Artifact

I teach an elective in cultural anthropology, but mostly I facilitate the discussion and my brilliant students lead me.

Today we were talking about the power of artifacts as a means of telling how people lived in a certain time. I asked, Tell me you were born in a particular decade without telling me you were born in a particular decade. Then I showed them my Paula Abdul cassette tapes.

We discussed how so many of our artifacts are now digitized and easily disseminated.

I then shared this digital artifact with the class in my Zoom screen:

photo courtesy Ben Crump Law Firm

I didn't share how I came across the picture; I offered it without preface of who and where and what. I simply asked the class how they felt when they saw it.

Peaceful, one student said.

Warm, another said.

A student who is a mother of two said, "That little boy is knocked out. He's living his best life. He's in the bosom place--it's the best."

We took a couple of beats to acknowledge how many of us knew this feeling, the mother and child bond, the safety of surrender.

Then I shared that this digital artifact, this picture, was used this very week in a court of law to tell a jury about how people lived.

Who is this little boy? I asked.

Oh.

Oh it’s George Floyd, they responded. It's George Floyd as a little boy resting in his mother's lap. The same mother, a woman some years deceased, whose name he cried out during his final moments.

That went from 0 to 100 fast, said one student.

Damn, said another student.

Why do we need artifacts to remind juries of people's humanity? Why do we need to see proof positive that we all come into the world defenseless? Why have the arbiters of justice and brokers of power in America so long subverted the humanity and equality of Black Lives?

Artist Titus Kaphar used this picture of a young George Floyd with his mother as inspiration for his cover of TIME Magazine. Kaphar wrote, “ I see the black mothers who are unseen, and rendered helpless in this fury against their babies. As I listlessly wade through another cycle of violence against black people, I paint a black mother … eyes closed, furrowed brow, holding the contour of her loss.”

"It's weird," said one student. "When you first showed us the picture, I felt all warm and now I just feel gut-punched."

It's my hope, though, that the jury members will hold this picture in their hearts, hold it close in their bosom place.

Thirteen

I don’t know if this is still an expression in Korean parlance, but in 2007, an elder at our Korean church announced that I was a woman “who was no longer alone.” Meaning I was pregnant with you.

As was pretty on-brand for me in my twenties, I resented the phrase. Pregnancy did not automatically change me from “no longer” anything, especially as determined by an elder male. That was for me to determine.

Some weeks later, I was sitting at my work cubicle and struggling to stay awake. I know, I know. You’re like, Mom, can you not with the tale again about how you were all working and grad schooling and commuting and incubating a human. WE GET IT. You’re Pioneer Woman.

Okay but this is important. Because my boss called me into his office and waved a report at me that I had “written.” He basically said there was nothing in it he could use. You’ve probably never had someone tell you that, or maybe you have, but since you are not a “hard-o” like I am, let me assure you. That reckoning should have been devastating and I should have been way insulted. Instead I was just so tired all the time that it just made me feel…sad. For my boss. Because he was depending on me to do the dang thing and I was just a tired fail potato that housed a Costco sized M&Ms every afternoon.

I went to the restroom (as I did in those days every 12 minutes) to pull myself together.

I stood in the stall and held my belly and felt the full freight of my sadness. And then I felt you. You turned and for the first time I could discern the outlines of your head, your back, your legs all tucked. Sacred encounters can happen anywhere, and there I met the holy and the wholly lovely person who had been with me for all the conversations and the commutes and the interminable classes at night. I was no longer alone.

I had no idea. No clue. Not even a speck of the dustcloud that trails after the miracle on which a love like you floats.

You are musical and hilarious. You are still a nature baby, held in the thrall of frogs and turtles and other amphibious creatures. You speak fluent sarcasm and can carry a bit with an ease that amazes me. We recently met a family at the dog park whose Boston terrier named Monte has spawned an entire fiction series that you will oftentimes play out while riding with me in the car. You are so beautiful and don’t know it. You are learning to love being you.

