Covert Mom: This Mess We’re In

By Mariah Mottley

My daughter is working on being a grown-up; when we sat down in the Thai restaurant she put her wallet on the table, like her dad does. She made it recently, out of duct tape and has been eagerly on the search for cards with which to fill it. She wants evidence of her identity and of her membership in the world. She is 12.

Tonight it is just the two of us; we decide to share green curry and spicy rad nah with vegetarian spring rolls. Eager to be good company, Béla put her napkin in her lap, tucked her chin on her hand and asked me how the column was going. I’d spent much of the weekend staring at my computer screen. I said I was writing, but I really I had been reading the news.

“Not well,” I told her. “Heard anything about Charlottesville?”
She nodded. She listens to jazz on her radio to fall asleep at night; it’s an NPR station.
“Know what a white supremacist is?” I asked.
She started to nod, then shook her head.
“Well they had a rally. A riot. Things got violent. People died. Others were injured. The Ku Klux Klan? Heard of them?”

She shook her head again. Our spring rolls arrived, and I bit into one, trying to figure out where to start. I covered the basics, as best I could, acutely aware of my shortcomings as an impromptu historian.

Basically, I said, in the south, after the Civil War, during Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement, the Ku Klux Klan routinely murdered, tortured, and terrified black people, in an attempt to keep them from accessing their civil rights like education and voting registration. The KKK, I explained, were domestic terrorists, they arrived in the middle of the night, in masks, and did whatever they wanted. They killed people for registering to vote, for looking at white women, for organizing, for being too successful, anything. They were rarely, if ever, held accountable for their crimes. She didn’t know about lynching. I spared no detail. She covered her face with her hands. I took a sip of water. She wanted adult conversation; she got some.

The worst part, I told her, is that the past isn’t even past. The KKK still exists, even has member groups here in New York state, and is now only one of many modern white supremacist groups who see Donald Trump as their advocate, so much so that David Duke, their poster boy, publicly thanked him for his support in Charlottesville.

I don’t know very much about David Duke, I added, or really any white supremacist groups, because I hate that they exist and try not to even think about them. I took a sip of water.
“That is my white privilege, being able to just ignore David Duke because he upsets me,” I said. “That can’t happen any more.”

I went on, telling her that David Duke’s people rebranded the idea that began as first Manifest Destiny and then resurfaced as Hitler’s lebensraum into the term white genocide. Lots of people bought it.

And I’m not sure how to evaluate the situation. But I had lost her attention, finally overloaded her brain, saw the thread of logic die in her eyes. She hasn’t read enough history books. I haven’t read enough history books. I filled both cheeks with curry.

“Aren’t Nazis supposed to be German?” she asked.
“The people marching in Charlottesville were chanting ‘Blood and Soil,’ which was a famous Nazi slogan.”

At this, her eyebrows went up.
“And, they marched with swastikas and confederate flags.”
I took out my phone and showed her a picture.
Her mouth dropped open, the butt end of a vegetarian spring roll in between her teeth.
“Is that legal?” she asked.

I stumbled through an explanation of free speech, until I felt I was on the edge of her attention span again.

There was no happy conclusion to this conversation. I kept looking at her empty wallet on the table beside us. After I signed the check, she ate both our Andes mints, and I refreshed my Twitter feed to see what else had happened since I’d been away from the computer. I saw the image accompanying this column, then, and knew I’d found a card for her wallet. This is the world she is a member of, a piece of her identity she should always be aware of.

“Do you think you’ll finish the column tonight?” she asked, as we headed out of the restaurant.
“Nope,” I said, thinking about my laminator.
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Originally from Manhattan, Mariah was educated in Massachusetts, Montana and Texas, often by failure. She lives with her husband and three children in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York. Mariah can be reached at mariah@mariahmottley.com.