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(Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer testifying at the DNC in Atlantic City in August of 1964.)
Fresh Air recently re-ran a segment featuring “Freedom Summer,” the documentary directed and produced by Stanley Nelson that chronicles SNCC and CORE’s combined efforts to bring civil rights to Black Americans living in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. One of the goal’s was to bring the nation’s attention to the extreme system of apartheid that Blacks lived under, and that was reinforced by every branch of power in Mississippi, from government, to the highly censored news media, to white “Citizens’ Councils,” to the KKK.
“Freedom Summer” moves me to tears every time I watch it, and I have watched it a bunch of times. So profound was its effect that I ended up having one of my characters, Daniella, be a part of “The Mississippi Summer Project” as it was known before it came to be called “Freedom Summer.”
Chapter five of We Are All Good People Here is comprised solely of letters from Daniella, which she writes while living in Mississippi with a Black family, spending the hot days going door-to-door, encouraging Black Mississippians to register to vote, despite the danger such action would put them in, and despite the known futility of their attempts (white county registrars saw to it that nearly all registrations by Black people were denied.) For Daniella, her summer in Mississippi marks the moment her life splits into two, Before and After, as she would spend the rest of her life deepened and changed by this experience
I HIGHLY recommend you watch the documentary, Freedom Summer , which PBS is currently streaming for free.
And here’s the 2014 Fresh Air interview with director Stanley Nelson and organizer Charles Cobb:
And, finally, here is chapter five from my book — my favorite chapter in the novel — which is simply a compilation of Daniella’s letters home from Mississippi.
As a white woman from the South who writes novels that attempt to debunk some of the falsehoods of white, Southern nostalgia, I’ve spent years trying to educate myself on the complex legacy of racism in this country. *** In doing so, I have been faced with my own delusions, and the delusions so many of us white people maintain in order to preserve the idealization of our “goodness.”
As our country grapples with how to answer the clear and present call for systemic change in order to bring about racial justice, I recognize the desire of “good white people” to cling to the belief that we, ourselves, are not racist; that, indeed, are hearts are full of only love. But our “goodness” is not the issue at hand. Instead, we are being asked to acknowledge systems of racial inequity that are rooted in our country’s very founding and, though these systems have morphed and changed over the last 400 years, continue to play out today. To do so, we must recognize that we have been miseducated about the violence of our history, and we must resist our inclination to preserve our ignorance.
It was not until I was 34 years old that I learned the extent of our country’s history of lynching, despite the fact that I graduated from the “best” high school in Atlanta. This brutal history is too often hidden from curriculums. It certainly was in the predominantly white, private schools I attended, not because the history is hard to access (it is not), but presumably because we “good white people” didn’t want to deal with it. My own white, Southern grandmother, who I deeply admire for having spoken out early against racism, asked her relatives not to share stories with her of racial injustice perpetuated by her dirt-poor family during the Depression. She wanted to be shielded from knowing her family’s full history, because she intuited that surely it included violence against blacks.
I understand my grandmother’s impulse, but today we are being called upon to stop shielding ourselves from history. And in doing so, we are being asked to consider how we white people have collectively benefited (materially, though not spiritually) from systemic racism, including our political and corporate power, our generational accumulation of wealth, our healthcare outcomes, the schools we attend, the neighborhoods we live in, the way we are policed, and so on.
Whether implicitly or explicitly, most white people in this country are conditioned to believe in the primacy and superiority of white culture. It’s a toxic and in some cases subtle conditioning, and one that we must try to unlearn.
For me, attempting to unlearn my racist conditioning has meant abandoning “truisms” of white culture that aren’t actually true. For instance, that our country provides an even playing field, despite the fact that for centuries, Black people were enslaved and then brutally oppressed for nearly another 100 years by Jim Crow laws in the South, and discriminatory practices in the rest of the country. And then, when explicitly racist laws were (mostly) dismantled, and Federal voting protections put into place, systemic racism continued in more veiled forms, “hiding elsewhere,” as one of the ministers at my church says—in home mortgage policies, in how schools are funded, in the criminal [in]justice system…
Lately, I’ve been sitting with the fact that our country’s first president wore false teeth made not of wood, as legend has it, but rather from a collection of materials that included the pulled teeth of enslaved people. When I first heard this correction, I thought surely it wasn’t true, probably because my white imagination had been trained to doubt the unimaginable indignities and sufferings heaped upon Black people over the centuries.