You spent this year fighting a personal crisis of which only you and Daddy and I will ever know the true depths. You will meet people in life, good and loyal friends and partners, who will learn about this crisis, but they will only understand it as ones learning about the events of a history instead of marching across the battlefield in combat. I hope you will remember what we learned in fighting this war alongside you, and that you will always know the miles we would travel to help deliver you to safety.

Throughout this past year, none of us have been alone. We have been always together, and the edges of where we began and ended became blurred by the seasons that bled into one another that we have called this long quarantine. We dream of a time when we will be free of the restriction and the fear and the stupid masks. But we also know there will be a loss that accompanies this freedom, and that loss will be the togetherness we will have called Never Being Alone. I would not relive this year for all the M&Ms in the world, but I will not soon trade in the marvel of once again finding myself with you.

A Tale of Two Cashiers

Unless you know my daughter, whose soul is a glittery black balloon filled with puppy love and a thirst for justice, this first anecdote will not make much sense. Ergo, a brief primer on Daughter: You know how in board game commercials for kids, there’s always a big hamburger faced lad who elbows out everyone to hammer the gavel joystick thing or whatever and then shouts I WON? Yeah, my daughter would have been the side kid looking on with amazement, genuinely happy that Burger Boy took the W. But in the last couple of years, she’s become a bit of a righteous crusader and she sees you winning Hungry Hungry Hippos and is all STOP HUNGER SHAMING HIPPOPOTAMUSES! JUSTICE FOR THE PIGMY! SAY HER NAME!

So that’s my shopping companion. Thus, our mission a few weeks ago on a rainy Saturday evening was to visit a very disorderly Dollar Tree in order to see what we could see. We watch a fair number of YouTube Momfluencers in which the Momiverse teaches us how to assemble baskets with only Dollar Store Items. It’s…amazing? We wanted to mount our own adventure and we thought it would be more fun to sidestep the bougie boutique in favor of a chaotic experience.

We were not disappointed. In COVIDian times, there are arrows on the floor of store aisles directing traffic flow, as everyone knows, and which 66% of people ignore. At this particular Dollar Tree, 108% of customers were like, I see your arrow and I raise you an I NEED THAT BAR OF SOAP IN AISLE 4, BREH. Please socially distance your own self while I plow through with my cart full of stocking stuffers and by the way, where’d you get those fresh Lisa Frank stickers, hon? This was the kind of store where you’d just find a pregnancy test stuffed inside a Valentine’s mug (not, like, totally unrelated but still not a major merchandising concept). 1-800-HOTMESS. By the time we got to the register, we could not explain what had happened and what we had bought. As we were checking out, I looked up at all the mylar balloons that had escaped capture and floated up to the ceiling and I pondered how a balloon graveyard is actually 6 feet off the ground (deep, yo). The cashier handed me my bag and I told him his Senegalese twists were pretty and before I could say Merry Happy, he YELPED, I mean, YELPED, “Ohmahgahh, thank you SO MUCH! I was doing my hair all night long, I was up until 4 a.m. and I was like this is taking FOREVERRR, but you all are just making me feel so good” And then Daughter yanked her bunny rabbit hat ears and he died and was buried under a graveyard of mylar balloons, ashes to ashes, dust to Dollar Tree dust.

Not even one day later, I had to pick up a few more Christmas gifts at Target. As I was nearing the cashier, I had that sinking feeling that this was not going to end well. I saw it on the downcast face of the cashier. He was having a day. As I pulled my cart up to the register, I saw him look left, look right, and then yell, OH SHIT! THIS KEEPS HAPPENING. He then took off. I mean, there was no explanatory pause, like, “Pardon me, ma’am. I just need to go chase after this customer who forgot her bags.” Nope. Just BYE. Apparently the prior customer had forgotten to press the button that would have closed out her transaction, so the cashier just abandoned ship and ran after her. The security guard walked over and rested his hands on his head, sighing The manager also came over and tried to make sense of why there had been a cashier at register 7 a second ago, and that person had now vanished.

And the tale of these two cashiers pretty much captures the whole story about the way 2020 elided right into 2021. We either found a spark of joy somewhere in our lives, we perished, or we yelled SHIT THIS KEEPS HAPPENING and hoped management would swoop in and take care of this hot mess, STAT.