Liberal Manifest Destiny

An open letter to Gita Larson and other progressive liberals

by Mona Shaw

I write this on the chance that some of you care.  While I’m using Gita’s recent aggression as an example.  I witness similar assaults every hour of every day.

Gita, when you evicted Sharon Smith from your home, you committed an act of violence.

I know I don’t know you, so there is no need for you to tell me that, but I know you will anyway.  I do know you are a white woman, and a Quaker.

There is nothing you can tell me, however, that will mitigate the violence of your act.

Especially violent was your decision to effect that eviction by moving her few possessions from where she was residing into a storage locker, changing the locks, and notifying her of her homelessness with a text message. You did all of this while she was at work. Imagine the trauma, of trying to do your job while learning you no longer had a place to live.

The only benefit of the doubt I can muster for you is that the damage done and the cruelty of the method you chose is beyond your experience and ability to grasp such trauma.  If it’s not, your action is worse.

Every target of oppression struggles with PTSD. It’s part of our dance.

A blow like this, at first, shocks our entire system into an emotional shutdown, as if someone belted an enormous, discordant gong as hard they could.  The vibration lasts for days, if not weeks.  We dare not feel until it does. We must force ourselves to function within that tremor if we are to survive.  We must endure again the agony this triggers of previous abuse, which plays like a Power point presentation in our souls.

We must function and plan despite it. Gaslighting comes with the territory. If we’re lucky we’ll weep, if we’re luckier we’ll sob.  Tears can heal and reset our souls.  But we’ll fight weeping just the same until the crisis is past, until we can breathe, because we fear we might not stop crying; and we want to survive.

We will suffer unspeakable suffering that will become part of our patina for the rest of our lives.  Until the next time, and we know there will be a next time.

I am a white woman and a grandmother. Sharon is a Black, Native American grandmother.  I understand you're a grandmother too.  I think of Sharon's 20-year-old grandson in this.  How must he feel that this has befallen his grandmother?  Mine would be deeply hurt.  Yours likely does not face that risk.

I am not qualified to speak of the racist impact of your act, except to know the racism—the nadir of American evil--is inescapable.  I have, however, lived most of my life in poverty, so I am infinitely qualified to speak of the class aggression in this.  The class abuse I have witnessed and experienced has cost me everything I owned and nearly my life on more than one occasion.  It has taken the lives of many I have loved.  I know when it’s present, and I know how it works.

So, I know the harm is about to get worse.  As the privileged do, you will haul out standard and garish canards, affected rationalizations to avoid introspection. You may even see a therapist or ask clergy to help you work through any sense of guilt.  Clearly, rationalizing had already begun days earlier with help from likeminded friends.  You planned this deliberate act for some time.

While this is a not an exhaustive list, I am intimately familiar with them all.

“Perhaps, I could have handled this differently but….”

“I did all I could do.”

“I have to take care of myself right now.”

“I’m doing the best I can.”

“I can’t be all things to all people.”

“I have a right to govern my own space.”

“I’ve done a lot for these people.”

“I could have done much worse.”

I have come to wonder if liberal theology believes that absolution comes from proving others have committed worse sins than they.

The damage will be punctuated by blaming the her for your actions.

“I can’t deal with her while she’s angry.”

“She has a victim mentality.”

“This isn’t really about what I did.  It’s about her pathology.”

“She could have avoided this by dealing with it earlier, differently, better. etc.”

“She doesn’t know how to make herself happy, so she strikes out at anyone.”

“She needs to learn you can get more flies with honey.”

You will ultimately deliver the affluent coup de gras.

“I don’t have to do this.”

“Let’s face it.  She’s not a good poster child for the cause.”

“She is not one of us.”

“I could have done nothing to help.”

“If they don’t stop being so critical, they’ll lose our support altogether.”

These set us up for the most damaging part of all.  To some degree, we will believe you.  We will blame ourselves too.  We will feel like a failure to the point of feeling worthless.  We will think this might not be happening if we were smarter, had better timing, had done things differently, looked different, had a better demeanor, etc.

To paraphrase Dr. King, “It’s not the attacks of our enemies that hurt the most.  It’s the actions or non-actions of our friends.”  Sometimes, it’s your best friends, people you’d previously trusted with your life.

