This must be my week for reading irritating letters in magazines. I saw this one in the therapist's waiting room last night, in an old (February) issue of Good Housekeeping:
"I'm one of the few African Americans living in my area. Several times I've sat next to a woman at the movie theater or restaurant who has then shifted her purse to the other side -- as though I'm going to steal her wallet. What can I do or say?"
The answer was that maybe these women were just trying to give her more room, etc. etc. I'm not saying yes or no. I'm saying that this brought back a memory.
About 15 years ago, one of the veteran English teachers at school and I went to some kind of diversity in literature workshop. We were, in fact, the only people in the room who were not "of color," whatever that actually means. Anyway, at some point in the day, one of the stories we were asked to read was a very short piece called, I believe, "The Pocketbook." I can't find it on the Internet right now; maybe someone out there knows it. It was written in the forties or fifties, I think, by a very well-known African-American writer, although I can't remember who. The story's only a page or two long. I had read it before once, maybe when I was in high school.
The essence of the story is that there is an African-American cleaning woman, perhaps in her fifties, working in the apartment of an elderly Jewish woman, for whom she has worked for years. Whenever the old lady moves from room to room while the cleaning woman is there, she takes her pocketbook with her. Ultimately, the cleaning woman shows her employer the error of her bigoted Jewish ways by carrying her own pocketbook with her from room to room, at which point the old woman realizes that she has inadvertantly been insulting someone she actually trusts and thinks well of, and she apologizes.
My colleague and I looked around the room and saw with wonder that every other person there -- all women, by the way -- saw the truth in this story. I'm not sure exactly which truth they saw; to me, it was anti-Semitic, among other things; I didn't care for that of course. The truth they all saw, I think, was that white and/or Jewish people inherently do not trust African-Americans and behave accordingly. Their truth was that in real life, this happens all the time.
We were stunned, and at first couldn't even explain to the rest of them why. I guess they thought we were being defensive. What we finally got across to them was this: just because these old ladies do this when their cleaning ladies are around, it doesn't mean they don't do it all the rest of the time, too. It has nothing to do with ethnicity on either side, I think, and less with prejudice. It has to do with the old-woman-needing-her-stuff-nearby thing. The perception of the African-American person in the room was that she was seeing it, so it must be related to her, it was being done because of her, it was prejudice. When I stood up and announced to the group that my own mother did this in my house every time she was there -- carried her giant pocketbook with her everywhere, including the bathroom -- they didn't believe me. My colleague (btw, the child of Holocaust survivors) said that her mother did the same thing.
Imagine their surprise when they finally got it. It wasn't bigotry, prejudice. Just a little bit of the old lady crazies. It wasn't all about them. Why do people always think that, whatever it is, it's all about them?
Imagine that.
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I'm watching Roseanne
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