Turbulence

It was a long day that began very early in my cozy bed with cats and husband, and alarm ringing at 3:30 a.m. The aircraft had a mechanical issue that added almost an hour to our wait time on the tarmac, and was followed by a bumpy ride, and steeplechase through Dallas-Fort Worth’s huge airport, and barely a bathroom stop before sliding into my seat on the last leg to Birmingham. The first leg was so bumpy I dry-swallowed a Xanax and it hit me in time to keep me from clawing my seat-mate as we rumbled above brown Texas, green Louisiana and Mississippi, and red Alabama. I don’t enjoy flying, and I had started the adventure with my anxiety at a 9.5 and was above 11 the rest of the day. Or twenty-11. Anyhoo, no, I did not drink a thing. It was still (too early in the) morning for a long, long time. Also, yes, I wore my mask all day. I was a lone masker in a sea of naked faces.

I found myself listening to a couple of playlists for self-soothing, and when the one I call Ebullience (for joy, excitement, energy) ended, it started up the playlist I call Rage, which has a lot of Beyonce/Lemonade in it. I put that list together after Austin died, and I needed something to accompany me as I ran, or tried to run, and get myself to do the 5K. (I only made it to a 3K, but it was still a triumph for couch-potato me.)

Nevertheless, I enjoyed listening to Queen Bey, and then the Allman Brothers came on, “Tied to the Whipping Post,” and I took a deep dive into hearing this white man/men singing about how their broken hearts were the same as the unfree being scourged into raw meat or to death. It’s a song with a lot of rage in it, and I had added it to the list for that reason back in 2019 when I was feeling a lot of rage about Austin’s suicide. But it struck me completely differently on this trip, flying right over the former slavery states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. White dude with a broken heart just doesn’t get to compare his sad day with the brutality, the enormity of 400 years of state-sanctioned violence. It is this thoughtless kind of action that I hope to purge from myself–this kind of ignorant, nonchalant racism, where a song that sounds like fun turns out to be a sick anthem. It’s hard to say goodbye to pieces of art or artists who we once admired, but if the message is toxic? It’s time for me to release my enjoyment of Southern rock (headbanger that I used to be) and try a little harder. Pay a little more attention.

Growth doesn’t come when you sit in the same chair and eat the same boogers, my friends.

Hitting the Road

Old letters and photos, sepia-tones and showing age, with an old ink pen.

I am heading out on Tuesday to the East Coast, via the Deep South, to New England, following the course of our family history back through time. I’m starting roughly where we left off with slavery, in Alabama, and working my way backward through Georgia, South and North Carolina, up to Virginia; Maryland and D.C., then up via train to Boston and the Cape. We will end up at the Mayflower II, if all goes well.

Accompanying me are my elder sister and a cousin, both of whom share my family history, and who were willing to come along for the ride. We are also planning to stop to see some bucket list places, including Chincoteague (PONIES!), Mount Vernon, Gettysburg, and a side trek to visit my brother-in-law in Maryland.

This will add several states to my list, and we are hoping to go bird-nerd crazy (my sister is an excellent birder). I already downloaded the Merlin bird packs for Southeast and Northeast USA to my phone. It is my fondest wish to see a red cardinal somewhere, some time. (Our mutual grandmother Ruth loved cardinals best, and knew them well from her Illinois and Montana childhood. I’ve never seen one.)

Red cardinal bird on the ground.
Courtesy of eBird, https://ebird.org/species/norcar
I’ve never seen one, but I hope to.

My plan is to stop at graveyards to visit ancestors, find their headstones, say hello, what were you thinking, how have you been? We would stop at houses if we could find them, but most of them are gone. There is the ruin of a mansion supposedly haunted by one of our Upshaw forebears, bitten by a rabid fox and smothered by her own servants (enslaved). We will find the plantation lands if possible, and I’ll take photos and see what it looks like now, maybe visualize what they were seeking when they stopped there. The journey has its dark side–but it’s part of my personal reconciliation and reckoning. I very recently joined Coming to the Table, an organization that helps white people reckon with and bear their ancestors’ past slave-owning. Reckon with it, because it is a story many people want to forget or rewrite. Bear it, because there is no reconciling it. Reckon — like recon, to know again, it means to count again, to account for. It’s what I’m trying to do.

