Waspy Ways
Elena is on the phone with me. I figure if she’s going to pop her pills and smoke and go trotting off into her dangerous crooked alleys, I’m not obligated to follow too closely. I’m going to write and read an article or two and tune back into her conversation when like right now, she talks about the ghosts in her grandmother’s old plantation home and the two hidden rooms in the basement with the chains that she and her sister discovered and got thrashed for discovering as kids. There was an axe and a jug too, she says.
Let’s talk about it, for God’s sake. Up North we were too enlightened to keep people in chains, but out of thirty students, I don’t have a single black kid. Out of four hundred students at the school, there isn’t a single black child. Isn’t that a little too obvious to scoot under the rug?
When I taught privately in the Midwest, four out of fifteen of my kids were black, and it’s not like this was some kind of proactive search–they were just normal kids and parents who wanted lessons. So I just don’t get (or I do get it, but it’s too risky to blurt out) why Massachusetts is so segregated. It’s totally fucked up. People pretend to be outraged with anything that hints of racism, but they have ways. Waspy, quiet ways.
I hate that I sound like a small white girl, especially when I sing.