Work in Progress: Chain-blogging Ten Questions

Belinda Nicoll (My Rite of Passage) tagged me in this challenge to answer ten questions about a work in progress. Here are my responses.  Thanks for tagging me, Belinda!

What is the title of your WIP?

I don’t have a title yet. I’m not done writing, and a title hasn’t made itself apparent, nor have I concentrated on discovering one.

What is your WIP?

A book of short stories about women and personal power.

Where did the idea for the WIP come from?

I write non-fiction about race and culture, and I have always had a special interest in women and power or lack of power. Once a psychic told me I am a very feminine soul, and I believe that. I always felt very feminine.  I don’t consider that a weakness but a strength.

I am of the generation of women who entered the workforce in large numbers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I saw and experienced so much sexual harassment. One of my undergraduate professor’s wrote a reference letter that said, “Dianne will be a pretty addition to any office.” Someone in the career services department was smart enough and progressive enough to clue me in, and I had the letter tossed. We didn’t have a name for sexual harassment back then, but we knew it when we experienced it, and we persevered in spite of it.

I think about the power we own as women: the power of procreation, the power to choose what we think is right and best for us and those we love, the power to make choices about our bodies, and the power to make societal change. I think of feminism and what we hoped for, how we envisioned it, and I wonder how to interpret and view the backlash I see in a very sexualized, object-oriented culture where both women and men struggle to define themselves and their roles. I wanted to play with all of those concepts and see where they would take me.

What genre would your WIP fall under?

It is feminist fiction.

Which actors would you use to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I love movies and actors – I could watch movies all day and not get bored.  I know because I’ve done it many times. It would be hard to choose amongst so many actors and I would be honored that anyone of them would choose to play one of my characters. I’d like to be in on the auditions. Maybe I could throw a few lines at them.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your WIP?

These are stories about women discovering their personal power and how to use that power to develop self-love and acceptance and to negotiate their way in life and society.

Is your WIP published or represented?

No, I have ambivalent feelings about the state of publishing, a capitalist endeavor. I think it’s become like reality TV.  It’s all about marketing and what sells, not necessarily about the writing or the message. I am strongly considering self-publishing. I’ve never been a joiner, and I can feel myself pulling away, feeling uncomfortable with the whole process, not wanting to compromise my personal ethics and values for a publishing contract, and wanting to have control of the process. Self-publishing may be the great equalizer for writers, but I'm not sure about that either. 

How long did it take you to write?

Literally years, because I wrote two of the stories a long, long time ago, took them out recently, dusted them off, and revised them. The other two are new, one still very much in the works and the other at the revision stage. I may write a fifth – a kernel of a story is germinating. My process is very “inside my head” and then when I am ready to write, the whole thing pours out as fast as I can type. Then I go back, revise, build, and restructure.

What other WIPs in your genre would you compare it to?

I hate to compare myself or my work to anyone else or his/her work. I’m too insecure for that, but I also think that we should not place more value on any one piece of art over another anymore than we should place different value on individuals. Every story is valid and has a place in the human collective. Writing ability varies, and so do personal aesthetics and the leanings of mainstream culture, but should those things make any one story less worthy of being told than another?

Which authors inspired you to write this WIP?

Surprise, I love detective, police, and mystery novels: James Kellerman, Walter Mosley, Michael Connelly, and James Patterson are favorite authors in that genre. I enjoy very visual and visceral writers, too. Toni Morrison comes to mind. I can read her books over and over. I’m reading Craig Johnson’s Longmire novels right now – I just love his characterizations, his word choices, how he is miserly with his words, but they are so rich, and how his writing is sensual. I like how he delves into cultural differences and how two different cultures interact, especially when they’ve had a violent, distrustful history.

Really, I enjoy just about every book I read, because I love being in the moment of the story, wrapped up in it, experiencing it through another’s eyes. I enjoy the unique way the writer has chosen to tell the story. All of the written and oral stories I’ve heard over the years have inspired me. Stories and reading were my ways of escaping as a child, growing up in an alcoholic, interethnic home where there were many arguments and lots of chaos.

Tell us anything else that might pique our interest in this project.

I think it’s time to assess how far we’ve come in this new age of feminism. In some ways, we have regressed, and I worry about young women.  In other ways, young women demonstrate strengths I certainly feel I never had.  We have a long way to go, though, in so many ways. We need to acknowledge that there are many ways an individual can live a feminist life. We need to accept and embrace those disparities that can arise due to class and cultural differences as well as individual temperaments and personalities. We need to be inclusive rather than exclusive. We have a long way to go, too, in the areas of access to education, career opportunities, childcare, health care, and reproductive rights. 

