51-Shame

So there I am, standing in line at the customer service desk in the local Wal-Mart, waiting to return an item. There are a couple of people in front of me and it gives me a chance to engage in a favorite pastime, imagining what it must be like to be somebody else living in America in the 21st Century.
There’s this sour, dissatisfied middle-aged white lady waiting to return some item that is of too poor a quality for her delicate tastes. She probably went on and on about it, last night, to her poor husband, who was thinking “you did buy it at Wal-Mart you old bat, what were you expecting”. But saying that would only make things worse so he just keeps his opinions to himself, agrees with what she says, and pours his heart out to his mistress on weekends.
It’s hard to picture her as a laughing carefree young girl. Or to imagine a time when she wasn’t filled with a rage that can only find expression as haughty disgust. She won’t have any trouble with the exchanges clerk. Anyone can see this Trouble coming and most just give way to her to shorten the time they have to spend with her. In the end, she’s just very sad and lonely.
The clerk burst out of high school last spring and is getting her first taste of the adulthood for which she has spent her entire young life longing. Now that it is here, she finds most of her energy spent dealing with the feeling of being overwhelmed and incompetent and afraid. And resisting the strong desire to move on back home and sleep in late on Saturday mornings and worry about boys and hairdos and weekend plans instead of rent and light bills and Laundromats.
Next in line is a Black guy in his early thirties, dressed in work clothes and who has learned not to make eye contact with anyone, especially this large lot of white woman Trouble in front of him. He has learned from long experience that Black guys in Wal-Mart get a lot farther with deference than with assertiveness. Sure it’s the 21st Century and all, but still, at this level of reality, little has changed from when his father was a young man and his father before him. Besides, he’s not here to argue philosophy; he only wants to exchange the batteries he bought for his wife’s camera. Her sister is coming over this weekend and they love to take pictures of each other’s families. He had better come home with the right batteries.
I thought about the discrimination I see everyday in our little 1950’s Mayberry of a town. While our elected officials here in South Carolina debated the flag controversy last summer, this scene was being played out in towns all over South Carolina and all over this country for that matter. Maybe the players were Hispanic or Philippino or Indian, but the scene is the same. And for those of you who don’t know it, the disagreement is not about the Confederate flag in South Carolina. It is about hatred and small-mindedness and power and control and money. And it’s not over, not by a long shot. The Civil War and the 60’s were just the racial pot boiling over. It simmers on quietly.
So just before my son and I went to a Braves baseball game recently in Atlanta, Georgia, the birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr., I ordered a copy of his autobiography. I was reading, in the quiet of the morning, what Dr. King had written of the blatant segregation that was the law of the land in the 40’s and 50’s. But he also wrote about the economic deprivation that was the rule, if not the law. His efforts were designed to change that injustice as well.
As we drove by his burial place on Auburn drive on a sunny southern July day, I recalled with shame that part of what my elected representatives had agreed upon in the Confederate flag settlement. It was to force South Carolina state employees to choose one of two State holidays next year. We have to choose either Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday or choose Confederate Memorial day. Shame on them for making this ancient division an active part of the law. Again.
All of this was running through my mind and my heart as the White Lady got her chance. She berated the poor clerk, the Wal-Mart and the general state of the Universe as the clerk filled out her refund slip as quickly as possible. The young clerk took it personally and when the Lady was done with her, she was feeling very small.
So when the Black guy got his turn, I almost thought he would turn away at the futility of it. But he didn’t. He stepped right up, and the clerk impatiently addressed him as “sir”. But when she said sir to him, all who heard her knew that she had called him the ancient “boy” just because she could and it made her feel better, feel stronger. She poured all the hatred she had just received from the Lady onto this man.
His conditioned gaze fell to his shoes, and we could both feel the playing field rising up steeply in front of him. He remembered his father criticizing him and his teachers treating him like he was stupid even though he was a LOT smarter then most of them. And he felt the lump forming in his throat, making him stutter and sweat, and after a few gallant tries, he just gave up and just walked out.
I stood there dazed for a little bit but after a minute, I stepped forward. The clerk used the same word “Sir”, but this time it had that conspiratorial tone and meant, “You know how those people are…”
And that is when I heard the whisper in my ear, from far back in the years and a million miles away from this scene in time…
It was Dr. King looking us right in the eye and in his strong and fearless voice saying over and over and over…

“I have a dream…”

Dave Seward
October 2000