We will consider giving up, quitting activist work, crawling into an anonymous hole and never coming out.  Sometimes, when it’s particularly dark, we’ll consider quitting life. 

Pulling yourself through that contracting, throbbing knothole is the hardest think a justice truth-teller ever must do.  And you do most of the pulling alone.  Your trust in others is destroyed for the time.  You gasp and wriggle and reintroduce yourself to your own heart.  If you’re lucky, and not everyone is this lucky, you eventually collapse, exhausted, outside that knothole.  You rest, for however long you need and when you can.  You stand again.

The pain you inflict has a long reach. When you attack someone's credibility, it not only hurts that person, it threatens that person's ability to help others.

Some will say you don’t deserve this letter.  You and your pals will regurgitate Manifest Destiny again, and again.  And, again. 

Too often liberals expect our deference and servility.  We know you clutch to your class position like rare pearls. You are so terrified of losing that.  So, you must remain convinced our hope is derived from your largesse, largesse which you are free to extend or withhold on a whim.  You like us in our place, and you’re quick to put us back there if we stray.

And, just to survive, we often play along.  We comfort you when you’re offended by a hint of truth.  We applaud when you win a human rights awards for your low-risk, peer-approved support.

We smile approvingly when you raise your hand at diversity forums to show all you’ve learned in all those sensitivity trainings. You are “culturally competent.”  We let it go when you interrupt us because you believe you can tell our story better than we can.

We know we are your project.  We are your self-aggrandizement--your way to prove you are a good person.  When we fail to do that, our value evaporates, and you’re done with us.

You objectify us.  You don’t believe we’re human, at least not as human as you.  We’re not as bright; we’re not as clean, we’re not as savvy, or as knowledgeable about how the “real” world works. We’re not as shrewd; we’re loud; we’re crude and crass; we dress “inappropriately”; we’re messy, and we certainly lack the white, professional-class social graces you revere.

Liberals often throw us under the bus when we present a risk to their comfort or social lives. You are fine with leaving us alone on that limb.  You rationalize that too.

“There is more than one side to this story.”

“I have a mortgage to pay.”

“I have other people I need to think about.”

“I have to work with that man, woman, group, etc.”

“I have to protect my resume, career, etc.”

“I have to take care of myself right now.”

“I need to get away from this controversy and give myself some space and peace."

You don’t really see our bodies outside the hospitals and in the street, and you vote for those you know will kill us, because, they’re not killing you.

You threw out a Black, Native American grandmother as if she were an irksome inconvenience, like weeds in your yard.  You placed a blanket of racism on all of this, a blanket that those of your class and race has historically infected with some variety of small pox or another social infection you’ve never known.

In the end, you provided a service.  We need to learn we can’t count on you.  We must do this for ourselves.  We will plow through even you, if we must, to realize justice and liberty.

I’m not at all concerned that I will turn off allies with this.  In more ways than not, it may be better for us if you go.  As Lila Watson says, if you’re oppression isn’t bound up with ours, you can’t help us anyway. 

If your oppression is bound with ours, if you are one us, I can’t drive you away. You do have to do this.  Justice has never been won by those who must be sweet-talked into it.  It’s won by those who can’t be talked out of it.

I am simply asking you to think with a little introspection.

Fire and ICE

by Mona Shaw

The latest ICE raid on May 8 happened 18 miles from my front door. It also reminded me of how I lost faith in Democrats.  I know some think this came about when I flew off the handle one day in some purist tantrum.  It didn’t happen that way at all.  The truth is much more embarrassing.

My disenchantment with Democrats began during the Clinton administration.  After a spate of unconscionable legislation and policies, from GATT to NAFTA to DOMA to DADT, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act horrified me most of all.  I was so fed up that I voted for Monica Moorehead of the Workers World Party for president that year.

But I waffled in my resolve.  I waffled a lot.  I still thought there was value in working for local candidates, and I volunteered for them and cut them checks.  I even voted for John Kerry in 2004, because George W. Bush for an unabashed war criminal, and I was still beguiled into believing that Democrats were against war for profit. I couldn’t envision a 2018 when G.W. would be considered an affable teddy bear by the party.

