The real Lonely Hearts’ Club
A few days ago, on my regular subway commute home, I peered up from Newsweek and noticed a guy across the aisle was reading 1984. Now, 1984 is one of my very favorite books ever. Certainly, I can find no fault with this fellow MTA rider’s literary taste. But, seriously, the New York subway is a pretty tough place to be reading that sort of thing. Surveillance cameras everywhere, cops searching your bag, crowding, the distinct smell of unwashed human bodies, the free reign of enormous, greasy rats. You see where I’m going with this. It isn’t subtle.
But sometimes with Orwell, it is subtle. You look from the page out into the world, then back to the page, then back at the world. You privately wince a little and say to yourself, “I wish that weren’t quite so true.”
Right now, I’m in the middle of Burmese Days, a novel he wrote in the Thirties, when he was still a little hungry. At the point I’m up to in the book, the plot is just getting going, but the atmosphere and context are well established. Orwell worked as a policeman in Burma not ten years before, and the Raj he writes of is a saggy one that ceases to know what it is or what it’s for. The main characters are a group of Englishmen who spend most of their waking hours drinking and smoking at the European club (”European,” of course, meaning white-only). They are racist to varying degrees–to one man in particular, the Burmese people are “dirt” and “savages,” while to others, they are considered harmless, and even charming, so long as they remain unblinkingly obedient.
To Orwell fans, our hero, John Flory, is familiar. He is boozy and somewhat hapless, erudite in an unconventional way, and oddly lovable. He isn’t perfect, but you’re rooting for him. Flory is interested in Burmese art and customs and his closest friend is a Burmese doctor, not a fellow British officer. Again and again, both at the club and among the “natives”, he is expected to act a certain way and have certain attitudes because he is British. Even his Burmese friend makes certain to have whiskey available when Flory visits, because that is what Englishmen are supposed to drink.
At the club, Flory is forced to listen to racist, anti-native diatribes and nostalgic memories of the grand old days of the Raj, when brown brothers knew their place, but he lacks the courage to defend his friend. At the doctor’s, he denounces the English character and Britain’s role in India to a degree that the doctor, a heartfelt Anglophile, considers seditious. Watching Flory go between the extremes of these two worlds is fascinating.
I have lived a lot of my life in New York as Flory in miniature. My Latino students continue to be amazed that I like my enchiladas with salsa rojo (the spicier option, at least locally), and even that I would go to a Mexican restaurant in the first place. I love these moments with my students, but negotiating my whiteness, and the set of assumptions that comes with it, among the adults is often not so rosy.
My first year at Is 162, I shared a classroom a few periods a week with Ms. Purcell. I don’t remember her first name, or maybe I never knew it. She was black and from somewhere in the South. From the beginning, it was clear that Ms. Purcell was going to have a hard time in Bushwick. When kids were nasty to her, she was nasty right back, which only made them nastier the next time around. In December, she announced that she was not coming back after Christmas break. She and I were in our shared classroom one afternoon shortly after she gave her resignation, and I guess she decided I had as good an ear as any.
“Fuck this,” she said. “I’m goin’ home, where I can actually teach.”
One thing I know for sure is that a conversation that begins with the word “fuck” is one which you want to be brief. “This isn’t an easy place to work, that’s for sure.”
I was trying to be small talk-y, politely disinterested, but instead my remark encouraged her. “Did you know that this school was going to be nothing but Spanish trash when you got hired? ‘Cuz I sure didn’t. You can’t teach kids like that.
“Um, what? Didn’t she take a walk around the block when she interviewed and notice that everyone she saw was Latino? Did she really just call said Latinos “Spanish,” like it was 1970? And, most curious of all, why is she saying this to me, when she knows I’m an ESL teacher? Despite the questions streaking by in my head, I was too stunned to actually say anything.
She laughed mirthlessly. “Lowlifes. I ain’t wastin’ any more of my time.”The atmosphere in the room seemed to snap and I could feel something in me rushing to the surface. I was inexperienced with just about everything then, but I couldn’t let this woman think that I was sympathetic to her hate.
“Please don’t talk about the kids like that,” I said, and then immediately regretted saying “please.” It was not a rhetorical tsunami, but it was something. She looked up and studied my face, which I tried to keep still.
“What’s your problem?” she spat. “You’re white.”
“That has nothing to do with anything. I chose to work here. If I wanted everyone to look like me, I would have stayed in Maine. These kids are special to me. So just don’t talk about them like that around me,” I said.
I don’t remember what she said after that, so maybe she didn’t say anything. It wasn’t the absolute last time I saw her, but it was certainly our last conversation. I was proud of the way I had handled myself, both because I felt that I had stood up for my students and that I had represented white America well.
Sometime later, I was in the teachers’ room talking with some colleagues, one of whom was Latina. One of them was telling an unrelated Ms. Purcell horror story and we were laughing. Still feeling new and like an outsider, I was pleased that I had a Purcell tale of my own to extend the conversation. They expressed disbelief when I told them what she said. I threw in my line about taking a walk around the block when she interviewed, which got a laugh, then told them what I had said in response. The Latina teacher sort of scrunched up her face and what she said I will never forget:
“Well, thanks Ms. Sampson. But we can stand up for ourselves.”
The paralysis of being so completely misunderstood by people who have no questions has never left me. Finding a mirror image of that feeling in the pages of book is vindicating, but the feeling is still maddening. And something worse, too. It is lonely.
I know that damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t feeling.
In the situation you describe at the end of your post, anything you might have said would have been wrong in somebody’s view, but saying nothing was not an option at all.
“Can we all get along?” asked Rodney King. Sometimes, sadly, the answer is no. You can’t, for example, get along with someone who is determined not to get along with you.
You’ve been at 162 long enough now that you could call out anyone who gave you that “we can stand up for ourselves” brand of patronizing crap. Another way of saying this is that you now have the right to decline to be profiled.
Anyway, a great story beautifully told!