Planting Dandelions (19 page)

I was disturbed by some of the accepted conventions I encountered, and curious about a whole lot of others. Why did so many white southerners say “He's black” sotto voce when describing someone? Was it a
secret
that the person was black? Was it rude to observe that they were? And why was it that when white girls got drunk, they almost always started talking to each other like inner-city black girls? Did it go both ways, I wondered. When black girls partied, did they think it was fun to talk like white sorority girls?

But you weren't supposed to ask those kinds of questions. I went to a poetry reading with an African-American friend where I was the only white person. I wasn't uncomfortable, but it seemed strange to me. Did it seem strange to him, I wanted to know, so I asked. Not cool, said Patrick, when I told him. You're not supposed to notice.

But how could you not? The roar of all that went unseen, unsaid, and unasked was deafening, like white noise.

The worst thing is, after a while, you stop hearing it.

“Why do they call it the Hood?” my mother asked innocently, gazing through the passenger-side window at the dilapidated homes that surrounded Little Rock Central High. She thought it was the official name of the district, like SoHo or the Haight, a proper noun you'd see emblazoned on banners attached to lampposts. Welcome to the Historic Hood District!

I thanked God I had vetoed her idea to walk, not that I would have let my mom, fresh off the plane from Canada, walk to Central High. I could just see her asking a crack addict for directions to the Hood. I explained that it was slang for “neighborhood,” and that it was synonymous with “ghetto.” As we drove past boarded-up doors and broken windows, I told her about white flight, how after the school was integrated, there had been an exodus of white families to the suburbs and a boom in private schools. I told her about the gangs, crack houses, and drive-bys.

My mother's face was crestfallen. Visiting Central High was a pilgrimage for her. I might as well have told her the moon landing had been faked, and the Vietnam War was still going on.

“What was it all for, then?” she asked. “What's changed?”

“I don't know,” I said, turning back onto the freeway that slices this city in two, cutting the black urban neighborhoods off, like a necrotic limb, from the affluent white ones. Its construction began shortly after desegregation. “I don't know.”

When I was nine years old, I flew with my family to Trinidad. It was my first time in the tropics, and I'll never forget how it felt to step out of the plane, into equatorial air so choked with humidity that it was viscous. When I first came to the South, the issue of race felt like that to me; pervasive and displacing. But people who lived and breathed it all their lives seemed acclimatized to it, whether they were black or white. Eventually I was, too. I can't pretend to be above it anymore. I'm immersed, saturated. Racism is embedded in the news media, in our institutions, and in the infrastructure of our communities. My sons are heirs to it. On parents' day at my youngest child's private preschool, he announced an ambition to grow up to be a garbageman, and all of us white parents smiled and said that it was a fine thing to be, and felt safe doing so, because
of course
none of our children will grow up to be a garbageman. Every garbageman they've ever seen is black.

Of course I'm well aware that systemic racism is a problem for all of America, not just the South. In fact, I think it's
the
problem for America. White southerners often feel like they are the scapegoat for the sins of a whole nation, and they've got a valid point. But it's been only half a century since doorways and drinking fountains here were labeled “white” or “colored,” not long enough to call it history. Though the signs have come down, segregation persists, in reality if not in policy. For ten years, we lived in a neighborhood that most consider to be the epicenter of liberalism in Little Rock, the kind with bumper stickers in every driveway: yes to a woman's choice and the environment, no to war and gated communities. And yet that neighborhood is the whitest place I've ever lived, even more than the town I grew up in, if that's possible. There are gates, and then there are gates. At least the ones with guardhouses and no trespassing signs are being honest about it.

I know there are enclaves like our old neighborhood in every city in America, and I sympathize with those who bristle at the suggestion that the South is stuck in its racist past. But it's not just northerners, or African-Americans, who can't let it go. I'm not sure where else in the world you could live and routinely encounter men in uniforms from a war that supposedly ended nearly 150 years ago. A Civil War reenactor was the surprise highlight at last year's Cub Scout banquet, and it was a good thing there was no question-and-answer period, because I had some pointed ones regarding period costume for slaves of the Confederate States of America.

The Civil War is a part of my sons' heritage I've struggled with for a long time. Family legend has it that they are related to a celebrated martyr of the Confederacy, David O. Dodd, a seventeen-year-old message boy whose trial and execution are reenacted in Little Rock every year. It's interesting, and I don't want them to feel ashamed of it, but is it something I want them to feel proud of? I had no answer for that question until we went to Gettysburg last summer, a side excursion on an epic road trip north. One hundred and forty-six years to the day that the first shots were fired, I watched my sons play in the shadow of an enormous oak that must have grown out of the earth while it was still bloody.