I also believe a lot of young men today are distracted and unmotivated, and maybe a part of it has to do with the fact that feminists did not consider in a meaningful way how to help men redefine and adapt to new roles as women changed or expanded theirs. I don’t think we did enough to help couples navigate and build relationships as equal partners. I don’t think we came to terms with the fact that it’s okay that men and women are different, whether it is nature or nurture that creates the differences, but we can still be equal. Equality does not mean being the same, and we need to root for equality and self-actualization of all people.

There is a long continuum of gender identification, and an individual can fall anywhere along that continuum from very masculine to very feminine. We can work to understand and change socially defined gender roles and embrace the complexity of gender individuality. That way, everyone, no matter how one self identifies, can feel comfortable instead of feeling societal pressure to change inherent traits in order to feel “normal” and accepted by others.

I'd like to tag:
 Angela Haigler
Sarah Meinel
Lacey Lyons
Heather Magruder
Karen Celestan

Get Up, Stand Up: Redemption Songs

I felt discouraged this week. Sometimes I wonder why I keep writing about race and culture. It seems as if people don’t really care when it doesn’t impact their lives directly. On surface, of course, lots of people denounce racism, but most of those people will not ever do a single thing about it, because they don’t see their role in it, and they don’t recognize racist situations. In their minds the racists wear white sheets and burn crosses on lawns. They aren’t the people sitting near us in the restaurant giving us the “Southern stare” or the ones telling Ronald that President Obama is neither a citizen nor a Christian.

We experienced the “Southern stare” again on Friday night.  I described how we coined the phrase in my post Amendment One: I See Hateful People (http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2012/05/amendment-one-i-see-hateful-people.html). 

We had gone out for pizza on Friday, and on our way out of the restaurant, a table full of people stopped eating, talking, and drinking to stare at us, as if they had seen the strangest thing and might never have a chance to see it again. You might be asking, “Why do you have to keep talking about it? Why does it bother you? I’ve been stared at before.”

I bring it up again and again, because it is common in our experience. We can’t go places without it occurring and if you are white, you don’t think about that happening to you. You may have been stared at, but not in this way, I promise you. You are expected and welcome just about every place you go. You don’t surprise, shock, or offend others. We do. Gay couples do. People who have physical deformities do. But if you are white, heterosexual, and physically average (which most people are), no one notices you, and you can go about your business. But for those of us who differ from the majority, our ability to go about our business is hampered and sometimes turns dangerous as it did for Trayvon Martin who was shot and killed returning from a quick run to the convenience store.

Take gay couples in my home state of North Carolina. Not only did the state vote to constitutionally define marriage as between and man and a woman, many preachers have spewed hate about homosexuality during their Sunday sermons. On Mother’s Day a Catawba County preacher railed against gay couples and called for them to be placed in concentration camps. Not only did he reach his parishioners with his hateful message, the church posted the sermon on You Tube where it was viewed 165,000 times before it was taken down.

An alumnus from Wake Forest University took out a full-page ad in the Winston-Salem Journal asking for the removal of the university’s chaplain Imam Khalid Griggs. The alumnus Donald Wood claimed Griggs, a Muslim, would replace all our laws including the U.S. Constitution with Shariah law.

The Ku Klux Klan still exists, and they planned to stage a rally and cross burning near Harmony, NC on Memorial Day weekend. Protestors turned out. One sign read, “Bigotry wrapped in religion is still BIGOTRY.” One resident of Harmony was quoted in the paper as saying, “[The Klan rally] was a shock to me. I thought that stuff died down.”

But it hasn’t died down. Such activity has actually increased. Though most people don’t think they support racism there is a new level of fear and anger about people who are different than the majority, particularly because minorities are now growing in number. See my post Demographic Evolution (http://aboutracewriter.blogspot.com/2012/05/demographic-evolution.html).

So I keep writing about it hoping I can contribute to changing our social views on race and culture. Over thirty-six years of experiencing race in America has taught me that change is slow and regression is prevalent. Sometimes I think I can’t change anything. Then discouragement paralyzes me.

But last night my resolve changed again.

We went to Ziggy’s, a national club in Winston-Salem, to see The Wailers perform. There is only one original member left, bassist Aston “Family Man” Barrett, but we had seen Bob Marley and the Wailers twice before Marley died in 1981.

