On Race (or, White People are Awkward)

In North Carolina, people are going to talk to you in line at the grocery store. This is a form of communication that I once abhorred, small talking with strangers about the contents of my cart. I’ve gotten over it. In the South, strangers are not so strange when they feel like they have something to share. I was buying a half a watermelon at the Piggly Wiggly when an older couple behind me asked the price. I told them it was three dollars, and the woman said, “Oh no, child, you need to go get you one of the whole ones. They’re just four dollars.” Before I could object, the man took my half watermelon and high-tailed it to the produce section to replace it with a whole. He returned in 30 seconds with a huge watermelon, rolled it gently into my cradling arms.

“Thanks,” I said. “Jeez, I don’t know if I’ll be able to eat this whole thing by myself before it goes bad.”

The woman said, “Oh heck, just share it with your neighbors or your friends at church.”

I nodded, filed this idea somewhere in my mind and came home and hacked the sucker in half. I recalled the suggestion of the couple in line, just share it with your neighbors, and thought, “Yeah, that’s a really nice thing to do. I’ll do that. I’ll share this with my neighbors.”

I live on the second floor of a building that was constructed sometime in the 1930’s, with two mirror-image renovated apartments upstairs, Clay and I occupying one and our best gay husband, Barry, living in the other.

Below us in a rear apartment lives a guy who doesn’t often speak to me, but does talk to Clay and Barry. For the record, his unwillingness to speak to me seems to have less to do with any sort of contempt or disregard for women, but rather, he seems like the kind of youngish-man who is still sort of scared to talk to girls, which is fine with me. He wears camo every day (unless he’s going shirtless), talks about being a professional boxer, thinks people are breaking into our building all the time (as evidenced by his calling the police so many times for imagined reasons that I heard them once firmly ask that he stop calling them. And, yes, I was totally eavesdropping from my deck), and it was his chew spit can that spilled all over me when I took out his recycling. He’s a polite odd fellow who I wave at, who returns the wave, but that’s largely the extent of our interaction.

The street-facing space in our building is a beauty shop called Natural Creations catering largely to African-American clientele, owned and operated by a lovely woman named Pam, who is always friendly and warm when I see her. 

During the day, when I’m at home being a starving artist, the building is largely quiet save the soft music from Pam’s beauty shop, which sometimes drifts from her door up through the open windows of my apartment. And since it was mid-day, and since I could faintly hear music and conversation from outside drifting into my window, and everyone else was at work, I thought, “Share with your neighbors, yeah, great idea . . . who’s home? Pam’s working downstairs. I’ll take this half watermelon down to Pam.”

I covered the exposed half of watermelon with plastic, put the whole thing in a grocery bag, and made it half way down the stairs before I stopped mid-step.

Am I seriously about to walk into a black-lady beauty shop with a half a watermelon and say, ‘Hey, I thought you’d like this.’?? Pam doesn’t know me very well, and who knows how many customers she has in there, and am I really gonna be a white person walking into an African-American owned business with half a watermelon and nothing else to say for myself? I can’t share this watermelon like that!

This is a testament to how fucking awkward white people are, even very progressive, very supportive, very informed about race, white people. I sat in my kitchen thinking about how awkward I was being about this fucking watermelon.  I love black people. I love black music, I love black art. I love thinking about race in terms of politics and culture and society and history. This is my thing! I teach African-American Literature, for jangus’s sake. I’ve kept a race journal and made my students keep a race journal, documenting for a period of time each instance that the issue of race is brought to their attention. I own books by Cornell West and Michael Eric Dyson and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and I’ve actually read them. Why am I being so god-damned weird about this half a watermelon?

A few days later, Barry mentioned a vehicle he saw while making his commute from nearby USMC- Cherry Point, where he teaches an English course. “It was one-a those big ol things, those big trucks that are extra wide and extra loud. And in the back there was a big American flag on one side of the bed, and just as prominently, a Confederate flag on the other side.”

“Why does that surprise you?” I asked.

“Because they’re Marines. They’re supposed to all be brothers. Closer than brothers. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

“It’s because they don’t know any better.” I said.

“How can people not know any better, in this day and age?” he asked.

This is what I told him. This is what I’m telling you, readers, this is what I’m telling myself and this is what you need to know, perhaps not what you want to know.

I think MOST people are not racist in their hearts. There are obvious exceptions . . . the Klan, Neo-Nazis . . . but those people aren’t reading my blog anyway. MOST people aren’t racist, but MANY people do and say racist things because they don’t know any better. They’ve never had cause or occasion to seriously consider the experience of people outside their own race. In fact, most people don’t frequently consider the human experience for most people outside their own tribe . . . immediate family, extended family, family friends, church families, and so on in concentric circles outside of one individual.

