Snake Circle

by Roberta Sykes

  Through a mutual friend, I had met a Black American couple, Beverly and Robert Glenn. The friend had told me that Robert had worked while Beverly completed her doctoral degree. Now Beverly worked, at the Law and Education Centre, while Robert was completing his degree at the Education School.

  Beverly told me, at our very first meeting, that she disliked children, so when she invited me to her house I didn’t go. She rang to press her invitation before finally I admitted to having a child with me. ‘Well, bring her anyway,’ she said in an off-hand manner, which I later learned was part of her mask.

  Having so openly declared her dislike of children, I was surprised to find that Beverly had a whole room absolutely full of toys and games in her extremely elegant house. These were all pulled out for Naomi’s enjoyment and amusement. Thus commenced our frequent visits. Beverly was an eccentric but welcoming host, and Robert was ever-willing to leap upstairs and set up the double guest bed so we would stay the night.

  One night when we were staying over, we put Naomi to sleep in the attic guest room and continued our talk in the lounge. We were suddenly alarmed by a lot of noise and banging upstairs, and we all bounded up there as fast as we could. We found Naomi, sound asleep, yelling, scrambling around and banging on one of the walls. She woke up as we calmed her, and she looked amazed and startled. She said she was trying to get through the door which she imagined to be in the wall. On the way downstairs after we settled her down to sleep again, Beverly said, ‘You know, there used to be a door there, but we closed it off.’ Eerie, I thought, very eerie.

  Eber Hampton, who drove a pick-up truck more reminiscent of the prairies than of streamlined Boston and Cambridge, occasionally invited Naomi and me along to some local Indian events. One time he packed his tent and extra sleeping bags for us, and took us to the Spring Festival.

  It was held in the woods outside Boston. Participants came from all over, and Eber was able to identify the tribes represented there by their many different dress styles.

  ‘Watch this,’ he said, with amusement, when the drumming began. Most of the assembly fell into a line and began to dance in a circle, single-file, to the beat of the music. He nudged me. ‘The ones still sitting down, they’re from the west. In the east we dance anticlockwise, and in the west they dance clockwise. ‘That’s why they won’t get up.’

  He hauled himself to his feet and went over to speak to a nearby group, still seated. ‘It’s alright to dance the “wrong” way just this once. Come on, no one’s going to hurt you,’ he said, and taking the hands of a couple, he helped them to their feet.

  The air was still quite cold and dancing kept people warm. Before long, every able bodied person had joined in.

  A fire had been lit in a small pit and, as part of the festival, it would be kept alight all night. As people straggled off to their campers and tents, the hard core moved in and sat around it, Naomi, Eber and I amongst them. It was the custom, so Eber had informed me, that those who were able to, should stay to keep feeding the fire and share creation stories. We listened to a variety of these stories, all interesting, all very Indian.

  There was one extremely dark man amongst the group, with Afro type long hair pulled down into very thick braids. He was Seminole Indian. They were the descendants of slaves who had run away and joined an Indian tribe who lived in the swamps in Florida. He and his slightly lighter companion remained quiet as each person in the circle took their turn telling the creation stories.

  A hush fell over the group when the speaker sitting beside them was thanked and it became the turn of the Seminoles. All eyes were turned towards them. They stared ahead into the fire, looking thoughtful but apparently ignoring everyone.

  A deep voice, an Elder, spoke. ‘It is your turn to tell your story, but if you are ashamed of your stories, the turn can pass on.’ At that, everyone in the circle burst into laughter, and the man sat up straight and began his story, and we all listened with attention and respect.

  I was delighted at the Elder’s sense of timing and teasing humour, so similar to that of so many of my Elders at home in Australia. Despite the cold of the night, I felt warm and comfortable in the company of all these new friends.

  8

  All my classes were interesting, but the work I took with Chet Pierce that year had the most profound and enduring effect on me. Chet had set out on his career at a time when very few Blacks were admitted into Ivy League schools. Those who were had usually received a sporting scholarship and were not expected to succeed academically. Chet had succeeded in both the classroom and on the sports-field, going on to qualify in medicine and psychiatry, later holding two professorial chairs at Harvard, in the fields of education and psychiatry.

  Being the first Black in any field is controversial enough, but Chet had set himself the task of excelling at everything he did. He undertook scientific studies on large mammals, such as elephants and whales, and, when the time came, on the effects of isolation on man and lectured on this subject around the world. Part of his isolation research was undertaken at the South Pole. A consultant to NASA, where his expertise on the effects of isolation were particularly relevant, Chet advised on the likely effects of isolation for those involved in journeys into space and ultimately to the moon.

  He had also turned his scientific attention to racism, discovering ways to identify and quantify this particular human behaviour, as well as searching for ways in which to eliminate it altogether. He was, for example, a prime mover behind the development of Sesame Street. He described this program as a series of advertisements, or jingles, that were picked up and learned by young children in the ghettoes. They spent a lot of time in front of televisions and had previously learned by rote all the advertising jingles for cigarettes, soap powders, and the like. Now they learned numbers and the letters of the alphabet.

