“He went through my bag,” Vivian tells me.  “Right there.  In the store.”  She’s perched at the cafe counter.  She’s just coming up from the city, and she’s pulled in to the cafe before she even goes to her house.  Bob makes her a burger while we sip tea.  

This is the first day we’re open since our vacation to Washington, DC.  It feels good to be back, but the last few days of our trip are still percolating in my mind.  On our way out of the city, we visited Mount Vernon, and spent several hours sponging in the details of George Washington’s life.  We took particular interest in the final exhibit:  about his slaves and their descendents, about his struggles to balance his ideals about liberty against his own practices, about his choice to free his enslaved workers upon his death.

We left Mount Vernon and drove to stay with friends in Princeton, only to learn that the town is still raw from controversy surrounding one of the University’s heroes, Woodrow Wilson.  Princeton’s Black Justice League has been working for a few years now to raise awareness about the nuances in Wilson’s character that haven’t made it into the history books, most notably his endorsement of segregation.  

On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to Washington and Wilson.  They both had quite a lot going on.  They were complex people, trying to balance tragedy, war, and leadership in trying times in a context of commonly accepted  (if questionable) cultural practices.  But I can’t settle myself in their favor.  Their stories haunt me, particularly after watching a video this past winter of Vivian, who is the Director of the Harlem Wellness Center, talking about race and health inequality.  

“It’s sooo toxic,” Vivian pulls me back to her story.  She had purchased a piece of fish from a store in the city, taken it out to her husband waiting in the car, then went back in to buy something else she had forgotten.  These were the actions that prompted the search of her bag.  “These are the little things black people face all the time,”she tells me.  “And it builds up in our bodies.  It poisons us.”

I try to understand what it must feel like to confront subtle and not-so-subtle mistrust, day in and day out, for a lifetime.  I try to imagine how that would play out in my immune system, in my cardiovascular system.  Blimey.  I can’t handle Mom challenging me on my recipe cost calculations without nearly blowing a gasket.  How many more great heroes and heroines could our nation celebrate if we could stop poisoning our brothers and sisters?

But I can’t stay at the counter.  Saoirse has loaded a tripod and recording equipment into the car.  We are leaving to attend a special gathering of the Native Church just down the road.  Two members of their community have passed, and there’s to  be an all-night service to ease their spiritual passage.  Saoirse has gotten permission to come beforehand to interview folks for a project she’s working on, a short video on the spirituality of the water.  I’m going along as her support crew.  

We capture one stirring interview after another.  “Water is life,” we are told over and over.  We hear stories of respect, reverence.  Water is a deity in the eyes of our interviewees.  Saoirse gains more confidence with each interview, and we agree that she will approach the elders and solicit one last interview without her old hag of a mother to interfere.  Our friend takes her to make the introductions, and we agree she’ll come back to get me when she’s ready to start recording.  

A short while later, she finds me.  “I really need you now,” she whispers in my ear. I excuse myself from my conversation and follow.   She brings me outside to a teepee where a cluster of men, mostly from the Mohawk Nation, sit on lawn chairs and tree stumps, smoking cigarettes.  I take a position on the ground beside her tripod to help keep the dialog flowing in the direction of her camera and the man who has agreed to speak.

My help isn’t needed.  We could sit all day and listen.  We hear stories about how uranium mining out west has poisoned the water.  We hear stories about the toxins in the St. Lawrence.  These are not just tales of greed and pollution.  For these elders, these are tales of blasphemy against their spirit world, destruction of their community.  The sheer violence of the pollution nauseates me.  The interview is supposed to be only three short questions, but we just let it roll.  Her video is only supposed to be three minutes, but there’s too much here to take in.

At last, Saoirse turns off the camera and begins putting her equipment away.  I kneel on the ground before this generous elder and take his hand.  

“Thank you so much for sharing with my daughter today,” there are tears of gratitude in my eyes.  

He smiles.  “Do you know why I did it?”  

“Why?”

“Because she’s beautiful.”

“She has a beautiful spirit,” I offer, trying to create the meaning I want to coax from those words.

“No.  Beautiful.  Look at her.” He turns and nods to his friends.  “Right?  Right?”

They nod and laugh while Saoirse pretends not to hear them and bags her equipment.  She finishes, comes forward and locks eyes with each of them, as I have taught her.  “Thank you,” she says. 

They invite us to come back for the ceremony, but we head for the car. 

“The one on the left told me I could sit on his lap,” Saoirse confides when we’re out of earshot.  “He was joking, of course.  But I didn’t know what to do….Because he said it to be funny.”

And I’m brought back to Vivian’s story.  Toxic.  It’s toxic.  What Saoirse did today was brave.  Leading up to this day was brave, reaching out, making connections, asking people outside her sphere to share with her, setting up appointments.  She even brought fresh baked cookies and eggs for the congregation.  

