Les Miserables Lives on Part II

I have another friend, a couple I'll call Mel and Kari. They are bright, funny, kind, caring people, very hard working, and their whole lives revolve around parenting their four kids under the age of seven. Mel is a scientific genius without a college degree. Kari has an advanced degree and training in a field that is both art, craft and science. Mel works in his field, but the companies around here that hire in his field only hire for a year, and then they fire people.

They used to hire people and work them until it came time for them to qualify for benefits, then fire them (much like retail stores are doing today) until the IRS told them they couldn't do that. Now, they hire people for 1 year, give them no benefits, then fire them. Legally.

Of course, that's only one of his jobs. He started another one last year, another part-time, because, of course, he knows he can't count on the first job for permanent employment. That job, too, does not offer benefits, so he is screwed.

Kari has started a business of her own based on her training field. Her business is flourishing, but she has to keep costs low to get business, there are material's costs and store space rental, plus, it's a craft, based on her own labor, so there's only so much she can work, (particularly with four little ones.) Mel and Kari earn enough between them that they do not qualify for medical assistance or Welfare, but not enough that they can afford things like medicine or even dental care for the children, though in our state, the kids are covered for medical care. Kari and Mel cross their fingers, watch the blotch grow on the front tooth of one of their kids, and keep on keeping on, with a cheerful good will.

Mel comes from a large family with a history of bi-polar disorder and suicide. Working two jobs now, he sleeps very little. They can't afford an anti-depressant that would help him cope, though anybody with four young kids and one and a half jobs would probably be exhausted enough to feel depressed. Kari is endlessly patient and wonderful with her small horde, and so is Mel--when he's rested enough to be present. He's such a gentle man, but what little time he gets to spend with his children finds him grumpy or lumpy. Really, he just wants to sit there and rest.

So, I ask you: where are our family values? Don't talk to me about prayer and church being the answer. This family is deeply religious. He is choir director of his church. She teaches Sunday school classes. Their home is filled with religious photos and I know they pray a lot, because her four-year-old kept  insisting, "Jesus is so the boss of this house, because he's the boss of everything," when I gently explained that since we were Jewish, he wasn't the boss at our house, that God was. This family prays then gets up off their needs and works damned hard. When are the rest of us going to do the same thing--for families like this one? When are we going to get smart enough to this family? Doesn't it make sense that we'd want to keep a father of four with a family history of suicide on his mental health meds? Doesn't it make sense that a mom of four young kids should have the medical care she needs to stay healthy? If we want her to work, shouldn't we make sure those terrific kids have quality childcare?

Let's shout out for real family values, ones that help families with their boots on the ground. Medical care for everyone. Quality childcare or financial aid for families where both parents work. If jobs can't or won't provide medical insurance, why don't we just switch to single payer? Heck, I've torn a calf muscle in Europe, had an orthopedic surgeon come to my hotel, diagnose, go to the pharmacy for the necessary medicines, give me an injection and a massage on the sort spot, and apologetically charge me $35.00--because with any French citizen, this would have been free. Happy doctors working there. Happy people going to them. Call it socialist or not, it works wonderfully. Why not do it here? 

Les Miserables Lives On.

I have a friend. Call her Claire. She has an illness which is catastrophic and progressive, and in her case genetic. 

I wish that this were not so. 

As a friend, Claire has always been ridiculously careful to make certain that she gave as much as she got. 

She married a construction guy and has three daughters, lovely girls, kind, polite, bright, thoughtful. She is about to lose custody of them, due to her illness and the fact that, rather than pay child support and help her parent, the father has used this as an excuse to stop paying child support and snatch the kids, something she must now fight legally. 

She has not done anything to bring on her current situation apart from marrying an asshole many years ago. I spoke today with another of Claire's friends. This woman, call her Amanda, is far more competent than I am in so many ways. She is an interior designer, doing well, married to an architect. Her house is organized and neat, her children's birthday parties both spontaneous--(foot and finger-painting as an activity)--and planned to within an inch--(with walls and floors were prepped by having sheets taped up all over them.) She is socially deft. I have watched in admiration as she walks through some challenging political parent stuff. Which there is, just like in those "How does she do it," novels. 

