Les Alpilles

Walking on the edge of the Provencal town St.  Remy in the French landscape of the hospital where Vincent Van Gogh was confined, I feel different realities slide across and over, inside and outside, one another. The afternoon Vicki and I walk through the hospital grounds, storm clouds threaten but never break; we walk into foreboding.

We follow a straight gravel allee or path. There is an untidy clump suspended from a tree above us and a woman in a red jacket stands on the side, shooting a photo of our advancing group. On our right a grove of gnarled olive trees, the leaves not quite green, not quite gray, not quite purple in the shifting stormy light. All may be rectilinear, but there is a sense of underlying disorder, or is it that all outside is orderly, but my internal state is disordered. And, if my state is disordered, what was Van Gogh’s, how was Van Gogh’s, how was it different from mine?

The hospital walls are limestone blocks. In their massive stolidity they convey nothing so much as the word bourgeois — a bourgeois which has nothing in its purse but Provencal dust. A few staff cars are parked beside buidlings, but there is no human visible except for our group. There are still patients in the hospital, but they are sequestered from the public. Against the rectilinear biscuit-golden wall, a leafless winter tree on her slim trunk holds up curving limbs of black filigree. In the walled garden, the array of lavender has been cut back for the winter, shorn like West Virginia school boys on the first day of school. The irises, their fronds closely packed in fenced rectangles, are shuttered, holding nothing but the idea of their purple buds.

Inside the dark indoors, green and sunlight are cloistered within Romanesque arches.

The odd and tortured limestone outcroppings painted by Van Gogh — les alpilles — rise into the gathering storm clouds.

Embrace Your Voice: Matthias

MATTHIAS, sometimes in pink hair and hoodie

On the rooftop, who am I

I am the white-hair woman on the rooftop whose face can light up like a firecracker, but who can stay awake past midnight, one, and two in the morning shredding herself down to worrying, worrying about money, about her daughter, about things undone. I work to stay fit, but I am a “girl” of the 50s, who would not be able to do anything except she walked her dog her entire childhood and youth, up and down and across lower Manhattan including the trucking cobbled routes and walked to school or the subway. I have ringing in my ears: is it my past shaking like aluminum foil? Will the tinnitis rise up and block all sound? I love olives. I used to think that loving olives was a mark of my Jewishness despite that Jewishness always seeming ill-informed and fumbling. I have a loved partner of my age. I love our shining youth, our future.

Below, on the ground, in the real place, he is he

If I were on the ground with him, he would be tall, willowy, standing a head above me, but from the roof, he is most prominently head top, hair cut close to the scalp and dyed pink on the crown, no way except literally  covering his awesome brain. His arms hang ungainly long from my perch above, long and sinewy enough to grasp the world, expressive boy hands which can push away. From here, his feet are big, for a world which wants to tumble him. His heart is falling out of his chest, his words of disaster and disgust spew, but he looks toward the sky and the roof. And he smiles.

hair not pink this week

Working on a piece about my friend, Matthias Pressley, but can’t as I stumble over the name Trayvon Martin. Matthias is two years older than Trayvon Martin. In his eyes and in his FaceBook posts, Trayvon Martin looms, huge like Matthias’s eyes.

I listen on YouTube to several mothers and one father of black teenage men murdered by the police: Oscar Grant, Ramarley Graham, Malcolm Ferguson. Ramarley Graham’s mother was summonded to the police station and even there never told, but left to guess when she heard the word “homicide” casually exchanged between two officers, that her son had been killed. Neither she nor her son’s father were accorded any deference though they were grief-stricken and shocked. The testimonies were posted by my friend, and Matthias’s mentor, Nia Wilson of SpiritHouse NC. Her son is a Black High School Senior.

I can say nothing original about this and I guess the point is not originality, but how many of us there are who feel this way. We have always been here, outraged and indignant, but in this age we have an electronic voice outside the commercial venues. That is where many of us have been:  dogging every piece of information related to the case, mired in it, giving the death of a seventeen year old its due in something our culture measures in terms of work not grief: time. For a while I didn’t realize how heavily Treyvon Martin’s murder weighed on me. The heaviness was compounded by the negligent/intentional mishandling in the case on the part of authorities.

I am a child of the Emmett Till generation. I am 69; today Emmett Till would have been in his 70s. So many women in HANDS ON THE FREEDOM PLOW cited the murder of Emmett Till as a critical factor in their development as activists.

