“Well, I never saw a child with such a conscience!” Aunt Violet exclaimed to my parents, when I was about three. No one remembers what I had done to evoke my great-aunt’s comment, but her authority, as one who had cared for many children, was deemed impeccable. Apparently, then, my passion for the right and the good was kindled early and needed only a bit of fanning to begin to blaze. My middle-class family was respectful and caring. We attended the United Church and helped others; the idea of writing up the Ten Commandments on two tablet-shaped sheets of paper and taping them to my bedroom bookcase, however, was entirely my own. I doubt I knew at age eight what a “graven image” was, let alone “adultery.” But the French provincial gold trim on the two bookcase doors looked irresistibly like Moses’ stone tablets, as rendered in my red leatherette illustrated Bible. It seemed as right and natural to ponder these ancient, obscure injunctions on my bookcase as to gaze at the graceful ballerinas twirling on my pink bedroom wallpaper.
I learned that a keen conscience never goes on vacation. In 1970, when I was ten, we took a one-week family trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I not only noticed that all the hotel guests were white and all the maids were black, I obsessed about it. I watched these women in their green cotton uniforms line up to board the city bus that would take them away from the beach to … well, I had no idea, but I was sure it was not to comfort and luxury. Their weary eyes worried my soul. I decided, as grandly as a ten-year-old could, that the racial construction of the American South needed immediate and serious attention. As a start, I left little notes for the maids who cleaned our room each day: “You are very nice.” “White people and black people are equal.” The maids did not reply.
Undaunted, and assisted by the “Stories of Famous People” volume of my family’s Children’s Encyclopedia set, I took as my hero Harriet Tubman, the amazing Underground Railroad organizer. That year in Grade 5, I made her the subject of my speech for the annual school public-speaking contest. No one got as fired up about Harriet as I had hoped, but I felt some satisfaction in getting the word out. The American South may or may not have felt the benefit of my zeal.
It was in these elementary-school speaking contests that I realized the first thing I had not been told. When I gave speeches on freedom fighters and racial prejudice, I got a lukewarm response. When, in Grade 8, I spoke on the joys and trials of living with siblings, I won all the way to the county level, where I took second prize. I also took the point: people prefer whimsy to moral rant. I had no idea that my noble ideals of truth and justice, which were linked for me to a sweeping love of humanity, would in fact alienate me from many people. I began to realize that I would never be entirely at home in the world as long as my care for it involved my inexorable conscience.
There was no turning back, though. Others aided and abetted. When I was a young teen, someone at church suggested that I should consider becoming an ordained minister. I resisted as long as I could—it was hard enough being an uncool teenager without this further embarrassment. I was not a pious believer, and I did not know how to deal with the Bible’s contradictions. A few religious studies courses later, both piety and the Bible were duly deconstructed, and I was hooked. The more I studied, the more I got involved in the life of the United Church and the wider social struggle, the more I learned to analyze critically my beloved world—all for its own good, of course. I became more truly what I had always been, a woman who loves the world too much—with nary a self-help book to guide me.
So began my real life of alienation. While I was still studying theology, two former school classmates, young men who had, as far as I could tell, never taken any interest in me whatsoever, took me aside at a class reunion, sat me down and tried to talk me out of my vocational choice.
“You have real talents,” they insisted. “We still remember the siblings speech. Don’t throw your life away like this!” The pleading in their voices told me they were sure I was about to follow a charismatic leader into a distant forest and drink poisoned Kool-Aid.
Once ordained, I became, for some, a member of the “moral police,” those unpleasant people who take offence at raunchy jokes and censure alcohol consumption. Not that I do either, but the assumption that clergy exist to make people feel guilty is entrenched in a culture that has long abandoned any actual fear of organized religion. How many times have I suffered through the phrase “I know I shouldn’t swear in front of a minister, but …?” What I would like to say, but don’t, is that I don’t mind the swearing, but would they please apologize for driving those gas-guzzling, air-polluting sport-utility vehicles?