Maybe it will just be a fun roadtrip. Or maybe it will change my life. I used to be terrified to travel, because when you leave your safe space (home), bad things can happen. There’s no control. #issues I have mostly grown past that, but once a Catholic, always a Catholic, even when you’re an atheist-pagan, like me. I slipped this little St. Christopher into my coinpurse because I need all the good luck and blessings I can muster.

Round silver medal of St. Christopher held in the palm of a white woman's hand.

I’m still packing. Trying not to be nervous. Mostly excited. Cemeteries and history and cousins, oh my!

The Cause of Conscience: Go Set a Watchman (Book Review, Part 1)

2015-07-19 15.29.15(WARNING: Spoilers)

I have never read To Kill a Mockingbird. This is cause for alarm among you many literate people, but you needn’t think me unlettered. In high school I read Poe, Shakespeare, JD Salinger and Carson McCullers; lots of plays, many short stories, and certainly some fat summer beach reads, too (The Thorn Birds, Jaws, Roots, Shogun and Hotel, to name a few). In college I majored in journalism and had no cause for deep American reading, and no affinity for Southern lit, but I did read Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. I went on to study early 20th-century British literature for my master’s degree, and drank my fill of Woolf, Joyce, and Orwell. I still read scads of early and mid-century Brit lit. It’s my crack. But I didn’t have Harper Lee on my radar for pleasure reading until now.

I’ll add a caveat to my preamble that I realize there is an issue with the release of Lee’s first draft/second book. I have read her biography and understand the nature of her friendship with Truman Capote, her anxiety about meeting people and the “sophomore slump” that often hits young, successful authors who feel unequal to producing as fine a work again. I also recognize that there are claims of elder abuse and mixed opinions about the role of Lee’s sister as protector or as censor. History will judge those who abused Lee’s trust, I’m sure.

With all that in mind, I set out to read Go Set a Watchman before reading TKAM, in hopes of seeing which felt the more true. GSAW was written first, as the earlier draft of TKAM, so they say, but her agent and editor did not think it would sell. Lee rewrote the story from the young Scout’s viewpoint and had a bestseller on her hands. She eventually won the Pulitzer Prize for her work. That’s pretty heady stuff.

“For thus the Lord said to me: “Go, set a watchman; let him announce what he sees.” Isaiah 21:6

It is but a quirk of fate that in the past month, there was an assassination of nine African-Americans in Charleston, SC, and the Confederate flag has at last begun to come down. The #BlackLivesMatter and #Occupy campaigns have raised the African American issue in the media — and a new generation of activists are tired of waiting for justice and equality. As well, in the past few months I have been engaged in family history research and have been grappling with my own Alabama roots and heritage of slave-owning in my DNA. White privilege? Yes. So much yes.

* * *

I opened Go Set a Watchman with virgin eyes and no idea other than generalities on what to expect. And was — riveted.

Scout as a young woman — Jean Louise — is New York City-cynical, streetwise, on vacation to Maycomb, Alabama. Her brother is dead. Her beau, childhood friend Hank, is on hand to woo her back to small-town life. Attorney Atticus Finch, whom she calls by his first name, is her father, crippled by arthritis, a longtime widower living with his pushy Southern matron sister, Alexandra. Adult Jean Louise is a sexual being, pushing the boundaries of Southern small-town mores by behaving like the child Scout; a late-night swim with her beau creates a furor. She’s also enlightened, having crossed the border into Yankee territory and lived and worked alongside a rainbow of skin-tones. She returns to find Maycomb charmingly simple, the same as always, but smaller in size and in their way of thinking. The problem isn’t that home has changed; it’s that she has changed.

