A Note to Ms. Betty Reid Soskins

This post is in response to Betty Reid Soskin's post: http://cbreaux.blogspot.com/2019/08/i-can-barely-see-my-computer-through.html#links

My response is too long and I can't post there (smile).

Hi Ms. Betty:

Thanks so much for the story of near misses, latent memories that spring to life without notice. The walk through the train cars past or through the see of whiteness, faces, mouths, eyes, a collective gesture of dismissal was an ancestral walk cross ship planks, down stairs into dark pits. . . across auction blocks. You heard the clank of weighted shackles around wrists, throats, ankles. You felt the bitterness of the fruit hanging so low it was hard to ignore its stench.

However, once past the foreign land—structural racism or segregation, once safely landed, you are embraced by family, other African Diaspora people who awaited your arrival.

You write:  "And we must remember, that we are not living in the same reality -- and rarely if ever has that been true.  The America that I've lived in bears little resemblance to that of many others.  That's probably as it should be.  I don't argue with that.  It's from those variables that our richness as a Nation is forged.  But the variables should not rise from the inequities and injustices embedded in a flawed social system that bears the awful legacy of slavery, but from the adjustments and corrections we've lived through as a people guided by our founding documents and a heritage of freedom that ensues therefrom  -- as we continue the process of forming our 'more perfect Union.'"

I saw a play recently at Shotgun Players in Berkeley, “Kill Move Paradise” by James Ijames, directed by Darryl Jones, Artistic Director, Lorraine Hansberry Theatre. The play takes place in the spaces between death and what's after that.  The way into this club is violent death. The last person to enter is a Black boy-child.  He says what he remembers is the blood.

A completely white space, without memory, the men are met by a newly minted dead Black man. Isa is a one-person cheer team. He shares messages that arrive via paper airplanes and monitors the ticker tape pouring from the facsimile machine in the corner of the open room that looks somehow apocalyptic yet familiar.  Its whiteness is blinding, a cross between the White House, the Lincoln Memorial and a slave ship. There is a barred window at the top of an incline, the men try unsuccessfully to climb. There are also capped pipes-- cavernous opportunities into imagined alternative dimensions -- what if, your work and Ijames ask, if another way were possible?

Isa reads the names and then awaits the dead arrivals.

Each time there is an earthquake-- the death a fissure that cracks the soul that holds us, yet can't keep Black boys, Black men, Black people, safe.  When quaking ends and the dead man ceases his futile escape attempts, Isa asks him to recall his last memory -- this shared story, a totem the men wrap themselves around.

What if before the journey to the west in slave ships, African ancestors could have created a collective blog where they shared what they were doing, thinking, being before capture? Just like their shackled ancestors, these men cannot leave. Captives. The only difference between time now and time then is the shared language (like in the Colored Car you speak of Ms. Betty)—everyone speaks English. On the slaveships new language was born of necessity.

Another difference between then and now is viewership. The capture is not anonymous. In Kill Move Paradise, spectators take pleasure in watching the men's discomfort. Similarly, a certain pleasurable validation came from the white passengers who watched your public humiliation, Ms. Betty, yours and your elders as you were marched from first class to the cars behind the cargo next to the coal bearing engine.  Your memories triggered by the three shootings two weeks ago, as from Texas to Ohio to Gilroy point to historic cognitive dissonance this memory creates in a 97 almost 98 year old life.  You had to change trains cars in El Paso, Texas (the site of the shooting).

Everyone in the Bay Area knows the Garlic Festival. I remember the first time I heard of garlic ice cream and thought how much I wanted to taste it. The garlic festival is a summer is almost over, last hurrah, festival one wants to add to our memories chest as fall moves into winter. There is a sacrilege attached to killing people at the Gilroy Garlic Festival. Garlic is what one wears to protect one from evil, like vampires.  Is that too a lie? Why wasn’t the pungent remedy effective?

You state you couldn't play the lead in a high school play because you were a Black girl.  The microaggressions haunt our collective gene pools.  You drop the class and enroll in public speaking. I wonder if the public speaking strategies would have helped you stand your ground, perhaps used Monroe’s Motivational Sequence to show how much the production needed you in its cast.

In your soon to be released CD, you share the story of being hired for a job because the employer didn't know your race by your surname.  Here you speak of your father's inability to advance in his career without a union card and that he might have passed to do so. For a man with five children, a mortgage and wages that were not on par with white men made this kind of deception an economic necessity for those men who could cross racial lines.

You write: "My proud father, Dorson Louis Charbonnet, a trained and experienced millwright and builder, once he left the South, could not find employment except as a white-aproned sandwich hawker in a Southern Pacific railroad lunch car! In that role he earned $75/month for most of his life [yet it cost $47.25/wk to support a family of five then.] [W]ith [his wife's] help, [the Charbonnet's were able to make it.

"But what about those who were too dark-skinned to use this option?  Suspecting that Dad was passing was never mentioned, though the fact that we never met anyone of his co-workers, nor were we ever taken to visit his worksite, and the silence around the issue made for a climate of shame that worked to alienate my sisters and me from our parents for much of our lives.  Since both my sisters were lighter-skinned than I in the early years, I'm sure that the burden of keeping the secret was most deeply felt by me; as if just being "colored" in a hostile world weren't burden enough for a child."

My older daughter experienced something similar. Hired over the phone, when she arrived, the employer was surprised with her African presentation, but they could not change their offer. What they did was change the job description and hide her in a backroom.   When you were denied promotion based on race, you and your husband quit your jobs and opened a record store, Reid's Records so you were no longer dependent on the whims of whiteness for your livelihood.

The descendents of southerners who lost the war still mourn their losses, their poverty, their outsider position in a nation that went to war to force unity on a people who vehemently disagreed. Everyone wasn’t wealthy, but the wealth which was in people and a way of life established on backs of African people, continues to haunt certain gene pools.  America is a lesson that forced alliances fail.  The government cannot force southerners to shake hands with Black Americans and say, “let’s let bygones be bygones.”

The southerners did not see Black people they'd enslaved as equal, and from white supremacists actions through President Obama's time in the White House and now #45 there is an elephant in the kitchen breaking the china.

Your description of the Black world you sort of fell into on this journey to your homeland in the south, is wonderful. In this story you share a richness that is Black Heritage and show a humanity bigotry and racism do not erase or pollute. Your work and life is testament to this amazing spirit. Thanks for the gift.

Toni Morrison stated that there is something wrong with a people whose sense of self is wrapped in racial identity, racial identify that is reflected in Black negation. What happens when the neck one's boot rests on rises up?

I also love your story of your Grandfather George Allen (which you tell on A Lifetime of Being Betty), how you would garden together. I think the analogy here is that as we prune and weed and plant, sometimes to make space for the next season's crops we have to clear what is no longer useful. Perhaps you thought you got it all when you were clearing last season, but obviously the harvest yielding truth, justice and righteous, still needs tilling. Rocks are keeps the plants from springing up. Denial is heavy, indeed.

What your memories remind us is to keep the hoes sharpened, there is still much racial justice accountability work to be done. Who has done and is doing the harm? Who are those people harmed? What needs to happen for those people and their ancestors harmed? What responsibility do those descendants of harmers need to take into account and address? What needs to happen with the current harmers? It is all connected.

Ms. Reid Soskin's is releasing a new collection of stories on CD, A Lifetime of Being Betty, released August 17, following the wonderful publication of her book last year, Sign My Name to Freedom (2018): https://www.thefreight.org/event/1858290-little-village-foundation-berkeley/

Stay tuned for two films, one in December the other early 2020 with a soundtrack featuring her original music (smile).