Fighting words

You can’t make this stuff up.

But once you finish choking on the multiple ironies of this sad, brief news, you’ve got to ask, “How does this happen, exactly?” How does someone who purports to be fighting for peace — who so believes in nonviolence that she joins an affinity group and wears a shirt attesting to her values — lose her grip on humanity and pummel another person into unconsciousness?

If a couple of small-town activists can’t settle a dispute without slugging each other, what hope is there for all the blood-wracked corners of the world — North Philadelphia, Ferguson, Gaza, Guerrero? For any of us?

These are rhetorical questions, of course, so let’s start with rhetoric. That is, with talk. The kind of talk that can swiftly flame an argument into a fistfight.

Starting small

Let’s start someplace small: the lineoleum-floored, fluorescent-lighted dayroom of a senior center in Blackwood, New Jersey. I was there not long ago to read a short story aloud and lead a discussion, part of my work with People & Stories, a program that brings the power of great literature to people — in prisons, GED programs, drug rehabs, shelters — who haven’t encountered it before.

For this group — adults from 62 to 93, black and white, male and female — I chose “American History,” by Judith Ortiz Cofer, the tale of a blue-collar town in November, 1963. The town, which includes the ironically-named intersection of Straight and Narrow streets, is unified in sorrow by the death of President John F. Kennedy; at the same time, it’s riven by class, ethnic, and racial bias.

We hear the story through the soon-to-be-jaundiced lens of Elena, a Puerto Rican ninth grader whose crush on a white Southern boy brings her face-to-face with racism. By the story’s end, the boy’s mother will literally shut her door to Elena; she points to the grim tenement locals call “El Building” and asks, “You live there?”

At almost any hour of the day, El Building was like a monstrous jukebox, blasting out salsas from open windows as the residents, mostly new immigrants just up from the island, tried to drown out whatever they were currently enduring with loud music.

Kids today

“The music today is horrible!” burst out Anna, a white woman with tightly curled hair. “You can’t even understand it. And they play it so loud!” Her compatriots quickly offered stories of teenagers who blast rap from their car speakers, neighbors whose music pounds through flimsy apartment walls.

I thought, with a shudder, about Michael Dunn, the Florida man recently convicted of murdering a 17-year-old after firing ten times into an SUV full of black teens. The trigger for Dunn’s ire? The teens were playing “thug” music. Loudly. And they wouldn’t stop.

Although I knew no one at this table was packing a pistol, the rising tension made me nervous. I could hear where this exchange was headed: down a narrowing road of assumptions, a path where loud music would soon be linked to laziness, poverty, ignorance, and crime. The graying heads around the table would nod, their voices a choral huff of righteousness. Someone might even flush with rage or curl a fist: Ach, kids today!

Except that’s not what happened.

Instead, quiet Lorraine recalled how her parents reacted when she and her friends began listening to Elvis Presley; the older generation was scandalized by those swerving hips, that come-hither voice. Rita, who dyes her thinning hair a deep merlot, said, “It’s true, the music today is different. You have to understand it. My grandson helps me out with it.”

Changing perspective

I read the “monstrous jukebox” passage again, and even Anna changed her tune: “Well, either they were celebrating being in a new country or drowning out their problems. Music, to me, always soothes your soul.”

This is what happens in People & Stories: Someone voices provocative words, stinking with prejudice — Hispanic people are like that, so insular…Teenagers don’t think of anyone but themselves…The Chinese always beat their children…The new ones who come here, they don’t even want to speak our language! — only to hear someone else offer a story or a question, a memory, a poke at the assumptions curdling under whatever was just said.

In other venues, words can be inflammatory; conversation devolves as each side drives the other to vociferous, even violent extremes. You can hear that bitter volley on the airwaves, on the sidelines of the high school soccer game, in the streets of North Philly or Jerusalem. In People & Stories, words are not weapons; they are tools we use to peer beneath the surface, picking our way ever closer to a complicated truth.

Lost languages

“Sometimes,” Anna said, shaking her head in vexation, “I hear Spanish language on the television, and I want to throw my TV through the window. They just need to learn English!”

That hung in the air for a long, uneasy moment. Then Rita talked about the Italian spoken by her grandparents, a mother tongue that barely exists in her family today. Lorraine said her grandmother, horrified by Hitler’s atrocities, had stopped speaking German during World War II. The women were sad about these lost languages and the stories they contained.

“I guess it is very hard for foreigners in this country,” Anna said. “And I shouldn’t say ‘foreigners’ because we’re all foreigners.”

No one could argue with that.

We may never know what inflamed the woman in the “Stop the Violence” T-shirt who couldn’t stop herself from striking out, again and again. But surely there’s a story, a dark and painful one, and someone — defense attorney, psychologist, friend — ought to find out about it. “What happened to you?” they should ask. It’s our only hope of interrupting that Mobius strip of wound and retaliation, thought and fist.

“American History” ends on a downbeat — Elena watching snow drift past a streetlight, “turning gray as it touched the ground below.” Or maybe it’s a hopeful image because Elena keeps her gaze high on the still-white snow as it falls.

What we know is that history is neither straight nor narrow; it is a wide and messy unfolding. History happens every time someone slams a door or squeezes a trigger. But every encounter is also a chance to write history anew: when good people say reckless things and then — if they are lucky, and no one has pulled a gun — take a breath, listen, and speak again.