Indeed, Democratic candidates were a consistent presence at peace festivals and rallies during all the Bush administration.  They often spoke and held their peace signs high. It was at one such gathering that I met Dave Loebsack.  You could always count on him being there.  The first time I met Dave, I mispronounced his last name.  He was more than a little piqued at my mistake and corrected me in a patently snotty tone.  I was quite embarrassed and apologized profusely.  He didn’t accept my apology and just glared at me and walked away.

“People are touchy about their name,” I rationalized.

I swept it under the rug and volunteered for his campaign just the same.

The day he was elected I made phone calls on his behalf until the polls closed.  I was thrilled he was elected.  As Republicans go, Jim Leach had been a very moderate one and voted like a Democrat as often as not.  I knew it would be even better. 

I was excited in early January, 2007, when I learned that he was going to hold a town hall meeting a block from the mobile home park where I lived. I was the first to arrive.

He was still giddy about his win and talked about watching “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.”  (He has yet to participate in a filibuster.)  He eschewed suggestions that G.W. Bush should be impeached for his war crimes.

“Do you want Dick Cheney for president,” he asked.

“Impeach him too,” I suggested. 

He told me to “Get serious,” and shot me that look he’d given me at the festival.

I was embarrassed and intimidated and decided to move to safer ground and ask a soft ball question.

“What are you thinking about the ICE raid in Marshalltown last month?” I asked.

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said.

My response was a reflex, and my surprise was real.  The Swift raid had been on the front page of the Des Moines Register for weeks and had received national news.  I thought everyone knew about it.

“Really?” I asked.

“I’ve been a little busy,” he said.

His tone was so hostile that others noticed and became quiet.

He gave a nervous laugh and said, “I guess I don’t suffer fools and trouble-makers gladly.”

The subject was abruptly changed.  All but one or two present continued to fawn over him.

I checked out mentally after that.  I was too worried.  It wasn’t that he didn’t know, though that was sad.  It was that he didn’t care that he didn’t know.

His response disillusioned me.  Not because he was rude to me, but because he had exposed to me his modus operandi for dealing with statements he didn’t like.  His M.O. was to shame and discredit the person who asked or said those things.

I also knew that it wasn’t in his instinctive repertoire to care about the families that had been destroyed by the raid.  He didn’t know an Esperanza or a Jorge or a Consuelo or any of the other Latinos who comprised a good third of my trailer park. My neighbors were devastated and now being terrorized.  He had not seen them weeping while shoveling their walk.  He not driven slowly by my trailer to read the sign I’d put in my front window condemning the raid.  I had to do that.  I wanted them to know that this white neighbor was on their side.  He didn’t see Jorge shovel my walk after that.

“Do any of these upper middle-class Democrats really care about the folks?” I had to wonder.

Or, do they just adopt “positions” that are quickly minimized when the rubber hits the road?

I had to pay closer attention. He had stoked my belly’s fire for the truth.  My disappointing discoveries were many and profound.  The rug became very lumpy.

Thank you, Martin

 by Mona Shaw

Martin Luther King, Jr. is personal for me.  He is my teacher, my mentor, and my friend. He changed my life, forever.  He led me to the defining moment of my life.

When I was 16, I believed then, as I do now, that he was fighting for me and all the poor people who lived in Flint Hills Manor, a neighborhood of dilapidated cinder-block row houses, where the poorest of the poor lived in Burlington, Iowa. I had heard the “I have a dream” speech while perusing used comic books in Susie Alvine’s corner store, and I was instantly and solidly on board.  When he said, “Justice and equality for all, I just assumed my people were included in the “all.”  He was like church.  When I heard his voice, I felt loved.

Life was hard for me then.  At school, I was mocked and taunted because of my

Neighbor kids in the Manor

address.  I ate my lunch alone in the hall instead of the cafeteria to avoid the abuse.  My father and step-mother were in a very dark and angry place at the time.  At home I felt the end of a leather belt most days for anything and nothing.

“You left the light on in your room while going to the bathroom!” 

“The way you breathe is disgusting!”

My feet were like blocks of lead when I forced myself to carry myself to either destination.  My soul was even heavier.  But, I had Dr. King.  I also had my church.

Flint Hills Church of the Nazarene was my refuge.  They saved me body and soul.  They told me I was special, that I was smart and a beautiful child of God. They loved me, and I loved them back.  I felt joy in church.  I laughed in church.  I prayed and sang until my spirit soared.  They taught me the Gospels and how to stand up for your convictions in the face of adversity. 

