As is almost always the case, it began with the atmosphere. I do not like heat – I am terrified of it in its extremes, actually – but the summer here has been so cool and cloudy that a clear blue sky and bare feet on warmed concrete sidewalks and floorboards out on the porch and shorts and a t-shirt and that honey-colored glow that comes about only when the sunlight makes it through the front door and seeps, almost like water, across the living room floor, amplifying not only the grace of the grain but every single micro-speck of dust as well – I liked every bit of it.
I’ve been planting again. I am trying to break myself of the habit of putting plants in right beside one another and then waiting to see what happens. There is a triangle of plants in the front corner of the yard, and then around it I’ve arranged – I think – plants of various height and width and texture and color. I’m training a couple of vines on the fence, or trying to. This particular corner of the yard, as it happens, is situated a few feet from the intersection of two streets, the corner on which I live, and my goal, I suppose, is to create a wall of growing, blossoming, climbing, evolving plants.
Because my front porch, for various reasons, is public territory. I think all front porches should be to a certain extent, but in my neighborhood, on my corner, if you are looking for a place to sit and read or ponder or simply experience the elements by focusing on them, by feeling them, my front porch is not the place. Cars and trucks speed and screech through the intersection. The sound of sirens is so normal it’s almost not even noticeable. There are barking dogs and slamming doors and people with phenomenally loud voices yelling and shouting and repeating and then firing up power tools of one sort or another and throwing two-by-fours around their yards and then yelling some more because whomever it is being yelled at cannot hear what’s being yelled. I think it’s important to know your neighbors, to be known to your neighbors, to be available if needed, but there are many neighbors – there always have been, regardless of my whereabouts – who believe that if I am visible I am waiting for them to tell me something. I often want to say, This book, the one in my lap that is open, is not a prop. I am reading it.
So a few weekends ago I was sitting out on the porch on an uncommonly quiet Saturday afternoon. There were plenty of things that needed to be done, all of which I was ignoring, because I was mesmerized not only by the weather but by the most recent translation of Anna Karenina. It’s a love story with a lot of money troubles and class conflict and political posturing woven in so when the noise began it occurred to me not as an interruption of my reading but as an enhancement.
Hundreds of black people arrived within half an hour. The women wore dresses mostly covered with flowing white wraps. Some of the men wore the wraps as well, but their clothing seemed more exposed: They dressed in pants that were either black or very dark gray, and either white or pale blue shirts and solid-colored ties. The children were miniature versions of their (I presume) parents, sans the white wraps. They arrived, as they do every weekend (though usually on Sunday mornings) in larger-than-normal vehicles polished to the point of shine. As I read about some of the finer points about the difference between society in Petersburg as compared to that in Moscow, I imagined the vehicles whooshing around corners and into parking spaces as stagecoaches. Look, I thought to myself, it’s Darya Alexandrovna! Look, it’s Countess Lydia, and Kitty, and … Anna.
These people are from Africa. According to one source – dubious at best – they are Ethiopians. On this particular Saturday, rather than going to the church building to the west of my house, they went the opposite direction, one block to the east, and that was where the festivities began. There were booming drums and chanting and clapping and singing with words in a language that I may not know but that I felt I understood. And it could be because I was really enjoying my book, or because the day was so glorious, or that I was experiencing that rare sensation of feeling like I’m accomplishing more by willfully accomplishing nothing (I don’t know what to call that), but for these reasons and perhaps much more, the festive ruckus only added to the harmony I’d already established with the day.
Until, that is, I picked up a tid-bit of conversation among a group of women getting into a SUV across the street and realized that the celebration was, of all things, a wedding. And that, I’m embarrassed to say, changed everything.
This is terrible, I think, but it’s true: The first thing that came into my mind was how dare these people, who were not even born in this country, have the right to get married when I don’t? Isn’t that gross? I think so. I think it’s even more gross that it went downhill from there. I could not look into their faces – any of them, their children included – without seeing an enemy. How dare they flaunt their privileges in a neighborhood where plenty of folks live who are denied them? And so on and so forth until I reached rock bottom – my definition of it, anyhow – and that was when I realized that this is what happens when politics and religion are used to divide people into camps. What happens is that people – me included – disappear into camps and become tribal and start looking at others not as people but as enemies who must, must be conquered. If you are after my food – or I believe you are – I need to either kill you or starve to death. I was horrified by myself, honestly, but at the same time I have a whole new brand of respect for the people who orchestrate that sort of shit – Christians, usually – because I am here to tell you, based on recent personal experience, it works.
