White Wmn Whisperer.

To all of the white folks that have demanded solutions to racism, support on their journey to wokeness and other ridiculous shit.

ellenKillfrane
Aug 23, 2017 · 6 min read

I only enjoy children between the ages of approximately 6 to 11, when they are related to me or are in adult supervision. I feel similarly about American white women. As in the Americas. The same rule applies to the blancos of Mexico, Bogota and the others.

Those who have not reached the age of one-hand worth of years are young enough to float through life as if their actions are without repercussions. In need of protection and blameless, impervious to the connections between what they say and how people feel.

After 12, the age the Bible and the Talmud declare as the ending of childhood, your words come from a place of knowing. Your innocence is no longer a natural byproduct of age. It’s willful and cancerous. Luxurious innocence is always at the cost of others.

I hate when people ask to touch my hair. Since I have been able to recall memory, I can recall white hands. There was never an age that meant I was precluded from answering the curiosities and anxieties of white hands and minds.

Veronica’s twin boys asked me why I looked weird. They touched me, my hair and laughed, said I was dirty, my skin was dirty. I remember mumbling something about God. They were children, so was I. I remember my sister, 10 years my junior walking with hesitation by my side. Making me about 11, just before breasts and the perm that would mark me as a woman and also make my hair fall out. I was young enough to think that white children had the same rules as brown ones did. I told Mrs.Veronica what the boys had done, she laughed and told me they were only curious kids. I told her I was too. I could always count on the people of Mallard Pointe to teach me daily lessons. White kids = kids. Black kids = shrunken adults.

(20 years later, the same wobbly legged sister told me the twins dropped out of college after the first year. The beauty of the pressure that made them unable to function in an adult world was the same pressure that guaranteed my baby sister, 5 or 6 years younger than the twins, would flourish. She had been bending and changing constantly, to accommodate the preferences of others her entire life. Two white men down, millions to go. I felt such deep relief at the sight of their failure. In their twenties, did their mother still think they were just kids? Despite their inadequacies and lack of education, they will still likely make more money than me.)

I think my awareness of white men existing in a parallel universe started around the same time, my 11th year. My older brothers best friend cornered me outside of his house and pulled his penis out. I was taking my little sister for a walk in her stroller when we passed his house. Only 7 houses away from the safety of a distant father and a postpartum mom. I can’t remember the words he said or what I said back. But, I remember the pale green stucco rubbing the edges of my elbows. I can’t remember how I ended up with my back against the wall. I put my arms up, as if with enough pressure I could melt into it. I can see his face perfectly. My sister in her stroller, in the grass. Why did I pull her stroller onto the grass?

Bowl cut blonde hair. Freckles of varying shades. Short, rounded face. He could have played a blonde Dennis the Menace. Nothing about his face was extraordinary, everything from his eyes to his lips was what I thought normal was. Perhaps I should thank him, I stopped seeing faces like his as normal.

His penis was the color of the baby earthworms we used to pluck from the ground on weekends. Neither pink or orange, the combination left them an indecisive shade of translucent pastels.

It was the first time I saw a penis. The last time I would see a white one, in-person.

Madeline asked me why I wasn’t playing with the other Elliot anymore. We were a group. Madeline and Elliot Meyers were siblings, The other Elliot was from his mother’s first marriage and Mrs. Alison wasn’t having anymore. The crew was completed by my brother and I, we all lived within 8 houses of each other, born between the same thousand or so days. My avoidance of Elliot was quickly picked up by the others. Madeline asked and I confided. It was the last time I made the mistake of trusting a white girl or woman. I can still feel the aloneness in the pool that summer. It was the summer I started to change. Spending more time inside, more time playing basketball, more time getting stronger. Sexualized, then told I was too ugly to be assaulted. None of these words existed in my mind yet, but the older I got and the more I knew, the more painful the memories were. The other Elliot was popular and considered handsome, he would have no reason to “like” me. That was how what happened was understood. It’s the only way I could forgive them now, as an adult. They believed an older boy exposing himself to a prepubescent girl equaled “liking her”.

I never told my brother. He was in the pool that first day, when Elliot Meyers told me I was so ugly, why would I make up such a stupid story, didn’t I know how ugly I was. I kicked Madeline when I ran out of the pool, I couldn’t take the taunting anymore. In my fervor I jumped before the kick, a leftover from my self-defense karate classes, the ones my mother thought would teach us discipline. Where was this kick the day against the green house? They all laughed, including my brother. I cried.

(In my teenage years, I learned that the mistakes of white people in proximity to me were my own fault and responsibility. Becca Norman’s weed was my fault, despite the fact that I didn’t smoke. By 15 I learned it was safer to stay away from them. I couldn’t be responsible for the lack of rules in their lives or the punishments it brought to mine)


Veronica, the mother of the twin college dropouts told my mom that Elliot Meyers was working for the RNC as an attorney. Truth continues to be stranger than fiction. The Meyer’s mother was a quiet, firm and graceful woman. Their father, an arrogant, fat pig who in an attempt to perhaps mimic the popular soap operas of the 90s, left his family for a younger woman.

I wondered for years what would have happened had my brother assaulted Madeline. Same age difference, same relationships. It was the first time I came to understand that my womanhood wasn’t worthy of protection.

Alejandro was the first man I recalled those memories to. It was the first time he invited me to his home, I wanted him to know everything. Why I was me. After a few months of dating, he suddenly stopped talking to me after that weekend of undressing. That weekend, the closest I’ve ever been to another human. That was the breaking point for him. Writing this feels like a betrayal of those 3 days, no matter how many languages I learn, I will never have sufficient words to describe.

I couldn’t then and still cannot figure out why I felt such a peace with him.

So much of my life between 8 and 14 in that neighborhood feels like outtakes from Dave Chapelle’s “The mad real world”.

At around 13, my feelings towards the neighborhood kids had changed. We all knew our places by now. I became defiant, boyish in a way that was unnatural for me. I would play basketball at Arjun’s house. The grandson of the new Indian neighbors, he took cold showers so that his skin wouldn’t get dark(er) and spoke with a British accent. I was regularly kicked off pick-up games because I fouled too much. It was important to me that they knew even if I lost, I would leave the court victorious one way or another.

I was beat by my parents the last time I played on Arjun’s driveway court. For reasons I cannot remember, I retrieved a saw from my father’s useless corner of the garage. He was a collector of masculinity for display only, things that proved their was indeed a man of the house. He never touched or used these things, always picking up hobbies but only in his imagination. The state of my current life says I have inherited this gift, along with my sporadic rage.

I chased Elliot Meyer through the neighborhood, saw in hand until my mother emerged from our house, alerted by my brother. I understand what people mean when they say they accidentally killed someone. Had the boy not ran, I would have been left with the decision to either finally give him what he deserved or look like a fool. I had no more capacity for the latter. I remember the urgency in my Mother’s voice. My name sounded more like a warning in her mouth, she knew what I was capable of. I was not crazy. Simply tired.

)

ellenKillfrane

Written by

Currently in a love hate relationship, with myself.

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