Volume Four Prose
Learning to Feel, Learning to Speak
Sandra Wassilie
I imagine I go to a speech you make about racism in the American workplace. Yes, the woman who shrank from your touch is present. Here. Finally. The one who often sat by you on a group tour through China, and carried on conversations with you. The woman who made a place for you at our meals or on the bus. She who would greet you when you approached. And you would do the same when it was I who approached. We were friends over those three weeks away from our country and its history.
Now I am sitting in this session at this imaginary conference 37 years later, both of us at the age of reflection. I have no idea where you are, but you are at the podium in my head at this moment.
At the reunion of tour participants during the vocational education conference a year later after our China journey, you and I again engaged in close conversation, about work at our separate institutions in separate states. About China. Deng Xiaoping was the leader then, and China was just emerging from its extended hermetic existence, searching out its place in the world. Did you reach for me at the elevator after the get-together in the conference hotel? Is that when I shrank away? We were both shocked to the core. You did not follow me onto the elevator. I never saw or talked to you again.
I do acknowledge you called me in my room, left a message on the voicemail with profuse apologies, and expressed wishes to talk with me. I did not want to talk. I did not want to explain myself. I did not know what to explain. Why had I withdrawn so swiftly and assuredly? What deep water did your pebble ripple that I could neither fathom nor feel?
You must have called again, but I let the phone ring and ring. No message left this time. You had been persistent, but I was stubborn. You were not ready to run, but I had run far away from you, and far from myself.
What you don’t know is that later that day, I came to some level of courage that I could talk with you. Explore what was going on with me, and share what we had expected from an encounter that had started out feeling so mutual. I called you back, but time had run out. The conference had ended. I learned you had checked out. I sensed my refusal to talk was more a slap in the face than my shrinking away. I rarely refused to talk to someone. Why you? What was it in you that made me run?
Was it your black skin? Was it the overture of intimacy? Or both of these and something deeper? I do not regard myself as racist, but some element of racism may have been in play. I have to consider this if I am going to heal. I cannot help but reflect back on Larry in high school.
One of the lone black students in an Alaskan high school, an Army brat with star status on the football team, Larry, I think, had a crush on me. I ignored what I thought was his interest, but I was gracious enough to say hello every day in math class. Although I was not interested in Larry personally, the small part of me that was intrigued by his attention thought about the ramifications of an interracial hook up. Peers. Teachers. Parents—especially Mother. Interracial hookups were a big deal in those days, and interracial marriage still illegal in some states. More than public criticism, the very likely prospect of a severe dressing-down at home quashed any leaning I had toward going out with Larry. The tension between my mother and myself over going out on dates was already so intense I was drowning in her low estimation of my ability to handle boys, and I lacked confidence. I had to consider: what would my parents let alone other people do to either of us? Larry was gracious, too, and never made a move beyond the question in his brown eyes.
Was there some element of that earlier experience of a black man’s interest in me in my response to you? I expect it is significant in ways I only now begin to comprehend as we grapple with race relations in these United States of America (the irony of our country’s name). What I think is that I sensed I could not handle you and whatever history each of us would bring to a relationship, but maybe what I feared most was relationship: relationship in which my personal self would not only confront my personal incapacities but also my personal history.
In those days when we met, I already avoided entanglements with any man who might be serious about me beyond a one-night stand. I am afraid that is the truth. I ran with the rebels who would leave me—and leave me alone. Though I don’t really know, I believe you were not a rebel but a bastion of stability who could confront those issues that divide and demean us. I was not ready. I was not ready for your level of maturity.
So, getting back to what you might presume was a racist reason behind my visceral reaction to your touch, and my fear of entanglement with you: yes, probably. It lurked behind my already unreal aversion to any male who might be a serious adult. But it really had less to do with color of skin or physical appearance. It had to do with my not yet owning our collective racial history. However, people want to frame it, we, black and white and mixed have a common racial history in this country. We have had separate roles and experiences, and continue to have separate subcultures as well as common ones. The American collective until recently has been unwilling to own the black experience, or any ethnically different experience in our country at the deeper levels, having lived in a kind of confusing mindset of the intellectual overseer and emotional slave bathed in varying cross-currents of denial, aversion, guilt, and anger.
However, we need to talk to each other, not past each other. We need to be aware of complicity in woundedness; we have let it be used as an element of control, to let people feel victimized, whether as the abused or the abuser. We need to continue to acknowledge that awful things have happened at physical, emotional, and spiritual levels, and still are. We need to celebrate the efforts of real emotional and spiritual work that many have achieved. We each need to call ourselves out and face how we have been tested, admit our failures, and perhaps find nuggets of mutual understanding. That is what I am doing. I am looking at you now behind the podium, looking you in the eye, and I am saying, I am sorry I let you down. I have since grown up a little.
