Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  “At one point Immigration had raked the desert sands to a smooth surface. Perfectly flat and smooth. Why? They did this so they could count the wetbacks who came in during the night. That’s why I walked backward into America, to make it look like I was returning to Mexico.

  “I saw a dead man, hanging by his neck from a rope in the desert. I finally arrived at a train track. My cousin kept walking, but I risked hopping on a freight car to Los Angeles. That’s where I stayed for some years before moving here to North Carolina five years ago.”

  After a silence, Leah asked him, “America was nothing but ‘a grunt ’ to you as a teenager. What is it now?”

  José stretched out his arms to take in the house, the woodworking studio. “All of this,” he said. “And freedom. Opportunity. I love this country.”

  His response began as spontaneous and genuine, but by the time he got to “I love this country,” I sensed he was mouthing what you were supposed to say to Americans.

  On TV, the soap opera was over and the local news came on. Easter was on the way, and with it rumors of right-wing groups who were planning to once again impede Siler City Latinos from carrying statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary through town. Since 2000, Siler City had been a crossroads of US immigration issues, ever since David Duke, former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, had given a speech there in front of four hundred people denouncing illegal immigrants. Some supporters waved American flags; others, Confederate flags. Most Latinos stayed in their homes that day, afraid to come out to counterprotest. Duke was assisted by the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi group, and most of the supporters were from out of town. Racial tensions in Siler City were high because thousands of Latinos had been moving there and taking jobs in the poultry industry, and the city government had written the federal government for help in removing undocumented workers. Days after Duke’s speech, the local Latino Catholic church was vandalized.

  Since then, a group of white and black parents and the school board have tried to transfer undocumented Mexican students out of local public schools, and Duke has held several more rallies. Siler City has become even more racially divided. In 2006, protestors stormed the door of the town hall to ask for stricter immigration laws, some shouting, “I pay my taxes!”

  José looked out the window toward the Thompson farm, toward Siler City beyond, a huge frown etched deeply into his forehead. I asked him what was wrong.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “A veces con un poco de miedo, no más.” — “Just a little afraid sometimes.”

  IN GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA, in November 1979, the state’s Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party killed five of Jackie’s young friends in cold blood while they were protesting racism. Luckily, Jackie herself arrived late to the protest. To date, none of the killers have been prosecuted for what occurred in the Greensboro massacre. The Greensboro police were sympathetic to the KKK and weren’t about to turn in their buddies.

  As Jackie told me when we first met, her father was a Klansman, and he used to rally like the rest in a pointy white hood. Nevertheless, Jackie keeps several framed photographs of him in the 12 × 12. While sitting in Jackie’s great-grandmother’s rocking chair, I once examined an incredibly tender photo of her parents. Jackie’s mother sits in the same rocking chair, looking melancholic, while her father, dressed in a pair of jeans and flannel shirt, stands beside her, hand on her shoulder, looking directly into the camera. The look in his eyes is childlike. On the other side of the 12 × 12 is another photo of her dad. Another is up in the loft, framed by her bed. She loves him.

  During my time in the 12 × 12, I kept wondering: How could this be? Jackie’s dad went against every principle she lives for. In the days after my lunch with José, as Siler City prepared to deal with more anti-Latino riots, after witnessing Mike Thompson and his sons descend in anger on those Mexican and Guatemalan teenagers, after visiting Siler City’s chicken coop and stumbling across the relics of slavery in the surrounding countryside, I felt myself become first annoyed, then angry toward Jackie. How could she turn the other cheek to all this?

  These people — the ones who killed her friends in Greensboro, KKK members like her dad — they had to be brought to justice, didn’t they? A mix of fear, resentment, and bitterness grew in me, and there was nothing in the 12 × 12 solitude to distract me from it. So I did what I often did at Jackie’s: I walked.