We are now being asked to recognize the extreme limits of our imaginations. We are being asked to let go of our perpetual equivocations, our “every country has bigotry” response that so often flies out of our mouths when we hear examples of racial prejudice in our country. Once, while I was a resident at an arts colony, a Black artist gave a presentation on photographs she had taken at the Elmina Castle in Ghana, a fortress where abducted African people were warehoused before being forced onto slave ships. The white audience’s response? They wanted to talk about the existence of current-day slavery. They wanted to divert the subject away from the pain of our country’s history of slavery and focus instead on something—anything—else.
As “good white people,” and perhaps especially those of us who are proud of, say, not having voted for Trump, our impulse is to justify, to explain that while we are sure we’ve acted in a prejudiced manner at some point in our lives, we aren’t racist. That we love everybody. That we just wish everyone could get along. But we live and breathe within a racist system. We are not immune to the world around us. We do not wear space helmets as we glide through life, breathing only the air of our transcendental purity.
So how do we resist our inclinations? We can, as Austin Channing Brown urges, choose to care more about the safety of black people than we do about our own desire to avoid feeling uncomfortable. We can choose to check our defenses, our tendency to bring up present distractions whenever the subject of systemic racism comes up. How many potentially fruitful conversations about the lived experiences of black people in this country have been sidelined by a white person arguing heatedly, instead, over semantics, having, say, a lengthy argument over whether or not the term “racist” or “bigoted” is correct?
We are being asked to sit with the discomfort this moment invokes. We are being asked to feel the pain of others. We want to deny, or, to “fix things,” quickly. We rush to post videos on Instagram of cops and protesters dancing, hugging, sharing water. Our imaginations fail to recognize that these “feel good” videos do nothing to change systems that fail black people again and again. We want to see the heartwarming clips, so that we may return to the happy fantasy that we are good, that it is simply a case of “bad apples” on each side who are making things so hard: a few bad cops. A few bad protesters.
Our desire to feel better often causes us to turn away from the pain, and return to the illusion that everything is okay. But everything is not okay. We need to feel the discomfort of that truth. And then we need to transfer our discomfort into action, and join the legions of those who are currently working for systemic change, and those saints who came before us.
***Footnote: I would not be able to think about systemic racism with any cogency without the scholarship and brilliance of Black writers. Twenty-two years ago, I took a literature class in college in which we read Their Eyes Were Watching God, Passing, Native Son, Beloved, and Jazz. These novels changed the way I saw the world, and changed the books I chose to read going forward. (Previously, I had mostly read works by western, male writers in literature classes.) During this current season, I’ve been reading W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. And I am just starting James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree.
My son is six, and has the teensiest penchant for the dramatic (no idea where he got THAT from!) He and I are alike in so many ways, and because of this, he is very adept at making me feel guilty. As in, the kid has got my number. Every afternoon, when my husband takes over, and I hightail it to my “home office” (er, bedroom) in order to get a little of my own work done, G acts as if he’s Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, saying one last goodbye to Humphrey Bogart before boarding the plane. “One more hug,” he’ll beg. And then whisper, mournfully, “I love you, Mommy!”
Sometimes he slips notes under the bedroom door. “Hi, Mommy. I miss you.”
This doesn’t stroke my guilt at all. Nope. Not at all. (“I miss you, too, darling! We’ll reunite soon! Hang in there for the next 1.5 hours as you play Legos with Daddy. It will be okay!”)
The other day, during our morning time together, my son said he wanted to fly a kite. The weather was brisk and windy, so it was actually a perfect day to do so, but I resisted. I didn’t want to put the damn kite together, and I didn’t want to run around like a maniac trying to get the kite to take off. Eventually, though, I rallied, and suggested we walk to the nearby playing field, where we could first fly the kite, then have a little picnic. I packed popcorn, cheese sticks, apple slices, and water.
We found a honeysuckle vine about two blocks from our house, and G picked a great number of the flowers, fantasizing about making a whole tin of “honey,” if he could just extract enough nectar. (I remember having this exact same fantasy as a kid, as well as fantasizing about making perfume by boiling rose petals in water.) I was a little nervous about him sucking the nectar from the stamen in the age of coronavirus, but I also reasoned that the risk was minimal, the joy great. So, I didn’t stop him. After he wearied of honeysuckle, we kept walking, arriving at the soccer field, which was blessedly empty. We spread out a picnic blanket and began to assemble the kite. It was missing a piece.
I repeat: It was missing a #$%^&* piece.
This is a universal truth of parenthood: Whatever it is you are trying to put together will always be missing a piece.
