I’m writing while I sit by my husband’s bed awaiting his back surgery.
I’m writing while I drive home late at night.
I’m writing when I get up at 3 a.m. to let the cat in. Or out.
I’m writing when it looks like I’m reading. Or spacing out. Or chopping vegetables.
Because, for me, writing doesn’t look like writing until the last 10 percent.
“Genius is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.” — Thomas Alva Edison
Writing — for me — is like that, too, sort of. It’s all in my head until the last bit, which is writing it down (on paper or screen). I don’t sit at my desk and wonder what will come. I write all the time, and then sit down and let it out.
And that’s about all I have to say. Tomorrow I have an essay to write. A chapter to finish. Some poetry that is weeping my name.
Because the events of the past week — the horrific shooting deaths of nine African-Americans in a Charleston church by a young white racist, and the — maybe — final straw that will bring down the Confederate battle flag, and bring the longed-for change, I am trying to say —
Because when we were children, in the extremely white liberal suburbs of Marin County in the late 1960s, we used to say, “Eenie meenie miney mo, catch a nigger by the toe,” called Brazil nuts “nigger toes,” and when someone asked, “Where’d you get that?,” the response was, “Stole it off a dead nigger.”
Because the one African-American girl in my elementary was so beautiful, but so different from me, and the time she invited me to sleep over, I felt so strange at being the only white person in the house that I never slept over again.
Because when I was in junior high, we watched “Roots” on TV and saw the story of slavery in America, and then named our black cat Kunta Kinte and my sister’s sheep Kizzy.
Because the most strikingly odd groups at my white high school were the exchange students from Germany and Norway, or the handful of punk rockers dyeing their hair blue or green in 1979.
Because I never talked to the one African-American boy in our class, and to this day I still don’t know his name.
Because my father still says things like “black as the ace of spades.”
Because as a young adult, although I was beginning to meet people of color, of all colors, I still used to say that Richmond (CA) was where all the black people lived and was careful never to go there.
Because I married into a Nicaraguan family, I got to hear skin-toned racism as my then-husband swore at African-Americans and Afro-Hispanics.
Because I learned from them that being “pure Spanish” (white and cultured) was better than being “puro jincho” (a peasant, a country hick).
Because when I was suddenly a single mother in 1986 and went down to the welfare office to see about getting help, and was one of few white women there, in shame, I never returned.
Because when I married again, into a Portuguese family, I found myself sitting in a relative’s trailer home watching the Super Bowl in 1991, when Whitney Houston sang the most beautiful rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner,” and listening to a spew of racist slurs from the man of the house. He said he’d rather kill himself than ever hear the song sung by a black person, and I did not speak up. (But I told my then-husband I’d never go back, which was something.)
In between then and now, I grew, I learned, I opened up and am continuing to ruthlessly self-examine my words and my actions as a citizen of the human race. I don’t always succeed.
Because as I now examine my family’s American history, I find slaveholders among them, as well as casual racism in every generation (the vintage Valentine above is from my grandmother’s childhood scrapbook, circa 1910).
Because it took so long for consciousness to dawn, and for me to understand and own my own racism, I offer this apology to my African-American brothers and sisters for not speaking up before, and my pledge to be an ally going forward.
May I be as brave, some day, as Bree Newsome, who climbed the flagpole in Charleston and pulled down the Confederate flag, in seeking to change the world.
Willie Doris Upshaw Bailey, fishing — with a veiled hat and white gloves.
I spent Saturday digging through old newspapers to see what frolics my great-grandmother was up to as president of the Daughters of the Confederacy in Portland, Oregon, 100 years ago. Let’s just say there plenty of genteel hijinks that involved white women doing the Virginia Reel, reading nostalgic poetry in “slave dialect” and guest speakers telling “many clever darky stories.”
Can you tell I died a little bit inside when I read that?
I did a lot of family research while working on the two volumes of the Doris Diaries (I’ve Got Some Lovin’ to Do and Reaching for the Moon, from the 1920s). In those hours of internet and library research, some at home and some in other states, other cities, I went looking for Doris and her father for the books, and often found her mother instead. Willie Doris Bailey, nee Upshaw, was my great-grandmother, and she was a Southern lady. She left the south when she married my great-grandfather in about 1901 and they moved to Boston so he could study architecture. When he finished, they moved to Portland, Oregon, where they remained almost the rest of their lives (except for a brief stint in Phoenix in the early Depression years).
…and she caught one, too. #whitegloves #pinkiesup
And in all that time, she never lost her accent, Doris recalled. I keep reading about Willie Doris, whom I remember as a very old lady (she lived to be 99, dying in the late 1970s). And in everything I read about her – well, I’m not sure I would have liked her. She was a fervent admirer of Robert E. Lee and claimed that they were distant cousins (I have traced our names through the Sewell line and there is cousinhood there, but still quite tangled).