The era is the 1950s and the Civil Rights movement is underway, with integration and the like on the agenda. The whites of Maycomb don’t like it, and their “citizens’ committee” looks a lot like the KKK. The N-word is thrown around with vitriol and Jean Louise is alarmed — she thinks of herself as color-blind. There is an incident whereby a white neighbor is accidentally killed by the grandson of Calpurnia, Jean Louise’s African American surrogate mother — their housekeeper as she and Jem were growing up. When Jean Louise comes face to face with a grieving Calpurnia, the young woman knows everything is different, that black and white are not the same, at least not down in Maycomb. And when she discovers her father and fiance in a citizens’ committee meeting, she realizes her whole life has been a lie.

I will say no more about the plot — too much already, perhaps. But to turn to the Atticus problem: I am familiar with the figure of righteous Atticus waving his figurative sword at prejudice and racism, despite not having read TKAM or seeing the entire movie. He shows up as a cultural touchstone in films, books, essays and news articles. The Atticus I find in GSAW is an aging man of his era; he was steeped in racism in small-town Alabama from his youth, and whatever his personal beliefs, the tint of the standard philosophy is going to seep in. I read his protests to adult Scout as plausible — he’s at the meeting to keep an eye on things. He’s in the group but not of the group. Hank is there because he wants to succeed in small town life; it would be social suicide not to participate  — plausible today but frankly, reprehensible. Atticus is a character with his own moral compass who’s dragging his feet into the new era; he is less obstructionist and certainly less vocal and violent about it than his sister or the neighbors. Is he a good guy? A bad guy? He’s a racist — but they all are. What I don’t follow is Dr. Jack Finch, Scout’s uncle (Atticus’s brother), teaching a brutal lesson fraught with bizarre classical literary references, to Jean Louise on hero-worship. That final episode seems overwrought and histrionic in the extreme. Dr. Finch is the oddball in the bunch, acting as Greek chorus to show Jean Louise her errors.

What is hard to read, especially in light of current events — and as I said above, I read a lot of novels from the early 20th century, weekly, in fact; I am used to seeing non-PC expressions like “nigger in the woodpile” or “worked like a nigger” in those dated texts — what strikes me as much harder to swallow is the infantilization of the African American race as a whole by the characters, including Jean Louise, that continues today. “The Negroes down here are still in their childhood as a people…They’re [the NAACP are] trying to wreck us,” Atticus says. While Jean Louise argues for a race’s humanity, all the characters accept the belief that the Negroes have miles to go before they sleep, even as the population is being oppressed and prevented from enjoying their civil rights (no wonder they have so far to go). I see this attitude still alive in the world today; African Americans are “that way,” are “like that,” fill in the blank as you wish. They are Different from white people, and don’t know better, and have to be protected from themselves (cue talking heads nattering about black-on-black violence instead of the centuries of causes for violence in a shell-shocked community). And the stratification endures.

As a text, as fiction, Lee’s work is stellar. Jean Louise is a thoughtful character, sympathetic and well drawn. The scenes where African American characters have agency are few and far between, despite a story that purports to have their interest at heart, but what is there is sharp and very keenly felt. Calpurnia calling Jean Louise “Miss Jean” for the first time upon the girl’s menarche, or Calpurnia’s silence when Jean Louise arrives to commiserate over the tragedy, speaks volumes about the strict racial divide. Hank’s unsuitability as a mate for Jean Louise, the class division of this same society, is portrayed in the subplot. Setting, language, dialogue, plot and characters are beautifully crafted for a first novel, and I am in awe of Lee’s youthful skills.

