OK, this has to stay just between us, because I’m sure it’s in poor form according to everyone in this “get yourself published” world. A world where it’s clear I do not belong.
Side note: I just looked up where the expression “mum’s the word” came from and nearly died of boredom.
At any rate, belong or not, I still want in on the getting published world, so I wrote an OpEd and sent it to one zine, waited 5 days, wrote a follow-up, got no response. I then sent it to a major newspaper who sent me a really thoughtful rejection note:
Thank you, Marjie,
We cannot use your essay (our next issue is full), but we appreciate your interest. We hope you can place it elsewhere. It's lovely.
Best, The editors
I didn’t mind that at all. So nice of them.
Then I sent it to another major publication many days ago and got nothing back at all, and so I’m going to publish it here.
If I hear back from them and they say yes, I’ll of course immediately take this down and deny it was ever up, and you will all feign shock and be appalled that someone might suggest they’d ever seen it before.
Still, it’s an itch I want to scratch, so I present to you my first OpEd.
Wait, I mean, no I don’t. That would be wrong. I’d never do something like that.
The Riverfront Brawl Was Another Gift from Montgomery
As a white, Generation Jones Bostonian, I lay in my bed the other night and watched on my phone as citizens 1,200 miles away stood up for us all, and saved a man’s life.
A pontoon boat was moored at Montgomery, Alabama’s Riverfront Park in space reserved for the riverboat cruise ship Harriott II. After 45 futile minutes of hailing the pontoon boaters via the public address system, the riverboat’s co-Captain1, Damien Pickett, gave up. He rode with a 16-year-old crewman in a small skiff from the ship to the dock. As he attempted to move the boat slightly to make room for the ship, the boaters approached him, making obscene gestures. They argued, circling, and surrounded him.
If you know America, if you’re watching the footage, your stomach gets tight here. Pickett was black. The boaters were white. One black man surrounded by a group of angry white men. Scary.
Then, one of the boaters launched himself at the co-captain, blindsiding him, knocking him backwards. Righting himself, Pickett threw his hat up in the air and moved forward, defending himself against his assailant. Within seconds, five men and a woman punched and kicked the captain. Outnumbered, he fell and then lay on the deck. His white young helper tried to intervene but was pushed away.
Then something remarkable happened. Seemingly out of nowhere, people, mostly men and some women, mostly black and some white, arrived from the shore to help Mr Pickett fight off the group of attackers. Another 16-year-old crewman jumped from the riverboat and swam to the pier to help his boss. More of the Caucasian berth-appropriating boaters joined in the fight against him.
Much has been made of the fact that one of the defending men waded into the fray wielding a folding chair. He hit a couple of people with it, including a woman. I’d suggest that the best way to avoid getting hit by a folding chair in a fight is not to hurl yourself into the fight.
Did you know the folding chair was invented by Nathaniel Alexander, a Black man from Virginia?
The police arrived, and by the time it was over the aggressors were sitting on the dock in cuffs. No one was seriously hurt.
Mr Pickett was doing his job that day. But he could have been killed.
A group of Black men showed up for him, knowing the risks of going up against white people, especially when the police might be called. Of doing anything when the police might be called.
The police showed up. They did the right thing. Arrested the right people. Killed no one.
Nobody pulled a gun.
Nobody died.
The national news each day is painful, and can bring me to tears. We are choking in endless violence, blatant racism, and corruption. Our agonizing past is nowhere better defined than in that same harbor, where enslaved people were marched from steamboats or unloaded from nearby, overpacked trains up from New Orleans to be sold in Montgomery’s town center, the former cradle of the Confederacy. Decade after decade of apartheid and Jim Crow cruelty followed.
Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat there.
It was toward Montgomery that the people were marching from Selma when the police and state troopers attacked with dogs and fire hoses, billy clubs and tear gas.
Unlike the previous marches in Alabama in the 60s, that time TV cameras were filming the brutality. The film was flown from Alabama to New York, and what the rest of the country watched that night, interrupting their shows as a special broadcast, became known as Bloody Sunday. The ensuing outrage eventually led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
I was six years old that year, a first-generation kid with a Lebanese mother and Argentine father who’d met in Boston and worked together to find the promise and freedom of the American Dream.
My father, almost 93, now watches in horror as the fascists and thugs from his past arise in his land of safe haven: as police burst into people’s homes on false pretexts, guilty without need for trial; as the poor are resented for receiving even their small part of the pie; and as an entire political party tries to strip us of our right to vote, to determine and control our own lives. My father misses my mother every day, but I think he’s glad she didn’t live to see this happen.
But Montgomery gave us another gift this month.
The brawl on the riverfront was no joke at first, though the memes stemming from it are a work of art. A man doing his job was threatened and abused by people who likely thought they’d get away with it—who didn’t even pause to think about whether they’d get away with it—because of their skin color and his. But this time we got old-fashioned fisticuffs, a thrown hat, the cavalry arriving to support the hero, a dramatic dive from a ship to a pier, people unwillingly dumped into the water, a WWE-style folding chair, and a bunch of calm cops standing around.
This time the good guys won, just the way we were promised it should be.
Morning Teaistisms
The kettle has been working overtime. Apparently this “real writer” thing requires more caffeine than the fake writer scene, and so bouncing back and forth between coffee and tea is a slightly schizophrenic-yet-tasty way of getting through the day.
I called my dentist the other day, telling the receptionist that of course it was an emergency, why else would anyone ever call a dentist?
When he got to the phone I asked him if he remembered when I couldn’t handle anything iced or hot on my teeth, and when he said he did, I told him that I was drinking iced coffee and hot tea next to each other all day long now and it didn’t bother me at all!
You’d think he’d have wanted to know how all his hard work paid off, but he muttered something about bourbon and that he’d see me Tuesday and hung up.
Weird guy.
Descriptions of Mr Pickett’s job title have been varied, but this is what I believe to be true.
This was very poignant and well written. The perspective you have and that from your father is particularly of need to be shared and heard in modern America where we seemingly are moving backward on multiple fronts. Thank you for writing this. Here is to seeing it get published.
Wondrous as usual - my only thought would be (as one strains to understand why you got no interest) is that right now, maybe especially now with the spectre of the next election always present, many are fatigued with a treatise involving racism or critiques about each other ... even though it turned out to be, as you said, a good example of things going right. It's the only thing I can think of.....though I will never admit that I even saw or of course ever read it! Someone might jump at the chance to have it, carry on.