Disagree Strongly

aka the Sound of a Million Wings Flapping in Unison

Early last month, I attended an antiracist conference. A presenter had us all stand. He’d divided the stage into sections. He made statements. After each, we’d filter into one of five Scotch-taped divides—“strongly disagree,” “disagree,” “neutral,” “agree,” “strongly agree.”

At last, his gaze slid over us before he said, his tone solemn, “We can end racism.”

For a moment, no one moved. Then we lifted onto the stage.

Now, I can’t stop thinking about my view from the right-hand side of the room. How, on the other side, “strongly disagree” formed a bulbous head that stretched into a long needle, the end streaming beyond the tape’s edge. How among those looking back in my direction were the majority of the young Black women in attendance, guests from a local high school.

A CT scan my doctor called urgent and limited availability for the test conspired to make me miss the keynote speaker on day two. On the drive back from a clinic far north of the city, I passed an empty field the color of cornflower. All at once, a flock I hadn’t seen rose from the ground. A pixelated teardrop of black dots filled the azure sky. It stretched into a train. It elongated, opening like a ballerina’s outstretched arms. 

As this dance unfolded (my sister would fill me in), Dr. Joy DeGruy was laying out the story of the Statue of Liberty’s hidden chains. In 1865, French abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye shared with sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi his vision to memorialize the women and men and children who American landowners had enslaved for 300+ years.

In her intended form, Lady Liberty held broken chains in her left hand. But the American backers, landowners, refused to finance her unless her chains were hidden. So links of her chains lie only at her feet, invisible unless by helicopter. And only recently, on DeGruy’s petition, are visitors to Ellis Island told this part of her story. She was marking not our freedom from tyranny abroad but from within (or at least the start of it).

Now, I can’t stop wondering. What would be different if, for the past 160 years, everyone who’d stood at her feet had celebrated the freedom she was meant to honor? Without the unspoken message that stories can be retold and shame should be hidden?

“The Statue’s shackles and feet.” NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, Statue of Liberty NM

I can’t stop remembering a rocky beach where a tall woman with a strawberry pixie cut plays with a mostly blind albino Great Dane. It’s low tide. And something about the ocean’s distance feels tender, like it’s drawn away for need of solitude.

Or maybe the tenderness came after the question. 

“Do you think we’re racist just because we’re white?”

My companion, a Vietnam vet from New York I’ll call Ken, must be in his late sixties. His hair, a mix of white and ash, falls a few inches below his shoulders. A red banana circles his forehead. We’re sitting side by side against the ’80s model Class C motorhome he’s called home for the past few years. We’re sipping coffee he brewed that tastes like a waitress who looks spent but calls you honey and tops you off for as long as you need. We’re watching woman and dog chase gull and pebble and clouds that move like spoken word poets.

I glance his way. His gray eyes behind frameless glasses search mine, no malice or tension.

Ruby, the camper van I live and travel in, sports a trio of signs in her window: “Black Lives Matter.” “Trans Rights Are Human Rights.” A rainbow flag. So the question isn’t exactly out of nowhere. Still, I wasn’t expecting it. We’ve spent a handful of days—the four of us—camped side by side. A handful of others have pulled down into this tiny cove to stay for a few hours or a night. Many would have given me reason to move on were it not for Ken and the woman with her pink and white dog and our cozy “neighborhood.”

The day before, I returned from rock hopping to find Ken had moved his chair next to Ruby. “They were looking in your windows.” He nodded to a beat-up trans-am, both driver and passenger clearly blitzed out. “I’ll stay here till they go.”

A seabird takes flight. “I think,” I say, “we don’t know what it is to live in bodies outside the ‘default’ the systems in place are designed to favor, what it’s like not to see people who look like us in positions of power.” Or some other clunkily worded response. I talk about ingrained biases and systemic inequities and the difference between equity and equality.

I don’t listen, not really, when Ken talks about all the ways the systems have failed and belittled him and his. But I undoubtedly say, “I hear you, man,” at least twice.

