Snake Circle

by Roberta Sykes

  Who to thank for these premonitions, I wondered, as I lay in my bath, letting the warm water wash away the tension I had accumulated throughout this very stressful day. A vision of a thick coiling snake rose up before my eyes, a bush snake who had seen the catastrophe that had almost robbed my mother of her life. I sighed with relief. ‘Oh, I am being looked after,’ I whispered aloud to myself. Somehow I knew straightaway that I was where I was supposed to be, doing the things I was meant to be doing.

  By this time I had become a bit concerned about the direction my work was taking, and I was keen to finalise the last few stages. I had heard from the Australian Council of Churches that funding to enable me to finish had almost run out. They would keep their commitment regarding fees and accommodation costs, but there would be no more money available for me to travel backwards and forwards to Australia. This caused me to panic and struggle against sinking into another depression. I had planned my abstract on the understanding that my thesis would be on the subject of Black Australian education. Without a research program and the input of people in Australia, such a thesis would be impossible. I feared that I would have to develop a proposal about a more accessible, but far less relevant, American-based subject.

  As I was plodding wearily through the basement at the Education School one day, a tiny sign on the noticeboard caught my eye. It was an advertisement for a competitive travel fellowship, created to honour the memory of one Peter B. Livingston, administered by the Harvard Medical School, Department of Psychiatry. I made a copy of it and took it around to ask friends what they thought.

  The fellowship represented the only chance I had left to write my thesis on my chosen subject, Australia. If I could only win it, I thought, I could use the prize to go home, travel quickly around Australia interviewing the people I regarded as experts, then return to compile and analyse the data the journey had generated and write my thesis.

  No one I asked about the competition seemed very enthusiastic, and Chet gently cautioned me. ‘Schools normally award prizes to their own students,’ he said, pointing out that the advertisement emanated from the Medical, not the Education, School, and he was surprised that it had been displayed on the Education School noticeboard. I went home from our meeting a bit disheartened. Chet held positions in both the Education and Medical schools, and I felt sure he knew exactly what he was talking about.

  I scoured the noticeboard again, hoping that there might be a similar fellowship on offer from the Ed School, but I was unhappy to find there was not. So, I reasoned to myself that night, I am without options. If I don’t apply for the fellowship, I’ll be unable to go home. If I do apply and am not successful, I’d still be unable to go home, but at least I would have given it my best shot.

  I wrote up my application, outlining the tack I wanted to take with my thesis, illustrating how certain common words, such as ‘incentive’, ‘achievement’ and ‘community’, are loaded with the values of whoever is using them, and how they are then not understood in the same way by people who do not share the same values. I delineated the power relationship implicit in the government’s use of these words and its relationship with minority constituents, who also use the same words. I explained how individuals representing both speak to each other without understanding, always to the detriment of the most needy people who have the most to gain. I also detailed how I would use the funds to further this research, if I were successful. This project took me two days, after which I posted my application and crossed my fingers for good luck.

  Over the next few weeks I received two surprise phone calls, both early in the morning.

  The first came from the Dean of my school Paul Ylvasakir, just after seven. He had received bad news overnight, and had sat up waiting until this ‘reasonable’ hour to call me. One of his nephews, a champion skier, had just died in Switzerland—from a drug overdose. Apart from his wife, whom I had met very briefly at a function, I didn’t know any of Paul’s family, so I was extremely surprised by his call.

  ‘I wanted to tell you this,’ he said, ‘because you were almost the first person who came into my mind as soon as I heard the news. I have to tell you—when you took your daughter out of school, to keep her away from drugs, I thought you were being, um, naive. But suddenly, when I heard that this lively and lovely boy, my nephew, just over twenty and never, to my knowledge, involved with drugs, died in this way, everything you had been saying made sense. Drugs do not respect people. My nephew was not a poor boy, not a Black boy, he was a very comfortable white boy, but we all thought he was a man. Now, he’s just a dead white boy.’ I could hear his tears over the phone and I had no idea how to comfort him, so I just let him talk.