We were too early to purchase tickets, so we wandered upstairs to the outdoor bar. Ronald asked me to wait while he went to the restroom. He is always attendant to me at bars. I hated them when I was a young woman because men buzzed around me like flies on dog shit, and I hated the attention. I always thought my large eyes made me look vulnerable to their pickup lines. I’m not as worried now that I am a woman of a certain age, but Ronald is still protective, and I am appreciative.

I stood by the outdoor deck to wait for him. A man stopped him on the way, hugged him, and told him he missed him.  The middle-aged black man with pocked skin stood at my height. He carried a stuffed messenger bag swung around behind his back. I heard Ronald tell him that he had the wrong guy, but the man insisted, “No, man, I know you. I just got out of prison, but I remember you.”

I wondered if he was one of the people Ronald spoke with on one of his late evening forays downtown during the warm weather. He likes to sit on the benches lining the sidewalks, watch the crowds walk by, talk to anyone who stops, and, he tells me, learn about life and people. A minute later the man’s white wife joined them, so I wandered over. She looked weary and shy. She weighed a good hundred pounds more than her husband, her skin was sunburned, her hair lay flat on her head and pushed behind her ears, and her teeth were dark on the edges and spaced apart.

Ronald introduced me, and the man told me I was beautiful and that Ronald was fortunate. Then he told us his wife waited for him while he served a fourteen-year sentence for shooting an intruder during a break-in at his home. He had found God in prison, as many do, and we talked about the Bible for a few minutes. Then they told us they were homeless, down on their luck, and looking for some help. We expressed our sorrow for their condition.

Soon we hugged one another good-bye like long lost friends. The man asked Ronald if he could talk to him privately, and I knew he was asking him for a handout. I stood with his wife and told her I hoped something good would come into their lives, and she told me she had spent a day in the hospital for heat stroke and how her husband was trying to keep her out of the sun. “Take good care of yourself,” I said when Ronald and her husband joined us again and we said our final good-byes.

“You didn’t know him,” I said after we had purchased our tickets and entered the venue.

“Nope.”

“How much did you give him?”

 “Twenty,” he said.  I wasn’t surprised. On many occasions I witnessed Ronald give someone money, buy someone a meal, give something of ours to someone who needed it more than we did, or give someone a lift to a destination miles out of his way. His generous spirit is one of the things I love about him.

“They’ll get a nice meal out of it. Maybe at Jimmy John’s,” I said. I felt bad that we spent fifty dollars to get into the concert when it could have bought them a hotel room for the night. I knew they scoped us out, another interracial couple that would be empathic. I knew they lied, but I didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t.

“He worked for it,” Ronald said as if he had read my mind.

“You did what felt right,” I said.

The Wailers came on stage long after the opening band, just as I was growing tired of waiting, just before midnight. They opened with the song Get Up, Stand Up.

Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights

Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights

Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights

Get up, stand up, don't give up the fight

Preacher man don't tell me

Heaven is under the earth

I know you don't know

What life is really worth

It's not all that glitters is gold

Half the story has never been told

So now you see the light

Stand up for your rights

My whole mood lifted. I felt awake. Ronald and I, holding hands, moved to the music. I leaned into his ear and said, “I love the drummer.” I sang along with the lyrics. The crowd was quite diverse: people of all ages and all races, quite a few interracial couples. Reggae music has universal appeal.

The main singer was not Bob Marley, but he had a special stage presence, a mellow, soothing voice, and he sang in the pocket of the music, riding on the rhythm, taking his time, as if he were floating on the notes.

When the band took their final bows and left the stage, I was disappointed for a moment. “They didn’t sing No Woman, No Cry,” I said. “They can’t be done yet.”

The lead singer and the guitarist wandered back up on stage about five minutes later.

The singer began singing a cappella. The guitarist joined in after the first verse.

Won't you help to sing

These songs of freedom?

'Cause all I ever have

Redemption songs

Redemption songs

Redemption songs

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery

None but ourselves can free our mind

The rest of the band walked back on stage, and they began playing No Woman, No Cry. “You have to dance this one with me,” I told Ronald. He wrapped his arms around me and I nuzzled my head against his chin. We held each other tightly as the lyrics washed over us:

No, woman, no cry.

'Cause - 'cause - 'cause I remember when a we used to sit

In a government yard in Trenchtown,

Oba - obaserving the 'ypocrites - yeah! -

Mingle with the good people we meet, yeah!

Good friends we have, oh, good friends we have lost

Along the way, yeah!

