This Is How (21 page)

“Yeah, but does the doctor say I’m dying now?”

“The doctor says you are.”

“So, am I?”

“Well. You know when you look up at the sky at night and you see stars? And you know how if you keep looking without blinking you see more stars? And how if you
keep
looking even longer you see that the black sky is really made almost entirely out of stars that seem to extend back and back and back forever? The chance that you will live is about the size of just one small star out of every star you see.”

“So, not very much of a chance?”

“Not very much of a chance, no.”

“But maybe a little chance?”

“Maybe. A very little, tiny, tiny chance.”

“Okay.”

I
MET A BLACK MAN
who told me about growing up in the South when all the busses carried signs that told him to sit in the back. As long as your skin color was the darker color that people come in, you wouldn’t sit in the front. The front of the bus was for the people who made the laws and owned the world and would turn red if they got mad.

WHITES ONLY
is what the sign up front read.

He said, “That’s just the way it was.”

But there was one girl who questioned
the way it was.

She was a black girl.

She couldn’t sit in the front with the paler people, the whites.

If you even tried, probably a lot of them would look at you and they would turn that mad red color.

Back then if you were a black girl there just wasn’t much less you could be.

But this girl saw something that either nobody else saw or folks saw but didn’t think about. Or they thought about it but didn’t say anything.

She saw that the world was broken.

Because, if you had coloring to your complexion, you could be called such horrible things.

She’d learned in school about the slavery. Which wasn’t allowed anymore. But when it was allowed, the black people were like the animals. And the white people owned them and could make them do anything they wanted them to do.

But that was in the past so it was gone.

Except it wasn’t. What if she wanted to sit in the front of the bus and see what it felt like? Maybe it was a bumpier and more fun kind of ride.

Or, maybe it was smoother and better for napping.

Maybe she wanted to sit in the front where you could only be white because slavery was over now.

It wasn’t allowed anymore for white people to make pets out of the black people and be horrible to them.

Or tell them where to sit.

You couldn’t do that. It was wrong.

It was a broken thing.

It was a lie.

So Claudette Colvin, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, took a seat up front.

Then she refused to give up her seat to a white person and move to the back of the bus.

She did this before anybody else had done it. Or, if somebody else had done it, nobody knew about it. Because the trouble didn’t happen until Claudette.

When she refused and refused and refused to give up the seat that was as surely hers as if God himself had handed it to her, the police came and they pulled her off the bus.

There was a trial. It was this trial that decided everyone could sit where they wanted to sit on a bus.

All the people who hadn’t even thought about it, thought about it now.

Once somebody peels back the curtain and exposes the truth, it’s like the truth gets bolder in the air. And it becomes brighter, like a light.

Nine months later Rosa Parks became famous for doing exactly what young Claudette had done before.

Rosa Parks is an American hero who was carefully chosen to take the political stand that she did.

Claudette was not a polished, experienced civil rights activist; she was just a fifteen-year-old girl who saw something nobody else chose to see and believed in the deeper truth of it enough to
not
take a stand when it was required by law that she do exactly that when a white person stepped on to the bus.

Fifteen. She was fifteen.

The truth
for as long as she’d been alive was that she belonged in the back of the bus, where all the other black people sat and had always sat for as long as anybody could remember.

That was just the way it was.

When something happens every day it becomes normal and true.

If enough people believe in something, you wouldn’t even think to question it.

Whites up front, coloreds in the rear. Let’s all just get going so we can get home.

The truth behind “the truth” is what Colvin saw. And she would not unsee it, even when angry, red men stormed that bus—imagine how the whole bus must have rocked and creaked each time the officers shifted their weight.

They must have looked at her like she was dog shit on the bottom of a shoe.

She must have seen this in their eyes. And it must have been more terrifying than anything she had ever experienced.

She did not let go of her grip on what was true.

I imagine many people thought, when they read about the trial of this young girl in the papers and then just nine months later, the same business with that second woman, Parks: “Hell, if they start sitting up front, where does it stop? You know what I mean? These are ignorant, ignorant folk. Hell, average old nigger ‘round here don’t know whether to scratch a watch or wind his ass. I am not fooling with you. I mean, we start letting these folk sit up front with all of us, you know it is just a matter of damn time before one of them gets it in their cotton-pickin’ head that he might go on and round up all his damn buddies and—well, shit. One of these fuckers could end up mayor of this city.

“Now, I’m gonna tell you something. This is no damn joke, what this Parks girl has gone and done. It’s already started.

“You just imagine it. Imagine if one day, one of these coloreds, he decides to run for the Oval Office. And I know, I know that may sound far-fetched.

“But I am telling you, there could come a day when one of them makes a run for president of these United States.

“This could happen, buddy. This could indeed happen. And the white man, he could find himself underneath the rule of a black man.

“Right here in our country. That is what could happen because of that first damn little girl that made a fuss.

“I wonder if she even is able to comprehend that her actions could potentially change the fundamental reality of our nation.”

My family is from the South. Because they were landowners, our family records go very far back.

That’s how I learned that my ancestors purchased the first slaves that arrived in America.

I wonder what my ancestors would think if they knew that I never voted in a single United States presidential election until I was forty-three years old.

And I had to ask the nice old white lady how to do it.

The nice old white lady said, “You’ve never voted? Ever?”

I said, “No.”

She said, “Well, it would be my privilege to show you how to vote.” And as she led me across the tile floor she added, “But I cannot
tell
you how to vote. Because this is America. And we value liberty and freedom above everything else.”

I said, “That really is the truth, isn’t it?”

She made the “oh” mouth that old people make sometimes. And she said, “Oh, yes. It most certainly is the truth.”

I voted for the man who had two black girls for daughters.

And he won.

Right now, the most powerful thing you can be in the world is a black girl.

This makes me feel safe.

The world isn’t broken anymore. Or at least not all the way broken.

Because one little girl saw something glimmer beneath the surface and she knew by the shine of it that it was the truth.

She believed what she saw with her own eyes. She knew what she saw was the truth because that’s what the truth is, you see. The truth is the thing you recognize instantly, even if you’ve never seen it before. You know.

Your blood knows it. Even the air around you knows it.

Truth is not an opinion. It’s a force like gravity.

It’s the most valuable substance known to man.

When the police pulled her from the bus, she was forced to let go of her seat up front, but these uniformed men could not grab her words out of the air, so the truth was released, airborne, as she shouted,
“It’s my constitutional right!”

Even though no great wind came upon the crowd and there was no bolt of lightning, even though it did not change from day to night, everything now was different.

In the blink of an eye, in the scream of a girl, there had been a change to the fundamental reality of our nation.

“It’s my constitutional right!”

She had seen the truth. She had spoken it out loud. And this unleashed it into the world.

The world changed.

Nothing you build on inaccuracy or mere hope or longing or lies or laws that oppose the nature of things can endure. When the wind comes in the form of a young teenage girl, it will all be blown away, down to the bedrock of what’s real, what’s true.

This is how.

This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you.