Rest, Rosa

I was going to rant on about the breakdown of decency and values in this country, and had a considerable little diatribe going yesterday, which I didn’t finish. I intended to finish it this morning when I got into work, (in my spare moments, of course,) but this morning’s news made me think of something else.

Rosa Parks has died at age 92.

Rosa Parks was an icon in the civil rights movement, and she is one of my heroes. When I was four years old, Mrs. Parks boarded a Montgomery, Alabama bus on her way home from work. She sat in the “colored seats,” one row behind the white seats in the front of the bus. That day, the bus picked up rather more passengers than usual, and the bus driver asked the people sitting just behind the white section to stand up and yield their seats to the white folks. Mrs. Parks refused.

Mrs. Parks was a quiet, unassuming woman, a member of the NAACP. She had not been planted, nor was she told by anyone to defy the law—but defy it she did. It set off the firestorm of the civil rights movement in our country. Her subsequent arrest was the spark in the powder keg of segregation, which then exploded. Then it changed our laws.

I admired Mrs. Parks and what she did. She wasn’t special, just a decent, hard-working woman, weary from a day’s labor. She didn’t use name-calling, firebombs, guns, rhetoric or blame to make her point. She just sat in her seat and refused to be a second-class citizen anymore. This small and minor act was the only weapon she had. But it wasn’t just the act, (Rosa Parks was not the first woman to be arrested for refusing to yield her seat,) it was her basic decency that proved how heinous a philosophy was segregation. It is the basic decency of most people of color that makes all prejudice heinous, makes it so unacceptable. We cannot continue to think of skin color, national origin or ethnic association as making us different. Mrs. Parks made that clear, as obvious as it seems to us now. Yet it is still not as obvious in our actions, or our minds.

Recently I saw the film “Crash.” Racial prejudice and its consequences is the core plot element in this film. It shows that we are not always what we think we are, even when we think we have no prejudices, or try to do the decent, honorable thing. The film is well done, thought-provoking, and makes its point harshly, but with intelligence. It shows us that despite our new laws prohibiting segregation, our regulations about busing, banishment of “separate but equal” accommodations, and all the hard-won freedoms made for and by people of color, that we have still not evolved enough to overcome prejudicial thinking. It makes me sad, and it seems synchronistic that I saw the film the day before one of the linchpins of the civil rights movement died. But it’s even more important than that to me.

I remember my ninth birthday party. I was born in July, and my party was always an outdoor event, usually a picnic, to which I would invite everyone I knew—classmates, neighbors, relatives—to share in hot dogs and watermelon in our back yard. That year I invited my fifth grade classmates. All of them. Most of them showed up. Including the one black girl in our room.
Her name was Jewel. She was quiet, shy, pretty. Her parents were far better off economically than mine—our family had always skated right on the edge of outright poverty. She came from “up the hill,” and one of her parents was a businessman, the other a professional. They wore suits to work, and drove a new car. Jewel wasn’t a close friend, but she was a friend. I was glad to see her. She alighted from her parents’ car with a gift in hand—one of only two who brought me something. I greeted her and showed her the back yard, where everyone else was already tucking into picnic fare; but before I got to follow her back there, my mother pulled me aside.

“Don’t you think she would be better off with her own kind?” my mother asked me. I puzzled over this a moment—as far as I understood, Jewel was with her own kind—we were all fifth graders. I must have looked oddly at my mother, because she got flustered, embarrassed, and repeated the phrase—don’t you think that little girl should be with her own kind?

I remember the feeling I had then. Stunned, shocked, humiliated. I couldn’t look at Jewel for the entire party. I couldn’t talk to her. I had finally understood what prejudice was, and it was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. My own mother had committed a crime—that of being a bigot—and I couldn’t talk to her anymore either. Of course, despite my shame, that resolution was merely temporary, though I had lost a key element of trust in an instant. Yet, this incident was never spoken of again between us.

Fast forward to 1993. My mother is ill, severely diabetic, and must go on dialysis. She has been resistant to her insulin for years, and it’s killing her, unless she gets the lifesaving procedure. She sets up her appointment at a local dialysis center, and arrives—late—and finds out that she can’t make dialysis fit into her schedule. She argues with the attendant at the center, and makes a scene. I know this has happened because I’ve been monitoring it all from my desk at work, via my uncle, who is trying to make my mother see that she’s causing her own problems by being inflexible. Nothing seems to work—but she gets her dialysis and goes angrily home. When I get home that evening, I call her and ask how it went.

My mother launches into a diatribe of her own: the attendant was not cooperative. She was rude. She wouldn’t let my mother have the appointments she wanted. She was deliberately trying to inconvenience her. And the reason? Because she was black.

I was transported once again, back to that birthday party, when bigotry came rushing at me like a ten-ton truck to run me over. Then, I was silent—the subject had been dropped. This time I wasn’t. “Mom,” I told her, voice shaking, “I know you think you’re the victim here, but I can honestly say that it probably didn’t matter one little bit what color that woman was. You were rude to her.”

The silence on the other end of the phone is a moment frozen in time for me. My mother’s bigotry was larger than she was. When she recovered her wits, we fought. We screamed at each other over the phone line; we said horrible things to each other. The upshot was that I told her I did not want her talking like this to my children, that I had not raised them with such ideas, then I told her I wouldn’t talk to her either, until she apologized for her bigoted statements.

That was the last time we spoke.

My mother died the following year. I did not know she had been sick. My family didn’t tell me until the day of her funeral; they thought I was being hard-headed, that I had thrown away my family for my principles. Perhaps I did. But there are some things I will not abide—and prejudice is on the top of that list. A family that promoted bigotry was not a family I wanted to belong to. My mother, and our relationship, was sacrificed for that belief.

Rosa Parks might have understood. There are just some lines you don’t cross, and some thoughts you can’t allow to be part of your life. I lost my mother; lost the chance to tell her one last time I loved her, (which I did, no matter how she felt,) lost the opportunity to show her that one could live without being bigoted. I was not a good example. I was hard-headed. But I stuck to my principles, and paid for them. It hurts, to this day.

But so does prejudice. It hurts us all. It hurts us more.

Thank you, Rosa Parks. Thank you for sacrificing your freedom so that the law could change. Thank you for being a decent person, standing up for your rights as a human being. Thank you for living a long time, and making us all aware, if nothing else, of what you did for us.

Rest in Peace at last.