Her Social-Conscience Education

Her parents were involved social humanists, activists who deplored and abhorred racism and social injustice in its many forms. They and their like-minded friends spent evening hours debating how they would help to make the world a far better place than it was. They had profound personal knowledge of the inequities that abounded in the world, of the plague of racism.

They were the fortunate ones, those who had emigrated from Europe, to live in North America. They took nothing for granted. They valued everything that was fair and just. Including the opportunities that they felt were opening for them in their new countries. They might well have left the past behind and dedicated themselves completely to their futures without plaguing themselves with the reasons they had left Europe.

They did not. Which goes far in explaining why there was seldom unaffected, light-hearted laughter. And why she, even as a child, suspected something was dreadfully wrong. She was given books to read, just as soon as she could, books that challenged her newfound abilities, just as they challenged her emerging sensibility toward the normatives of failed societies.

She soon became disabused of the idea that it was just Jews and blacks who were both spurned and slandered. Books like To Kill a Mockingbird, How Green Was My Valley, and the Grapes of Wrath grew her awareness of the world beyond her immediate knowledge. And she slowly graduated to books like Eugene Sue's The Wandering Jew at a time when her classmates were reading Black Beauty.

She romanticized the plight of American Blacks, although at that time they were called Negroes. And she was confused, coming across young black Canadians who were standoffish and unfriendly to her understanding overtures. Once, trembling before a physically threatening black girl older and larger than her in an alleyway, she grovelled and was permitted to leave unscathed.

And another lesson was learned thereby. After that occurrence she turned to other types of literature, and her favourites became the Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan series; she haunted her neighbourhood library for the possibility of any new editions she had never yet read. She had noted her father's choice of reading material; Zane Grey's cowboy action novels, little knowing their fascination as moral redemption through confrontation.

Her sensitivities had been set, she felt great empathy for the world's downtrodden. This was part of her emerging worldview, her intrinsic values. Still, she never aspired to the commitment she had seen in her parents. She was alert, however, and did small things to alert others, to protest inequities when and where she could, to communicate her lofty and genuine human rights values.

Without becoming too overtly involved, she wrote letters, some to be published as letters to the editor, and joined peace marches. She occasionally went along with organized activists to lobby Parliament Hill. She used to joke about her wizened little old mother as a peacenik. That she might be, but she was also forbidden entry to the United States.

Her parents had belonged to a social group that called themselves socialists, but the government called them communists. She could dimly recall having had the figure of Tim Buck pointed out to her in the lecture room where he gave one of his speeches at her parents' social club. She knew, but could not remember that she had heard Paul Robeson sing in the club's auditorium.

She became a feminist in due time, and for a while attached herself to the Quakers. But she soon discovered that 'belonging' to any group just did not express her total commitment to her generalized worldview, and soon left them. She began to write articles focusing on social empathy along with poetry, short fiction, sent them out hopeful they might be accepted in literary magazines, and some were.

She led a busy life, and a solitary one, finding it difficult to make friends, and feeling distant from family. But she moved steadily up in the ranks of the civil service, and she travelled widely, considering herself truly privileged to see so many disparate parts of the world, some she admired, others not.

When, in late life, when the bloom certainly had left the rose of her physical appearance, she did marry. To a man whom she had met at a diplomatic function, while abroad. He was himself a diplomat, born in Tunisia, an un-observant black Jew who claimed his forebears were most likely remnants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.

Amazingly, she conceived, not once, but twice, and confounded both their expectations by producing two little boys, one shortly after the other. A natural process, but a feat withal, at her age. They exulted, and began to raise their children in harmony and a mutual determination to raise well-adjusted and intelligent beings who would become a benefit to society.

When they re-settled briefly in Atlanta, Georgia, she dutifully visited the Ebenezer Baptist Church, and the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial. She felt awed by being there, moved by the video she'd viewed along with others rapt in attention, hearing that long-dead voice intone "I have a dream". Exiting the building she felt re-energized - and exceedingly humble.

