In the winter of 2015, Starbucks tried to get its patrons to talk about race.
Across the country, baristas in the iconic coffee shop slapped a black-and-white sticker onto cups: “Race Together.” They initiated dialogues; they committed publicly to hiring ten thousand disadvantaged youth and to open more stores in low-income neighborhoods. Their stock rose. Critics claimed the coffee franchise giant just wanted free publicity. Others said it was a trite way to talk about race. Still others mocked Starbucks’ efforts and suggested they should tackle income equality instead — including the fact that a twenty-ounce latte at Starbucks costs nearly one hour’s pay for a minimum-wage worker.
Starbucks says it ended its “Race Together” campaign in March 2015 exactly as planned, not in response to the criticism. And a year later, as cars continue to line up in Starbucks drive-thrus and people continue to sit hunched over laptops in Starbucks cafes, the weeks when the franchise tried to get its patrons talking about race seem quietly forgotten.
For some of us — white, Protestant, salaried — it’s a privilege to say “no thank you” to the race conversation. We take another sip of our coffee, sit back in the black leather chair, listen to the music playing from the speakers overhead. We talk about a story we heard on NPR on our way over.
It’s easier that way. We don’t like the discomfort of that conversation over our steaming mochas and cappuccinos. But of course, for some of us — white, Protestant, salaried — it’s a privilege to say “no thank you” to the race conversation. We take another sip of our coffee, sit back in the black leather chair, listen to the music playing from the speakers overhead. We talk about a story we heard on NPR on our way over.
This is not everyone’s privilege in this country. My daughter, who is adopted from Ethiopia, thinks about race constantly. She is only nine, but every moment of the day, her difference confronts her. In school, her white and Hispanic friends ask to play with her beaded braids. They are curious. They love the bright colors of the beads but also the way the complicated parts pattern Mitike’s scalp. When she wears her hair free, her friends ask, How did you get it so curly? No girl with straight blond hair attracts as much attention.
When Mitike joined a city volleyball league for nine-to-ten-year-old girls in August, she noticed immediately that she was the only girl with brown skin, black curly hair, dark brown eyes. All the other girls, mostly residents of the affluent Denver neighborhood surrounding the recreation center, have blue or green eyes, blond hair, names like Payton and Ashley and Piper. Meredith and I picked up Mitike at the end of the first practice, expecting to hear about games and drills. Instead, Mitike frowned at the ground and asked, “Is there any place in Denver where a blond girl would stand out?”
My daughter, who is adopted from Ethiopia, thinks about race constantly. She is only nine, but every moment of the day, her difference confronts her.
Of course. In the east Denver hair salon where I take Mitike to get her hair braided every six weeks, I am the only white person I see all afternoon. I sit in one of the black plastic chairs in the waiting room and endure the double-takes of the patrons who push open the door (it sticks) and nod and smile at the Ethiopian owner as the little bells on the door handle tinkle. They catch sight of me, then look again. A white girl? In this salon? The men shake their heads and proceed to the back, where they get their beards oiled and their heads shaved. The women stare a little longer, then survey the salon suspiciously until they find Mitike wincing in her chair, the stylist parting another section to braid. Ah. A white woman with a black child. Well, at least she knows where to bring her to get her hair done.
The first time we visited one of these salons in Denver, Mitike couldn’t stop talking about it. “Everyone looked like me!” she said. “Now you know what it feels like to be so different!” Embarrassed of my embarrassment, I tried to hide my red face, my quivering lip. For four hours, I’d endured the stares and the muttered asides, and one woman’s glare. But I understood: Mitike feels this level of scrutiny every day. It was my turn.
The first time we visited one of these salons in Denver, Mitike couldn’t stop talking about it. “Everyone looked like me!” she said. “Now you know what it feels like to be so different!” Embarrassed of my embarrassment, I tried to hide my red face, my quivering lip.
My Ethiopian daughter has pulled me bodily into the dialogue about race. I didn’t think it applied to me before. That had been my privilege.
And that’s part of the problem.
When Mitike was in preschool, a fifth grader chasing her on the playground yelled at her, “You’re such a dirty, oily-haired n*&@#*!” The principal, sober-faced, and a teacher who had been supervising recess told me this when I arrived that afternoon. They said the fifth grader’s parents claimed they never used such language at home and couldn’t imagine where he’d learned it. The principal expelled the child. She wanted to make it clear that her school tolerated no bigotry, ever.
Shaken and exhausted by the fact that Mitike had been the victim of such abuse, I sat my little curly-haired four-year-old on my lap on the front steps of our house and carefully asked her what she remembered the fifth grader saying. “He called me dirty, Mommy!” she said indignantly. “That’s why he got ’spelled, ’cause he lied! I take a bath every other day!” She didn’t remember the “n” word, because she didn’t understand it. As for the “oily-haired” part of the epithet: that was just true. Every day, we massage Mitike’s scalp with coconut oil. It’s the secret to an itch-free head.
I shared this experience on a blog I was keeping at the time, and one of my aunts wrote, “My love is color-blind! When I see Mitike, I just see a little person I love and adore!”
