Margotlog: My Father, the Racist -- What Made Him So?
So many kinds of racism, so many ways it hides or shows its true colors. In the Southern United States, with its centuries of enslaving Africans and Native Americans, white settlers, then citizens developed intricate, deep, subtle but often overt justifications for denying their human kinship to those they "kept." The Bible told them so, for instance. Biblical justification based on the "sons of Ham" who denied the Christian God; whose skins were black. Or the cultural/racial differences which led whites from Northern Europe to define those with darker skins as barbarian, who spoke unintelligible languages, danced naked (God Forbid! As if the swooping necklines of 19th-century European/American gowns didn't reveal quite a bit of flesh), etc. etc. By the 19th-century the pseudo-science of phrenology developed elaborate measurements of skull, nose, lips, etc, to separate "civilized" northern races from the benighted tribes of the south. Benighted as in night+be=not of the sun, not of the intellect.
As a student of racism and slavery, U.S. and worldwide, I am only a beginner, but I've read and observed enough to see how these basic ideas wormed their way deep into the psyche and social behavior of whites and blacks who practiced or were caught in this demeaning mistreatment of human kin. It's deeply troubling to hurt what is alive, and worse still to deny kinship with those ultimately like oneself. Amounts to self-hate, yet this must never be acknowledged, must be shrouded in justification, or pushed violently away. Because if this kinship is acknowledged, accepted, embraced, then the whole structure which houses those differences comes crashing down, leaving black and white facing each other with a legacy of hurt. This could frighten those who've done the repressing.
Why my father raged so virulently against the African-Americans who shared our communities, while most whites, born and bred in Charleston, went about their accustomed ways with barely a murmur has everything to do with his status as a dark-haired, dark-eyed, strange-named Northerner. Consider this: a very good friend whom I met in first grade at Ashley Hall, the girls school where my parents sent me because they didn't trust the segregated city schools to provide a decent education (they may well have been right, given that South Carolina was near the bottom of state expenditure for public schools)--anyway, this lovely girl, who became a lovely young woman, remained my friend well into high school. Her family pedigree was of the best Southern white stock; she dated a young man from wealthier but less ancient stock. Both families were "devoted" to black cooks and their children, yardmen and their children who once had worked or still did work for them. She and her boyfriend drove baskets of food and clothes into the segregated neighborhoods, to the doors of these black people. My Charleston friends retained kind, even affectionate attachments to their servants and recognized an obligation to them. No overt fear or hatred was displayed by either side that I could see, though the two groups were separated by a social and racial gulf.
Yet, the pain and rage of African-Americans burned or smoldered throughout the 1950s and 60s. I saw it riding the segregated city buses when tired black women carrying heavy shopping bags had to walk past empty seats to their segregated back of the bus. And then there were the sit-ins and civil rights marches, the rise of passive resistance and the "infiltration" of Northern whites who marched alongside Southern blacks for equal rights. At this point of "infiltration" my father became most enraged.
He knew no black people first hand--we couldn't afford to hire "help," nor would my staunch, self-reliant North Dakota mother have stomached any other woman in her kitchen. As a boy, my father, I learned years later, had been pelted with rotten eggs and tomatoes. In Pittsburgh every Sunday his father, the Protestant "missionary," walked his family up the hill to preach to Italian Catholic immigrants. My father and his brothers were dressed in white. Try to imagine the horror of having his Sunday white--bleached with "the blood of the lamb"--smeared with the hatred and derision of kinsmen. He was only a boy. How could he understand his father's determined effort to wrench countrymen from the fist of Rome?
To my father, Catholicism meant "Roman Catholicism." His Southern Italian family protested mightily the grip of Rome on their local priests, often the only educated men in a village. To my grandfather and great-grandfather, Protestantism equaled education sufficient to read the Bible oneself, and thus to take a more active role in political, legal and financial affairs. To become less downtrodden, less "enslaved."
The fact that my father could not make a common cause with Southern African-Americans as they fought for equal education, equal access to the voting booths, to drinking fountains and public restrooms, to movie theaters and libraries--all the amenities and supports of public life--the fact that he howled against their rising up to protest. The fact that he imagined them knocking at his door intending to date one of his daughters--me! There all my history and explanation break down into one simple idea: he was afraid. Afraid with a fear so profound and unalloyed, so unexamined with reason and empathy, so untreated as a wound must be treated that the pain flooded his entire being and took him over. That was his burden. Which of course became my burden second-hand as I listened to him, recognized the gulf between what he feared and what was actually the case, and could do nothing to reason with him. I could only withdraw because he was too far gone, as we say. Too far gone most of the time to listen or grasp that his behavior was more disturbing than any threat he prophesied.
