Clintonville, Ohio
I lived in Clintonville, Ohio when I was a little girl. Clintonville is a neighborhood in north-central Columbus, Ohio, bounded by railroad tracks and Interstate 71, the Olentangy River, and the Glen Echo Ravine. The town was the center of Clinton Township, named for the forgotten U.S. Vice President George Clinton (he of the Jefferson administration), and was part of the land grants given to Continental Army soldiers in lieu of pensions in what used to be Wyandot Indian territory.
During the American Revolution, the Wyandots fought for the British against the Americans, and when the British surrendered, they were left to fight the Americans on their own. White people regarded the Wyandot as fierce warriors. They were defeated at the beautifully named Battle of Fallen Timbers. Beautiful in the same way that the phrase trail of tears is beautiful. Beautiful in a kind of poetics that hides pain and responsibility.
The Wyandot surrendered most of their land in Ohio with the signing of the Treaty of Greenville, and by 1842, the aggressive and appropriately named U.S. Indian Removal policy forced the Wyandots to give up claims to their reservation at Upper Sandusky, Ohio, to sell their land for far less than market value, and to be removed to a reservation in Kansas. After the Civil War, and during the time of the Underground Railroad, the Ohio Wyandot were again removed, this time to Oklahoma. Removed.
In 1985, the U.S. government delivered $5 million dollars to descendants of the Wyandot people as partial compensation for the exploitative treaty of 1842.
Yesterday, I read an op-ed in the New York Times about the federal government telling the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation they cannot build and operate a distillery on their own grounds. The tribe sells craft beer and spirits at a restaurant in their Lucky Eagle casino, but a prohibition on tribal distilling originates from an 1834 law regulating trade on Indian lands. The op-ed told its readers the law was motivated by a patronizing view of Native Americans as helpless to resist the intoxicating allure of alcohol, and yes, there are studies about heightened alcohol consumption rates among Native Americans, but that argument is a red herring here. The craft spirits industry creates much needed jobs, and these spirits are going to be sold at the restaurant, regardless of their origin. The law was also motivated by greed, plain and never simple. The op-ed noted that in recent years, several bills have been introduced in Congress to repeal just this sort of outdated and offensive law targeting Native Americans and reservations, including this one that bans distilling. Henry Pickernelli, chair of the Chehalis tribe, noted that the official policy of the United States government is to "support tribal self-determination and self-sufficiency." That just sounded like poetics to me, poetics without teeth.
Clinton Chapel in Clintonville is now a funeral home, but for several decades it was a stop on the Underground Railroad. As you know, the Underground Railroad was essentially a system or a map of hiding places and safe houses that helped fugitive slaves escape to freedom in Canada, and Mexico--the point being, outside of the United States. Whites and blacks served as "conductors" or guides from place to place. Slavery was illegal in Ohio, but of course, people in Ohio were afraid of the end of slavery, and many vehemently opposed the Underground Railroad. By the time I learned Ohio history, as a little girl, we were taught that slavery was something reprehensible that happened a long time ago, and to be proud that the Underground Railroad ran through Ohio. In other words, we were on the "right" side of history in Ohio. As a grown woman, living in Massachusetts, I don't know how to sort out what is mine from the collective, how to acknowledge the historical pain and take responsibility for the present day pain. I remember teaching Maya Angelou to first year literature students at Princeton University, and a young white man's face suffused with humilation and anger--it wasn't me, he said indignantly, arguing with the poet. I didn't own slaves.
This morning, I read an article in the New York Times about the Tennessee legislature withholding $250,000 from Memphis's bicentennial celebration budget, punishing the majority-black city for removing three Confederate monuments. Memphis had circumvented a state law prohibiting the removal of historical monuments by selling the parks that held statutes of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first head of the Ku Klux Klan; Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy; and Captain J. Harvey Mathes, a Confederate soldier, to a nonprofit that took the monuments down last year. The legislature's move to rebuke Memphis for honoring the wishes of its people continues an ugly tradition of mostly white Southern state legislatures yanking power and resources away from cities with multiracial or majority-black leadership or voters when those cities act in ways meant to benefit their own residents.
