March 27, 2008

I HAVE COME home from a long stay in Mexico to find – because of the presidential campaign, and especially because of the Obama/Clinton race for the Democratic nomination - a new country existing alongside the old.  On any given day we, collectively, become the Goddess of the Three Directions and can look back into the past, look at ourselves just where we are, and take a glance, as well, into the future.  It is a space with which I am familiar. 

When I was born in 1944 my parents lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a white distant relative,  Miss May Montgomery. (During my childhood it was necessary to address all white girls as "Miss" when they reached the age of twelve.)  She would never admit to this relationship, of course, except to mock it.  Told by my parents that several of their children would not eat chicken skin she responded that of course they would not.  No Montgomerys would.

My parents and older siblings did everything imaginable for Miss May.  They planted and raised her cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs, painted her house, patched her roof, ran her dairy, and, among countless other duties and responsibilities my father was her chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the day or night.  She lived in a large white house with green shutters and a green, luxuriant lawn:  not quite as large as Tara of Gone With the Wind fame, but in the same style.

We lived in a shack without electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in wind and rain.  Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in tenant farming.  During the Depression, desperate to feed his hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a month to twelve.  Miss May responded that she would not pay that amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn't pay it to a nigger.  That before she'd pay a nigger that much money she'd milk the dairy cows herself.

When I look back, this is part of what I see.  I see the school bus carrying white children, boys and girls, right past me, and my brothers, as we trudge on foot five miles to school.  Later, I see my parents struggling to build a school out of discarded army barracks while white students, girls and boys, enjoy a building made of brick.  We had no books; we inherited the cast off books that "Jane" and "Dick" had previously used in the all-white school that we were not, as black children, permitted to enter. 

The year I turned fifty, one of my relatives told me she had started reading my books for children in the library in my home town.  I had had no idea – so kept from black people it had been – that such a place existed.  To this day knowing my presence was not wanted in the public library when I was a child I am highly uncomfortable in libraries and will rarely, unless I am there to help build, repair, refurbish or raise money to keep them open, enter their doors.

When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early twenties it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known, the plantations, because they attempted to exercise their "democratic" right to vote.  I wish I could say white women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men did, but I cannot.  It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender free.  

I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.  That, for instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo.  Because, in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality, this is part of what whiteness means.  I loved my school for trying to make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I knew I could not.

I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better.   It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him.  Cannot see what he carries in his being.  Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black,  white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.

When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required.  Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves.

True to my inner Goddess of the Three Directions however, this does not mean I agree with everything Obama stands for. We differ on important points probably because I am older than he is, I am a woman and person of three colors, (African, Native American, European), I was born and raised in the American South, and when I look at the earth's people, after sixty-four years of life, there is not one person I wish to see suffer, no matter what they have done to me or to anyone else; though I understand quite well the place of suffering, often, in human growth.

I want a grown-up attitude toward Cuba, for instance, a country and a people I love; I want an end to the embargo that has harmed my friends and their children, children who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard Zinn, that war is as objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is beyond obsolete as a means of improving life.   I want an end to the on-going war immediately and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq. 

I want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behavior towards the Palestinians, and I want the people of the United States to cease acting like they don't understand what is going on.  All colonization, all occupation, all repression basically looks the same, whoever is doing it.  Here our heads cannot remain stuck in the sand; our future depends of our ability to study, to learn, to understand what is in the records and what is before our eyes.  But most of all I want someone with the self-confidence to talk to anyone, "enemy" or "friend,"  and this Obama has shown he can do.  It is difficult to understand how one could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and talk to another human being.  When you vote you are making someone a proxy for yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot.  But if they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them, human, impossible, then what good is your vote?

It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as "a woman" while Barack Obama is always referred to as "a black man."  One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact.  How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.