Just Another Saturday Morning In The Heartland
or, Dining Blue In A Red State
Out at the diner for breakfast this morning, there’s a 3-top of older white men across from us. One in a checked shirt talks loudly about how, because he gets a monthly stipend for his car, he’s leasing an $80,000 car, and it’s very nice. His buddies agree it’s nice. I think about how I didn’t see an $80,000 leasable car in the parking lot — not even an $80,000 truck.
I watch a teenage busser clear the long table next to us (I think it’s a 16-top). It had been emptying out when we left. Spread across the table amidst the carnage of napkins shoved in water glasses with silverware are four singles. You know, $4 — the tip for the waitstaff taking care of the dozen or so people who were clearing out as we arrived. It’s been, I dunno, over 25 years since I waited tables, but some things never change: there’ll always be a 12-top of old men who tie up most of a section for hours and leave $4 for the staff whose asses they were grabbing, while acting like the waitress should be thankful they thought her hot enough to do so. Unless it’s a large extended family 12-top, in which case, the older men are teaching the boys how to objectify and humiliate the waitress, while the mom looks on with resignation or anger, it’s a toss-up.
Rhonda, who’s ruled the waitstaff with grace as long as we’ve been going there, catches my eye from back in the service area. “Abby, you both want juice this morning?” I nod, and moments later, there she is with coffee and orange juice, and of course, no menus because “Usual?” she asks, and we nod.
Chad’s facing the FOX News TV, and I’m facing the Weather Channel TV. This usually works out the best for us lately. Like for the past several years. I’m too likely to accidentally read the crawler and react. Even if I don’t say anything, I still tend to react. I definitely don’t want to be reading it the morning after Trump pardoned Sheriff Joe. Not if I want to enjoy the corned beef hash, eggs over easy, home fries, and wheat toast Rhonda knows I pretty much always pick. Anyway, it’s not like The Weather Channel is all that relaxing either, with its animations of Hurricane Harvey slamming into Texas, but at least I know that storm will eventually blow itself out, and the devastation it leaves behind won’t have been because evil humans made it happen.
“Man, I hope everyone in Texas is doing allright,” I say, sipping my coffee. Chad mentions having read a news story about ICE and CBP and evacuations. I feel the hot surge of shame come roiling up from my belly — shame that this is my country. “I’d better not turn around,” I said, breathing deeply. Deep breaths. Deep breaths. I wonder if $80,000 car guy cares about any of it. I glance across the room. A fourth old white guy has joined them, and pulled out a bible and a spiral notebook.
I mean, I guess I can’t be sure it’s a bible, right? It could be any fine-print, thin-paper black book laid out in multiple columns with occasional red text. Yeah, but this is southwest Ohio, and of course it’s a bible. It’s a bible study breakfast or a group of pastors talking about tomorrow’s sermons. That’s what it always is. When we can tell ahead of time, we always sit across the room from such groups. It’s like not looking at FOX News; I’m too likely to want to turn around and say “Excuse me? What did you just say?” and I’m definitely going to say some words in the privacy of the car as soon as we leave.
If I’m at my least vulnerable those words will be tough, ironic, snarky: flipping the script and saying “I totally think those people have a right to their lifestyle choices, but do they have to keep doing it right there in public where anybody can see it?” When the reality of things is hitting too close to home — as it usually is in Trump’s Ohio — it’s more likely to be a runthrough of contingency plans, a reiteration of the rules of travel for leaving the house, and the statement that we should probably fill up the tank in this car while we’re here by the truck stop just in case the shit hits the fan today and the gas lines are so long and we can’t get the fuck outta dodge.
Neither of those is particularly awesome. I weighed those considerations this morning when I said “Hey, do you wanna go out for breakfast?” I love our diner. All the years we lived in California, we longed for a diner like this one. I don’t want to lose the great thing that is being able to go out for a diner breakfast. Everyone who works here has always been unbelievably amazing to us. I don’t want politics to take away one of the creature comforts that’s special about living here.