Amanda, too, thinks Claire is the most deserving of folk. That she has been an inspiration. That to watch her fail after all her hard work and steady upward climb is excruciatingly painful. 

Lately, Claire's middle child has openly declared allegiance to the Dad who grabbed her, and who fills her head with lies--"I don't have to pay child-support." "If I don't pay child support, she'll just have to get a job like the rest of us." And never mind the realities of her disease, the constant, intense pain and exhaustion, the ways it affects her thinking.

We have both watched Claire struggle with Welfare and our state's medical insurance plan for the adult parent of young children. She was denied disability, because she did not yet have the paperwork from a major clinic documenting her illness. She needs to appeal, something very hard to do when a disease is clouding up your good, smart brain and you can't afford the meds to treat it. 

She sleeps long hours, which is a part of the disease--constant fatigue. She is always in the grip of excruciating pain. Despite this, until recently, she was the go-to-mom on the playground for snacks, the volunteer mom for helping the teacher or field trips.

I am planning to call her today and tell her that I get it if this fight is too hard, too much for her. I get that it may be too much for her, fighting welfare and disability and a dad playing nasty and one child who has decided she has to declare allegiance now because Mom's going to die. I will understand if she does give up, if she literally just curls up and dies. And she has already done far more for her daughters than her own druggie mother was ever able to do for her. Claire has been a steady, disciplined, loving mom. Her girls were, until Dad grabbed them, shining, happy children, despite the divorce and custody battle. The school librarian has said they are some of the best, kindest kids in the school. It is gut wrenching to understand how little our society cares, about children, about mothers, about what is best for both. It is gut-wrenching to see someone like Claire--someone who has steadily grown, learned, kept on going, someone truly inspiring, be literally destroyed by a system that cares so little. It is like watching Les Miserables--except this is now and this is real and this is a woman who four years ago seemed someone to envy--with the big house  and the big car and three shining daughters. 

If I had the funds, I would put them into an attorney for her disability battle and for her custody battles. But I don't. I don't know how much or what I can do. 

If I let her, Claire will pull away of her own volition as she falls. She will sleep and not call and not return my calls. That's her way under extreme stress--isolate and not be a burden. But is it right for me to let her pull? How hard can I--should  I--hold on? What kind of a world do I want to live in? What kind of values do I want to teach my children? 

How I wish I were not having to ask these questions. How I wish that I, too, were one of the innocent ones who believe in what I think of as a Santa Claus God, someone who takes care of you as long as you behave well. How I wish I could sit at home, safe in the knowledge that God will take care of me, because I'm smart and good and if He's not taking care of Claire, well, it's all her fault. Safe. 

How I wish that we, as a culture, truly did support family values. The values of this woman's family that have made her children a delight and her life an inspiration to Amanda and I, with her strong moral fiber and her mother's love. 

Special holsters decorated with apples and school houses

I really want my children's teachers to be packing. That way, our teachers can be focused on guarding the children as well as teaching them. I want my child's kindergarten teacher to have to adjust her holster before bending to tie my little one's shoe. I want her shoving the butt aside to pull my wee one on her lap. 

We've slashed budgets for teachers, phys ed, the arts and school psychologist, but surely we can find the budget for guns and ammo, along with training.  Plus, there would be side benefits: we'd be creating a growth industry, special holsters decorated with apples and school houses. And we'd never have to worry about an appropriate teacher gift:  all they would want for Christmas would be a few more rounds of ammunition. This would also cut retirement costs, as they could take a later job teaching girls in Afghanistan. Maybe schools could even share their budgets with Foreign Affairs. 

Plus, think of teacher's newfound ability to use guns as a disciplinary tool. Probably a knock in the head with one would be effective, or if not, the click of the safety going off as a warning. This could be very helpful with recalcitrant kids, unless of course, the child overpowers the teacher. But what the heck, said bad child would only get to shoot until the teacher next door unholsters and races in.

And so what if some bored, impulsive eight-year-old makes a grab for it and kicks off maybe twenty rounds? The casualties would hurt, but in the end, it would cut down on education costs. 

Most of all, our children would be learning our nation's real values: fire power and saving money to spend where it really counts--on the extremely wealthy, who we hope and pray will give the rest of us jobs.

Why I started this. . .

