It’s The Usual Question, Regina

It’s always a mistake when I think to myself, “I’ll just duck in here and pick up a few things. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

So there we were, meee-eee-eee-eee and Mrs. — Mrs. Orr.

(Mrs. Orr, Mrs. Orr, Mrs. Orr, Mrs. Orr, Mrs. Orr…)

There we were, fresh out of a grocery store where we’d stocked up, and on the other side of the parking lot I noticed the Dollar Tree…those places where, yes, everything’s a dollar. They’re great for things like notepads, generic anti-inflammatory drugs and pain relievers like Ibuprofen and acetaminophen, for cheap kitchen matches and implements that can be used in gardening (like colanders for planters or baking sheets for bird feeder platforms).

We had our purchases gathered in less than five minutes and headed for the checkout. Just before we reached the register, another customer stepped up in front of us and started unloading her cart.

She looked to be in her forties, though I’m not skilled at determining such things. Skin the color of graphite, her hair tucked up under one of those pleated things that looks like Laverne at a 1950s beauty shop would  hide her curlers under. Neon green halter top, pink terrycloth shorts, sandals revealing dirty feet and chipped hot pink nails. Sunglasses the size of saucers, and earrings the same size dangling from her lobes. The earrings bore the legend Black Queen.

She got about a third of her cargo unloaded, then slurred a question at the hapless teenage clerk about how much an item cost, holding it aloft. Mrs. Orr whispered to me, “Yeah, why don’t they put prices on this stuff?” I chuckled and we listened to the clerk explain to the woman that everything in the store is a dollar. Everything. Yes, everything.

The customer stood weaving and shaking her head while the clerk rang up the items. About halfway through, the customer concluded the count she’d been making. “How much is dat already?”

“Eighteen, which will be eighteen dollars. Without tax. So far,” said the clerk.

“Aw, hell, I gots to put summa dis  back. Hol’ up, hol’ up, lemme count somethin’….”

My wife and I exchanged looks. I glanced back at the woman behind us, who had that Careful Neutral Gaze on her face that I’ve seen so many times. She wouldn’t make eye contact with me.

Up in front of us, her royal high-ness was still counting. Another employee stepped over to the adjacent checkout line and beckoned us. “I’ll take the next customer.”

We moved over and checked out and paid in about one minute. When we left the store, the regal one was still selecting items for today’s purchase and placing other ones back in her cart. The cashier had the Careful Neutral Gaze on her face, just like the customer behind us. The profanity boiled up within me, choked back but compelling me once again to wish that in this age of gender fluidity, I could change the sex of another human being so that I would be justified in kicking the living dogshit out of her. Which isn’t very Christian, or very Catholic, or very mature of me. It does have, however, the distinction of being completely honest, and surely honesty is still a virtue in some dust-covered circles.

My problem, you see, is that I notice certain things. Things that are verboten to be noted and cataloged and saved for future use. I never have been nor can I ever be intentionally blind. I am not colorblind, nor am I idiotblind.  I see, I notice, I remember. How very unsafe of me. Proof that I don’t love the Lord, or love the gosspul.

I’m forever grateful to Flannery O’Connor for refusing to meet with the repulsive and manipulative James Baldwin when he requested a get-together with the brilliant writer in her native Georgia. In all her Southern Catholic incandescence, she flatly declined on the basis of appearance. Think about that, Twenty-First Century Denizens. Appearance. Name a public figure today who would refuse to meet with another public figure out of distaste for things might look. Brave girl, that F.O.

Not that Miss O’Connor was flawless. In a letter to a friend, she talked about her short story The Artificial Nigger and described what she called “the Negro’s redemptive suffering for us all.” That sort of statement from a lithe and powerful mind like O’Connor’s stuns me. Its the sort of thing no normal person concludes on her own; it’s the sort of thing one has to be force-fed. It’s also the sort of thing uttered by people who never actually had to live around and interact with colored people. Feet of clay, I suppose.

But FO redeemed herself in a letter to Maryat Lee, dated May 21st 1964, in which she wrote,

“About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophizing propheseying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too. [Martin Luther] King I don’t think is the age’s great saint but he’s at least doing what he can do & has to do. Don’t know anything about Ossie Davis except you like him but you probably like them all. My question is usually, would this person be endurable if white? If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him for a minute. I prefer Cassius Clay…Cassius is too good for the Moslems. [emphasis mine– SKO]

These sorts of honest observations guarantee that Miss O’Connor will be unpersoned and canceled and memory-holed before too long. How dare she ask such questions? How dare she notice such things?

May her memory be blessed. She was a queen of literature, and she didn’t need a pair of vulgar earrings to announce it. She could probably do simple arithmetic in her head, too. Which proves that she was a racist who deserves to be expunged from human history.

~ S.K. Orr