In the 1970s, when I lived in Clintonville, the world presented to me was white and Christian. We were Jewish, and I knew that was different. In fourth grade, my teacher made me show the matzoh I had brought in for lunch as part of show and tell. The only black person I knew was Darryl, who was the son of my mom's administrative assistant, who came over to play a couple times. We kissed once, which was very exciting, and I assumed Darryl and I would get married. My mother said that would be fine, but she would be sad for me because my life would be harder because other people wouldn't be as kind or as open-minded about such a thing. I learned about the Underground Railroad in school, and was secretly pleased to be from Ohio, instead of from the Southern states, which seemed bad and backwards to me. My real secret was I was born in California, a place that seemed outside of history. I thought being born in California made me kind of exotic, and sometimes it made me feel I wasn't really from Ohio and that was a good thing.
What I knew about Native Americans was nothing--we said "Indians"--and I knew that friendly Indians helped the Pilgrims, and they ate Thanksgiving together. My parents had a book called Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and its presence on the book shelf in the living room suggested there was more to know. But we didn't talk at home about the history of slavery or genocide that is at the core of this country's history, past and present. We did talk about the Holocaust, so we were capable of discussing difficult things if we were the oppressed, not the oppressor, and in sixth grade, the year we moved from Clintonville to Bexley, Ohio, I participated in what can only be described as a seminar on the Holocaust at my Sunday School, which was at the Hillel near OSU and run by college students and a gregarious bear of a man named Meyer Zola. The central question of that seminar was what will you do when it happens again? It being the Holocaust, which was cast as inevitably happening again-- the question really was when. I was particularly torn because the college students suggested I might have an opportunity to deny my Judaism because my last name was Brown. It was clear that such a denial might save my life but was the wrong answer. Late at night, I would imagine scenes where the Nazis demanded I tell them the truth about my Judaism, and I would be torn between what was right and what would save my life. I was the heroine in my own miniseries.
In fourth grade, I was part of an experiment popular in the 1970s called split level classrooms. So we had a class made up of half fourth graders and half fifth graders. I remember nothing about what educational opportunities this setup afforded me, but it did put me in range of a fifth grade girl named Jessica, and her sidekick Eleanor. I was thrilled to be adopted into their dyad, knowing nothing yet about the deadliness of the all girl triad, where one girl is always on the outs, ganged up on, and made to feel small so that the other two can feel triumphantly larger, cooler, accepted. At any rate, Jessica told me we were going to become witches and I believed her and I wanted it. Witches. Jessica was the first charismatic person I had run into with a vision I wanted to buy into. She promised we would learn magic, and I had been waiting my whole life for magic. A childhood honed on the Narnia Chronicles and the Witches of Avalon and the Lord of the Rings was a childhood resplendent with the possibility of magic. According to Jessica, we had to go downtown to get the materials to become witches.
The three of us boarded the city bus and went downtown. I marvel now at the freedom I had to move through the city and the world at a young age. I don't think my older kids asked for the same freedoms--they never wanted to get into Boston, seemingly content in the boundaries of Melrose, where we lived when the first four were growing up. Or maybe I have no idea--perhaps they took the T into Boston all the time. I wouldn't know, because I was at work. Perhaps they had their own coven in Melrose, and I will learn of it only because I am writing this now. I don't pretend to know the content of my children's childhoods--I was a constant visitor, but as anyone who has witnessed their child's entry into the public school system, there are entire worlds about which we know nothing in our children's lives.
At any rate, we took the bus downtown and Jessica marched us to a store which has almost faded from my memory--I remember stacks of boxes and shelves with buttons and thread and fabrics you could touch and buy. But it was more than a sewing store because we could buy other things there too--like garlic necklaces to ward off vampires, and mysterious spices and feathers. I actually think it was some kind of Wiccan store and perhaps Jessica really was part of a coven. I don't know exactly what we bought, but I know we were planning to conjure up the devil because that was part of becoming a witch. I was terrified and thrilled.
Jessica and Eleanor had their heads together constantly, and I desperately wanted to know what they were planning, but they were the older girls and the dynamic had already been set--I was the lucky little girl plucked from obscurity. I fretted and waited and then one day Jessica told me the time was right: we were going to meet the devil and become witches that day.
After school we walked down High Street, a busy, four lane road that cut through the center of Clintonville, to get to Whetstone Park. We walked past the playground area, with the giant truck tires embedded in cement you could crawl into to hide, or perch on top of to survey the area. We walked past the picnic grounds, where we would come on the Fourth of July to see the fireworks. We walked right into the woods.