For others, my affiliation with a progressive religious group means that I represent a lot of bleeding-heart causes like feminism, gay/lesbian ordination and women’s reproductive choice. Nearly everything I stand for could be off-putting to a good number of people, especially other Christians. I could not possibly have Jesus Christ as my personal saviour and call God “Mother,” could I? Like many of my United Church minister colleagues, I became wary of telling airline seatmates and other strangers in close quarters my true profession. Like other leftists, I learned not to announce my political preferences unless I wanted a battle. It is harder, though, to hide the fact that one has ordered the vegetarian meal.
Something else happened as I entered theological school. I learned that I was not alone, that in fact many of us are carried through life by overeager consciences. I met people even more zealous than I, people who viewed my lifestyle and commitments as practically wanton. I discovered groups whose members crusade for their causes with a boldness that I could never match. Animal lovers, tree huggers, pacifist communists, anti-poverty activists—they had shaped what for me had been half formed, private anxieties into organizations that could issue tax receipts!
Of course, the problem with finding fellow travellers of this sort is that we tend to complicate one another’s lives and together alienate ourselves even further from everyone else. Every cause embraced adds to the list of products to boycott, meetings to attend and things to fret over. We exhaust one another with conscientious possibilities, even as we revel in our common quest. There is also the challenge from outside, from the Powers That Be who would delight to see us split with each other over some matter of principle. Still, what a gift to find myself a part of a long and vital legacy, to learn that I did not invent, but only inherited this overwhelming sense of moral duty. A second-century document describing the Christian ethical life told followers of this new religion to live as “resident aliens” in the Roman Empire. And so some of us do.
It did not take India long to remind me of my small place in the order of resident aliens. I already knew that this subcontinent features whole religions shaped around views of life’s sanctity that would put my non-killing ways to shame. India defeated an empire with non-violent resistance. I already knew that I had much more to learn than to teach here. My first glimpse of this ancient land, awash in humanity—people walking, riding, pedalling, peeing, praying, begging, meditating—confirmed that this place was far too complex for any analysis I might attempt in several years, let alone two weeks. Even in the midst of the deepest poverty I had ever seen, even as the West rained terror just over the northwestern horizon in the opening volleys of the Gulf War, India invited my well-worked conscience to take a holiday. And then it gently taught me its special lesson.
The residents of Vaikalpalayam speak Tamil. On our first visit, an interpreter facilitated the introductions. The women of the village had a question that the interpreter hesitated to translate. Why, they wanted to know, do you women wear such ugly clothes? Sure enough, our sensible beige pants and drab T-shirts paled in the face of the Indian women’s saris, threadbare but bold in blue, purple and green prints. Tiny girls, already seasoned labourers, wore delicate pink flowers in their hair as they headed to work in the fields. One of the women produced a small red dot, a bindi, and pulling me close, fixed it on my forehead. Yes, the women agreed, that was a start.
&nbs
p; The next day, I visited the village on my own. We used sign language and my few feeble words of Tamil to converse. I learned that one of the women was named Shandra, which means “moon,” and sounded much like my name, Sandra. This similarity gave us a special affinity. A young girl shook off her plastic bangles and handed them to Shandra, who then slid them over my fingers and onto my wrist. Indeed, the women nodded, that is much better.
On my last day to visit the village, I walked there slowly, not quite ready to say goodbye, or even poitavarum—“I go, and come again.” I stopped to pick up a red hibiscus blossom that was lying in the dust and tried to put it in my hair.
“Hello!” called a voice. I turned and saw a man standing at the gate of his small middle-class home. “Would you like some roses?” he asked. I followed him into his garden, where his wife cut red and pink roses from lush bushes. Then they sat me on a kitchen chair, and the woman expertly attached the roses to my hair.