I had come to that church the way most children did, by crawling onto a blue Sunday School bus when it drove through our neighborhood every Sunday morning.  They welcomed every child, no matter how they were dressed, with or without shoes, and they loved us all. I could endure whatever came my way, because Sunday was coming.

When I showed up with belt marks on my face or arms or legs.  People in the church tried to do something.  The pastor at the time mucked this up horribly, but they were the only ones who tried.

They didn’t talk about racism in church, but, because they taught us to sing, “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the word, red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight,” I assumed they were against it.

I believed King’s speeches were the 20^th Century gospel.  I thought the Vietnam War might be wrong. When he said it was, I knew it.  His words about poverty and income equality were like drops of water on a scorched spirit.

I learned that Dr. King had been murdered in the same place, but not in the same way, as I learned about the assassination of JFK.  They didn’t announce it over the loud speaker, and they didn’t send us home.  I heard a teacher say, “Someone finally killed that trouble-making nigger.”  I wanted, I prayed earnestly that it was not him, but it was.  I was flattened. And, no one comforted me.

My father did have his kind moments and was patient with my devastation.  He tolerated it when I cut photo after photo of Dr. King and Coretta Scott King behind her black veil from the local newspaper and taped them to my bedroom wall.  I would pray and sob to those photos at night, “Please come back.  Please.  Like Lazarus.  We need you.”

After a few weeks of listening to and watching me, my father did say, “You know you’re not a Negro, don’t you?”  Still, he let me be with my photos and my mourning.

My parents didn’t go to church.  Just the same, every week a “witness” would visit our home, pray with them and try to convince them to save their souls and join us.

One week it was Brother Hartzell.  Now, born-again Christians love talking about

Mug shot of King

the crucifixion more than anything else.  It is an effective topic to elicit agreement.  Brother Hartzell began to agonize with sweat and tears over the mistreatment of Jesus, carrying the cross, the whip, the nailing to the cross, the piercing of his side, and the vinegar shoved to his lips.  He closed his mini-sermon with this.

“That nigger last week got a better funeral than Jesus.”                        

Brother Hartzell left.  My belly burned, literally.  Bile rushed to my throat with an equal scalding.  I swallowed and swallowed to keep it down.  I tried to convince myself that I’d not heard what I heard.  But, I had.  My father couldn’t resist a taunt.

“Well, it looks like your church doesn’t love your guy as much as you do.”

My misery only increased over the following days.  I finally ran to my pastor’s house and poured out my heart and confusion.  The pastor and his wife were loving and concerned.

“You have to understand, “Brother Smith said, “Some people believe the negro is inferior, and some don’t.  We have respect both views. And, even though Brother Hartzell was clumsy in his statement. He is technically right. Hang on to that, Mona.”

Flint Hills Church of the Nazarene

I did not respect both views; I did not want to hang on to that, and explained my position.  Sister Smith took my hand and spoke.

“I know this is hard.  I have trouble with that thinking too, but we must still love each other.  Though I do believe mixed marriages are a sin.”

I was even more confused and tormented and a bit derailed.

“Why is mixed marriage a sin?  Aren’t their children precious? And what about…?  And what about…?  And what about…?”

Dr. King had taught me well.  Brother and Sister Smith finally cut me off and told me that I needed to go home and pray about it.  They said if I prayed in truth, God would explain it to my heart.

“Jesus loves the little children.  All the children of the world.  Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.  Jesus love the little children of the world.”

Throughout the night, the singing became gently louder and more beautiful, until it sounded like a choir of angels.

Eventually, I heard bird song and saw light coming through my bedroom window.  I stood and tore some loose skin from my knees blistered by the hardwood floors.  I looked at the photo of Dr. King’s photo on the wall and whispered to my soul with a conviction I had never know until then.

“They’re wrong.”

The following Sunday evening, I preached the first, if not the only, anti-racism sermon in Flint Hills Church of the Nazarene to our youth group.  Sister Smith was not amused.  She took me aside.

“Don’t ever do that again.”

“I won’t,” I promised, “because I’m not coming back.”

I believed this was a test of who I would be, and that my soul would perish if I did not follow it.  I kept my promise, never went back, and never regretted it, but I missed them. I wept about this many times.  The community, the singing, the love, the refuge were gone for good.

