Texan who was tricked by Used Husband into moving to Milwaukee. Fomenting feminist revolution based on potty parity, pockets, and psleeves. Bad bacon eater. Also, cats. Also, REVOLUTION.
When I lived in Chile and my roommate and I had parties, we would just tell guests we were going to bed and to lock the door behind them when they left, but that practice does not seem to transfer to the US.
What do you do when you invite someone to supper – someone you have not seen in a long time and is only a casual friend (but is nonetheless, a kind, warm person) – and it’s 10 p.m. and he still won’t go home?
Mr T and I had a houseguest, HG. HG and Mr T have a mutual friend from their old job who lives near here. They asked Mutual Friend (MF) to dinner.
A couple of years before covid, MF moved back to town to care for his aging parents. We would see him about once a year or so. He always showed up with nice cheese and a bottle of wine. He was pleasant company.
(MF also, it turns out, despite being a well-educated, intelligent person, has turned into an anti-vaxxer trumper end times conspiracy theorist. But I didn’t learn that until after this most recent visit.)
(We will not be inviting him back.)
We ate and then I announced I was going into the bedroom to read and the three of them could carry on.
Three hours later, HG announced that he was going upstairs to call his wife. He said goodbye to MF.
Twenty minutes later, HG came back downstairs.
MF was still there.
“How long are you guys staying up?” he asked.
Mr T came into the bedroom, closed the door, and whispered to me, “He won’t go home! How do we make him go home?”
I said, “Just tell him you have an early morning and it’s been nice to see him.”
Mr T answered, “I can’t do that! He knows both HG and I never get up early!”
Do I have to do everything myself?
(At least I knew I could get MF out of the house. When Mr T’s parents stayed at our house for nine days nine whole days nine miserable days for our wedding, Mr T’s mom fell down the stairs and I thought HOLY SHIT SHE’S BROKEN SOMETHING THEY WILL NEVER LEAVE.)
I sighed.
Put my book down on the bed.
Got up.
Put on my slippers.
Walked out to the dining room where HG stood helplessly.
Walked up to MF, smiled, put my arm around his waist, started walking him to the door, and said, “MF it’s been so good to see you again! I’m afraid I have to kick you out, though. I need to get to sleep and y’all are too noisy for me. Thank you so much for coming!”
Dear Miss Manners: How do I politely and firmly convey to an interested party that I merely want to discuss business, and am not interested in meeting for coffee or any other alone time that could be construed as romantic?
I feel that an abrupt “I do not drink coffee, but I will see you at the next official function” would not sufficiently discourage the interested party from inquiring further.
And that the commenters who dismissed the letter writer’s concerns are (probably) men.
“LW2 getting coffee is not romantic alone time, it’s an opportunity to build a business relationship.”
“Really? This seems unduly rigid. There is nothing wrong with getting to know a colleague better. If someone is hitting on the LW, it’s better handled in a coffee shop than by shutting down all platonic outreach completely. Not everyone has a bad motive.”
“People are assuming inappropriate intentions around this coffee. If someone wants to meet professionally to talk about business but in a coffee shop, or even if they want to get to know a colleague better in lieu of a water cooler, these are not monumental requests. Responding coldly as if LW can NOT be bothered to have a single informal conversation and no interest in knowing a coworker or worse, assumes the coworker is hitting on LW, that’s so rude. Who would want to work with this person? Part of work is sharing ideas, and that happens well in informal settings. And part of working with coworkers is having positive relationships with them. Nothing about the request is unprofessional but many of these catty responses are.” – Frank
Years ago, my male and otherwise really good boss Bob got angry with me when I told the ad salesman from a trade publication that I didn’t want to have dinner with him that night after work.
Bob and I had already met for a few hours with the guy.
We had covered the business issues.
I was done.
But then the salesman asked me to dinner that evening.
I am not the most perceptive person when it comes to identifying flirting, but damn. This one was obvious. He asked female me and not my more powerful male boss?
This was not about the work.
Bob told me it was my job to do things like that.
In his mind, it was a simple dinner.
In mine, it was a huge infringement on my personal time by someone who I had already met with during working hours and with whom I had no interest at all in a romantic or any other kind of relationship.
A customer asked me to meet him for lunch. I reluctantly agreed, because I needed this guy.
But – he didn’t want to meet at the restaurant. He wanted me to meet him at his workplace (he was the produce manager at a grocery store that was letting us photograph ads there).
I met him there. He wanted to drive. I got into his car.