  ‘Taking your daughter out of school, it might not work, but it was everything that you could do. You did everything that was in your power to do. Me and my family, we stood back and hoped our boy would find the right way of his own accord. What a loss. I know now we didn’t do everything we could do. We didn’t have a clue about this . . .’ he tapered off, leaving his sorrow hanging in the air.

  ‘I feel sure your nephew would not want you to feel responsible—’

  ‘In the American way, I’m not responsible, but the way people were before this, oh, we’re responsible alright. We were his family.’

  ‘Paul, don’t blame yourself. It’s easy for me. You know the boiling frog theory? Well, I wasn’t here while the water was getting hotter. I arrived to find the water hot, couldn’t help but notice it and had to get my daughter out. It’s a tragedy that, like so many other Americans, I guess, you didn’t feel the climate changing, but you can’t blame yourself for that.’

  A long silence followed during which I could feel Paul agreeing with me, although he didn’t say so, then, ‘Listen, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go on like this. I just wanted you to know you’ve done the right thing, and how much I admire you for it.’

  There was little joy for me in Paul’s statement, the cost to him had been too high. I had never regretted my decision to remove Naomi from school, to shield her to the extent that I could from the culture of sex, drugs and violence which seems to permeate so much of American society. Australia was her ‘real life’, where the overtness and frequency of these things was so much less. It wasn’t that Australia had none—I was well aware, from my own experience, that violence and sex lay close to the surface in Australian culture, too. Through my work at the Health Commission I already knew the extent and likely growth rate of our drug scene as well. I spent the day sadly, reflecting on all this, and in sympathy with Paul and his family.

  The second call, just a week or so later, took me completely unawares. An unknown, soft and cultured male voice asked, ‘Roberta? Roberta Sykes?’

  ‘Hmm,’ I agreed, non-committally.

  ‘I am ringing to tell you that you have won the Peter B. Livingston Fellowship.’

  My mind spiralled out of control. Is this a joke? Who is this man? What’s happening here?

  ‘Roberta—are you still there? Did you hear me? You’ve just won the Peter B. Livingston Fellowship. Don’t you have anything to say?’

  ‘I’m . . . uh . . . speechless,’ I croaked.

  ‘Ms Sykes, that’s completely unlikely,’ he replied, humour dancing from his voice.

  He continued chatting a little while I steadied myself, before asking me to attend a celebratory lunch. There were two winners, he said, myself and another student, a man from the Medical School. We were to meet at an expensive restaurant, and I wrote down the date, time and address. I knew my mind wouldn’t hold these details, I was trembling and too over-flowing with joy.

  12

  I was assured now that I would be able to complete my thesis on the subject of my choice. With little to do apart from take care of Naomi and attend to her schooling, I had some time at last in which to reflect upon the kaleidoscope of experiences and impressions which I had amassed on my road up to this point.

  Naomi and I had made many friends and had entertain
ed many visitors during our time in the States. I recalled now the time when my friends, Sandra and David Bardas, from Melbourne, had called to say they were coming up from New York and would like to have dinner with me. I understood this to be their first visit to Boston, and Sandra had heard of a famous restaurant, Joyce Chen’s, that they were keen to try. Would I meet them at their hotel?

  When I arrived, Sandra was waiting in the lobby. David had been delayed and was upstairs freshening up and would join us shortly. Meanwhile Sandra and I were to go into the bar and have a pre-dinner drink.

  I had scrubbed myself up and was wearing the most respectable of my small selection of clothes suitable for the evening. Sandra was her usual fashion-plate self, dressed in a pale blue patterned outfit, which I instantly admired.

  We found the bar and had settled down into the plush upholstered chairs when a crisply attired waiter approached us, his lip curled at the appropriate angle. Bending towards us he whispered, ‘Madam, I regret that I am unable to serve you.’ I was shocked. Was this racism I was encountering in the five-star hotel? But no. He continued, ‘We are not permitted to serve anyone in denim.’