In this great future, you can't forget your past;

So dry your tears, I seh. Yeah!

No, woman, no cry;

No, woman, no cry. Eh, yeah!

A little darlin', don't shed no tears:

No, woman, no cry. Eh!

I felt the urge to cry and squeezed my arms tighter around Ronald’s neck. He tightened his arms around my waist.

I know now that I have to get up, stand up. I have to keep writing about race and culture, even when it is painful and when people wonder why I keep talking about it. I may not change anyone or anything. No woman, no cry. All I have are redemption songs.

Parenting Creativity Part 2

I’ve been thinking a lot about the arts and creativity again this week as I began to reread my memoir yet again. I hadn’t meant to reread it, but I had asked Ronald to read it again. After all, it is his story, too. When I printed it out to give to him, it felt and looked so inviting. Even as an avid Nook user, I find I still like to hold a physical book, feel the paper, and run my eyes over the words as they make patterns on the page.

As a child I loved the smell of libraries and the touch of books. Here’s a little reminiscence I wrote about one of my visits there when I was around four years of age:

A couple Saturdays a month Peggy (my big sister) walked me to the city bus stop. When the bus rolled to a stop in front of us, we climbed on board. Peggy dropped coins into the coin slot, we took seats side by side, and we rode into downtown Albany. We got off at State and Pearl Streets. Then we crossed State Street and climbed the concrete steps of the massive brick building fronted with Greek-styled columns that housed the New York State Museum of Natural History and the New York State Public Library.

 Once in a while we would turn away from the library and go into the museum. A life size model of a sperm whale skeleton hung above the entrance high in the air. We wandered through the circular paths from one exhibit to another. There were taxidermy animals set in natural habitats and wax figures of Indians sitting in long houses around campfires. One room was called the Gem Room, and each case held samples of sapphires, rubies, emeralds and diamonds. An Ellis Island exhibit portrayed immigrants arriving on US shores for the first time as my grandparents had arrived from Montemurro, Potenza, Italy: wax mannequins crowded around steamer trunks, valises, and duffle bags that fit everything they owned, awaiting check-in.

Round and round we went, stopping to look at each exhibit while Peggy read the placard describing it, lost in the enormity of time and place. Soon the gift shop would be ahead of us, and sometimes Peggy would let me pick out a tiny museum memento, maybe a tiny plastic whale or wooly mammoth or a coin purse decorated with Indian beads, to take home with us.

Most Saturdays we did not go to the museum but to the NYS Public Library. The smell of musty books overwhelmed and the quiet enveloped me. On this day Peggy left me in the children’s section while she went searching for books to please her tastes. “Stay right here and don’t move,” she whispered. But there was no way I was going to go anywhere.

The library floor was cold dark tile. I sat cross-legged on it in the middle of the aisle, my dress pulled over my knees in a triangle, with books on either side of me in long wooden four-level shelves. I smelled the books, the pungent mustiness burning my nostrils; I touched their plastic jackets, and ran my fingernails over them, scratching the surface.

The pictures held me spellbound. Some were just line drawings; others were in color; and still others seemed to jump off the page. They spilled over into the words I could not yet read, and their colors and lines were textured with movement.  Make Way for Ducklings, Madeline’s Rescue, Ten Apples Up On Top, Are You My Mother?, Curious George, Happy  Birthday Moon – I knew them by the pictures on their covers. I scrambled on my knees up and down the aisle, pulling books off the shelf, and looking for ones I hadn’t taken out before and whose covers and pages attracted me in some way.

Peggy wandered back with a few books in the crook of her arm. “Let’s pick some books to take home, just four,” she said. I knew Peggy would read to me whatever books I chose. I picked just four because I knew she would take me to the library again when the books were due and let me take out more.

We checked the books out and walked back to the bus stop on the opposite side of the street from where we had gotten off. On the bus, Peggy dropped more coins into the slot and we took our seats for the ride home. Often a visit to the library exhausted me as no other play could, and I slept with my head on Peggy’s shoulder for the duration of the ride until she roused me at our stop on Central Avenue and Locust Park. “Come on, we have to get off now, “ she coaxed.

The walk home always seemed longer than the walk to the bus stop, and my feet felt heavy as bricks. I held my books against my chest, my arms tightly wrapped around them, lest I drop one in the road. They were my treasures found.