Jessica lead the way, and maybe she knew exactly where she was going, and maybe she was making this up as she went along, but I followed her, clutching my little homemade cloth bag full of spices, and my special feather, and she lead us to a place I can remember as clearly as if this happened yesterday. It was dark and cool in the woods, and there was a massive tree which had fallen over and its exposed roots made a kind of root cave. There, Jessica said. To become a witch you had to go alone into this cave.
I was 9 years old and Jessica and Eleanor had turned against me on the walk. I don't know when it happened or why, but by the time we got to that terrifying tree, I felt alone even though I was not. And that commandment to go into the tree in order to meet the devil. Jessica could not have known...I don't think...how this moment echoed in Puritan times when the women accused of being witches told the court of walking in the dark forest of Salem Village and meeting the devil there--a tall dark man with a book, a book you could write your name in and then you would have given your soul to the devil and would be a witch, an outcast from society, someone capable of ruining crops, causing calves and babies to be stillborn, wrecking marriages. I don't know what Jessica was reading in her fifth grade year, but I do know that I knew that the devil was in that root cave, and that if I went in, something terrible would unfold. I can still feel the hush of judgment, the stony silence of my friends as I froze in fear; the chatter of little children from the playground grew faint there in the woods.
And I ran. I ran from Jessica and Eleanor. I ran all the way home, my heart thumping in my chest, and I went into my room and curled up on the bed, half waiting for the devil to follow me home. I chickened out, Jessica would tell me the next day, as she made it clear that our friendship was now over. I had put my lot in with these older kids, and it wasn't initially clear to me how I would continue at Clinton Elementary, without friends now. But I still remember the terror I felt in the woods--it was absolutely clear to me that the devil was real, that he waited for little girls in that terrifying root cave, and that if I had gone in there, I might not have come out. It didn't feel like I was about to become a witch--rather, it felt like if I ducked down and crawled into that dark corner in the universe, I would have simply ceased to exist.
Of course I survived the loss of the friendship, such as it was, of Jessica and the lesser star, Eleanor. I don't remember how I rebuilt my brand, but I know that in fifth grade, I spent the night at Kendra's house. She lived in a house by the ravine with her mother and brother. Her parents were divorced, which was the height of scandal to me, confirmed by the fact that we slept on a water bed with silk sheets. Such a bed was impossible to contemplate in my house in Clintonville.
And then, before sixth grade, we moved. We left Clintonville, with the carport overhung with lilacs in the summertime, and moved to Bexley, the Jewish suburb. I don't know what the reasons my parents had then or what they might say now, but I do know that 1979, the year I entered sixth grade, was the year that the Columbus City Schools were desegregated according to court order. In March 1977, federal judge Robert Duncan had found the Columbus Board of Education guilty of operating a school system that sent black children to black schools and white children to white schools. The school board appealed the ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the district only built schools in the rapidly growing city of Columbus where a study suggested they be built, and that race was not a factor. But the court disagreed, and in 1979, Columbus desegregated every one of its schools, a feat not accomplished anywhere in the country at that time. I remember the shorthand for this was just "busing." If we had stayed in Clintonville, I would have been bused to another school district.
And so it was that I went to high school in Bexley, which was the Jewish suburb, even though the majority of its residents were not Jewish. The Bexley City School District is one of the top high schools in Ohio, and I was miserable there for many reasons. It's impossible to guess at what my high school life would have been like had we stayed in the Columbus City school system. I do know that Bexley is where I became hyper aware of money--of who had money and thus, most importantly for me, more clothes. I know money also meant bigger houses and cars and vacations to places other than Myrtle Beach, but for me, what mattered was clothes. I wanted more clothing so that I would fit in. I distinctly remember a beautiful girl named Ashley Early--she had moved from somewhere in the South and she had gorgeous blond hair and a thin body but what really sticks in my memory is the number of pants she had. She must have had truly dozens of pairs of jeans and the corduroy pants which were popular. At the time, I really believed that if I had more clothing options, high school would have been better, and who is to say what might have changed my poorly aligned stars. As it was, I graduated early, in three years, and never looked back.
I knew fewer than five black students in high school, and no students who identified as Native American. I was in the marching band, and we would travel with the football team to other communities to play Friday night football games. In certain towns, people would throw pennies at the band when we marched on the field to perform our routine for them. We were all Jews in their eyes, all money-grubbing others who would probably pause the marching band show to pick up the pennies. We were instructed to ignore these "shenanigans" and we did, but I remember.
