I'm not as good at this as Perrin and I don't bother to polish words - no time --
I took last Friday off to do some errands that necessitated visits to government buildings, only to learn that they were all closed for Jackson-Lee Day.
What. The. Fuck?
Christ. It was established long ago, so it wasn’t some bizarro retaliation for Martin Luther King Day. But still . I stood there staring at the sign on the DMV’s door, muttering, “This is just wrong.” Guy next to me laughed and said, “You’re new in town, huh?” I thought, “Dewd, you’re here too, so whatchya talkin’ ’bout?”
Bizarrely, the day I read Ilyka Damen’s commentary, I went to the 1st floor to chill. There, I ran into Antonio, a guy I’d met the day before. I was having a hard time not bawling about what I’d read and dewd says, “Look Shag. I can tell you’re a smart person. Intelligent.”
I fought the urge to turn around and flee, wondering what the hell I did during small talk conversation about him, being new, what kind of job he did, his wife, his kid, and being poor and struggling to, somehow, ‘make it.’ WTF did I say that made him think that? I suck, I thought. I can’t even engage in small talk without sending off the wrong signals. R says it’s the way I articulate words, my handling of language, not that the words I use are “big” or “hard”. Which makes me laugh because, normally, I think of myself as being inarticulate in contrast to the smooth mastery of proper English exhibited by others from upper middle class homes.
I just don’t know what I do wrong.
Antonio snaps me back from my thoughts, and I focused on trying not to bawl, pretending that the tears in my eyes were just part of an oncoming cold. The sniffles. “Tell me something. What do you do when you feel like you don’t know something? When you know you have to learn something new and you’re scared because it’s hard? I’m trying to make something of myself, get out of Mcdonald’s. I can’t support my kid. There’s got to be something besides McDonald’s. But I’m struggling here.”
I wanted to cry again as I choked back the truth. When I had no one to teach me to drive and was too proud to ask, I got a book from the library. When I wanted to learn but couldn’t go to college, I got books out of the library. When I didn’t understand something or was thrown into a world where I had to struggle or die, I found a book to help me figure out what to do. I talked to people of course — who often told me about books I should read. Then there was that first summer at the truck stop, where my boss and his son filled my head with books to read and provided me that warm embrace of actual conversation about those books: “Did you read Gravity’s Rainbow yet Shag? No? You went for the Russians instead?”
So, I thought: fucket. What else can I say but what I know and do? I told him what I do to learn. I told him, “Yeah, I don’t know what you’re trying to learn, but here’s my number and email. Ask me any time you need help. I know, there’s probably not a book on how to figure out the program you’re struggling with in the sales dept. I don’t know what that program is, but I’m here if you need to ask.”
I related stories of struggling. Of feeling up against a wall of indecipherable programming languages and man docs that terrified me because girls aren’t supposed to be good at that stuff, as Mr. M and Mr. Q told me in grade school right up through my last year of high school. I told him about my partner, struggling with new material, reading a book several times until one day he said, “OH. I’ve read this three times and didn’t get it. Now, I’m reading it again and it makes sense. Why didn’t I get it the first time. Do you know why that is?”
No. I don’t. I know the experience, though. Of having to read over and over to get it. And most often, of only really understanding when I talk about it or write about it. Hence, the hunger for others with whom to share the new learning. Hunger kills, though, as I’ve learned.
Antonio was talking about how hard things were, about the challenges he felt. We talked about how school makes us feel stupid, especially if “they” in their infinite wisdom think that, because you’re on the wrong side of the tracks, you can’t learn certain things. He nodded and his eyes brightened up and he said, “Oh, I’ve been there Miss Shag. I know just what you mean. And I think about it all and I remember that it’s like Martin Luther King. He probably had it hard. Not probably. He did have it hard. He was up against things that, even a black man today isn’t up against. He did it. So can I.”
I didn’t know what to say. Part of me was, “Sure. You go! Go in to work early, stay late. Figure it out. You’ll succeed and thrive. you will!” And the other part was, “That’s just not fucking enough. What he’s up against. What so many of us are up against. I just can’t be fixed by hard work, unpaid overtime, smiling in the face of struggle, bootstrapping it. It’s just not true. He might make it. I might make it. But then there are those left behind, or who fall down the ladder.
What the fuck do I say?
I mumble about how it was part of a long process, there was community that worked on the issues for decades. But I ratchet this back. No one needs a white chick telling them about that.
Today, we talked politics for awhile. He wanted to know if it was true about Bush and a tax cut for singles and married. I didn’t know. Hadn’t yet read the news. I said, “Oh Bush needs something to make him smell like a rose after this war.”
Antonio laughed and said, “I don’t know much about politics ”
I said, “But you are reading more news than I have today
What do you mean?”
“But in my life time,” he continued, “Besides John F Kennedy, the guy who’s done the most for people like me is Clinton. I don’t care about fat cats who got money. You got more money than me, I don’t care about your problems. I want to know what they’re going to do for me.”
“But do you think any of them will do anything for us at all?” I ask.
He grinned and nodded acknowledgment and I wondered, should I knock down his enthusiasm for politics like that? I’m old enough to be his mother, probably. And I asked him about Clinton’s attack on welfare after he rambled off stuff about Clinton raising the minimum wage, bringing up jobs, balancing the budget.
And of course he said that there needed to be controls on that. Some people really do need it. “Like me,” he said. “My family needed welfare. But they wouldn’t take it. They went to work, instead. Maybe there’s been times when I could have used it,” (lots of luck, I thought. Clinton killed it.) “but there are some people who just don’t want to work. They been on it for too long. They aren’t trying to get off it. They don’t want to work like my folks.”
I kept listening, understanding what he was saying and, therefore, shutting up because who am I to tell a young black man trying to make his way in the world what and how he should think. It'd just be a know-it-all white chick who’d speak and, in that sense, devalue what he sees as his experience. Or maybe he’s had no such experience with folks on welfare at all. I don’t know. But in any case, I smiled and listened and considered what he was saying. It’s not like it’s the first time I’ve heard it. It was the common theme when I taught night school at an urban extension campus at my uni.
*sigh*
so, I’ve read an edited collection from Merri Lisa Johnson, Jane Sexes it Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire, about half the essays in David Roedinger’s collection, Black on White; Black Writers on What it Means to be White, and a book I saw on the new book shelf, Earl Ofari Hutchinson’s The Latino Challenge to Black America. I’m about a third of the way through and, while the topic isn’t new (teaching in the urban extension campus opened my eyes to that, not to mention my former co-worker who, at times, made me want to quit my job in disgust), some of the factoids he raises were eye-opening, particularly the black-on-Latino and Latin-on-black violence he describes. Aiyiyiyi.
Also delved into Mattilda (aka Matt Bernstein’s) Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity.
gotta fly.
p.s. I also read The Problem with Diversity and to utter silence on this godamned discussion list!
shag
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