“I Am Not Trayvon": Serial Murders Of The Heart
Ever since President John F. Kennedy pronounced, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” people of different ethnicities from Cairo to Campuses in California have proclaimed “I am_______,” or “We are all_______,” as a sign of solidarity with individuals and groups, particularly with those who are oppressed. For example: when word spread that Mitt Romney reportedly had put his Irish Setter, Seamus, in a crate strapped to the roof of his car for a 12-hour drive from Massachusetts to Canada, the dog showing serious gastric distress down the rear window while the Romneys drove on—Mitt Romney reportedly stopping only briefly to hose down the car and dog, and then continue with the now wet dog still in the crate strapped to the roof of the car, I hashtagged #WeAreAllSeamus. I hashtagged this because I honestly feel that were Governor Romney to become President Romney, 99% of us would find ourselves at least metaphorically wet, and shivering, trying to get a grip on a slippery, shaking surface, loosing the contents of our digestive systems from both ends at once, while strapped to the roof of Romney’s vehicle as he heads undeterred to his personal destination. That’s just my read. I’ve known people like that. Maybe I’m wrong about Romney—but I’d rather not find out.
With similar sentiments, people of all races have stood in solidarity with Trayvon Martin, the African American teen who was reportedly followed and then shot to death walking to the home of his father’s girlfriend inside a gated community by volunteer watchman George Zimmerman, who is identified as Hispanic. But, before proclaiming, “I am Trayvon,” it may be important for some to first say “I am not Trayvon.” As a middle-aged white woman who looks Irish even from afar, “I am not Trayvon.” For one thing, as a middle-aged woman who would look clearly white even under a hoody in the rain, I don’t think Zimmerman would have found my presence in the community suspicious—though I don’t live there and know no one who does. If Zimmerman were to have questioned me, it would likely have only been to inquire if I wanted a ride home in the downpour. As a middle-aged white woman, I would have answered him no, since I would not have trusted him or any stranger enough to hop in their car. If it was really pouring and my walk was really long, I might have been tempted to make an exception for a woman offering a ride, but that would not be a smart move. As we have seen, women have been accomplices in kidnappings and murders—such as the women found guilty for their parts in the kidnappings of Jaycee Dugard and Elizabeth Smart, and the woman suspected to have taken part in the abduction and murder of the Vermont teacher, Melissa Jenkins. I myself have been seriously conned by middle-aged white women whom I did not suspect in the least. I’ve also been conned by middle-aged white men whom I trusted.
What’s more if police had arrived at the scene and found my body lying there shot to death, with Zimmerman claiming to have fired in self defense; I doubt authorities would have taken his word—even if, instead of being found with ice tea and skittles (as was Trayvon Martin), I had been found holding one of those little pistols Nancy Reagan said she carried, but did not know how to use. And yet, even our first black President has been described as being threatening when simply conversing on a tarmac, and his statement that if he had a son he would look like Trayvon, has been interpreted as hateful by some.
My intention here is not to litigate the guilt or innocence of George Zimmerman. In my opinion, that should be done in a court of law. I think it tragic for Trayvon’s family and for the nation that, due to what appears to be multiple failures in the legislative, legal and judicial systems in Florida, the media has been forced to launch it’s own investigations and rally it’s own forces to call for a justice that has thus far been denied. My purpose here is to give an account of seminal race related moments in my own life, hoping that by this peek through my little window light will be shed on the bigger picture we all face.
Roughly fifty years ago, I entered a public school kindergarten at the age of four after having attended a private nursery school for two years. The usual age for beginning school was five, but an exception had been made for me because both of my parents worked (which was not common at the time), I already had two years of school experience (also not common at the time) and my parents needed to conserve what little money they had (probably pretty common at the time). The public school was located in an area that was becoming suburban with the baby boom, on the border of the city in which my parents had been raised. Just prior to my first day of school, my father took me aside and told me the “n” word. He told me what it meant and said that I might hear it in school, and if I did I was never to repeat it. I was to use the word “colored” instead. The “n” word was the first bad word I had ever heard. I would not hear another until I entered junior high school. It was a different time back then.
