1) Arts appreciation two Sundays ago. A free ticket came my way and so I went.
2) The walk back from the theater. A passage through time (wishful thinking).
My dad was right when he informed me once in my teenage years, "you have an attitude problem." I figured he based this on the fact that I was an angsty, alienated teenager and didn't argue with him. I wasn't rude, I simply disliked most people and norms and was straightforward in my indifference. I'm a lion, from the family of big wild cats, I pounce when I have to with no restraints, I am protective, I kill with my bite which really means I commit pain with words because that is the only weapon I am not afraid of, that I can master, the pen is mightier than the sword after all - but when I really have to, pounce that is, when I am provoked, pushed over the edge.
A few weeks ago Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog paid a visit to our class and spoke and took questions for an hour and 45 minutes. An affable, aggressive man he pointed to each one of us in the large lecture theater and asked for our names at the start of the class, which I thought was a nice gesture, considering he was only visiting for an hour and 45 minutes.
While talking about his writing process toward the end of the class, seated sideways on the table in the front of the room, he looked right at me in the sea of students and asked, "what's your name again?" I told him, and he repeated it, and then asked, "Have you ever written something you normally wouldn't, it just didn't reflect the person you are, but you completely believed it anyway?" I waited for him to explain a little further what he meant, not wanting to nod eagerly and immediately say yes like a naive person trying to gain acceptance by heavyweights without really understanding. Besides, here was a great writer standing before me, I wanted nothing more than to hear him speak and explain things while I listened.
I thought about his question long after the class ended. I thought of something recent I had written, if I had believed what I had written. I had supported a black man, a character in one of the novels I'd read for a different class, and the violence he had unleashed as retaliation for being treated like a second-rate citizen by some white people. What causes a stand up guy like Coalhouse Walker, a ragtime piano player, to abandon his principles and calm and go on a rampage of terrorism toward some white people, why, by being provoked of course, and being denied his right to justice by the police, lawyers and city officials one after the other. We're all human after all. Some white girl (although every student in the class is white, except me) retorted, "He's essentially a terrorist." Yet most of American history is rooted in terrorism, I wanted to say, and following that horrific history of slavery, lynching, slaveowners raping their slaves, Coalhouse Walker trying to gain justice for himself when a crime was commited against him in the first place, pales in comparison to all of that history.
It is hard for self important people like her to grasp the anger and despair endured by minorities. I understood violence in that context, and why it had to happen, what led to it, and why it didn't make Coalhouse Walker a bad person. It's about self respect and sticking up for yourself. It's about the lengths people will go to in order to make a point, to make people listen, finally. And I believed it,with all my heart, when I said, "I wouldn't go down without a fight either."
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