This latest improvement evoked vigorous nods of approval from the women of the village. Bindis, bangles and flowers—finally I was beginning to brighten up. As we bade farewell, Shandra pointed to the sky. She was giving me a token, the moon. It would shine, silver and calm, as a reminder of our brief friendship. Its thin rays would form a fragile link between one of the wealthiest people in the world and one of the poorest. And it would be an emblem of another thing I had not been told, or perhaps the thing I had until then simply failed to hear. With conscience, with solidarity, there is also kindness and beauty; there must be kindness and beauty. I tucked that thread into my hair, alongside the roses, and waved goodbye to the wise women of Vaikalpalayam.
One of
a Bunch
Sandra Birdsell
Whenever I’m asked what it was like to grow up in a large family there is nothing I can liken the experience to, so I just reply, “It was interesting.” It was not an event like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, albeit at times the ride was tumultuous. The awareness that my family was large and I was growing up in it was a gradual one; however, the experience must have been more than interesting, because when I was twelve years old I attempted to write a novel about a large family—my family, the Bartlettes. I had four brothers and six sisters and shared a room and bed with three of those sisters. Finding the time and space to be alone with a book seemed impossible, so why I thought I might be able to write one is likely attributed to an inherited trait that my father jokingly referred to as “infernal optimism.”
The house we lived in, in Morris, Manitoba, was rather ordinary, a two-storey, wood-frame affair with a lean-to porch stuck onto the back where, in summer, we would bathe and our mother would set her loaves of bread to rise. In fall and winter it was taken over by a mound of skis and skates, boots, snowshoes and occasionally the carcasses of rabbits and fowl hung from the rafters amid the bundles of herbs our mother had strung up to dry in the heat of summer. There had once been a piano back there, an old Steinway with lifting black veneer and chipped ivories—the ones not pried off by little fingers. The keys were marked with large letters, written in grease pencil by a child determined to teach herself the notes. The house overflowed with a clutter of children’s belongings; its whole appearance was like a boot, an illustration for the nursery rhyme about the woman who had so many children she didn’t know what to do.
I imagined the main character of my novel, the family, as being blocky-shaped, a violet-grey colour with a single head and twenty-two arms and legs sticking out from it. That my parents should be included in this shape hadn’t occurred to me yet. Their lives seemed disconnected from ours and were lived off stage. While we, the Bartlette children, ruled the world, our father worked at his poolroom barbershop and our mother was a shadowy and often muddled person, a head-and-shoulders study framed by a kitchen window. She would call for us from that window, call all our names, sometimes twice, until she eventually hit on the person she wanted or in a sputter of frustration threw up her hands in defeat.
The perception that our family was a blocky, violet-coloured shape with multiple appendages took hold one Halloween night as we went tramping from door to door. When our shouts for treats subsided and the door opened, I began to notice that invariably the person would exclaim, “Oh, look, it’s the Bartlette children! The Bartlette family is here.” I had always thought that our numbers made us special; certainly the size of our family made us different from other families in the small town, and I was proud of that difference. And yet I began to feel resentful. As the evening progressed my resentment grew, and when next we were greeted at the door as the Bartlette Family, I made myself taller, poked my head out from the centre of the troop and blurted, “I’m Sandra.”
If the woman at the door had heard, my declaration didn’t evoke a flicker of response. But from my siblings I felt a sudden stiffness, caught their looks of disapproval, and as we went down the sidewalk their pointed silence left me feeling stranded. We returned home and gathered in the dining room to empty our loot bags on the floor; gradually their miffed tightness dissipated. Under the supervision of the oldest sister, our Halloween treats were divided equally, down to cutting up sticks of chewing gum. I received my share, knowing I’d been forgiven for the crime of wanting to be noticed apart from them. That was when I envisioned our family’s blocky shape and colour, felt that I was melded into the unit, safe, but invisible.
Then a stay in bed for an entire winter with rheumatic fever gave me the opportunity to read novels and entertain the idea that my position of fifth child among eleven siblings afforded the best vantage point to view a family and write about it. A particular brother figured prominently in my first work in progress, selected perhaps for his verve and charm. Unlike my oldest brother, he rode one of those narrow-wheeled bicycles that were just beginning to make an appearance in the windows of hardware stores. My oldest brother had opted for a sturdier bicycle with proper fenders, balloon tires and a wide, sprung saddle. I noticed how one brother was fleet-footed, a rolling stone, while the other went about in a quiet determination to learn to play whatever musical instrument he could earn money to buy.
