I guess I haven’t felt too perky and hadn’t really realized that it was because of a sinus infection.

But I didn’t truly feel sick until last evening, when I had to tell my son the truth.

He was being punished for talking too much in school; another note home from the teacher about his disruptive behavior meant no computer or television that afternoon and evening.  After a couple hours of reading, I lightened the punishment a bit.

His sister was catching up on work she missed today due to illness; one of her assignments was to watch a video on Martin Luther King Jr.’s life.  I let her brother join her; he was more likely to pay attention if he thought he was getting away with something.

After the video, he chattered on about what he learned, about why and how persons of color were mistreated and discriminated against in the past.

I reminded him that it wasn’t just African-Americans, but native Americans, Asians and Hispanics who suffered mistreatment as well.  He hadn’t made the association between his own ethnicity and prejudice.  I told him that people see him differently because he was fair-skinned and blonde like his father, but that he wasn’t white.  Or at least only part white.

He knew already knew that, but he hadn’t seen it in the same way before; he hadn’t fully digested the meaning of being mixed race.  I could see him working on this as he trotted off to his bedroom for a few minutes.

When he came back, he asked when Martin Luther King died.  I told him I was about his age in 1968 when Martin Luther King was shot and killed.  Murdered.

God.  That hurt.  It made me sick to see the look on his face.

He didn’t grasp what I said the first time, his eyes opening wide.  Shot?  He asked.

Yes.  Shot with a gun.

Somebody shot Martin Luther King?

Yes, somebody shot him with a gun and killed him.  They wanted him to die.

Oh.

He wandered off for a few minutes and came back.  He asked about the year 1964, about the laws that Martin Luther King helped along.  He couldn’t get his words around this legislation.

I told him it was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, that I was three years old when this became law.

He’d learned that this was the law that stopped Jim Crow, that made it illegal to segregate whites and blacks.  The words still failed him a bit; it was difficult for him to explain what he meant since the idea of segregation was so foreign in his mind, let alone a cumbersome word like segregation.

Other questions bubbled up as he explained what he’d learned from the video.  Were other people treated badly like this besides African-Americans?

Yes, I told him, Chinese people like his great-great-grandfather were not allowed to become citizens and faced restrictions on whether they could own property or even come to the United States.  The Chinese Exclusion Act was aimed at Asian people like his grandfather’s family.

The stricken look on his face again made my stomach recoil.

Was there anybody else, he asked, that was treated badly?  He wanted to get to the bottom of this, upset but determined like a dog on a bone.

Yes, I told him.  Native Americans were forced to leave their lands, had their language taken from them.  People like the Cherokee were made to leave the place they called home and were made to live some place else that was not their home.  Hawaiian people, too, like his grandfather’s people – they lost their language and were not allowed to speak it.  Hawaii was once a sovereign nation, a country of its own, before the queen was locked up and the land taken.

I could see this was enough for the moment.  He pursed his lips and thought a bit.

But the president helped change things, the one who got Martin Luther King out of jail so that Martin could keep working, right?  What was that president’s name?

Kennedy or Johnson?  I asked him.

Kennedy, he said, that one.  He helped get Martin Luther King out of jail.  Is he still alive? he asked me.

I said no, someone shot and killed him.

Again, the stricken look of shock and disbelief.

Like Martin Luther King?  Someone shot him with a gun, too?

Yes.  I was very tiny, only a couple of years old.  Your grandmother was twenty-two, younger than your stepbrother is now.

This was enough.  He couldn’t handle any more and needed a break.  He was quiet for a few minutes, swaying a bit as he thought, twisting his lips as if working to say something that wouldn’t come out.  He blinked hard a few times then wandered off again to his room.

Good God, this made me feel sick, to have to tell him all these horrible things.  It feels like I'm reliving these events again.  I don’t know how much he’s grasping of the context.

And yet I remember how much I understood at seven years of age, when I read the evening paper with my father, understood how big and how tragic an event it was that Martin Luther King had been assassinated.  No one talked about it with me; I read about it on my own, watched the evening news and heard about it on the radio.  I don’t know that I felt I could ask any questions about this event – but then even adults had much to learn at that point in time about the enormity of this loss.  In this respect, my son is more fortunate that he can ask about this freely; there are so many resources about race in America than there were when I was his age.

In spite of feeling heartsick about teaching my son the bitter truth of our nation’s past, I feel a sense of pride that he is so willing to deal with it head on.  

I hope I’ll be up to the challenge when he’ll want to face down even uglier truths in the years ahead.

12:27:14 PM    comment []