Crazy Fortune 13: Flashback
The Salvation Army Foster Parent Program where I worked was located off Union Square, on a quiet street in a quaint brownstone. Nearby was Stuyvesant Park. I ended up working on the ground floor, which was located halfway below street level and from my desk, through the high windows, I could watch people’s feet as they walked by, along with the occasional dog.
My supervisor, Helga, was a middle-aged, six-foot-tall nurse who had been born in Latvia, but lived most of her life in the States. She smelled pleasantly like the inside of a pocketbook—a combination of lipstick, powder, breath mints, and worn leather. And she had a wonderfully nurturing character. An interesting ethnic hierarchy existed at this agency, in that the social workers and professional staff were predominantly Anglo (the psychiatrist was French, however, with a heavy French accent), the clerical staff was predominantly Puerto Rican, and the foster children and parents were primarily black, of either African or Caribbean descent.
The composition of the clerical staff ended up being emotionally charged for me because of an incident that had happened about ten years ago when I was starting graduate school and living with Richard in Massachusetts. I’ll digress here to tell that story, as it’s a powerful one that made a lasting mark on my psyche, one which the staff here unknowingly helped to heal.
We had moved to Amherst from Little Rock (Richard’s home town and our place of residence our first year as newlyweds), renting, for the summer, one of the hellacious tin cans that served as married student housing at U. Mass. (I always describe our place by likening it to the metal box that they put prisoners in to punish them in the movie, Cool Hand Luke.) The layout was a “C,” with the living room in front and the kitchen in a hallway that connected to a bedroom and bath in the back. The place had four windows— two in the living room and two in the bedroom—optimally positioned to get no airflow going whatsoever. It turned out to be a beastly hot summer, and of course there was no air-conditioning. Richard and I spent most of the summer when we weren’t in class sitting around drinking ice water in our underwear and hanging out at the Student Union bar, which did have air-conditioning, nursing a cheap draft beer for as long as we could.
Kathleen and Joe (Richard’s sister, who was also my best friend from college, and her husband-to-be) came through to visit near the end of the summer. They were getting ready to attend the University of Connecticut in Storrs (Joe for medical school, Kathleen for graduate school in Anthropology), which was an-hour-and-a-half drive away, and we thought it would be a good idea for the four of us to rent some place halfway between Amherst and Storrs, come autumn. Springfield, Massachusetts seemed to be the best location, though it meant that Kathleen and Joe had a longer commute than we did, but we found what we thought was a cool apartment, the majority of the bottom floor of an old Victorian where we were allowed to have a dog. Kathleen and Joe had acquired Jessie the Wonderdog a year previously, a malamute-lab mix with beautiful markings and a terrific personality.
Richard had found work at a gas station in Amherst, so he was at work when Kathleen and Joe and I decided to buy some used furniture for our new place. We picked up a hitchhiker while we were out in Kathleen and Joe’s VW bus, and he suggested that we check out a nearby Goodwill. We were completely new in town—had only been there a few days—so we didn’t know much about the different neighborhoods. And we didn’t know that the day before, a white policeman had shot and killed an unarmed fourteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy in the Puerto Rican part of town. And that riots had ensued.
Because of the route we took to the Goodwill, we didn’t drive through any of the areas where rioting had been going on. We found our destination and parked on the street. When we got out, the vibe was intense. People were leaning out their tenement windows, restless and narrow-eyed, and we seemed to be attracting a fair amount of attention. I felt extremely uncomfortable, but I wrote those feelings off as simply feeling out of place in such a poor section of town, especially one in which we were the minority. When we got out, Jessie jumped out with us, but Joe put her back in the bus.
“You stay here, girl,” he told her. “We’ll be back.”
She jumped out again.
“No, Jessie!” he said. “You stay.”
Once, more, she sprang out of the bus, whimpering now. I will never ignore animal behavior again, I can tell you that.
“That’s weird,” he said wonderingly. “I wonder what’s up.”
We should have all been wondering that. But being the clueless young people we were, we sauntered into the Goodwill to check things out. We found a great chair that we were considering taking home with us and Kathleen and I were giggling at a couple of the more eccentric items for sale when we noticed that Joe was nowhere in the store.
“Where did he get to?” Kathleen said, puzzled. Then she thought she heard something outside.
We went out to where the bus was parked. And there we found the VW in flames, a fire truck beside it while firemen hosed it down with fire hoses. An enormous crowd had gathered to watch the show, all Puerto Rican. The firemen were all white.
When Kathleen and I appeared, Jessie made a dash for us, crying hysterically. We held her in our arms while we took in the scene. The front windshield and one of the side windows had brick-sized holes smashed through them, presumably where Molotov cocktails had been thrown. How Jessie had managed to squeeze herself through one of those holes, we couldn’t imagine. While we huddled there, holding Jessie, the crowd turned their attention to us. Soon, we were surrounded.