This was the only instruction I recall my father giving me in preparation for public school. It may seem odd that my father felt it so essential to explain all this to a four-year-old, but looking back, knowing things now that I was only later to learn, I may be able to better understand. My father was the son of Irish immigrants to New England and he had grown up in an Irish/Jewish/Italian neighborhood that was becoming African American as the Irish, Jews and Italians moved to the suburbs and African Americans moved North. When I was in my teens and attending a public school that was predominantly Jewish in population, I learned that as a child my father had been the Shabbos Goy in the neighborhood temple that some of my classmates’ parents had attended. A Shabbos Goy is a person who is not Jewish and who weekly lights the candles and performs other tasks in Synagogues where Jews are not allowed to perform such works on the Sabbath. My father told me that his mother was a big believer in religious and ethnic harmony and insisted he do this favor for the Jewish community—in spite of the fact that he had to run from the temple each week with his head tucked under his arms to protect it from the rocks that Irish boys threw at him as he dodged and darted his way home. When he told me, I remember thinking that as much as I believed in religious and ethnic harmony, I doubted I would have risked my son sustaining brain damage to assert it. Still, looking back, it appears he learned from his mother (who died years before I was born) an important lesson about prejudice that he wanted in his own way to impart to me before I went out into the world, so to speak. As the youngest of eight, he had inherited no material goods from his parents who died within a week of each other. His older siblings claimed it all, and he was not up to bickering with them, I am told. But this lesson against prejudice that his mother imparted to him was an inheritance worth more than any material good. Sharing this inheritance with me was his way of passing on her legacy. In this way lessons are taught and generations are shaped.
My father needn’t have worried however. There were no African American students in the school I attended and no one there spoke the bad word. A few years later, however, we moved to an area that was more rural—an area where many of the roads were named after families still residing there. Population growth in the town had been limited because it had reservoirs that served the city and much of the property was owned by the water company and considered watershed. It wasn’t a wealthy area at the time, and as I recall when I began that September it seemed like the kids in my class were nearly a year behind the kids in my class at the prior school. Demographically, it was low SES. Later in life, an African American friend of mine who had moved to the town after it gentrified would laughingly refer to the indigenous residents of the town as “Swamp Yankees.”
My family arrived to this new town in the summer. The town had a large public pond that probably had a lifeguard, though I’m not sure. If it did, I took little notice. I had not been raised with the concept of drowning. To me, water was something that supported you when you laid down on it and transported you when you moved through it. I recall my father dropping off my older sister who was entering junior high school and me to play in the pond during the day. She went straight to the diving board with the teenagers. I was only seven, and I don’t recall if any arrangement had been made regarding my supervision, other than the unwatchful eye of my sister. Maybe there had been. My parents were usually pretty good about such things. By today’s standards it seems unthinkable to leave a child to play in the water without directly putting them in the care of an adult, but my father and his friends grew up swimming in a swimming hole with no lifeguard and no supervision, and I was certainly never taught to fear the water, so I just don’t know for sure. Anyway, I spent the day playing with an African American girl who was there with her mother. The girl was a few years older, possibly my weight plus a quarter again as much, and at least a foot taller than I, maybe more. Having started school a bit young I was used to being smaller than everyone, and none of our physical differences concerned me in the least. If I recall correctly, I was trying to show her how to float, something I had learned to do on my own as a toddler when a wave lifted me up in the ocean. Afterward we played on the edge of the pond, where she appeared to be more comfortable. I had a wonderful day with her, and her mother probably took care to make sure we were both safe. My father came and got me at the end of the day.
When I got in the car, before my sister came, my father started to explain to me that sometimes people who don’t have any friends will make friends with someone new to town, and that if I made friends with someone who had no friends the people who did not like that person might not like me either. I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he mentioned that the child I had been playing with was colored, and that if I locked myself into playing with her other people might not want to be friends with me. I was shocked. I was confused. I was disappointed. Was this the same person who told me never to use the “n” word? Was this the same man who with my mother had just rented our old house to a Jamaican family that was the same color as my new friend, and never mentioned anything to me about their color? Both my parents had only expressed joy that they had found such wonderful tenants, and great respect for the father who was a doctor and a professor. Where was this crazy directive coming from? What was I to do?