There was a second kite in the package, a cheap-ass thing my husband had bought the year before in Tybee Island, after our good kite broke. We tried it out, running as fast as we could, the kite trailing on the ground behind us, failing to launch. Eventually, winded, we sat back down, and I offered G some food.
“Bring anything cheesy?” he asked.
“I brought cheese.”
“I meant cheesy like Cheez-Its!”
“Nope. Just cheese, popcorn, and apples. But they’re the really good apples!”
He started mumbling, “Nothing ever goes my way. The kite doesn’t work, there’s nothing cheesy to eat, it’s so unfair.”
Y’all. I pulled a Mom. Big time.
“Listen, honey. I’m going to tell you something true: Life is full of beautiful things, and big disappointments. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t feel the disappointments. But if all you focus on is the bad, then that is all you will see. And the more you notice the good, the more good you will see. I’m serious. It’s like magic. And it’s something I try to do every day, think about what I’m grateful for.”
“I know, I know….” (Believe me: this is not the first time I’ve been an evangelist for gratitude with him.)
“Okay, so you know. But let’s try it. Like, right now, I’m grateful for this beautiful spring day. This blue sky–have you ever seen a sky this blue?”
“It’s blue because of the virus. Because there’s no pollution.”
“Did you know that in New Delhi, in India, the sky has been gray for a long time because of pollution, and now it’s blue? Can you imagine? Can you imagine how beautiful that must look, and how happy people must be to see the blue sky again?”
“What else?”
“Well, I’m grateful that the work I do lets me stay home and be with you for a big part of the day. And I’m grateful we live in Atlanta, and can walk to this park. And I’m grateful that there’s honeysuckle growing all around. What about you, hon? What are you grateful for?”
“I’m grateful for the virus.”
Me: GULP.
“Um, why are you grateful for the virus?”
“Because of the environment and the sky and pollution.”
“Oh. Okay, but, honey, the virus also brings lots of bad things. Lots.”
“Yeah, but more good than bad, right? Didn’t you just say to look at the good?”
Jesus Christ. My kid is too smart for me.
But he got right to the thorny heart of the issue, didn’t he? Should we express gratitude for experiences that might bring about some good, but also cause a great many people to suffer?
I have no good answer to this question. But I’m wary of the suggestion that coronavirus is a necessary lesson from God, or the universe. I think coronavirus just IS. Yes, like everything, it exists because of a particular series of consequences and events, and we should examine that series of events and learn from it. As in: Could we have been better prepared for this? Hell, yes. Has our hubris helped land us in this situation? Most definitely. Is our national leadership failing us spectacularly? You betcha. Are we failing each other by childishly deciding that we’ve “had enough” social isolation and congregating in big groups at local restaurants that have re-opened? Guilty as charged.
But is this some big lesson being co-taught by God and Mother Nature, who have decided to send us all to our rooms to think about what we’ve done to the earth, the planet, each other? I don’t think so. For starters, the homeless among us don’t have a room to go to, and considering that God’s heart resides with them, I can’t see God deliberately enacting something so cruel.
But just because I don’t believe this virus was sent as “a lesson,” doesn’t mean there’s not much to learn from it. It’s more that, referencing the brilliant writer and thinker, Kate Bowler, the suffering itself is not redemptive. As Bowler says–speaking from years of Biblical scholarship–in the Christian tradition, only Christ’s suffering was redemptive. (For this and so much more, follow Kate’s instagram feed @katecbowler and check out her amazing video talks. )
I say all of this, and yet I also have to confess that in my own life, I am most grateful for the beautiful gifts that arrived in hideous packaging, like the freedom I experienced during my divorce from my first husband, a marriage that, much like the cheap-ass kite Gus and I tried to fly, never managed to launch. During my divorce, I was scared a lot of the time — of my sudden financial insecurity and how that might affect my writing career, of my soon-to-be-ex-husband’s mercurial moods, of possibly not ever becoming a mother. And yet. It was also as if I’d sprinkled Miracle Grow — or some organic version of it — all over my soul, because I grew up faster in that year it took us to untangle than I had in the prior 35 years I’d been alive. And I learned how to take care of myself in a real way, to listen to the voice in my head that said, “Honey, is that a wise move?” about any questionable decision I was about to make, and then to heed that voice’s caution.
But here’s the thing: I don’t think I ever should have married my now ex-husband. We weren’t a match. We didn’t have each other’s backs. We weren’t in it for the long-haul. Our love was conditional, and all too often transactional. And yet, being who I was at 26 when I met him, I don’t know how I couldn’t have married him, this older writer who said that he would mentor me, would help me become the thing I burned to be, a publishing novelist.