Several years ago, we lived in a house much like this one, (but not quite as fancy) in West Adams, which at that time was a mostly middle class African-American enclave somewhat West of USC, in the heart of Los Angeles. We--white and Jewish, clinging to Middle Class by our fingernails--were fortunate to have found that particular neighborhood at that particular time.

The area had been built around the turn of the 20th century and ranged from mansions to more-than-comfortable homes. By the Great Depression, the fancy part of town had moved North and West to Country Club Park. During those tough years of the 1930's, many of the great homes of West Adams took in boarders while paint faded on their mammoth walls.

By 1947 and 48, the first Negroes (as they were then called in polite company) moved in. These were the educated and the well-to-do--lawyers, insurance company owners, teachers, nurses, doctors, some of them movie stars on the order of Hattie McDaniels, the first African-American to win an Oscar. That didn't matter.  The impolite response was burned crosses, minor riots and white flight. Soon the neighborhood was almost completely Black with a smattering of Asian, mostly Japanese.

But it turned out, our block had someone of color who had moved in long before 1947. According a neighbor down the street, her great-aunt had built their sweet Craftsman cottage in 1908, when that branch of the family was passing for white. Successfully--Nonny (not her real name) even mentioned one of them who was an Admiral. In the Navy. Yup.

Her story started me on the long road to writing my novel, "The Color of Safety," which is about a hundred years in one house in West Adams, and which is in part about someone in the first half of the last century who is "passing for white," as that slip across the color line is called.

But trying to research what it was like to pass proved tough. Oh, there are literary sources. Charles W. Chestnutt wrote of men who succeeded and women who were punished for crossing the line. Nella Larsen, who was scarred emotionally when her mother crossed over, leaving her behind,  wrote of passing in terms that screamed, "Danger, Danger." Chester Himes wrote a painfully hilarious almost-sketch of a story (Dirty Deceivers, 1948) in which a couple, both passing, believe they have married "up"(i.e. white) only discover that their beloved wife/husband is--yes--just a person of color, passing, like they are. Though at first, they are delighted--it turns out they are even distantly related--within paragraphs, they feel cheated that they didn't manage to catch someone 100% white. The very short story ends with them suing for divorce. So, yes, those literary sources certainly gave me insight, particularly Himes'.

But I wanted details. After all, if you're going to write a novel, you have to know about, oh, smells, sounds, tastes. What you're seeking are those perfect minutia, that pebble in the shoe that makes each moment come alive as someone reads it. Those--those just weren't there.

So I started calling around academia, history departments, looking for any kind of oral histories. And I ran, slam, into a stone wall. Sure, okay, I get it, white woman doing research on passing? In most well-to-do families, the idea of passing was a shameful thing. Only classless people would not want to be wealthy and African-American.

And today, it really carries a sense of shame, as if these people didn't realize that Black is Beautiful, without much understanding of what folks in the past were really up against.

So what I heard was, "Oh, well, that sort of thing really didn't happen. I mean, people would pass to sit in the front of the street car, or maybe to get a job, but then they'd come home and within a block, they could go back to being Negro again, return to the family, relax."

"But," I'd say, "What about what Walter White said in his autobiography?" (Ironically titled, "A Man Called White" since White was then the blue-eyed, blond-haired, fair-skinned president of the NAACP.) "In 1948, White wrote: 'Every year approximately twelve thousand white-skinned Negroes disappear—people whose absence cannot be explained by death or emigration. Nearly every one of the fourteen million discernible Negroes in the United States knows at least one member of his race who is “passing”—the magic word which means that some Negroes can get by as whites, men and women who have decided that they will be happier and more successful if they flee from the proscription and humiliation which the American color line imposes on them."

"And," I'd say, "What about Melba Pattilo Beals? You remember, she was one of the kids who integrated Little Rock High school. She wrote in her absolutely brilliant memoir, 'White is a State of Mind,' about her fair-skinned cousin, Griffin, who went north to college and on his first day, fell madly in love with a white woman, love at first sight. Knowing she was from Alabama, he was instantly sure she would never marry him if she knew he was Negro, so he called his mother and said he was going to live his life white.  And now this cousin, Griffin, was a sheriff in a small southern town by day and a member of the Klan by night. He had to be, or he would have been found out (and couldn't have maintained his place in Alabama society.) And he was calling to warn Beals' parents that the Klan was offering a reward to anybody to kill all five of the children integrating the school."