When white people say things like “C’mon, the Civil War ended a hundred and fifty years ago. Slavery is not an excuse for trouble in the black community.” I have always been the first to jump in and try to correct them: What about the legacy of slavery? What about the post-Civil War removal of Union troops that resulted in demoralizing and humiliating and unjust Jim Crow laws that affected every black citizen? What about lynchings? What about church bombings? What about poll taxes and voting exams? What about contemporary redistricting? What about continued police brutality? What about the exploitation of blacks in the entertainment industry?

These types of rebuttals frequently fall on deaf white ears, and I never understood that until recently. Why can’t the average white person take all of this information and develop a greater understanding for the experience of people of color who are living right beside them? The answer is this: they don’t HAVE to. The system is constructed in such a way that white people don’t often have to consider the experience of people of color, because they’re taught to believe that all people are equal but are given no further information. Honestly, try hard to recollect the middle and high school lectures and units we studied on the Civil War. One or perhaps two days are spent on the subject of slavery, and that’s it . . . moving on . . . in fact, let’s just skip ahead to WWI. (P.S. I have a similar argument regarding Vietnam, but that’s a story for another blog.)

I don’t want to sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, even though to some degree, I probably am, but I suspect sometime in the very near future, Americans are going to have no choice but to get it together. We have lived in an infinite growth culture in an environment based on finite resources for far too long. This is the end of the American Empire as we know it, and soon, the things that keep us divided are going to have to evaporate, or we’re not gonna make it.

And white people in particular (god love em and I am one) are going to need a crash course in how to empathize with people of color. And we all need a lesson in patience and a desire to connect instead of isolate ourselves and our tribes from one another.

I want America to consider this: Think about our country and the people in it as one family. That sounds really woo-woo and hippy-ish, but wait, I’m not finished yet. Imagine that within our family, there was a deep, dark, dirty secret. Imagine that long ago, Daddy used to beat his kids, beat his wife, keep them locked up, separated us from one another, made us do things we didn’t want to do, made us work for no pay, had sex with his daughters and sired children with them. Imagine he set up rules that applied to only some of his children, not all, and that those rules denied the children their basic human rights. Imagine your brothers and sisters were hung from trees for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Imagine all of these horrors and THEN imagine that suddenly the family says, “Ok, all that is over, and we just aren’t going to talk about it.” Imagine how fundamentally fucked up that family would be, having experienced unimaginable horrors for generations that they aren’t allowed to talk about or consider relevant. Imagine, as a family, that we just didn’t talk about all that shit that went down, all the things that continue to go down as a direct result. Generations of the family would briefly mention the subject, but only when absolutely necessary, and expect that everyone in the family should abide by this example.

After some time, those least affected by the horrors of the past will forget them. It will not be part of their family narrative. After some time, that family history will be distilled down to ‘America had slaves, it was horrible, Lincoln freed the slaves, Martin Luther King fought for Civil Rights, and Obama is president.’

But for the members of our family who were MOST affected by the horrors of the past, the legacy is different. Legalized slavery may have ended in 1865, but we have continued to foster the unbalanced power between whites and minorities through systemic inequalities. That is an inarguable fact. If you are a white person reading this and you’re seeking an argument that illustrates somehow that there aren’t systemic inequalities in American culture, then please ask yourself why you would like to believe that there aren’t.

We need to stop talking about ‘colorblindness’ with regard to race. I question whether or not the phenomenon actually exists in a racial context, but even if it does, colorblindness is just another form of blindness. And who wants to be blind? We need to LOOK. Look at what we’ve done to ourselves. Acknowledge our shared history. See what happened within our family over the last three hundred years or so and say, “Wow, we really fucked up.” Examine our past and our present with open, color-filled eyes. Take it in. Cease to be a fearful bystander in a community that is flawed. Enter into your own discomfort and come out a more thorough person on the other side.

And black sisters and brothers, know this. . .  most white people don’t know any better. They just don’t. It is easy to be exasperated with us. We ask you stupid questions and do stupid things like try to touch your hair. Please try to be patient with us. Most white people have a vague understanding of the black experience, at best, and know that when people do and say racist things that it may not mean that they ARE racist. More likely, no one has ever explained HOW the thing they said or did WAS racist. The guy with the Confederate flag on his truck might not have any sort of prejudicial feelings toward minorities, but has been the recipient of largely awful sources of information. It is certainly not the job of enlightened people to teach the ignorant, but in an effort to make America a better place, we’re all gonna have to do some time connecting with people who just haven’t had occasion to consider the experience of other human beings.