Fifty years later, I still miss them.  Every time I pass the church, a part of me wants to go inside, see the pews, smell the smell of hymnals, and look at the light that comes through the stained-glass windows.  But, I cannot go backward.  Still, I cannot but love them for what they gave me when they did.

I didn’t know what to do with my new knowledge, but I kept walking in it.  In the summer, kids in the Manor and I built tents in our backyards and put signs on the tents that said, “Resurrection City.”  The newspaper came and took a photo.  It was something.

Things at school improved dramatically. It turned out most of the teachers did get it, and they said so and organized the first of MLK events sweeping the nation.  The Black kids and poor kids at school suddenly became cause celebre. I had friends.  I would learn these friendships were superficial, and we were fundamentally a do-gooder project. Still, the persecution stopped. They even hired a Black teacher the following year.  I took his class.  I had fun in school for the first time.

Fifty years have passed. I have witnessed many things. My activism increased and became more radical as did my experiences with betrayal and disillusionment.  Dr. King’s life has been sanitized by the dominant culture. The have fashioned his memory to suit their self-interests. Progress in racism, let alone militarism and poverty, has been painful and slow and is far from achieved. Rarely is it mentioned that his mother, Alberta, was also assassinated while sitting in church six years later. He was far more radical and far more of a socialist than most people realize. Please read his work.  His widow, Coretta, lived on for many years to support equality for women and the rights of lesbian and gay people.

The writing of Martin Luther King, Jr. has sustained me through it all.  When I fall flat, and I have many times, and have no hope, eventually I will pull out “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” and it will lift me to my feet. 

Here and there, someone will point out to me the flaws of Dr. King.  These flaws are undeniable.  I also know this.  We all miss part of the truth.  That’s why we all need to preach it.  And, Dr. King never preached anything but the Truth. And, he absolutely lived and put his life on the line for the Truth he preached. For me, that distinguishes him, forever.

I, too, believe that we will get to the Mountain Top.  I, too, believe “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”  I’ve now entered old age, so like Dr. King, I know I may not get there with you.  But, I know completely and absolutely that justice is inevitable.  Keep reading his truths.  Keep walking.

Thank you, Martin.

Gram

by Mona Shaw

I don’t have a chip on my shoulder.  I have an entire forest.  The resentments I have from witnessing the mistreatment of the poor are rooted through the bone. 

Whenever I hear a rich person say, “I worked hard for what I have.”  It takes all the self-control I have to not go ballistic.

My grandmother worked hard.

Cora Victoria Riddle was born on February 19, 1914.  She was the kindest and most generous person I’ve ever known.  She was also the wittiest.  I never knew anyone to spend fifteen minutes with her not left laughing until their sides hurt.  When she wanted to compliment me most, she would tell me I was “somethin’.”

She was born to a Swedish father, an affable and charming drunk, and a Chickasaw mother on an Indian Reservation in Ada, Oklahoma.  Unlike her darker and younger sisters, she had fair skin, crystal blue eyes, and hair the color of butter.  Because of this, my great-grandmother doted on her.

When she was a child, she contracted malaria which morphed into St. Vitus’s Dance.  Her tremors were so violent, my great-grandmother had to tie her to a chair and spoon-feed her. Because of this, she had spotty formal schooling and knew what she knew by teaching herself.  For whatever reason—Gram attributed it to a chiropractor—she had healed by the time she was about 15.  My great-aunts complained that now that she was well, she still didn’t have to help with housework.  My great-grandmother told them, “All Cory has to do is be able to sit still and look pretty.”

She began dating a man named Bill Johns when she was 16. 

After I was grown, Gram would tell me things, always in voce sotto, not exactly a whisper, but quiet enough that anyone in another room couldn’t hear her.

“I was so damn dumb,” she told me once.  “Bill asked why I was taking Lydia Pinkham pills so much.  I told him that I hadn’t bled in three months, and I was anemic.  He said, ‘You’re not anemic, Cory, you’re pregnant.’”

Gram and Bill, about 1930

They married in 1932. The baby was stillborn. Three more children arrived each successive year.  My mother, born in 1933, was the first of those.  All were delivered at home by a neighbor or midwife.  She told me when the youngest was born, the midwife left her and said she’d be back later.  Gram begged her to wait just a little longer.  “Well,” Gram told me, “When she got back, there was Bunt bawling in the bed.”