She was a leader in the Daughters of the Confederacy, holding teas and exhibitions to celebrate Shiloh Day and Jefferson Davis’s birthday, in Portland, decades after the war ended. She was even a DOC delegate to the veterans’ reunion in Atlanta in 1919, one of the last, since few veterans remained. She did not shrink from her heritage, not at all. She owned it like her family had owned slaves.
I follow her activities in hundred-year-old news tidbits and I shake my head in dismay. Your side lost, lady, I want to tell her. Let it go! Slavery was not a sustainable model. It was bad for everyone – and the aftereffects are still damaging today. I sit here, a California progressive, a Green Party member, looking back at my slaveholding ancestors and I have no words for the apologists. What is there to say but it’s over – and yet, just this week I have been signing petitions to tell South Carolina to take down the Confederate flag that waves over the dead bodies of nine people who were praying in a church when they were gunned down.
It remains to be seen what I will find in my quest for answers. I’m not even sure what I’m seeking. But I sense, as a West Coast native with nothing but love for my multicultural, gender-fluid, tree-hugging, pot-smoking neighbors, that I will have a pretty rude awakening ahead of me. The reckoning between what was then and what is now remains to be seen. Come along with me, won’t you, as I figure it out?
A few years ago I picked up a book at the library because of its intriguing cover and title. It was Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family.I read about Ball’s exploration of his roots, delving deeply into his family’s history as slave owners, discovering the ugly truth in his own backyard, as it were. When I finished reading this devastating portrait of Ball’s own family, it took weeks before I could read anything else. My mind was full of the revelations and secrets he had exposed.
The photo is one of very few African-Americans, possibly a former slave, taken my my grandfather Rae Bailey while visiting family in Georgia in 1924. His caption: “Old Mary — bilin’ clo’s, chile.”
Not long after, I was visiting my 93-year-old great-aunt Doris, and we turned to the topic of books. I told her about Ball’s story and offhandedly remarked, “Wow, I’m sure glad we didn’t have slaves in the family. I couldn’t live with that kind of guilt.”
“Oh, but we did,” she said.
To say that I was speechless is an understatement. Doris explained how she remembered hearing about the nine slave cabins “we” had had, a few generations before her in Alabama. She did not say slaves – just slave cabins, mind you – but there’s no getting around this one with semantics. She remembers hearing stories about them, as part of her childhood. She even brought out some very grainy photos, shadowy cabins in shadowy fields, and said, “Those are the ones.” Our slave cabins. Lovely.
Needless to say, that conversation knocked the wind out of me. It is mighty difficult to be smug and complacent about one’s own liberality when one has that kind of stain on one’s hands.
What I felt for weeks, months – for years now, in fact – is repugnance and shame. I felt tainted and helpless to do anything about it. Are the sins of the fathers visited upon the generations to follow? Is there karmic retribution for such deeds? Is there anything that can be done about my own relentless Catholic guilt, pure and simple? I didn’t know then, and I still don’t now.
But it’s a thing I live with – this knowledge that back in my family’s history there are people people who were monsters with no morals whatsoever — or people who were caught up in the mores and practices of their time. Were they confused, or stupid or evil? Or keen entrepreneurs? Or hapless folk much like us who got through their days not worrying so much about the chattel in the field, but about what was for supper, why the children wouldn’t behave and whether it would rain on the church picnic?
I pretty much get through my life like that – on one hand, worrying about the meteor hurtling toward Earth that will turn us all to dust, and on the other, why I can’t get those rust stains out of the white towels and how much easier life would be if I could find a pair of sandals that were both sexy and sensible, and mystery of mysteries, why I can execute a perfect French twist with a pencil and no mirror when washing last night’s dishes, but on important occasions my hair merely resembles the most rakish of English thatched cottages.
And then I open the newspaper – a compulsion, a hazard of the trade, a duty of the 21st-century citizen – and see the mocking grins of U.S. soldiers parading Iraqi prisoners on leashes, or standing behind pyramids made of human bodies or those forced to simulate sex acts for the camera. The faces of the prisoners are covered, in creepy pointed hoods. We can’t see their expressions, can’t know how much the scenario bothers them or not. If you can’t see faces, then you can’t see emotions, like pain, or fear. That makes it easy, doesn’t it?
And in the news reportage, everyone runs for cover – we did what we were told by our superiors, or we didn’t know that this was happening below us in the ranks, or I’m shocked and appalled that this would happen, or I’m not shocked at all; that’s what war is. We knew or we did not know, we are vile perpetrators of gross acts of torture and humiliation, or we are no worse than those we captured, or we are far better than these lowly scum because they are Iraqis and we are Americans and wasn’t Sept. 11 reason enough for you?
