Submission to Racism
When I first saw a busload of black girls, their heads full of braids tied with plastic-colored balls, I stared. Open mouth, time-stopped stare. I had not known there were schools full of black girls. They had been so missing from my life I did not miss them. If you would have asked me then, who was the prettiest, I would have chosen me, except blond, blue-eyed, slimmer. You know. Like Nikki. She had it made and we both knew it. Those girls never came to my school. I never knew them.
Until later. In college, at the record store, Jocelyn told me to watch the young black boys the closest. They’ll pocket CDs if you let them, she said. And I figured she knew. One time this man, older than me, was shuffling through the S’s and then he turned to me: why are you staring at me? The question rippled and rippled and kept coming back every day in the store, rippling.
In high school, as a cashier at K-Mart, I remember trying to touch the hands of black people when I gave them change, just brushing them slightly so they hardly noticed. Wanting to be closer. Not wanting to say it.
Born in Texas and raised in Buffalo, New York, Mary Kane currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota where she is completing a graduate degree Hamline University’s writing program. She also has a career in marketing, and resists the habit of writing ad copy and billboards while working on her first love, poetry. Her work has appeared in Murphy Square, Kaleidoscope, Burner Magazine and OVS Magazine.