My aunt’s intention was good. Before I knew Mitike, I might have said something similar. But now I understand that I want people to notice Mitike’s beauty, her colorfully beaded braids, her coffee-brown skin, her slim Ethiopian figure. Her heritage — and those turquoise and purple beads — are part of who she is. Color-blindness is its own brand of ignorant racism. We are different. If we pretend otherwise, we’re faking our interactions with each other. The key is to notice more than just skin color and hair type. I also want people to notice Mitike’s quick smile, her genuine laugh, her gift as a storyteller, her confidence as a leader. I want the world to see her. That fifth grade boy with his ugly words didn’t see her at all; his blindness allowed him to speak violently.
She’s angry, now: her parents pretended race didn’t matter, and so they didn’t acknowledge her ongoing reality, which was that race mattered quite a bit, in every moment of her life. She felt crazy, as if her perception of the world was false.
Recently, I read the incredible and important essay “What a Black Woman Wishes Her White Parents Knew” by Mariama Lockington, a black woman adopted by white parents and raised in Denver in the 1980s. She’s angry, now: her parents pretended race didn’t matter, and so they didn’t acknowledge her ongoing reality, which was that race mattered quite a bit, in every moment of her life. She felt crazy, as if her perception of the world was false. Addressing her parents, Lockington writes, “Maybe you think your silence is better than fumbling awkwardly through uncomfortable realities. It’s not. I am a black, queer woman in America, I am your daughter, and I am always in danger.” She insists that by refusing to openly discuss oppression, her parents “erase” her. Lockington’s essay broke my heart. I want Mitike to feel she can talk to us about anything she experiences in her difference; I want her to feel visible – never erased.
“Look,” he told the class. “The word hurts. It matters to me in a way you can’t get. Until it stops mattering that much to me, it’s got to keep mattering to you.”
Many of the comments on Lockington’s essay are defensive and angry. People are uncomfortable. Privileged, they want to choose not to talk about race. They want Lockington – and Mitike – to just express gratitude to their white families for raising them, as if raising them in white America eliminated all difficulty for them. They don’t want to see that my daughter – beautiful, black – hears about race differently than they do: in every news story about another police shooting of a brown-skinned person, in every racial slur directed toward one of Obama’s daughters, in every bigoted comment Trump’s supporters make, in every statistic about people of color in poverty.
I often remember a day in one of my high school English classes, when we had just begun reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I asked the students to freewrite about the “n” word and how they felt about its presence in the novel. In the ensuing discussion, a white student argued, with annoyance, that the word didn’t matter and it was a waste of time to discuss it. Many other students chimed in to agree, until an African American boy raised his hand. “Look,” he told the class. “The word hurts. It matters to me in a way you can’t get. Until it stops mattering that much to me, it’s got to keep mattering to you.”
Starbucks was right. We need to hold more dialogue about race. All of us. It’s not comfortable, which is exactly why we need to sit ourselves down in those black leather chairs. Some of us, like Mitike and Mariama Lockington, need to do more talking. Others of us need to start listening.
What I know: Starbucks was right. We need to hold more dialogue about race. All of us. It’s not comfortable, which is exactly why we need to sit ourselves down in those black leather chairs. Some of us, like Mitike and Mariama Lockington, need to do more talking. Others of us need to start listening.
In her whole life that our nine-year-old daughter Mitike can remember until this year, America has officially embraced hope and progress.
After all, just the day before I brought her home from Ethiopia on August 29, 2008, the Democratic National Convention in Denver nominated Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American presidential candidate. On election night that November, a group of us gathered at a neighbor’s house to watch the results and bite our nails—and when CNN called the election for Obama, we all grabbed spoons and pots and pans and marched jubilantly around our chilly Alaska block, chanting, little one-year-old Mitike happily in the lead, shouting, “Obama! Obama! Obama!” in her Amharic accent.
When CNN called the election for Obama, we all grabbed spoons and pots and pans and marched jubilantly around our chilly Alaska block, chanting.
And because she has been immersed in this kind of progress since the first day she arrived in America, Mitike assumes it is a basic quality of our nation. When Hillary Clinton accepted the nomination from the DNC on July 28 last month, Mitike peered at me and Meredith and asked, “Why are you crying?” We stumbled to explain how incredible this step forward is for our country, to finally have a woman candidate for president. I mumbled something about 1920, Susan B. Anthony, 235 years since Abigail Adams. Meredith tried to explain how the 2016 DNC, with its uplifting of people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, women, the poor, and immigrants, embodied and celebrated the message we long to hear about the United States of America: that in this nation, we work to move closer and closer to increasing the opportunities for all people, because we are stronger and better when we work together. Mitike listened to our muddled emotional explanation and then shrugged. “Moms. That’s just the way America is.”
Of course, I’m grateful that our daughter takes for granted that her adopted country is good, and that it will continue to move forward toward the “more perfect union” for which those wise (and flawed!) writers of the Constitution hoped. But I’m also filled with fear about the future our country could tip into in November. I fear the racist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynist rhetoric of Donald Trump and his supporters. I fear that the country our daughter believes she knows will fail her.
