FEAR, ETC.

It's a nagging and recurring fear, a remnant of some time I can't remember but do. It's a remembering of a moment in another's life, but I can't shake it. I don't get it. We keep an open home 'cause it's kinda outside of town. Seems far, but it's not. We can see Gunnison's steeple. It's darker than dark at night, and when I stand at my kitchen window, I, for reasons that I simply can't fathom, think about the physician who was killed while standing at his kitchen window in the dark of night. Killed, according to the killer, because he performed abortions. I wonder what that has to do with my life and my fear. I think perhaps the incident reminds me of my own particular discomfort in this place, and this may be the manifestation of that long ago life in Mississippi.

This part of the world often looks and feels like the rural South. Pick-up trucks with guns, hunters, chewing tobacco. There are no drawls, but there are the shared sentiments. A couple of weeks ago, one of my students reported that her sports team was at a local restaurant in Madrid. She and her friends were stunned as a local noted that he saw "a nigger driving around." The man expressed his discomfort and alerted his fellow citizens. This is where we live. Athough it often appears that we are wrapped in the comfort of middle-class progressive politics, we are not. It is that man I see at my window; that man scares me with his possibilities and potential. He reminds me of that not so long ago letter: "Dear Mrs. Bass, You are a nigger ape from Africa...You are trying to turn St. Lawrence into a nigger school......." The rest, the prayer he (and I believe it is a he) prayed is too frightening to quote. Maybe the connection between this person and the killer is the sentiment, the mindless hatred of another human being just because.

There is the relative absence of black people that scares me. We're conspicuous, lacking anonymity, known. I'm a "troublemaker." Too vocal. Too black. And why don't I just go back to where I came from if I don't like it up here? That's not the point. If this were Mississippi or any other town in the rural South, I would not live here. An all white town in the rural South is that way because it wants to be. It has to work hard to achieve that goal in the South, and it ain't no place I wanna be. That reality and that remembering and the sentiment expressed in that letter fuels my "unreasonable" fear of standing in front of my kitchen window in the dark, dark night.

When I expressed my feelings to a couple "friends" a while back, they simply looked at me. It's so easy to ignore another's pain and fear. It's so easy to suggest that one is "irrational" or, worse yet, "paranoid." My grandfather was almost killed by the KKK. My cousin, a school principal in the newly integrated Mississippi, kept a rifle in the corner of his living room AND a pistol in the drawer of his office at school. Cross burned in the yard. Threats. The present reality is that racial hate groups are growing in this country. Hate crimes are on the increase. The Southern Poverty Law Center tracks this stuff. I've got to stop reading its publications. Perhaps I'll feel less like a target and more like a "regular" person.

So when I scream about radical factions in the nation or the ways in which the "teaparties" inflame and incite hatred or rail against the waves of right-wing conservatism, it ain't solely about politics. It's about fear for my personal safety and well-being, and, again, I use "my" to represent the individual and the collective. Is the fear a reflection of my generation? My experiences? My relative isolation? Is it simply the result of living under a microscope in a fishbowl? Do I long for a life without scrutiny in that racial/ethnic kinda way? I just don't know, but I do know that living here is hard. And it gets harder. I miss and long for deep connection and even more than that, deep understanding. I miss relationships that are not professional. Conversations that have nothing to do with SLU or the closing of the P&C. I long for those people who don't give a damn about PhDs or my last article or tenure or being full professor. People who live in a world where none of this matters. I long for a place with choices, and where walking into a room or restaurant won't draw curious and sometimes hostile stares. There are such places--places where I can stand in front of my kitchen window and fear less because I'm not the sole black person who lives on this road or in this town. I don't want to go to a basement in the Hermon Public Library to see my doctor. I don't want to "break new ground" or be "the first." Anonymity. Just one in a bunch. I do not want to grow old here. I want the freedom to stand at my window and not think. I want to be free to enjoy my happiness without the burden of recognition. Free to be me without fear..........