I’m talking about a place that is a little village

perched under the number 7 train in Queens

between Junction Boulevard and 111th St.

I’m talking about the Corona Ice King

Spaghetti Park and P.S. 19.

The Corona F. Scott Fitzgerald

called the valley of ashes

as the Great Gatsby drove past it

on his night of carousal, but what me

and my own know as home.

And we didn’t know about any valley of ashes

because by then it had been topped off by our houses.

The kind made from brick this tan color

no self-respecting brick would be at all.

That’s Corona.

I’m talking about Flushing Meadows Park

home of World’s Fair relics

where it felt as if some ancient tribe

of white people had lived there long ago.

It was our own Stonehenge

our own Easter Island sculptures

made from a time when New York City

and all the country

was imagining the world’s future.

Back when the future

still seemed exciting and glossy,

like some kind of old stainless steel

science fiction movie

not now when the future seems

like the inside of  a dark coat sleeve.

I’m talking about Corona

under the shadow of Shea Stadium

where brown men became famous

and moved to Long Island

where our brothers played baseball

in the tar school yards on the weekends.

Back then

our brothers’ futures

were so open and they were so close

they all dreamed the same dream together

That with the crack of a bat

and the pull of their skinny brown legs

they could run away from the smell of garbage

the fear on the streets

the boys beating them up

when they came out of the masjids

in the evening.

They could hit that bat and it would land them

all the way into the safety of Shea Stadium

and then passed that into the island

that was long and rich

where all the baseball stars lived.

the source of their existence, my mother filled her silver cart

and moved in line to make her purchase.

The cashier turned a sharp glance at the small brown woman

with the pierced nose and covered head. She didn’t fit

into this, an American supermarket.

“And what?” asked the cashier, “Are you willing to pay for this?”

She held the head of lettuce in the air.  It reflected

off her rhinestone glasses and the hairspray in her hair.

“But this,” said my mother, “Is America. I thought there was no barter here.”

“Hmmmph,” said the cashier, “There’s give and take all over the world.

What made you think it would be different here?”

She shook her head and her plastic hair.

“But I have money.”  My mother tried to act like she didn’t care.

Her English broke all over her and fell apart in the air.

But the cashier cackled, “No, no, no, my dear, what I want is here.”

And she jabbed a nail, silver-painted and crooked at my young mother’s stomach

which I had just begun to share.

“That is the price you’ll have to pay, my dear, for this fresh lettuce

each egg that erupts into a new-blown head will be the property

of this here supermarket, country and nation.

“And don’t even think of running because we’ve got the goods on you.

Along with every other immigrant, we’ve got your passport

your foreign passport right here.”

She made to reach into her too tight jeans, but my mother, she ran out of there.

The shopping girl openly laughed behind her, and the lines and lines

of customers just stood there with their stupid grins.

My mother ran, the door opened by itself.

My mother ran, but she still found herself

in a foreign land, far away from home.

Note: When Rapunzel’s mother was pregnant, she developed a craving for vegetables from the

witch’s garden. When her father tried to steal the vegetables, he was caught and so terrified, he agreed to give up his wife’s firstborn child.

Nothing in P.S. 19 was ever heated enough. The auditorium, the cafeteria, the large windows with their pull-down plastic vinyl drapes rattled in another winter storm.

Ms. Cooperman, our teacher, frowned as she saw us shiver. “Bring your coats,” she said. “We’re having an assembly.”

It had snowed heavily the day before, and not many students or teachers had come to school. It would be another day spent smelling each other’s winter coats and feeling trapped, watching The Red Balloon, a silent film which seemed to be the only film the school owned.

But we did as Ms. Cooperman said because we adored her. It was clear she cared for all of us, even those who spilled over, out of our seats and into the hallways. We used to ask Ms. Cooperman why she had never gotten married. She always laughed and said, “I’m not married because I don’t want to be.”

On this snowy day, the entire fifth grade piled into the auditorium. I was lucky to get a wooden seat without gum glued to the bottom. Mr. Nichols, the vice principal stood in front of the stage. He was skinny, pale, fidgety and always dressed in a tie and jacket.