And because she has been immersed in this kind of progress since the first day she arrived in America, Mitike assumes it is a basic quality of our nation.
We Americans find ourselves in a dangerous moment, stretched painfully between what some of us hope our country could be and what Donald J. Trump wants our country to become. As First Lady Michelle Obama proclaimed in her eloquent speech on July 26: “[This election] is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives.” The question has become not a question of policy but a question of whether we teach our children about progress and love, or about divisive hate.What is at stake in this presidential election is not Mitike’s formation. At nine, she believes wholeheartedly that the world requires us to be kind and lovingly accepting of those who are different in any way from us. She trusts that a nation, like a person, is simultaneously fallible and tasked with the responsibility to improve. For eight of her nine years, she has watched and listened (an avid fan of NPR, which I play while I cook dinner) as President Obama has wrestled with immigration, Guantanamo, Osama bin Laden, drone strikes, the auto industry, equal pay for women, police brutality, race, same-sex marriage. Obama has not always made (or been allowed to make) the decisions I wanted him to, but—while my child watched, learning—he worked to lead our nation in the direction of progress.
I fear the racist, homophobic, xenophobic, misogynist rhetoric of Donald Trump and his supporters. I fear that the country our daughter believes she knows will fail her.
What is at stake in this election is not who Mitike becomes, but whether she will be safe in her own country—and whether we will be. What is at stake is how America treats Mitike as a person of color and as an immigrant and as a female, and whether her friends at school—many of them refugees, some of them Muslim—will be treated with the respect and given the rights every person in America deserves. What is at stake is whether her mothers’ marriage to each other will continue to be honored as legal, and whether all of us will continue to be able to write and speak freely in this nation without fear of repercussion. What is at stake is whether America will fall prey to its own shadows—like the seething racism that prompts some citizens to call their president unspeakable names, or like the terrifying misogyny that allows Trump to dismiss his vile, derogatory behavior toward women as “locker room talk”—and thus endanger the entire world.
Meredith and I have protected Mitike from many of the ugliest of our nation’s weeping wounds: the details of the Sandy Hook massacre, for example; or the racist comments hurled at Malia Obama online when she announced her acceptance into Harvard last May. I don’t want Mitike to feel that afraid. But every day Trump says or does something more offensive, or proclaims his cavalier apathy toward world affairs, every day his supporters seethe with vitriol toward Obama and anyone else who isn’t a white English man with roots in colonial America, it becomes harder and harder to protect Mitike (and ourselves) from fear.
So I remind myself: our little girl has grown up believing that America stands for progress, so now is the time we model for her that light, as the prophet said, still shines in the darkness.
However, of this I’m certain: if we fall into fear and let our children tremble, we won’t even need to hold the election this coming November. Of course FDR was right: we must fear fear itself most. It is our fear that will defeat us.
So I remind myself: our little girl has grown up believing that America stands for progress, so now is the time we model for her that light, as the prophet said, still shines in the darkness. Mitike and I spent an entire afternoon registering voters in a park here in Denver. On the weekends, we hike in our beautiful mountains and we spend time with our family, trying to talk more about hope and progress than about fear. Every day, Meredith works in her private psychology practice to help people find peace in their lives, and I drive to a high school to teach teenagers how to express themselves and advocate for themselves in writing. And Mitike watches. We chant what Michelle Obama said she teaches her girls: when others go low, we go high. I remind Mitike (and Meredith, and myself) that no matter what happens in November, the general direction of this nation is progress. Just look at how far we’ve come.
This is not the time to be afraid, but the time to act, to vote, to stand up and speak for what (and who) matters, to declare our belief that our nation will continue to progress toward a more inclusive and more just place for all Americans of every kind.That’s what America is, right?
We can’t afford to take for granted how far this country has come. This is not the time to be afraid, but the time to act, to vote (as President Obama said, “Don’t boo, vote”), to stand up and speak for what (and who) matters, to declare our belief that our nation will continue to progress toward a more inclusive and more just place for all Americans of every kind.
I decide to travel back in time and space to my farm in eastern Iowa, to warn my eighteen-year-old self that she’s a lesbian.
I figure this information will save her quite a bit of pain and difficulty in her life, which has become my life, and I’m interested in a more unsullied path to where I am right now. So I go. It’s 1995, and my self — a senior in high school — is sitting at the round kitchen table working on her calculus homework. I stand in the doorway for a moment, watching her. She looks serious, her brow furrowed. Beside her, a glass of milk and a small bowl of raw cookie dough (she wasn’t very health-conscious then). She’s still wearing her shorts and bright red t-shirt from track practice, and her wisps of dark hair have escaped from her ponytail. She’s chewing the end of her pencil.
“Hey, Sarah,” I say from the doorway.
She starts, and nearly falls out of her chair. It’s midnight; she thought she was alone in the kitchen. She doesn’t recognize me. Why would she? I’ve got gray hair and wrinkles at the corners of my eyes; I’m thinner than she is, since I’ve lost all the muscle tone I developed in West High School’s weight room.