Where the book fails for me is the denouement, the confrontation between Scout and her father. I don’t think it works. The strange tutelage of Uncle Jack feels dropped in from another planet. I have trouble following his Red Queen logic, and so does Scout, for that matter. And I certainly don’t buy the neat reconciliation that ends with Jean Louise remembering not to bump her head on anything difficult in life, like racism in her town, or her beau’s KKK connection.

2015-07-19 15.30.45
Ophelia has thoughts on being black and white, but prefers to leave it to the reader. #catsofwordpress

I have not yet cracked the spine of TKAM. I look forward to reviewing that story, and then, comparing and contrasting the two, side by side, as an author’s oeuvre and as documents of our national racist heritage.

Your thoughts? Tell me.

Because I Haven’t Known What to Say

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 Scan0029my 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.

As we all are, I am a work in progress. May my movement be forward, never backward. It’s not about guilt. It’s about being accountable and owning our history.

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.

Three Writing Lessons from Life

I’m in the midst of promoting one book and writing another, but, as is the way with life, other projects and adventures get in the way. And yet, they all lead back to writing, somehow.

2014-11-29 20.09.33Take our grand-dog, for example. I’m not a dog person; I am most definitely a cat lady. But the more time I spend babysitting Peanut, who’s a puggle (pug and beagle mix — who looks like a boxer!), the more dog-person-y I become. I take him for walks, I chat with him, I use a special “Peanut voice” when in conversation with him, I make sure he has water and a snuggly place to sleep, and so on.

I think I’m “not a dog-person” but, according to my Facebook friends, I am. I’m doggier by the day.

When I was writing Veronika Layne Gets the Scoop, I was pretty sure I was writing a chick-lit romance. Sex and the City! Hot sweet love! I like romance, but not so much on reading mysteries and suspense. I like a good love story. Who doesn’t?

But when the publisher set the BISAC codes for the book, I found that I had written a mystery-suspense-thriller.

I don’t read mysteries. I don’t write them. I don’t even like them. Except sometimes (Dick Francis horse racing thrillers). I filled in my love story with the adventures of a young reporter. That part kind of took over, until the romance was just about ten percent of the total story. The publisher said it no longer counted as a romance.

So apparently I wrote a thriller. And apparently I like dogs. One dog. Just this one. There’s a surprise.

2014-07-26 16.12.05In another example, we bought a crack house last summer. Not that we wanted a crack house, but it was a troublesome entity in the neighborhood, and out of frustration over tenants who trashed the place, we offered to buy it from the landlord, and, to our shock, he agreed. We suddenly found ourselves with another fixer-upper (koff, gasp, wheeze). We have been working our way through permit-red tape all through fall and have been having a survey done of the property.

We just found out a few days ago that the house is actually partially built on the neighbor’s land. Since 1940, that is (koff, gasp, wheeze). We kind of eminent domained, unintentionally. Once again, we thought we had one thing, and we ended up with another. We had plans. Big plans. And the map has changed. If that doesn’t sound like your latest writing project, then you must have a better plan than I do.

I’ve got a third example, and it isn’t pretty. I’ve been watching the events of Ferguson and New York, and everywhere else where there is police brutality, gun violence, and racism. A lot of arguments have played out in the streets, on Facebook, in the news, between friends and among family members. I’ve blocked people and rebutted trolls, tried reason and logic, written passionate replies and stood my ground. And I fear this is not going to end soon, though perhaps it will end well.

I am trying to have faith about progress of the human race.

Where this leads me is to truth. Truth can be ugly, but it’s better to see it than to hide it. It’s better to speak it than to lie.

Ernest Hemingway said ernest hemingwayof his work that as long as he could write one true thing every day, he felt that he was progressing. I am well aware of my privilege and intend to make use of whatever bully pulpit comes of it. It is my intention to write truly. The mot juste. The truth about whatever story or lesson comes my way.

Follow these examples in your writing:

  • Dig deeper and find out who you really are.
  • Let go of the road map and deal with what is.
  • Look at — and tell — the truth, however painful.

And let that be a lesson to you.