Because of her husband's diplomatic connections, their two little boys attended an International School, and they adjusted well to their new environment. Another privileged one where they were housed in a lovely bucolic area of the city, a community with its own well-forested little lake wherein swam ducks, geese and swans. She had no cause to worry about her boys bicycling in the neighbourhood.

But in the neighbourhood stories circulated. Hear those sharp sounds at night? Gunshots, that's what. Just be aware. Reasoned that was why, although she and her husband would often go for evening walks in the neighbourhood, they rarely saw anyone else on foot. And those other rumours, that blacks had been seen driving up to the lake, shooting their park geese for the dinner table.

At diplomatic soirees she met the black aristocracy of the city, and the black mayor, and the black Congressman who slid effortlessly through the crowd of those whom he largely represented. Viewing all those well-dressed, sophisticated people she was a little amazed. At the easy confidence with which all these well-connected people, white and black, assimilated at cocktail parties.

Her mind dragged her back to the reality of that part of the city that was a ghetto, where people lived inadequate, degraded lives without any hint of upward mobility remotely possible for the disaffected young. Where young boys dealt drugs and threatened one another through gang affiliations, and young girls thrilled to the prospect of becoming unwed mothers.

She knew the statistics well, had deplored them as unbelievable. Yet a secret part of her took comfort in the well-realized fact that desperately poor blacks preyed on one another, seldom upon those who lived elsewhere. Those areas and life-styles appropriated by an entirely different strata of society, whose well-financed lives bore no resemblance to theirs.

It was there, in the ghettos, that the battles continued to diminish the possibility of extraction from a life-style with few values and wholesale detriments to useful human aspiration. And she often wondered why it was that there was that great divide. What she identified as a divide between educated, well-remunerated, socially-upward blacks, and those who could never sever their ties with disadvantage.

She had met diplomats at the Canadian mission, the Consul-General and his wife, those consular officials representing Canada's trade issues, political, economic reporting and public affairs programs, and tourism. She became intimate with some of the issues involved and because of her past work as a civil servant was welcomed at the Consulate for her experienced advice.

She soon learned to avoid the Consul-General's wife, if she could, emulating all the other personnel, both Canadian and locally-engaged who did likewise. The woman was a haughtily-entitled black beauty, her mother a high-ranking diplomat from Jamaica and her husband was utterly devoted to her to the point of allowing her to interfere with the official work of the consulate.

She preyed on junior diplomats, made their lives miserable, and did even worse with the locally-engaged who were so in fear of her that they trembled in her presence. Should any happen to offend her they would be reported to the Consul-General and then the anger that his wife directed toward him would be re-directed to the cringing offender who had dared question his wife's authority.

When she eventually accepted yet another proffered invitation from the local Welcome Wagon group in her affluent neighbourhood, she understood that the group was a regular one, meeting on a weekly basis, as friends finding much in common. They were delighted to have among them someone with her diplomatic connections and much-travelled experience, and she enjoyed just being another woman in their company.

Their homes were as gracious and well-appointed as hers. Although they owned their own homes, and she did not. Hers was rented and she was there for a specific period of time, after which she would be returning to her own home, back in Canada. The last meeting she attended with the group before cutting off complete contact with them was when they began speaking conspiratorially, then boldly, about school busing.

Integrated schooling hadn't worked, wouldn't work, and they would never accept it. "Why not?" she asked innocently, as they turned astonished eyes on her. "Those black thugs, that's why! You wouldn't want your kids in everyday contact with them, would you?" Would she? She felt embarrassed, stumbled, said something inane about the unfortunate needing opportunities. She wondered, weren't they aware of her children?

Reminding her of the last cocktail party she had attended and when she'd been introduced to a large, black woman wearing a turquoise cocktail dress and large pink pearls, she had somehow managed to lose confidence, spoke tentatively at first, then babbled on about how difficult it must be to be black in this country, this city ... remembering how she had withered under the woman's stolidly blank gaze.