“Who are you?”
Her worst problems are that she’s still got an hour of homework before she can go to bed, and that her lower back aches from the track meet. I think about telling her, Just wait until you find out how much your back hurts when you’re 39, but I have more important things to say.
She doesn’t sound afraid. My current self would sound terrified if a stranger showed up unannounced at night in my kitchen. I’ve become afraid of everything, but this Sarah is brave. Afterall, nothing has befallen her yet. Her worst problems are that she’s still got an hour of homework before she can go to bed, and that her lower back aches from the track meet. I think about telling her, Just wait until you find out how much your back hurts when you’re 39, but I have more important things to say.
“I came to talk to you.”
She glances anxiously at the calculus.
“Don’t take that so seriously,” I say. “You’re going to become an English teacher.”
She laughs. “No. I’m majoring in math.”
Oh, this phase. When I thought I would become an engineer, just because everyone (and my grades) had told me I was good at math. I didn’t even know, really, what an engineer did.
Oh, this phase. When I thought I would become an engineer, just because everyone (and my grades) had told me I was good at math. I didn’t even know, really, what an engineer did.
“Fine. Look, Sarah. You’re gay.”
“What?” She flushes, frowning at me. “Who are you?”
“Just hear me out. You’re gay — you know, a lesbian? Like Kayla on the newspaper staff? Like Tig on your basketball team? You like girls. When you’re 28, you’re going to realize this, but you’ll already be married to a man, and –”
“– to Jake?” She looks so hopeful I want to hit her over the head with her calculus textbook. Jake? She’s going to break up with that high school boyfriend only weeks into her first year of college.
“No, not Jake. But it doesn’t matter. Look. You’re a lesbian, and you’re going to realize this — or, I mean, I — and I’m you — didn’t realize it until I was already married to a man, and I wish I’d known earlier. I’m 39 now, and I’m marrying a woman next month, and –”
“You’re what?”
Ah. It’s 1995. Ellen Degeneres didn’t come out until 1997, and the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage was the Netherlands, in 2001. In eastern Iowa, my eighteen-year-old self has only ever heard whispered rumors about lesbians, and the whispers are never kind.
Ah. It’s 1995. Ellen Degeneres didn’t come out until 1997, and the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage was the Netherlands, in 2001. In eastern Iowa, my eighteen-year-old self has only ever heard whispered rumors about lesbians, and the whispers are never kind. Kayla on the newspaper staff, Tig on the basketball team — they were outcasts, destined never to be popular; they were odd. Queer.
“In 2016, gay marriage is legal everywhere in the United States.”
Her eyes widen. “You’re crazy.” She glances to her left, at the magnet that holds the knives above the sink. The magnet that only works periodically, so the knives have fallen and nicked the white countertop.
Carefully, she rises and begins edging toward the foot of the stairs. She glances up to where her parents — my parents — are upstairs, sleeping.
“I’ll go. I just want you to open your eyes. And don’t date the guy you meet at camp next summer — he’s unbalanced. And maybe you should reconsider your college choice? Go to Smith or Bryn Mawr, instead?”
She’s clinging to the doorframe by the stairs, one hand on the blue glass cookie jar, which is filled with Oreos. I don’t remember my mom ever filling it with Oreos, but there it is. “I –” She swallows, touching her throat. Emotion always gets stuck, a lump, in my throat. “I don’t understand.” Then: “I’m not like Kayla or Tig.”
“But you are.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know.” She doesn’t. She’s never read any book or seen any movie with a lesbian character. She’s never had a lesbian friend. She’s never walked in a neighborhood where men hold hands or women kiss each other openly. She’s been taught in church that marriage is between a man and a woman, and no one has ever mentioned homosexuality. She’s never thought about it. But in twenty-one years and one month, she’s going to walk down an aisle and marry a woman. Legally. It will be legal in Colorado, where she will get married, but it will also be legal in Iowa, in Mississippi, in New York, in California. In countries all across the world. And she will marry a woman in the presence of her supportive family and that woman’s supportive family, and all their supportive friends. After, they will wrap their arms around their daughter, who is adopted from Ethiopia, and everyone will clap and cheer.
Nothing has happened to her yet. She is unmarked by loss or grief, by disappointment or anger… but she doesn’t know the pain that is ahead of her.
“I don’t understand,” she says again. She begins to cry. Nothing has happened to her yet. She is unmarked by loss or grief, by disappointment or anger. Sometimes, she is hard on herself when she doesn’t get a top grade in her physics class or when she misses too many free throws in a basketball game, but she doesn’t know the pain that is ahead of her. I don’t want to tell her. I don’t want her to know about her parents’ divorce, about her own divorce from the good man she will marry when she still doesn’t know she is gay, about the sudden illness and death of the first woman she will love.
And suddenly, I want her to be this innocent a little longer.
