by Courtenay Nearburg

I am a white woman, 26, a native Texan of English / German / French-Alsatian / Cherokee Indian descent. My grandfathers were white second-generation immigrants. They were good men, they worked hard, they worked with their hands. My father made good in the oil business and I was raised in Highland Park, an affluent suburb on prime real estate just north of downtown Dallas.

There were no black families living in Highland Park when I grew up. I graduated from high school in 1989. I had yet to know a black person my age. I knew black servants that worked in the homes of my friends and neighbors. We had a "housekeeper." I was not allowed to use the word "maid" because my mother considered it derogatory. The woman's name is Helen. She pretty much raised me.

I did not grow up in the "hood." I grew up in "the Bubble." It's a quiet place, safe, peaceful. It shimmers like a bubble, iridescent, crystalline, unreal and magnificent. The white people who live in the Bubble do not want out. By comparison, the outside world seems dirty, scary, loud, impoverished and tragic. Violent. In the Bubble, the white children are sheltered from the storm of racial turmoil that rages around them in the inner city. They do not play with their servants' children. My mother invited Helen to attend our family weddings, but I always remember Helen working in the kitchen. She wore my mother's hand-me-down dresses when she didn't wear a white frock.

Helen remembers how picking cotton ripped the skin of her pink palms and she brags that she got her master's degree in "sugah'n'shit." Her real name is Rachel. Helen is her middle name. Rachel Helen Woods. She is in her eighties now, stricken blind by diabetes. Her skin is so black, it's gray like smoke. When I last visited her tiny house in South Dallas, she greeted me with squeals and tears. She sat in front of me and patted me over from foot to forehead, oohing and aahing over how big I've become, all grown up.

We talked about God and the neighborhood, the children who visit her and the children who have died. We talked about her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren. Her daughter, Elaine, slept in the next room, the only other room in the house, and Helen complained that she is lazy and that she keeps bad company. Elaine's husband is in jail and Helen thinks that she is on crack. But she needs someone to take care of her, and Elaine has nowhere else to go. Her own children have children and they have no room for Elaine.

I worry about the fact that the house has no air conditioning. The windows are covered by stacks of boxes and old furniture that has been piled over the years against the walls so that hardly any light gets in. Helen doesn't notice the dark but I am concerned about the heat of Texas summer. She doesn't want an air conditioner because she believes that the change in temperature between inside and out will make her sick. I am afraid she will suffocate in the little house. There is a stench in her room. It creeps into the room from hidden corners where descendents of one of my mother's cast-off pets have peed and no one cleans since Helen can no longer keep house. The little mutt dogs clamor at my feet, and Helen shoos them with a newspaper, "Git off her, little dog, off! Off!" and I laugh with her.

I told her about my job at an arts organization, producing jazz and blues music. I didn't go into a long explanation of our mission at work, to promote African American arts and preserve the cultural history of African Americans in Central Texas. I felt uncomfortable talking about it. I didn't want to tell her how I feel ashamed of my privilege in the face of her pain. I didn't want to tell her that I feel responsible for her slavery, and that's the reason I became shy around her in high school, and that's why I do what I do now. I know that she loves me deeply, and I wanted her to know how much I love her. I also know that I am one of those who have kept her in chains all these years. I am trying to do penance, I guess. I feel guilty, and I didn't want her to see that guilt. I feel that it would be disrespectful in the face of her true dignity.

We are all victims of "domestic violence" -- our world, the only home we have, continues to be dominated by fear, violence and death. Our society is divided into "haves" and "have-nots," winners and losers, white and black, unequal and separate. We suffer with racism, like a plague on our communal body. There can be no mistake about who is in control. He is white, wealthy and ruthless. As one of his daughters, I am battered by his ruthlessness. I am sickened by his greed. And I am crying for Rachel Helen, because she must be my grandmother, the one The Great White Father has forsaken. I must respect her and him equally, and thank them for their wisdom, but I long for peace between them.

I believe in the dreams of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I believe in Rachel Helen Woods' eternal love, and I believe there is much work to be done to heal the wounds left on our already-weakened communal body by the searing hatred of racism and the strangling disease of hopelessness. I believe in affirmative action because we are fooling ourselves if we think 30 years is enough time to heal the gaping wounds of 400 years of torture, and we are fooling ourselves if we think that public education today gives the black child a fair shake in the "race" for success that predominates every aspect of our American culture.

Ninety-eight percent of my graduating class at Highland Park attended college. Few needed scholarships or financial aid. Most went into business school. Highland Park is an independent school district financed not by state money, but by property taxes. The district consists of four elementary schools, one junior high, and one high school. Fourteen hundred students graduate a year, on the average. Ninety-nine percent WASP. Most find starting salaries in the 20's. Their fathers earn six figures and their mothers disperse some of it into popular philanthropies. Some of those philanthropies benefit the children of their household employees. Those children still do not play together.

I was introduced to Dr. King by Dr. Smith, my eighth grade U.S. History teacher. A lot of my secondary school teachers were Ph.D's. Dallas Independent School District cannot afford such luxuries. I'll never forget Dr. King's voice, passion quivering in his commanding tones. I had never before been moved to tears by a man speaking. He came to me from a turntable at the front of a classroom, and I felt a strong emotion rise from my stomach, from the place of courage. I could imagine the vision he described. I felt the same emotion come to me again last year listening to Subcommander Marcos speak on KOOP Radio. I couldn't understand his language, but the quality of his voice was the same.

I wonder if the black children getting their state-funded public education in DISD listened to Dr. King's speech on a turntable in their classrooms. Were their 8th grade history teachers Ph.D.'s? Did they play YMCA soccer and attend cotillion? Did they have bicycles and warm clothes and books and coloring pencils? Who cooked dinner for them while Mama and Grandma cooked and cleaned for the white children in Highland Park?

When I was in high school, our basketball team (all white, tallest player 6'4") went to the state finals. On the way to Austin, we played many all-black schools. There was violence. One boy, Tommy Lott, was hit in the face with brass knuckles and almost lost an eye. The word "nigger" flew around the halls of my school and the crowds chanting taunts turned ugly at the following games. An effigy of a young black hotshot named Thomas Hill was waved in the Highland Park student section at one of the semifinals in Moody Coliseum at Southern Methodist University. Highland Park won the game.

Rachel Helen Woods is not a victim of this social injustice. She is a survivor. She didn't desegregate busses or protest in the civil rights movement. She slaved. She was beaten by her alcoholic husband. She held her babies as they died. She held me to her breast and dried my tears. She cried as her babies had babies and their fathers went to jail. We are all children of her ancient family, the family descended from Africa, homo sapiens, the human race. We still refuse to recognize and accept all of our kinfolk, and we remain mired in mindless fear and loneliness, imprisoned in ignorance, as a result.

Racism is hatred, the opposite of love. It is blindness, and we must open our eyes. We must find it in ourselves and expose it. Use the negative to create a positive. Find service work and do penance with your hands and your hearts, and finally your pocketbook. Then we can release it and we will be free to embrace our brothers and sisters. It is a dream. We can live it one day in the future. Rachel Helen Woods lives the history.