“All right boys and girls. Today we’re going to show a movie about a very important topic. I want everyone to pay attention.” We didn’t listen to him, of course. The teachers tried to shush us as he continued, “This is a movie about AIDS.”

Everyone got quiet. We’d been hearing about this new illness in whispers. We were children living in the middle of an epidemic, but no one ever told us anything. We were only taught to be afraid. Someone turned off the lights, and I had an apprehension this would be nothing like the Red Balloon.

In the opening scene, there were three men in hospital beds, thin as skeletons. They were all White with blue eyes, some with blonde or brown moustaches. Their skeletal faces reached up and out towards us.

The movie followed their lives as they became sicker and thinner, as they struggled to do everyday tasks, to drink a glass of water, their Adam’s apples bumping up against the skin. Their cheeks grew more sunken and their eyes shone out with light, the light of death.

In-between the time in the hospital, there were pictures and home movies of them from when they were healthy. They were some of the most handsome men we’d ever seen. Their hair was perfectly groomed. Their skin was soft, their smiles open. These men were dying.

By the end of the movie, we were glued to our seats, paralyzed. In what we thought was the last scene, there was a movie still of one of the men. Underneath his name was written: Died, December 13, 1983. He was frozen in his hospital bed, the man who had been laughing with his friends just a few minutes before. We were stunned, and then there were girls crying in the audience.

We thought the movie was over, so we started clapping. Something we had stopped doing for The Red Balloon. But no, another picture came of a man from the movie. This man had died too, only a few months later. And then the other, and the others. After each picture, after each man died, we clapped, wanting the movie to be over, wanting to do something with our fidgety hands.

After the lights came on, Ms. Cooperman was furious. She took us back to the room and held us during lunch. We tried to explain to her that we thought the movie was over.

“Again and again? You’re smarter than that.” She looked like she was going to scream or cry. Two things we never imagined her doing.

How could we explain to her we were clapping because we were terrified? We had never seen people dying this way. We were only ten years old and still didn’t understand what this illness was and what we knew was happening all around us. We were never told that by clapping we had accidentally participated in the gay backlash that darkened and still darkens the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We were only told the entire fifth grade would have detention.

I didn’t know then how inappropriate it was to show us such a film without explanation or education. I didn’t know how poor our neighborhood was, that there was an assumption that “people like us” even when we were ten years old were thought to be sexually active. I didn’t know how many queer educators there were in our school and what our applause had meant to them during this dark time.

I didn’t know the face of HIV would change and come to resemble our faces, the faces in our fifth grade audience. I didn’t know I would become an educator myself in the NYC public school system and would understand first hand the difficult choices educators make every day. I didn’t know the trajectory of my life would bring me into a queer, South Asian community where we would struggle decades later as if it was 1984 all over again to raise awareness about queer culture, the importance of sex education and sponsored healthcare for those who were HIV positive.

In my late twenties, I joined SLAAAP!! (Sexually Liberated Asian Artist Activist People!!), a collective of queer artists and activists who were interested in creating sexy and humorous educational materials and media projects which discussed homophobia and HIV/AIDS awareness in Asian American communities. SLAAAP!! was sponsored by APICHA (Asian and Pacific Islander Coalition on HIV/AIDS) and collaborated with various community organizations, including The Audre Lorde Project.

In SLAAAP!! postcards and posters, we wanted to take a different stance from the fear-based HIV/AIDS imagery we had seen and experienced. Our materials presented life-affirming images and themes such as “Beyond Ignorance There Is Pleasure. . .” and “Someone You Love Is Queer. Recognize The Diversity Within Your Family.” In 2001, large-scale bus posters were displayed in bus shelters in Asian American neighborhoods in Queens, including areas close to PS 19. An excellent archive of these posters can be found on artist Chitra Ganesh’s website. Feel free to share them with others.