“Come over here,” I called to them softly, after absorbing the figures and dates on the interpretive marker. I swept my arm out in front of me, and described to them what I saw in my mind's eye: men and boys, some not much older than my ten-year-old, marching onto the field. It had taken us three days to drive from Arkansas, I reminded them. Imagine if you had to walk. How tired and ragged they must have been. How determined.

I turned to my boys, so full of passion and persistence, the two traits I value above all others but kindness. They come by it honestly. They are their father's sons. Sons of the South.

“People say they were fighting for lots of reasons, but they were defending people who kept other people as slaves. It was wrong, and it was a good thing they lost.”

I let that sink in, before adding, “The Confederates weren't all bad people. And the Union soldiers weren't all good.” I wondered what it was like to be a mother of young children on the path of Sherman's March.

“People do terrible things to each other in wars,” I told them, ending the lesson, and letting them get back to climbing on the cannons. I strolled a few paces over to Patrick, hoping he wasn't baiting any of the other visitors with talk of the “War of Northern Aggression.”

“I had a talk with the boys about the war,” I reported.

“What did you tell them?”

“That the North had the just cause, but they were douchebags.”

He laughed. “That sounds about right.”

We loaded the kids in the van, and drove off slowly toward another field.

“Arkansas!” the boys shouted as we came upon a granite memorial.

We pulled over and got out to read the inscription, the usual stuff about blood, valor, and hallowed ground.

“Such a fucked-up, stupid thing,” I heard my husband say, in a low, thick voice. I looked over, and saw with surprise that there were tears on his cheeks. It amazes me how deep are the wounds of that war. It makes ghosts of the living, compels them to reenact that mistake, over and over, so no one can move on. Southern men. Always starting something they can't stop.

I looked back at the monument to the fallen, thinking that the words Patrick just spoke made a better epitaph for them. Fortune doesn't always favor the bold.

“That sounds about right,” I told him. “Let's move on.”

A
cross America, the onset of winter is heralded by a spectacular show of fall color that begins in late October and peaks toward the end of November. This riotous display spills forth from our mailboxes and newspapers, in the form of glossy sales flyers reminding us that Thanksgiving is coming, and that it's going to take a lot of new stuff to make us properly thankful this year. We'll need a moving truck of new furniture and appliances, tableware to seat fifty, guest linens and inflatable mattresses to sleep twenty, matching cashmere turtlenecks for the whole family, and—this was in the warehouse club holiday flyer a few years ago—a small jet. Because a good hostess is always prepared.

It's hard not to get swept up in it. There is rarely anyone but me, my husband, and our kids around our Thanksgiving table, but that doesn't keep me from fretting over my mismatched dishes and tragic lack of a guest suite, as I thumb through the flyers and spin a daydream in which I usher a steady stream of guests toward monogrammed hand towels and ingenious place cards. Financial reality delivers me from most temptation, but I am vulnerable in Target, where the dream—or snippets of it—appears to hover more nearly within reach. It's a dangerous illusion, because shopping at Target is like sawing down the leg of a table. You get one cute, hip thing for your house, and it makes all the things that aren't cute and hip stand out. One of my friends calls it the “hundred-dollar-an-hour store.” I find this formula to be uncannily accurate, and if she actually came up with the algebra on her own, she ought to be chairing the Federal Reserve.

I'll walk in there with a list that reads “Batteries, Velcro,” and walk out ninety minutes later with a receipt for $144. In between coming and going is the spiral descent into the heart of darkness, the vortex of the red bull's-eye. The unraveling is accompanied by an internal dramatic monologue that swells to operatic heights, an aria from a beggar's opera:

It starts in the key of innocent wistfulness.

Then, the rationalization begins,
andante.

Now, the bargaining,
allegro.

The drama builds, with hostility and wheedling,
cadenza.

For God's sake, they're just five dollars a plate. Is it so terrible to want to splurge a little? You think so-and-so would think twice about spending a few dollars on
her
Thanksgiving table? CAN'T I EVER HAVE ANYTHING NICE FOR ONCE IN MY LIFE?

To the checkout, fait accompli,
pianissimo
. The fat lady has sung.
Grazie.