The Asparagus Cutters…and George Floyd
They walked the roads on spring nights, men with dark skin and ragged clothing in groups of five or seven or eight, strung across the macadam. I asked questions about them, but got few answers; I was a child in the back seat of an old Buick, and mostly ignored.
They were migrant workers from Puerto Rico who came to pick asparagus. I learned that the term, spoken as a single word ‘puertoricans,’ did not refer to their country. It defined them: creatures who followed crops north, who worked in the dirt of farms, who were despised, who were poor.
Sometimes I saw people try spit on them—spics, people also called them—from car windows as they passed the men. The spitters would point and laugh, jeering.
Why, I wondered? Even to a little girl, it seemed so very wrong.
The men walked the roads because that was all they could do after work. They had no cars. No television. No telephone. Nothing. There was nothing to do for miles around. If they were fortunate enough to pile into the back of a pickup truck to ride to a country town, white people moved away from them as if the puertoriccans were infected with something, and watched, eyes narrowed, squinting.
I still loathe that look: the squint of racism. You aren’t equal, it says. Your kind isn’t welcome here.
The Puerto Ricans would arrive every spring to work in fields outside my town. They bent, cut, and stepped forward; bent, cut, and stepped, harvesting tender spears of asparagus. I once asked where they lived, and my mother pointed to a shed: low-slung, brutally plain concrete block with tiny windows through which no breeze would ever freshen the air.
Barely any toilet facilities, my mother muttered.
“How do they take baths?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she whispered, and turned away.
I frowned. Who could live like that?
They sent the money they earned home to their families. To children like me, I wondered? To mothers like my mother?
I know how most people thought of them: as dogs. Not the coddled well-fed household-member dogs of today, but the chained-out-back, supper-scraps animals of a 1950’s farm; dogs I had seen cursed and kicked. Nobody that I knew cared about the Puerto Ricans. They were insignificant beasts of labor.
In the still-segregated Eastern Shore of those days, I also grew up hearing the word ‘nigger’ regularly. Nobody thought much about that. Nobody white, that is. There was no respect; there was no intention of respect. Dark-skinned people were were not like ‘us.’ They had nothing in common with ‘us.’ We did not need to care about them was the message we absorbed through our white skin. White privilege existed long before anyone thought to coin the phrase.
I say all of this bluntly because there are people who do not remember that kind of meanness. Lots of people do remember; they are often people of color. But even as a child, I knew it was wrong. I am sure that other people knew it was wrong, too.
My father had worked bringing in hay by hand. Even though he would likely not have admitted it to his neighbors, he knew how hard they worked. My mother had been raised in the city of brotherly love. She was not racist.
I used to send silent greetings to the workers when our old car passed them on the county roads. Hello. We don’t all hate you. I would breathe out hope. It was all I knew to do.
But it was unchangeable, I believed. It was the way it was and always would be. People I loved cast proud votes for George Wallace as president, trusting that his hatred for people of color would save ‘us’ from the ghastly prospect of having to acknowledge black people as equals.
In college, I heard of a man named Cesar Chavez. Something about grapes and migrant workers. (Much later—women did not matter as much then, either—I heard of Dolores Huerta.)
Chavez sounded brave. Thinking of the asparagus cutters, I raised my fist in solidarity—but inwardly thought, such a shame. So much hope and effort, but nothing will change. What did one man, one woman, a bunch of liberal students matter? The problem was too big. Unchangeable.
I was right…and I was wrong.
I was right in what I instinctively understood as a child, that the racism all around me was a terrible thing. But I was wrong to believe that efforts of people who envisioned change were doomed.
That was years ago. This year brought George Floyd.
The uprisings and protests after his death contrasted with my sad cynicism of earlier days to show me how wrong I had been. Something did change: across the farthest reaches of the world, people stood up for a man they’d never known. One by one by one, they stood up…in droves.
One human mattered, regardless of how seemingly insignificant his life had been.