There is an answer in this mess, but we may never know the truth. As Pontius Pilate said to Jesus before washing his hands of blood guilt, “What is truth?” What indeed?
I do not profess to know answers to much of anything. Any rumors of knowledge or power on my part have been greatly exaggerated, and any perceptions that we, the media, have an inside clue are frankly just smoke and mirrors. So in these situations, rather than pontificator or spin-mistress, I become a parent, which is about the best I can offer.
As I tell my children, when someone tells you to do something you know is wrong, you have to have the courage to stand up and say no. Even if everyone else is doing it, if it’s wrong, it’s wrong.
If you are in charge of a project or a team or a committee or a war, and something goes wrong, you are responsible, even if you did not know that thing would go wrong. Fix it; that’s what responsibility is.
And hurting people is not OK. It’s not acceptable to use force to get what you want, to be wantonly cruel to animals or smaller, weaker people to prove a point. Bullying is wrong.
But we know all these things, don’t we? Regardless of your opinion of this war (and guess what? It ain’t over yet, despite the nicely staged announcement several months ago), despite the Vietnam comparisons and the sacrifices being made by our own Alamedans, our reservists, our family members overseas, despite dire pronouncements left and right, the brutal fact is that war is hell. People die who do not deserve to. And terrible, unspeakable things sometimes happen.
As for me, safe in my little house thousands of miles from real danger, I cannot judge those who fight it, or wage it, or win or lose it. But in this particular war, I can’t see redemption. I feel helpless and angry and plagued with guilt over what happens in my name, over how we achieve our goals and how we fail to achieve them. Curse me for a fool, but I’m just wishing we’d spent a little more time talking, or planning, before coming to blows. And I’m hoping that future generations won’t look back on us with the same sense of guilt and shame.
This essay first appeared as a newspaper column in the Alameda Sun in 2005. Modern Muse copyright Julia Park Tracey 2005.
When I was in my twenties, I remember older women telling me “just wait until you hit 30, that metabolism will slow down so much that you won’t be able to eat a saltine without gaining five pounds.” I feared that statement so much because I valued my body like every other 25 year old does. I didn’t want to give up my youthful appearance and those delicious low-rise jeans that were so unbelievably uncomfortable and grotesquely revealing. I didn’t want to be out of shape and not be able to keep up with my future children. I love fitness-I love exercising and eating healthy, but I was so scared that once I hit 30, my body would spiral out of control and leave me lazy and hungry ALL THE TIME. I listened to these women and let their own stories affect who I was.
It wasn’t until I reached about 32 that I realized that I had to stop focusing on other people’s results and start putting the effort into my own personal results. So, I continued with my fitness obsession and because I learned what I am capable of physically, it made me yearn to discover what I was capable of on other levels. Which is why I set out to complete the first novel that I had started. Once I sent my novel out to the world and realized that I could write and possibly make a career out of it, I felt as if I conquered yet another thing that people had been telling me wasn’t possible.
In my twenties, I never gave myself the option of shouting to the world “I AM UNIQUE. I AM ME.” Instead, I hid from being unique and I altered my opinions and likes/dislikes so they were in line with those around me. One thing that is unique about me is that I love exercise-I love it so much that I feel all out of sorts if I don’t get my heart rate up every day. I used to get defensive when these older women would tell me that I’m destined to be sloppy and out of shape, simply because of age-now I smile and walk away.
Being in my 30s has taught me that I may not always be right, but I know who I am and I know what I’m capable of. It has taken me a long time to realize that I need to compete with myself, not with everyone around me. I no longer let anyone tell me how to feel or think-I make those decisions confidently on my own. So bring on the low-rise jeans and pizza in moderation, because I know what I’m capable of.
EJ Hanagan writes women’s fiction with a focus on strong female characters. Her second novel, Underwater Secrets, was recently released. Alternating between generations and intertwining the stories of Claire and her mother, Underwater Secrets teaches that sometimes the key to loving ourselves involves loving the people around us, quirks and all. Set on a lake in New Hampshire in the sixties, Underwater Secrets, provides a glimpse into the past.
does. I didn’t want to give up my youthful appearance and those delicious low-rise jeans that were so unbelievably uncomfortable and grotesquely revealing. I didn’t want to be out of shape and not be able to keep up with my future children. I love fitness-I love exercising and eating healthy, but I was so scared that once I hit 30, my body would spiral out of control and leave me lazy and hungry ALL THE TIME. I listened to these women and let their own stories affect who I was.