Though the margins of society are sometimes rich with innovation, they often contain those most vulnerable. There were few immigrant groups in Charleston when we moved there--a well-established Jewish community who owned clothing stories along King Street. Did I know any others? No, I think not. Xenophobia--fear of outsiders, second cousin to racism. With a sensitivity honed by his childhood traumas (I'm guessing), my father didn't have to think, he could smell how closely hatred breathed. He created an armor of language; dyed himself in the hues of racial hatred to repel any notion that he, a Northern, deserved that hatred himself. I sometimes think he would have led a far calmer life had he remained in Pittsburgh among the Italian-immigrant community. There he unquestionably belonged. Though he might foray elsewhere, he could always return to those who recognized him for what he was--the Protestant minister's second son with a talent for the violin and a yen to become American. But this he could accomplish gradually, never entirely disowning his European identity. The religious conflict of his father's generation would have quieted. Occasionally racism might have roused him to a thoughtless outburst but it might not have consumed years of his life. That's sometimes what I wish for him. Where that would have left me, I can't quite imagine.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Margotlog: My Father the Racist
My Father the Racist
"Don't say such a thing in public," I can almost hear him admonish. Yet, when I think back, piece together his behavior, that becomes the simple conclusion. Racial prejudice nearly ate him alive.
He could have been worse. As far as I can tell, he largely exercised his prejudice within the home. He did not disguise himself in a white sheet and hood, drive around black neighborhoods and burn crosses on black peoples' lawns. (Or worse.) Yet in the presence of the Citadel cadets he taught, whom he invited to dinner, he spewed racial hatred while the rest of us sat silent, our heads bowed as if to ward off his animosity. Sometimes a tiny quirk at the ends of his mouth gave an almost humorous tilt to his diatribes, as if he knew he transgressed a social norm, being the "bad boy" whom his father, the Reverend John B. Fortunato, would immediately order from the table.
As boys in Pittsburgh, he and his brothers strung up their oldest and most pliant brother after seeing a Tom Mix movie. If their mother, the gentle Rosalie, hadn't glanced through the kitchen window and raced out to cut him down, who knows what might have happened.
My father often acted on impulse. He derived from an ancient culture of drama and emotion. Years later, when I sat with him and watched the opera "I Pagliacci" on TV (The Clowns by Leoncavallo, one of the greatest Italian operas of all time), I heard in the wrenching sob of the cuckolded Canio, the lyrical pain and revenge at the heart of Southern Italian culture. Lived entirely in the open.
Lucky for me, though his racism browbeat me, sent me to my room seething with anger and disgust and determined not to engage with him again, my mother's cool refusal to be drawn into his vortex helped distance me. I left home for college in "the north," although Baltimore hardly qualified as true north. Friends marched and protested for civil rights up and down the east coast, but I was incapable of such overt political behavior. My experience with my father's racism had created such an intense need for protection and silence that I shrank from political engagement in any public way.
Yet, here I am, exposing our story, which I have learned is far from unique. Children of parents with extreme and unexamined political views often retreat. They move to another climate, another country. From South Carolina to Minnesota; Illinois to Italy. Then, from a distance they let the threats of cataclysm subside. Pull out the barbs of hate. And find that they have earned a discernment, if not the power to act openly. They can discern the soft underbelly, the manipulation of emotion, the excessive untruths of political extremism.
What happens next is their own story.
"Don't say such a thing in public," I can almost hear him admonish. Yet, when I think back, piece together his behavior, that becomes the simple conclusion. Racial prejudice nearly ate him alive.
He could have been worse. As far as I can tell, he largely exercised his prejudice within the home. He did not disguise himself in a white sheet and hood, drive around black neighborhoods and burn crosses on black peoples' lawns. (Or worse.) Yet in the presence of the Citadel cadets he taught, whom he invited to dinner, he spewed racial hatred while the rest of us sat silent, our heads bowed as if to ward off his animosity. Sometimes a tiny quirk at the ends of his mouth gave an almost humorous tilt to his diatribes, as if he knew he transgressed a social norm, being the "bad boy" whom his father, the Reverend John B. Fortunato, would immediately order from the table.
As boys in Pittsburgh, he and his brothers strung up their oldest and most pliant brother after seeing a Tom Mix movie. If their mother, the gentle Rosalie, hadn't glanced through the kitchen window and raced out to cut him down, who knows what might have happened.
My father often acted on impulse. He derived from an ancient culture of drama and emotion. Years later, when I sat with him and watched the opera "I Pagliacci" on TV (The Clowns by Leoncavallo, one of the greatest Italian operas of all time), I heard in the wrenching sob of the cuckolded Canio, the lyrical pain and revenge at the heart of Southern Italian culture. Lived entirely in the open.
Lucky for me, though his racism browbeat me, sent me to my room seething with anger and disgust and determined not to engage with him again, my mother's cool refusal to be drawn into his vortex helped distance me. I left home for college in "the north," although Baltimore hardly qualified as true north. Friends marched and protested for civil rights up and down the east coast, but I was incapable of such overt political behavior. My experience with my father's racism had created such an intense need for protection and silence that I shrank from political engagement in any public way.
Yet, here I am, exposing our story, which I have learned is far from unique. Children of parents with extreme and unexamined political views often retreat. They move to another climate, another country. From South Carolina to Minnesota; Illinois to Italy. Then, from a distance they let the threats of cataclysm subside. Pull out the barbs of hate. And find that they have earned a discernment, if not the power to act openly. They can discern the soft underbelly, the manipulation of emotion, the excessive untruths of political extremism.