  Almost immediately, I realized where part of my feelings came from. I’ve been physically attacked three times in my life, in Providence, Boston, and Amsterdam. All three times by gangs of young men. In Providence, the attack on me was one of twenty-seven by African American gang members, who were targeting white and Asian college students as part of their initiation. In Boston and Amsterdam, I might easily have been killed or crippled had it not been for luck: the police happened to be passing by. In both these cases, the perpetrators were arrested and prosecuted for violent assault, but eventually they got off without jail time.

  Violent attack is barbarian and inexcusable, and I understood what José must have felt, what North Carolina Latinos and blacks, then and now, must feel: extremely vulnerable and outnumbered by a violent group. I vividly recalled my assailants’ furious faces, their shouting, grabbing me, punching me to the ground, and kicking my skull and rib cage. They deserved punishment! Forgiveness seemed little more than another word for weakness.

  These thoughts pounding in my head, I suddenly stopped walking. There before me, a box turtle was stranded between the rails. His head came in and out of his wrinkly neck. I loved box turtles as a child on Long Island, discovering them hidden amid the fallen oak leaves in the forest patches near my house. I lifted him up and placed him in the woods. His feet found grass, and he bolted forward. So did I. Onward. Something raw rose up in me, a desire for revenge against the people who had attacked me, who continue to attack others. I walked more briskly, then jogged, then ran hard. Nature absorbed some of my pain. A teal blue sky wisped with clouds to the south, a washed-out indigo blue to the north, and a million points of light green, buds and tiny leaves, bursting forth everywhere. I walked into it, walked for five or six miles, and kept walking.

  I wasn’t going anywhere in particular; I just let my legs lead me. Slowly, my jaw, held tight, began to slacken. I tried to focus on the present moment. I realized I was hardly aware of my surroundings because I was so wrapped up in my inner angst. Off the tracks and into the woods. I felt tingly, sweaty, breathing hard, at first from exercise, but then from a beautiful growing realization: I don’t have to be controlled by lower-order feelings like anger and resentment, even when they burn right through me. Cradle the feeling, release it, and come back to the moment. I repeated a mantra from Thich Nhat Hahn that I’d found the previous day in the 12 × 12: Breathing in I calm my body / Breathing out I smile /Dwelling in the present moment/I know it is a wonderful moment.

  The mantra brought me back. For a moment only; then bitterness returned. Ah, I said, a sudden realization. So this is bitterness! I walked with it, cradled it like a baby in my arms, and then breathed with it, calming my body and mind, releasing it, releasing bitterness and coming back to the present moment.

  Wonderful moment. I came upon several hundred black tadpoles on the verge of death. Their mini-sea of rainwater had evaporated so much that it was now just a shallow puddle. From a distance the tadpoles looked like a swarm of insects on the water, as the top of their heads and their tails protruded. Only as I got closer did I realize they were tadpoles — and that they didn’t know anything was amiss. They swam lazily, eating from the pool bottom and siphoning off what landed on top, oblivious to the fact that their pool was drying up.

  There were no replenishing rain clouds in sight. I did a quick tour of the surrounding area and found no other water where I could translocate the poor guys. They were doomed, but I reminded myself: frogs themselves are not doomed. Likewise, 99 percent of the little stunted firs, pines, and dogwoods, the tiny saplings shaded from the su
n under the tree canopy, were doomed. But trees aren’t doomed. Nature played the odds, spreading out a thousand seeds of amphibians, of trees, so that a few might survive.

  I sat by the puddle and looked at the black-and-gray creatures, glossy as the sad sinking surface. They nibbled at the wet clay bottom, swerved and sliced one past the next, and some of the large, grayer ones — another tadpole species — rimmed the water’s surface with parted lips, sucking off what they could and leaving a thin wake. I fished a tadpole out, put it back, watched it swim away. Dipped a hand into the clay bottom, squeezed silky mud through my hand, and then sank in the other hand. I enjoyed the cool mud, the feeling of the water.