I want her to finish her calculus and go to bed, and dream of hiking Long’s Peak, which she plans to attempt again this summer with her dad. When she wakes up, I want her to drive to school and kiss her boyfriend and rush to her AP English class, which she loves most, though she has never considered majoring in that subject.
“Sarah,” I tell her, my voice gentle. “Tomorrow, you’ll think you dreamed this.” And without looking at her again, I walk to the front door and pull it open. I step out onto the deck my dad built, and I walk down the stairs and out along the sidewalk to the long gravel driveway. Here, beyond the cover of the two great maple trees, the night sky is vast. The crickets have already begun to make their music. Above me, the Milky Way scatters its protective blanket.
I am all that I have become and am becoming. And it all happens exactly when it should.
I close my eyes, and when I open them again, I stand on my front porch beneath the stars in Colorado, and I understand: if I’d traveled an easier route to this moment, I wouldn’t get to stand in this moment at all. I get to marry Meredith in a month because my 18-year-old self became this exact 39-year-old with silvering hair and scars. And every evening, when Meredith and Mitike and I hold hands in blessing at our dinner table — the same round wooden table where I did my homework all those years ago — I am amazed at all I never imagined. And that’s the point: I am all that I have become and am becoming. And it all happens exactly when it should.
It’s 1864. In the U.S. Hall of the House of Representatives, a gathered group of congressmen, weary from the bloody Civil War and despairing their fractured nation, pauses to listen to a twenty-two-year-old Quaker named Anna Elizabeth Dickinson.
Dickinson steps to the podium, demure, clad in a conservative high-collared black dress. The men wait in impatient silence. Someone clears his throat. But then Dickinson raises her gray eyes to the crowd, and she begins to speak, and her voice is like a raised sword in battle, her plea for abolition a resounding heartbeat the tired men need so sorely that they rise in standing ovation at her concluding words.
She was called “America’s Joan of Arc.”
She was called “America’s Joan of Arc.” The famous radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had been printing her words since she was fourteen, and the writer Mark Twain praised her: “She talks fast, uses no notes what ever [sic], never hesitates for a word, always gets the right word in the right place, and has the most perfect confidence in herself.”
Thousands flocked to hear her speak against slavery and for the rights of African Americans and women. Dickinson’s passionate intensity—her belief in the rights of all, in the forward progress of our hearts—was what the nation desperately needed.
And I believe—faced with Trump, unconscionable gun violence, police brutality, climate change, decade-long wars, xenophobia and homophobia and racism—our nation needs to hear from Dickinson again. Right now, we need both the living and the dead to remind us that hope is not lost, that our words are powerful, that the people who hear us and read us may be moved to take action in the direction of human rights. But how can someone like Anna Dickinson, who died in 1932, speak to us at all?
Right now, we need both the living and the dead to remind us that hope is not lost, that our words are powerful, that the people who hear us and read us may be moved to take action in the direction of human rights.
She whispers from the historical archive. In the June 27 New Yorkerarticle “The Woman Card,” journalist Jill Lepore reveals the surprisingly feminist origins of the Republican Party, noting, “One of the Party’s most popular and best-paid speakers was Anna Dickinson.” But Lepore offers Dickinson only as a nondescript famous woman who helped lead the nascent Republicans. In that brief historical note, Dickinson’s sword-wielding power of speech remains with her dust. How can I actually resurrect her, now that we need her?
Historical fiction. Breathe air into Dickinson’s lungs again. Paint her story around her; let her speak again; let the fragments of her real correspondence and her speech transcripts be cornerstones of a story with flesh and bone and blood; research costume and event and dialect so that Civil War-era Philadelphia—and its great Quaker orator—nearly exists again. In good historical fiction, we slip into the spirit of a different time and then emerge knowing that if real people once took incredible and brave action like that, we can, too. Good historical fiction slaps us awake: “Go. Now!”
Good historical fiction slaps us awake: “Go. Now!”
But it’s still not enough. Historical fiction, bound to a certain time and place, has to report, like a responsible journalist. History, whether it’s etched in stone or whispered in shadow, requires a certain telling. There are rules.
Anna Dickinson lives the same life there, on repeat: wildly famous as an abolitionist, then scrambling after the Civil War to cling to that fame. She moved powerful men with her words on abolition, but she could not move her society to approve of her ardent belief in the equality of all, male and female, white and black. She could not convince her society to bless her romantic relationships with women, or her proclivity for wearing pants and climbing every high mountain she could, or her desire to take male roles on the theatrical stage. She raised her sword and shouted for everyone to follow her into battle, but few actually did. When her own sister had her committed to a mental institution in 1891 (when Dickinson was forty-nine), she calmly hired lawyers to prove her sanity, exited the asylum, and then retreated to live in bitter isolation for her last forty years.
The story of a bitter ninety-year-old lesbian dying in obscurity does not inspire us for our own time.
As historical fiction, Dickinson’s story is probably better left to a single sentence in a New Yorker article. Maybe that is why no one has written it. The story of a bitter ninety-year-old lesbian dying in obscurity does not inspire us for our own time.
