The sophomore survey of African American literature was the most popular literature course in the English Department at Texas Southern University, and this semester it was so over-enrolled that it needed to be split into two sections.  The black woman professor who regularly taught it was one of the most popular on campus.  I had long wanted to teach the course, but as a young white professor at a historically black university, it was unlikely that I would ever get to.  Other faculty had produced more scholarship on African American literature and had life experience I couldn’t claim.   But ever since I had read Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and on and on, I had longed to teach these writers.  In 1968 as a graduate student at the University of Houston, I had submitted a proposal to write a Master’s thesis on Ralph Ellison’s  Invisible Man only to be turned down with the response, “He will never last.”  So much for the predictions of the Chair of Graduate Studies in English.

So when I learned that English 244 was going to be split into two sections, I went to the chair of the department and requested a chance to teach it.  After all, there was nothing to lose.  Surprisingly, she said yes.  So the next day I walked into a room full of students disappointed that they had been placed in the section taught by someone other than their beloved Professor Pyle.  I knew that what I said and did in the next minutes would determine whether they and I spent the next three and a half months in pleasure or in pain.  I decided I had to face my whiteness and their disappointment head-on.  The door to the classroom was toward the back of the room, and as heads with disappointed, skeptical faces turned toward me, I walked in talking:   “I know I am white, I know I do not have your experience,   But here is what I can do:  I can teach you to read and to write about great books and do it well.”  By the time I reached the front, the room was hushed.  All eyes were on me, perhaps astonished at my directness and clearly curious about this white woman who presumed to enter their literary world.   Without another word I simply opened Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and began to read, and the power of the words began to work their magic.  I felt the students forgetting about me and even themselves as they listened.  The magic of some of the most powerful and beautiful writing in the English language continued all semester.    I saw students with varying interests and abilities, each with a story worth telling and hearing, and they accepted me as a white woman who could teach them to read great books and write about them.

I tell this incident now because it comes back to me as I see in the current cultural moment yet another opportunity for white people to give up our fear and to acknowledge our complicity in the suffering of black people.  Above all, the present moment is an opportunity to realize what we whites are missing out on, a connection with people who have a lot to offer us and to teach us.  That statement could be said of all people, in fact.  Here is another incident about the grace of connection I think of now:  My husband Thorpe (a fellow English professor) and I both happened to be attending a conference on African American literature in Charleston, South Carolina.  We were among the few white people there.  One day we signed up for a conference tour of historic Charleston, and were the only white people in the group.  I was astonished at the friendly welcome we received from the group of professors who were all strangers to us.  Before long, as we walked the streets, joked, and exchanged stories about incompetent administrators on our home campuses, I was struck by how deeply satisfying it felt to be a part of their group, if only for a little while.  It may sound like stereotyping, but just let me say that white academic groups felt dull and sterile in comparison.  That afternoon was a gift.

Such an experience would have been unlikely for me in the segregated Texas I grew up in.   Until my late teens I never gave a thought as to why my world was white.  White schools, neighborhoods, friends, and shops seemed “normal,” just the way things were.    I do remember a moment of budding consciousness, however, at four or five years old, the first time I saw “whites only” and “colored” drinking fountains in a department store.  In more inchoate words then, the question struck me, “If the store lets ‘them’ in, why do they make them use separate water fountains?”  Even my little brain saw contradiction and hypocrisy in the store’s taking their money and treating people badly. 

Another incident involving my four-year-old self, which I don’t remember but which my father told me a few years before he died, reveals how deep seated racism was in mid-century Texas.   I was walking on a sidewalk in downtown Waco with my father.  Coming toward us he saw an old friend from his childhood years in Rogers, a tiny town in central Texas.  This friend, however, lived on the other side of the tracks then, in the black section of town.  Part of my father’s walk to school went through this neighborhood, and somehow he and the black boy, who was walking to his black school at the same time, became friends.   I don’t remember his name, so let’s call the boy Sam.  My dad was about eight and Sam about twelve when this incident occurred.  White boys my dad’s age sometimes came along and would bully my dad.  Sam would shoo them away.  But one day Sam said to my dad, “If you don’t fight them, you will have to fight me.”  So my dad screwed up his courage and began to attack.  The bullies ran away, and my dad never forgot Sam’s lesson. So when he saw Sam walking toward him that day in downtown Waco, he must have been delighted, and the two men must have continued talking for some time.  Apparently, after they parted I pulled on my dad’s coat and said, “Daddy, daddy, do you know he is a nigger?”  When my father told me that story about my four-year-old self, I was appalled but not surprised that I had absorbed racism from the world around me, even though I never remember hearing racist attitudes at home.  I never even remember hearing the word nigger at home, but I had heard it somewhere—and absorbed its meaning—even at four years old. 