Bill beat her, viciously.  She put up with it.  We were all told my biological grandfather died of a brain tumor.  He did not.  The day after my 21^st birthday, we were sitting in her kitchen, Bill's name came up, and Gram began talking in voce sotto, looking not at me, but into the past.  “I’d look up, and he’d be staring at me with crazy eyes.  He’s whisper, “I’m gonna kill you Cory.”  One time after he almost did, I had to have him committed. He might hurt the kids.  I just had to.”

He died, not from a brain tumor, but from an interaction with another inmate in which he was murdered.

Becoming a widow with three toddlers is never easy. In the early 1930s, it was impossible. The America's Great Depression was full-on, and as she said, “Men couldn’t even get jobs, let alone a woman.”

She fed her children and her charming ne’er do well father by doing anything that translated into money.  She confessed to me once of being frustrated with her father for not helping.  “I’d say, ‘Daddy, what if you drink yourself to death?  How will I pay for your funeral?’”

“’Oh, Cory,’ he’d say, ‘Just throw me to the hogs.’”

She sewed buttons on cards, not as an employee but piece work, for a button factory—one dime for a hundred cards of four.  She was fast and guessed she made about 15-cents an hour. Until the day she died, she still had scars on her finger-tips from those needles and thread. She ironed other people’s clothes.  She did their laundry and cleaned their houses.  Their diet was mostly biscuits and gravy, pork backfat, and the green beans she somehow found time to plant in the back yard.

“Green beans make their own seeds,” she explained to me once.  “And you can trust them to come up.  Anything else was too expensive and too risky, even tomatoes.  Don’t even think about carrots.”

Remembering one of those days always caused her to tremble.  A social worker knocked on the door and tried to convince her to allow the children to be temporarily placed in better homes until she got on her feet.  

"At least let me take the baby," the woman said.

Gram smelled a rat.  She splayed herself in front of the screen door, raised her fist and seethed, "You'll get my kids over my dead body!"

It was a common practice for parents to agree to this, only to later learn the paper work they'd signed meant they'd given them up for adoption.  Most never saw their children again.  The social worker never came back.  Though Gram said her heart pounded for years whenever she heard a knock on the door.

They survived.

Gram and Bamp, about 1970.

In 1942, she married Arthur “Jake” Nelson, the only man I would know as my grandfather.  His heart and soul matched hers.  They were deeply in love until the day he died.  Bamp, as we called him, is the only man I ever considered a saint.  He was the prototype of what a man should be.  Things were better.

“Jake made $10 a week,” Gram giggled once, “Me and the kids were living on $10 a month.  I thought he was rich.”

Of course, they were still poor.  Yet, they were content. As both often told me, “We didn’t have a lot, but we had enough.”

They scraped enough together to buy a house on a five-year contract.  They loved the house and put a lot into it.  My grandmother painted the kitchen white with red trim and hung red and white gingham curtains.  They were giddy the day the last payment came due.  A house, a real house, would be theirs at last.  When Gram arrived at the wealthy man’s house to give him that last payment. He asked her to wait until the next day.  Something unexpected had come up, and he couldn’t do the paperwork until then.

Early the next morning, the sheriff was at their door, serving them with a notice of eviction.  They were told that because their payment was late, the rich man had the legal right to take back the house.  He did.  They had to move so quickly that she forgot the kitchen curtains.

“Oh, I probably wouldn’t have a place to hang them anyway,” she thought.

They moved into The Manor.  The Manor or Flint Hills Manor, is where poor people, i.e. “white trash” lived in Burlington, Iowa.  It still is, but it's more racially integrated.  The Manor was built during World War II as temporary housing for workers at the ammunition plant, 5 miles from Burlington.  It was mostly cinder-block four- and six-plexes, but there was a small section of red brick buildings for more important plant employees. 

After the war, the buildings were sold piece-meal to various slum-lords. The buildings deteriorated quickly.  The streets were never repaired by the City.  The stigma of living there was solid and the fodder for many derogatory local jokes.  The red-brick buildings were slightly more expensive in rent.  Gram and Bamp moved into the cinder-block section.  This was the same section in which I grew up and didn’t leave until I was 18 and after I graduated from high school.