  James Holman, a blind nineteenth-century British writer and traveler, said his blindness seldom caused him to miss anything. When they became aware of his condition, people always invited him to “squeeze things” as a way of perceiving them. Perhaps this is what we in a flattening twenty-first-century world must do: squeeze things, places, feelings, and ideas until they yield something. I squeezed the mud again, deeper into the earth now, and pulled out my hands, shellacked in deep brown, the sun gleaming off the rippling water that slid down my hands onto my forearms. A breeze peeled back my mudcovered arm hairs and smoothed a little wrinkle out of both my eyebrows as I got up. I walked into the forest with gleaming brown hands.

  After another mile, the mud now caked on, I found myself once again at No Name Creek. I put my hands in the creek and rinsed the clay off, took another step and then another, and suddenly realized how different I felt.

  Rather than being a tense ball of anxiety, I’d now come fully into the present moment. No marooned tadpoles, moored turtles, or hawk feathers falling from the sky announced the change. My heart pumped away as usual, but my mind had stopped. I smiled. I breathed. All the walking had paid a dividend. I looked down into the creek.

  My image shimmered. I could see a face, some eyes, the strawberry blond color of my hair, the blue of my jeans, but all of this was like looking into a bubble. Seeing my translucent image in No Name Creek, I realized something important about Jackie. This is what she’s done with her life: become transparent. Later, she would confirm this and explain more: when you become so enmeshed in the fullness of nature, of Life, that your ego dissolves, emotions like resentment, anger, and fear have no place to lodge. She says she still feels these emotions, a little, but more like a dull thud against her mind. They fall away.

  What would have happened if she and her friends had taken revenge on those KKK folks in Greensboro, maybe with a tit-for-tat killing? This would have only continued the cycle of violence. Instead, in 2005, she and others came up with a novel idea: to replicate post-apartheid South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They created a Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission to hear public testimony about the event and to examine the causes and consequences of the massacre. The Greensboro City Council officially opposed the efforts of the commission, but the process forged ahead and became the first of its kind in the United States. What the commission discovered was significant: that Klan members had planned beforehand to provoke violence at the rally, and that the Greensboro Police Department and the FBI knew this ahead of time. The commission also determined that the white supremacists fired on demonstrators without being attacked first. The commission’s 2006 final report laid out a blueprint for continued dialogue and peacebuilding, and through this process of open acknowledgment and engagement, instead of more hatred being fueled, an entirely different result is manifesting: hatred is slowly transforming into healing.

  That’s what happened in South Africa. Never was there a better case for revenge. For decades, the white minority had practiced legalized segregation, keeping the black majority in separate “townships” or shadow towns, marginalized from economic and political power. If you protested against this, as Nelson Mandela did, you could be imprisoned for decades. But after apartheid was dismantled and blacks took power in 1994, Mandela exhibited wise leadership, and the other cheek was turned. Whites were not only allowed to stay in South Africa, but could keep their homes and businesses. As a result, South Africa avoided the kind of massive bloodshed seen in Zimbabwe, and the country and its economy continued to function for everyone.

  JACKIE DIDN’T MEET HER FATHER’S HATRED of other races with a dose of her own. Instead, she decided to walk the Selma-Montgomery march every year in her native Alabama. In fact, when I first met her, she’d just returned from the weeklong event. The original Selma-Montgomery march occurred in March 1965, ending weeks of political and social conflict over voting rights in the South during the peak of the civil rights movement. On March 7, some six hundred civil rights activists headed east from Selma en route to Montgomery. They made it six blocks, to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, before state and local officials met them and attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas, driving them back to Selma. Two days later, Martin Luther King Jr. led a “symbolic” march from Selma to the bridge. After that, other civil rights leaders in Alabama traveled to Montgomery to receive protection to carry out a third, full-scale march from Selma. On March 21, 3,200 marchers left Selma on their way to Montgomery. They reached the capital four days later, at that point 25,000 strong. Five months later, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which gave blacks the right to vote. To commemorate the 1965 marches, the federal government created the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail in 1996, and today, thousands of people follow that route every March to celebrate the acts of heroism that took place and to continue the process of racial healing. The annual march ends with a rally on the Montgomery green, the exact spot where Jackie’s Klansman dad used to rally in his hood.