Now I am sitting in this session at this imaginary conference 37 years later, both of us at the age of reflection. I have no idea where you are, but you are at the podium in my head at this moment.
At the reunion of tour participants during the vocational education conference a year later after our China journey, you and I again engaged in close conversation, about work at our separate institutions in separate states. About China. Deng Xiaoping was the leader then, and China was just emerging from its extended hermetic existence, searching out its place in the world. Did you reach for me at the elevator after the get-together in the conference hotel? Is that when I shrank away? We were both shocked to the core. You did not follow me onto the elevator. I never saw or talked to you again.
I do acknowledge you called me in my room, left a message on the voicemail with profuse apologies, and expressed wishes to talk with me. I did not want to talk. I did not want to explain myself. I did not know what to explain. Why had I withdrawn so swiftly and assuredly? What deep water did your pebble ripple that I could neither fathom nor feel?
You must have called again, but I let the phone ring and ring. No message left this time. You had been persistent, but I was stubborn. You were not ready to run, but I had run far away from you, and far from myself.
What you don’t know is that later that day, I came to some level of courage that I could talk with you. Explore what was going on with me, and share what we had expected from an encounter that had started out feeling so mutual. I called you back, but time had run out. The conference had ended. I learned you had checked out. I sensed my refusal to talk was more a slap in the face than my shrinking away. I rarely refused to talk to someone. Why you? What was it in you that made me run?
Was it your black skin? Was it the overture of intimacy? Or both of these and something deeper? I do not regard myself as racist, but some element of racism may have been in play. I have to consider this if I am going to heal. I cannot help but reflect back on Larry in high school.
One of the lone black students in an Alaskan high school, an Army brat with star status on the football team, Larry, I think, had a crush on me. I ignored what I thought was his interest, but I was gracious enough to say hello every day in math class. Although I was not interested in Larry personally, the small part of me that was intrigued by his attention thought about the ramifications of an interracial hook up. Peers. Teachers. Parents—especially Mother. Interracial hookups were a big deal in those days, and interracial marriage still illegal in some states. More than public criticism, the very likely prospect of a severe dressing-down at home quashed any leaning I had toward going out with Larry. The tension between my mother and myself over going out on dates was already so intense I was drowning in her low estimation of my ability to handle boys, and I lacked confidence. I had to consider: what would my parents let alone other people do to either of us? Larry was gracious, too, and never made a move beyond the question in his brown eyes.
Was there some element of that earlier experience of a black man’s interest in me in my response to you? I expect it is significant in ways I only now begin to comprehend as we grapple with race relations in these United States of America (the irony of our country’s name). What I think is that I sensed I could not handle you and whatever history each of us would bring to a relationship, but maybe what I feared most was relationship: relationship in which my personal self would not only confront my personal incapacities but also my personal history.
In those days when we met, I already avoided entanglements with any man who might be serious about me beyond a one-night stand. I am afraid that is the truth. I ran with the rebels who would leave me—and leave me alone. Though I don’t really know, I believe you were not a rebel but a bastion of stability who could confront those issues that divide and demean us. I was not ready. I was not ready for your level of maturity.
So, getting back to what you might presume was a racist reason behind my visceral reaction to your touch, and my fear of entanglement with you: yes, probably. It lurked behind my already unreal aversion to any male who might be a serious adult. But it really had less to do with color of skin or physical appearance. It had to do with my not yet owning our collective racial history. However, people want to frame it, we, black and white and mixed have a common racial history in this country. We have had separate roles and experiences, and continue to have separate subcultures as well as common ones. The American collective until recently has been unwilling to own the black experience, or any ethnically different experience in our country at the deeper levels, having lived in a kind of confusing mindset of the intellectual overseer and emotional slave bathed in varying cross-currents of denial, aversion, guilt, and anger.
However, we need to talk to each other, not past each other. We need to be aware of complicity in woundedness; we have let it be used as an element of control, to let people feel victimized, whether as the abused or the abuser. We need to continue to acknowledge that awful things have happened at physical, emotional, and spiritual levels, and still are. We need to celebrate the efforts of real emotional and spiritual work that many have achieved. We each need to call ourselves out and face how we have been tested, admit our failures, and perhaps find nuggets of mutual understanding. That is what I am doing. I am looking at you now behind the podium, looking you in the eye, and I am saying, I am sorry I let you down. I have since grown up a little.
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Sandra Wassilie has had poems tacked to a tree near Seward, Alaska, taped to a greenhouse in San Francisco, and recently, read by her son at a national family farmers convention in Des Moines. Her first book The Dream That Is Childhood: a Memoir in Verse depicts a life informed by wilderness. Numerous other poems appear in journals, anthologies, and a chapbook, Smoke Lifts. Living with a partner in Oakland, CA, she currently manages an apartment building, and occasionally breaks out into prose. Bio Photo credit: Jimmy Oligney
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