But what if there is a different way to tell stories like Dickinson’s? In these past few years, I’ve been experimenting with hybrid forms, thanks mostly to my reading of authors like Jeanette Winterson, Rebecca Brown, Eleni Sikelianos, Michael Ondaatje, Julio Cortazar. I am primarily an essayist, but my essays sometimes look like poems or short stories or lists. What matters is the story, and the reader and the writer and the character who are transformed by it.
Could I, by writing Anna’s story in a bending and crossing of genres and times, help her become the woman she longed to become?
Last summer at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, I heard renowned author Maxine Hong Kingston wonder whether it is possible that the writing we do now, in this time, could help heal the people who came before us. I wonder. Could I, by writing Anna’s story in a bending and crossing of genres and times, help her become the woman she longed to become? Could her life arc not to a mental institution but to what she could never have imagined in 1891? Could she ride into battle with the real Joan of Arc in 1430? Could she emerge in 2016?
What if I stepped out of time, holding Miss Dickinson’s hand?
In the past year and a half, I’ve written over a hundred pages about Anna Dickinson: notes from history books and biographies and Civil War websites, fragments of poems, pieces of essays, imagined moments, letters addressed to her, blank pages with captions for photographs that do not exist. In the early mornings when I write, I’m as likely to work on “the Dickinson stuff” as I am to work on my essays or my monthly column. It’s a book: I know that much. I also know it’s a book others need to read in this chaotic time. But what genre will this book be? In what category will it fit? None. Several. Genre is irrelevant. Anna Dickinson needs to be written back into the now, and I’m the conduit. Like Anna, this book won’t fit into any categories.
Genre isirrelevant. Anna Dickinson needs to be written back into the now, and I’m the conduit. Like Anna, this book won’t fit into any categories.
This month, I plan to disappear into the Colorado mountains and work on the Anna Dickinson book until I’ve finished a complete draft. I’ve rented a cabin with a view of Mount Lady Washington, the peak the Hayden Survey named after Dickinson when she accompanied them up neighboring Long’s Peak. I’ll hike in the mornings, then work in the afternoons and evenings.
I don’t know where this work will lead me, but I know I want Anna to wake up, like Woolf’s Orlando, and find herself in a new time, with new possibilities for changing our world.
A glimpse:
Anna Dickinson was not a man. She could not wear pants or shirts that did not constrict her breath. She could not own property or inherit money or vote in any election. She could not marry a woman she loved.
She was not beautiful. She was not dainty and she was not gentle. Her eyebrows were not fine and her nose was not small. When she stood to speak, her voice was never soft. On her way from climbing Long’s Peak to climbing Pikes Peak, she did not ride inside the train to Colorado Springs, but perched like a goddess on the cattleguard, the wind in her hair.
Anna Dickinson did not love men as lovers and she did not love women as mountain climbing companions. She never slept with a man and she never slept with just one woman. When she wrote love letters to Olive or Susan or Sarah or Lou, she was not shy. She was never satisfied that she had done or seen or heard or loved enough.
Anna Dickinson was not a man. And yet when she spoke against slavery on the Lyceum stage, the newspapers said she was not demure enough to be a woman. When she played Hamlet in New York in 1881, her harshest critic wrote, “We always knew Anna Dickinson was actually a man.”
Once, she wrote to her lover Olive Logan, “Someday, some of us will become so overcome with passion that we will become men, and we will make furious love to our beloved women, and then we shall be married, and live happy forever more.”
Anna. Ms. Dickinson. American Maid of Orleans, bearer of the fleur de lis. I am not a man. I am a woman, and I am your vision.
Anna. If I write your story now, will you hear it one hundred years ago?
It is so much better to live as a lesbian now, in 2016, than it was in 1952.
That’s what I’ve been thinking ever since I immersed myself in the beautiful new lesbian film Carol last month. Carol (2015), that gorgeous film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt, portrays the blossoming love between two women in 1952. To live honestly as a woman who loves women, Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) must risk the custody of her beloved little daughter and the status of her moral reputation in society. When Carol and Thereze Belivet (Rooney Mara) walk in public or sit at a restaurant, they cannot touch or gaze at each other too long. They can only express their love in the stolen privacy of rented motel rooms.
As I watched Carol, I felt an immense gratitude that I live and love in this time, in this region of this country. I sat in a Denver movie theater with my fiancee Meredith’s fingers securely intertwined with mine, and all around us sat other lesbian couples openly expressing affection. Because we live in Colorado, a state with a workplace nondiscrimination law that covers sexual orientation, both Meredith and I are confidently out as lesbians in our jobs. Because the culture of Denver is generally supportive of same-sex families, we are also out at our daughter’s school, where the third graders chanted, “Hello, Mitike’s moms!” when we walked into the room to help celebrate Mitike’s birthday in January. We feel safe here. In our neighborhood, we sit on the front step of our house on summer evenings with our arms intimately around each other’s waists, watching our daughter jump rope on the driveway.
In 1952, in Carol’s time, we couldn’t have hoped to live so openly or to marry each other legally, or to adopt a child together legally. We couldn’t have dreamed it.
