Futility
"What I mainly recall about our aborted conversation is that sickening feeling of erasure . . ."
by Jane Milligan
Who knows why I did it again—cast pearls before swine, poured water on a rock. Somehow, when the subject of race creeped into a conversation with a coworker, I felt compelled to tell him about a harrowing encounter with yahoos in a pickup truck.
Accompanied by a friend’s young son and my dog, I’d gone to visit my father and was out for a walk in San Diego’s East County, where most of the residents didn’t look like us. They looked like my coworker. I told him about these rednecks trying to hit us with their truck, calling us niggers as we stumbled into a shallow ditch to escape. I thought I saw a hint of a smile (skepticism?) on my coworker’s face when I mentioned how these guys began backing their truck towards us while we tried to regain our footing. The coworker remained silent and I wasn’t sure what was in his eyes. Doubt? Emptiness? Ice?
Recognizing a familiar dead end, I let the conversation veer away from the futile attempt to describe what it’s like being in my skin, away from the dumb hope of finding some shred of shared humanity or common ground.
What I mainly recall about our aborted conversation is that sickening feeling of erasure – for the umpteenth time. So familiar. And deadening. And brought on by myself.
Jane Milligan, a San Diego native and retired teacher with degrees in art and creative writing, has been published in the Santa Clara Monthly Review, Writers’ Monthly, We Speak: A Journal of Black Writers in San Diego, An Activists’ Poetry Anthology: Selected Poems for “Good Trouble and Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana (San Diego City Works Press). Primarily a poet, she’s seeking new ways to share improbable stories of survival and her ponderings regarding a future that has many holding their breath.
For more by Jane Milligan and others, go here to buy a copy of Sunshine/Noir III: Writing from San Diego and Tijuana, now out on San Diego City Works Press.