MY STARRY STARRY NIGHT

Or, Where Am I, Anyway?

I often have trouble remembering where I am, what day it is, or even which direction I’m headed in. My lack of orientation may – or may not be - related to some mystery marks in my brain.

            When I was little my mother would say, “Oh, honey, you just live in another world,” and by the time I was a teenager, I started answering, “I wish I did.”  During the late 1950s and early 60s, even the provincial newspapers in Charleston, South Carolina, began to report black college students holding sit-ins at whites-only lunch counters in North Carolina, and about marches in Alabama broken up by white cops on horseback or with water cannons. While my cousins were shouting awful racist epithets at the tv and no adult tried to stop them, I glimpsed, for the first time, that I’d been born onto the wrong side of a dreadful historical mess.

I could not yet fully absorb this new information: that my family, my tribe, my white folks descended from the Irish refugees of the potato famine, were mired in a racist moral disaster. So, when I turned 18, I left home. I couldn’t wait to belong nowhere. I still assumed it was possible to belong nowhere, and for several years I lived in generic California apartments with white walls and white drapes, and later I lived in New York City, another good choice for people trying to reinvent themselves.

            Homesickness dogged me, no matter where I went. I ached for the flatness of the South Carolina Lowcountry, for the wide views of the salt marshes and the ocean, for massive live oak trees graceful under their mossy burdens. I missed the thick summer heat, air so warm and humid that people moved and spoke without any urgency. The Southerners I grew up with were so polite they didn’t even blow their car horns in traffic jams. 

During the years I was gone I became a novelist and a journalist, but most of my work ended up being tied, somehow, to South Carolina. How would I ever overcome my upbringing? How would I ever stop being a person who secretly had a lump in her throat when she heard “Dixie, a song she now understood was both sentimental and racist? So, when I was 33, I returned home, desperate to locate myself among the people I’d grown up with.

I rented a house out the Isle of Palms and slept blissfully at night, while the ocean growled and murmured nearby and the palmetto trees swayed in their postcard moonlight. I wrote 13 essays about this return that were published in the Village Voice, 6 of them appearing on the cover. (Who knew New Yorkers wanted to know so much about South Carolina?) These essays were collected into a book called The Redneck Way of Knowledge and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1981, and it’s still in print from Vintage. During the pandemic, Audible even asked me to record it and I did, revising the pieces slightly and offering brief commentaries on their origins.

I think that book still matters because the Deep South I had returned to showed that the racism I’d fled was not so different from the racisms I had found in my various dislocations to California, New York, Washington, Vermont, and Boston. These racisms were different in degree and baldness, but not in their anguishing, intractable nature. My mother’s only comment was, “We learned a lot while you were gone, didn’t we.” Who knew my mother had a capacity for irony?

The riskiest essay I wrote for Redneck was the final one. It was called “Growing Up Racist”, and its opening line was, “Like every white American I’ve ever met, I am a racist.”  I was trying to address the impact of institutionalized and unconscious racism, which we did not yet have terminology for. We may now have that terminology, but I might be the first white person who attempted to write about it, to try to personally confront the helplessness of finding oneself on the high end of an uneven playing field, only to discover that no matter what I did, no matter where I went, I would not escape the privileges and burdens of my whiteness.

There are many books available now that examine institutionalized racism and I recommend them all to you, but none seem yet to provide adequate solutions for the wounds of slavery left by the American Civil War, wounds that continue to fester and bleed and may be reopening.

My last book came out in 2018. In Tomb of the Unknown Racist I penetrated the heart of white supremacist extremism and tried to explore this frightening problem: What will white people who yearn to deinstitutionalize racism do about the growing number of armed white supremacists, types like the Boogaloos, the Proud Boys, and other fringes? Are they still fringes? How many of them are they, and how heavily armed? What will we do if these white extremists emerge among our families or our friends? What if they are our brothers or sisters or parents, or even our children?

I don’t know the answer. I just hope I’m not like the mythological Cassandra, who could foresee the future but was not believed. In any case, I will continue to place my faith in the idea that Martin Luther King was right about the arc of history bending toward justice.

I live now on the tiny island of Vieques, off the coast of Puerto Rico. The US Navy shelled this island “for practice” starting in 1941, and they didn’t stop until the 21^st century, when they accidentally killed someone. Starting only a mile away from me, parts of the island must remain closed, because removing all that ordnance is no easy task after 60 years of Navy “practice.”  Confiscating this island was deemed justified by the start of WWII, but why did the bombing continue for so long? Is violence really that much fun?

In Charleston the first shots of the American Civil War were fired from the Battery, and playing on those cannons became part of my childhood. My canonical history may be part of why Vieques feel so much like home. Also, it is very beautiful here. In the bioluminescent bay, I can thrust in my arm and pull it out dripping with silver light.

Right now I am sitting at my desk, late at night. It’s hot and humid, and the ocean grinds in and out slowly, whispering its secrets. Gravity holds me down while the earth spins at more than a thousand miles an hour and the solar system hurtles through space, yet I don’t feel these forces. I’m just sitting at my desk.

Unidentified bright objects. UBO’s. That’s what, forty years ago, those first neurologists called the mystery marks they found in the MRI images of my brain. UBO’s. “Oh honey,” my mother said, “This explains everything. I’ll bet you’ve had those all your life!” Many years and tests later, doctors all seem to agree: the marks in my brain are inexplicable but probably harmless. “I know what they are,” I told my mother. “They’re stars.”