What happens next is their own story.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Margotlog:: Grey Water
Margotlog: Grey Water
In 1988, the Twin Cities went six weeks without rain, from mid-May to the early July. Usually June is one of our wettest months. We had bought our 1912 house several years before; it was bare of greenery except for a boulevard Ash Tree. I was appalled: I grew up in South Carolina where lush foliage shades everything. The only grassy swards in Charleston were parade grounds: pebbled Marion Square in front of The Old Citadel where we lived in former barracks which looked like a medieval castle, and the new Citadel's parade ground where we watched Citadel cadets fall into faints from the heat. Our Saint Paul house needed softening to make me believe it was home. I started planting trees: two silver maples in the back, a white pine seedling at the rear of the property, blue spruce seedlings front, side and back, and in the front a Russian olive and a sunburst Locust.
New trees need regular watering for the first five years of their lives, the kind of coddling we give our children until they run away and start their own kind of trouble. Day after day blue impenetrable skies sailed across, and the nights were clear and starry. Once a few huge drops splattered the back deck: coins I wished I could spend on inches of rain. Instead I turned the hose to low flow, and moved it every day to a different tree. The water bill mounted. A watering ban was instituted already in the suburbs.
Day after day, the grass browned; I kept watering the trees. Though exhausted, I could not let a single tree die. Each tree had become a living thing, a member of my family, a part of myself. Eventually I began collecting rinse water from the basement wash, lugging pails of water out the cellar door to the yard. One pail took care of a single small tree and I had, let me see, nine new trees, plus the boulevard Ash, which of course became "my tree," not the city's. A pail of water was sufficient to get a fledgling tree through half a week of heat and drought, but the big Ash needed a slow hose for at least an hour a week. Plus I had planted various perennials, and pots of annuals--for color in front and back: pink, red, lavender impatiens; deep purple petunias, reminiscent of my North Dakota grandfather's porch where their scent signaled lazy summer afternoons playing with my dolls; and spiky poker plants.
I'm not a hefty sort; little upper-body strength. I could barely carry the pail of water up the cellar steps and out into the yard. But I was obsessed and determined. My love for the trees grew as boulevards, yards, parks around me scorched. It's never been so bad since, though over the last decade rainfall in the Twin Cities has run lower by six inches than "normal." Yet rain has never been as persistently absent as it was in 1988.
That drought taught me attention and conservation. Though I surely used more than my share of water, I learned to pay attention to ways we wasted water inside. I advocated shorter showers to my obsessively clean husband. I began to collect water in dirty bowls to use again and again in that scraping operation before the dishwasher. I insisted that we not flush liquids but only solids. Lately I've championed "grey water" legislation for the State of Minnesota. Grey Water means recycled but relatively uncontaminated water. To recycle the water from showers and washer rinses would require simple plumbing changes in our houses. But plumbers need training in this adjustment and the State must be ready to certify their expertise. To institute such a change for the entire state of Minnesota would require an act of the legislature. Other states--Arizona, California, New Mexico, Montana--have made this change. Here, it will take a while--after all, we live in a land of 10,000 lakes, as a water department employee scoffed at me once when I chided him for letting water flow from a hydrant. We will have to overcome a lot of resistance. Not everybody has been as stringently educated as I was by the 1988 drought.
In 1988, the Twin Cities went six weeks without rain, from mid-May to the early July. Usually June is one of our wettest months. We had bought our 1912 house several years before; it was bare of greenery except for a boulevard Ash Tree. I was appalled: I grew up in South Carolina where lush foliage shades everything. The only grassy swards in Charleston were parade grounds: pebbled Marion Square in front of The Old Citadel where we lived in former barracks which looked like a medieval castle, and the new Citadel's parade ground where we watched Citadel cadets fall into faints from the heat. Our Saint Paul house needed softening to make me believe it was home. I started planting trees: two silver maples in the back, a white pine seedling at the rear of the property, blue spruce seedlings front, side and back, and in the front a Russian olive and a sunburst Locust.
New trees need regular watering for the first five years of their lives, the kind of coddling we give our children until they run away and start their own kind of trouble. Day after day blue impenetrable skies sailed across, and the nights were clear and starry. Once a few huge drops splattered the back deck: coins I wished I could spend on inches of rain. Instead I turned the hose to low flow, and moved it every day to a different tree. The water bill mounted. A watering ban was instituted already in the suburbs.
Day after day, the grass browned; I kept watering the trees. Though exhausted, I could not let a single tree die. Each tree had become a living thing, a member of my family, a part of myself. Eventually I began collecting rinse water from the basement wash, lugging pails of water out the cellar door to the yard. One pail took care of a single small tree and I had, let me see, nine new trees, plus the boulevard Ash, which of course became "my tree," not the city's. A pail of water was sufficient to get a fledgling tree through half a week of heat and drought, but the big Ash needed a slow hose for at least an hour a week. Plus I had planted various perennials, and pots of annuals--for color in front and back: pink, red, lavender impatiens; deep purple petunias, reminiscent of my North Dakota grandfather's porch where their scent signaled lazy summer afternoons playing with my dolls; and spiky poker plants.
I'm not a hefty sort; little upper-body strength. I could barely carry the pail of water up the cellar steps and out into the yard. But I was obsessed and determined. My love for the trees grew as boulevards, yards, parks around me scorched. It's never been so bad since, though over the last decade rainfall in the Twin Cities has run lower by six inches than "normal." Yet rain has never been as persistently absent as it was in 1988.
