The Great Race War Part 1 - My Own Medicine

By Barbara Groark

The character of Maid Marian in the story of Robin Hood (following the 1938 film version starring Olivia deHavilland and Errol Flynn) seems a snob when you meet her, but she’s a good girl, educated to rule, healthy, wealthy, and open to new information. She opposes Mr. Hood’s activities, especially one day when he kidnaps her for ransom, but he treats her well as his prisoner, and when he finally gives her a tour of the squalid refugee camp where the poor are forced to live as a result of public policy, she has a change of heart and mind and begins to assist Robin in trying to alleviate their condition, eventually influencing public policy, when she gets back home, against the wishes of the local authorities. She overcomes tribal prejudice and penetrates the thick walls of economic and social class distinctions without losing her own place in the social hierarchy. She gets down and pitches in without fear of contamination, without losing anything that is essentially hers. Her eyes have been opened, her compassion awakened, and she becomes even more herself, a better self.

Most people have some experiences from childhood and adolescence that correspond in some way to Maid Marian’s epiphanies and adjustments in words and actions. Things we had been worried about become not so worrisome. Childish beliefs are not so much thrown over entirely as expanded and redefined, or maybe they are just re-worded, because they are re-understood. And we get to reexamine everything when our own children come along.

I remember the first time I realized that the color in black people’s skin did not rub off. It was during one of my few hospital stays as a child. I was in the children’s ward with sharp and roving pains rolling left and right in my abdomen. Our family doctor, a Chinese American, suspected appendicitis, but the pain rolled left and right, similar to menstrual cramps, but it was too early for my period.

Two episodes of these mysterious pains had sent me to the hospital, once at the age of five and once at the age of ten. I would spend days in pajamas slowly rolling my knees from side to side. The pain would subside briefly and then return. When I was older, reading books would help distract my mind. But during both episodes, the only thing that made the pain stop was when my father laid his hand quietly on my stomach and kept it there like a heating pad. My mother and I were amazed, and also relieved whenever he had time to do this “laying on of hands.” Nothing inappropriate went on. However, he could only stay for a limited amount of time, up to an hour when I would fade into a sleep. The pain would eventually come back.

One memory of the earlier episode was of my lying flat under a light on an examining table with several doctors and my father looking down at me. The main doctor in the center of the group pressed my abdomen in several places and asked at each press if I felt any pain, to which my answer was “No” each time. Then he put on a rubber glove with some goo at the fingers and penetrated my five-year-old vagina. This was a surprising sensation for me, but there was no pain, so I remained in an analytical frame of mind. I saw my father put his head down as if he were watching me be crucified. The doctor pressed my insides on the left – no pain – and then the right, where I felt a sharp pain and said “That hurts.” The doctor, nodded and removed his hand and appeared satisfied at coming to some discovery, and I went home with my father. The pain ceased after that without further treatment.

For the second episode of this mysterious pain at age ten, I was eventually put in the hospital for a few days. The doctors had decided on an appendectomy, but then changed their minds. I got visits from an Indian doctor several times, who seemed very interested in the leftover poison ivy rash on my shins than in my abdominal area. Other doctors and nurses visited periodically, but I never received the kind of examination I got at age five, and I do not remember taking medicine of any kind.

I was in the children’s ward, which was pretty noisy at night with the tiny babies crying every few hours. There was an eleven-year-old boy in a bed to the left diagonally across from me. We never spoke and would eye each other as if we were not there, from natural pre-adolescent modesty on both our parts, and slight embarrassment at being placed with all these younger children. The different night-shift nurses, who at that time still wore the traditional white dress and cap, would get to know me since I would occasionally call by my little wired button in my bed to complain that I could not sleep. They would be kind, but said “Just go to sleep” and pat my arm over the covers, that’s all.

One night as I lay listening in the dark to the sounds of the ward, a night attendant – she was not wearing nurse’s whites – came in to check on me without my having called anyone. She was a large black woman probably of middle age, and now that I look back, I’m guessing that she was well aware I was watching her in the dim light in a slightly wary way. She checked around my bed and my night table. She asked me in a whisper how I was, and I said that I could not sleep. She did not say much more, but pulled my sheet and blanket to make them straight and pulled the edge up to my chin. Her hand was about to brush mine, and I was slightly fearful of her touch but too polite to pull back. But when her hand did brush mine, the touch left me relieved. I thought, “That feels like my grandmother’s hand,” that is, slightly rough with work, but friendly and gentle. She bustled her way out of the ward, probably laughing to herself.

I was able to go home soon after that, since the pains had gone.