The next day that my father brought me to the pond he put me in the care of a redheaded woman who, like me, looked Irish from afar. Like us, she had moved to the town somewhat recently with her family. She had a daughter my sister’s age and a daughter who was just a year ahead of me in school and not quite so much taller than I. I had an okay time with her, but her mother called me a “milk bottle.” When I asked her what she meant, she said that my skin was white like milk, but not to worry because she used to be that white too, and that with sun I would get a bit of color. Why would she say such a thing, and to a child she did not even know? Was she trying to impress upon me that I was white? If I remember correctly, I mentioned her comment to my mother who pointed out that she too was milk bottle white and not to be concerned about it. I had never thought of the color of my skin prior, and ever since, even to this day, I feel embarrassed in a bathing suite because I never did acquire much color.
It seems that after that I mostly hung out with my sister at the diving board where I learned to front and back dive. I don’t know if my parents had told my sister to keep me with her because I wasn’t to play with the African American child and the Irish woman had caused me distress by calling me a milk bottle. I also don’t know if it was the Irish woman who initially drew my father’s attention to the fact that I had been playing with a black child that first day. It’s quite possible she had seen my father who at the time looked a lot like Brian Dennehy, and took it upon herself to caution her fellow Irishman about my selection of playmates, offering her own children as a more appropriate choice. As the years passed I found this woman to be quite the busybody (though otherwise pleasant) and it was not at all beyond her nature to interfere with me. It’s also possible my father had simply seen me playing alone with a child who was significantly older and larger than I, and surmised that the girl had sought friendship with me because no one else would be her friend, and then deduced that possibly no one would be her friend because she was African American, and everyone else was Euro-America.
Though my father’s intervention in that friendship was disturbing to me then, and now, I suspect this too had its roots in his childhood as the Shabbos Goy. Racism was as rife when I was a child, as anti-Semitism was when he was a child. You know that house I mentioned my parents had rented to a Jamaican family? Well, when it came time to sell it the buyers pulled out because they drove by and saw that a black family was living there. They were even willing to forfeit their deposit rather than live in a house that had housed black people. No doubt my father deduced the situation at the public pond and probably just didn’t want to sacrifice his seven-year-old daughter’s popularity on the pyre of other people’s prejudice. I can’t blame him. After all, as I said, had I been his mother I likely would not have had him suffer a stoning every week in the name of inter-faith harmony. My father probably just didn’t feel it was my burden to bear—but I have borne it anyway. We must all bear the burden of racism. That summer when I learned about race at the pond still plays in Technicolor across my mind. I wish my father had stuck to his initial stand with me about race, and not been fearful for me regarding my inter-race friendship. If I were going to be bullied at least I would have suffered the bullying for a cause. I ended up being bullied for a spell anyway before those grade school years would come to a close. But not before I would witness something that made me very sad.
I barely ever saw the African American girl at school because she was so much older, possibly in the sixth grade, and had class in a different building. However, it turned out
that her mother was a teacher at the school. One day we children were all playing outside at once. I don’t remember if it was a Field Day featuring intramural sports or what, but for some reason her mother was leading a group of children in a game and I was told to go join her group, though she was not my teacher. She was asking the children to form a circle by holding hands. I ran up to hold the hand of one of the children in my grade when I heard the teacher call out to come close the gap. I turned and saw her daughter standing to my left many, many, many yards away, her mother holding her left hand, but no one holding the other. I thought of what my father had said to me in the car and realized that the huge gap was there because none of the other children wanted to hold her hand and were staying as far away from her as they could on that account. I felt terrible, and embarrassed for her, and also somewhat excited because I had actually never held hands with someone who had dark skin before—at least not since being taught to recognize race. I ran to hold her hand as quickly as possible letting the circle close between us. I felt for her mother in that moment too. I felt how it must have hurt her to see her daughter being rejected in that way, and I felt badly about my own behavior at the pond, for having not sought her out the next day as I would have done had I been left to my own nature.