“Pigs!” someone shouted. “Pigs!” shouted someone else. Soon, they were all screaming at us, their faces so transfigured by hate they didn’t look human. Some of them held bricks and bottles in their hands and they were edging closer, getting themselves worked up enough to start beating us to death.
We were in shock, of course. It was one of those horrible times when everything seemed to happen in slow motion. We could see that some sort of threshold would need to be reached for someone to throw the first brick or take the first swipe at us with a bat or bottle—humans aren’t naturally wired, I don’t believe, to kill innocent people. But we could see that this tipping point was dangerously close; we were seconds away from becoming dead bodies.
Bizarrely, the firemen were laughing, probably from tension and from trying to diffuse the tension. They were angry with us for being in this part of town, risking our lives and theirs. “Don’t you watch television?” one of them yelled at us. “Don’t you listen to the radio?”
Well, we didn’t have a television at this time, and the only person who had been listening to the radio since we moved to Springfield was Richard. He was the only one who knew about the riots and he hadn’t been around to tell us not to come to this part of town.
We didn’t know what to do; we simply squeezed Jessie in our arms all the tighter, while the crowd inched closer and closer, screaming all the while, now spitting at us.
We were torn between wanting to maintain some kind of eye contact with individuals in the crowd, to try to appeal to their humanity, and closing our eyes so that we wouldn’t see what horrifying development might come next. We sensed that trying to run away would only inflame the crowd and incite their predatory instincts. But gazing into the glazed eyes and feral faces of the mob just increased my terror. A mob, I realized with a sickening feeling, is not made up of individuals, once a group of people becomes a mob. I had closed my eyes to pray when two of the firemen muscled their way through the crowd and shouted at us.
“The fire’s out!” they yelled. “Get in your bus! See if it will start and get the hell out of here!”
We sprinted for the bus and jumped in while Joe frantically stuck his key in the ignition. We held our breath for it to start, and when it did, we held on while Joe peeled out as fast as he could. Small shards of glass came loose from the windshield and pelted us; we all grabbed our sunglasses and thrust them on to protect our eyes from the flying glass.
As we raced away, we drove through the section of town where the riots had taken place. We stared, open-mouthed, at the burned-out sockets in tenements and store fronts that were once people’s apartments and shops, at singed curtains that flapped forlornly in busted-out windows, at the shattered glass that littered the sidewalks.
When were far enough away, Joe pulled over to the side of the road and we removed as much of the broken glass as we could. Then we drove home in silence.
This did not augur well for our stay in Springfield, which ended up feeling somewhat cursed. The place that we rented appeared to be haunted with a malevolent presence (you can read about that in this blog entry,). Kathleen and Joe had two separate car accidents on icy roads while commuting to school, though thankfully neither one of them got hurt. Joe, not realizing what he was tying Jessie to in the back yard, tied her to the vent pipe for the furnace and one day, she pulled it out in a bid to escape, which sent melted snow cascading into the furnace and damaging it, shutting it down during frigid temperatures and necessitating expensive repairs. The commute ended up being too much for all of us, with our studies and jobs. So after our first semester, Richard and I moved back to Amherst (but not to married student housing) and Kathleen and Joe moved to Farmington, CT, which was close to Storrs.
Fast forward ten years to my assignment working at The Salvation Army Foster Parent Program: I wasn’t consciously thinking that I was afraid of Puerto Ricans, but such a terrifying experience inevitably leaves some scars. Fortunately, my most recent experience with a Hispanic population was in Costa Rica, where my experience was overwhelmingly positive. Having fallen in love with the music, culture, people, and language, when I had the opportunity to interact with the other clerical staff in Manhattan, I was just happy to be able to use my Spanish, and to help them out with transcriptions when they needed it. I hung out with the clerical staff at lunch and on my breaks, since that was my professional station, feeling at home with them and comfortable. These ladies (as well as the occasional Hispanic social worker) were kind, friendly, and affectionate. At some point, I asked them where they had moved from, and that was when I found out that they had come from Puerto Rico.
It was only then that I remembered that the mob that had almost killed me had been composed of Puerto Ricans. It was a sweet realization. Unsought and unexpected, here I was befriended by the same nationality that had spit on me and called me a pig. I’ve always known intellectually that you can’t brand an entire ethnic group, nationality, or culture with generalizations and stereotypes, but the reptilian brain, continually on alert for danger, doesn’t necessarily hold truck with such intellectualizations. This, however, ended up being a profoundly emotional experience that replaced the traumatic one from the past. I’ll always be beholden to the lovely Puerto Rican ladies at The Salvation Army for that.
Above: I’m working on some abstracts with my new camera.
Thursday, May 13, 2010