Beyond my bedroom window, a sister climbed a tree and began her watch for unsuspecting pedestrians coming along the sidewalk. Another sister was content to putter in the kitchen and wondered aloud where our mother kept the pinch salt the cookbook called for. I recorded this all while perched uneasily on the side of the bed scribbling in the notebook, feeling more than a pinch of guilt. The doctor had pronounced my heart to be fit as a fiddle, untouched by “romantic fever,” as my father called it, and my name had been returned to the roster of the many and varied chores.
The chores were assigned according to how we were bent, and I was bent for the outdoors, for tasks that expended an overabundance of energy. I could stack a woodpile as expertly as my father, chop kindling and spade the garden. On Saturdays there were eleven pairs of shoes that required shining, mud to be scraped from the trousers my brothers wore on a day of fishing at the river. Kitchen chairs were to be hauled outside, upended, leg bottoms pared clean with a knife, scatter mats pounded against the house and dragged through the snow to brighten them. By the time my sisters and I had learned to tie our shoelaces, most hours away from school were occupied with these tasks. I thought that my mother must lie awake at night imagining ways to keep us all busy, to keep me from realizing my potential to be a basketball champ, a diva, an acrobatic clown.
Music was an acceptable diversion from these chores. When my oldest and most beautiful sister wasn’t hearth keeping, she was at the warped, out-of-tune piano on the porch, playing “Ebb Tide” and wishing for music lessons. Chording to my father’s fiddle-jig music on a Saturday night, my oldest brother would be picking on a banjo and puffing on a mouth organ at the same time. A Saturday bath on the porch, a tub of curdled water tipped onto a flower bed, and the lean-to was transformed into a music hall. I imagined the Bartlette music spilling into the street, across the garden, being heard with amazement.
> One day a student of music came to visit us. She was from Frankfurt and had come to our town wanting to view the devastation of a recent and terrible flooding of the Red River, as many strangers had done all that summer. A CBC radio producer had also visited and interviewed our mother amid the ruins of our house while we children squatted around tubs of soapy water scrubbing a film of silt from dishes and sealer jars. “Mrs. Bartlette had all the children busy at work,” I heard the interviewer report to the country. Mrs. Bartlette had also been written about in a newspaper, a woman stubbornly refusing to vacate her flooded house, finally being forced to leave it from a second-storey window. And so we were not surprised when the German student came knocking at our door.
At the sound of music, we were drawn from all corners of the house and yard to gather at the piano as the student played a Chopin étude, amazed at the music coming from the old Steinway. It was a riveting moment that transported us from the dirt and filth of the floodwaters and the cluttered porch where we stood listening in awe. In the silence that followed, the wooden lean-to suddenly became less than ordinary, and I slunk away along with the others, avoiding the disquiet in one another’s eyes. I harboured a growing suspicion that the piano and my most beautiful sister, and perhaps all the rest of us, were not realizing full potential. Unless our parents’ budget could allow for special lessons for all, an individual request for such had to be denied.
And yet, I began to notice that we Bartlette children were very different from one another, even the twins who sometimes dressed alike—one had insisted that our father crop her black hair short and feather it in a ducktail, while the other wore her auburn hair in a pageboy style, which she meticulously arranged every morning in front of the only mirror in our bedroom. Photographs the twins had clipped from movie magazines competed for wall space with the artwork of another sister and with my collection of calendars. We bickered over whose taste in art should dominate the walls, whose belongings took more than their share of space in the bureau and closet and whose turn it was to use the mirror. In winter the frozen laundry was brought in from outdoors and hung in rooms throughout the house. Our room became chilly and damp each washday Monday, so one thing that went without any debate was whose turn it was to switch off the bedroom light—a truce became necessary for the sake of needing to snuggle for warmth.
Dropped Threads 2: More of What We Aren't Told Page 22