That drought taught me attention and conservation. Though I surely used more than my share of water, I learned to pay attention to ways we wasted water inside. I advocated shorter showers to my obsessively clean husband. I began to collect water in dirty bowls to use again and again in that scraping operation before the dishwasher. I insisted that we not flush liquids but only solids. Lately I've championed "grey water" legislation for the State of Minnesota. Grey Water means recycled but relatively uncontaminated water. To recycle the water from showers and washer rinses would require simple plumbing changes in our houses. But plumbers need training in this adjustment and the State must be ready to certify their expertise. To institute such a change for the entire state of Minnesota would require an act of the legislature. Other states--Arizona, California, New Mexico, Montana--have made this change. Here, it will take a while--after all, we live in a land of 10,000 lakes, as a water department employee scoffed at me once when I chided him for letting water flow from a hydrant. We will have to overcome a lot of resistance. Not everybody has been as stringently educated as I was by the 1988 drought.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Margotlog: That Restroom Paper Towel
That restroom paper towel: what do you do with it? I've been tracking trash. Since the flu scare last year, I try to put either glove or paper towel between my hand and a public door handle. Thus, after drying my hands at a public restroom, bathroom, lavatory (lava in Italian means wash), I hold onto the paper towel and open the public door with it. Thus it leaves the restroom (no rest) with me. What then? Stuffed into my pocket or purse, it travels home where I leave it on a counter to dry (if it's not dry already). Then comes the fun part. Well, not exactly fun, but money-saving, proud-of-my-ingenuity, etc: Under a sink, upstairs or down, I keep a fancy paper bag stuffed with used paper towels. When I need a clean-up towel, I grab one lightly used, and proceed with the cat upchuck or food spill.
Fran, my husband, is finicky about such things. He insists on a pristine towel, fresh from the fat paper roll. Beside the stove, he's installed a lovely home-making icon, circa 1990--a silver wand with a fat roll of white paper towels impaled upon it. Something his parents, the poor missionaries from Virginia, North Dakota, and earlier the walled city of China, could never have afforded. I venture to guess that paper towels weren't available for purchase until after World War II. Fran and I operate two systems of home management in our household: mine, which leans toward economy and reuse; his, which glories in the beauty of one-time use, followed by a vigorous toss in the trash. When the city of Saint Paul instituted home recycling, I had to fight his resistance. Argue, raise my voice, undo his insistent toss in the trash. We both won: he now takes out the recycling.
What is it about Americans, post World War II? I often ponder this shift. Not that I remember before the war, but I have my mother, the economizer, reuser par excellence, as a model. We were a poor professor's family in Charleston during the 1950s and 60s. I remember cloth napkins which she washed, along with my father's uniforms, in the kitchen sink. No washing machine until they moved across the Cooper River Bridge to the tiny town (now a huge suburb) of Mt. Pleasant in the mid-1950s. She kept a rag bag under the sink. Yes, she opened cans--that gift to American home-making after the war (heaven help us)--and threw them in the trash because there was no other choice. But she saved one to use as a grease can.
We rarely ate at restaurants--couldn't afford it, nor were there many choices. If our day included bus rides around town for various errands, she packed a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches, apples, and cookies. We sipped water at drinking fountains, labeled "Colored" and "White." Charleston was poor after the war but still could afford to operate two fountains at every location such things existed--inside department stores, at gas stations. Perhaps in city parks. Did we ever encounter African-Americans in the city parks? At Hampton Park where we hung over little curved bridges to watch ducks preen? Or downtown at the Battery with its band shell and guns left over from the "War Between the States?" I think not.
Now I like to think I've achieved a minor accord with throw-away culture. I'm not interested anymore in one-time, pristine use. Yes, cleanliness, but I try not to be obsessive about it. I refuse to believe there's any reason not to reuse something with continued life in it. The paper towels, for instance. Or plastic containers for cottage cheese. First I reuse these to freeze leftovers, and when too many stack up, I take them to the cat litter boxes and scoop what has to be scooped into these containers. After all, at this point, we cannot recycle them. I hate the fact that I haven't found a way to make my own cottage cheese, and hope several resuses will quiet my guilt and disgust at the mountain of plastic growing steadily under our landfills and swirling in the Pacific.
Fran, my husband, is finicky about such things. He insists on a pristine towel, fresh from the fat paper roll. Beside the stove, he's installed a lovely home-making icon, circa 1990--a silver wand with a fat roll of white paper towels impaled upon it. Something his parents, the poor missionaries from Virginia, North Dakota, and earlier the walled city of China, could never have afforded. I venture to guess that paper towels weren't available for purchase until after World War II. Fran and I operate two systems of home management in our household: mine, which leans toward economy and reuse; his, which glories in the beauty of one-time use, followed by a vigorous toss in the trash. When the city of Saint Paul instituted home recycling, I had to fight his resistance. Argue, raise my voice, undo his insistent toss in the trash. We both won: he now takes out the recycling.
What is it about Americans, post World War II? I often ponder this shift. Not that I remember before the war, but I have my mother, the economizer, reuser par excellence, as a model. We were a poor professor's family in Charleston during the 1950s and 60s. I remember cloth napkins which she washed, along with my father's uniforms, in the kitchen sink. No washing machine until they moved across the Cooper River Bridge to the tiny town (now a huge suburb) of Mt. Pleasant in the mid-1950s. She kept a rag bag under the sink. Yes, she opened cans--that gift to American home-making after the war (heaven help us)--and threw them in the trash because there was no other choice. But she saved one to use as a grease can.