As another winter comes to New York City, the chill in the air reminds me of the silence, fear and ignorance which fueled those early days of the AIDS epidemic. It reminds me of the work necessary to achieve the World AIDS Campaign’s goal “Getting to Zero.”  No more new HIV infections, no more discrimination for those who are HIV+ and no more AIDS related deaths. With persistence, with accurate information and with life-affirming actions, this is possible.

Over the last twenty years, Amita had learned her father had also sexually assaulted at least seven other women and young girls in her family and community – truths she came to know from the direct disclosures of these other survivors. Amita shared her own story of living through both her father’s violence and the failure of the criminal legal system to hold him accountable, as well as her healing journey, with the world through Secret Survivors, a theater project-turned-documentary she conceived for Ping Chong & Co., a New York City-based performance group.

When Amita discovered the New World’s Fair was showcasing her father as a spiritual leader, she was horrified and outraged. Most of all, she worried her father would use this new platform to shield himself from accountability for all of the violence he had committed, or worse, to gain access to new victims. To prevent her father from continuing to hurt others, Amita reached out to the organizers of the festival and her community of friends, comrades and chosen family in New York City, where she had been an organizer for 13 years.

It was important for Amita and many of us in her community that Vaid not be placed in a position of spiritual leadership. We know from highly publicized cases, such as those involving the Catholic Church that rape within a holy area is considered by many believers to be impossible. This belief gives perpetrators carte blanche and further silences survivors. In fact, the Catholic Church is one the most active lobbyists to curb the statute of limitations, making it impossible for adult survivors of Child Sexual Abuse to prosecute perpetrators who hurt them in their childhoods.

At the same time, there is evidence that those who commit rape without getting caught will go on to sexually assault multiple victims. In a 2002 study Repeat Rape and Multiple Offending Among Undetected Rapists,researchers Lisak and Miller found undetected rapists averaged close to six victims each, and were likelier to commit multiple acts of other forms of violence as well. Child Sexual Abuse has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. According to the US Centers for Disease Control, one out of every four girls and one out of every six boys will be sexually abused by the age of eighteen. If one adds to this the statistic that between 64% and 96% of all rapes are never reported to criminal justice authorities, the numbers skyrocket.

For The Feminist Wire, in follow-up to our recent forum on violence, I wanted to document the events that unfolded after Amita reached out to the New World’s Fair and to her community of supporters. The actions of the New World’s Fair were blatant reminders of how individuals in positions of power uphold the silence that makes Child Sexual Abuse the epidemic it is. At the same time, the support of Amita’s community and the Queens Museum of Art was a testament to how structures of violence can be challenged and will one day, with effort, be dismantled.

BR: How did you find out Vaid was presenting at the New World’s Fair? Could you describe your initial feelings?

AS: This may sound strange, but I periodically “Google” my father to stay abreast of his whereabouts and activities; like most survivors of sexual assault in the US, I have to live with the knowledge that the person who harmed me so deeply (and in my case, repeatedly) is roaming free in the world. For my own safety and the safety of my family, who live in the same state as my father, I keep tabs on him at least once a year (and lately, because of the public nature of Secret Survivors, at least a few times a year).

Not much has come of those Google searches in the past, but on the Sunday before the New World’s Fair, I found him listed, with a bio and photo, on the Fair’s website as a keynote speaker for their event on “human evolution.” It was the first time I learned my father has recently published a series of books online focused on new age “wisdom,” including titles such as “The Radiant Words of Love and Wisdom,” and “The Evolutionary Plan.”

So many emotions ran through me in that moment, including shock and rage at my father’s audacity to present himself to the world as a spiritual healer and leader, even after all the violence he has so unapologetically committed, and disbelief that he has managed to connect with people who support him, even after all of the publicity Secret Survivors has received in the past three years.