Matthias, self portrait

On FaceBook: Matthias Pressley says: Secondly, I very damn well like my MF hoodie. It has a nice spinal cord piece that I might duly note that I added myself. If I want to wear my pimped out black hoodie to the freakin’ corner store or to BEST BUY or to church or to stand at the bus stop or to a gotdamn GALA, guess what? I purchased that shit and I will wear it, it’s mine. Who says hoodies are out? Who says it’s dangerous for people of color to wear hoodie’s just because of racial profiling looney-tunes? Huh!!!????!!!! I would like to kindly state/suggest: “Geraldo Rivera and ALL those alike, SHUT THE FUCK UP.”

Matthias, self portrait

I haven’t written here for several weeks. I plan to continue to write every two weeks, on Wednesdays, from now on. I have to embrace my voice, as in photo below with AfroLez film-maker, activist, Aishah Shahida Simmons (a daughter of SNCC).

Faith n Aisha Shahidah Simmons, Duke University Women's Center

Sister in the Movement, International Women’s Day 2012

Amina Rachman and I worked as organizers in the early 1960s with the Harlem Brotherhood Group (National Conference of Christians and Jews) and SNCC. In her rich and complex life, Amina was known at birth as Sherron Jackson, Sherron 10X within the Nation of Islam, Amina Abdur Rahman within Islam, and Amina Rachman within the community of Kolot Chaiyenu where she celebrated her Bat Mitzva in her 50s. Amina made the transition in September 2011. With her children Josh and Sabra and others I was fortunate to be by her side when she passed. I was also fortunate to speak at her funeral.

Good Morning.

SNCC the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is in the house. I bring condolences from:

Mary Britting, New York Office

Gloria Richardson Dandridge, the Eastern Shore of Maryland

Ivanhoe Donaldson, Harlem Brotherhood Group and SNCC at large

Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Southwest Georgia, Alabama, and Detroit

Penny Patch, Southwest Georgia and Mississippi

Peggy Dammond Preacely, Harlem Brotherhood Group and Southwest Georgia

Carol Rogoff, NY office and Mississippi

Fannie Rushing, Chicago

Kathie Amatniek Sarachild, Mississippi (and NY Redstockings)

Muriel Tillinghast, Mississippi (and NYC labor politics)

Dorothy M. Zellner, Atlanta Office

We offer our condolences to Sabra and Josh, Amina’s sisters, her uncle and her enormous family by affection. Our sister Amina never turned her back on the struggle.

It is significant that Amina had such a beautiful voice, whether she was a teenager singing 50s hits like “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads,” or the adult chanting at her Baat Mitzvah decades later. She was a person to be heard.

There were ugly, haunting truths and entrenched cruelties in our 1950s. These truths flickered across our televisions and filled the newspapers: segregation and racial violence including the murder of Emmet Till, a boy our own age. Inspired by the southern sit-ins, Amina who was then known as Sherron Jackson and I worked with the Harlem Brotherhood Group which was affiliated, tellingly, with the National Conference of Christians and Jews. Amina would become a one-woman conference of Christians and Jews, with two Muslim journeys sandwiched in between.

At that time, Amina and I fell into the habit of calling one another, “Sis.”

The year I went south Amina was a freshman at New York City’s Music and Art Public High School from which I had graduated. She was the first M & A student to wear her hair in an afro. Any time she met a teacher who had also taught me she would say much to that teacher’s consternation, that she – Amina – was Faith Holsaert’s younger sister. She was also moving toward the Nation of Islam and as a teenager presided over the Nation’s meetings at the Audobon Ballroom. In her pragmatic politics and understanding of racist power she was affected when Minister Malcolm X said it was foolish for demonstrators to lay their bodies down nonviolently before earth moving equipment. Amina was one of the people who formed a bridge from SNCC to Minister Malcolm X. She went to Africa with him on his final trip to that continent. On her return she spent a night at my family’s apartment, filled with the hope and danger of those last months of Malcolm X’s life. At dawn she rose and said her prayers on my mother’s rug.

We were out of touch for a while, but in 1974 my mother died. One night in West Virginia I answered my phone. “Sis,” a voice said, “I just heard about your mother,” and we picked up where we had left off, moving into our years of motherhood, our lesbian lives, our adult work. Our love endured five decades, an attachment honored by Amina’s daughter Sabra who was the one to tell me “Ma has had some bad news.” When I walked into Amina’s hospital room a week ago, she broke into that Amina smile. “Sis,” she said, “you came.”