We’ve spent centuries creating little divider tabs for ourselves. We are woman or man, we are religious or not, we are white or black or Asian or Native or Latino, we are democrats or republicans, we are feminists or anti-feminist, we are Jews or gentiles, and of those gentiles, there are like 200 sub-categories: Methodist, Catholic, Baptist, Episcopal. Or we are Muslim or Hindu or any other of the various underrepresented religions in America. We are pro-life or pro-choice. We are athletes, or cosplayers, strippers, or gamers, potheads or rockabilly rude boys. A time is coming when we have to start putting ourselves back together instead of ceaselessly dividing, a time when we need to stop senseless divisions and open our eyes to the richness around us, a time for us to stop being a problem-based culture constantly seeking to place blame on one group or another, and begin a cultural shift based on solutions and shared pursuit of happiness. It’s coming fast, and soon there will be no time to dissolve the fences between us. Better we become truly united by each of us making a concerted effort to see, to look into the faces of everyone and feel connected by our shared experience, with all its failings and flaws, and still support one another and help one another and re-establish an idea of neighborhood and know that we are all part of the same tribe.

A View: a Mini-Trenches Manifesto

I was going to go for a walk, no destination in mind, those kind of childhood walks we took before someone taught us that everything should only be done for a particular purpose. One of the spiritual gurus I fan-girl out on sometimes, Teal Swan, is a big proponent of these walks, and she looks fabulous all time. In New Bern, one doesn’t have to walk far to encounter something pleasing to the eye, or haunting to the eye, or otherwise notable to the eye. This place was founded in 1710. It’s got some old bones to rattle.

 I pulled on shoes and sunglasses and set out for a walk with the following rule in mind: I will not predetermine my destination. But somewhere in the recesses of my noggin, I knew I’d probably walk down Pollack St. and poke through the English and French gardens at Tryon Palace (North Carolina’s colonial capital), maybe snake through quaint downtown storefronts and restaurants, peek in at galleries (of which there are an unusually large number for a town of 29,000 people), poke around graves in the 18^th century cemetery, end up down at the waterfront and read clever names of boats passing by, or look for turtles sunning themselves on the rocks, or try to get close enough to the mallards to see the colors of the feathers on their heads up close, because its iridescence reminds me of gasoline floating in puddles and it weirds me out that something found in nature could remind me of something so unnatural. Or I could watch seagulls eat something disgusting washed up in the pools on the banks of the place where the Trent and Neuse Rivers meet and make way to the Atlantic Ocean some miles east. It’s not a bad place, aesthetically speaking.

While I had no good reason for my walk, no appointment to make, no errand for which I was responsible, I know that when I take off on these spontaneous wanderings, I’m going to think about writing. More likely, I’m going to think about things that I want to write about. Most likely, I’m going to think about my life as if I weren’t the one living it, but the biographer of the person living it . . . the one making a distant observation of this character that is living this life. This is a characteristic I’ve finally realized about myself. I feel like my life has been lived and simultaneously constantly observed by two different people. I’ve probably said this before, and it’s something I’ve certainly examined in my writing for years, but something human I’ve learned this go around is that I should be trying to reconcile the person who gets up in the morning and does the things she does and the voice in my head that is constantly remarking on those doings. On my walks, I ultimately start thinking about my daily living while concurrently constructing some story around it to discern some grander meaning of life. If at this point in my explanation, you find yourself wondering: “What the hell is Jacks going on about now?”, rest assured, you’re not alone. These thinkin’ walks sometimes turn my head into an MC Escher drawing. My brain, examining my brain, and from a distance also designing some story that makes my brain connect to the brains of everyone in the universe. There’s some brain-on-brain criticism that goes on, a lot of René Descartes I think, therefore I am happening.

Thinkin’ walks tend to start with an itch in my soul, something I need to let percolate without the distractions of housework or cat poop or mail-to-be-opened nonsense that I typically allow to interfere with my creative life. And today marks the 4^th day characterized by my sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, waiting on news from a job interview last week. I feel like a homely, hope-filled gal waiting for a prom date to call. If I could get out of the house, I could stop feeling that way. I could also shift my focus from how deeply silent my apartment is, void of the children chattering, the background blue buzz of the television, the sound of Clay’s guitar from the porch. I’ve been here for almost a year, and still haven’t grown accustomed to the quiet. I miss my kids, who are starting another year of school in Columbia tomorrow, and I’m shattered inside that Mommy isn’t there to be a part of that. I miss my husband, who is surely sleeping in a Marine Corps barracks in Iwakuni, Japan right now, our time difference being exactly 13 hours. He’ll call when I’m nearly asleep, when he’s just beginning his day. 