Actually, in lots of ways, this diner reminds me of several diners I loved in Chicago, ones that were longtime haunts for A.C. Reed, the old bluesman who took the rules of travel I learned as a US citizen living abroad and extended them to include a sharp and painful understanding of the rules of travel for black musicians on the road in the Jim Crow era — rules by which he lived his life, and so by extension did I when he hired me in 1990.
So maybe that’s why $80,000 leased car guy’s rise in volume strikes through my coffee reverie. “Well, they say that,” he says, with the same kind of snide tone I’ve had when I make it to the car before I say I wish it seemed like these bible study and pastor’s groups ever read the book of Matthew, “They say that, but come on. Just going to Chicago on a weekend is asking to get killed. With the way those people are, you’ve got an excellent chance of being killed just for being there.”
The hot surge this time is rage, not shame. Motherfucker, I was a white college girl when I hit Chicago, entirely dependent on an old black man who told me, over and over, that my idealism was fine and well but in real life, I could think it was 1991 all I wanted, that didn’t make it a safe thing for a black man to go some places with a young white girl in the car. That I could think Jim Crow was over, but it just went to ground. That it wasn’t ever gonna be over, not in his lifetime, not in mine. That it didn’t even really make no sense to get mad about it, because it ain’t like The Man gives a fuck if the blacks and women are mad. The Man already knows who’s mad, and it ain’t him, so fuck it.
I’m more scared all the time, living here just outside what’s known to be an old KKK town, than I ever was in any part of Chicago. “Like that motherfucker’s ever even been to Chicago,” I muttered, as under-my-breath as I can, because there’s a young family sitting behind us now, with a bright-eyed toddler who can say “Up!” and “Bye-bye!” and whose mom is engaged in the nonstop patter that tends to go with that age.
“What?” says Chad, who missed the guy’s pronouncements while putting Cholula on his eggs. It was our bottle of Cholula from home, because they stopped having Tabasco at the diner, and whatever they have now that’s supposed to be hot sauce just doesn’t cut it. The top of the bottle fell and rolled under the table. We couldn’t find it; the Cholula would not be going home with us. I almost felt proactively guilty; I wouldn’t put it past the staff there to find the top and keep the Cholula for us.
I leaned forward, and repeated what I’d accidentally overheard. Quietly, and all, so as not to disrupt the diner. So as not to draw attention. So as to be able to come back for corned beef hash and eggs over easy and a coffee cup that never runs dry. So as not to show every one of these typical old white men that middle-aged SJWs get table-flipping mad when you say some ignorant bullshit in front of them. So as not to tempt A.C.’s ghost to laugh at me from on high for how it’s been decades and I still get mad, and don’t I remember he said it would be like this?
“Of course he’s never been to Chicago,” Chad says. “And even if he had, he’d be able to find some way to stay in his FOX and Breitbart echo chamber about it.”
I wonder (but don’t wonder out loud) how many of the old white men at that table legit, no lie, have hoods and robes in their closets. How many of ’em have burned crosses, and where. How many of their kids are locking their moms in their bedrooms for telling ’em to stop playing video games and screaming rape threats at other players. How many of their grandkids went down to Charlottesville with that nice boy from Mason (3 miles down the highway from where we sit right now) who’s on video beating a black guy with a baseball bat. You know, that nice boy the same age as my kid, who lately, I’ve taken to telling things like “I think you should change out of the could-be-construed-liberal t-shirt before delivering pizzas, and no, I’m not kidding.”
I think about my friends back east, my friends in California, my friends who are not, quite literally, worried that the contractors coming to their houses are going to take note of all the obvious multiculturalism in play here, and report them to actual no-shit nazis and white supremacists. I remember what it was like to be unable to find a diner for breakfast, but on the other hand, to never be sitting at breakfast overhearing some of the shit I’ve overheard in this diner over the years.
I think about those friends saying, “Look, we’ve got to defend everyone’s right to free speech.” And I agree with that. I really do. But I damn sure felt safer in Chicago with a Black Panther for a congressional representative, than I feel right now in this small-town diner full of nothing but white people. And I am white people. I don’t get to take that off and put it down any more than black folks get to take off their skins. The difference is mine makes me complicit, while theirs makes them the obvious target. We could, as A.C. taught me back in the day, be in the exact same situation, handle it exactly the same, and the white girl’s gonna walk away alive when the black man gets beat to death and buried in an unmarked grave.