  In his classes, Chet shared with us the fruits of his labours. In so doing, he peeled back our skin, flaying us with truths that were sometimes painful to hear. Some of the white students, particularly, resented this, and wrote negative evaluations of his classes. These were collated in Gutman Library for prospective students to view, as were all course evaluations. Non-white students largely adored him, though they too were whipped by his words.

  ‘Racism,’ he intoned in his quiet, calm deep voice, ‘is a mental health disease of national, even global, proportion. It has all the qualities of an epidemic’ He proceeded to justify his statements in medical terms, and rationalise his conclusion before moving to quantify for us some of the ways in which racism manifests. This was indeed heady stuff, and we were riveted in our seats. He had drawn up lists of the behaviours in which Blacks’ time and space, and consequently our lives and opportunities, are controlled and contained.

  Chet also turned his attention to the many ways in which Blacks cooperate with their own oppression, presenting us with a list of these as well. Those of us in the room who were Black frequently winced with the truth of his pronouncements, recognising in ourselves and in our friends the behaviours that he was identifying.

  One such item on his list, ‘Blacks over-disclose’, forced me to recall the many times when, at home in Australia, over-disclosure had almost shut down our movement. ‘We’ll be at Parliament House in the morning, ten o’clock sharp, to demonstrate about this,’ someone would publicly announce. Why then were we always so surprised to find, on our arrival, hundreds of uniformed police waiting for us, as well as plainclothes detectives picking up individuals along the way, and ASIO staff with their cameras set up in surrounding buildings?

  Chet’s papers, such as that on ‘Offensive Mechanisms’, which details some of the processes of micro and macro-aggression, will remain sources of inspiration for me for the rest of my life.

  In Conroy Commons, Chet’s Black students almost ritualistically gathered after his classes to discuss the impact his work was having upon us. There was unanimous agreement that his was probably the most important course we were ever likely to take. It gave
us insights into racism and its impact on ourselves and society that we were unlikely to have received anywhere else.

  But that’s not all there was to Chet, which, even if this had been the case, was still life-saving. His example, as a strong, calm and self-possessed Black man, was also sterling.

  In one of the two courses I took with Chet, a young white man displayed his audacity by starting to jump in and ask questions long before it was appropriate to do so. We had all been told to wait until lectures were finished and questions were invited before bringing up any issues we may have had.

  The first time this bright spark interjected, the rest of the class sat forward, interested to see what Chet was going to do. He answered the question, thoroughly but briefly, before pointedly picking up his notes to resume his talk.

  The second time, only a few minutes later, Chet faintly scowled at the young man, but replied to the question politely, though coldly.

  Insensitive young man that he was, he again interrupted the flow of the lecture. By now we felt that he was actually challenging Chet on several levels, first behaviourally but also on his intellect. He asked a question which had to do with space travel, but which had really no relevance to the material we were being taught at the time.

  Chet rocked back in his chair, cast his eyes towards the ceiling, and began to answer the question before bringing his gaze back down to lock eyes with the man. The words he chose were multi-syllabic, mesmeric, and virtually incomprehensible to anyone other than a fellow scientist at his own level, which of course we were not. Neither was the young man. Chet continued relentlessly, while the young man, completely out of his depth, squirmed in his chair and grew visibly smaller and smaller before our eyes. For what felt like forever, but was probably only ten very long minutes, Chet lambasted him by answering his question in exquisite detail. When he had finished we looked around the room to discover that everyone was sitting there stunned.

  ‘Do you know what Chet was saying?’ those of us in our Black after-class group each asked one another later.

  ‘No, not a word, but wasn’t it mag-nif-i-cent?’ to which we all heartily agreed.

  Another course which I found very compelling that year was Community Psychology, taught by Dick Katz. In many ways it touched upon aspects of the work I had been doing in Australia, but for which I did not even have names. I thrived on the lecture material, and also on the tutorials held after the formal lectures. So many students took this course that Dick had a cadre of teaching fellows to carry on the themes in smaller groups.

  After approaching me to inquire if I was interested in moving to the doctoral program, Dick spoke to me again. This time he invited me to participate as a teaching fellow in his course for the next semester. I was still worried about my ability to pass in my course-work and wanted to reserve what time I had in case I needed it to study. So although I was flattered, if a little confused, I politely refused. As well, I was unsure what I would have been expected to teach. I had been there just one term, which did not seem long enough for me to have learned anything I could teach, and I told him this.

  ‘You’d meet with other teaching fellows, and we help you to categorise and parcel up what you already know—that’s what you’re teach.’

  This astounded me. What I already know? Good grief! How come I didn’t know that I already knew something valuable enough to teach at Harvard? The idea that I might have knowledge scooped out of me, knowledge I didn’t even know I had, and that it could be labelled and parcelled for sharing with other students was dizzying.