****

This week Cara astounded me with a beautiful short memoir film, a memoir in motion. It aroused and recalled my emotions and what it was like to let my seventeen-year-old twins Cara and Mackenzie move twelve hours away to pursue intensive dance training at a conservatory. The memory elicited tears as I recalled how, that first year, Ronald and I repeatedly wondered if we had done the right thing by sending them there. I cried that first year almost as much as they did. But the film was joyful as I witnessed Cara’s exploration of how she grew to love and emulate the very teacher she had at first questioned and for whom she felt anger, distrust and dislike. The dance duet between teacher and student, and then teacher peers, is evocative and moving. I showed it to Ronald and he said simply, “It’s beautiful.” Cara intuits her way through her artistic pursuits and through life, a whimsical, beautiful, artistic being.

Here’s the link, if you’d like to watch it: http://vimeo.com/36345833.

I wanted to share a photo of Mackenzie doing the very thing I shied her away from as a child when she begged to take gymnastics – “you’ll get hurt,” I admonished each time she brought it up. But I cannot figure out the technology to include it, so I will include a short piece from my memoir describing the circus arts she now performs in addition to dance:

(From Chapter 8, Watch Our Show – possible new book title: Salt and Pepper: A Memoir about Interracial Love – let me know your thoughts on it)

We would sit through many performances over the years: piano recitals, dance recitals, dance performances at the conservatory, and then their own productions and dance films.  We went to New York City to watch Mackenzie fly on fabric that was suspended from the ceiling, secured with giant carabiners. She spun in graceful circles. Then she scaled the fabric twenty feet up, twisting and turning it around her body, the long fabric tails flipping through the air.  Near the top she released her hold and spiraled downward, the fabric unwinding as if she were a spool and it the thread. Just as it looked as if she might not stop, she did, the fabric flexing bungee-like, her back arched, her legs and arms hanging backward toward the floor, looking like a spider in a web.

*****

Ronald and I had no map to follow when we grew up as artistic people. We had no mentors. We did not know about nor have access to special schools or conservatories that can immerse one in art and where one can meet other artists. We lacked drive perhaps, to push ahead anyway, as many, many artists did and continue to do. Maybe we were too sensitive and worried too much about the response to our creative endeavors. I still worry and feel disappointment. Maybe we needed stability more than the satisfaction one gets from creating. Or maybe we were too afraid of failure or what might lie ahead. No matter though, we still live artistic lives, now maybe a little more comfortable with our artistic endeavors than we were as young adults. And we raised two artists who forge ahead, not always sure of where they are going, but who are committed to living creatively and artistically.

Parenting Creativity

I had conversations with each of my daughters this week about their artistic pursuits. I originally wrote that sentence by describing the conversations as “nice” but that isn’t accurate. They were conversations about struggle, frustration, the process of sharing work and passion, and how hard it is to be an artist of any kind. We spoke about how an artist’s work is affected by where you present your work and who sees it. They’ve watched their own parents struggle with this as well and witnessed our feelings of failure and lack of personal satisfaction. There has been growth, but if it is only internal or only at home with no audience in sight, there is a sense of incompleteness about the process.

I’ve felt my own love/hate relationship with my creativity. As a writer and a daydreamer, my creativity isolates me. Yet I feel the urge to share my writing and then oftentimes end up disappointed by rejection (one agent told me to rewrite and “tell me how you feel.” Isn’t that the clichéd counselor’s exhortation?) or arguments (family and friends telling me what I experienced and how I perceived that experience is incorrect). That’s hard to take because it is my story, my memory, my vision, my perception, and my expression of what happened and how I processed it. The feeling is innate in the telling and the choices made during that telling.

Then I think of my husband, the most creative, sensitive, and artistic person I know. He’s been a successful artist. He’s led bands and recorded music.  He is driven to try repeatedly to collaborate but each time he feels that disappointment, the failure of not reaching a shared vision, his sense that others don’t have or want the same intensity of experience, and there he is, a musician left alone with his instrument. He has told Cara and Mackenzie time and again, “Do your own thing. Don’t wait or rely on others.”

One other thing he tells them, that I agree with and often repeat, is, “Amateurs help amateurs remain amateurs.”

Cara had her own bit of wisdom to impart today, to me, her mother. I told her I was rereading my memoir, going over it again, reading it out loud, and looking for weaknesses in the structure and the writing. I said, “I’m not liking it now. I think the second half is complicated.”

“Mom,” she said. “Don’t over edit. You’ll ruin it.”

 I know that. She’s right. My story is braided and complicated. That’s how my brain perceives things, too. It wouldn’t be my story if I edited that out. I saw that as I finished reading the last few pages of the memoir out loud an hour or so ago. It’s authentic and true to who I am and the story I’ve chosen to tell about me in all its complexity. It’s not a story about just race and racism; it’s a story about two creative, imperfect people who feel the impact of differentness in a racially constructed world.