In elementary school I first learned about slavery in the South and remember being horrified that slavery could happen to anyone.  But I didn’t know enough history to understand how the whiteness of my world was a consequence of history.  In high school, with a group of other students, I took a Christmas basket to a black family in the housing projects.  I thought of my family as poorer than most others around me, but what I saw in the projects was beyond anything I knew.  My father had grown up on a hard-scrabble farm sometimes not knowing whether there was enough food for breakfast, but as a white man, he went to college on the GI Bill after World War II, when blacks had largely been excluded from military service.   My father and mother were able to buy a little tract house in the suburbs of San Antonio that were no doubt closed to blacks by redlining if not by deed restrictions.  They acquired equity and bought a bigger house years later in a better neighborhood from which blacks were probably also excluded.  At least none lived there.   As a white man, my dad rose in the ranks at his job, promotions that might well have been closed in the 1950’s to a black person at his government agency. 

In 1961, a book came out that was to open my eyes, John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me.  Under the supervision of a doctor, Griffin had darkened his skin with drugs and dyes and toured the South as a black man.  He described the daily insults and even dangers experienced each day from white people as he went about his travels.  I was horrified and shocked and shaken out of my ignorance.  So when the Civil Rights Movement came in the mid 1960’s I supported it.  When I began teaching in 1976 at Texas Southern University, I naively thought state-sanctioned racism to be a thing of the past.   I remember saying one day in class that the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act had ended racism.  After class that day, one by one, students politely lined up to tell me their stories about being bullied by the police, being paid less than co-workers doing the same job, being followed in stores as if they were expected to steal.  I learned that our dean, a black woman, one day was pulled over by the police and slammed against her car as they searched her for non-existent drugs.  I realized that I knew nothing about world black people lived in. 

In spite of an adulthood spent reading and thinking about racism, marching and organizing, I still have to acknowledge that I am a relatively naïve product of history.  But I have learned that when opportunities occur to transcend history, to experience freedom from unconscious, conditioned responses to black people, moments of grace are possible.  May we be open to that grace. 

That last line was supposed to end this essay.  But something happened this morning, a Sunday, that needs to be stated.  Setting out to do an errand with my gas tank almost empty, I pulled into a Shell station that was closed.  No cars were there, no one in the office.  But gasoline pumps usually work anyway, so I sidled up next to one.  As I turned off the engine, I noticed a black man on a bicycle coming toward me into the station.  He looked middle-aged, in jeans and a shirt, but the first thing I noticed was his skin color.  There were none of the signals that trigger white people’s fear, nor any that might assuage their fear—in other words, no hoodie and no suit and tie.  He rode slowly toward the office, stopped, and sat on his bike.   I wondered for a second what he might be doing there and whether I should get out of the car and pump my gas or just drive away to look for another station.  Then, ashamed of myself, I got out and walked to the other side of the car to open the gas tank, and by then he was fixing something on his bike.  A couple of other cars pulled in, the drivers oblivious to the embarrassing drama that had just occurred in my head.  Would I have even noticed a man on a bike coming toward me in an empty gas station if he had been white?  I will never know.  This incident shows me how much power dark-skinned men have, and how much conditioning even a woman who should know better has to overcome.  No wonder black men have been lynched, shot in the back, held down with a knee on the neck, and all the rest of it; they are perceived as so powerful they have to be eliminated to quell white fear.

So what to make of this little episode?  My conditioning reared its ugly head, but years of work to overcome it let me get out of the car and pump my gas.  I did not give in to fear as I might have fifty years ago.  That is progress.  And that is what I mean by the ongoing possibility for grace.