We rarely ate at restaurants--couldn't afford it, nor were there many choices. If our day included bus rides around town for various errands, she packed a lunch of peanut butter sandwiches, apples, and cookies. We sipped water at drinking fountains, labeled "Colored" and "White." Charleston was poor after the war but still could afford to operate two fountains at every location such things existed--inside department stores, at gas stations. Perhaps in city parks. Did we ever encounter African-Americans in the city parks? At Hampton Park where we hung over little curved bridges to watch ducks preen? Or downtown at the Battery with its band shell and guns left over from the "War Between the States?" I think not.
Now I like to think I've achieved a minor accord with throw-away culture. I'm not interested anymore in one-time, pristine use. Yes, cleanliness, but I try not to be obsessive about it. I refuse to believe there's any reason not to reuse something with continued life in it. The paper towels, for instance. Or plastic containers for cottage cheese. First I reuse these to freeze leftovers, and when too many stack up, I take them to the cat litter boxes and scoop what has to be scooped into these containers. After all, at this point, we cannot recycle them. I hate the fact that I haven't found a way to make my own cottage cheese, and hope several resuses will quiet my guilt and disgust at the mountain of plastic growing steadily under our landfills and swirling in the Pacific.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Margotlog: My Father's Lessons
My father, the classroom professional, instructed us in manners, in American presidents, in Southern secession (after he, the boy from Pittsburgh, learned it himself). He also tried to teach us an ancient, musical, time-keeping method which I pull from memory as solfeggio. Did I know what the Italian word meant? No. But even as I say it, he appears beside me, a hand with an imaginary baton creating an image in the air as he counts, and I play a simple tune on the piano. Immediately, the time-keeping morphs into a Saturday morning rhyme dragged across the sea from Sicily: "Uno, due, tre, cantare, suono, suono, suono something something, then the swift ecco si, ecco no, and a boom, boom, boom of either church bells tolling or a cane beating an unfortunate back. These little fragments are all I have unless by some rare chance I find someone on the outskirts of Palermo whose father also sang the ditty, and thus can put it in context. Knowing as I do that the Catholic Church held peasant Sicily in its grip (the other fist was the Mafia's), I suspect the ditty of having two meanings, which not even my father, born in the United States, could probably decode.
Escape: his grandfather fled Trabia, so I've heard, because his small Protestant church had been defaced and the Bibles burned. Once in New York with wife and infant son, this ancestor of mine acquired the makings of an English-speaking Protestant minister and moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to serve an immigrant Italian community. Escape was in my father's blood. He married my mother, the Nordic from North Dakota, in part, he confessed to her, because he wanted to become "a real American." By then, his family had acquired education and solvency. The original Sicilian immigrant/minister had become recognized by Scranton as a pillar of the community, mistaken by some as the U.S. president Grover Cleveland.
My parents' move to South Carolina could also be construed as an escape, chasing a job after World War II. At The Citadel my father was hired to teach veterans returning to college on the G.I. bill. This move gave my mother a reprieve. Once, she confessed that she'd threatened to leave my father if he insisted that they move in with his parents. She couldn't compete with his mother/aunts/cousins for his affections. With her youthful shyness, she'd have been swallowed up by that soft yet stern, raucous yet reverent Italian family.
Once in South Carolina, my father was stuck--in more ways than one. He could never manage to leave, though half-heartedly he tried a few times to find teaching jobs elsewhere. But the South, Southern history, and soon racial indignation held him in its grip. Here's the lesson toward which I've been tending. Not to portray it as the most important or only lesson I acquired from him, but as the one I found the least easy to decipher as a girl. As racial discord heated up during the 1950s and 60s, my father "lost it," as we'd say today. He became a louder and more fanatical racist than any other Southern father I encountered, defending white supremacy and ranting and raving against blacks and Northern white agitators whom he was sure were swarming across the Mason-Dixon line to murder us in our beds.
As I watched him fulminate, as he dragged me, the teenager, into his net of conspiracy, threatening that a black boy would come to our door, intending to date me, I fought, argued, stormed away, returned to have it out with him. But eventually, his unstoppable fury silenced me. No matter how logically or rationally I argued--"But Daddy, we don't know any Negroes," as we were taught then to call the black people whose lives paralleled ours but rarely touched. "No Negro boy even speaks to me." Our schools. our neighborhoods were segregated. I didn't even know where black teens went to school.
As my silence descended like a protective cloak, I began to observe him, to catch how even a small bit of news or daily encounter could set him off. Yes, indeed, there was racial strife elsewhere in the South--Little Rock, Montgomery, Birmingham, Jackson. But in Charleston, South Carolina, all was quiet until the late 1960s. Very late for agitation, for marching for civil rights. By then I was living in Minnesota. And what my father had taught me, entirely inadvertently on his part, had become woven into the physical remove I'd acquired. I looked back at his fury, at the few actual events that roused him to such irrational threats, and remembered his much earlier discomfort dressing in the mornings when we first moved to Charleston, when he had to don the tight-fitting military uniform for teaching at The Citadel.
