I HAVE COME home from a long stay in
Mexico to find because of the presidential campaign, and
especially because of the Obama/Clinton race for the Democratic
nomination - a new country existing alongside the old. On any given
day we, collectively, become the Goddess of the Three Directions and
can look back into the past, look at ourselves just where we are,
and take a glance, as well, into the future. It is a space with
which I am familiar.
When I was born in 1944 my parents
lived on a middle Georgia plantation that was owned by a white
distant relative, Miss May Montgomery. (During my childhood it was
necessary to address all white girls as 'Miss' when they reached the
age of twelve.) She would never admit to this relationship, of
course, except to mock it. Told by my parents that several of their
children would not eat chicken skin she responded that of course
they would not. No Montgomerys would.
My parents and older siblings did
everything imaginable for Miss May. They planted and raised her
cotton and corn, fed and killed and processed her cattle and hogs,
painted her house, patched her roof, ran her dairy, and, among
countless other duties and responsibilities my father was her
chauffeur, taking her anywhere she wanted to go at any hour of the
day or night. She lived in a large white house with green shutters
and a green, luxuriant lawn: not quite as large as Tara of Gone With
the Wind fame, but in the same style.
We lived in a shack without
electricity or running water, under a rusty tin roof that let in
wind and rain. Miss May went to school as a girl. The school my
parents and their neighbors built for us was burned to the ground by
local racists who wanted to keep ignorant their competitors in
tenant farming. During the Depression, desperate to feed his
hardworking family, my father asked for a raise from ten dollars a
month to twelve. Miss May responded that she would not pay that
amount to a white man and she certainly wouldn't pay it to a nigger.
That before she'd pay a nigger that much money she'd milk the dairy
cows herself.
When I look back, this is part of what
I see. I see the school bus carrying white children, boys and girls,
right past me, and my brothers, as we trudge on foot five miles to
school. Later, I see my parents struggling to build a school out of
discarded army barracks while white students, girls and boys, enjoy
a building made of brick. We had no books; we inherited the cast off
books that 'Jane' and 'Dick' had previously used in the all-white
school that we were not, as black children, permitted to enter.
The year I turned fifty, one of my
relatives told me she had started reading my books for children in
the library in my home town. I had had no idea so kept from black
people it had been that such a place existed. To this day knowing
my presence was not wanted in the public library when I was a child
I am highly uncomfortable in libraries and will rarely, unless I am
there to help build, repair, refurbish or raise money to keep them
open, enter their doors.
When I joined the freedom movement in
Mississippi in my early twenties it was to come to the aid of
sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land
they'd always known, the plantations, because they attempted to
exercise their 'democratic' right to vote. I wish I could say white
women treated me and other black people a lot better than the men
did, but I cannot. It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that
white women have copied, all too often, the behavior of their
fathers and their brothers, and in the South, especially in
Mississippi, and before that, when I worked to register voters in
Georgia, the broken bottles thrown at my head were gender free.
I made my first white women friends in
college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our
friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white
women and that whiteness mattered. That, for instance, at Sarah
Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the Board of Trustees
practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to the campus for
meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other trustees, women
and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because, in our country,
with its painful history of unspeakable inequality, this is part of
what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to make me feel I
mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I knew I could
not.
I am a supporter of Obama because I
believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He
offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start
over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my
feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he
carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement
he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans black,
white, yellow, red and brown - choose Obama over Clinton only
because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.
When I have supported white people,
men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible
people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have
occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be
forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not
perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We
look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our
species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and
for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if
we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people
other than our (white) selves.
True to my inner Goddess of the Three
Directions however, this does not mean I agree with everything Obama
stands for. We differ on important points probably because I am
older than he is, I am a woman and person of three colors, (African,
Native American, European), I was born and raised in the American
South, and when I look at the earth's people, after sixty-four years
of life, there is not one person I wish to see suffer, no matter
what they have done to me or to anyone else; though I understand
quite well the place of suffering, often, in human growth.