I wish I could remember Jessica's last name, because maybe somehow I would be able to find her on Facebook. I would love to know what she thought we were doing. I would like to find out that she knew her history better than me, and that she knew that at some point in history, there were women who testified about wandering in the woods and signing the devil's book. Of course, those women were testifying to save their very lives. The path to hanging was clear--if you would not admit you were a witch, you were hung. As you know, my son Zachary wants to get a tattoo on his body that reads "more weight" for the answer that Giles Corey gave to his tormentors as they laid stone upon stone on his body, in an effort to get him to confess to being a witch. They obliged him with more weight, and that is how he died.
As I get older, history seems less ancient and sacred and more relevant and present. The world is filled with stories of our inabilities to put things right--we have not made reparations to those who we enslaved. We have made partial reparations to the Native Americans, who still, somehow, are subject to laws that do precisely the opposite of what the policy suggests is the goal. How many generations has it been since we were slaves and slaveholders? Since we removed Indians? Since we hung women as witches? It's really a blink of the eye, from a certain vantage point, and I don't know what we teach our children about slavery and Native Americans in the Carlisle Elementary school system, but I'm eager to find out and to add my voice and views as supplemental, as counter point. I know now that there is no"right" side of history to be cleanly on, and that being from Berkeley or Clintonville tells you nothing about my politics, or what I am holding onto, or what I do that causes others pain, or what causes me pain.
I can't help being drawn back, though, to that moment in the woods when I turned and ran for what felt like my life. I had been waiting to be whisked away to Narnia, to a time when I would be seen as the magical queen I knew I secretly was, but when magic arrived, it felt dirty and scary and self-erasing. I think about the women of Salem, the women who were vulnerable for any number of reasons--they were mentally ill, they owned property and had no male heirs, they were black like Tituba, they were white like Giles Corey--they ended up separated from the community in some way which made them profoundly vulnerable and they were understood to have consorted with the Devil, to have signed their names in his book and given away their rights to a fair trial, to life, in many cases. Then, as we would later, as time passed and we thought we knew better, we made reparations. Pardons and reparations for some of the victims and their families were granted by the government in the early 18th century, and the legislature would regularly take up petitions and discuss further reparations until 1749, more than fifty years after the Salem witch trials. The last victims were formally pardoned by the governor and the legislature of Massachusetts in 2001.
During the American Revolution, the Wyandots fought for the British against the Americans, and when the British surrendered, they were left to fight the Americans on their own. White people regarded the Wyandot as fierce warriors. They were defeated at the beautifully named Battle of Fallen Timbers. Beautiful in the same way that the phrase trail of tears is beautiful. Beautiful in a kind of poetics that hides pain and responsibility.
The Wyandot surrendered most of their land in Ohio with the signing of the Treaty of Greenville, and by 1842, the aggressive and appropriately named U.S. Indian Removal policy forced the Wyandots to give up claims to their reservation at Upper Sandusky, Ohio, to sell their land for far less than market value, and to be removed to a reservation in Kansas. After the Civil War, and during the time of the Underground Railroad, the Ohio Wyandot were again removed, this time to Oklahoma. Removed.
In 1985, the U.S. government delivered $5 million dollars to descendants of the Wyandot people as partial compensation for the exploitative treaty of 1842.
Yesterday, I read an op-ed in the New York Times about the federal government telling the Confederated Tribes of the Chehalis Reservation they cannot build and operate a distillery on their own grounds. The tribe sells craft beer and spirits at a restaurant in their Lucky Eagle casino, but a prohibition on tribal distilling originates from an 1834 law regulating trade on Indian lands. The op-ed told its readers the law was motivated by a patronizing view of Native Americans as helpless to resist the intoxicating allure of alcohol, and yes, there are studies about heightened alcohol consumption rates among Native Americans, but that argument is a red herring here. The craft spirits industry creates much needed jobs, and these spirits are going to be sold at the restaurant, regardless of their origin. The law was also motivated by greed, plain and never simple. The op-ed noted that in recent years, several bills have been introduced in Congress to repeal just this sort of outdated and offensive law targeting Native Americans and reservations, including this one that bans distilling. Henry Pickernelli, chair of the Chehalis tribe, noted that the official policy of the United States government is to "support tribal self-determination and self-sufficiency." That just sounded like poetics to me, poetics without teeth.