We need that differentness that we bring to the creative process, else it would just be the same artistic product over and over, like thousands of same model cars made on the assembly line.  Some are blue, some are silver, and some are black, red or white, but they are the same damn car. There would be no individuality, no authentic emotional exchange, no true sharing of culture, spirit and humanity.

Mainstream culture embraces the car theory of artistic pursuit. Find a good artist that appeals to the masses; then duplicate him or her until the masses tire and want something else. Artists don’t choose to be tragic figures, but I understand how many end up that way.

Nurture your creativity. Accept its differentness. And when it grows mature and it gives you good advice, be open to it. That’s good parenting.

(Excerpt from essay Mother Mother)

I had a terrible fight with Ma when I was fourteen. I hung out with a group of girls, all living middle class lives. They spent their weekly allowances at the mall and bought T-shirts, Snoopy and Mickey Mouse stickers, Tiger Beat, a fan magazine, and 45s with hits by David Cassidy and Bobby Sherman. I didn’t get an allowance. Ma and Dad couldn’t afford to give me one, and our house looked nothing like their houses. It was cluttered, dusty, and greasy with worn-out furniture and raveling rugs covered in animal fur over asbestos tiled floors. A film of cigarette smoke blanketed every surface.

My newfound friends enjoyed ice-skating at the tennis courts on Locust Park. Just three blocks from my house, the tennis courts were flooded each winter by the village and the skating was free. The girls kept asking when I was going to come, and I wanted to go so I would not be left out or forgotten. They had already expressed their displeasure at my eccentric behavior when I spent a sleepover at one of their houses hunkered down in the corner with the novel Knock on Any Door, by Willard Motley. They couldn’t understand how an old, moldy paperback with a torn cover, taken from Ma’s bookshelf, could possibly be more interesting than looking at a centerfold of David Cassidy in the latest Tiger Beat issue.  But I found Nick “live fast, die young, and have a good looking corpse” Romano much more intriguing. I couldn’t put the book down.

I asked Ma for ice skates, and she wandered into the cellar and pulled out a musty pair of skates from beneath a pile of junk. Peggy had used them a decade or so before. The leather was cracked and brittle, and they smelled bad. I hated them in comparison to the other girls’ brand new skates. When I put them on, the other girls sneered and said they were ugly. I had not skated before, and my ankles leaned inward and grew sore and tired within a short time. I struggled to hold back my tears and formulated my plan for getting new skates.

When I got home, I started crying. I told Ma how my ankles hurt from wearing the old skates and how much I needed a new pair. Ma lashed out at me, saying the kinds of things I was used to hearing like how selfish I was. I lashed back. Then I ran into my room, and sobbed for all I stood to lose by not having those skates.  In a few minutes, as I choked and blubbered, Ma came into my room, sat on the edge of the bed, hugged me, and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize how much the skates meant to you. I’ll find a way.”

My victory felt shallow and tarnished, but I got my skates the next day. I know now that Ma had no money for skates and was more worried about putting food on the table. And she was right I was selfish. The minute I had those new skates on, though, I forgot about it. My ankles still sagged inward and hurt, but my skates were shiny and new.

I made sure, even if I went into debt, that Cara and Mackenzie never suffered my shame. It caused fights between Ronald and me as my store credit cards hit their limits, but I never wanted them to feel unworthy. In principal I didn’t allow them to wear the more expensive popular brands that many of the middle class kids wore. It was my way of keeping them grounded, and I reminded them how some of the other kids they went to school with might never have a new winter jacket or a warm pair of boots. Each year we donated clothes they had outgrown to the school nurse, so she could give them to students who needed them. I explained that their old winter jacket would become someone else’s new jacket and that if they saw someone wearing something that used to be theirs, they should never mention it. That’s how parenting is done sometimes, as a correction of the past. It doesn’t make it better or even right, but it happens just the same.

Rumble Jumble

My brain is rolling around loose in my skull this week.  It feels like a rumble jumble up there. It’s that time of year.

It’s coming off the Christmas holiday and going on a soup diet so I can get control of my sweet tooth and my fat cravings.

It’s having a nightmare about zombie heads that roll around and kill people. And the heads were people I knew. Somehow I was able to turn a few of the heads back into whole people not infected by the zombie germ. Can’t remember how I did it though.

