Michael Dearing

WHERE I'M COMING FROM
by David Sedaris

“If I had my way, I would never return to my home town again,” I said to my mother a little over a year ago, when I was a sophomore at Bradly.

She’d just picked me up for Spring break, and we were in the car together, just the two of us. “But why?” she asked, surprised like she always is when I actually think for myself. “Greenfield was always so good to you!”

I said, “Um, and how ‘good’ would it have been were I a person of color? Were I trans or marginalized?”

And she said, “Well, I don’t know. We’ll have to ask Phoenix.”

“Right,” I said. “The go-to.”

Phoenix is half African-American and half Native-American. She converted to Islam while in prison for a drug offense, and transitioned to female after she was released. Then came a re-arrest, this time for assault, and the city council encouraged her to run for mayor. She was elected with 99.8% of the vote, and while that’s great and everything, it’s sickening the way my mother drops her name. “Your father and I ran into Phoenix after our Internalized Dominance Seminar last week,” she’ll say, or, “I was having coffee With Barb Beasley at Brown Complicity, when who should stroll in with her five support llamas—but Phoenix!”

I’m like, “Tokenize much?”

If my parents can’t see how racist it is to have a half African-American, half Native-American trans mayor then I can’t help them. I mean, Greenfield. That should be its motto: We Do Everything Half Way.

It’s so white solutionist, this town, so anti-tolerant. My parents, like all of their privilege preserving neighbors, pay lip service to diversity, just so they can talk about it at their racial humility lectures. Like, when Greenfield declared itself a sanctuary city, my mother invited a Guatemalan couple to move into my old bedroom, the one left empty when I went to college. The husband cut people’s grass for a living, while his wife self-identified as a maid. Combined they spoke maybe twenty words of English, most along the lines of “Yes, sir. Right away, sir,” and both of them liked to work in their bare feet, which were gnarly and calloused.

I was like, “Stereotype much?” so my father got them both into Greenfield Tech. Neither of them seemed very into it, but at least on paper Louisa was now majoring in disruption studies while Enrique was pre-pre-pre med. “Doctor Calderón,” was how my mother introduced him, as in, “And have you met our dear friends, Señora y Dr. Calderón?”

My father paid their tuition and gave them an allowance of a thousand dollars a week, not individually but together, thinking, I guess, that it was 1972 or something, and a mug of coffee costs a nickel. When it turned out the Calderóns weren’t actually going to classes, that instead they were sneaking off and still doing their self-exploitive, stereotypical jobs so they could add that money to their allowance, and pay a coyote to smuggle Louisa’s widowed mother along with, like, seven of her other grown children across the border, my father was like, “This is OK but not OK.”

The OK part meant that mom and dad moved into the garage, as the extended Calderón family needed a lot more space than my old bedroom, and the not OK part was, “Now that that’s settled, you really have to attend classes and become a doctor and a disruption studies person because, like, we told all our friends that that’s who you are and our internalized colonialist worldview means that we get to define you.”

So embarrassing, my parents. Meanwhile Louisa’s mother, who was pushing eighty, and walked with a cane was out there lurking twenty paces behind Mayor Phoenix, snatching up tufts of llama wool that got snagged on hedges and so forth. It turned out she was spinning it into yarn so that she could knit a fucking poncho for my father, who she practically worshiped—had been conditioned to worship! It took her months to do this, but it was finished by this Christmas. I was there in Greenfield, home from school again. My parents and I were in the driveway, getting a little sun, when she hobbled out of the house to present it to him, all of her kids, her whole extended family standing there as my dad unwrapped it. They were all like, “Try the poncho on!” in Spanish, and just as my father slipped it over his head, the across-the-street neighbor, who goes to Smith and was also home for a few weeks, took a picture and Tweeted it, with the hashtag “Allow me to appropriate and disrespect your culture on Christmas Day.”

Greenfield came down hard, just as they had last year when my mother’s former friend Judith Mesmer offered her, “famous take on the classic Chinese egg roll” in a recipe she posted on Facebook. I mean, it had corned beef in it!!!

Dad hoped the poncho thing would die down and I was like, “Don’t bet on it.” Because it didn’t deserve to die down! I said, “You did the crime, now do the time!” When the tires on his recumbent bike were slashed, he reached for the old, “Well, the people I appropriated from didn’t seem to mind,” line.

And I’m like, “Yeah, they’re too busy trying to navigate the systemic white power structure you and your ancestors worked so hard to build.”

Jacqueline Beasley-Sykes, our town’s Unitarian minister, told my father to his face that he didn’t deserve to live. Then someone threw a molotov cocktail through the living room window, obviously thinking we were still based in the house rather than the garage. Louisa’s mother, Maria, was sitting in front of the TV, crocheting a traditional Guatemalan aging blouse for my mom, and was super messed up in the resulting fire: third degree burns covering almost all of her body, including her face. She was blinded. Her fucking hands burned off! So she’s in the hospital, at, like, death’s door. Mayor Phoenix comes to visit with all the hoopla that follows her—the press, TV cameras etc—and when she asks Maria how she’s doing, the woman turns her completely bandaged head toward the sound of the talking, and says, in Spanish, “I think that I am dying, Sir.”

She mis-gendered Phoenix.

And like my dad said at the town hall meeting that night, “Do we have a zero tolerance policy for transphobia, or do we have, like, a 30% tolerance policy? Because that’s how fascism starts. And if you think it can’t take root in Greenfield, that means it already has!”

Of course we ordered the Calderóns to evacuate our house, or, what was left of it. The family tried renting an apartment with all the allowance they’d saved up, but sometimes a town will surprise you by doing the right thing. Sometimes the people you thought of as epistemic oppressors will band together and with one voice say, “Nope. Not here you don’t. Take your hate speech and the yarn that rightfully belonged to our mayor’s support llamas and get the fuck out of our faces.”

And sometimes, just sometimes, that town is Greenfield.

cc: @Mixmax @olofster @JasonJTatum

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