Clinton Chapel in Clintonville is now a funeral home, but for several decades it was a stop on the Underground Railroad. As you know, the Underground Railroad was essentially a system or a map of hiding places and safe houses that helped fugitive slaves escape to freedom in Canada, and Mexico--the point being, outside of the United States. Whites and blacks served as "conductors" or guides from place to place. Slavery was illegal in Ohio, but of course, people in Ohio were afraid of the end of slavery, and many vehemently opposed the Underground Railroad. By the time I learned Ohio history, as a little girl, we were taught that slavery was something reprehensible that happened a long time ago, and to be proud that the Underground Railroad ran through Ohio. In other words, we were on the "right" side of history in Ohio. As a grown woman, living in Massachusetts, I don't know how to sort out what is mine from the collective, how to acknowledge the historical pain and take responsibility for the present day pain. I remember teaching Maya Angelou to first year literature students at Princeton University, and a young white man's face suffused with humilation and anger--it wasn't me, he said indignantly, arguing with the poet. I didn't own slaves.
This morning, I read an article in the New York Times about the Tennessee legislature withholding $250,000 from Memphis's bicentennial celebration budget, punishing the majority-black city for removing three Confederate monuments. Memphis had circumvented a state law prohibiting the removal of historical monuments by selling the parks that held statutes of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first head of the Ku Klux Klan; Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy; and Captain J. Harvey Mathes, a Confederate soldier, to a nonprofit that took the monuments down last year. The legislature's move to rebuke Memphis for honoring the wishes of its people continues an ugly tradition of mostly white Southern state legislatures yanking power and resources away from cities with multiracial or majority-black leadership or voters when those cities act in ways meant to benefit their own residents.
In the 1970s, when I lived in Clintonville, the world presented to me was white and Christian. We were Jewish, and I knew that was different. In fourth grade, my teacher made me show the matzoh I had brought in for lunch as part of show and tell. The only black person I knew was Darryl, who was the son of my mom's administrative assistant, who came over to play a couple times. We kissed once, which was very exciting, and I assumed Darryl and I would get married. My mother said that would be fine, but she would be sad for me because my life would be harder because other people wouldn't be as kind or as open-minded about such a thing. I learned about the Underground Railroad in school, and was secretly pleased to be from Ohio, instead of from the Southern states, which seemed bad and backwards to me. My real secret was I was born in California, a place that seemed outside of history. I thought being born in California made me kind of exotic, and sometimes it made me feel I wasn't really from Ohio and that was a good thing.
What I knew about Native Americans was nothing--we said "Indians"--and I knew that friendly Indians helped the Pilgrims, and they ate Thanksgiving together. My parents had a book called Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and its presence on the book shelf in the living room suggested there was more to know. But we didn't talk at home about the history of slavery or genocide that is at the core of this country's history, past and present. We did talk about the Holocaust, so we were capable of discussing difficult things if we were the oppressed, not the oppressor, and in sixth grade, the year we moved from Clintonville to Bexley, Ohio, I participated in what can only be described as a seminar on the Holocaust at my Sunday School, which was at the Hillel near OSU and run by college students and a gregarious bear of a man named Meyer Zola. The central question of that seminar was what will you do when it happens again? It being the Holocaust, which was cast as inevitably happening again-- the question really was when. I was particularly torn because the college students suggested I might have an opportunity to deny my Judaism because my last name was Brown. It was clear that such a denial might save my life but was the wrong answer. Late at night, I would imagine scenes where the Nazis demanded I tell them the truth about my Judaism, and I would be torn between what was right and what would save my life. I was the heroine in my own miniseries.
In fourth grade, I was part of an experiment popular in the 1970s called split level classrooms. So we had a class made up of half fourth graders and half fifth graders. I remember nothing about what educational opportunities this setup afforded me, but it did put me in range of a fifth grade girl named Jessica, and her sidekick Eleanor. I was thrilled to be adopted into their dyad, knowing nothing yet about the deadliness of the all girl triad, where one girl is always on the outs, ganged up on, and made to feel small so that the other two can feel triumphantly larger, cooler, accepted. At any rate, Jessica told me we were going to become witches and I believed her and I wanted it. Witches. Jessica was the first charismatic person I had run into with a vision I wanted to buy into. She promised we would learn magic, and I had been waiting my whole life for magic. A childhood honed on the Narnia Chronicles and the Witches of Avalon and the Lord of the Rings was a childhood resplendent with the possibility of magic. According to Jessica, we had to go downtown to get the materials to become witches.