The following year for Halloween, I decided to be Aunt Jemima, the black mammy advertising icon on maple syrup bottles and who now sells frozen waffles as well. Today’s image of Aunt Jemima shows her with curly, short, modern hair, a pearl earring, and a high white collar. When I was ten, her image showed a hoop earring, a scarf covering her hair, and a shawl covering her shoulders over a plain dress, reminiscent of Mammy in the movie Gone With the Wind. She was assumed to be large (you could only see her head and shoulders on the syrup bottle), so I was wearing pillows. The Riverton Five-and-Ten store (equivalent of today’s dollar stores) had the black for my face, bright red lipstick, and the plastic hoop earrings. I decided against the minstrel show look, that is, white greasepaint around the mouth and eyes. My mother helped me get old clothing from around the house, and she may have sewn up some fabric for a large gathered skirt and a cotton scrap to wrap up my head.

I distinctly remember applying the black greasepaint to my face as I stood at the bathroom mirror. I had decided on a realistic look, complete coverage rather than the just the suggestion of coverage. By the time I was halfway through I was smiling, and by the time I had covered my eye area completely, I was not even myself anymore, an experience which is funny and scary at the same time. As Halloween costumes go, this one was very comfortable, since I had no need of a mask. The black went down my neck a bit and some at my ears, but the collar came up high and the headscarf covered most of my ears. The audience of my sisters and mother was appreciative.

I’m pretty sure it was Eileen Costello and Anne McQuaide and I who canvassed our neighborhood for candy with the rest of the troops for a few hours after nightfall. Since we weren’t tiny, we were allowed to go by ourselves, with no untoward incidents occurring. I was walking home alone for the half-block from Eileen’s house when I passed two boys in costume about my age and height walking in the opposite direction. They both said “Hi” and I said “Hi” as we passed each other, weary workers going home for the night with our pillow cases of candy. When they passed a few steps behind me I heard one say to his friend in astonishment “It’s a girl!” and they both laughed and kept going. I continued home with a satisfied air.

In high school, I read Gone With the Wind twice (and saw the movie once with about 25 girls in an expedition organized by Janet Stojak and Pat Vineis to a theatre in Philly) but of course was more interested in the romance in the story than social context by that time, and I also read The Autobiography of Malcolm X once and thought about the use of violence as an attention-getter before any justice could be served for minorities. But even Mr. X changed his views by the end of his story.

WE WON'T BE FOOLED AGAIN – Part 2

By Barbara Groark

What the poet Mary Karr calls the “Big Lie of the Drug Culture” caught many of us up in the years following 1968, but most people I know recovered within ten years and left the time-wasting and illegality behind. It was those who stayed stuck in the same old anti-authoritarian viewpoint (nothing odder than an old “angry young man” - who is not kidding about it) or were bamboozled into the more serious drugs who had trouble letting go. Again, the people in the 10 years younger than we had more trouble recovering anyway, only because they were younger when some of the big events happened, or when they started using drugs. It is some of their children who are the angriest in the aftermath of the sixties and seventies, if they are not entangled in the same syndromes themselves. With two whole parents, a kid can do almost anything. When both parents are just not there, anger is a better response than acquiescence and despair.

Here is another of my mother’s stories, one I did not hear of till some time in the 1990s. “I used to go to the food store for a few things, and it would take me three hours to get done. I’d run into women holding on to their carts and crying as they walked around picking up what they needed for supper. I’d go up to one, put my hand on her arm, and say, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she’d start telling me about one or two of her kids who was doing drugs and whatever else was going on at the time. Then I’d see someone else with dark circles under her eyes, and I’d talk to her for a while.” The children were just very far away from home, and some ended up dead. This was ongoing through the seventies, and it was not always the same women my mother saw in the supermarket.

These were women who loved to laugh - you know, Erma Bombeck readers, Wednesday morning bowling league members, genuine comedians themselves. [Try To Hell with All That by Caitlin Flanagan for a not uncritical but still affectionate view of the housewife flavor of those times.]

I know many of you have your own family tragedies that may be too painful to speak of. Psychologists say family patterns may be to blame, but don’t forget about the kidnappings. Some solid families had people stolen right away from them. The predators, like leopards and lions in the animal kingdom, go after the weak and the young. They don’t want a real fight on their hands.

The only thing I can think of to explain what happened is to take the really long view, like from outer space. We as a society must have been doing very well – civil rights laws, trials of Nazi criminals, even Church reform and ecumenism, expanded opportunities for women and the working class in general since the GI bill, post-World War II economic boom, new housing, more inventions. In fact, what were conservatives doing at the time? They were sending rockets to the moon, that’s what they were doing! That’s the conservatism I remember.

We all just had to be stopped! Too much justice and prosperity and human progress and wonder was happening!

Well, this blog is in danger of going off the deep end (really long views have this tendency), so I’ll make it a short one.