He was not cut out to be a soldier, had none of the true physical hardiness or discipline necessary to restrain his individual impulses to a larger order. Nor was he comfortable in the South. It was obvious from the beginning that he did not fit in--his dark curls, his passionate gestures, his voice with its extremes of emotion and sprinkling of Italian phrases. (He soon suppressed those.) THough The Citadel had hired him to teach soldiers who returned from the Italian campaign, who'd encountered the people of Italy, who grasped European civilization first hand, these students soon graduated and my father was directed to teach American and Southern history. He could certainly grasp its fundamentals, but only by becoming a furious advocate of the racial divide which had ruled the South for centuries could he hope to convince himself (and possibly others) that he, himself, was not one of those "outside agitators" he so feared.
As I watched his vulnerability turn ugly, bare its fangs at those less fortunate, at the bottom of stratified Southern society, I learned to suspect all exaggerated proclamations and promises. I glimpsed that his hatred had a cause which I did not need to espouse. And that beneath or around its fiery breath, its exaggerated demands and threats, lay a personal situation. Beliefs and fears did not arrive from nothing. Especially if they contradicted daily reality, they were driven by something vulnerable and suspect. Something that the driver either did not fully understand or sought to mask, throwing fear like a smoke screen over desires or intentions that were often selfish or self-serving, not particularly laudable or rational, yet often closely linked to the extreme politics he or she was advocating.
From time to time, I hear such extremism today--take the Tea-Party Republicans. These evidently middle-class white Americans seem goaded by fear of a government that will take some of their money and use it for those less fortunate. They want to remove all power from the center and clutch it to themselves. Apparently they want fewer services, lower or nonexistent taxes, or what I might call "home rule." Beneath or around this astonishing self-centeredness, lies their suburban existence, on the edge of the city; here in Minnesota on the edge of farm land (which the suburbs have until quite recently been gobbling up). Is this so different from my father's inordinate fear of a wave of Northern agitators flowing South? What privilege are these Tea-Partyites protecting which they dare not reveal even to themselves? What vulnerability are they seeking to mask by throwing the blame on others?
Answering those questions may be beyond me, but I am alert to my suspicions, not only of the impracticability of their platforms, but of their moral and ethical limitations. It seems as simple to me now as it did as a teenager subjected to my father's tirades: I ask, Do you even know those you fear? Is there any evidence that these "others," rather than your own faults or limitations, are the cause of your troubles?
Escape: his grandfather fled Trabia, so I've heard, because his small Protestant church had been defaced and the Bibles burned. Once in New York with wife and infant son, this ancestor of mine acquired the makings of an English-speaking Protestant minister and moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania, to serve an immigrant Italian community. Escape was in my father's blood. He married my mother, the Nordic from North Dakota, in part, he confessed to her, because he wanted to become "a real American." By then, his family had acquired education and solvency. The original Sicilian immigrant/minister had become recognized by Scranton as a pillar of the community, mistaken by some as the U.S. president Grover Cleveland.
My parents' move to South Carolina could also be construed as an escape, chasing a job after World War II. At The Citadel my father was hired to teach veterans returning to college on the G.I. bill. This move gave my mother a reprieve. Once, she confessed that she'd threatened to leave my father if he insisted that they move in with his parents. She couldn't compete with his mother/aunts/cousins for his affections. With her youthful shyness, she'd have been swallowed up by that soft yet stern, raucous yet reverent Italian family.
Once in South Carolina, my father was stuck--in more ways than one. He could never manage to leave, though half-heartedly he tried a few times to find teaching jobs elsewhere. But the South, Southern history, and soon racial indignation held him in its grip. Here's the lesson toward which I've been tending. Not to portray it as the most important or only lesson I acquired from him, but as the one I found the least easy to decipher as a girl. As racial discord heated up during the 1950s and 60s, my father "lost it," as we'd say today. He became a louder and more fanatical racist than any other Southern father I encountered, defending white supremacy and ranting and raving against blacks and Northern white agitators whom he was sure were swarming across the Mason-Dixon line to murder us in our beds.
As I watched him fulminate, as he dragged me, the teenager, into his net of conspiracy, threatening that a black boy would come to our door, intending to date me, I fought, argued, stormed away, returned to have it out with him. But eventually, his unstoppable fury silenced me. No matter how logically or rationally I argued--"But Daddy, we don't know any Negroes," as we were taught then to call the black people whose lives paralleled ours but rarely touched. "No Negro boy even speaks to me." Our schools. our neighborhoods were segregated. I didn't even know where black teens went to school.
As my silence descended like a protective cloak, I began to observe him, to catch how even a small bit of news or daily encounter could set him off. Yes, indeed, there was racial strife elsewhere in the South--Little Rock, Montgomery, Birmingham, Jackson. But in Charleston, South Carolina, all was quiet until the late 1960s. Very late for agitation, for marching for civil rights. By then I was living in Minnesota. And what my father had taught me, entirely inadvertently on his part, had become woven into the physical remove I'd acquired. I looked back at his fury, at the few actual events that roused him to such irrational threats, and remembered his much earlier discomfort dressing in the mornings when we first moved to Charleston, when he had to don the tight-fitting military uniform for teaching at The Citadel.