Amina told this story about Chicago SNCC. SNCC workers had underestimated the power of gang turf. There was a confrontation between raw SNCC recruits and a local group. The gang leader opened his razor-sharp switch blade. Softly as an expelled breath he passed the open vertical blade in front of the face of a recruit, cutting the recruit’s eyelashes.

Amina knew danger. Amina knew hardship and she loved people whose lives were hard. She never stopped believing a better world

Amina and her daughter Sabra

Amina at SNCC reunion, April 2010

is possible. She never stopped believing that within the powerful entanglements of race, gender, religion, and class, she would let no one else define her. She was her own woman, lost too soon to the world.

Say, if

Say

if you have a child who is lost for seventeen years

if you lose a word

if you never see her shape

 

and if she has been a war-torn child

who has shattered to stay alive

and if she has hidden parts

she doesn’t always know

and if you do not know

 

but she has a child

and another

and you barely know more

 

until a policeman

until a lawyer

until a social worker

and her voice

 

when an apartment

when a mattress on a shelter floor

when a bed on the fourth floor

and she gives her things away

 

So

she wears flipflops in winter,

she has your sister’s voice

and a well of loneliness like your mother’s

and a giggle like her own

She calls you Faith

She calls you Bio Mom

She calls you Mom

 

you walk her street with pavement cracks and hidden maps,

eat her burrito and saag paneer,

buy her children ukeles,

bring leftover fried rice to

the man on the steps of the SRO

which is her home.

 

For now.

Beloved Teacher

When I was nineteen I knew a woman, a stalwart of the Movement in her southern community. She was summoned to the local Board of Education and warned that if she became involved in the protest marches, she would be fired. In the high school classroom where she taught, she would announce a march into segregated downtown was forming at that moment. She would turn her face to her chalkboard and her back to her students. When she turned around, as she had wished, her students were gone. To the march. To jail.

She came from a family of community minded people. Her father was a minister who preached to those in the alleyways and back streets of their small town, a man who campaigned to register voters before the 1960s and involved his children in the work. Her mother was a teacher, one of that august and learned Black sisterhood who  taught and raised up the children of their South. My friend and her sisters became teachers, some returning to the high school they had attended. When offered a job in the newly integrated high school, my friend preferred to stay and teach the children on her side of town.

The brutality of Movement days caused her such pain. Following the federal trial waged against civil rights activists in her community, my friend could not get out of bed for a year. Then, she arose and into the 70s, 80s, and 90s, despite chronic and severe illness, like many who had been active in the 60s southern struggle, she kept on. She was involved in local Democratic Party politics, city politics, civic endeavors like the establishment of a local Civil Rights Museum.

I had come into her community at 19 and worked there for a year. Following a week in the city jail for one of those marches (above), I became so ill I could barely work. Under segregated medical care, I went undiagnosed. My friend, told me I was moving into her family’s home where I could be cared for. One evening when we were talking in her bedroom, she said there was a man in Florida who wanted to marry her.

I went home. Was diagnosed with hepatitis and confined to bed for a month. Over the next decades, I went on, organizing, marrying, moving to New Mexico where I was when the 1967 Six Day War occurred in the Middle East, had a son in New Mexico and a daughter born in Detroit, moved to West Virginia to follow the mandate that white anti-racists organize in the white community. And came out. More organizing, writing, and by then, like my friend, teaching school. At first when I taught in the public schools, each year I signed a statement affirming that I was not guilty of moral turpitude. That is to say: I was not violating community standards of behavior. I signed, knowing that according to prevailing “community standards” I was lying, because I was living as a queer. Well, in those days about as far as we could imagine and get our tongues around, was to say: lesbian.

Many decades after we had met and worked together, I returned to interview my friend. She introduced me to the younger woman with whom she lived, though I think the standard in her community was for single daughters, no matter how old, to live in the parental home.

On a whim, during the interview I asked, “What happened to that man in Florida?”

She laughed and wrinkled her nose in amusement. “Faith, there was no man in Florida.”

Only later, back home in West Virginia did I dare think: Was she telling me she was like me?

She has since died. Her legend is quite enormous, but it does not mention what we may have shared. For the youth in her community and the broader community, for all of us, there may be more we could learn from her. But it is not a light matter to question a family and a broader community’s portrait of a beloved figure.

No photos this time for obvious reasons.