It should be noted that not as many poor people live in The Manor now.  In 2006, the City of Burlington evicted hundreds of residents under eminent domain.  They City razed about half of the buildings to please an investor who was going to revitalize the property.  Many found themselves homeless.  The investors backed out of the deal.  The property sat empty for eleven years.  Some of those evicted never recovered. The buildings still standing are now federally subsidized housing.

Bamp and Gram had moved from The Manor by the time I was born.  Bamp had taught himself to be a mechanic. He was one of the most popular in town.  He still didn't make much because he'd fix your car whether you could afford it or not.  He'd have the customer write down the amount they still owed, put the tab into a cigar box and tell them to pay him as they could. Bamp was always giving out something to someone.  His son criticized him once for giving $20, a sizable amount at the time, to a stranger.

"The man told me he needed $20. I had $20, so I gave it to him. Now be still about it."

They somehow managed to buy a large garage in the middle of town on an alley.  There was no house.  They fashioned a section of the garage into a tiny 500 square-foot apartment.  Gram had a job at Kresge’s dime store.  As far as they were concerned, life was now good.  They lived there until he died.

My favorite childhood memories are visiting Gram at Kresege’s.  The other workers knew who I was and ala “Cheers” would holler my name when I walked in. I never stopped being thrilled at that.  I remember, before the store had air conditioning, hot summers when the store’s lights were dimmed, and the ceiling fans roared at top-speed to give some relief from the heat.  I remember Gram using her employee discount to buy me a snow cone.  I can still remember the ice shavings escaping from the machine as it ground huge chunks of ice into snow.  Sometimes Gram’s boss would buy me the snow cone.  He adored Gram and always told me so.  “She’s the best worker we’ve ever had,” he would say.  Twice Gram won the award of Burlington’s favorite employee, a contest the local newspaper, “The Burlington Hawkeye,” used to sponsor. Both times Kresge’s put a full-page ad in the paper after she won, with her photograph, declaring themselves to be “the friendliest store in town.”

She didn’t see it coming, when she found a pink slip on her time card two weeks before her pension was vested.  She wasn’t the only one.  It was widespread practice then by the S.S. Kresge Company, later known as the Kmart Corporation, and even a later a division of Sears.

My memories of Gram as a child are a mobius loop of joy.  One afternoon we were snapping green beans while sitting in the swing, when she abruptly stood up and slipped her lithe frame into a pair of Bamp’s overalls on the clothes line and waited for him to come home. Another time she put on a convincing “proper” act for my boyfriend then flipped him the bird after he teased her, shocking him down to his socks.  

Some things would hit her serious side.  Once when I was about 8, we were taking a walk.  There were several signs in a front yard the all read, “For Sale.  Only to colored people.”

I said something about it being nice they would sell to colored people.  Gram was vociferously anti-racist, an unusual thing in the 1950s, and she set me straight. She explained the owners had gotten some raw deal from their neighbors, were being forced to sell their home, and the signs were payback.  She told me to sit on the curb and knocked on the door.  She went inside for a while.  Then she and a woman came out.  They began taking down the signs.  “Colored people are as good of folks as white people,” I heard her tell the woman, “They don’t deserve to live next to these assholes.”  The woman laughed.

She could even make you laugh at a funeral.  When her father died penniless, I wondered how she’d manage his funeral.  “I’m just gonna throw him to the hogs,” she said. She paid for his funeral over time.

After being fired from Kresge’s, she took a job as a pants presser for a local dry-cleaner.  I went in there once, the temperature was well over 100, and there was only one little fan on the floor.  I caught her once putting Vaseline on a burn. I noticed more gray patches on her forearms. She cautioned me to not tell Bamp.  “I'm fine, and it'll just make him worry.”

She talked about the job as if it were a lark and kept us in stitches.  I remember a story about a co-worker who kept singing the same phrase from the same song over and over and over.  She’d mimic it, “I shot a man in Reno, just to see him die!  She has a damned fine voice, but Jesus Christ.”

The job took a toll on her just the same.  When I was 15, she collapsed at work and had to have a pace-maker.  Bamp was terrified.  He’d phone me in tears and say, “I can’t live without her.  I can’t.”

