We may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world
– James Baldwin
This is for George Floyd.
I came to Arizona in the late 1980s. Something of a cliché, part of the “brain drain,” I was a well-educated immigrant who had over-stayed her welcome in America and subsequently found a job in a bar. With my Northern Ireland accent and the right amount of naiveté about Arizona, I was the main source of amusement for the regulars who stopped by for a beer after their shift at a nearby manufacturing plant. Young and fearless, I charmed them with what they considered an Irish brogue, and the more alcohol I served, the more they wanted to tell me all about their Irish roots.
Most mornings, the bar was quiet, with only a few weary workers coming in after clocking out of the graveyard shift. One of them was Cliff. He was tall and handsome with a million dollar smile, and he was black. Like the other regulars, he teased me – relentlessly – about my accent, asking the same questions everyone else asked, if it was really that green over there, if I ate Lucky charms for breakfast or used Irish Spring soap. And, mostly, he would ask what a nice girl like me was doing in a dump like this.
One morning, Cliff arrived as the lead bartender was delivering a hasty tutorial on how to make cocktails. A self-proclaimed “broad,” she had decided it was about damn time I graduated from serving unfamiliar beer in colored cans to mixed drinks. A quick study, by 10 o’clock that morning, I had set up a row of dubious cocktails for anyone willing to try them. By the time Cliff showed up, I was deep in a learning curve, getting to know the popular highball cocktails that every bartender should know as well as the lowball variety favored by some of the locals, like the creamy Mudslides boot-scootin-boogie-Bob ordered for everyone in the bar on a Friday night. There were never enough shot-glasses.
Rather than over-pouring his usual shot of Jim Beam, I cajoled Cliff into giving one of my creations a go. “Ah, g’wan. Ya will, ya will. You’ll have a Tequila Sunrise to please me. And, what about a Salty Dog or a Long Island Iced Tea to sort you out for the rest of the day?” I don’t remember what he chose, but it amused him that I had written down all the recipes so I could learn them “by heart,” like a catechism. Sucking from a straw one those questionable concoctions, pretending to like it, he helped me pass the time, talking about how hot it was already and what I had planned for the weekend.
The jukebox he had nicknamed “Country Thunder” was silent that morning, the only sounds a dropped fork on the kitchen tiles, a Goddammit when the owner realized he was missing some ingredient vital to the daily lunch special or that the cook had spiked her coffee with J & B scotch. Again. Out of earshot in the back office, my bartending teacher was counting money, and at the far end of the bar two men staring ahead, smoking over a pitcher of Budweiser.
Chopping limes and twisting slivers of lemons for later, I kept Cliff entertained, until during a lull in our conversation, I heard one of those men call out to the owner who was still out of sight, “Hey Bud, since when do you allow the help to talk to niggers?”
Again.
“Hey – I said since when do you allow the help to talk to niggers?”
And I froze.
Instant, sickening, and recognizable, flight or fight fear, not unlike the kind I once felt as a young girl, when one evening after school, I turned a page in the Belfast Telegraph to find a black and white photograph of a young woman, a Catholic, who had been stripped and tied to a lamp-post, hot tar and feathers poured on her roughly shorn head – her punishment for falling in love with a British soldier.
Frozen behind a bar in Phoenix, Arizona, I was back in 1970s Northern Ireland.
In ”Punishment,” harrowing and haunting to read, the late Seamus Heaney evokes a young woman who has been shorn, stripped, and killed in a primitive, barbaric act he juxtaposes with the ‘tarring and feathering’ punishments in the Northern Ireland of his day. Speaking directly to the dead woman, he tells her:
My poor scapegoat, I almost love you, but would have cast, I know the stones of silence.
While I took a powerful lesson from Heaney’s poem and have applied it to all manner of situations in my life, I did not apply it that morning in the bar. Young and foolish and frightened – and privileged – I cast the stones of silence.
To anyone reading this today, it will be difficult to accept that I had not expected to find racism in 1980s America. This is the truth. Unravelling the memories, I return to my adolescence, to Sunday evenings in our Dublin Road living room, when my family – along with everyone else we knew – gathered around a tiny television to watch ‘Roots.’ We were horrified when Kunta Kinte was sold into slavery in America and whipped within an inch of his life for trying to escape. Aghast, we watched, night after night, but we also held onto the notion that just as the entire country seemed to be galvanized by the story unfolding on Roots, surely an entire country would subsequently adopt a kinder, gentler attitude. Surely?