I decided to give the organizers of the New World’s Fair the benefit of the doubt, understanding it was unlikely they knew anything about my father’s history of violence, and emailed them right away to let them know this history, requesting to have my father removed from the speakers lineup, have the reason for his removal publicized and have him replaced with a speaker working to end child sexual assault. I sent the following email:

Dear Kevin and Renee:

I am writing to you with shock and concern about the choice you have made to invite Vashisht to be a guest speaker for next weekend’s 2012 New World Fair. I am the eldest child of Vashisht Vaid, and need to inform you that you have been duped by his self-constructed illusion of his “spiritual practice” and of his existence as a person devoted to wellness and justice in any way, shape or form.

I prosecuted my father in 1991, when I was 13 years old, for raping me repeatedly from the ages of 4 to 12. During these years, he also forced me to consume pornography, and physically and emotionally abused and controlled me. He was also sexually, verbally, physically and emotionally abusive to my mother.

Due to prosecutors threatening to also prosecute my mother (who did not sexually abuse me), I was too frightened to move forward with my testimony, and never served as a witness against my father in court. He received five years probation, but no jail time. My mother finally found the courage to divorce him, facing shame and exile imposed on her by my fathers’ friends and “cultural colleagues” in our small South Asian community in New Jersey about a year later, and within months he went on to marry a woman he had known for about three weeks, and had two more children with her. . .

He began his predatory and violent raping of little girls in our family years ago when, as a teenager and young man, he began raping female members of my family. Two of my relatives disclosed their survivorship to me when I was in high school. He also sexually assaulted other women and young girls in my community including one of my childhood friends.

I have shared my story very publicly in a project called Secret Survivors and on my own website and am prepared to take public action to let every supporter of the New World Fair know you have invited a man who rapes his own daughters, nieces, wives and other young women and girls in his community to speak at a fair that is supposedly about wellness and justice. I ask that you recant your invitation to him, and instead issue a statement from me about my father’s violence, so that members in your community, which I assume he is active in, can understand they should protect their children from him and hold him accountable for his violence. …

I attempted to prosecute my father with the whole truth when I was 16 years old, a year after I started therapy and felt safe enough to tell my story, only to learn I could not, due to double jeopardy. I would like nothing more than to see my father unable to ever harm anyone again, so I must resort to reaching out to you to let you know the truth…I await your reply eagerly, and hope you will take action to ensure this man is prevented from doing further harm and is exposed for the violent and unrepentant rapist of children and women he has been for over 40 years.

Sincerely,

Amita Swadhin

BR: After you sent your initial email to Renee and Kevin, what was their response?

AS: Kevin, one of the organizers of the New World’s Fair, was the first to respond to my email. To my surprise, he emphasized my father was doing the New World’s Fair a favor my sharing his quote-unquote esoteric knowledge with them. He also dismissed my concerns as private quote-unquote family issues, and let me know that at the last minute, my father was unable to attend the event anyway (for unstated reasons).  Finally, he emphasized my concerns were a distraction from the main focus of the event – to uplift and enlighten society through culture and community.

BR: I remember when he wrote you had “nothing to be frustrated about” because Vaid was no longer speaking at the event and one of his follow up emails where he asked you not to “threaten our children’s futures” by pursuing the matter. The matter being warning others of a child rapist in their midst!

AS: I should note Kevin is the publisher and graphic designer of my father’s books, and stands to profit off the sale of these books. Even so, I was pretty shocked by Kevin’s blatant dismissal of my email (and my survivorship), and it was clear to me the New World’s Fair would not be informing their audience as to why my father was removed from the list of speakers. I responded with the following message:

Dear Kevin,

I am once again shocked at the carelessness with which you dismiss my truth and the truths of all the women and children that my father has raped, sexually assaulted, psychologically abused and otherwise harmed. Vashisht has a criminal record, after all – an indictment by his own admission of sexually assaulting me when I was a child (which resulted in his probation time). In a time in which we should all be learning from the mistakes of the Penn State administration, who so egregiously colluded with Sandusky and his repeated sexual assault of young boys, it is disappointing to see such patterns continue, and particularly disturbing to see them continue under the guise of “evolution” and in the name of a better world.