He turned on Kenny G.
Y’all.
This is not Professional Lunch music.
At the restaurant, while I was trying to talk about the ad campaign, he told me how lonely he was since his divorce.
He asked me how it was that I was still not married.
We all know This Guy.
Some men have blinders.
Some men really do think it is all about the coffee.
My boss Vinny thought so.
Once a week or so, a few of us would walk across the street to the coffeeshop and grab coffee. It took us maybe 20 minutes total.
I always asked Vinny if he wanted to join us.
He always said no. One day, he explained that he just didn’t like coffee.
I laughed and said, “It is not about the coffee! It’s about spending a few minutes with co-workers and developing relationships!”
I didn’t ask Vinny to coffee because I wanted him to have a cup of coffee.
I asked him to coffee to improve our work relationship.
It is never about the coffee.
The answer the Miss Manners letter writer is seeking is, “My calendar is always current. Please feel free to request a meeting with me and include an agenda so I can be prepared. We can us the meeting room on the third floor.”
The Metis Founding Mother, and Menominee “Queen” of Milwaukee
Josette Vieau (1804-1855), half French Canadian and half Menominee, married Solomon Juneau, the man who would later become Milwaukee’s founder and statesman.
Fluent in French and multiple Native languages, Josette served as her husband’s interpreter, facilitated alliances and access to tribal trade networks, ran the trading post when her husband was away, raised thirteen children, and was midwife to American newcomers.
She was praised as having a queenly presence, and widely credited as saving the settlement with bravery while her husband was out of town, averting a planned raid by the aggrieved Potawatomi tribe members against the white settlers by patrolling the streets herself all night.
By all accounts she was amiable, self-possessed, charitable and diplomatic. That plus her long marriage to Solomon Juneau earned her the name “Founding Mother of Milwaukee”. The Juneaus marriage was loving and lasted for decades. She died 1852, and Solomon died a year later, almost to the day.
When I read this post about Josette Vieau Juneau, I wrote, “So Juneau married a woman who gave him what he needed to be successful in his career. It’s a story as old as time: a man sleeping his way to the top, sometimes by marrying the boss’s daughter (looking at you, half the beer barons in Milwaukee and a senator), sometimes by marrying an entire network.”
And oh boy did I kick open a can of worms.
Well, with one guy. So maybe a worm.
The admin of the group wrote, “That’s about it, yep. Fur Traders needed Native business connections and they married into them.”
But another reader got all butthurt that I would diminish Solomon Juneau that way – by implying that he made a fortune only because he married the right woman. The idea that a woman even had anything to do with Juneau’s success was just offensive. How dare I.
He responded indignantly,
I would highly suggest you read primary sources on Juneau and Josette before Milwaukee was even considered becoming developed. Your comment about sleeping his way to the top is appalling. The Milwaukee County Historical Society has their original letters and you can still read them to this day. Based off his letters and others who wrote about their marriage, all evidence points to your theory as nothing more than a stupid fb comment.
I’ve read and handled countless letters from Juneau, Morgan Martin, and Josette. Absolutely NOTHING is true about Texan’s theory about Juneau. It’s obvious she hasn’t done her research concerning him, his relationship with Josette, and his role in Milwaukee History.
Absolutely appalling
Please note BTW that he says absolutely nothing that refutes my statement. Nothing he writes indicates that Juneau would have been successful even if he had been married to another woman.
PS I would also suggest that a marriage in the early 1800s that “lasted for decades” is not unusual, as it’s not like women were in a position to divorce easily back then. The way to leave a marriage was death.
1995 question: Ms Rodham Clinton, what do you think would have happened in your life if you hadn’t married Bill Clinton? Where would you be today?
Rodham Clinton: I’d be married to the president.
But sleeping your way to the top has long been a Wisconsin tradition.
For men.
It has long been a tradition for men.
In a new exhibit at the Milwaukee County Historical Society museum, I noticed that many of the famous beer barons became famous beer barons only after they married the daughters or widows of famous beer barons.
(Kudos to the museum for calling out these important details.)
(How much do you want to bet that the daughters could have run those breweries just fine on their own?)
(And how much do you want to bet that those daughters actually did run those breweries? But the men got the credit?)
Philip Jung, who rose to own a successful brewery, married the boss’ daughter. The historian (whom I greatly admire) who wrote the story below says Jung’s rise was not a result of nepotism, but I would have to say that Jung might not have been promoted to brewmaster in the first place if he had not been Best’s son-in-law.