That morning in a dive bar in Phoenix, Arizona, I couldn’t have been further away from Northern Ireland or from Gambia, West Africa in 1750, Kunta Kinte’s place of birth. I couldn’t have been further away from the right thing to do. I chose not to stand up. I said nothing to those two men. To Cliff, I said, “I’m sorry.” I am ashamed that I said it too quietly.
In response, Cliff stood up and looked at me. In his kind brown eyes, no anger just a resignation, a look that told me he was used to it. He picked up his hat, put it on his head, and walked out the door. He left a $20 tip.
I never saw him again.
I am so sorry. I am so sorry I said nothing. I am so sorry I did nothing.
Maya Angelou reminds us “when you know better, you do better.” Do we?
Nine days ago, we watched on TV a cell-phone video, recorded in broad daylight, as a police officer pinned George Floyd to the ground, and for minute after minute after minute after minute, after minute, after minute, after minute, after minute, after tragic minute, held his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck. We watched as onlookers pleaded for medical attention. We watched as the officer kept his knee pressed on the neck of a handcuffed man who presented no physical threat, having ignored the nine times George Floyd begged for mercy, for water, for his life:
“Please, please, please I can’t breathe. My neck hurts. Please, please. I can’t breathe.”
Helpless, we sat in our homes and watched as the scene played out the way we feared it would. Helpless, we watched until eventually George Floyd, unarmed and handcuffed and black, fell silent and motionless on the pavement, a police officer’s knee still pressed against his neck. We can no longer choose to be helpless.
We cannot – nor should we – look away from the harrowing sight of a defenseless black man pleading for mercy. We cannot – nor should we – look away from injustice. But looking at it is not enough. It never was.
George Floyd mattered. Somebody loved him. His life was important. It had value. He lost it yesterday in an encounter with law enforcement that once again raises pain and trauma for so many people. The issue of police-community relations has been a point of controversy and pain for the whole of American history. It involves centuries of trauma. In the past several years alone, almost every part of Minnesota has lived through a fatal encounter with law enforcement. George Floyd’s death raises that trauma yet again for so many people. It is legitimate for community members to be outraged by George Floyd’s death. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I strongly encourage everyone who wishes to exercise their First Amendment rights to protest to do so safely: use social distancing and wear a mask. It is an act of care for yourselves and your community to do so. ~
~ Minnesota’s Attorney General Keith Ellison
We are outraged. Of course we are, and we should be. We have been here too many times before. We were here when a Grand Jury cleared a white police-officer in the choke-hold death six years ago of another unarmed black man, Eric Garner; when another Grand Jury decided there would be no indictment of the police officer who killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown; when an attorney said that race had nothing to do with why his client, shot and killed Philando Castile during a routine traffic in Minnesota; and, when Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed black man, was killed as he jogged through a predominantly white neighborhood.
We were right here, watching and wishing – waiting – for justice, for peace. It comes dropping slow – too slow.
No justice, no peace.
Yesterday,George Floyd was laid to rest, a day after new charges were announced against the the officer who showed no mercy and against the others who were at the scene and chose to stand by while George Floyd died. In his eulogy, Rev. Al Sharpton said that when he visited the scene where Mr. Floyd was taken from us, it occurred to him that what happened there illustrates in one brutal metaphor, the African American experience:
“George Floyd’s story has been the story of black folks . . . because ever since 401 years ago, the reason we could never be who we wanted and dreamed of being is you kept your knee on our neck. What happened to Floyd happens every day in this country, in education, in health services and in every area of American life. It’s time to stand up in George’s name and say get your knee off our necks!””
It is time. And, white people like me can help. There are things we can do – little things – that will make a big difference for black communities, things we may have never done or said before, questions we have never thought to ask. We can act. As consumers, we can choose to shop from black-owned businesses. As voters, we can make choices about the who decides how our cities will be policed, and how our police will be funded, and we can force answers to question about why, during a pandemic that is disproportionately impact our communities of color, there is money for police officers to suit up in body armor, but not enough PPE for front-line doctors and nurses. As educators in loco parentis we can volunteer to sit on committees that examine curricula, and when we admit that it neither includes nor respects the diversity of our families, we can demand a change.
For suggestions on things each of us can do, please visit: 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice
Let’s not squander another opportunity to do one of these things – today. We can move on up the road.
Of Alex Haley’s story, James Baldwin writes:
Roots is a study of continuities, of consequences, of how a people perpetuate themselves, how each generation helps to doom, or helps to liberate, the coming one–the action of love, or the effect of the absence of love, in time. It suggests, with great power, how each of us, however unconsciously, can’t but be the vehicle of the history which has produced us. Well, we can perish in this vehicle, children, or we can move on up the road.