  On my arrival at the Education School, I had met the Dean, Paul Ylvasakir. During our first brief conversation we had discovered that we had friends in common in Australia. I later found a note placed in my pigeon-hole inviting me to come by his office to continue this discussion. When eventually I did so, he, too, voiced his concerns that I was in the wrong program. He had sent for my application and read my details out of interest following our first meeting. A student of my obvious experience should have been in the doctoral program.

  During my second semester I was sailing through my work with new confidence, born of the splendid marks I felt I had achieved. I had gained all As with the exception of Chet’s class. I marked down my poor performance there, B-, to the fact that everything he had taught me was so new and dazzling that I had not yet had time to absorb and analyse it before being required to write essays around the questions. Although not offered here as an excuse, I needed more time to digest and incorporate so much complex—and, for me, emotional—information into my world view.

  One day in April, early in spring, Dick Katz approached me again. ‘Well, you’ve survived the winter, so why don’t you reconsider what I asked you earlier? You should be in the doctoral program.’

  ‘But,’ I stammered, ‘even if I were to reconsider it, applications for the doctoral program closed months ago.’

  ‘Not for you, they haven’t. And there are others around this campus who are very impressed with your work, who would support your application. Everyone speaks highly of the contribution you have made.’

  I was flabbergasted by this evaluation, especially since in Australia I had been led to believe nothing I knew had any value. It would be hopeless to even think about applying for the advanced degree, though. I had been through so much to get the funding to do the Master’s program, I didn’t feel I could go through it all again.

  Still, in the regular reports I sent back to Reverend Martin Chittleborough, I told him of my good grades and progress, and that I had been invited into the doctoral program. I was surprised to return home one day to find a telegram waiting for me. ‘Congratulations on being invited into doctoral program. Accept. Australian Council of Churches will sponsor,’ and signed by Reverend Chittleborough himself. A short time later I received a follow-up letter, again congratulating me on my success and pointing out how it would benefit the Black Australian community to have one of their own attaining such a prestigious degree, and urging me to accept.

  Nevertheless, I remained unsure. How was my son faring on his own at home? And would he agree to my going away again, this time committing myself to spending several years here? Could I extend my study leave from the Health Commission? Or would I be jeopardising the only job I saw open to me? These questions were central to my decision. Until they were answered I felt I could not make a commitment.

  Professor Katz suggested that, since I was so unsure, I should cover all my bases. ‘Apply to the doctoral program, and if everything else works out, that pathway will be open to you. If you are able to return immediately next academic year, the nine courses you have already taken will be counted towards your degree.’

  ‘I don’t want these courses counted towards a higher degree, I want my Master’s degree in my hand to take home. I can’t go home with nothing. If it turns out that I can’t arrange to return, everything I have been through to get here, and to stay here, will amount to the fact that I have nothing to show for it at the end.’

  ‘You’ll still get your Master’s degree in June, and if you’re able to get back here, that coursework will still count towards your doctorate.’

  On this basis, I finally agreed to put in an application, and almost immediately received notification that it had been accepted. I was so thrilled to think that I could become one of those campus princesses anytime I wanted. Even if things at home didn’t work out and I was unable to return, I would hold tight in my heart the feeling that I and others knew I had the capacity to succeed. But would I get this chance?

  There were still end-of-semester papers to get through, and I couldn’t afford to slouch. As usual, I generated my essays quickly and had them in on time. Then I began to consider the arrangements I had to make to go home. Home! The thought was very uplifting. Despite having enjoyed my time at Harvard, I was looking forward to seeing my son and all my friends once more.

  For the graduation I had to hire a cap and gown, and there were other expenses involved whic
h I hadn’t budgeted for. We had managed very frugally, my daughter and I, every cent accounted for. Now, apart from the travel and emergency costs I had factored in, there was nothing left. After I left Australia a little more money had come in to Black Women’s Action from the public appeal we had launched. So I wrote to Naomi Mayers asking her to forward it to me, but received no response.

  In my budget I had set aside money for one phone call home during the year. If, as my mother had threatened, she had in fact died in my absence, I would have needed these funds to call and make any arrangements necessary. I was so near the end now that I felt I could use my emergency phone call money to pay these graduation costs.

  Throughout the year, many people had written to me and saved me from the depression caused by what we called ‘empty mailbox syndrome’. For foreign students and those from more remote places in the United States, the isolation of being so far from the people we knew could only be assuaged, and then only temporarily, by a precious letter—even a postcard—from home.

  My mother had put a letter in the post religiously once a week, even if she had no real news. And she always expected a response in the return mail. My son had also stayed in touch, including pages marked for Naomi, which she spirited off into her bedroom to read. Elaine Pelot had been a regular correspondent, saving for me clippings and items of interest from newspapers and magazines. Her fat manila envelopes stuffed with news had kept me up to date on Australian political and social changes throughout the year. Nugget Coombs had written, too. His first letters were tentative, but we soon developed an airmail friendship which blossomed and grew right up until his death. Gary Foley wrote me a solitary but very supportive letter. In his inimitable style, it began: ‘It is by sheer coincidence that I write to you on this day’, the letter dated April 1.