we ignore the lasting legacies of racist policies and prejudices. More than that, we ignore the complex and long list of experiences and struggles courageous Black, Indigenous, and people of colour endured that paved the way to that singular event.

The Mendez parents had a passion for education and learning. This resonates with me as it was a familiar message I heard from my own parents. And when I think with compassion about the many parents in the past with sharp minds, yearning to gather knowledge and be mentored by passionate educators, desperately hoping their children could be gifted the same thing, I ache. I ache because their faces become real and I despise the hate that unfairly kept this gift from their grasp.

The lines from this book that stood out for me are the ones about the system - the ways of thinking that were so deeply entrenched in White people's minds that they couldn't see the souls behind the eyes of the BIPOC people around them. These lines will stay with me because I am under no illusion Brown v. Board of Education solved the inequities in education...not by a long shot. There is much work still to be done.

"Your children have to go to the Mexican school, " said Mr. Harris. "But why?" asked Mr. Mendez. He was not given an answer other than, "That is how it is done."

"It's not only the building that's a problem - the teachers at the school don't care about our children's education."

"Every time he asked someone to sign the petition, he would get the same answer. "No queremos problemas." "We don't want any problems."

Finally - the text in the storybook from the courthouse scene comes directly from court transcripts, and it's heartbreaking. This is the testimony of the superintendent of schools:

"For what other reasons do you send children to the Mexican school?"

"For their social behavior. They need to learn cleanliness of mind, manner, and dress. They are not learning that at home. They have problems with lice, impetigo, and tuberculosis. They have generally dirty hands, face, neck, and ears."

"How many of the two hundred ninety-two children at the Mexican school are inferior to whites in personal hygiene?"

"At least seventy-five percent."

"In what other respects are they inferior?"

"In their economic outlook, in their clothing, and in their ability to take part in the activities of the school."

"Do you believe that white students are superior to Mexicans in the respects that you have mentioned?"

"Yes."