A White Life
I was going through my mother’s files after she passed away and found a gift that I gave her decades ago. It was a collection of short poems I wrote, which I made into a booklet with a hand-drawn bouquet of flowers on the cover. The inscription read—To Mother. At the end, I wrote this note:
Dear Mom, Sorry this couldn’t have been nicer. But you know it’s to you especially anyway. I really do appreciate you even though I don’t always show it. Your Loving Daughter, JOY
She added her own note to one of the poems, titled A Life for a Life, which read—'This is right after the Kennedy murder’. I was 16-years-old when John Kennedy’s motorcade drove by our high school in San Antonio, and we all stood along the road cheering as he passed. The next day I was in chorus class sitting near the back of the room when a messenger came to the door. He couldn’t get our teacher’s attention, so he stepped over to me and whispered, “When he stops talking, tell him the president has been shot.” I sat with that news, alone, for many long minutes. And, like so many Americans, I was watching live television when Lee Harvey Oswald was also shot. A Life for a Life reads:
A man murdered, was tried and also murdered. What right have we to take a life for a life. There were two, now there are none, There could have been one.
We thought after John Kennedy, then Bobby, then Martin Luther King, that we were done. Then came Vietnam, and the recession of the 1970’s, and we were done. Then 9/11 and George Floyd and we are just now learning about the Tulsa Massacre—a hundred years ago. Now it seems this is life, every week, week after week—shootings, racial violence, mindless hatred and long hidden history rising to the surface.
We are not nearly done. At best, we are a work in progress and each tragedy gives us a signal, and a chance to do better. As the days of Black Lives Matter have lifted our awareness, here is another poem written by that 16- year-old white girl back in 1963. It is called Persecution:
Today I laughed and sang What right had I to be so gay. For my people are hurting those Who cannot laugh, For they are black.
Let us hope we leave a world for the next generation that is better. And if not, let us hope that they are better than we are, than we have been.