The young man from “Truck Stop,” whose image erased my traveler’s fatigue and existential gloom, faded over time, and I am left to face the morning newspaper headlines with only my own resources for solace.  This morning, before coffee, I mistakenly skim the front page of my beloved New York Times, and all that is wrong with the world once again fills my brain:  “China Kept World in Dark as Outbreak Rippled,”  “First Tainted, Then Set Free By the Senate.”  Threats of pandemic and autocracy are too much to face before coffee and threaten to cause the twins of rage and despair to erupt.  But now is not a time to respond to the evil twins with a plan for political action.  So I tuck the headlines into a side pocket of my brain and turn to breakfast.

Time is short this morning, so I turn to the quickest possible choice, boxed cereal.  Then I discover that the wrong kind of breakfast cereal somehow found its way into the cabinet—sugar-coated to the tune of 17 percent of the RDA.  Now I can add crankiness to rage and despair.  If I can’t offer a plan of resistance to the evils of the world just yet, at least I can mount a resistance to the sugary breakfast cereal lurking in my cabinet.  

With stubborn determination, I turn to the refrigerator.  There I find an orange, a lovely, fresh orange from my friend Doreen’s orange tree.  As I eat it, I notice that each segment has two seeds.  Why two?  Why not just one?  Distracted from my crankiness, I eat on.  Two more seeds in each segment, until the last.  Then three!  Twenty-one seeds altogether in this very small orange.  Such profligacy, such energy!  It must be a remarkable tree, indeed.   Somehow this thought cheers me.

I ask Doreen about her tree.  She tells me that, as a child, when she and her parents came to the U. S.  from Taiwan, they planted an orange seed in a pot. It sprouted.  They put the little plant into a larger pot, and each time they moved, the increasingly larger pots went with them.  When they came to Houston, the plant, now a small tree, went into the ground.  This year it produced so many oranges that Doreen had bags of them to give away.  Thus, some ended up in my fridge, and one on my breakfast plate this morning.

I shall plant one of its twenty-one seeds in a pot and see what happens. With any luck, Doreen’s tree will have progeny thatperhaps cheer some person at breakfast in a future world. And if there are still any newspapers, perhaps they will have happier headlines. If not, maybe some cranky person will eat an orange, and its twenty-one seeds will remind her that life can be stronger and more mysterious than we know. Maybe it will remind her also that faith in the future is the foundation of action. Maybe it will help her make a plan to counter rage and despair, a plan of hope.

Interstate 20 between Abilene and Sweetwater doesn’t fit any conventional notion of the beautiful.  Driving, one sees just miles and miles of dry scrub landmarked by little except blowing tumbleweeds and oil-drilling contraptions rhythmically sticking their noses into the ground.  The occasional gas station sits like a lonely outpost as cars and trucks speed by.  The rolling, green hills we passed east of Abilene have long given way westward to a brown, treeless plain, and there is nothing to charm or distract the eye, at least not this traveler’s eye.  Not only is there nothing to charm, but, depending on my level of fatigue or hunger on this long drive from Houston to New Mexico, a lot to annoy.  Billboards on Interstate 20 here assault the gaze, urging ever more buying of ever more things.  Trucks speed by jockeying for position, as if getting twenty feet ahead of traffic provides any advantage.   I can start to fixate on the ugliness and relentlessness of commerce and on all that is wrong with the world, especially as day gives way to darkness.  I can get, shall we say, grumpy.

         On other trips to New Mexico, Thorpe and I have taken slower, more peaceful roads north and west that reveal the beauty of this arid landscape, with sun-lit tan and yellow and brown grasses blending into the horizon.  Open, unimpeded views of land and sky can clear the mind and settle my soul.  But tonight, however, arrival deadlines require that we make miles quickly.  So I try to be grateful for the efficiency and speed of this Interstate, but still want to grumble sometimes.  One spot can be particularly annoying—a sprawling truck stop covering at least an acre in Tye Texas, garishly lit, with lane after lane of trucks parked or filling up with gasoline.  We usually drive past, but tonight we must join the throng to fill our tank and our bellies.   