I thought about countless stories A.C. and others told me about being out on the road, playing for white audiences as black musicians, in an era before I was born, an era I thought was the past. You know, stories about being run out of town because someone’s white teenage daughter snuck into the juke joint. That kind of thing. In hindsight it’s so obvious A.C. was right. In the moment, I wanted so hard to believe we were past all that shit and moving towards a brighter, better day — that it was only the old white people, and the ones my age would never stand for the things A.C. and his contemporaries went through.
It’s Lebanon, Ohio that has shown me I was wrong: that it’s not old people who will die soon and then we’ll be done with it. That it’s not just white men. That people I know and love hereabouts wrestle every day with the knowledge that, while the textile heritage my mother left me includes hundreds of indigenous weavers walking great distances to help me bury her, my friends’ mothers sewed white hoods and robes. It’s Lebanon, Ohio that has shown me that while this may have been where people were going on the Underground Railroad, I wouldn’t call it a safe place to go now, as an escapee, a refugee, a seeker of asylum.
I mean, let’s look at this bible study group — dude, they may be pastors or priests or reverends or ministers or whatever clergy title they use — and the free, easy way one of them brags about the stipend that lets him lease an $80,000 car, and by the way, bla bla those people killing each other in Chicago. All that talk is way the fuck un-Christian. Like I keep saying when I overhear them talk, it’s as if they were issued bibles containing only weird translations of Leviticus and the works of that historical redpiller known as Paul the Apostle.
If I weren’t the great-granddaughter of missionaries; if I hadn’t grown up in Latin America; if I hadn’t actually read the bible; if I hadn’t gone to Catholic school: I might not know how incredibly un-Christian things are that people here pass off as Christian. I’m not a person of faith; I’m not a deist. I don’t believe there’s a higher power. And if I did believe there was, and it was a dude, there’s no way I could be his follower, because he’s a raging asshole who lets people do incredibly horrible shit in his name. If he can’t even convince his followers who avidly study up on him and his kid to act like decent human beings, what’s the point?
But I digress. The corned beef hash was excellent. Weather looked pretty bad in Texas. I tried to remind myself to scan the parking lot when we left, looking for the AMG Mercedes or Corvette, wondering if homeslice just got played when he went to the dealership, and is overpaying for whatever he’s leasing. I wonder if he’s clergy? I wonder if he’s read 1 Timothy 6:10? I wonder if he thinks people are impressed with his dicksizing? Maybe it’s a table full of those televangelical prosperity gospel types and they are, indeed, all impressed.
Anyway, that’s when the middle-aged black guy pulled up a chair and sat down at their table.
Now, if I were in the business of giving the benefit of the doubt, and supposing that I had any left to give to people who loudly and in public reference the whole “What about Chicago” line of bullshit, I might think, “Oh look, these folks are working their way towards inclusivity after all.” But I don’t seem to have that in me. Instead, I find myself wondering: does this black guy suspect that mere moments before he sat down, his colleagues or acquaintances or whatever they are were engaged in bandying about a lot of typical old racist claptrap? Does he hope he can reach them? Does he think they’re his friends? Maybe he’s undercover trying to get to the heart of what makes a white supremacist who probably says (and maybe even thinks) they’re not a white supremacist. Maybe this is the first time he’s sat down with these guys and he’s drummed up the benefit of the doubt for them. Maybe it’ll all go fine, for whatever value of “fine” we’re using these days.
I don’t know. I should mind my own business. I don’t say anything to Chad until we’ve finished eating, paid, and we’re in the car. Maybe I need earplugs to go out to eat. Maybe I shouldn’t go out for breakfast anymore. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about the lone black man in a diner by a truck stop that surely will be listed in the 21st century Green Book as “avoid.” I’ve watched Rhonda and her crew provide passers-through of color with the same great service they’ve always given me. But A.C. would never have said “Let’s stop and eat at this diner.” I know it’s an act of courage just to walk into a place like this while black. For me it’s largely an abstraction; I’m a white woman, and I’ll be fine. But I feel the sting of guilt and fear about my silence. This morning I tasted it in the home fries.