The three of us boarded the city bus and went downtown. I marvel now at the freedom I had to move through the city and the world at a young age. I don't think my older kids asked for the same freedoms--they never wanted to get into Boston, seemingly content in the boundaries of Melrose, where we lived when the first four were growing up. Or maybe I have no idea--perhaps they took the T into Boston all the time. I wouldn't know, because I was at work. Perhaps they had their own coven in Melrose, and I will learn of it only because I am writing this now. I don't pretend to know the content of my children's childhoods--I was a constant visitor, but as anyone who has witnessed their child's entry into the public school system, there are entire worlds about which we know nothing in our children's lives.
At any rate, we took the bus downtown and Jessica marched us to a store which has almost faded from my memory--I remember stacks of boxes and shelves with buttons and thread and fabrics you could touch and buy. But it was more than a sewing store because we could buy other things there too--like garlic necklaces to ward off vampires, and mysterious spices and feathers. I actually think it was some kind of Wiccan store and perhaps Jessica really was part of a coven. I don't know exactly what we bought, but I know we were planning to conjure up the devil because that was part of becoming a witch. I was terrified and thrilled.
Jessica and Eleanor had their heads together constantly, and I desperately wanted to know what they were planning, but they were the older girls and the dynamic had already been set--I was the lucky little girl plucked from obscurity. I fretted and waited and then one day Jessica told me the time was right: we were going to meet the devil and become witches that day.
After school we walked down High Street, a busy, four lane road that cut through the center of Clintonville, to get to Whetstone Park. We walked past the playground area, with the giant truck tires embedded in cement you could crawl into to hide, or perch on top of to survey the area. We walked past the picnic grounds, where we would come on the Fourth of July to see the fireworks. We walked right into the woods.
Jessica lead the way, and maybe she knew exactly where she was going, and maybe she was making this up as she went along, but I followed her, clutching my little homemade cloth bag full of spices, and my special feather, and she lead us to a place I can remember as clearly as if this happened yesterday. It was dark and cool in the woods, and there was a massive tree which had fallen over and its exposed roots made a kind of root cave. There, Jessica said. To become a witch you had to go alone into this cave.
I was 9 years old and Jessica and Eleanor had turned against me on the walk. I don't know when it happened or why, but by the time we got to that terrifying tree, I felt alone even though I was not. And that commandment to go into the tree in order to meet the devil. Jessica could not have known...I don't think...how this moment echoed in Puritan times when the women accused of being witches told the court of walking in the dark forest of Salem Village and meeting the devil there--a tall dark man with a book, a book you could write your name in and then you would have given your soul to the devil and would be a witch, an outcast from society, someone capable of ruining crops, causing calves and babies to be stillborn, wrecking marriages. I don't know what Jessica was reading in her fifth grade year, but I do know that I knew that the devil was in that root cave, and that if I went in, something terrible would unfold. I can still feel the hush of judgment, the stony silence of my friends as I froze in fear; the chatter of little children from the playground grew faint there in the woods.
And I ran. I ran from Jessica and Eleanor. I ran all the way home, my heart thumping in my chest, and I went into my room and curled up on the bed, half waiting for the devil to follow me home. I chickened out, Jessica would tell me the next day, as she made it clear that our friendship was now over. I had put my lot in with these older kids, and it wasn't initially clear to me how I would continue at Clinton Elementary, without friends now. But I still remember the terror I felt in the woods--it was absolutely clear to me that the devil was real, that he waited for little girls in that terrifying root cave, and that if I had gone in there, I might not have come out. It didn't feel like I was about to become a witch--rather, it felt like if I ducked down and crawled into that dark corner in the universe, I would have simply ceased to exist.
Of course I survived the loss of the friendship, such as it was, of Jessica and the lesser star, Eleanor. I don't remember how I rebuilt my brand, but I know that in fifth grade, I spent the night at Kendra's house. She lived in a house by the ravine with her mother and brother. Her parents were divorced, which was the height of scandal to me, confirmed by the fact that we slept on a water bed with silk sheets. Such a bed was impossible to contemplate in my house in Clintonville.