Valentine to my Mothers

My sister Shai and I were raised by two remarkable women, Eunice Spellman Holsaert, my Jewish mother by birth, and Charity Abigail Bailey, my mother by affection who was African American. At age four, I fell in love with Charity who was my nursery school music teacher. I spoke of nothing else. When my parents went to their first PTA meeting, they said, “Faith wants you to come live with us,” and that is what happened.

The picture of Eunice was taken by my sister’s friend Mehli Gobhai in my mother’s apartment where she was living alone after my sister had moved to India and I to New Mexico. The picture of Charity was taken in Haiti, where we all lived when I was seven.

We four lived together in Greenwich Village in the 1940s and 1950s. At the end of their lives my mother Eunice lived around the corner from Charity who had married. Eunice died in 1974 and Charity in 1979.

Eunice Holsaert 1970s

Charity Bailey, 1950s

Eunice with baby Faith

Eunice with Shai

Shai, Faith, Charity in the Catskills

Shai, Faith, Charity 1950s

Appropriation 2: Settlers

At a discussion of Hollywood and hegemony, my friend Yolanda Carrington referred to the United States as a settler nation. I thought: South Africa. I thought: Little House on the Prairie. I thought: our houses with their plumbing and heating and cooling sucking the green out of the land. I thought: Judy Collins singing, we’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot. In the past I have not called myself a colonist or a settler, but my friend’s designation rang true.

This truth feels truest in the realm of power and culture, but it’s more manageable for the moment to think about “settling” a geography. An example from my life comes to mind. For a few years, Vicki and I had a house in Chincoteague, Virginia, near the Atlantic Ocean. As I wrote that sentence, I heard an echo but could not at first place it, but now I have. It is uncomfortably apt. It comes from Isak Dineson’s colonial memoir Out of Africa: “I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills…,” a book brimming with settler arrogance.

The house at Chincoteague was narrow and high shouldered, a “waterman’s cottage.” Beside its sagging fence three trees twined as one — a catalpa (native to the Americas), a crape myrtle (exotic, some say from China) and one unnamed. My favorite bedroom of my entire life was on the second floor in that hundred year old house. It had tall, tall windows. When I lay down there for an afternoon nap, the vista at my side was a deep, wide comforter of blue sky. If I climbed the narrow stairs to the attic, I stood in a hand-hewn space defined by dark oak ribs. The hot sun, like the fire in a church censor, released the perfume of the old wood. Tilting my head back to look up at the peaked ceiling was like standing on my head inside a ship sailing into the sky.

The thing about that house is that we bought it and eventually we sold it. The day I found it I dipped my hand in the salt of the nearby ocean and said to my mother, who had loved the ocean but had been dead for several decades, We have a place at the beach. Vicki and I took good care of it — putting in new windows, painting, replacing a damaged floor, having moldy sagging sheetrock torn out and replaced, adding baseboard heaters. And we used it almost year round. Several summers I came close to living there, writing in the second bedroom, swimming in the ocean, walking on the beach, spotting osprey and pelicans and dolphins and loons. Every once in a while we’d see the wild ponies and Vicki claims one kissed her once. My friend Colleen snorkled in the bay shallows, slipping among the eel grass and floating above an enormous skate.

And yet. Even if I do not entirely accept that property is theft, even if I might prefer the idea that property is on loan, I was a settler on Chincoteague, an island whose name comes from an indigenous language, possibly Occahancock or Accomack Algonguin. Vicki and I bought from the middle-aged children of a Chincoteague-born couple who had moved away from the island for work, returned to the island at retirement, and had either died or grown terminally ill in the house. The sick bed was in the living room when we bought it.

European settlement of Chincoteague was spurred when English settlers from Jamestown bought the island. With them came some slaves of African lineage. The mysteriouss and wild, but not entirely wild, ponies, had already arrived to settle Assateague, the adjoining barrier island. Before ponies and other settlers, at least in summer the land was hunted and fished and known to indigenous peoples. Our settler myths have described these original people as childlike and unworldly in their concepts of land and our relation to it. For instance a website about Chincoteague says: Native peoples “…were generally generous, trusting people who had no idea of land possession or selling land as they believed only the creator could own land and often they welcomed European settlers not knowing they would be dispossessed of the lands they loved by aggressive colonial settlement.”

And before the native peoples and the rest of us who followed, there was the land, there was the sea, there was the vast blue sky. There were their creatures.

 

Catalpa in Bloom