He was not cut out to be a soldier, had none of the true physical hardiness or discipline necessary to restrain his individual impulses to a larger order. Nor was he comfortable in the South. It was obvious from the beginning that he did not fit in--his dark curls, his passionate gestures, his voice with its extremes of emotion and sprinkling of Italian phrases. (He soon suppressed those.) THough The Citadel had hired him to teach soldiers who returned from the Italian campaign, who'd encountered the people of Italy, who grasped European civilization first hand, these students soon graduated and my father was directed to teach American and Southern history. He could certainly grasp its fundamentals, but only by becoming a furious advocate of the racial divide which had ruled the South for centuries could he hope to convince himself (and possibly others) that he, himself, was not one of those "outside agitators" he so feared.
As I watched his vulnerability turn ugly, bare its fangs at those less fortunate, at the bottom of stratified Southern society, I learned to suspect all exaggerated proclamations and promises. I glimpsed that his hatred had a cause which I did not need to espouse. And that beneath or around its fiery breath, its exaggerated demands and threats, lay a personal situation. Beliefs and fears did not arrive from nothing. Especially if they contradicted daily reality, they were driven by something vulnerable and suspect. Something that the driver either did not fully understand or sought to mask, throwing fear like a smoke screen over desires or intentions that were often selfish or self-serving, not particularly laudable or rational, yet often closely linked to the extreme politics he or she was advocating.
From time to time, I hear such extremism today--take the Tea-Party Republicans. These evidently middle-class white Americans seem goaded by fear of a government that will take some of their money and use it for those less fortunate. They want to remove all power from the center and clutch it to themselves. Apparently they want fewer services, lower or nonexistent taxes, or what I might call "home rule." Beneath or around this astonishing self-centeredness, lies their suburban existence, on the edge of the city; here in Minnesota on the edge of farm land (which the suburbs have until quite recently been gobbling up). Is this so different from my father's inordinate fear of a wave of Northern agitators flowing South? What privilege are these Tea-Partyites protecting which they dare not reveal even to themselves? What vulnerability are they seeking to mask by throwing the blame on others?
Answering those questions may be beyond me, but I am alert to my suspicions, not only of the impracticability of their platforms, but of their moral and ethical limitations. It seems as simple to me now as it did as a teenager subjected to my father's tirades: I ask, Do you even know those you fear? Is there any evidence that these "others," rather than your own faults or limitations, are the cause of your troubles?
Sunday, September 5, 2010
What My Parents Salvaged
Often the items we save from the past have become icons; meaning had streamed into them. So I have brought from South Carolina my parents' photos from BB. "before babies" as my mother used to say. My father, Leonard Henry Fortunato, was as handsome as an Adonis with head thrown back, as he stood with his family posing for the camera. It was probably 1928, he just back from a year in Ferrara, Italy, where he had studied the violin and, I later came to suspect, had fallen in love with a golden-haired beauty. Among his family, that summer afternoon, passion tossed in his dark curls as he stood at one end of the family curve; his father John B., and oldest brother Stanley, at the other end, holding up the hammock of the softer sag of women and girls. Behind him his mother, the one he would weep for, years later, disturbing me at the breakfast table from concentrating on the Snap Crackle and Pop of rice crispies. "Oh, Leonard," my mother would complain, as if she could see through the back of her head. By then, married fifteen years, she had acquired a staunch, starched exterior--housewife and mother.
But earlier, before she met Leonardo over the library desk at Dusquenes University, Pittsburgh, before she left the midwest for the east coast, her college graduation photo caught her beauty like a madonna just emerged, still dewy, hair pulled away from soft features, with eyes that longed for something she could name.
My parents fell in love first with notions of themselves. Then across that library desk, their separate inklings of romance came together into a wave and captured them. Now I set the photos in my third floor study and sit in one of his soft reading chairs to regard them and their beauty, because as a child I soon lost the sense of them as romantic and glamorous. After several years living in the Old Citadel, the medieval patina wore off and my mother fought rats and cockroaches; my father tried to subdue his fear of not living up to the uniform he wore to teach at The Citadel. She was sharp-tongued and dismissive of his dithers; he eventually raged and cried out at her disrespect. Oh, just remembering, I put my hands over my ears.
Yet, yet, I would not have wanted them to remain beautiful youths forever. They had serious lessons to teach me, and their voices called me to attention. We must learn to save, salvage. My mother put her genteel, well-heeled childhood behind and made do with very little. She made over my father's trousers into rompers for her girls.
She took us to the Thrift Shop for dress-up clothes, Halloween, pretend dress up, dancing to records of The Sugar Plum Fairy. She made us doll clothes from scraps from the apron cloth bag. Aprons commissioned by the Presbyterian Church to sell at Thanksgiving for the poor. The night before Christmas, if I awoke before time to get up, I heard her sewing machine whirring as she tucked tulle onto a bit of polished cotton, for my Madame Alexander doll's dance dress. Because Sissy and I had two beautiful dolls, bought with Papa Max's money in the Chicago train station. Mine with dark hair; Sissy's with blond. The different in coloring mimicked our own, with painful consequences. But that's another story. This is a story of making do, of wearing hand-me-downs from our wealthy North Dakota cousins. Of learning to prize, even as we grumbled at our mother's ingenuity. What is new is not necessarily better, because what is affordable, made by hand, made with attention and care, late at night, carries with it a charm that can never wear thin. In the absence of warmth, in the rather remote Dakota chill of her personality, these marks of her affection carried the assurance that she would attend to more than our needs; she would charm us with silent beauty, leaving us to animate it.