          I enter the truck stop, weary, in search of the women’s restroom, and walk past the rows of snacks and truck paraphernalia to an area of services for truckers.  To my left are rows of recliners for resting or even sleeping, then washing machines and dryers.  Straight ahead I see showers, then finally I spot the women’s restroom at the very back.  As I walk toward it, I notice two men in the hallway outside the bay of showers, conversing.  I might have walked past without noticing them.  Ordinarily, if I had even noticed, I might have succumbed to negative stereotypes of truckers, indulging my snobbishness.  But tonight something catches my eye.  The younger of the two has his back to me, and I see him combing freshly washed hair that hangs to his shoulders.  He wears jeans and has yet to put on a shirt, as he talks to another man I can barely see.  He looks young and lean, and his body curves into the movement of the hairbrush.  I could have stood there, so struck was I by the simple humanity and beauty of this man, clean after a long day of driving, perhaps sharing a story of the road with a companion in his world. 

          But I move on, understanding that this unassuming, ugly truck stop is indeed a sanctuary for men and women who drive these relentlessly efficient and harsh roads day after day, night after night, as it also is right now for me.  It is not only a sanctuary, but if one is able to see it, a place with its own kind of beauty and grace.  Somehow, this young man, who stands in the hallway brushing his hair, lightens my step.  Grateful, not grumpy, I walk on.

   On October 21, men on tall ladders hung big red balls from the old oaks in front of the house across the street.    Given that Halloween decorations were timely, I thought, “What a strange shade of orange.”  After all, two doors down, the front yard was full of skeletons, gravestones, and cobwebs.  But, silly me, I was indeed seeing red.  Yesterday, October 29, the men with tall ladders came back, this time to climb the roof and string Christmas lights.  Once that was done, they wrapped the stately oaks in dense nets of smaller clear lights.  So last night the house lit up the neighborhood.  At least, when the kids trick-or-treat tomorrow night on Halloween, they will not do so in the dark.  Will they be confused, thinking they should be looking for Santa Claus and his sleigh packed with gifts, instead of ringing doorbells for candy?  Time is indeed out of joint.  But then the trick-or-treaters live in the city, in the midst of stores full of Halloween candy and Christmas decorations that appear as soon as the shelves are cleared of back-to-school supplies.  It’s as if Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas are all thrown into a big pot of holiday stew, where the flavors don’t really blend.  Commercial markers of the seasons I see in the stores just get me confused. 

          I turn to nature for a little re-orientation, to a favorite tree, the humble hackberry, which reliably marks the changing seasons.   It suddenly started turning orange on October 28, a Monday.  I had not seen it over the weekend, so my perception of suddenness probably was not accurate.  In fact, change had been happening outside my awareness for a long time.  Change seems to happen that way:  it seems sudden when one day a baby is walking, although she has been working toward it since birth.  One day she gets a driver’s license, one day goes off to college, one day gets her first real job.  These are markers of what is out of sight.  So, maybe it makes a certain weird metaphysical sense for our street to feature Halloween skeletons, Thanksgiving door wreaths, and Christmas lights all within the same block.  Time merges in a sort of crazy mash-up. 

           What is time anyway but a human construct of months, days, years, minutes, and seconds divided by earth’s rotation around the sun?  On Venus and Mars, what earthlings call a year is not the same as on earth, so when will the first colonizing humans celebrate their first Christmas?  Maybe Christmas can be whenever we, or the neighbors across the street, say it is?  If, in this age of the demagogue, we get to choose our own “facts,” maybe we get to choose our own sense of time? 

          These musings make my head spin, so I will cling to those moments when my brain gets outside myself and out of time:  when I am singing in a choral concert; when I am loving Thorpe, or a friend sitting across the dinner table, or a family member opening Christmas packages.  The list of moments outside of time can go on:  when I am engrossed in a painting, swimming in the pool, looking at my hackberry tree through the pool’s glass doors.  And I slip out of time, as well, and enjoy the holiday stew, with its mix of sweet, sour, and savory.  Let the clock keep ticking.  And let the Christmas lights shine.

The little central Texas town of Rogers isn’t much to look at today, but when my mother, Vivian Marks, was born there in 1919 it boasted three banks, six cotton gins, and a weekly newspaper.  The year before her birth, more cotton was shipped from Rogers than from any other Texas town.   Profiting from this wealth was the bank run by the Baugh family.  The bank survived the fire in the 1920’s that destroyed much of downtown, and it survived the Great Depression that began in 1929 when cotton prices plummeted.  The bank sat on a prominent corner of Main Street, and the Baugh house, the largest in town, occupied its own prominent position.  Like the Baugh buildings, the family stood out.  Everyone in town was likely aware of them and of their position in Rogers’ social hierarchy.