Three years later, he married one of the Best daughters, Anna, but Jung’s subsequent rise was not the result of nepotism. A master of the art of beer and a tireless innovator, the young man was promoted to Best’s brewmaster in 1877 and promptly tripled the company’s output. Jung worked closely with another Best son-in-law, Frederick Pabst. That flamboyant former lake captain eventually became sole owner of the brewery and renamed it for himself in 1889.
Wisconsin’s senator Ron Johnson married into his money.
In 1979, Johnson moved to Oshkosh, Wisconsin, with his wife, Jane. He worked for his wife’s family’s plastics company, PACUR….Curler created the company with funding from his and Jane’s father, Howard Curler. Howard Curler had been named CEO of the plastics giant Bemis Company in 1978, and for the first several years of PACUR’s existence, Bemis was the company’s only customer.
According to his campaign biography, Johnson worked as PACUR’s accountant and a machine operator. In the mid-1980s…. Johnson became its CEO.
Johnson was named CEO of a company his brother-in-law owned – and for whom the only customer was the company of which his father-in-law was the CEO.
I am wondering if Ron would have risen to CEO in a company where he wasn’t related to the owner or only customer.
In my nightly call to Ron Johnson (I also call all the other WI legislators), I asked him why he was protecting a man who rapes children and then I asked him if he had ever wondered where he might be if he had worked for anyone but his wife’s family. Did he really think he would have been a CEO or accomplished anything else without working at a family business and then using family money to run for office?
I’m just asking questions here.
If you have been wondering how absolutely completely stupid and otherwise unqualified white men fall up, wonder no longer.
How do you even know if you were raped? How can we ever answer such a difficult question? And have we forgotten that we are here merely to be livestock? (Well if we’re white.)
Medusa With the Head of Perseus, Luciano Garbati.
My friend’s stepmom, Betty, is 74 years old. She helped raise my friend and her brother and they adore her.
When I asked if she had children from her own body, she said yes, she had a daughter.
“I had her when I was 14,” she told me.
I raised my eyebrows.
“I was raped.”
“I had a boyfriend who was a few years older. He took me on the rides at the fair and I was dizzy and sick and he took advantage of me. When I figured out that I was pregnant, I told him, but he said I must have been with someone else. I didn’t know what to do.”
“But then his mama found out. She loved me. And she said, ‘That’s my grandbaby.'”
“And she helped me.”
Madge, an artist, is also 74.
She was raped when she was 21.
They found the raper (I KNOW, right?) and she testified at the trial.
She thinks they picked her to testify instead of one of his other victims because she was kind of plain and not flighty. They probably weren’t going to ask the woman wearing khakis and a t-shirt what she was wearing.
(Oh wait of course they would.)
(Below are images from the What Were You Wearing? exhibit, which shows the clothes rape survivors were wearing at the time of the crime.)
The defense asked her how she knew that the rapist actually penetrated her.
(WTF. Also, as if it would be OK if he had just held her to the ground, ripped her jeans off, and put his penis next to her vulva? That would be acceptable behavior?)
Madge has never married. She has never had a serious relationship.
“I think I am like an onion and the only layer I let people see is the one on the outside,” she said.
The raper was sentenced to one day to life.
Madge has never listed her phone number under her real name.
“I don’t know if he’s still in prison,” she said. “And I never want to answer the phone and hear his voice at the other end.”
And the word “rape” is not used in any of the news stories.
Although even in Arkansas, 15 is below the age of consent.
So it was rape.
By definition, this was rape.
Second Judicial Circuit Judge Scott Ellington gave Gipson a year of probation.
And he has ordered him to take parenting classes.
Parenting classes.
Why would a rapist be ordered to take parenting classes I really want to know the answer to this question.
I knew the Republican senators from Arkansas – Tom Cotton and John Boozman – hate women. Seems like all the Republican men do.
But wouldn’t you think that Sarah Huckabee Sanders – a woman – might have something to say about girl – A GIRL – being forced to give birth to her rapist’s baby and then TO LET HIM HAVE ACCESS TO THAT BABY?
Why is this man walking anywhere outside of a prison yard?
My sweet raised in a different time grandmother always referred to women by their husband’s name: “Mrs Don Schmitz ” instead of “Sally Schmitz.”
She didn’t stop there. She called entire families by the father’s name: “The Jake Jacobson’s sold their farm.” “The John Staab’s had us over for sheepshead.”
