The Continuing Education of a White Foster Dad Part II: Mo, Shay, and Ruby Bridges

“Dad, do you know who Ruby Bridges is?” 

Mo and I are walking our dirty old basset hound down the block to the park.  Like some damned souped-up, out-of-control vacuum cleaner, Boscoe is pulling against the leash in unpredictable directions, chasing every fleeting scent that crosses his bulbous, black, mud-caked nose.  I curse lightly under my breath as I yank him from a crusty-gone-white pile of cat shit he has found in the sparse, still-dormant Bermuda grass just off the curb.  He looks up at me with indignant and bloodshot eyes.  I have deprived him of his prize.

“Who?” I ask, distracted and disgusted with my dog’s affinity for sinister yard snacks.

“Ruby Bridges.  Shay chose her for her history report.  Do you know her?”

I search my memory and realize that I have heard the name, but do not remember its significance.  “I’m not sure,” I admit.  “Fill me in.”

Mo took a deep breath, the way she does when she’s about to start talking non-stop for a solid four minutes. “Well,” she said, “Ruby Bridges was the first black girl to go to school with white kids.  In the South I mean.  New Orleans.  That’s what Shay said anyway.  There’s all these pictures of her walking into school with policemen, and all these mean-looking white people yelling at her and holding up signs that are calling her…well…that word.  And there was a little black doll there in a coffin that someone was holding and waving at her.  I guess that person was telling Ruby they wished Ruby was in the coffin. And there’s this picture by this guy…I can’t remember his name…Norman Rock…something…and she’s walking along a wall and people had thrown tomatoes at this little tiny girl and it looks like blood on the wall and on the wall someone wrote that word and she looks really scared but she has those policemen with her.  She was born in 1954.  Which was a year before Bill Gates! Weird, huh?  And she had to go to school for a whole year all by herself with only one teacher because none of the kids or parents or teachers would go to school with this little tiny girl because I guess the white kids were soooo important or whatever.  And every day she walked to school some mean old lady would say that she was going to poison Ruby and yell that word but Ruby said she just prayed the whole way there and it made her feel better.  And only one single teacher would stay to teach Ruby in that whole big empty school all alone because she didn’t think that people should be so mean and have to go to separate schools.  And do you know what those policemen said to Ruby when she went into school that first time, with all those people yelling at her and hating her?  They said, ‘Don’t look back’.  But she was just a little girl, Dad.  Just a little girl and people threw things at her and told her they were going to kill her and that they hated her.  She was like us.  Like me and Shay.  She even looks like Shay.  Have you ever seen the picture Dad?  She looks just…like…Shay.”

Boscoe, sensing my distraction, has circled back to try and retrieve his lost fecal treasure.  Again I yank him back.

Again he looks pissed.

It has rained in the past few days, and it is uncharacteristically humid for the High Plains.  I feel a trickle of sweat make its way down the crease of my back toward my waistband.  I pull at my shirt, feeling silly standing there with nothing to say except “Boscoe!  Stop trying to eat that turd!”

Mo plays timidly at the park, swinging on the creaking chains and sliding down the shrieking slide.  She is timid because a few weeks ago an older boy called her that word here.  She was down here playing with the neighborhood kids and some older boy from a few blocks over said,

“What’s up, nigger girl?”

The neighbor boys saw Mo gasping and sobbing with her hands on her knees and they dove to her defense.  Mo begged them not to fight, but they were set on it.  They are good-hearted boys about to do something dumb out of moral outrage, out of anger, for their friend. Mo ran home and grabbed me and told me about it, afraid that people were going to get hurt over it.  She said she didn’t care what anyone said about her, she just didn’t want anyone fighting.  By the time I got down there—Mo was beside herself, afraid that I was going to beat up some 13 year-old-kid, even though I swore I would do no such thing and that I was just going to stop a bunch of kids from fighting—the fray was over, and no fighting had even occurred.

Now Mo is playing, trying not to look over her shoulder, and I can see she is hoping not to see those boys that called her that word. 

They had caused one of the most confident, most socially adept children I have ever known to look over her shoulder with that one act. 

After a few times around the park, Boscoe and I approach the sand pit where Mo is climbing a pole up to a wooden bridge connecting two ends of the playground fortress.  I tell Mo it is time to walk back.  Boscoe is panting in the unfamiliar mugginess and I have a distinct sheen forming upon my brow.  Mo grabs my hand and we walk along in silence for a while, and I’m thinking of Ruby Bridges.

No.  I’m not really thinking about Ruby Bridges.  I’m thinking about her parents.  I’m trying to decide if it was brave or reckless to send their daughter alone against the entire vitriol of a segregated South.  I’m trying to imagine being faced with such a decision.  To unmake my daughter and offer her up as a symbol, a symbol to be both despised and loved. 