I shouldn’t have married him, but I did, and I’m grateful for how I grew up in the process of untangling from that failed marriage.
Was it all part of some divine plan? My gut says it’s not that simple. My gut says the world is set in motion in a bazillion different ways, and to think it is all orchestrated around any particular life is hubris in the extreme. And to return to the virus–to think that coronavirus is somehow ultimately a good thing is to spit in the face of the ER nurses and doctors, and hospice chaplains, and frontline workers, and grocery store clerks who are experiencing trauma day in and out, not to mention those suffering from this nasty, nasty disease.
So, I cannot say “thank you” for the virus. But I can look for the lessons learned in spite of its awfulness, and look for the shots of joy amid all this mess. Because those exist, too. The world is a complicated, messy place, and cannot be contained by tidy explanations.
Here are some things I’m grateful for right now:
- Discovering, thanks to our friends the Morgans, the Michelle Obama Path, over near Georgia State University’s Decatur campus. It’s so pretty, dotted with shiny yellow flowers and with blackberries growing all around. We were able to pick enough to make a berry crisp. (Served on Peter Rabbit Wedgwood china no less, see pic below.)
- The many, many people who have lifted up my brother in prayer. He has Covid-19, but is now off the ventilator and is on his way to recovery!
- My solid-as-a-rock husband, Sam, who can build ANYTHING, and is currently finishing up our cedar box front yard garden, and then will be moving onto building a loft in my son’s room, which will give us more places to put stuff (i.e. G’s toys) in our 1100 square foot home.
- Harry Potter! I never read the Harry Potter books — I was in my twenties when they launched, and I didn’t have kids — so I’m getting to experience Hogwarts for the first time along with G. I’m addicted. What a treat.
- The Labyrinth at St. Philip’s Cathedral. This permanent stone walkway will always take you to its center, as long as you follow its lead through twists, turns, and cutbacks. It’s meditative to walk, and G loves to “run it,” especially if his grandparents–who live nearby–visit while he does, staying at a safe distance the whole time.
Love,
S
(Prayer square and blanket made by the NDPC Knit Wits)
It’s pretty much impossible to say anything definitive about living through this time of global pandemic. It’s all such a moving target. On Good Friday–nearly three weeks ago–I wrote a post that I didn’t end up publishing. It was about coronavirus and the privilege gap. As in, essential workers and people living in crowded spaces (those in nursing homes, hospitals, prisons, overcrowded apartments) are at grave risk, and those of us who can work at home (and aren’t crammed into too small a space with too many others) are significantly less vulnerable.
I was trying to make the point that contrary to optimistic memes and sweet signs taped to the windows of many of the houses I walk by daily, we aren’t all in this together. Some are in much leakier boats. And I was trying to connect this grim reality to the grim reality of Good Friday, when humanity’s sadism and brutality was on full display.
I still stand by all that. Of course. But the day after I wrote that post, I found out that one of my brothers, who lives in Minnesota, was very sick and showing symptoms of Covid-19. After finding out he was ill, I called him, and learned that he had just called for an ambulance. I was still on the phone with him when the ambulance arrived. I overheard the EMT help him gather his things. My brother was very disoriented, and the EMT was patient and kind.
I was calling from Atlanta, where the bulk of our family lives. I was struck by how very far away he was, how very far away most of those closest to him were–in particular, my sister, with whom he is exceptionally close, and his mother. (He is my half-brother. We have the same father but not the same mother.)
Soon after we hung up, I learned that he did indeed have Covid-19. Later that evening, the doctors determined that he needed to be on a ventilator.
So far, he is doing remarkably well, all things considered. But being on a ventilator is a lot to consider.
My day-to-day situation remains the same, and it remains one of privilege–nesting at home with my husband and son, taking a daily walk with my mask on, observing the flowers bloom in the front yard (it’s peony season, and God, are they lovely and fragrant), cooking good meals. But my experience of the virus has changed. The stakes are much higher. The danger, suddenly, quite real.
I’ve always had what I like to think of as “the God gene,” meaning I’ve always both believed in God and actively sought to feel close to God. (I know some deeply moral people who do not seem to possess this gene, which makes me think that some of us are inclined to religious life, others find grounding elsewhere.) But for much of my life, I’ve been skeptical of certain kinds of prayer — that is, the kind where you ask God for something specific, and if you ask in the right way, you get it. There’s a whole subset of Christianity based on this model–sometimes called “the prosperity gospel”–and I’ve always found it troubling. What about those whose prayers AREN’T answered? What about those who pray for financial wellbeing and don’t find it, who are stuck in a cycle of poverty? Is their financial situation their own fault, and not, at least in part, the result of a terribly inequitable economic system that is deeply rooted in racism? Did they simply not pray with enough sincerity or faith?