She was a product of her time and I guess so were the scientists who named the birds. But – did it ever occur to the bird namers that their names were inaccurate?
How do you look at a male Bluebird and a female Bluebird and decide that the name should be “Bluebird?”
When I got married, I changed my surname because I wasn’t philosophically opposed to the idea.
And then I learned more.
And I became extremely philosophically opposed to the idea.
Like – furiously philosophically opposed to the idea.
So I changed back to my maiden name. (With all the disclaimers that this, too, perpetuates The Patriarchy and “maiden” has implications that are just gross, etc, etc.)
I changed because I had grown to hate the practice, because I missed my old name, and because I knew it would anger Mr T’s parents, who by then had become my sworn enemies.
I knew they would see it as a rejection of them and indeed it was.
They continued to call me “Mrs Mr T.”
But my own mother, whom I love and who loves me in return, also continued to address envelopes and refer to me as “Mrs Mr T” and “Texan Mr T.”
She had a really hard time with reverting to addressing me by my maiden (ick ick ick) name.
How do you look straight at something and give it a name that doesn’t describe it?
How do you change the mindset that only men and males matter?
(My mom now refers to me as “Texan” and she has grown to hate the president. I guess I did inherit the ability to change from her.)
I found a stack of old letters, including one my friend and former housemate Bliss had written to me after she got married. I had sent her socks – SOCKS! – as a wedding present and she, ever gracious, thanked me for them.
They were handmade socks that I had found in Chile, where I was a Peace Corps volunteer, and were very cool socks, but still – I gave her socks as a wedding present.
But that’s not the story.
Before I joined the Peace Corps, I was dating Brad. He was super funny and smart and interesting and we had been friends for about a year before anything romantic happened. It had been clear to me that entire time that he wanted more than friendship, but I just didn’t feel that spark.
Translation: He was not hot. To me.
But after a bad breakup with Jerky McJerkFace (that is, JMcJF wanted to break up and he broke up by asking out my friend Darcy while I was away for a semester abroad – a semester abroad where I missed him so much that I came back after only a week, which was a big fat waste of plane fare and I destroyed my chance for a semester abroad, something I had always wanted to do I am an idiot) where almost the entire basis for the relationship was JMcJF’s hotness and his amazing kissing ability, I decided perhaps chemistry was not the most important thing.
(Darcy was a new friend and he gave her the impression that he and I had broken up before I left for Amsterdam. We had not. At least, I had not. She spent a year trying to repair our friendship and I finally relented and when we compared notes, we discovered JMcJF had used the same lines on us. He didn’t even bother to get original material. He has since faded into the ether, his career a big failure hahahahaha and Darcy and I have been solid for decades. We don’t talk about him anymore because he is boring.)
I chose friendship.
I decided that friendship was more important than chemistry.
Reader it turns out that friendship is not more important than chemistry.
It turns out that no matter how much you want it to be so, no matter how much you just like a person, kissing someone with whom you have no chemistry is just – boring.
It wasn’t just that it was boring.
It was also that bless his sweet heart he was a very bad kisser. Very bad. Very very bad.
But I never told my friends.
So when I wrote to Bliss – in a note that went with her wedding socks – that I was thinking of breaking up with Brad, she wrote back to say I was nuts. She reminded me how much I liked him. How much I liked his family.
And I remembered, reading her words to me, 30 years later, that I had never admitted to my friends that the sex was so, so bad.
I had focused only on the positive.
I didn’t tell the truth.
I didn’t tell the truth to the friends I knew best – the ones who knew me best – and who would give me the advice I needed to hear.
Because I know if I had breathed one word to her about the s-e-x, Bliss would have said, “What? NO! You cannot stay with someone where you don’t like the sex! It will not get better! It will not!
If I had breathed one word to any of my friends, they would have said the same thing.
Which is why I didn’t breathe a word.
Because I knew but I didn’t want to know.
Once you know – once you admit the truth, you have to do something.
I broke up with him.
By letter.
From South America.
Well I wasn’t going to call him and that was my other communication option.
I’m glad I broke up with him but sorry I ever got romantically involved with him because I lost him as a friend.
I googlestalk him occasionally. I think he’s happy. I hope he is. He’s married to a woman who looks super interesting and accomplished. Looks like they have a nice daughter. He is successful in his chosen profession. It worked out for him and I am glad.
And I sent that letter back to Bliss with notes and an apology for giving her socks as her wedding present.
I got a letter back from her today where she told me that her husband still has the socks and he still wears them.