A symbol both spit upon and lionized.

The fact that I’m even being struck like this is embarrassing.  I’m embarrassed that it took such a drastic life event, the adoption of our two girls, to finally even begin to see how flawed things were in my own country, to reach beyond an academic and liberal viewpoint, and to see how flawed things still are. 

The real Ruby Bridges is only a year older than Bill Gates.  She isn’t some two hundred-year-old memory.  She isn’t some distant relic of an antiquated past where we can click our tongues at our long dead forefathers who were simply not as enlightened as us.

Ruby Bridges is still alive, alive with those memories, alive with that past.  Ruby Bridges is younger than my parents.

We can know it in our heads, but it is much harder to know it in our hearts.  I believe we unwittingly harden our hearts against this kind of knowledge because understanding, because empathy, is so difficult to take on. 

Some people have said, “Those girls are lucky to have you two, you saved them from a bad road.” 

While this is well-intentioned and in some respects true on its face, on many levels it is bullshit.  We didn’t adopt the kids with some messianic purpose.  This isn’t that movie The Blind Side, where all that the poor, downtrodden black kid needed was a straight-shootin’, straight-talkin’, tough-love-givin’ derp-a-derp-a-derp rich Southern white woman to bring him off the side of a rain-soaked road and into the fold of respectable society.  Or to a football scholarship.  (I realize this is a pretty cynical view of the movie, so if you liked it, great, but for me there were some disturbing undertones were being perpetuated, albeit most likely unintentionally).  Sure, we took two kids in that needed both a home and love and we gave it to them.  Maybe we did save them from a “bad road.”  But they may have saved us from a far worse road, a road from which the majority of this nation needs saving.  We should all be so lucky.

“Dad?” she asks quietly.

“Yes?”

“Would you have sent me to that school?”

I can feel the slickness of childhood sweat between our clasped palms.  Her fingers squirm.  “I don’t know, honey.”  I think about my earlier question, about if it was brave or reckless of Ruby’s parents to do what they did.  I peer down at my daughter and my heart just about bursts, and I realize that it was the bravest thing anyone could ever do.  I also realize I don’t know if I would have had that bravery in me.  “I’d like to think I would.”

Mo sighs.  “Well,” she says.  “I’m glad that time is over.  I’m glad we don’t have people throwing tomatoes at Shay and me when we’re going to school.”  She looks back over her shoulder at the park.  “And I’m glad those boys weren’t there today.”

“Well,” I say.  “If they are there again, you know what to do, right?”

“Yeah,” she sighs.  “I’ll walk away from them.”

This is my daughter.  And I’m imagining her walking along that wall, and people are throwing tomatoes, and someone is waving an effigy of her in a coffin, and all the hate is spilling out in spittle-laden obscenities, and none of them see a little girl, none of them see my daughter, but a threat to every grain of petty awfulness they hold dear.  Because if they were to feel that aching in their chest for her as I do, if they were to see her as a child, as their own child, instead of an assault upon their ideology…then they could no longer make the obscene palatable.  They could no longer give a dismissive wave to what lives right in front of them.  They could no longer claim that there is no race issue in this country because they don’t throw tomatoes or call little girls that word or swear to poison their lunch and congratulate our society for not doing those things.  They could no longer offer meaningless, absurdly simplistic “helpful” hints to the black population at large and feel magnanimous with their generosity of spirit.  They could no longer see cities burn and believe the problem rests solely on those throwing rocks in the streets, shake their head and click their tongues and turn to a news channel hell-bent on validating their indifference.  No, if they had the privilege to see Mo as I see Mo, had the privilege to have Shay call them Dad or Mom and hug them and tell them they love them…well, then they would actually have to give a shit. 

“Right,” I say.  “And don’t look back.”

But if we really want to solve the problem, if our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could.  It’s just it would require everybody saying this is important, this is significant — and that we don’t just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, and we don’t just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped.  We’re paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids, and we think they’re important.

-          President Barack Obama, 4/28/15

Black as a Trash Bag

“You know why you sweat so much?”

The gym is full of bleary-eyed workout freaks getting their day started with an increased heart rate.  I am not one of them.  Well, not a workout freak, but I’m there, in the gym, at 5:50 a.m., trying to make good on my goal to lose 20 pounds.  I’ve just been on the elliptical machine kicking my own ass among the bizarre confederacy of soccer moms, New Year’s resolution newbies, 90 year olds in slacks and button up shirts, and tired middle-aged professionals, all huffing and puffing beneath the dull whine and stomp-stomp-stomp of cardio machines, all of them transfixed on the multiple screens showing local and cable news.  One of the screens in the far corner shows an elderly man in a suit behind a desk, speaking earnestly to the camera.  The scrolling black and white text at the bottom of the screen tells a rapt woman in yoga pants a story from Corinthians.