           I suspect, however, that a hundred years earlier in central Texas, social hierarchies would have been less clearly defined.  In the 1830’s each immigrant family, and single men as well, received land grants from the Mexican government.   Over decades, however, early landholdings were sub-divided among the successive generations of children, until within a hundred years many farmers had only small farms.  When market prices for farm crops plunged during the 1930’s, these farmers, my parents’ families included, struggled to survive.  But the bank owned by the Baugh family, prospered.  It was as if the development of a more rigid class system, such as what took centuries to develop in Europe, compressed into a hundred years. 

         Rogers’ class structure was a feature in many of the stories my parents told of their childhoods.  One story stands out—the one about my mother, Vivian, and the banker’s daughter, Delite Baugh.   One day in school at lunchtime, Delite was eating a stick of celery.  Vivian, who ate the vegetables grown on their farm, celery not among them, asked Delite what she was eating.  She replied, “Celery, but it’s only for rich people.”   At a young age, Delite understood her rank as the banker’s daughter, and if Vivian had not understood her own rank before that conversation, she did then.  As an adult, she could laugh at the absurdity of defining class by celery, but she must have felt ashamed that her family could not afford to buy it in the grocery store. 

          My mother and father, like so many others, escaped Rogers as young adults.  Thanks to their hard work, and to the GI Bill, they eventually prospered in the post-World War II economy.  But my mother kept attitudes toward class shaped both by childhood poverty and by family stories of more egalitarian times. I was a young child during these years, and in turn, I was shaped by her stories.

          I remember many Sunday afternoons when I became aware of my mother’s attitudes toward the class structure of our town of San Antonio and developed my own.  While my father studied for his college classes, my mother would give him some quiet space and pile my grandmother, my sister, and me into the car to take a drive.  We didn’t drive into the country, as some might have, but around San Antonio looking at houses.  We would cruise through our own neighborhood of starter wood-frame, small suburban houses and gradually get closer into town to the older, richer neighborhoods.  By fifth grade, I could have drawn a map of San Antonio based on the status of any neighborhood I had been in, and my mother no doubt could have, too.  I measured the rank of each house by size, whether the exterior was wood or brick or stone, and its number of stories.  Two-story houses made of stone were my ultimate.   

          By high school in Corpus Christi, where we now lived, I could have ranked each social group:  children of the local merchants who lived on Ocean Drive occupied the top, and the rest of us were somewhere down the ladder, with perceived parents’ income as the ladder.  So, as my mother’s daughter, I grew up aware.  And also like her, I suspect, felt both attracted to and repelled by such distinctions.   

           In the 1980’s I took a leave from university teaching to set up a writing program for first-year lawyers at a large downtown law firm in Houston.  Shortly after I began, one day riding the elevator up to my office, a senior partner and I exchanged greetings.  He asked, “So, where are you parking?” When I answered that I ride the bus, since I live close to Main Street, he looked horrified: “You can’t do that!  When you are first class, you have to go to first class.” I had violated a norm, acting inappropriately to the status of my employer.  Like my mother laughing at Delite and her celery, I could laugh, but I was old enough not to be humiliated, or to change my bus-riding ways.  And I could be horrified when a firm newsletter printed a mocking cartoon of a bag lady on the cover.  Yet I could also admire the firm’s norms regarding hard and good work and accept happily a salary larger than my university one.

          With the passing years, I find the tension still exists:  I long for an egalitarian ideal yet love the comfort of a house (yes, brick and two-story) in a close-in neighborhood in Houston.  I hate it that the income gap has widened to such extremes but happy that I have enough.  I hate it that some people carry debt in the hundreds of thousands for medical care, but grateful that I have Medicare and secondary insurance, as well.  Some might give away all their goods or start an orphanage in India.  That I cannot or will not do.  But I will vote, demonstrate, give food to the homeless, donate to causes that support a more egalitarian world.  I will do something, but it will never be everything I could do.  I will try to remember that when much is given, much is required, but I will live with the tension that it will never be enough. 

          In the meantime, stories about rich people eating celery and riding elevators continue to find current permutations in the news.  Have you heard the one about the rich parents who bribed college admissions officials and then a few days ago tried to impress their sentencing judge with expensively produced, slick videos touting their civic virtue?  If you missed it, don’t worry.  There will be more stories where that came from.