This image has nothing to do with this post, but I am too lazy to look for images of shame and I love this poem.
Ten years ago, my friend Claudia, who lived in Texas, posted on facebook that she was selling a lot of her workout wear.
She was an exercise instructor – I met her at a Jazzercise class and we became fast friends – and I assumed she was just purging inventory.
I bought some of it, but there was a tiny judgy part of me that thought, “I would just give away my extras to my friends.”
When I was in high school, my friend Ramona never invited me to her house. She would come to my house, though, and we would go to movies together and we were in the CYO together and we sat next to each other on the bus and she was always happy to hang out.
(Although to my eternal shame, I called her one time to go to the movies and she couldn’t and my response was, “But I’ve already asked everyone else!” WHO SAYS THAT TO A DEAR FRIEND WHAT WAS I THINKING?)
(Like – it’s been 45 years and I still remember this and I still cringe in horror that I said something so thoughtless and cruel to someone I loved.)
Anyhow. She never invited me to her house. I don’t think I was ever once in her house.
When Mr T and I first moved to our house in Wisconsin, we noticed a middle-aged guy walking his dogs a lot, even in the middle of the day. The guy had an odd gait – leaning forward, with one stiff leg, hesitating with each step.
“Drunk,” Mr T and I said, rolling our eyes at each other. “Doesn’t have a job and lives in his mother’s basement.”
We called him The Weird Drunk Guy.
Seven years ago, I was in Austin and had lunch with Claudia.
She told me she was preparing to leave her husband, a tech executive who, it turns out, had been having hookups their entire marriage.
What’s worse, they were gay hookups.
It’s not bad that he was gay – it’s bad that he knew he was gay but had married her anyway as a beard. It’s one thing to make a deal with someone to be your beard, but to trick someone into thinking you love her and want to be with her? That’s platinum-level assholery there.
He didn’t share his income. He paid for the house, but anything else she needed – clothes, car, doctor, she had to pay for. From her earnings as an exercise instructor.
He had also taken out credit card applications in her name and run the cards to the limit on his auto-racing hobby.
She had no money.
When we were 32, Ramona’s mother took her own life.
Ramona is the one who found her.
That’s when Ramona told me that her parents were alcoholics and she was expected to clean the house every day after school and make supper.
She had never breathed a word of this when we were in high school and I never thought to ask.
A few years after we moved into our house, I was talking to one of my neighbors with dogs. I mentioned The Weird Drunk Guy and the neighbor said, “Oh you mean Doug? He has MS. He lives on disability. He walks as much as possible to slow the progression of his disease.”
When my neighbor told me what was really going on with Doug, I felt a flush rise in my face and I wanted to sink into the ground with shame.
I am a judgey, judgey person. I criticize people in my head all the time. I roll my eyes at things I think are dumb.
But damn almost every time I do that, I get more information and discover IATA.
I’m trying to be better. I am.
(Although I still totally judge trump voters.)
(I mean.)
(Although I am happy to forgive if they see the error of their ways and join The Revolution.)
My friend Lisa – she of the fascinating blog that mixes fashion and politics and philosophy – and I have been trying to figure out how Stephen Miller makes himself the hero of his own story.
What does he tell himself at night when he’s waiting to fall asleep and he’s going over his day in his mind? “I have rid the country of Dangerous People, including the Paleta Guy in California! American citizens can sleep better tonight!”
How does he twist the truth – the evil – of his actions to justify them?
How does he make evil beautiful?
The professor for one of my Shakespeare classes had us cast the plays with Hollywood actors. When we were casting “Othello,” we wanted to put someone like Danny DeVito, who had been playing villains, in the role of Iago.
My professor said no, it needed to be someone like Robert Redford.
“Evil is beautiful,” he said. “If it were ugly, it would be harder for it to seduce you.”
(A question I wish we had discussed as well is, “How did Iago make himself the hero in this story? Did he really believe Desdemona was cheating on Othello?”)
A friend said, “The devil comes to you as everything you ever thought you wanted.”
Evil doesn’t look like evil.
If evil looked like evil, most of us would reject it.
A friend’s parents discowned her.
Her son is gay. He does drag.
The son had not come out to his grandparents.
My friend – who knew what her parents are like – tried to keep the information about her son off facebook, but other people tagged her in some posts about the son’s drag show and her parents saw the posts.
They sent her a facebook message telling her that they would, in the future, be choosing not to put themselves in the same space as my friend and her son.
What story do you tell yourself to make yourself the hero for disowning your child and your grandchild?