I don’t have words for my daughter.  I remember being in her shoes, earnest in my work, belittled with comments about my looks, but unable to react, “because it was a compliment.  Because it was a joke.  Because they didn’t mean anything by it.”  The only way I navigated out was by aging out, getting stronger with each year, my passage into marriage and motherhood my union card to be addressed for who I was and what I stood for.  I am trying to find advice for counseling her through this, to prepare her to face it down next time, and words fail me.  I can only feel the humiliation from my own young adulthood.  

I want to go home for supper and bed. She wants to go back.  She wants to see more.  Understand more.  We call Bob and Ula and ask them to meet us there. When they arrive, we are offered soup, bread, and an opportunity to sit and visit until dark settles in and the ceremonies begin.  

As Ula and Saoirse pass through the line with their soup, the man who invited Saoirse to sit on his lap reaches up and takes Ula’s arm from where he is seated.  I lean forward, now hovering over my daughters.  

“Get me some bread,” he tells her.  

She doesn’t understand at first.  He hasn’t framed it as a question.  He hasn’t used the word please.  It is an order.  

We are not in our culture, I remind myself.  We do not understand the rules.  But I am angry at this man.  I know how he spoke to one of my daughters.  Now I see him speak to my other daughter in a way that displeases me.  I hold my tongue and hand Ula the bread.  We pass through the line and find a quiet place to eat.  

We are not members of this church.  We will not stay for the actual ceremony.  But my family sits together, saying little, only listening to the conversations that float by, learning everything that we can — about the stories of the ones who will be honored in the ceremony, about the service itself, which will last until dawn.  The very thought of it makes me want to fall face forward in my soup.  It is already an hour past my own bedtime.   I look forward to my mattress, my pillow, my comforter.

Dark settles on the grounds, and the elders stand and make their exits, heading for the teepee outside, readying the space for the others to join them.  The elder who invited Saoirse to sit on his lap passes by, and I am jarred out of my muzziness.  

His leg is badly mangled.  His knee turns 90 degrees inward, and the other leg is cocked and warped as a result.  He can barely walk.  But he does.  And I see him move through that pain, headed out to that teepee. 

And there, this old native man will spend the entire evening.  He will not sleep.  He will pray until the sun rises, for the spirits of community members who have gone ahead of him, so that they may pass on to the next life.  And it registers to me that this tired old man has driven over five hours to be here:  to give up sleep, to sit in a stuffy teepee crammed with a hundred others, to give up precious hours of peace and comfort so that someone who has already passed may transition to the next world.  

And I’m moved by his selflessness.  

And keenly aware of my own selfishness for going home to bed.

Two days later, the members of that church gathering have disbursed, and Saoirse and I travel the dirt roads of West Fulton once more to meet with Brenda, our neighbor from the Onondaga nation.  When Saoirse asks her to speak of the spirituality of water, she tells us about how water pairs with the moon to cleanse a woman’s body.  She instructs us to pay attention to the animals when they are near water.  They can teach us about its spirit.  And then she starts telling us more stories about her people.  About their migration north, after George Washington’s burning of the corn.  

I hadn’t seen anything at Mount Vernon about the Burning of the Corn.  This is news to me.  

But I don’t doubt it.  I feel so confused, about all the ways we can be so mean and hateful to each other.  We enslave another.  We force each other to work in separate rooms, to use separate toilets.  We search a black woman’s bag, accusing her of theft.  We sexually harass a teenager who is trying to learn more about a different culture.  We dismiss an elderly man who suffers pain.  

In all this, two things so clearly.  We are all so guilty.  And yet, we are all capable of such greatness:  giving our lives for the sake of liberty, negotiating with the world’s nations to create peace, ensuring the safety of our communities, sacrificing sleep and comfort for the spiritual peace of another; sitting before a camera and sharing with a young person a different version of history, and teaching about the power of the spiritual world that flows within her own body.  How do we balance these rights with the wrongs?

“You share food,” Brenda’s interview pulls me back to the moment. She is explaining the misunderstood myth about smoke signals, but she answers my unasked question.  When members from one nation needed to pass through the lands of another nation, they came to the boarder and lit a smokey fire, she tells us.  It was a request to talk.  A delegation would be sent to meet the fire.  And the two parties would share food and conversation.   “No matter what, my mother always told me, you offer food and drink, and then you talk.”  She pauses for a moment and smiles broadly at Saoirse, who was a few minutes late because she baked Brenda cookies before she came to the interview.  “So thank you for the cookies.”

In Brenda’s words are the only answers I can find to this human predicament:  A commitment to sitting down together, to sharing food, to sharing water, to sharing life…  To try to stop poisoning each other.