  As I thought back on the three gangs that attacked me, I realized that, to an extent, I had turned the other cheek. After I was attacked by the gang in Providence, I wrote an op-ed piece for my college newspaper encouraging Brown students to volunteer as Big Brothers and generally climb down out of the ivory tower and get involved solving the problems that were the root causes of such attacks. After my Boston attack, the prosecutor tried to get me to press charges against the principal assailant, but I wrote a statement forgiving him, brutal as the attack had been. Had I prosecuted, he would have been denied entrance into the navy. In my statement I wrote that his anger would be better channeled into discipline in boot camp than festering and growing in prison.

  As I returned to the 12 × 12 after my long walk, however, I realized there was a key difference between myself and Jackie. Whereas she, from all indications, had evolved beyond anger, I still had it lodged firmly inside me — as I had just witnessed. Eventually, the stay at the 12 × 12 would help me let go of it for good. Yet everything on Jackie’s four tiny walls, including the photographs of her father, spoke of only one thing: love. I could not see a negative emotion anywhere. When Jesus said to love your enemies, he of course meant: Don’t have any enemies. Instead of letting racism and other forms of negativity inside you, transform them through forgiveness.

  DRIVE ALL BLAMES IN TO ONE

  12. SACRIFICE AND SEDUCTION

  DOWN BY NO NAME CREEK ONE DAY, I read aloud to Leah from Jackie’s copy of the Tao Te Ching, Lao-tzu’s famous book of Chinese wisdom: “Do you think you can improve the world?”

  Without hesitating, Leah said: “Yes.”

  I paused, and then read on: “I don’t think it can be done.”

  In unison we broke into smiles, and I continued: “The world is sacred, it can’t be improved.”

  “Hearing that,” Leah said, “I feel a pressure lift.”

  “It’s our training,” I replied. “ ‘You can save the world!’ It goes on to say, ‘The master sees things as they are without trying to control them. She lets them go their own way, and resides at the center of the circle.’”

  I turned my head to look at Leah’s profile. Neither of us said anything.

  Then she slid the book from my hand and continued reading from it: “Know the male, yet keep
to the female. Receive the world in your arms…. Know the white, yet keep to the black. Be a pattern for the world.”

  I felt lighter, in a deep well of time, the forest around us growing more roomy. “I like that,” I said, “about being a pattern for the world.” The opposites were bouncing around in my mind: male-female, white-black.

  “ ‘Pattern’ is so much better than ‘model.’ ”

  “Who said anything about model?”

  “Exactly. But we always talk about role models. And model citizens. Sounds as plastic as a model airplane, when we’re talking about an interwoven whole.”

  “Are you a pattern for the world?”

  Her cheek tilted toward her shoulder and she shrugged. “Your turn,” she said, handing me the book.

  “He who defines himself can’t really know who he is. He who clings to his work creates nothing that will endure.”

  “Lose your shtick,” Leah said. “The more deeply we try to carve an identity, the less we’re ourselves.”

  “We’re cheapened. It’s like trying to reduce God to one of its metaphors — the religions.”

  “Heresy!”

  “Perhaps, but the finger that points at the moon is not the moon. You know,” I continued, “I had an artist friend in New Mexico. She’d paint these beautiful watercolors on homemade paper. Work on them for hours, for an entire day. And then she’d leave the finished paintings by the river bank to blow into the water and disappear downstream.”

  “And thus they endured,” she said.

  This is the type of conversation Leah and I had during those spring days. On the surface these philosophical discussions were ironic because we were at the very same time gazing deeply into the dark waters of industrial chicken factories, at an underclass in sprawling trailer parks, and even at the possibility of racial violence among Jackie’s direct neighbors. Did we believe “The world is sacred, and can’t be improved”? Quite the contrary; it needed infinite improvement.