What story do you tell yourself to make disowning your child and your grandchild the beautiful thing, not the evil thing?
In what world is your gay, drag-star grandchild so evil that you must reject him?
Let me rephrase that: In what world is your gay, drag-star grandchild more evil than a convicted rapist, felon, adulterous man who’s not even kin?
Because the added context that probably helps explain this story is that the parents are trumpers. (My friend is not.) That’s not to say that only trumpers reject gay grandchildren, but if you make a Venn diagram of “People who reject gay grandchildren who perform in drag” and “trumpers,” I bet you will have almost a perfect circle.
We live in a world where gay grandchildren are evil but masked men grabbing people off the streets and sending them to concentration camps is not evil.
Where cutting medical care for poor people is not evil.
Where forcing the family watch their pregnant, brain-dead daughter’s body exist on artificial life support until physicians finally have to cut the premature baby out of the the daughter’s decomposing body is not evil.
Where trying to rob people of their citizenship is not evil.
Where cutting funding for cancer research is not evil.
Where the heroes are the people who turn their backs on their children and grandchildren while embracing a dictator.
I have no answers except that we need to start calling evil by its name.
A report on Fox News this week declares, “According to the poll, 43% of White men, spanning all age groups, say they are self-censoring their speech at work, and an additional 25 million men claim they’ve not been given jobs or promotions because of being White men.” A few things to note off the bat: the Fox piece links to a New York Post piece which links to a YouTube video for a podcast series titled “White Men Can’t Work,” that says it’s about about “the huge mental health toll on men – who are anxious about doing or saying the wrong thing at work. Self-censorship has become the norm.”
Go read the whole thing. While I wait, I will try to think of anything – anything at all – to add to her wonderful, insightful piece.
Like – in my own experience and that of my women friends – how we, too, self-censor at work.
We self-censored by not saying, “But that was my idea!” when a man was praised for suggesting something.
We self-censored when a client – at a lunch he proposed – put Kenny G on in his car (client was driving) and asked 38-year-old you how was it that you weren’t married yet?
We self-censored when the white male VP sighed and said that it was so hard it was for white men when he was looking for his first job in the late ’70s.
We self-censored when the partner made crude sexual jokes and then laughed and said, “Remember I’m the one who does your performance evaluation.” (We got a new job – five states away.)
We didn’t self-censor when we had a temp job for $15/hour (in 1993, when damn you could pay your Austin, Texas, rent with $15/hour) and the boss asked us on a date. We told the boss we didn’t think it was a good idea to date the boss and the next day, the temp agency called and said the client had cancelled the contract.
We didn’t self-censor enough with the boss who told us we used “too many big words that make people feel stupid.” That was the one where when the boss had to lay off one person on the team of ten, he picked you.
We didn’t self-censor enough with the bosses who told us we were too direct, too intimidating, too – whatever.
Whether we self-censored or not, it never worked to our benefit.
But I have told these stories before. I want to hear yours. Tell me.
American history is all about colonization and imperialism, but this was extra
This bridge crosses the Panama canal and connects North America to South America. Because of the way Panama twists, we would see the sun rising over the Pacific on our way to school every morning. Photo by Redney on Pexels.com
When I was in high school, I lived in the Panama Canal Zone.
Let me rephrase that.
When I was in high school, I lived in one of the last outposts of American colonialism and imperialism and state-sponsored segregation and racism.
I didn’t realize it at the time. I was a teenager; I lived on a US military base, which was integrated – the US military is one of the most integrated parts of US society; and at my Panama Canal Company high school, they weren’t exactly teaching us that we lived in a racist, segregated colonial outpost.
But I was there. And I am kind of horrified that I never noticed the things that Michael Donoghue, a Marquette history professor, wrote about in his book Borderland on the Isthmus.
He notes the segregation – literal segregation – in the Zone. As in white Zonians lived one place, Black Zonians another. The Company dictated where its employees lived – it was a company town. That is, people worked for the Company, which also ran the housing, the police force, the train, the movie theatre, the stores, and pretty much everything else in the Zone.
After the canal was built, the Canal Zone became a government-run “company town” with housing, schools and businesses exclusively for American citizens. The Canal Zone was racially segregated until 1954, with Black and white workers given separate “gold” and “silver” jobs. Their families attended segregated schools and used separate bathrooms and recreation facilities.
“The Canal Zone was not a normal place,” says Maurer. “It was essentially run like a giant military base, but also like a socialist enterprise. Everything was operated by the U.S. government, even franchises like McDonald’s.”
