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You think states can’t be controversial. You’re reading this in your own state thinking that your state is great, right? But everyone sees the world different from everybody else. If you’re in the South, some people don’t like the North because it’s full of elites. If you’re in the North, some people think if you’re from the South, you’re stupid or a racist if you’re white. If you’re from the East Coast, some people on the West Coast think you’re too uptight. If you’re from the West Coast, some people on the East Coast think you’re a weirdo whose parents probably smoke weed.
I don’t know if it was hanging out in Negril or with Eleanor or being raised by my dad, but I’ve never understood white people who can’t admit they’re white. I mean, white isn’t just a color. And maybe that’s the problem for them. White is a passport. It’s a ticket. The world is a white amusement park and your white skin buys you into it. A woman in economy argued with me about this once. She said, “I’ve heard this idea and it makes me uncomfortable.” “It probably should,” I said.
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We could all be shot dead by a crazy asshole with a gun because nobody really cares about dead schoolkids. We could all be kidnapped and no one would look for us. The chances of me getting raped before I graduate college are ridiculously high. The chances of me being abused by a future partner are about 40 percent. And there’s no class about that at school. I ask you: What’s the fucking point?
Things that don’t count as dangerous. Safe things. Safe hate. Tradition. You can say what you want so long as you’re not throwing anvils, I guess. They call it freedom of speech or traditional family values. The louder ones call it heritage—as if it were in our blood to be assholes to other people, as if we’d inherited it. The best the administration ever did is ban Confederate flags on cars in the parking lot. Sure, you can go to my school if you have a Confederate flag on your car—you just can’t park in the parking lot. That was the solution to the incident a few years ago. Nothing about the
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They teach us how to write a clear thesis statement long before they teach us how to deal with creepy-maybe-sex-offenders.
“Potatoes are one thing. People are another. You can’t abandon people and think they’re going to be fine. People need things. Probably love most of all.”
The driver laughs. All of us white, all of us lucky we get away with things.
The stupid bell—her mother bought it down south. The handle painted black with a blackface set of white eyes, two dots for a nose, and a wide-open red mouth. The bottom of the handle and bell part covered in a big house-slave gingham dress with an apron on the very top of the handle above the caricature face, a red handkerchief tied up, you know the kind, from the old maple syrup bottles. How she could deny being racist while in the same room with that bell is beyond me.
It’s because entitled white culture encourages those inside it to never look outside their own fucking worlds. We blow everything off because we’re so concerned with looking good we can’t just feel. My own fucking grandparents can’t stop for a minute and understand what I’m going through. You can’t fill that hole with a fucking lamb chop.
Because I’m not a racist nightmare. Because it’s my mother’s fucking bell, not mine.
“I never told Marla this one,” she said. “That time in Arkansas when she had to go to the hospital? Show ’em your scar, Marla!” Marla showed them her side. “So they were out of blood,” her mother said. “Did you know they used to separate it down there? Fools. They’d only give white people white blood and they’d give black people black blood. That doesn’t sound right even now when I say it, does it?” She laughed. Marla’s aunts and uncles laughed. “Well, either way, they had her blood type, but the nurse told me they couldn’t use it because it was what they called negroid blood. I said, ‘Hell
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Uncle Bill still made comments to her every time he saw her. Called her half blood. She tried to talk to her mother about it—asked, “Why didn’t you tell me this in private?” Her mother just told her to relax. “Bill’s just kidding.”
It’s a family-that-isn’t-a-family. My mother hates all of them. Says so as often as she can. Uncle Harry is going to die and I barely know him. I essentially just met my two aunts and they seem cool—and maybe not nightmare racists like my mother, so that’s good. But there’s more than one missing part here. More than one missing cousin, or one missing uncle who lives on the West Coast. The hole in this family-not-a-family is big. It’s bigger than a six-hundred-acre potato farm. It’s bigger than this county that we all live in. I can’t figure it out.
As sure of it as she’s sure of how her body made defective children because of the blood. The damn blood.
Good Lord!
Taking things for granted is the privilege of existence. The living don’t even think about it, same as boys aren’t scared to go missing at the mall. Same as her white cousins can drive over the speed limit across state lines to New Jersey. Same as her grandfather didn’t think twice about selling the family farm.
“The best part of all of you is underground if you keep thinking those people define you. “Our grandparents were rotten seed. Kept secrets. Worshipped money. Pitted their kids against one another. But we aren’t them. We can break free.” She shakes her head. “Or you can, at least.”