I want a grown-up attitude toward
Cuba, for instance, a country and a people I love; I want an end to
the embargo that has harmed my friends and their children, children
who, when I visit Cuba, trustingly turn their faces up for me to
kiss. I agree with a teacher of mine, Howard Zinn, that war is as
objectionable as cannibalism and slavery; it is beyond obsolete as a
means of improving life. I want an end to the on-going war
immediately and I want the soldiers to be encouraged to destroy
their weapons and to drive themselves out of Iraq.
I want the Israeli government to be
made accountable for its behavior towards the Palestinians, and I
want the people of the United States to cease acting like they don't
understand what is going on. All colonization, all occupation, all
repression basically looks the same, whoever is doing it. Here our
heads cannot remain stuck in the sand; our future depends of our
ability to study, to learn, to understand what is in the records and
what is before our eyes. But most of all I want someone with the
self-confidence to talk to anyone, 'enemy' or 'friend,' and this
Obama has shown he can do. It is difficult to understand how one
could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and talk to another
human being. When you vote you are making someone a proxy for
yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot. But if
they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them, human,
impossible, then what good is your vote?
It is hard to relate what it feels
like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use
her own name) referred to as 'a woman' while Barack Obama is always
referred to as 'a black man.' One would think she is just any woman,
colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the
history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a
miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How
dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial
inheritance.
I can easily imagine Obama sitting
down and talking, person to person, with any leader, woman, man,
child or common person, in the world, with no baggage of past
servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I cannot see the
same scenario with Mrs. Clinton who would drag into Twenty-First
Century American leadership the same image of white privilege and
distance from the reality of others' lives that has so marred our
country's contacts with the rest of the world.
And yes, I would adore having a woman
president of the United States. My choice would be Representative
Barbara Lee, who alone voted in Congress five years ago not to make
war on Iraq. That to me is leadership, morality, and courage; if she
had been white I would have cheered just as hard.
But she is not running for the highest
office in the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And because Mrs. Clinton is a
woman and because she may be very good at what she does, many
people, including some younger women in my own family, originally
favored her over Obama. I understand this, almost. It is because, in
my own nieces' case, there is little memory, apparently, of the
foundational inequities that still plague people of color and poor
whites in this country. Why, even though our family has been here
longer than most North American families and only partly due to
the fact that we have Native American genes we very recently, in
my lifetime, secured the right to vote, and only after numbers of
people suffered and died for it.
When I offered the word 'Womanism'
many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women
of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see
clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of
color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth
has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways. But
neither are we inclined to follow a black person, man or woman,
unless they demonstrate considerable courage, intelligence,
compassion and substance. I am delighted that so many women of color
support Barack Obama -and genuinely proud of the many young and old
white women and men who do.
Imagine, if he wins the presidency we
will have not one but three black women in the White House; one
tall, two somewhat shorter; none of them carrying the washing in and
out of the back door. The bottom line for most of us is: With whom
do we have a better chance of surviving the madness and fear we are
presently enduring, and with whom do we wish to set off on a journey
of new possibility? In other words, as the Hopi elders would say:
Who do we want in the boat with us as we head for the rapids? Who is
likely to know how best to share the meager garden produce and
water? We are advised by the Hopi elders to celebrate this time,
whatever its adversities.
We have come a long way, Sisters, and
we are up to the challenges of our time. One of which is to build
alliances based not on race, ethnicity, color, nationality, sexual
preference or gender, but on Truth. Celebrate our journey. Enjoy the
miracle we are witnessing. Do not stress over its outcome. Even if
Obama becomes president, our country is in such ruin it may well be
beyond his power to lead us toward rehabilitation. If he is elected
however, we must, individually and collectively, as citizens of the
planet, insist on helping him do the best job that can be done;
more, we must insist that he demand this of us. It is a blessing
that our mothers taught us not to fear hard work. Know, as the Hopi
elders declare: The river has its destination. And remember, as poet
June Jordan and Sweet Honey in the Rock never tired of telling us:
We are the ones we have been waiting for.