And then, before sixth grade, we moved. We left Clintonville, with the carport overhung with lilacs in the summertime, and moved to Bexley, the Jewish suburb. I don't know what the reasons my parents had then or what they might say now, but I do know that 1979, the year I entered sixth grade, was the year that the Columbus City Schools were desegregated according to court order. In March 1977, federal judge Robert Duncan had found the Columbus Board of Education guilty of operating a school system that sent black children to black schools and white children to white schools. The school board appealed the ruling all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the district only built schools in the rapidly growing city of Columbus where a study suggested they be built, and that race was not a factor. But the court disagreed, and in 1979, Columbus desegregated every one of its schools, a feat not accomplished anywhere in the country at that time. I remember the shorthand for this was just "busing." If we had stayed in Clintonville, I would have been bused to another school district.
And so it was that I went to high school in Bexley, which was the Jewish suburb, even though the majority of its residents were not Jewish. The Bexley City School District is one of the top high schools in Ohio, and I was miserable there for many reasons. It's impossible to guess at what my high school life would have been like had we stayed in the Columbus City school system. I do know that Bexley is where I became hyper aware of money--of who had money and thus, most importantly for me, more clothes. I know money also meant bigger houses and cars and vacations to places other than Myrtle Beach, but for me, what mattered was clothes. I wanted more clothing so that I would fit in. I distinctly remember a beautiful girl named Ashley Early--she had moved from somewhere in the South and she had gorgeous blond hair and a thin body but what really sticks in my memory is the number of pants she had. She must have had truly dozens of pairs of jeans and the corduroy pants which were popular. At the time, I really believed that if I had more clothing options, high school would have been better, and who is to say what might have changed my poorly aligned stars. As it was, I graduated early, in three years, and never looked back.
I knew fewer than five black students in high school, and no students who identified as Native American. I was in the marching band, and we would travel with the football team to other communities to play Friday night football games. In certain towns, people would throw pennies at the band when we marched on the field to perform our routine for them. We were all Jews in their eyes, all money-grubbing others who would probably pause the marching band show to pick up the pennies. We were instructed to ignore these "shenanigans" and we did, but I remember.
I wish I could remember Jessica's last name, because maybe somehow I would be able to find her on Facebook. I would love to know what she thought we were doing. I would like to find out that she knew her history better than me, and that she knew that at some point in history, there were women who testified about wandering in the woods and signing the devil's book. Of course, those women were testifying to save their very lives. The path to hanging was clear--if you would not admit you were a witch, you were hung. As you know, my son Zachary wants to get a tattoo on his body that reads "more weight" for the answer that Giles Corey gave to his tormentors as they laid stone upon stone on his body, in an effort to get him to confess to being a witch. They obliged him with more weight, and that is how he died.
As I get older, history seems less ancient and sacred and more relevant and present. The world is filled with stories of our inabilities to put things right--we have not made reparations to those who we enslaved. We have made partial reparations to the Native Americans, who still, somehow, are subject to laws that do precisely the opposite of what the policy suggests is the goal. How many generations has it been since we were slaves and slaveholders? Since we removed Indians? Since we hung women as witches? It's really a blink of the eye, from a certain vantage point, and I don't know what we teach our children about slavery and Native Americans in the Carlisle Elementary school system, but I'm eager to find out and to add my voice and views as supplemental, as counter point. I know now that there is no"right" side of history to be cleanly on, and that being from Berkeley or Clintonville tells you nothing about my politics, or what I am holding onto, or what I do that causes others pain, or what causes me pain.
I can't help being drawn back, though, to that moment in the woods when I turned and ran for what felt like my life. I had been waiting to be whisked away to Narnia, to a time when I would be seen as the magical queen I knew I secretly was, but when magic arrived, it felt dirty and scary and self-erasing. I think about the women of Salem, the women who were vulnerable for any number of reasons--they were mentally ill, they owned property and had no male heirs, they were black like Tituba, they were white like Giles Corey--they ended up separated from the community in some way which made them profoundly vulnerable and they were understood to have consorted with the Devil, to have signed their names in his book and given away their rights to a fair trial, to life, in many cases. Then, as we would later, as time passed and we thought we knew better, we made reparations. Pardons and reparations for some of the victims and their families were granted by the government in the early 18th century, and the legislature would regularly take up petitions and discuss further reparations until 1749, more than fifty years after the Salem witch trials. The last victims were formally pardoned by the governor and the legislature of Massachusetts in 2001.
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