Several years ago, I knew of a woman who got very sick, very suddenly. I didn’t know her personally; she was a friend of a friend. By all accounts, she was a wonderful human being: a mother and wife and high-powered business woman who was adored by pretty much everyone she encountered. Upon her diagnoses, her deeply devoted friends and family surrounded her with healing prayer. This core group of ceaseless prayer warriors believed that because of their faithful and relentless pleas to God, she would not die. She was too faithful a woman to die so young.
She died.
My guess is that there was no reason for her illness and death, other than the simple truth that we humans are mortal, and therefore vulnerable to disease. But does that mean her friends and families prayers were for naught? I don’t think so. Perhaps, the faith and loyalty of her tribe buoyed her family during her illness. Perhaps, she felt so loved and cherished and tenderly cared for, that she was not as scared as she might otherwise have been in the face of death. Perhaps, her death changed those who prayed for her–perhaps it opened up the possibility of less certainty, and a wilder and more difficult God to comprehend, a God that cannot be captured by our limited, finite brains. A terrible reality, but perhaps closer to the truth.
Her death certainly made me question an assumption I had always taken for granted, that a shortened life is a ruined life. Perhaps it is not. Perhaps it’s just…shorter. After all, we are all going to die. Do we not allow someone to have had a “good life” if it is not also a long one?
This is not to try and short-circuit the necessary grief and anger and despair that her friends and family–and God, her children–felt. One thing I feel pretty certain about is that faith in God is not meant to short-circuit necessary grief. And that her friends who prayed so earnestly for her healing had a right to be furious when she died anyway.
One of the reasons that I’ve spent so much of my life wary of the idea that God will grant our prayer requests–assuming we ourselves have the proper amount of faith–is because I grew up in a world of tremendous wealth and privilege, where people seemed to believe that God INTENDED for themselves and their families to live in multi-million dollar houses and belong to private clubs, just so long as the parents tithed, and were “fiscally responsible,” and the children made good grades, and didn’t have sex before marriage. In that world, it seemed Christ was personally invested in every tiny poop taken by white children in smocked clothing, but didn’t give much thought to, say, brown bodies being warehoused in American prisons, or, more currently, migrant kids at the border separated from their parents and kept, in some cases, in cages.
But if God is worth anything at all, God cares about all–whether we are outfitted in smocked dresses or prison garb. And in the Christian tradition, God came to this earth the dark-skinned child of a disempowered woman, came to this earth a child who was soon made a refugee, as his family fled to Egypt shortly after his birth in order to protect their newborn child from Herod. And so it can be plausibly argued that while God loves us all, if we want to feel close to God, to feel God’s presence, we need to go to the margins, because that is where God showed up when God came to earth.
A metaphor that helps explain this concept: God loves us all–from mouse to elephant–but God’s heart is with the mouse being stepped on by the elephant.
But the thing is–the mouse prays. People on the margins pray. The man I used to visit in a detention center (he was an undocumented immigrant awaiting a court hearing to determine if he could stay in our country), prayed all of the time, and asked me to pray for him. And I did. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in praying. It was more that I saw prayer as a way to tap into God’s presence, to feel accompanied by God, in sorrow and in joy. I did not believe that prayer was supposed to shield us from our experience of being human on this earth. I did not believe that prayer could change outcomes.
I say this, and yet, there have been times in my life when I have heard the voice of God–and whether that was simply deep intuition or a voice outside of myself, I’m not sure really matters. And listening to that voice DID help me chart my life in a way that brought me joy and connection. Listening to that voice did change the outcome. And what of the civil rights movement of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s? Was it not girded by prayer? Did Fannie Lou Hamer’s bedrock faith not allow her to face the beast of white supremacy and not back down?
Perhaps my resistance to the efficacy of prayer is, in itself, a form of buffered, white privilege.
I’m thinking about all of this, of course, because of my brother. So many members of my church have reached out to tell me they are praying for him. And so many people from his life and his family’s life are praying, too. And this isn’t a, “he’s in my prayers,” sort of empty assurance, where that statement serves as the prayer itself, where once you say it, you promptly forget whoever it is you said you would pray for. (See: politicians “thoughts and prayers” after a mass shooting.) These folks are ACTIVELY praying for my brother, every day. Lifting him up. Focusing loving attention on him. Asking God for help.