It’s being back at work after a week and a half off and remembering how much I have to do and feeling frightened but up for it at the same time.

It’s about getting a bug to write another essay and letting the idea cogitate while reading up on my topic of interest. The research gives me a frame of reference and helps build structure to my  “pursuit of mental rabbits” (that’s Scott Russell Sanders’ phrase) as I start to pour out all my thoughts and emotions onto virtual paper.

It’s about getting a rejection for my memoir manuscript and licking my wounds and thinking about what I want to do next, even as I work at producing more writing. I did not submit to multiple small publishers, just one, even knowing that multiple submissions would have been more efficient. But I’m not sure what I think about the publishing world and if I want to be a part of it. I’m not looking to publish the next great bestseller. I’m not trying to be a full time writer. I’m not trying to gain credentials to get a great teaching gig.

It feels hard enough sometimes to be part of the corporate world in my day job and my career is on it’s downward ride to retirement, though I’m not sure when that will be. I’m a humanist in a capitalist society. I never did fit in, and I’m not sure I want to fit in, but I believe I have something to say and a unique way of saying it. I’ll be cogitating a lot on this in the next few weeks.

It’s about racism that creeps into my life when I’m not even thinking about it. Like when I was reading about the hateful people in Alabama who talk of terrorizing people by profiling the Hispanic population. Children are frightened to go to school and adults are afraid to go to work. How is this helping? It’s helping to “take back the country.” Except the people that want it back are the descendants of those who took it in the first place. Why can’t we all just get along?

Then Ronald and I went to Best Buy. I had my purse on my shoulder and Ronald had his man bag on his. He carries his Nook and a notepad and his phone in it. It’s about the same size as a small shoulder bag for women. As we entered the store, I turned my head to smile at the greeter, an older white male, but his expression stopped me short of smiling. He looked frightened and ready to flee or press the button on his walkie talkie to notify security.

“Do you have a return?” he asked, looking directly at Ronald.

“No,” Ronald responded. He never stopped walking.

After we left the store we looked at each other.  “Really?”

It’s not like we haven’t talked about it before. One incident, and we shrug it off as someone’s mistake or bad day. But add up a whole day’s, week’s or month’s worth, and I can see how a person of color can jump down the throat of someone who asks a seemingly innocent question. Celebrities lose their freedom to shop and spend leisure time because they are constantly recognized and swarmed by their fans. If you are a person of color in America, you never had that freedom in the first place. You are always being watched. What would it take to earn the freedom to experience stress free shopping, dining out, movie going? And why would one have to earn it? Isn’t it an inalienable right of being American and being human?

Maybe I’ve had too much soup. I’ve got that rumble jumble in my brain.

(Excerpt from Chapter 7, The Ubiquitous They, Shades of Tolerance: A Biracial Love Story)

I graduated with a dual degree in English Education and Speech Communication. I took the first job offered to me after graduation –bill collector – so I could continue to stay in Syracuse. I hated it and hoped a teaching position would come along soon.

That fall I was offered a teaching position in a rural school district outside of Syracuse right during the interview. I was too inexperienced to realize that should have concerned me. My first day, a chilled November day in 1979, was disastrous. I had strep throat, and I drove the forty-minute commute with a three-day old driver’s license in my purse. A bit shaky on the highway still, I talked to myself the whole way. I arrived at the school thinking how great it was that I had survived the drive only to discover that the other teachers had walked out due to an expired contract. When they finally came back in the building an hour later, the teacher, whose place I was filling, gave me a tour. She was quitting to have a baby.

As she guided me through the crowded halls, her hand instinctively held in front of her belly, she rattled on about the students.

“A lot of the students are going to be your age,” she said.

“Oh?” I said, feeling feverish and overwhelmed.

“They come from farms, and lots drop out during planting and harvest seasons,” she responded. “And I should tell you, we don’t have a drug problem like they do in the city schools. We have an alcohol problem. Not much else for teens to get into around here.”

Oh, no, anything but alcohol, I thought to myself, trying to keep up with the perky teacher, her belly seeming to propel her forward rather than slow her down.

She pointed to a student going in the opposite direction down the corridor. “She’s from the only black family in town,” she said, as if it were special news. “We don’t associate with them.”

My head swirled and all movement around me seemed to slow and stop. I lagged behind the teacher now, and she stopped to wait for me.

“Are you okay?” she asked, looking concerned.

“Fine, I’m fine,” I said. “I’ve got a sore throat.”

