FINGER PRINTS

I just watched a PBS special on Maya Angelou; can’t begin to collect my thoughts and feelings: too much, way-too much. Near the end when people who were near and dear to her were framing their last comments a woman mused, how many of us are covered with her finger prints? It’s a wonderful metaphor; finger prints, she touched us. You couldn’t be around her and not be touched. She wrote a poem for Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993. Before that I’d never heard of her but sat silent, stilled by the simple, uncluttered elegance of what she had to say. She was preaching to the choir and I didn’t even know I could sing. I am familiar with some of her poetry but had never read her autobiography, ’I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.’ I knew she was a national treasure but the tv special took me unawares. 

In the 1960’s, Civil Rights, she brought passion and an uncompromising demand for racial justice. She had a sense for powerful language and razor sharp timing. Her publisher at Random House was a white man of course; after reading her hand written draft of Caged Bird, he was amazed by her command of language and story telling craft. But nothing touched him more deeply than feelings of shame for his whiteness (his words) that he had taken for granted all of his life. In that moment, when I saw his lips move and heard his words I was validated. He mirrored feelings that I had carried for decades. When I tried to express them to my peers they dismissed my apprehension. “You’re over reacting.” But I wasn’t over reacting. I’m old now and there’s no alternative that I haven’t explored. Denial is the preferred drug for a guilty conscience and nobody wants to face that disgrace in the mirror. It doesn’t matter if you are the Devil’s disciple or an unwitting accomplice, the racism of white supremacy is alive and well, and it shames me. 

There are other finger prints on my character and my conscience, evidence of up lifting. I could speculate as to who put them there but after all this time that’s all it would be, speculation. But someone left me predisposed to challenge the things I believe with even more vigor than the things I reject. Where is the flaw; where is the lie in my own bias, the one that makes me feel so secure? Human nature - Seek Pleasure & Avoid Pain - is too ingrained to resist; all we can do is to know it’s there, like bad road, and proceed with caution. More so than physical pain, emotional/psychological pain can be unbearable. Without a clear-eyed moral compass, people behave like water; we take the easiest (painless) path and it’s down hill. I’m no better, no smarter; I just have different kinds of experience pushing my buttons. She said, “We are only as blind as we want to be.” I’m just a little white boy who did the math, who understands that privilege and oppression are opposite sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. When you have lived with privilege and equality is thrust upon you, it feels like punishment. Maya Angelou was a grand lady. I would like to think her finger prints are on me.