One day he phoned and simply said, “I’m coming over to pick you up. We’re gonna paint the kitchen.  Cory’s gonna come home to a painted kitchen.”

We painted the kitchen red and white.  There was only one window in the kitchen, but we bought a yard of red and white gingham.  I made the curtain, and we hung it there.  And, yes, she was thrilled to tears.

Bamp never had to live without her.  He died in 1972, she was devastated, but stoic.  He died from arteriosclerosis.  He was diagnosed too late for any treatment.  Old Doc Patterson had treated him for arthritis for years.  They amputated one leg and were going to amputate the other, when they determined there was no point.  He had been admitted to the “poor people’s” ward at University of Iowa Hospitals.  They don’t have those anymore, but they did then.  He was on ward C23, an enormous hall with about 50 beds lined up on each side.   It was not uncommon to see filled urinals left on bedside tables for hours.  I would surreptitiously empty his and give it to a nurse. After, I learned he wouldn’t make it.  I began to sneak him cigarettes.  The attending resident told the nurses to leave us alone and just brought us an ashtray.  We sat and smoked and talked.  He would stop to writhe in pain and apologize for the interruption.  He passed from this world in absolute agony.  In pain so abject he no longer knew I was there.  I will never forget his screams of pain at the end, while trying to stifle his screams, then whisper, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

A University of Iowa professor Ken Amada, once bragged to me about how he had been admitted to the VIP section of University Hospital.  “The rooms have mahogany paneling,” he told me, “and the food is made by a certified chef!”  This professor neglected and sexually harassed his students and cut gay men from faculty searches.  I wanted to hit him.  I regret that I didn’t.

Gram dressed him in a brown, second-hand suit he had never worn, and a brand new pink dress shirt. No tie. They must have had an inside joke about the pink shirt, because she’d snicker every time this came up.  If there was, she never told me. His best friend, a Black man also with the name Jake Nelson, was a pall bearer at his funeral.

I stayed with Gram for a few days after Bamp’s funeral.  She had things for me to do.  One was to burn the receipts in the old cigar box of money people still owed him.  Even though she would now live on only her Social Security, she was clear about this. She feared someone might try to collect those debts to help her.  “I know they mean well,” she said as we watched them turn to ashes, “But Jake didn’t believe in dunning people.” I still regard this as the most empowering moment of my life.

My last night there before I went back to college in Iowa City, she had been quiet for a while, then spoke abruptly, not in voce sotto.  “I just gotta say this,” she paused, “He was a good man.  He was a very good man.  He didn’t deserve to die in all that pain.  I’m mad as hell about that.”

My uncle Bernard, her older son, would die soon after that from a brain aneurysm. He was too young.  It was the only time I ever saw her cry.  “It’s mean,” she confided in me.  “It’s mean.

She would make do.  She would even feed me when I stayed with her one summer between college terms.  The University had been dismissed early that year because of anti-war protests. I was in the middle of it, and she knew it.  I half expected her to object, but she didn’t, except to say, “I admit I worry about you getting hurt.”  Later she added, “Daddy always did say it was a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.  He had to have been right about something.”

She began to date and then married Lew Ebey, a widower she’d known for 40 years.  She moved to live with him in Macomb, Illinois.  They had a modest but comfortable house.  She planted a huge garden with green beans and tomatoes, and even carrots.

Gram died February 27, 1989.  She was 75.  I borrowed a car to go to her funeral. After a post-funeral dinner in a hall that was filled to maximum capacity, Lew took me aside.  “She so loved you,” he said, “Not a day went by when she didn’t tell me you were somethin’.”

The memory of Gram that haunts me the most took place that summer I stayed with her.  I turned 21 that summer, and she drove me to the store to legally buy a quart of cold beer.  She laughed when I insisted the clerk card me. We were laughing, and I was regaling her with all the ways I was going to change the world with my college degree.  Poverty and classism would prevent my ever getting that degree, but I didn’t know that yet.  I said, “Hey Gram, maybe you should go back to school.  They might write a story about you!”

She grinned and said, “Mon’ Lynne, ain’t nobody ever gonna write a story about me.Hell, after they cut out the dirty jokes and cuss words, there wouldn't be nothing to write. I ain’t never gonna be no rags to riches story. That’s okay, most poor folks ain’t.”