Charlottesville

I was born in Macon, Georgia. My parents were from Georgia, Texas and Alabama. No doubt we were Southerners. We waved the Confederate flag, sang Dixie and Robert E. Lee was our hero. Family mythology has it that we were somehow related to Lee’s horse, Traveller. Perhaps that is the indication of the rest of the story.

For all the Southernness of the American South, my story goes further south. My parents were true Southerners with a tinge of unique otherness for a post-WWII young married couple with a toddler, me! My toddling memories are at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Phoenix followed by sitting in a very large chair in a Mexican restaurant filled with every color crepe paper and getting sick in the back of a Pan Am plane. At some point, many stops later, we landed in Rio de Janeiro, none of which I remember. I do remember the apartment in Copacabana and the first apartment in Sao Paulo where I grew up, after which the memories become too many to innumerate. My family lived in Sao Paulo until I was 17, therefore safe to say I was raised in Brazil where we still waved the Confederate flag, sang Dixie and revered Robert E. Lee. Yankees, as far as we knew, were the enemies with blue bellies and pointed heads. Based on my parental teachings I won my 7th grade debate for separate but equal versus integration.

By 15, I was a mediocre student with raging hormones highly distracted from any idea of studying anything but boys, which landed me in Fairfax Hall, a young ladies’ finishing school in Waynesboro, VA, 25 miles from Charlottesville. Fairfax was housed in the former Queen Anne-style Brandon Hotel built in 1890. Arms and legs always had to be covered when entering the dining hall where we were served by black waitstaff in white jackets with whom we were not to interact. We had lights out and inspections. On Saturdays we received cadets from Fishburne Academy in the rec room while properly chaperoned. On Sundays we were piously dressed and taken off in groups to one or another church in Waynesboro. Out of classes, girls rode horses, played tennis, fenced and swam. Charlottesville was a field trip to roam the lush University of Virginia campus and tour the magnificent Monticello of our glorious founding father, Thomas Jefferson. We celebrated May Day on the rolling front lawn with a May queen and court in plantation era hoop skirts. We graduated in virginal white.

Minus the distractions, I discovered I had a mind, one that didn’t quite work in accordance with most of the other Southern young ladies. It took me awhile to understand why so many young Southern girls were in a Virginia boarding school. It was the ‘60s and girl’s boarding schools were blossoming from a very specific root: keep our porcelain skinned white girls away from those big black boys who were beginning to infiltrate public schools. Raised by parents who did not believe in integration in a country that, at the time, proclaimed racism did not exist, I was confused.

At the end of my Fairfax tenure, my family moved back to the USA-Kalamazoo, Michigan to be exact. Through their influence, I was placed in Kalamazoo College where I was even more of a misfit than at Fairfax. My identity thus became shaped. I joined picket lines. I made friends with the black students. I fell in love with the entire African continent listening to stories of juniors returning from their year abroad. Unprepared for the cultural reality of American college life, with parents who needed their firstborn to be a college graduate, I deliberately flunked out.

In Chicago and New York my lovers were Latino or Black. Not a deliberate choice but an inclination derived from a Brazilian upbringing. In those years, I learned ragged truths of these United States of America, not only Southern. I lived oppression by association. I began to understand systemic racism that blocked pathways and potential, interpersonal racism between people of differences, and internalized racism of self-hatred. I lived in a world of continual and vitriolic racism while still maintaining all the privileges of an attractive young white woman. Alone I was treated one way; with a black partner, I was treated another. I was vilified for my associations.

Today, as a senior citizen, this Charlottesville weekend has made me look back to where I came from and where I am. I have led a life that continued the path that developed on the streets of Chicago and New York. My daughters are Latinas, one lesbian, one straight. My grandchildren and great grandchildren are black. My life’s calling has been as a catalyst to empower others of all stripes, beliefs and orientations to break through the cages that hold them back to become workers in the fields of social justice.

All things once revered are broken inside of me. No longer is Charlottesville a field trip to admire Monticello and Thomas Jefferson. No longer is Charlottesville just a beautiful quiet university town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Charlottesville of my teenage vision is now a battleground. A battleground for social justice. “Charlottesville” is a charge. A screaming charge of “Forward” through those hills, that state, our nation to fight for justice that includes everyone, all Americans, justice that breaks through pre-conceived notions of white supremacy and power, justice that relinquishes icons created in pre-contextual ideologies that are no longer valid. The Charlottesville of my young ladies’ finishing school days must be dead and buried. Charlottesville is now our national metaphor for the fight we must all take up against every injustice: racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and theophobia. Let’s never give up on America, its people, its land and its soul.