But earlier, before she met Leonardo over the library desk at Dusquenes University, Pittsburgh, before she left the midwest for the east coast, her college graduation photo caught her beauty like a madonna just emerged, still dewy, hair pulled away from soft features, with eyes that longed for something she could name.
My parents fell in love first with notions of themselves. Then across that library desk, their separate inklings of romance came together into a wave and captured them. Now I set the photos in my third floor study and sit in one of his soft reading chairs to regard them and their beauty, because as a child I soon lost the sense of them as romantic and glamorous. After several years living in the Old Citadel, the medieval patina wore off and my mother fought rats and cockroaches; my father tried to subdue his fear of not living up to the uniform he wore to teach at The Citadel. She was sharp-tongued and dismissive of his dithers; he eventually raged and cried out at her disrespect. Oh, just remembering, I put my hands over my ears.
Yet, yet, I would not have wanted them to remain beautiful youths forever. They had serious lessons to teach me, and their voices called me to attention. We must learn to save, salvage. My mother put her genteel, well-heeled childhood behind and made do with very little. She made over my father's trousers into rompers for her girls.
She took us to the Thrift Shop for dress-up clothes, Halloween, pretend dress up, dancing to records of The Sugar Plum Fairy. She made us doll clothes from scraps from the apron cloth bag. Aprons commissioned by the Presbyterian Church to sell at Thanksgiving for the poor. The night before Christmas, if I awoke before time to get up, I heard her sewing machine whirring as she tucked tulle onto a bit of polished cotton, for my Madame Alexander doll's dance dress. Because Sissy and I had two beautiful dolls, bought with Papa Max's money in the Chicago train station. Mine with dark hair; Sissy's with blond. The different in coloring mimicked our own, with painful consequences. But that's another story. This is a story of making do, of wearing hand-me-downs from our wealthy North Dakota cousins. Of learning to prize, even as we grumbled at our mother's ingenuity. What is new is not necessarily better, because what is affordable, made by hand, made with attention and care, late at night, carries with it a charm that can never wear thin. In the absence of warmth, in the rather remote Dakota chill of her personality, these marks of her affection carried the assurance that she would attend to more than our needs; she would charm us with silent beauty, leaving us to animate it.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
The Moon Shell - Edisto Beach, South Carolina
Moon Snail, plucked from low tide at Edisto Island winters ago--the kid still in kindergarten. Its curve has the sinuous appeal of a Pre-Raphaelite madonna, borrowed from Islam. Lately this beach, once so empty of humans except ourselves, has lost its plethora of shells, crowded out by dogs, walkers, and worst of all (I truly don't mind other feet), by huge, deserted beach "cottages." We think Minnesota lakes have succumbed to suburban mcMansiondom? We're not alone. Charleston's barrier islands too, movie-sets for a twilight-zone of conspicuous consumption, eating itself and everything in its path. Tidal river, marsh and dune grasses--all eroded or polluted by tall walls where no one stands to watch the waves.
Yet many Decembers, just after Christmas, I return to the State Park on the other side of the river, to a nicely winterized cabin, the very structure where our family of three shivered and made beach art on the porch. Lately reviewing summer jaunts into the "wild," I remember earlier, more rugged outings to Lake Superior, to Gunderson's Cabins where each little shack (let's call them what they were) barely held chill at bay, a kind of second skin, more solid than tent, yet prone to drafts. Some mornings in mid-June, I hunkered in bed writing and munching through two meals until two o'clock when the sun finally warmed up a hum.
What did I ever truly want from the beach, the lake, the winter waves? Not comfort. All the comforts of home hooded too much--I inspected decor, not horizons; considered menus, not sustenance. As a student recently wrote about her family's pop-up tenting in the Adirondacks, summers in the woods, at the lake meant doing without, wearing through comfort to scratchy body odor, and boredom as the only outing meant slogging through miles of forest, when the demanding city self sloughed away and left an awareness of legs, feet, eyes peering into the gloom. We weren't out to make "time." but to persevere, to make time with fall of light and stand of trees. To be uncomfortable, sometimes afraid, better at settling into a wild skin.
Yet many Decembers, just after Christmas, I return to the State Park on the other side of the river, to a nicely winterized cabin, the very structure where our family of three shivered and made beach art on the porch. Lately reviewing summer jaunts into the "wild," I remember earlier, more rugged outings to Lake Superior, to Gunderson's Cabins where each little shack (let's call them what they were) barely held chill at bay, a kind of second skin, more solid than tent, yet prone to drafts. Some mornings in mid-June, I hunkered in bed writing and munching through two meals until two o'clock when the sun finally warmed up a hum.
What did I ever truly want from the beach, the lake, the winter waves? Not comfort. All the comforts of home hooded too much--I inspected decor, not horizons; considered menus, not sustenance. As a student recently wrote about her family's pop-up tenting in the Adirondacks, summers in the woods, at the lake meant doing without, wearing through comfort to scratchy body odor, and boredom as the only outing meant slogging through miles of forest, when the demanding city self sloughed away and left an awareness of legs, feet, eyes peering into the gloom. We weren't out to make "time." but to persevere, to make time with fall of light and stand of trees. To be uncomfortable, sometimes afraid, better at settling into a wild skin.
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