“George Floyd knee on neck.” Type those words on a keyboard, and watch the last seven minutes and forty-three seconds of a man’s life. Listen to people beg Derek Chauvin to get off Floyd. Watch Chauvin, hands in his pockets, uniform tight across his muscled chest, smirk as he looks down at George, adjust his knee, press harder; whistling almost, as he casually killed the man—a man for whom Chavin had no respect, no intention of respect; a human being Chauvin decided just didn’t matter because George was troubled, and poor, and had a different color skin.
The images I watched are burned into my mind. They are burned into our national conscience.
We still have a long, long way to go, but I’m grateful to see ‘people like us’—white people—not just whispering the hello of a powerless child, but standing with people of color to demand what our Pledge of Allegiance promises:
justice for all.
We owe it. We have done them wrong for so long. I heard, astonished, as Josh and Chuck of the podcast STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW spoke of J. Edgar Hoover’s political campaign against Black Panthers, whose primary ‘bad’ action was to feed and educate impoverished children of color in American cities. Hoover, in a position of public trust, had done wrong—and we believed him. I heard those two white-as-white-can-be podcasters describe their love for ‘Soul Train’ and what it meant to black communities. Nobody I knew growing up would have admitted to liking it. But I heard Chuck say he had, and I whispered back across the airwaves, me too.
The bubble of misinformation and mistrust is big and it is tough.
But it is not impervious. It can be broken.
George Floyd’s death brought a fresh awareness that ‘unchangeable’ is a big lie. George’s murder fanned a growing, burning desire to put an end to four hundred years of seeing people as insignificant simply because they are of color, or if they have no wealth—or worse, both.
George has helped some of us to stop our squinting. His murder helped us to just see.
See humans. See people. Not ‘blacks,’ not ‘puertoriccans,’ not ‘whites’…not your-kind-versus-our-kind. Just ‘us.’
We each must choose: follow the legacy of those who spit on migrant workers simply because of the circumstances of their birth versus ours? Narrow our eyes and squint at all who are different from us, creating a ‘them’ we can push down and climb over? Tell ourselves that today’s ‘they’ have nothing to do with today’s ‘us’?
Or will we have the innocent wisdom of a child, realizing something is wrong and doing our bit, however small, day by day, to right it? Will we offer our hand in help to people like Congressman John Lewis? To Wall-of-Vets protestors?
I never thought I’d wear a mask like people on Asian television—yet because of COVID, I now cannot imagine leaving my car without one. None of us ever imagined homeschooling for every American child, yet here we are. Unchangeable things change.
Emboldened by once-unthinkable changes from the pandemic, will we find courage to confront and change wrongs we may never have realized? Will our actions of defiance start small but become stronger as we take one step after another? Become more determined as we choose to work towards that which must change? Will we move from a tentative childlike whisper to a full-throated shout?
I love the backroads of Cecil and Kent County where I grew up. I love the broad fields of the Eastern Shore, the tall oaks, the quiet tidewater. I love them so much.
And I love the land and the strong, beautiful ideals of the United States of America. I love its promise of goodness, and fairness to all.
We have good work to do. But it can be scary work: friends of mine still have the ‘squint’. I feel nervous confronting them. Neighbors I care about repeat lies blatantly spewed from hate-mongering news outlets. Appalled, I struggle to be brave, to find the right response.
Barely more than a whisper, if that is all we can manage: “I see it differently.”
We don’t have to get it perfect. We just have to be brave enough to try.
Our Pledge of Allegiance lights the way. When we see people not experiencing “justice for all,” we can’t just mouth the Pledge. We must be brave enough to make those shining words true for all of us.
As we hack an imperfect path through the wrongs of the past towards a better future, may we encourage one another, because your attempts matter. Mine matter. Every human matters, and every striving for goodness matters.
Faltering, fearful, and perhaps messy though our attempts may be, we become stronger just for trying. Our combined actions, perfect or not, create a community: first a trickle, eventually a tsunami of human desire to change the once-unchangeable, to sweep away racism.
We can do it, my friends. We can do it. Onward.
Written by Katie Aiken Ritter on July 31, 2020 in honor of the courageous young man who faced the ‘unchangeable’ and became Senator John Robert Lewis.
Image courtesy of Depositphotos.com