His deployment came as quite a surprise, although it certainly shouldn’t have, and it somewhat derailed a lot of our plans—moving to a larger place, kids relocating out here before the school year began. At the same time, a lot of these plans have been delayed by my inability to find a full-time job in Eastern North Carolina. The closest large city, Wilmington, is still an hour and a half away. This region of the country is speckled with small, old coastal settlements, most of which haven’t grown much past the 50,000 mark in terms of population. New Bern is probably called “the city” by residents of the numerous tiny towns that surround it, most of which have populations under 1000. There aren’t a gaggle of opportunities for employment for a gal like me. I’ve been working in higher education in one way or another since 2002. I’ve been teaching since 2007. I know books. I know literature. I know writing and love and music and people and world events and pop culture and joie de vivre, but that’s about where my skill sets end. It’s been a struggle. The thinkin’ walks help me avoid an overly-critical shame spiral that ultimately results in my needing a glass of wine and a soft bed to just sleep through a real sad patch of time, call a mulligan on that day and start over again the next.

I miss my girlfriends and having people to go to lunch with, I miss my writer friends, who remind me why I call myself a writer, and why I hold onto that identifier.  I miss having a garden, I miss my backyard and my bathtub. And if I had to stay in this apartment one more second, I was going to veritably lose my shit. I had to scratch this nagging at my ear, the pulling of my shirt tail to the world outside to get out of my inside headspace and into my outside headspace.

 I made it to the stairs leading to the ground floor of the building and remembered that tomorrow was trash day, so I retreated to the kitchen again to swing the bag over my shoulder as I headed downstairs. I figured as long as I was taking my trash down, I should roll the city garbage cans to the curb. And while rolling them to the curb, sweat already beading on my forehead in the Carolina August heat, I thought that while I was taking the garbage out, I should take the recycling out, too, just to get it out of the way. Certainly after a long, sweaty walk, the last thing I would want to do is take the recycling out. So I consolidated the recycling materials in the three different bins our building is allocated. And while I was dumping my neighbor’s bin, one of his chew-spit cans tumbled out of the bin and spilled down my leg, gooey brown slime sinking into my shoe and between my toes. I gagged and ran back upstairs, hiking my leg up into the kitchen sink, shoe and all, to scrub his chewing tobacco refuse off my toes.

Those who know me intimately know that sometimes I get the gags from things that gross me out. Bear Grylls eating giant grubs and drinking liquid squeezed from elephant poop have sent me to the toilet for a vomitus review of my lunch. A story a girl told me once about a Japanese porn involving eels and a funnel and her words made me ralph, sight unseen. . . I threw up just imagining the image. I could watch someone having brain surgery or a hip replacement, I can stomach blood and guts and gore, but there are things in this world that are just Jackee-Bugaboos, and it turns out that having the contents of a spit can splashed on me is one of them. While I upturned the whole bottle of dish soap, indiscriminately squeezing it on my foot and lower leg, the underlying aroma of sun-baked tobacco spit hit my nose and pressed my bugaboo button, and I leaned forward and puked into the sink.

I was hot and sweaty and dirty and I’d already puked, and I hadn’t even left the house yet. This is when that veritable shit-loosing happened. 

In a cranky temper-tantrum fit, I dried off my leg and ripped off the dress I was wearing. It wasn’t likely sullied with the spitty mix, but I didn’t even want to chance smelling that smell again. I pitched it into the laundry and flopped face-down on my bed in my underpants. The brain I had planned on having a hearty think with started in on me . . . everything sucks, I miss everyone, I hate this town, I’m sad, I’m lonely, I miss my family, I can’t get a job, my education is useless, I’m impoverished, I’m a terrible mother,  I’ve made so many mistakes, I’m a shitty person, I regret being a shitty person, I can’t do anything right, I’ve failed at everything, I’m an idiot, I can’t even go on a thinkin’ walk without it getting all screwed up. . . you get the idea.

I folded my hands on my pillow, rested my chin on top of them, and stared out the window. This vista from my little apartment gives the onlooker a view of the Mexican Bakery across the street, and the AT&T cell phone tower just beyond it. I noticed that if I squinted my eyes, the tower’s design could look like that of any other tower. If my eyes crop a little square of that otherwise ugly thing (and sometimes reminder that everyone everywhere is spending way too much time on their phones), my brain could pretend it was a much cooler tower. And then I remembered something: A few years ago I spent a couple of hours on a Parisian real estate site, gazing through the monitor at quirky studio apartments in neighborhoods like Montmartre, imagining how amazing it would be to have just six months of peace and quiet in one of those little domiciles, a place of peace and quiet where I could get some real writing done for just a little while.