He explains that the Zone was also basically a sundown town. That Panamanians weren’t allowed to enter the Canal Zone unless they worked there. That Panamanians couldn’t even have professional jobs in the Zone until the early 60s, which was when one of my high-school friend’s father was hired as the first Panamanian police officer in the Zone.
(And yes it is very strange to read a book and see a name you recognize. I felt the same way in a Latin American history class in college where we read Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express and I saw the name of the father of my ninth grade best friend. Mr Dachi was the US Embassy official who had helped Theroux in Panama.)
What I do remember – and what my friend Jane, who was my biology lab partner, also remembers – is the entitlement and bitterness that the Zonians had – and still have! – over the Canal Zone treaty, which was signed while we were in high school.
Let me back up.
The US helped Panama engineer a coup to reach independence from Colombia. Then the US took over building the canal from the French. When the canal was done, the US maintained a colony in the Canal Zone, a strip of land bordering the canal, with white Americans living in a few distinct housing areas and the Black descendants of the West Indians who built the canal living in others.
The US also established military bases in the Zone. I lived on one of the bases, which had its own elementary school, but for middle school and high school, all the military kids and the Zonians went to the Company schools. Rich Panamanians and embassy people also sent their kids to my high school (they had to pay tuition).
My high school was full of cliques, but I thought it was just theatre kids vs athletes with some division as well between Zone and military, but it turns out that even with the Zonians, there were differences. The Zonians who had been there for three generations considering themselves very different from (superior to) the rest of us, including teachers in Zone schools and other newcomers.
Jane (whose parents were teachers in the Zone schools) and I were comparing notes on what we have learned as adults that makes us look back at our time in the Canal Zone (she now lives in Canada) and go WHAT THE HELL?
She recommended a book to me – Canal Zone Daughter, a memoir written by a woman whose family moved to the Zone in the late 1950s, when the author was a little girl.
The book is described thusly:
In Canal Zone Daughter, [the author] chronicles her unique childhood culminating to the crushing loss when former President Jimmy Carter signs treaties that effectively eliminates her – and fellow U.S. citizens’ – former home.
That was my first clue that this woman did not look back on her childhood with any insight. Yes, of course it’s a loss for your childhood home to change. But that happens to all of us everywhere. Nothing stays the same. We do experience things one way, but as we age and gain experience and (I hope) wisdom, we can review our past critically. Was it really as rosy as we remember?
The author writes about how the Black people lived in another neighborhood. About her family’s maid – that she and her siblings started to boss their live-in maid around and rather than tell them not to do that, the mom just fired the maid instead. About going to a Panama City casino when she was in high school. About American Canal Zone workers protesting with a sickout, comparing their efforts to the Alamo. About how the US “gave” the canal to Panama instead of returning it.
And she just leaves it all there.
I have to admit it has taken me more time than it should have to realize having space for a live-in maid in base housing was kind of weird. But I went to that same casino when I was in high school and even then, I was thinking, THIS IS BIZARRE DO HIGH SCHOOL KIDS GO TO CASINOS IN THE STATES?
As far as returning the canal to Panama – I didn’t care so much about that. It was just another place where I lived for a while. I wasn’t emotionally attached – I had never considered Panama to be my home.
But when I learned more about what happened in the Zone and with the treaties, I realized returning the canal was definitely the right thing to do. In the documentary Carterland, they explain that Panamanian President Omar Torrijos was asking the US if it really wanted to have to defend the both sides of the 51-miles-long border of the Zone from terrorism. As in, how many soldiers was the US prepared to send to Panama to stand guard? And in his book, Dr Donoghue explains that the US had been trying to get rid of the canal since the 1960s.
“Economically, the Panama Canal was extremely important for the United States before World War II, but after that its economic importance declined rapidly,” says Maurer, author of The Big Ditch: How America Took, Built, Ran, and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal. “And by the time Jimmy Carter decided to take the political risk of giving it back, its economic importance to the United States was almost nothing.”
The author of the memoir does not look back with any criticism. She is angry and is still convinced something was stolen from her. At no point does she say, “When I was a kid, I thought it was normal for middle-class people to have a live-in maid but now I realize that is something that works only when there is a colonial system with huge wage disparities.” At no point does she say, “When I was a kid, I thought it was normal that all the white people lived in one place and the Black people in another, but now I realize that WOW that was Jim Crow segregation and it was wrong!”