  Sandra and I both looked at her gear, and yes, under those diamantes the fabric was indeed denim. Beneath his gently sneering eyes, we made our way to the door. Outside, Sandra said quickly, ‘I’ll run upstairs and change. Wait for me.’

  I grabbed her by the arm. ‘No you don’t. I intend to lunch out on this for years—about how I got chucked out of a fancy hotel for being with a rich Jewish girl who didn’t know how to dress.’ We both cracked up laughing and just stood around giggling like foolish schoolgirls until we were joined by David.

  At the restaurant, we caught up with each other’s family news as well as the situation in Australia. Since arriving in Boston, I had sent their family Christmas wishes, using one of the Black nativity scene greeting cards I had been thrilled to discover there. Sandra told me she had produced the card at the dinner table and one of her children had eyed it curiously, a Black family gathered beside a gift-laden Christmas tree.

  ‘Why has she sent us this Black card?’ her child had asked. ‘Does she think we are—?’

  ‘We send her a white Christmas card every year, don’t we?’ Sandra had responded. She went on to enlighten her brood. Surely, she reasoned, their reaction to receiving a Black card, which the children had regarded initially with surprise and wonder at its inappropriateness, might be akin to my own reaction at having received only white cards all my life. She had used the opportunity to set them thinking about how racism might sometimes be taken for granted.

  During our dinner, Sandra and I began talking about the advancements in technology while David visited the men’s room. When he came back, we were talking about computers, which, although I’d had only a little to do with them personally, seemed to be the way for the future. Although unable even to consider the purchase of one myself, I was urging Sandra to buy one.

  ‘What would she need a computer for?’ David inquired as he settled back into his seat.

  I tried hard to think of a reply. Although politically active on behalf of the Black community, Sandra was primarily a home-maker. She had talked to me occasionally about her desire to write her family’s history, but apart from that I could think of nothing that would make a computer an imperative in her life.

  ‘She could use it for storing recipes,’ I piped up, an idea that had come to me like a brainwave, but which would later haunt me.

  ‘Hmm,’ David said, obviously completely unconvinced.

  Over time, Sandra and I both bought our computers. Sandra turned a room of her house into her ‘computer room’, from where she has coordinated a host of projects including major demonstrations by fashion designers against uranium mining at Kakadu National Park.

  Two Aboriginal dancers, Lillian Crombie and Michael Leslie, also came up from New York to visit. They were studying and performing with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company in Harlem. They had been students of mine at the Aboriginal Dance and Skills Development Program, and I was really pleased to see how successful they had become, winning scholarships to travel so far. As I had no room for them at the time, Kenton had made space for them in his lounge room.

  Their visit gave them the chance to touch base with me again, hear all my news and share theirs. We felt ourselves to be the only Black Australians on the American eastern seaboard. So it was appropriate that we should spend time together and discuss the strangeness of the environment in which we found ourselves and our responses to it. As well, they told me, the trip to see me was a very welcome respite from the rigours of dance training. They also wanted to see Cambridge, and it provided a very different view of American life from what they had become familiar with through living in New York. We spent a happy few days together, Kenton being amused to have three Black Australians chatting rapidly in his apartment in an English he claimed he could just barely understand.

  Not all my visitors were so pleasant. During my first year Germaine Greer had contacted me, explaining why she had not been able to respond to my letter inquiring about funding, and advising me that she was coming briefly to Boston. Would I be interested in coming to a dinner? She said there would be someone there she thought I ought to meet, Professor Dana Chandler.

  I was already quite friendly with Dana Chandler, who was the Director of the African-American Arts program at North-Eastern University, and we had plans underway for an exhibition of Aboriginal protest posters and other cultural material. Still, I thought it would be a nice evening and decided to attend.

  The meal was very pleasant and included lots of fare which I could not otherwise afford. As well, I had the opportunity to chat with Dana and meet some other white people.

  Afterwards Germaine organised for someone to drive me back home. There were several of us in the car when I asked if she had received the copy of Love Poems and Other Revolutionary Actions, which I had included with my letter.

