by
Carol D. Marsh
I’d had
it.
No matter
that I was the one who had dreamed of this place for years, had slogged through
the building’s three-and-a-half year gut demolition and renovation using untold
quantities of dogged determination and more yelling at the contractor than I’ll
ever confess. I’d been ecstatic to move with my husband into our apartment on
the second floor in December 1995 and prepare the building called Miriam’s
House for its first residents—Washington, DC’s homeless women living with
AIDS—in March 1996.
And no
matter that I already had fifteen months as resident manager of a house for homeless
pregnant women, where I’d been taught a series of painful lessons about the
difficulties a middle-class suburban-raised white woman encounters when living
with eleven street-wise black women. Why I underestimated the power of our
differences after having learned it so painfully then, I couldn’t have told you.
Perhaps I thought I had already discovered everything I’d need to know to live
and work at Miriam’s House.
I hadn’t.
And so, by June, I’d had it.
This
resident hated the rules, all of them, and complained loudly every chance she
got. That one snarled at my cheeriest greetings. And Tamara. Oh, goodness,
Tamara. Who had walked up the front walkway, the first resident to move in on
our first day, with a call that I knew immediately I’d remember forever. “I’m
home!”
Home, a concept
I’d formed while growing up in not-one-bit-integrated suburbia in the sixties
and seventies, had become so fixed in my mind that there was little of the
conceptual left in it. And though part of me knew this home would be very, very
different from my pretty imaginings about how well we would all get along and
how grateful they would all be, imagination dominated nonetheless.
Tamara—with
what was to me a gleeful, sometimes spiteful, persistence that made a mockery
of that cheery greeting on her first day—set about disabusing me of these notions
and any others I might have had about myself and how I would be in Miriam’s
House. And though most of the residents were friendly and willing to help me
bridge our differences, I let Tamara’s combination of bold disrespect and sly
baiting overshadow all that was going well.
At a house
meeting: Why ain’t you piped purified
water into the ice maker? Makes no sense to have good water to drink if we have
to put that ice into it. You ain’t thinking.
In the
dining room after dinner: You all shoulda
heard Carol in the car on the way to the emergency room when I had that fever. (Taking
on an overly sweet, childish voice) ‘I
hope you’ll be okay. You know I’ll stay there for you.’
Before
long, I was avoiding her. I’d slip away from the TV room or dining room when
she came in. I’d brace myself for her onslaughts in house meetings and wait for
her to be done, responding with just a few words if at all. I couldn’t figure
out how to relate to her without incurring her contempt and getting my feelings
hurt yet again. I gave up. Avoidance seemed the best policy.
But best
policy or not, it simply was not sustainable in that small community.
I stop on my way down the stairs and
sniff. Good lord, what stinks?
What I’m smelling cannot possibly be
food, at least, not in undigested form. So, in mystified ignorance, I follow my
nose into the kitchen, where the nauseating odor seems to emanate from a pot on
the stove. I lift the lid, take a whiff of the steam rising from the boiling
mess, and gag.
I look around and see Tamara, watching
me and grinning. “Chitlins. My favorite.”
Oh. It is food. And that is Tamara, ever ready with the quick and slicing
jibe. I rearrange the expression on my face. “Hmm. Chitlins. What are they?”
“Insides of pigs. Don’t worry, I cleaned
‘em good. I ain’t triflin’.” She gives the pot a stir, sending another plume of
noxious steam into the kitchen's humid air.
Insides?
I want to gag again. Watching me, Tamara's smile broadens. Something in me
stiffens its spine against my too-easily hurt feelings and decides to try
something new as she asks what I had for dinner.
“Tofu stir fry,” I say.
“Tofu? What the hell is that?”
I risk a quick grin at her. Here’s my
chance. “Sorta like fermented soy beans.”
“And you think chitlins are bad?
Fermented beans? Sounds disgusting.”
“Not as disgusting as chitlins.”
I’m a bit shocked at myself for
answering in kind, stiffened spine or no. This is not how I usually speak to
the residents, especially not Tamara. I steal a wary glance at her to gauge her
reaction: still grinning. Whew.
“No way my chitlins is worse than them
beans.”
Once she has settled the lid back onto
the pot, thank God, Tamara turns to send the spoon clattering into the
sink and pivots back to me. “No way.”
“You don’t know that. Have you ever
tasted tofu?”
Later, I realize this is what she’s been
waiting for.
“Okay, I’ll eat a tofu if you eat a
chitlin.”
Oops. This is not where I expected the
conversation would go. But her knowing smile galvanizes my pride—it surely
cannot be my stomach—into agreeing.
The women who taught me the most—about
myself, about life at Miriam’s House and life in general—were the ones who
fought me. Well, I saw it as fighting me, at the time. Averse to conflict and
wanting to be liked, I wished we’d all just get along. Meaning, I realize now,
I wished they’d all act like I needed them to act.
I came to see that women like Tamara,
the ones who complained and resisted and stomped on my every frayed nerve, were
waiting and watching. Too many well-meaning people had proved unreliable. Too
many ill-meaning people had doled out injury. I believe those who struggled and
pushed were those with the most to lose, precisely because they had lost so
much already. And as the one with the power, with a lifetime of advantages
they’d not had, it was for me to prove my trustworthiness to them. Not the
other way around.
What finally worked, what finally
broke through, was almost always some small, spontaneous gesture of mine that
grew out of an otherwise mundane encounter in the course of a regular day. It
was almost always something simple, yet that nonetheless set the stage for a
moment of grace and generosity made possible because I relinquished a little
bit of my desire for control.
Tamara happily goes to the cabinet for
a plate as I leave, rather less happily, for my apartment upstairs to get “a
tofu.” Belatedly suspicious of the alacrity with which she had proposed and
been ready for the deal, I realize my sense of having the upper hand is an
illusion. I look at the innocuous bit of tofu as I put it on a small plate. At
worst, tofu is tasteless, but since my husband stir-fried it with soy sauce and
a few spices, this has a pleasing flavor I couldn't imagine chitlins having. I’ve been had. But the tofu and I go
downstairs to our fate.
As soon as I enter the kitchen, Tamara
grabs the tofu off the plate, pops it into her mouth and chews
enthusiastically. Watching me. I stare at her, suspicious.
“At the treatment center they only
cooked vegan food. Never did get to like it, but I can eat it.”
She swallows, turns to the stove and
lifts the lid off the pot.
“Okay, and now for the chitlin.”
Dipping into the pot, she pulls out a
pale, half-curled strip of something pale and limp. The now-familiar odor
sidles toward me. She puts the thing on the plate. She holds the plate out. I
put the chitlin into my mouth. My teeth close on it. Already anticipating the
taste—as judged from that smell—I had firmly resolved not to allow my
expression to reveal any disgust or, what was more likely, fear. But I had
neglected to prepare for the texture, and it feels as though I've placed a
slimy, hot rubber band in my mouth. My resolve, conquered by a chitlin, falters
and flees.
“Acccchhhh!” I spit out the offensive thing
onto the plate. “It’s like rubber!”
Brown eyes regard me slyly from beneath
a wig's bangs. “You have to eat it. I ate the tofu.”
She’s right. Very quickly, so as not to
give my mind or stomach or taste buds a chance to protest, I throw the chitlin
into my mouth, give a couple of ineffectual chews, and gag it down.
Then we go into the dining room, Tamara
and I, and we take chairs in front of the stereo where she fusses with the CD
player so we can listen to some Yolanda Adams. The sun is setting, the room in
dusk, but we turn on no light. It’s just the two of us, smelling of chitlins
and finding the beat.
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