Teryll KerrDouglas on Unsplash

The teardrop of birds that filled my field of vision as I made my way back to the conference is called a murmuration. I google the word. And though I’m not sure it’s right, I like this definition—“the sound of a million wings flapping in unison.”

Have you seen one? It feels like magic, doesn’t it, thousands of bodies moving together, cutting as one, at speeds we can’t fathom, into vees and figure eights, mushrooms and feathers, a pulsating blob executing a pirouette, a group of individuals becoming not just united but shapeshifter.

Which is maybe the magic, when you think about it. I’m guessing you’ve heard that the birds aren’t following a leader. No. They’re watching each other, gauging their closest neighbors’ movements and adjusting accordingly. It’s like that for schooling fish, too. They watch and feel. Through a lateral line of pressure-sensitive pores along their bodies, they sense the waves made by those moving alongside them.

I stop short of telling Ken the guy he voted for would stand on his face if it were the only stool around and he needed a leg up. I don’t lose my shit when he talks about his freedom being violated by mask mandates. It’s 2021. And I have no idea what’s coming for me, for us.

I’m not yet immunocompromised by treatment for an autoimmune disease that hasn’t yet been triggered. I’m not worried I’ll lose my health care insurance (or at least the subsidies that make it possible for me to afford it) in a few short months.

Just over half of my neighbors in this land of liberty haven’t yet cast votes to re-elect a man who embodies unkindness.

Relief is my primary response to the giant white blob bounding my way, cutting our conversation short. I brace myself, having learned the Dane will misjudge my distance and topple me with her greeting if I’m not prepared. “What a good girl,” I coo, once I’ve gotten her to sit between my legs. I stroke her face and gaze into her cloudy pink, unseeing eyes. The heat off her fur feels good under my hands.

I accept a joint offered by the Great Dane’s human and take a tentative drag before handing it to Ken. I’ve not been sharing bottles and such since Covid. But now seems the time for an exception.

The sea as seen from Ruby the van’s side barn doors

Back in that room, on my island of “agree,” I wanted us to be in unison. Part of me was pulled to migrate to “strongly disagree,” to say, OK, I feel the waves of what your experience has taught you. Or I’m trying to. Part of me wanted to say, Don’t we have to at least believe it’s possible? 

I didn’t ask myself where I’d have stood if the presenter had said, “We can end misogyny.”

A poet was in the room. Because it was a private moment between those of us gathered and I’m going to give you some of her words, I won’t tell you where she stood. I was glad of her presence.

I can’t stop thinking about the numbers we were given at the opening dinner. Before I tell you what they mean, hold them in your mind—$454,000 and $28,000. One is the average income of a white family in King County, Washington. One is the average income of a Black family in that same county. That’s not a gap; it’s a chasm. And it’s legislation (votes, let’s be real), intents made invisible by disingenuous wording notwithstanding, that’s kept it wide.

A friend joked he’s being stalked by Mary Oliver since Tuesday’s election results. “He should be so lucky,” my sister quipped. He is / we are deeply fortunate, I realized, to have along our lateral lines those who turn to poets.

I can’t stop believing proximity is partially at play—proximity to disinformation, that is. That at least a whole lot of Kens were voting for cheaper gas and eggs. Period. They were adjusting to their neighbors’ movements. But I know that some were welcoming the suffering of others.

In “Because if I don’t write,” poet and publisher Jessica Care Moore writes, “Because if i don’t write / You will write for me / tell historians black girls were / crazy / invisible / lost in time” (lines 27–32). And later, “I write to live / to prove to black girls everywhere / we are possible” (lines 55–57).

Murmurations and schools form for protection from predation and cold. But a mass less stunning would surely suffice. 

It occurs to me that we, in the archipelago of agree and disagree, were actually moving in unison, creating the shape of us that day, preparing for a shift. That I will not be silent because, after all, what else is there to say? That I will keep flapping my wings and feeling alongside those who write into possibility.

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I didn’t know what to send you this week. But I wanted to show up. I wanted to fly/swim/write/think alongside you / with you. I told myself, write the post you want to see. I don’t know if this is it. But it’s what was in me. Please tell me, if you want, what’s in you?

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