Even in her amazon blurb, she writes “Charming, funny, and poignant, the author captures her remarkable American story in an exotic place and time.” Because imperialism and systemic racism is “exotic?”
Although many of the reviewers echo the author’s sentiments – that something was taken from them unfairly, other Zonians in the reviews know better. This reviewer mentions the slums (emphasis mine). I remember them. We saw them every morning from the bus on our way to school. I had never seen poverty like that before.
Missing is the dark side of Panama. A few steps from my house a chain link fence separated our military base from the Curundu river and a slum called Hollywood. Houses made from salvaged plywood and tin roofing stood on stilts to escape the frequent flooding. No electricity, running water or sanitation. It must have been difficult to stare through that fence at our houses with their soft lighting, glowing TVs, and bug lights in well tended gardens. We did not go to bed hungry, nor could we conceive what that was like. We Americans did not create Hollywood, but it was the other side of the coin from our beautiful life. It helps to remember both the good and the bad. Still I would recommend this book, so people will know how special our life was there and how rich it made us. We were a band of brothers and sisters, all in for every new experience, made wiser by the gain and loss of “home”, a happy few in paradise, naive to the pain around us, with eyes forever dissatisfied by ordinary stateside life that lacks the tropical light and shadow preserved in our memory.
Another former Zonian wrote this (emphasis mine):
Having lived in Panama for many years…. I was enchanted with this delightful adventure….Along with the laughter she provides, [she] also covers the sadness of the inevitable and eventual turn over of the Panama Canal and the zone to Panama. Despite the tremendous disappointment so many felt at what seemed a betrayal of their way of life (and at the time it was!), most came to realize the international implications of a remaining U.S. “colony” abroad.
I know there is so much I don’t know. And I know I still hold beliefs that need to change.
But I also know that I did not write an entire book about my childhood without ever once thinking critically about what I was writing. The author even has a PhD, so must know how to do research. Surely she could have learned a little more about the history of the canal and woven that information into her book?
I can absolutely see writing events as I remember them. Much of what she writes is fun and interesting and made me think “I remember that!” Of course you record your history as you remember it.
But – does she not remember the graffiti painted on the walls in Panama City? The strikes? The bomb threats? The slums? The fact that her dad probably worried about his employees getting thrown into a Panamanian jail? (My dad worried about his airmen carousing in town and getting into trouble – getting them out of jail was not easy.) Because I sure do. And I didn’t even spend my entire childhood there.
This image is from Puerto Rico, but the same sentiment was expressed in Panama: “Yanqui go home” and “Gringo go home.” Source
You write what you remember but then, you look back with a critical lens of, “Is there more to this story?”
I’m trying to figure out why I am so angry about this book. After all, it’s a tiny self-published memoir that almost nobody read.
But it makes me think of so much of what is happening today.
That plantation in Louisiana that burned to the ground and the subsequent lamenting from some white women who had such fond memories of getting married there.
The older white woman who told me on facebook, “I am not fond of his personality either but I love most every policy he and his marvelous cabinet have put into place or that he promised in his campaign. Enough said. I voted for Obama who reintroduced racism back into the country. Will never vote Democrat again.”
(Also WTF? “Reintroduced racism?” Because racism had been eradicated before Obama was elected?)
Another older white woman who wrote, “Try doing your own research. What about the watseful spending approved in the New Green Deal? What about the lies that #46 was in the ball? I am not a health care professional but I am a caregiver and work with dementia patients often. I could see the signs of dementia in 46 before the 2020 election. They used and abused that poor man. They lied to the American people and put our country in danger by having a man in Office who was not cognizant enough to do his job. They are death and darkness using the murder of unborn children to gain votes. They support homosexuality and use it to get votes when it is an abomination to God. Read your Bible and do some research using non main stream media.”
The people who shrug at American citizens with cancer – little children – being sent out of the country because their mothers are undocumented immigrants. At children being zip-tied in preparation for being deported. At masked unidentified men grabbing people off the streets and throwing them into unmarked vans. At the regime arresting judges it does not like. At a US senator (Hi Joanie Ernst!) smirking as she tells a constituent worried about Medicaid cuts that “we are all going to die.”
All of the people with privilege who refuse to see that privilege.
All the people who refuse to examine their beliefs in the face of new evidence. They think they are safe, so why do they care?
Jane points out, “There’s a lot of power in being able to say to people ‘I used to believe x, and then I learned z, so now I think differently.'”
But that only works if people are open to new information.
Texan in Exile 