That was when my academics would start to talk. Not that they had much to offer. Because how do you get oral histories of people who have vanished into the whitewashed woodwork? Even Shirlee Taylor Haizlip couldn't do it. Taylor Haizlip, in case you missed the Oprah episodes like I did (because my kids leave me no time to watch TV) by dint of persistence and energy, found and reconnected with her aunt who had left the ranks of "Colored" around 1916. But--and for me, this was a huge but--though she talked with her new-found "white" cousins, Taylor Haizlip was too kind to ask her eighty-some-year-old aunt the questions that would have come out of me like a hail storm, rat-a-tat-a. Not. . .not ethical questions, no. I understand that there was--and probably still is--a tangible need to pass. After all, I am a blonde Jew who could easily pass for English or Swedish and I am married to the child of Holocaust survivors. Of the very few Jewish children who survived the Holocaust, almost all of them were able to pass. If those eleven cousins of my husband who died during WWII had been fair enough (and lucky enough--at least two of them were blond, so we're told by those who still miss them) and if parents' Polish or French had been good enough, and if all the stars had aligned enough, they might have survived the war.

What haunted me, though, was the idea that this cousin of Beals, Griffin, was not only a sheriff, but had joined the Klan. But of course, he would have to, wouldn't he? If you were passing, you'd have to be the worst of them. And you'd have to keep an eye on them, the way Griffin did for his little cousin, Melba, back in Little Rock. You'd have to brag about your pure white sheet and trash-talk Niggers--and maybe even lynch a few--in order to survive.

And then there was the rest of Walter White's introduction to his autobiography: "Often these emigrants have success in business, the professions, the arts and sciences. Some of them have married white people, lived happily with them, and produced families. Sometimes they tell their husbands and wives of their Negro blood, sometimes not. Who are they? Mostly people of no great importance, but some of them prominent figures, including a few members of Congress, certain writers, and several organizers of movements to “keep the Negroes and other minorities in their places.” Some of the most vehement public haters of Negroes are themselves secretly Negroes.”

My (Jewish) mother always said to me, "Be careful about marrying out of faith. Because if you don't teach your children to be proud of being Jewish, the world will teach them to be ashamed of it. And if you scratch the grandchild of someone who converted to Christianity, you're likely to find an anti-Semite." Of course,  Mom's rule doesn't hold true for all the world, but there is something twisting in  having to hide who you are. (And one other Jewish girl in my class (there were only about seven in my whole school) the one whose Dad had married a non-Jew, used to wear a cross on a chain around her neck, and pretend nobody at her house at matza around Easter)

And if you have to hide who you are in a world that holds who you are in contempt, then who do you become? What happens to you on the outside? What happens to you on the inside? Do you become that mouth-foaming, gay-hating politician who plays footsie in the Minneapolis airport? Do you become Griffin, the Klan Klegal, who is secretly black?

That was the origin of my complicated novel, the Color of Safety. I hope to lead you on the journey of discovery along with me as I finish the last section of the book.

Sara Selznick

Cory Booker: Empathy Training for Bureaucrats and Judges

Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, is voluntarily living off food stamps for a week. 
What a wise move, both to understand what life is like for many of your constituents and to publicize same. I think living off food-stamps for a week should be a requirement for anyone who wishes to run for office in this country.

But I would add that said official should:

1) be given a small clothing budget and have to wear clothing for that week purchased at a local thrift store on a minimal budget.

2) have to apply for welfare in an area where they are not well known.

3) spend the week with no access to the internet via smart phone or computer except at the library.

4) be required to apply for several low wage jobs at spots that require at least four bus transfers--arriving on time for said appointments. (Or if living in a rural area, they should manage to get to a job interview thirty miles away without assistance from anyone they know.)

5) have no access to health care for the week unless they can pay for it out of their welfare.

I believe this should also be a required annual test for all judges, including Supreme Court Justices--they pass the test or they lose their job. This would be one good way to build empathy for the poor in this country and stop their demonization.

Jewesses in Blackface. The White Negress.

