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