I cut this because it seemed too long a sidebar. But maybe at some level I didn't want to expose myself to the kind of scrutinty the passage talks about. This would have been late in the book, when Tahija and I start to have serious conflict.
Usually Jamarr and Tahayyah had nothing good to say, in my hearing, about black people, family not excluded, family particularly included; it seemed an ugly little general rule operative in my own family dynamic: if you hate and feel ashamed of yourself you will hate and feel ashamed of those like you, the more so the more they are like you. This is especially true if folks from the dominant group are hanging around, judging or not, it hardly matters: their existence in and as the dominant group is the judgment. It's simple, and sad — divide and conquer at its most psychologically damaging; and it lasts longer than the conquerors' need for it, longer even, sometimes, than the conquerors themselves.
I remember my mother's fierce shushing us on the train, though we were a fairly quiet five kids, and good (on the train). Poor white trash had big loud families, especially the Popish Mics. Still to this day I make nervous jokes about the rhythm method, Irish drunks, rusting appliances in the yard. Still I grow tired around middle and upper class people. It wears me out: repressing the shame, letting it come up, trying to let it go, accepting when I can't, envying, trying not to envy, or judge, trying to keep up with people who don't have to exert energy on all this and have had all their lives far more material resources, trying to forgive them, to see whatever crosses they may bear, and with what grace, trying to discern when in any one relationship all this is too much for me, and to walk away, self esteem not too dented. Just recently a friend was telling me how when a friend of hers had nasal surgery her two eyes turned black, and everyone stared, made jokes. I laughed and told her how once when my mother had an abscessed tooth my father took her to the emergency room, and everyone stared at him that way.
She looked at me blankly. "They figured he'd beat her up, see? Her face was all swollen."
"Oh," my friend said, seeming to back away from me. Because I had a father anyone could even suspect of that? (Had I told her he drank, betraying him, a complicated, sensitive, suffering man, to stereotype, as I have risked doing here?) I wanted to ask—well would they not have suspected it of your father in a similar situation? Then I realized her father and mother would never have been in a similar situation because she came from the land of preventive medical care, even dental insurance. I'd read of that place. No abscessed teeth in it, no breaded aspirin packed into a throbbing tooth, no dishcloths of ice on the cheek, no swished whiskey, no mother sitting up all night rubbing your cheek because there isn't money for a dentist and the clinic is on the other side of State Road 7, where white people don't go. We hadn't fallen that low.
And we didn't fall that "low", public assistance low, until my father died suddenly and left us, a widow and five kids aged two to seventeen, with nothing but his car, one week's pay and the promise, a year or so down the line, of social security survivor's benefits (thank God for those). But I sure wasn't telling my middle class friend all that. The look on her face when I said abscessed tooth shut me--as my mother used to say--right the hell up.
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