I have always shuddered at the idea of people in blackface. Blackface, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, was a style of entertainment called a minstrel-show, where white people corked their faces dark and performed in stereotypical styles that mocked African-Americans as stupid, lazy, lascivious, etc. It was not only a Southern tradition, but was performed all over. Even black people performed in Blackface, and Al Jolson became famous for his "Mammy."

Jews in Blackface. Yes. And some of the most successful ones in the first part of the 20th Century. Perhaps it was a way to identify with the dominant culture and mock a subservient one, as Jews tried to become The Color of Safety. Perhaps it was a way to remain connected to the non-dominate culture, with "blackness" standing in for a connection to Judaism, as in The Jazz Singer, where Jolson is leaving behind his rabbi father's culture, but is still, via singing in blackface, remaining connected to it--and Jolson's "Mammy," like many Jewish blackface performers, was a more positive version of Blackface than many. 

Now, a lovely librarian recommended I take a look at a book by Lori Harrison-Kahan called White Negress:literature, minstrelry, and the Black-Jewish imaginary. Rutgers University Press 2011.

What Harrison-Kahan suggests is that for Jewish women, Blackface might have had a different meaning. Blackface was used in lit by Jewish women writers like Fanny Hurst, Edna Ferber, and Jewish singers like  Sophie Rucker, Fannie Brice, Sophie Mayhew and Nora Bayes all "blacked up" at some point. Harrison-Kahan suggests that Blackface was a way that Jewish women could break away from idealized female behavior. If you look at Sophie Tucker, who was forced into Blackface because producers thought she was too big and ugly to sing with her own face, blackface allowed her to perform at all, and may gave helped her create her public persona which was big, loud bawdy and allowed to seek sexual pleasure despite gender, looks or size. 

I don't know if Harrison-Kahan says this, but Eastern-European Jewish women (as opposed to German Jews) had come from a culture where women were expected to be active outside the home and were being shoved into the dominant culture's idea that women raised kids, created the home and that was that. It may be that the imagery of blackface was appealing because here was another group allowed to be alive and lovely outside their homes.   

Whatever the case, I am eager to read her book. When the budget allows!

More Research: refracting race, conflict in Japanese interment camps, the Imperial Russian Dental Corps, dentist testing at Walla Walla penitentiary

The fruits of research are so rich and so strange. And thank heavens for the Internet and the kindness of librarians. I can't afford the research materials I want, but the internet has been a gift from heaven, with librarians at the Seattle Library and at our local synagogue the angels within it.

I have learned that at several Japanese internment camps, there was not just conflict between kibei (First generation Japanese-Americans educated in Japan) and Nisei, (First generation Japanese-Americans educated in the U.S.) but this tension was some of the cause of violence, riots, and one family (that of the husband of the fabulous singer, Pat Suzuki) literally being pushed outside the boundaries of their camp after the father was beaten.

I have learned that the Czar had an Imperial Dental Corps in WWI--I think, but I'm not sure--and that other armies in WWI had their own dental corps, with wagons, uniforms, equipment, etc. Well, but of course. Remember the origin of the phrase trench mouth?

Also, that dentists in the Seattle Area in 1927 took their licensing tests at Walla Walla penitentiary, by special permission of the Warden.

And if you ever wonder if one person can make a huge difference in the world: the reason that Japan did not actively support the extermination of the Jews was because of one German-American Jew, a financier in New York who hated what the Czar was doing to the Jews in Russia during the pogroms of that era (back to that Czar again, the handsome one who was later murdered) and so this one guy helped to substantially finance the Japanese during the Russian-Japanese war (1904-1905). This one man's choice many years before meant that the Japanese a) could not be persuaded that Jews were evil incarnate who should be exterminated like rats and b) that although they now believed that all Jews had money and were powerful and pulled the strings of the world behind the scenes, these were qualities the Japanese wanted to emulate.

(I wish me and mine had some of the money and power Jews are supposed to have. . .I know I'd change a few things in the world, or even this country, like our growing child poverty rate.)

What I find most fascinating about all this research is the way that it Asian, or Black, or Jewish "racial" identity--seems, like a light through a crystal, to splinter into facets when you look at them carefully through an historical lens. Yes, dental exams at Walla Walla pen are fun, as are Jazz bands at Manazanar, but this perspective is to me, the most important thing.

Next post--about the Jewish concept of good and evil. Now that's really fun.