We can be Heroes

I particpated in the Woodstock Writer's Festival Story Slam last night.  I did not win, but I had fun.  Here is the story I told.

    I always wanted a hero who looked like me. I looked for her everywhere, in books in plays, and movies, but she was missing in action.
    At age five, I mounted my fist production of Peter Pan. I was ten when I produced it again. Both times I played Peter, and directed, and I cued everyone on their lines from the stage.  The nuns worried about me wanting to be a boy. I told them that they had it all wrong. Peter was a woman who didn’t want to grow up to be a man. Every production I’d ever seen had a woman playing Peter. Peter was my hero. A brave orphan who could fly, which is who I thought I might be under different circumstances.
    When I was eleven I attended a boarding school in Mexico. Returning home for the winter holidays I filled out the immigration form on my own for the first time. Under race I put human. I was detained until I chose a race. Though I pointed out that what they really wanted was my ethnicity. December 1967, I became a Negro.
    In high school I led a protest of the Vietnam War. Threatened with suspension, ten of us sat out on the lawn singing protest songs and sneaking cigarettes in the bushes. In a school of a couple hundred, 10 is a significant number, so instead of suspending us, they created courses in civil disobedience. I learned that being brave can effect change, but no one ever called us heros. 1970, I became an activist.
    When my kids were little I used heros to teach them the large arc lessons of bravery.
    “I think the bravest humans beings on the planet are superheroes,” I would bait.     “Yeah, because they have super powers,” my son would lisp through missing teeth.
    “Nah,” I’d say, “You’d have to be totally brave to get away with wearing underwear over tights AND a cape.” I think he got the point.
    When Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times for being black in America I was contacted to participate in organized civil disobedience, to be arrested blocking the doors to the NYC police precinct. I explained to my children why it was important to break the law, if the laws were unjust or unfairly applied. I told them that I might not be home that night, but that I hoped they would be proud of me, that they would think me a hero. I went to jail in excellent company. Ruby Dee and Ozzie Davis were arrested at the same time, we were held in the same cell. Two of my own heroes. 1999, the year I was arrested.
    When I came home from jail my son asked me if I wore underwear over my tights.
    “Yes,” I assured him, “and I had on my invisible cape.”
    We can be heros, all of us, but just for one day at a time please. Hero is too costly a suit to wear everyday, and underwear over tights is completely impractical.

Hawk Eyes

I participated in Woodstock Writer's Story Slams last night. The theme was Very Superstitious.  Great readers, great stories, and I won!  The prize comprised wonderful gifts from local businesses.  Thanks so much for the opportunity!  

This is that story.

You see everything with your hawk eyes, that’s what my Mama said. When you’re told something often enough you believe it. Dogma is like that.

My Mama kept tarot cards wrapped in silk in a lingerie drawer, alongside a vibrator made of smooth yellowed plastic. She said, sex is the strongest magic. I keep my cards in a file drawer next to a bag of runes, frankincense, rolling papers, some candles, and a box of matches. 

The first spell I ever learned was to bring good luck. Making pancakes. Use whole grains to ask the mother planet for her assistance. Request her bounty as you measure the ingredients. Add eggs. That’s the power of Saturn, the great shit disturber, the planet of change, but make sure to grind in a bit of sea salt to neutralize his ego, because it’s enormous. Add vanilla, a little aromatic alcohol to appease the other gods, not too much because you want them sober. Cook them in an iron skillet for its tempered strength. Use honey or syrup to make the sweet luck stick.

My Mama was a mix of Native American, emancipated slave, and Irish. Her grandma was born on the Cherokee Reservation in Tennessee. She married an Irish train man and they raised a clan in North Dakota. My Mama made gri-gri bags. She had dolls with pins stuck in them. Some wore human hair and had fingernail clippings inside. Those even felt unkind. 

A former lady of the evening, a friend of Mama’s, told me that she was often hired by gamblers to bring them luck. She said it was because she was as black as midnight. They’d rub her afro, and sometimes they’d rub their heads up high between her thighs, all for luck. They say that luck is a little sprite who sits upon your shoulder whispering in your ear, or is that genius?

Mama sent me to a convent boarding school when I was 8 to learn the myths and legends to be had about that belief. Water into wine, bread metamorphosed as flesh, saints and miracles, women are chattel. 

Girls from around the world were sent to the convent to learn English and Western manners. I learned about arranged marriages and blood on the sheets, about the isms, racism, classism, and sexism, and about sin, original and not. Mama threw me into that dragon’s lair with intention.  She expected me to learn how to breathe fire, or at the very least to learn its alchemical properties.

I make decisions based on omens.  A deer at my window, owls out in daylight, signs,  old wives’ tales, witchcraft. Witch, from the ancient Anglo-Saxon ‘wicce,’ German ‘wissen,’ ‘to know’ and ‘wikken,’ to divine’. I see with my hawk eyes a world composed of differences -- beliefs, skin tones -- and samenesses -- love and pain, birth and death.

I flick salt over my left shoulder. I think it’s to keep some kind of demon at bay. I eat black-eyed peas at New Year. Always use an old broom to sweep a new house. Horseshoes should be upturned. Never buy opals for yourself. Horoscopes, astrology, psychics, crossed fingers, and wishing on stars. I don’t think that time is kept in clocks, nor that god is confined to religions. Mercury the sign of communication is currently retrograde in Aquarius, the sign of freedom and originality, associated with revolutions, social progress, the new age, and oddly with ankles. Superstitious? Me? Very. It’s the only way I know to believe in belief.