I’ve been praying, too, asking God to be with my brother, to help him heal, to bathe him in light, to let him know he is loved, even in his sedated state. To let him feel a sense of steady and infinite love, regardless of outcome.
I believe my brother can feel this divine energy directed at him. But do I believe it is helping him heal?
Well, here’s the thing. He’s doing remarkably well. The doctors thought they were going to lose him, and now they think he has a shot at recovery.
And yet, someone else’s beloved brother, or mother, or aunt, or grandmother has died from this disease, and my religion insists that their life was as worthy and important as anyone else’s. So, why would God save one of many?
I don’t know. I really don’t know.
I only have a wisp of understanding of this massive, infinite thing I think of as God. Recognizing the limits of my comprehension, it seems to me that it’s both arrogant to think prayer DEFINITELY works in the way you want it to work, and it’s arrogant to think it DEFINITELY doesn’t work. I suppose I’m having a Job (as in the Book of Job) moment, because mostly I’m just in awe of how much I don’t understand. But this is what I currently know:
1) Praying helps loosen me from the bonds of my own anxiety and overthinking.
2) Praying makes me feel closer to the person I am praying for. Even though I am not physically near my brother, I FEEL near him when I pray for him.
3) Knowing that people are praying for my brother brings me great comfort and peace, and I believe it brings him comfort and peace as well.
4) There is something to be said about letting God know what you want. Surely God or the universe knows anyway. But there is something honest and humbling about just stating what you desire, knowing that it is not within your power to make it happen. There is something distinctly vulnerable about stating your needs. It kind of goes against all of the training I had growing up in a competitive, status-oriented world, in which I was taught that to be vulnerable or earnest or faithful was to be subject to ridicule. But God loves our vulnerable, tender hearts.
5) I feel less anxious in general when I allow myself to be in conversation with a spirit greater than myself. Sometimes this spirit feels “out there,” as in as big as the sky. Other times it feels deeply internal, as in getting in touch with my innermost intuition. But always, I feel in conversation. Whether I’m listening to a “still, small voice” from inside myself, or I’m outside on a walk, conversing with God as if God is lurking in the clouds.
6) Certainty is the opposite of faith.
Which is all to say, my relationship to prayer is changing. Some might say evolving. I would even go so far as to say I’m certain that prayer helps. I just don’t know how or why.
Love,
Susan
(Sam putting up banners at my church.)
Hi, friends.
So, how are we all doing?
Me, I’m caught in a cycle of being profoundly aware of what an honest-to-God PRIVILEGE it is to have the ability to stay home, and occasionally going out of my mind with the family-togetherness of it all.
The place in which I’m currently spending ALL my days and nights–that is, my house–has a screened front porch, and from it I can look out onto our small yard that houses a towering tree that my husband planted years ago. He planted it to mark the first anniversary of his marriage to his first wife, with whom he parted amicably. I love the tree and love that Sam’s anniversary impulse was to plant one. Sam is private, so I don’t talk much about him in the public sphere, but I will say this: He’s the kind of solid, dependable, can-fix-just-about-anything-sort-of-a-man that I once thought only existed in novels.
Another thing about Sam: He does not have the same “religious gene” that I do. I’ve always been drawn not only to God, but to the search for God, be it books on faith, talks on faith, Taize services, incense, ritual. I should add that my Christianity is of a leftwing variety that some of my rightwing Christian friends might find apostate, but I can live with that. (What I can’t live with is subscribing to an exclusionary faith that dishonors other religions, and is much more interested in individual salvation and, say, the 2nd Amendment than in the daily struggle to love each other well–imperfect beings that we are–during our fleeting time on this very earth.) ANYWAY, back to Sam: he’s not particularly religious, but he says that IF he were a church-goer, he would definitely belong to my church. And because it’s important to me, he attends services about 6 times a year, and together we had Gus baptized.
The other week I needed to put banners up outside our church urging people to STAY HOME, as a way of loving one’s neighbor, and guess who hung them? Sweet Sam. It took about 2 hours to do so. Watching him steadily go about the task of hanging up church signs, it occurred to me that THIS was what church was about–people in community looking out for each other, guided by a spirit that is generous, loving, and connected. What does it matter what beliefs we profess? My own beliefs have changed so much over the years. I think the more crucial question might be: How do we act towards each other? Do we patiently show up for those we love, even if we are showing up for something that isn’t exactly “our thing?”