In 1952, in Carol’s time, we couldn’t have hoped to live so openly or to marry each other legally, or to adopt a child together legally. We couldn’t have dreamed it.
And yet. In 2016, now, I watch the high school students in my classroom. They live post-DOMA, in a state that supported gay marriage before the Supreme Court did, in a nation with high-profile gay celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper. And yet. Their classmates use “That’s so gay!” as an insult; the media shows them primarily heterosexual love; their parents (and in many cases, their religions and their cultures) expect them to enter traditional marriages.
It’s only a little better than it was in 1952.
Outside the United States, the situation for us is often literally dangerous. Over seventy-five countries in the world still criminalize homosexuality, and in many of them the punishment is death.
It’s true that I can hold Meredith’s hand in a movie theater and tell our daughter’s teacher that Mitike has two moms, and it’s true that I can brave being out at the high school where I teach. It’s true that the Supreme Court supports our right to marry each other legally. But it’s still not easy to be out, and often, it’s not even safe. According to the ACLU, only twenty-two states protect GLBTQ+ people from discrimination in the workplace. Almost half of U.S. states fail to include gender and sexual orientation in their hate crime statutes. In Mississippi, gay and lesbian couples are still barred from adopting children. Conservative politicians like Republican candidate Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) still speak about us as if we are diseased or criminal, against God and morality; in August, Cruz called the fight for gay rights a “jihad” that GLBT people are waging against Christians. Another Republican candidate, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), said at the beginning of January, “I do not believe there is a U.S. Constitutional right to same-sex marriage,” and added that he believes children should only be raised by heterosexual parents: a father and a mother. Politics aside, many families still refuse to demonstrate acceptance. On America’s streets, over 40 percent of homeless youth identify as GLBTQ+.
Outside the United States, the situation for us is often literally dangerous. Over seventy-five countries in the world still criminalize homosexuality, and in many of them the punishment is death. That means that lesbian Americans like us have to carefully vet where we travel. Lesbians who live in those countries have to either hide who they are or risk death. Both options are unconscionable.
We will have to contemplate, alongside our love, the fragility of last June’s Supreme Court decision when candidates like Cruz or Rubio move nearer the White House.
On this Valentine’s Day in 2016, Meredith and I will go out for a date at a restaurant in Denver, as thousands of other couples in the city will do. But unlike what Senator Cruz terms “traditional couples,” we will have to be cautious about when and how we show each other affection. We might kiss across the table, but only quickly, painfully aware that someone could yell an ugly epithet at us, or threaten worse. We will hold hands, our matching silver engagement rings glimmering in the candlelight, but, unlike those “traditional couples,” we will have to contemplate, alongside our love, the fragility of last June’s Supreme Court decision when candidates like Cruz or Rubio move nearer the White House. We will discuss our lovely daughter, but in the shadows, we will shudder to remember that some would tell us we hurt our daughter by giving her two mothers. And we will talk about our planned honeymoon to Costa Rica, which we have chosen because it’s beautiful and warm, but primarily because it’s known to be one of the safest and most open countries for gay and lesbian couples to visit. They’ll accept us there.
It is better for us today than it was for lesbians in 1952. And so on this Valentine’s Day in 2016, I will step outside that restaurant with Meredith, my legal fiancee, and I will kiss her full on the lips.
It is better for us today than it was for lesbians in 1952. And so on this Valentine’s Day in 2016, I will step outside that restaurant with Meredith, my legal fiancee, and I will kiss her full on the lips. And maybe someone who sees that kiss will change his mind about gay rights, or maybe someone will realize her God is love, and love is what she sees between us. Or maybe, horribly, some bigoted person will yell across the street that we are sick, wrong, against God, that we are the problem with America. But I will kiss Meredith anyway. And then we’ll drive home to our cozy little house, pay the babysitter, kiss our sleeping daughter, and crawl into our bed. Our bed. We may not yet live in a completely safe and accepting world, but right here, in each other’s arms, our fears fall away.
Right here, we just love each other. And that is exactly right.
To be a black woman online is to realize that any minute, your safe space can be compromised.
The anonymity of the internet enables Red Pill fanatics and basement-dwelling trolls to spew hatred without serious repercussions. When the general public talks about the need to combat online bullying and harassment, the discussion rarely includes women of color. Black women should not have to accept racist, misogynistic violence from faceless cowards lurking behind egg icons. The threshold of harassment that black women face online, especially within the context of social media, is beyond tolerable. It is toxic and menacing, abuse ranging from doxxing (exposing a person’s personal information, including home address, telephone number, etc.) to death threats.
Take for example the abuse from racist Twitter users aimed at Ghostbusters actress and SNL cast member Leslie Jones. The Ghostbusters movie recently premiered, and angry fanboys were feeling extra vicious. Jones faced a seemingly endless barrage of racist attacks. She retweeted the insults in hopes that Twitter support would ban the users. Unfortunately, support turned a blind eye to the mounting abuse. One user compared her to a gorilla, to which Jones responded, “I don’t understand.” Another troll with an icon of a stick figure in an SS uniform said, “She’s extremely ugly.” The collection of usernames and accompanying icons were just what one would expect from an army of human garbage.