  This question seemed to trigger Germaine off. She roundly berated me about my publication, scornfully saying ‘You call that poetry? It’s not poetry at all.’

  ‘Well, Judith Wright seems to think so. She wrote to me several times and told me herself that—’

  ‘She’s a better expert than me?’ Germaine’s voice was harsh and shrill, and I was embarrassed that she felt she could talk to me like this in front of a earful of her white friends. I had never seen before what I’d heard described as a ‘Greer tantrum’, but this time I was the recipient of both barrels.

  Well, I wonder what caused all that, I mused to myself as I made my way across the courtyard to my building. Perhaps I said something that offended her earlier in the night, but screaming at me on the way home about my poetry made no sense at all.

  It was no surprise, indeed somewhat of a relief, that I did not hear from Germaine again. Years would pass before I was to gain an insight into the subliminal reason behind the behaviour she exhibited that night—which had far more to do with racism and its myriad manifestations than poetry.

  Over the next decade I was, sadly, to discover that many of the mixed-race friendships, particularly with white Australian women, which I had thought of as being mutually supportive, were regarded by the other person as a way of patronising me. My attendance at Harvard, I realised, threatened this view they had of themselves and these relationships inevitably broke down. This was to be a hard lesson; white Australians, in general, have no history of dealing with Blacks as equals, a problem which, to this very day, has not been overcome.

  During the time that Naomi spent in Cambridge, she had maintained her own relationships with people at home by writing letters and sending postcards. Once she became a teenager, she often kept these activities quite secret from me. I knew about them, of course, but girls of that age like to exercise their independence. One of the ways in which they do that is by keeping secrets and rationing out information as though it were currency.

  I was therefore surprised when Naomi
told me that Mrs Owen was arriving in Boston to see her. Mrs Owen had grown from an occasional babysitter when Naomi was five years old to something akin to a grandmother-by-proxy. I knew Mrs Owen to be thrifty, always living on a tight budget and saving her few cents, but that she would save up to come halfway around the world to visit Naomi, well, I was fairly blown away by that.

  A genuine and enduring affection had sprung up between her and the children, particularly Naomi, who had often stayed over at Mrs Owen’s house for no apparent reason, other than, I thought, that Mrs Owen made her cakes and treats, and gave her the little attentions which, time-wise, I could not afford. Because of her kindness, I had encouraged the children to include Mrs Owen on our family Christmas gift list.

  I smiled when I dropped Naomi over to the motel at which Mrs Owen was staying so that they could spend time together. I was grateful for the normality that her visit injected into our geographic isolation, and appreciative of the financial cost this visit must have incurred. The world, I thought, is a small place when people determine that it will be so, as Mrs Owen had obviously done. Naomi, however, took it all in her stride, seeing absolutely nothing unusual in someone who cared about her travelling so far to be, so briefly, with her.

  During my stay I had taken very few trips around, the budget not running to much. Bernard Jackson, from the Inner City Cultural Centre, whom I had met in Los Angeles, accepted a short contract in New York and sent me a plane ticket to come down and visit him. He had been intrigued that someone he knew was actually going to Harvard, and he said he would welcome the opportunity to chat, since we were now only a few hundred miles apart.

  I found Jack, as he preferred to be called, to be one of those philosophical and learned old men one is rarely privileged to meet in this life. Had he lived in the Black community in Australia he would have been regarded as an Elder.

  Our meeting took place at a time when America was making a great to-do about another space mission. I had learned from scientists working at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and elsewhere, with whom I occasionally socialised, that the US Government seemed to be moving towards the development of space mansions, places where the ultra-rich would go to live, free from the pollution they had created on this globe as they had amassed their riches. Those of us, the majority left on earth, I thought, would be the proles, servicing these mansions and living in nasty conditions created by global warming and toxic emissions. Manned space ships were the first step towards developing space taxis, and other experiments were under way to explore the feasibility of completely recycling and self-sustaining mini-communities, which could exist in bubbles with artificial climate control.