So, what else is going on? I’m spending LOTS of quality time with my son, and he is also spending LOTS of quality time with the television. I feel guilty about this, but I’m trying to let it go. Our house is small, my son is needy (as all young kids seem to be during this strange and confusing time) and sometimes I need the television to babysit. When I start to feel as if I’m going to lose my mind from 1) suddenly becoming a homeschooling parent, and 2) not knowing WHEN my kid is going to be able to hang out with his friends and his grandparents again, I find that if I can just get outside, I’m usually okay. I had a therapist once tell me that when I felt as if I was going to lose my shit (this was back when my son was a stubborn toddler), I should get outside as fast as I could and put my feet in the dirt. And so, I’ve had a few comical parenting moments of being like, “Wait, right there!” while I run outside and walk around barefoot.
But it helps. It honest-to-God helps. As does yoga (my studio is offering online classes), walking, watching sweet, lovely movies with my kid at night, contemplative prayer, and meditation.
This week, my membership gifts from The Bitter Southerner arrived. Do y’all know this online magazine? So excellent. Its fearless editors are committed to representing the South in a more honest and interesting way than it is usually portrayed–celebrating what is great about it and unearthing all that is regressive and terrible. I love my new “Stand for a Better South” bag, and were I going anywhere these days, I’d take it with me, always!
On that note: my kid ALWAYS wants any buttons or stickers I receive, which is why he is in the possession of vintage gay rights buttons from the 80s that I got at an art exhibit (I wish I could say they were just mine from that time), as well as all of my Bitter Southerner buttons, and a button he got from the High Museum’s A.A. Milne exhibit, as well as a button showcasing one of his favorite pairs of literary siblings, Charlie and Mouse. The other day we tie-dyed t-shirts (fun), and he decided to decorate his tie-dye with all his buttons, as seen here.
I hope everyone is hanging in there. What a strange, strange time we are living through. Take notes! Stand for a Better South! Think about what you want the world to look like once we emerge from this place…
Love, Susan
I hadn’t intended to name this blog. But I think “gimme shelter” works–at least during this time when the governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, refuses to order a “shelter in place” for residents, despite the fact that the cases of COVID-19 are growing at a truly alarming rate in the peach state. (C’mon Kemp. Gimme Shelter. Give us shelter. Or let Stacey Abrams take over.)
Also, I just really love the Rolling Stones. My husband and I got married in our home, my therapist officiating (if that tells you anything about me), and after we kissed for the first time as husband and wife, one of our two guests put on “Torn and Frayed,” from Exile on Main Street, which felt like an appropriate anthem for Sam and me, each entering a second marriage in mid-life. Sure, the song is about addiction, and making music, and living on the edge–and that wasn’t Sam’s and my story–but the line, “just as long as the guitar still plays” resonated. You don’t have to be shiny and new for the music to sound good. You don’t have to be shiny and new to find love. In fact, Sam and I found each other after each getting worn down a little.
Yesterday the wonderful Robin Homonoff hosted me on her podcast, “Reading with Robin, during which we mused on how a lot of us might go full-on gray during this period of social distancing and hair salons temporarily closing. That or Madison Reed is going to have a banner year.
It’s a fine line between taking action that makes you feel good about yourself and clinging to a youth that has passed, all while overlooking the juicy gifts of middle age. I don’t want to fight aging too hard. Still, I’m not yet ready to go gray.
Are my thoughts on aging with or without hair color too shallow during this time, or just very human? So many people are suffering. And dying. I know that the majority of humanity will survive this pandemic, but not everyone. That is so sobering and so awful. I wish there was a way to wrest the gifts of this time away from the tragedy. The gift of bird song everywhere, and freer days, and the stripping away of the inessential, and not really giving a shit about more gray hairs, and the joy of more idle time with my kid, and more hikes, and more meals on the porch. But there’s this dread cloud in the distance. How bad is it going to get?
Mostly I try not to go there.
It’s interesting: My anxiety manifests in health worries. Sam’s plays out in worrying about money. Surely, there’s a gendered aspect to that.
One thing my “serenity prayer” meditation (from 10 Percent Happier) teaches is to accept reality as it is. We are in an uncertain and dangerous moment. That is true. There is no trick mirror that will transport us into a different reality. We are here. It’s awful, but it’s the truth of the situation. And in some ways, allowing myself to recognize the truth-that we ARE in a global pandemic, that this IS scary and real and unchartered–helps me better navigate my way through it, or at least, keeps me somewhat grounded.
Here’s something else that’s keeping me grounded: Revisiting the poetry of Mary Oliver. And here’s a song I used to listen to all the time in college, a song I’ve returned to lately, as it’s evocative of long, slow, days. Also, the 70s style captured in this video is pretty great.