The weather here is beautiful. It’s Saturday. It’ll mostly be a day of tasks around the house. Maybe I’ll write about breakfast. And maybe I’ll hit “publish” when I’m done. I don’t know. I long to be far from all of this. I long to be able to view all of it as abstract, as hypothetical questions of principle and ideology. It’s just that I can’t seem to.
A.C. would tell me to keep it quiet till I get in the van. Shut up till you’re where it’s safe to vent, to snark, to voice the frustration and the fear and find the ways to make it funny, even when it’s really not funny at all.
We drove home, and on the route we took, there are no obvious “Deplorable and Proud” signs up. Hell, I went that way because there aren’t any. But the area’s thick with them, and with glossy, fresh, replaced-every-month-or-two Trump signs. But it’s not driving past them, living amongst them, that scares me the most. No. What scares me the most is how many of my true-blue liberal friends don’t seem to even be close to realizing I’m not kidding, I wasn’t exaggerating about the racism, sexism, xenophobia, and ramped-up radicalized rightwingery around here. “Can’t we find ways to bridge these gaps?” they’re saying — but they’re asking the gap-bridgers to be the ones who have the most to lose, the ones who risk the most in such efforts, and who already know that’s a lost cause.
Odds are that I, a middle-aged white mother, can skate on by. I could stay home and sheetcake it. I could go out for breakfast and hash-and-eggs it. Not all my friends and family could; many of them are quite visibly targets. And for my acquaintances of color, they’ve got no way to know I wouldn’t pick up a tiki torch and hope I don’t get caught on film before I have a chance to don a pussyhat and a safety pin and call myself “Ally,” a set of actions I’d never take, but how can someone know that? They don’t know if I’m one of the good ones. I can’t ask them to find benefit of the doubt for me that I can’t find for others who look, at least superficially, like me.
I want out. I want off this ride. But it’s like my mentor A.C. told me when I was a teenager: there is no getting off this ride. And every time we don’t make it miserable as hell for people to be even mildly white supremacist, misogynist, xenophobic, whatever — every time we don’t hold people socially accountable for that, every time we equate people’s right to say horrible and even inciting things with the constitutional right to criticize the government, we’re giving the seeds of those awful viewpoints soil, and sun, and water, and room to grow and flourish.
And I think about that white woman who asked Malcolm X what she could do to aid the struggle, and he said “Nothing.” I’ve been a million rounds thinking that one through. Sometimes I think he was right and sometimes I don’t. I usually try to go with his later advice for white people to work in our own communities. I try to remember A.C. teaching me that my ability to be angry was a privilege, one he mostly never had.
But today, I got nothing. I have some work to do, regular work and housework, and some food to cook, and when the work is done, some beer to drink and a family to love. Today is fine. Odds are tomorrow will be too. But there’s this sense of impending doom, this certainty that things are trending in terrible, dangerous directions, and I’m sitting here in a house that was recently literally struck by lightning trying to tell myself the thunder and flashes on the horizon portend nothing at all. It’s hard not to feel like people in the future won’t be reading this and screaming at it as if it were that chick in the horror movie who keeps going down into the basement in high heels after she drops the flashlight.
But like I say: today, I got nothing. So I’d better wrap this up and get to the mundane and everyday tasks that don’t go away just because you got struck by lightning and you’re afraid there’s a civil war brewing and you’ll be on the front lines. I’d better keep drumming up the hope that it’s all going to be okay somehow. I’d better keep my eyes open and stay ready. Like the song says, I don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Thanks for reading! If this resonated with you, you can applaud it as many times as you like by clicking on the little green clapping hands repeatedly, or holding down on the clapping hands, or… I don’t actually know what Medium thinks it’s doing with the clapping hands, but you totally can use them to let me know you liked this piece. You can also find me as @abbysyarns in all the social media places I frequent. Happy Saturday.