So this brings me back to Trayvon Martin. Yes, George Zimmerman reportedly shot Trayvon to death, and that act can never be undone. That life has been taken. In my opinion his life was taken because he was black. Trayvon is not the only youth whose life has been unjustly taken because of the color of his skin. There have been many more killings than those we learn of, and we almost did not learn of this one. All of these deaths are tragic. But how many serial murders of the heart have African American boys and girls suffered silently because a friend they were playing with inexplicably disappeared from their life and never came back. How many times have “little black boys and black girls” stood there humiliated and hurting for what must feel like an eternity waiting for “little white boys and white girls” to take their hand and close the circle. How much shame have little black boys and black girls felt in front of their mothers and fathers when made to feel less than the other children. And how many mothers and fathers of little black boys and black girls have wept over the pain they see their children suffer, not knowing whether preemptive explanations will make them fearful or forearmed. Before proclaiming, “I am Trayvon,” I believe those of us who are not black would do well to contemplate to what degree we may also be George Zimmerman.
Since the killing of Trayvon Martin, I have heard African American adults talk about how their parents tried to prepare them, and how they have tried to prepare their own children with advice about staying alive in a predominantly white world. Some have cautioned their sons that they bore the burden of other people’s race-based fears; and told them never to run, lest someone assume they were running from a crime. Some have advised their sons not to put their hands in their pockets, lest someone assume they have a weapon. Some have told their sons to put their hands on the dashboard and leave them there if pulled over by police. Some have told them to be polite and compliant, as anything they say may be interpreted as hostile or threatening.
But when I, a middle aged white woman, hear the audio of what sounds to me to be Trayvon’s terrified cries for help, I cannot help but think of the advice that many parents, teachers, newscasters and other authorities give young people of all races today in this age when we are acutely aware of sexual predators abducting, raping and even murdering young males and females.
We tell them not to speak with strangers and if a stranger gives them undo attention to run—if they can. If they can’t run, to pull out their cell phone and call for help. We tell them to yell and scream and make as much noise as possible if the person gets too close. And we tell them to kick and hit and fight with all their strength if the person tries to touch them. How was Trayvon to know whether the unidentified, ununiformed stranger following him was not another John Wayne Gacy or Wayne Williams? How could he know whether if he ran away the man would not prey on someone else, perhaps someone younger or smaller or in some way more vulnerable. It appears to me that Trayvon was stuck in what psychologists call a double bind, having two conflicting mandates that he is expected to enact simultaneously. As a young black man faced by an older non-black man, he was expected to cautiously stay put and passive. As a potential victim, he was expected to run or fight for his life. I don’t think many white people know what it feels like to be a young black man like Trayvon, developing an identity within that double-bind. I don’t think Zimmerman realized the double-bind he was presenting Trayvon.
Like George Zimmerman, most of us take our own circumstances, our own good intentions, and our own behavior for granted, and therefore fail to examine ourselves from an external perspective. It appears Zimmerman failed to recognize how suspicious his own behavior was making himself appear, and how his own behavior put himself and others in danger. Zimmerman’s recorded call to 911 and continued armed pursuit of Trayvon (despite 911 advising him to stand down and wait for them) indicated he was not going to risk letting Trayvon get away. Zimmerman appeared so convinced of Trayvon’s criminality that had Trayvon fled, the boy might have been shot in the back. We know Zimmerman carried a gun and was not afraid to use it. Friends and family claiming to speak for George Zimmerman have said that if Trayvon had just stopped and spoken with the approaching Zimmerman or if neighbors hearing the scuffle had come out to help Zimmerman, Zimmerman would not have shot Trayvon. It is understandable that those close to Zimmerman would try to make his actions everyone’s fault, but his own. All this secondhand testimony is troublesome as it just allows stories to be floated without holding anyone, Zimmerman in particular, to sworn testimony. But, in any case, audio evidence reportedly shows neighbors took the appropriate action by calling 911 because hearing the scuffle they were afraid to go out—with good reason we would learn because there was a man with a gun out there. They waited as Zimmerman had been told to wait. Cell phone records reportedly indicate Trayvon called his girlfriend while he was being pursued by this ununiformed stranger, and she has stated Trayvon expressed fear of this stranger. Under the circumstances it is hard to imagine Trayvon behaving other than he did. George Zimmerman may not have been a sexual predator, but one cannot deny that Trayvon had good reason to fear him. After all, the man reportedly did shoot him dead.
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