But now I’ve finished with the cardio portion of my morning routine, and am pouring sweat on a bench press downstairs in the strength training section of the gym (don't worry I always wipe it down).  Twenty-something dude-dudes are proudly walking around wearing Affliction tee-shirts and oversized Beats headphones.  They’re animated, speaking to one another with a lot of hand gestures and body movements, taking up far more space then they need to be.  I can tell they’re trying to calculate the amount of weight I have on the bar.

Whatever.

I lift what I want to lift now.  Not like when I was 25 and in the military.  I halfway want to tell them that I used to press a hell of a lot more than what I see them doing each morning, but realize that would sound weak.  And petty. 

I would sound like this 60 something fat man now looming over me, a wry grin spread across his puffy pink face.  He’s the one asking me the question. 

I see this guy almost every morning.  He’s like a cat.  If you make eye contact with him, he’s going to slink over to you and demand attention.  He’s also like a cat because I can’t stand cats. 

Here are the things this gentleman has disclosed to me over the past few months:

1.      He was a Marine before he was a special agent for the CIA.

2.      He used to work out with an Olympic weightlifter and once bench pressed 760 pounds.

3.      A carjacker once tried to get into his car (remember this is Amarillo, not Los Angeles) so he pulled out his 457 Magnum and the guy ran way.  The carjacker was, of course, Mexican.  And I am a fool if I am not armed all the time.

4.      I am apparently a huge pussy because I was in the Air Force (“Air Force?  Air Force?!?  You guys are barely military *Hyuck hyuck hyuck*”) was an officer (“officers don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground! *Hyuck hyuck hyuck*”) and a meteorologist (“you can be wrong all day and still get paid! *Hycuk hyuck hyuck*”).  Apparently I don’t live up to his standards and has every morning since given me a stupid dumb-shit sarcastic salute before he waddles his ass up to me and delivers some bit of what he believes to be a folksy witticism and what I believe to be total annoying bullshit.

5.      “We” (he means men) should keep women believing they are just as smart as “us,” but that “we” know better.

6.      There are a lot of women in the gym with “fake tits.”

This is obviously not your standard sweet old man, but a creepy fat guy (and he is fat…I usually would never comment on a person’s weight, especially since I’m a husky fella, but since he sucks and the only exercise I ever see him doing is wandering around and annoying people I will emphasize his monumental girth) that I seem to always attract.  I don’t know what it is.  Maybe I have one of those faces that says “Hey, come on over and say awful things out of the corner of your mouth under your breath…your shitty nature is safe with me!”  I swear to God, the next person that gives me the “Come on over here, son, let me tell you how it REALLY is” talk is going to get a kick in the nuts.

But I did not kick this man in the nuts. 

I sighed, racked the weight, sat up, and smiled at him.  Because that’s what I do.  I do that because I feel I am a polite person and I avoid conflict.  I always have.  I’m the quintessential middle child.  The peace maker.  I’ll listen to whatever horrible shit someone says and will mull it over and try to counter with rational reasoning or will simply nod and say “Ah, ha-ha, yeah, I get it…” and then will be mad about it all day just to avoid a moment of awkwardness. 

“So do you know why you’re sweating so much?” he asks again.  The striped sweatband he wears around his forehead is now hopelessly askew, and as he speaks a ball of spit transfers from one lip to the other, occasionally splitting into an unctuous strand.

“No,” I reply, resigned to hear whatever sophomoric nonsense he has to say.  “Why?”

“Well,” he says.  He looks around like he’s making a drug deal, and I know what he’s about to say is hideous.  His voice lowers to a murmur.  “Do you like watermelon and fried chicken?”

About a week ago, while the girls were doing their homework, I asked them about their upcoming Valentine’s Day party.  They had to make Valentines at home (I remember that when I was a kid we had time in class to do this activity, but whatever) so I got out all their art supplies.  Shay told me that she had to make 14 Valentines, and that the teacher said she had to make a card for every student in the class, and that no one was to be left out.  I told her that was a good policy, because how would she feel if she got less Valentines then everyone else?  She nodded, said she understood, but that she really, really didn’t want to make one for a specific girl in her class.  I asked her why.

She looked up at me and said, “Because yesterday she said I was as black as a trash bag.”

 

As black as a trash bag.

 

I was stunned. 

I knew one day this would happen.

