Is There Something Wrong with Me?
Sorry, but I have a lot of questions. As a writer, I believe that people write essays and fiction to reach people’s MINDS, HEARTS AND SOULS. We writers call it EMPATHY. We want to touch the reader, quietly and persuasively bring the reader into our world so that at the end of a page, chapter or complete book the reader says, “Now I see.” Or, “Wow, I felt for that person.” Or, “What would I do if that were me?” And I have to add that YES, I know we read to escape also. But this book…
Book club: we read Lisa Wingate’s BEFORE WE WERE YOURS. My quick outline of the novel: Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and four younger siblings are wrenched from their family home and all that is familiar to them to be thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage. The Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents–but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, they now live in a world of danger and uncertainty.
Sound familiar? Yes. It is, because it’s 2018 and the United States of America is wrenching children from their parents at our borders.
So I’m at book club with friends and I have the first question in the discussion. I know this group, I know their politics, so I prepared an answer, basically saying that like the children in Wingate’s novel, everyone in this country and in our government from my local representative in the House to the president must be responsible for the children at the border. To go a step further, we need to try, as best we can, to be responsible for all children in our great country. Because, and I think it bares mentioning over and over, THESE ARE CHILDREN who will be permanently damaged by the trauma of separation.
What reaction did I get? Tepid. Someone actually changed the subject before we blundered on to the next question.
Am I crazy? Why read this book if you aren’t going to be touched, if you aren’t going to FEEL SOMETHING? These were women, mothers and grandmothers. Have they forgotten they have a womb?
We got through the evening, moving on to the other questions. One question caused a member to bring up Bill Clinton’s philandering (yes, he’s guilty). But I had to say it, “What about that guy in the White House?” Result: the women who I carpooled with to the meeting, said right out—“That’s enough or you will have to walk home.”
That’s enough. Let’s just go blindly on reading this novel that Wingate researched and wrote with skill and passion. Let’s just pretend that this is just STORY TELLING, you know, like a FAIRY TALE. You get to the end and everything is JUST FINE. After all, this is book club. You can drink your wine and forget reality.
But I can’t and I won’t forget—no matter how expensive the wine and well wrought the dessert. Frankly, I could care less about all of that.
I’m a writer. I know the power of the keyboard and I will use it. EMPATHY. In some ways it is our only hope.
P.S. In case you don’t know, Congress just took funding away from CHIP. What is CHIP? Children’s Health Insurance Program: June 7, 2018, House Republicans voted to cut CHIP, selling out thousands of kids in their districts. They are gambling with kids’ coverage to pay tax breaks.
And I won’t let go of this idea: the future of any country is grounded in HOW WE LOVE AND CARE FOR OUR CHILDREN.
Now the question for me is—do I go to the next book club, keep speaking out? Yes.
PS Lisa Wingate: I also hope that, in a broader sense, the story of Rill and the Foss children serves to document the lives of all the children who disappeared into Georgia Tann’s unregulated system. Only by remembering history are we reminded not to let it repeat itself. It’s important that we, ordinary people busy with the rush of every day life, remember that children are vulnerable, that on any given day, thousands of children live the uncertainty…
Photo Credit, Focus on Family
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