It’s representative of how my life seems sometimes like a giant practical joke I’m always playing on myself. Back when my life seemed ‘normal’—house, kids, husband, groceries, garden, school activities, and work and work and work—I longed for just some time to get my shit legit, to richly wallow in my writey-hole, to have no other responsibilities to tend to so I could just dive into the world that surfaces when I sit down with a pen (or keyboard, whatever) and let things unfold for me. Here I was, suffering myself the slings and arrows of my own relentless criticism, and it’s like the universe was telling me, “But remember that little Parisian apartment you wanted with a view of the Eiffel Tower? Remember that time you wished you could just write for a while without distraction?”

I got an email from the kindly hiring committee. They said I nailed the interview. They said it was a delight to have met me. However they have chosen a candidate with more experience with non-profit accounting. The thing is, I knew this already. I just knew that though I’d pretty much smoked that interview like I was getting paid for it, I knew that it wasn’t right for me. Besides, I’d read my tarot cards three times, each time getting the same answer that this particular job is not for me, and that I knew that I should be doing something else. 

Prior to the interview, I’d written a Facebook post saying something like: “Dream Job Interview. Wish me luck.” But to tell the truth, no job is my dream job. I dream about not struggling financially, I dream about finally having all of my family in one place, I dream about being fulfilled by the way that I spend my days . . . but that job, that’s not my dream. I don’t dream about a one-hour commute to-and-fro every day, I don’t dream making sure my tattoos are covered lest someone think I’m some sort of trollop, I don’t dream about spending 40+ hours a week working to just have some leisure time, none of which would be spent on writing. These are not my dreams. I dream about getting paid to be myself, I dream about saying things, writing things that people find meaningful. I dream about wearing whatever I feel like wearing that day. I dream about work and pleasure not having such a definitive border between them.

The impetus of starting a blog was to just write the things about the human experience that I notice, to tell the same stories that I would tell to my friends or whoever is willing to listen. It was writing I could do between bigger writing projects. I feel like at this point I owe you an explanation about the title of this blog: Hot in the Trenches. I've been asked, but never really publicly addressed it. 

 “In the trenches”, draws upon the connotation of battle, because it seemed everyone I knew was fighting some kind of battle, enduring some long war with themselves and with the lives that they are living or the choices they make, and I thought that my own battles, my own ongoing war, might resonate with someone. When someone says: “It’s hot in the trenches” they’re indicating that the battle is raging, that heavy fire breathes down the necks of the grunts on the forefront. We are the grunts on the forefront, trying to figure it out as we go along. But I hope to evoke the double-meaning of the word ‘hot’. Hot like sizzling, hot like sexy, hot like “I know it’s shitty in here, but we all still look fabulous.” 

I want the entries of this blog to remind everyone that though we are all in battle of some kind or another, we can still be fabulous. We can still be who we are. We can still feel joy, and wonder, and marvel at the sheer humanity of everything around us. We can find delight in things just outside our window, even if they weren’t the things we expected. That’s what I want to do with these little things I share with you. Despite the heat and humidity, despite the tobacco spit running down my leg, despite the fact that my long thinkin’ walk didn’t get me past the end of my driveway and that my once fantasized-about apartment doesn’t overlook the Eiffel Tower, but an AT&T cell phone tower, despite the fact that I’m still unemployed, I somehow manage to delight in the absolute weirdness being a human allows.

When I’m feeling bad about myself, particularly if I’m feeling bad about myself as an artist, I watch “The Mindscape of Alan Moore.” If you haven’t seen it, even if you aren’t a typical fan of the graphic novel genre, I still highly recommend watching it, especially if you are a writer or artist of some kind. It serves as a much needed pep talk in those dark nights of the soul we all traverse.

With regard to traditional employment, Moore says this: “I found myself working at a skinning yard and tannery . . . I got expelled from that job after a couple of weeks for smoking dope in the men’s room, which wasn’t improving my career curve any. The next job I was able to get was that of a toilet cleaner at a hotel, and it more or less went downhill from there until I finally ended up as a comics writer.”

This took the sting of the job-rejection away, a little. Moreover, it’s an encouraging reminder that entering into an endeavor like being a writer might look like a battle. But I have a room of my own, with a hilariously gross misrepresentation of the Eiffel Tower just beyond, a constant reminder that I can create my own reality and play practical jokes on myself from somewhere in the ether. I have nothing but time to write until something else happens. So keep reading, I’ll keep writing. And remember that despite your battles (and you have them because we all have them), stay fabulous. Stay hot. Let it roll over us in so many waves, reminding us we’re alive.