" They've stolen everything," said the fellow passenger. An elderly Black man. To which I replied, raising myself from the back seat of the medical van, "And they think we're the criminals." "They" represented Americans hellbent on destroying even any semblance of democracy. They are organizing. The rest of us are talking. Acknowledging among ourselves that we notice. We're thinking.
Not long ago, I forgot and attempted to connect to another woman about by lived experience: a white male neighbor's racist behavior. Another Black woman and a Latina woman warned me about the man's racist behavior in the recent past. For a few weeks, I heard it! He has a history of finding Black people intolerable.
But I'm wrong. Wrong ! The white woman informed me that she needed to hang up. I don't want to hear this!
In other words, Your experience, Black woman, can't be heard! Keep your "opinions" to yourself or, if you must share, share your "opinions" among other Blacks who think like you!
Muted!
That's why I said what I said. "The gardener was my ancestor." And I looked out at the predominantly white young faces. I began the course with that image of the gardener created by William Byrd II, Virginia. An early American writer. And owner.
In the 1700s, Byrd's letters and writings help transform the plantation mansion into a paradise, a patriarchal garden. In one letter to a friend, he creates "gardeners," as carefree as he is at his desk overlooking the foliage on his windowsill.
" Our negroes are not so numerous or so enterprizeing as to give us any apprehension or uneasiness nor indeed is their Labour any other than Gardening and less by far that what the poor People undergo in any other countrys. Nor are any crueltys exercized upon them, unless by great accident they happen to fall into the hands of a Brute--
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