“It’s the cold weather. There’s a blizzard due this afternoon. Do you plan to move here? It’ll be a lot easier for you.”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

I drove home in the blizzard, the wind howling and pushing my car sideways on the highway, my visibility near zero. But there was a blinding darkness in my mind, too, and I wasn’t sure which was worse.

Two hours later I pulled up to Peggy’s house, where I had been living again since graduation. I was exhausted, discouraged, and crying.

“What’s wrong?” Peggy asked when I came in the back door covered in snow. She was pregnant with her second daughter, and she seemed all belly like Ma had been when she was pregnant with Andy.

“I can’t go back there,” I said.

“Why? What happened?”

“They’ll be burning crosses on my car,” I said. “They don’t like black people. They’ve got no teacher’s contract. I almost died driving home. My throat is killing me.”

“Slow down. What are you going to do?”

“The only thing I can do,” I said, sucking in air and wiping my hand across my eyes, smearing mascara across my face. “Quit.”

I dialed the number to the superintendent’s office and told her I was submitting my resignation.

“You can’t quit,” she said. “You signed the health insurance form.”

“There’s no contract,” I said. “You misled me.”

“Did you get offered another teaching job?”

“No,” I said.

“Did you know it is New York State law that you have to give thirty days notice?”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll come teach for the thirty days, but that’s it.”

“Don’t bother,” She said, disgust oozing through the phone lines. “I better not find out you are taking another teaching job. I’ll have you blacklisted.”

“Do whatever you have to do,” I said, and hung up. Then I sat on the floor and cried.

“Dianne,” Peggy said, “What are you going to do now?”

“I’ll figure something out,” I said. I stood up to grab the phone and called Ronald.

“You should have stuck it out,” he said. He would, for twenty-five years, after he got on the Fire Department.

“I couldn’t.”

The next day I applied for Christmas work at J.C. Penney. I swallowed Orajel just before the interview so I could speak through an enflamed throat. Disappointment must have shown in my expression despite my best efforts.

“Don’t look so sad,” the chubby personnel manager said, rubbing his hand over his balding head. “I just offered you a job on the spot, and I don’t usually do that. The least you could do is smile.”

“I’m grateful, really,” I said, but I doubt I convinced him.

Out on the floor in the women’s accessories department, I was told to keep a special eye on black shoppers. The black undercover security guard would trail them if we called his number and let him know they were in our department. One day I told him off.

“You know,” I said, “if you stopped wasting your time chasing after all the black shoppers and followed some of the little old white ladies carrying tote bags, you might actually catch someone shoplifting.”

I continued to apply for teaching jobs and was offered a substitute teaching position that started in February 1980 at a wealthy suburban middle school. My hope was that the teacher, who was pregnant, would end up quitting and I would get the position full time. In 1980 there were too many teachers and not enough positions. The baby boom generation had all graduated from high school, and the next generation was what would come to be called the baby bust generation. Schools closed and getting tenure as a new teacher was difficult. Oftentimes substituting was a way to become known to the administrators in the case that a rare opening occurred.

I taught three English classes and one Special Skills class. Of my ninety students, only one was black. He was a small, quiet boy, maybe trying to blend in and not be noticed.

I quickly discovered how difficult it was to take over classrooms mid-year. Every comment from the students seemed to be, “Mrs. Smith didn’t do it that way.” But I was determined to succeed, and though I kept my job at J.C. Penney just to be sure, and then stayed up until 2:00 a.m. each morning reading and correcting papers, I stayed with it. That spring I moved into my own apartment.

Ronald borrowed my car one day to go on job interviews; he was still waiting to hear if he passed the firefighters’ exam. He picked me up after school had been let out. One of my students stayed late for an after-school activity and saw me getting into the car.  She must have spent the evening telling friends the juicy news. The next day she confronted me.

“I saw you yesterday,” she said, her red hair, the same color as her freckles, gathered into a half ponytail, her glasses shielding her eyes with glare.

“Oh?” I said.

“Is that your fiancé?” she asked, twirling a strand of hair. Two of her friends stood next to her, giggling self-consciously.

“Yes,” I said.

“My mother said she would kill me if I ever dated a black man,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but I already knew this was a career-ender. I imagined she had told her parents, and I had no doubt her parents, in the name of protecting their child, had called the administration. I felt my heart drop.

“Well, what do you think of that?” she coaxed.

“I think your parents have a right to their opinion,” I said. “I don’t feel the same way. I believe you love the person, not the skin color.”

“That’s interesting,” she said, and she and her friends giggled and left the classroom.