Love,
Susan
March 25, 2020
Hello! Greetings from the edge of … whatever new world we will enter once this surreal season is over. I don’t know what the post-coronavirus world will bring, but I think we need to start imagining what we WANT it to look like. For one: I want indie bookstores to continue to thrive, and that’s going to take some effort on all of our parts right now. If you have the means, please order your “social distancing” reading materials from an indie. They need us. Amazon does not.
Looking for a good podcast during this time? I love On Being with Krista Tippett. I just listened to her interview Rebecca Solnit, and I pretty much want to quote everything Solnit said, as she was brilliant and wise. Here’s some of what she talked about:
1. History looks more like the weather, not a game of checkers. Meaning, it can change suddenly and quickly and is not a game we can easily master or control. Sometimes change comes from seemingly nowhere (though that “new” weather system might have been brewing under the surface for a long time) and often it surprises us.
2. The dominant narrative often exists in order to serve those in power. There is a narrative that in catastrophe, we become our worst, Social-Darwinist selves: selfish, brutal, dog-eat-dog. Solnit argues that humanity’s true cooperative nature is often revealed in catastrophe. We recognize our connectedness. We slow down. We awaken to the brevity of our lives, and we reach out to connect with each other while we have breath. We are told that in catastrophe, we will live in a Mad Max world, but that is a Hollywood worldview, and too often Hollywood lies.
3. Change and progress are not linear. The efforts you are making to bring about justice RIGHT NOW might not seem fruitful, but might pay off 200 years down the line. Justice is a long-game, and sometimes an entire lifetime is not enough time to see the arc of history bend toward it.
Contemplating all of the above is really helping me stay grounded during all of this. Of course, it doesn’t ease the fact that we are in a genuine crisis, but I’m trying to remember that the “crisis point” in an illness is when things are EITHER going to change for the worse (death) or the patient will get better. So, there is opportunity for real change. Not that our national leadership is up for the challenge of, you know, helping to protect the lives of the people of this country, but as the serenity prayer goes: I’m trying to learn to accept what I can’t control. (And yeah, I’ll be trying to help control the situation come next November.)
Here’s what I can control: staying home as much as possible (which is pretty much always, except for my daily walk). Finding joy in the extra time I have with my hilarious, nearly 6-year old son. Being gentle and easy with my spouse. Cooking good food and setting up a card table on the front porch so we can listen to the birdies chirp away as we eat dinner. Meditating daily. (I’ve been using the Ten Percent Happier app and it’s amazing.) Checking in with people. Attending Zoom cocktail hours! Staying connected to my church. Bringing as much greenery into the house as I can. Yesterday, my son cut a bunch of backyard flowers and made a gorgeous bouquet, that he insists on keeping in his room. (Fine, fine, even though it would look so good on the dining room table!) And I’ve even got two avocado pits going right now, trying to get them to sprout!
Perhaps most crucially, I’m trying to remember that throughout human history, we have gone through hard and scary things. We are wired to do this—to take care of each other, either by being on the frontlines as our hospital heroes are, or by hunkering down and staying home, and finding ways within those limits to help those most vulnerable.
And just think, even in quarantine, we connect through music and books and conversations. What a gift. What a blessing.
xoxo,
Susan
Guess who is an Indie Next pick for August 2019!?
We Are All Good People Here: A Novel by Susan Rebecca White
(Atria Books, 9781451608915, $27)
“I’ve been reading and admiring Susan Rebecca White’s novels since her 2009 debut, Bound South, and her new book is a continuation of her unmatched knack for capturing the essence of her Atlanta upbringing. Adding layers of historical context to the familiar world of her previous works, White tells a moving and thought-provoking story that spans the tumultuous final decades of the American Century. She explores race, class, privilege, and politics through a cast of very human characters ranging across the entire socioeconomic and ideological spectrum. The book bears witness to the evolution in conscience of these times as the reader experiences the evolution of this ambitious, talented writer.” —Frank Reiss, A Cappella Books, Atlanta, GA
Never Have I Ever: A Novel by Joshilyn Jackson
(William Morrow, 9780062855312, $26.99)
“Never Have I Ever will take you on a breathtaking journey from beginning to end. Jackson weaves a masterful mystery with unexpected twists and turns on every page. The story follows Amy Whey, a Florida housewife with a dark secret safely buried in the past until a stranger shows up to her neighborhood book club and starts a game that hurtles her back into her deepest, most hidden secrets. This story kept me guessing until the very end and still managed to surprise me. This is shaping up to be my favorite novel of the year.” —Dean Hunter, The Fountain Bookstore, Richmond, VA