I stammered a bit.  “Well, that’s…uh…”

Then Mo stepped in.  She was making her own Valentine’s Day cards.  “Who was it?” she demanded.  At first I thought it was a “who-was-it-I’ll-beat-her-ass” question.  Shay just shrugged and gave the name.

“Oh,” said Mo.  “I know her.”

“Did she say anything else?” I asked.

Shay looked at her hands.  They were rubbing one another.  She was nervous.  “She said that I had a wide nose because I pick it.”

Mo burst in before I could say anything and said “Well you DO pick it!”

They both laughed.

I did not.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“She said my hair was ugly because it was curly and messy and that hers was straight and pretty.”

And that is when Shay started to cry.

I was paralyzed with anger.  I knew if I started talking, I would say something awful.  I would voice the thoughts going through my head, stuff like You tell that little white trash piece of shit that if she ever…

 

Mo handled it much better than that.

 

“Shay?” she said quietly as her sister sobbed into her arms.  “Do you know that everyone in your class likes you?  All I ever hear is how much everyone likes you, and that how all the boys have a crush on you [I refrained from interjecting at this pivotal point], and how you’re nice to everyone.  And you always look cute.  That shirt you’re wearing…well, this morning, I was jealous because it looks so much better on you than it does on me [where the hell did THIS kid come from???].  You don’t have to worry about what that girl says.  She’s jealous because no one likes her and she’s mean to everyone.”

Good GOD! I couldn’t script better things to say.  All I could do is sit there and fight the lump jumping around in my throat.  This is how I know these girls are going to be okay.  This is how I know that their bonds will help them through the rest of their lives.  These two are blood.  They will always be blood.  Amy and I do the best we can to help them navigate murky waters.  But these two have to go through waters Amy and I will never have to go through and we therefore cannot draw them a map.  There are parts of their journey where we can only shout encouragement from the shores.  But God damn it, we will shout loudly.

Shay jumped up and held on to her sister for a while. 
 

Then Mo made a joke and Shay started laughing, and they asked me if they could go outside and play.  Outside where the sun was warm and the neighborhood kids were running around, waiting for our daughters to join in.

I sat at the table where this exchange had occurred and stared at my own hands for a while, trying to grasp all that had just happened. 

How big of a deal to I make this?

Do I call the school and demand that heads roll?

Do I sit the girls down later and talk to them about all that had just happened (especially given that I had barely said anything, just sat there stunned?)  And if I do talk to them, what do I say?

That this is going to happen for the rest of our lives, so they should get used to it?

Or that they should rage against it at every opportunity?

Do I downplay it?

Do I make a big deal out of it?

WHAT??? 

Shay did not seem too much worse for the wear over the whole thing, and it would have been easy to ignore it and let it go.  But I felt it to be a mutual learning opportunity that I could not let slip by.  In the end I told Shay that it was okay for her to be angry about it, because what the girl said was not acceptable.  That it was okay to find that girl’s words hurtful but not let them get to her. 

 And that she could feel any damn way she wanted to about it.

 “I won’t make you give that girl a Valentine if you don’t want to,” I said.  “I’ll tell your teacher why, and I’ll bet she’ll understand.”

Shay thought about it for a minute then shook her head.

“No, I’ll give her one.  I don’t like her very much, but I kind of feel bad for her.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Because she’s a foster kid, just like we were.”

I nodded, smiled at her, pet her curly, messy head and left the room.  If I spoke I’d lose it.  I am constantly amazed at children’s capacity to seek out and understand the best parts of humanity.

 

“…so do you like watermelon and fried chicken?”

I looked up at this piggish man and thought of Shay crying in her arms.  “Yes,” I said.  “I like those things.  Why?”

He rolled his eyes and his fleshy lips turned up in a knowing grin.  “Well, then, that explains it.  You probably have…”

“Can I show you something?” I said, interrupting him.

He stops short of saying what I know he is going to say. 

I reach up to my upper left arm and pull my phone out of the plastic workout sleeve wrapped round my bicep.  I open up the pictures and find one of the girls.  The one where they look so beautiful in their spring dresses, staring up at the camera.

“These two girls are my children.  We adopted them last summer, but have fostered them for a few years.”

I handed him the phone.  He took it, and his grin grew strained.  Confused.  At first I think he believed I was telling a joke.  He opened his mouth to say something.

“And they both like fried chicken.  But neither one can stand watermelon.”  He looked at me for a moment, searching my countenance for any sign of jest, but I offered none.  When he realized I was serious, his face went blank.

“Now,” I said.  “I want to get back to my workout.  Okay?”

He just walked away without saying a word. 

I like to think that, as he drove home that morning, he felt the world moving ahead without him.