Black women should not have to accept racist, misogynistic violence from faceless cowards lurking behind egg icons.
Understandably, Jones quickly lost the motivation to expose her attackers. Fans, costars, and Ghostbusters director Paul Feig expressed support for Jones. Twitter user @MarissaRei1 started the hashtag #LoveforLeslieJ in order to combat the cruel, crude, and ruthless abuse. Although it was comforting to see people stick up for Jones, it’s disappointing and disheartening that such hatred could go unmonitored and unpunished. Do we really want to condone and encourage an online culture that permits the daily dehumanization of black women?
When dissecting pop culture, the obvious racial bias is magnified. There’s no shortage of white knights for white women. Writing for The Guardian, Ijeoma Oluo noted, “Many other women of color – especially black women – on the internet face the same abuse that Jones is now facing, and we will tell you that this isn’t a harmless prank, this isn’t about hurt feelings or even the sting of a racist comment.” She added, “This is a deliberate campaign of abuse perpetrated on us to keep us off of the internet, and it needs to be taken seriously.”
Although it was comforting to see people stick up for Jones, it’s disappointing and disheartening that such hatred could go unmonitored and unpunished. Do we really want to condone and encourage an online culture that permits the daily dehumanization of black women?
In a 2014 study conducted by Women, Action, and the Media, the group gathered 811 reports of harassment on Twitter. Out of the 161 serious cases cited and reported to Twitter staff, “Twitter wound up taking action on only 55 percent of those cases—most frequently, they suspended accounts temporarily.”
Earlier this year, Twitter announced that it would be implementing a new protocol to deal with online harassment. Nick Pickles, Twitter UK’s Head of Policy, said, “This comes from the top of the company – safety is never finished.” Unlike the US, the UK has laws that “offer users some protection against more extreme harassment and several people have been jailed.” Twitter’s publicly documented efforts to deal with online toxicity almost seem hollow. Considering the fact that online abuse of women has become the expectation, rather than the exception, such a promise feels like an empty-hearted effort to placate those who demand stricter and swifter retribution.
Ijeoma Oluo noted, “Many other women of color – especially black women – on the internet face the same abuse that Jones is now facing. … This is a deliberate campaign of abuse perpetrated on us to keep us off of the internet, and it needs to be taken seriously.”
Although I obviously do not have the same global platform as Jones, I’ve faced online misogynoir. Whenever I write about race, I’m met with instant backlash. Not all of the responses I receive are cruel, but it’s too easy to remember the negative. No matter the type of essay or article, from personal essay to pop culture commentary, the racists are angry that I dare even to speak up. In real life and online, I’ve been told that I’m “too sensitive” or that I’m the “true racist” for rightly naming my enemy. In the eyes of the racists, white supremacy is a nonexistent institution, just as the American Dream is possible for anyone willing to pick themselves up by their bootstraps.
When Jones experienced racism, some Twitter users recommended that she take the high road and simply ignore the abuse. Why must black women be expected to turn the other cheek? Perhaps it has to do with the stereotype of the Strong Black Woman. But if studies have proven that racism can have a dire impact on a black person’s mental and physical health, why aren’t these rampant incidents of abuse take much more seriously?
Out of the 161 serious cases cited and reported to Twitter staff, “Twitter wound up taking action on only 55 percent of those cases—most frequently, they suspended accounts temporarily.”
In an interview with Alternet, an African-American woman with more than 116,000 Twitter followers said that she switches her avatars in order to get some relief from the trolls. With the icon of a white man, Sydette noticed a drastic difference in user interaction. She observed, “As a white man, that was the most fun I had online in terms of actually getting to talk to people and not be insulted by them.” Sydette added, “People thought I was wrong, people thought I was ridiculous but nobody thought I was stupid. I received fewer slurs and people were a lot more interested in my thought process than when I was anything else.”
As a black woman writer, my work is never separated from my gender and/or racial identity. On the other hand, my racial background is a vital part of my personal identity. I would not be the person I am today without the acknowledgment of my roots. I fiercely protect and defend my ethnic heritage because for too long, I was made to believe it made me worthless and ugly.
Before taking a break from Twitter, Jones said: “WTF!! These people hate themselves. You have to hate yourself to put out that type of hate. I mean, on my worst day I can’t think of this type of hate to put out. I don’t know how to feel. I’m numb. Actually numb. I see the words and pics and videos. Videos, y’all. Meaning people took time to spew hate.…Like no shame or compassion for human life. It scares the fuck out of me!”
Social media can be an inspirational tool when in the hands of the benevolent, and an extension of our culture’s legacy of racism when under the control of the malicious and malevolent. Until Twitter makes good on their word to take drastic disciplinary action against these vile attackers, black women are forced to make the choice between staying on social media and not backing down against very real, very disturbing threats or retreating for the sake of sanity and self-care.
Recent Comments