To dismiss repeated acts of child sexual assault and intimate partner violence perpetrated by my father (and too many like him) as “family issues” is certainly to collude with the silence, shaming and discrediting of victims that allows this endemic violence to persist. You should know, in case you do not already, that at least 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 6 boys are sexually abused by the age of 18 (this is a US Centers for Disease Control statistic). My vision for an evolved world certainly requires people who rape children to be held accountable for their actions. Does yours?

I remain disappointed you are framing my father’s removal from the speaker’s list for this event as completely disconnected from the violence he has committed, and that you are refusing to publicize this history of violence. This is a missed opportunity to both let people who have learned about Vashisht through your publicizing his bio (and his books) know that he is a danger to children and women, and to call upon all people invested in a better world to work towards ending the epidemic of child sexual abuse.”

I reached out to my colleagues at the Queens Museum of Art. They backed my request to have my father removed from the speakers’ lineup (given the New World’s Fair was taking place just in front of the museum). This led Renee, who had co-organized the New World’s Fair with Kevin, to reach out to me via email as well. She informed me she and Kevin had explained the situation to my father, and that he would not be attending the event. She also emphasized her belief that addressing my requests for the audience to be informed about why my father was removed from the event, or to add a speaker focused on child sexual assault prevention would detract from the event’s platform, focused on quote-unquote health revolution and evolution.

The New World’s Fair had for months been promoting my father (through their website) as a spiritual leader with ‘esoteric’ knowledge. Moreover, Kevin and Renee refused to tell me exactly what they had said to my father, despite my requesting, for safety purposes, to know whether they had mentioned my requests to him. I feared retaliation by my father, and also feared for the safety of anyone within the New World’s Fair community who desires to know my father but does not know his history of violence. I knew something had to be done to bring all of this to light publicly.

BR: I remember being shocked, but also thinking: Big Mistake, Kevin, big mistake. He didn’t know you are a vocal activist in the growing movement to end Child Sexual Abuse and he didn’t realize the Queens Museum is a major ally, a place I consider one of the birthplaces of South Asian arts and activism. After Kevin’s email, your supporters tried to figure out what the next best step could be: a quiet sit in, flyers, writing informational documents which would highlight warning signs that a child is in danger. . . Many of us had concerns about how we would be received walking into a community of Vaid supporters. Real fears came up about being outnumbered, of the police being called. What did you think of the process and the outcome?

AS: First and foremost, it has meant so much to me to have such a supportive community of friends and comrades to call upon in the first place. I feel incredibly privileged, knowing far too many survivors feel they have to live with the impacts of child sexual assault in complete isolation, due to the shame and stigma survivors still face, even in 2012.  Many survivors I know still have to interact with the people who sexually assaulted them, mainly at family and/or community events.  So first of all, I felt and still feel so blessed to have a strong and widespread community of support.

That said, I found out about the New World’s Fair after I had moved away from New York City (for the first time in my adult life). I was living so far away from my friends and family, and it was hard to process everything around the event over email, phone and Skype with friends.

Seeing my friends and comrades begin to step forward even enough to discuss the potential of taking action lifted my spirits and my courage immensely. It was a message that, at the end of the day, I have support to hold my father accountable. It was a moment to reflect on how much work I have done over the past 20 years to share more and more publicly in attempts to hold my father accountable, and how successful I have been in building solidarity and friendship with people who are able to support these efforts.

I also anticipated that, without me on the ground in New York City, it would be challenging for my friends and comrades to lead any meaningful in-person action at the New World’s Fair once my father was removed from the speaker’s lineup. So many of us are trauma survivors, including survivors of child sexual assault – I am acutely conscious of how triggering my requests for support can be (having been on the other side of that feeling many times), and I knew that many people would not feel safe in a potentially confrontational environment.

Moreover, throughout this entire ordeal, I have maintained compassion for Kevin, Renee and other people who have begun to give my father a platform as a spiritual leader. I imagine that, after months of organizing the New World’s Fair, it was shocking to receive my email and learn of my story, especially for Kevin, who has worked closely with my father to create his books. My aim throughout this effort, beyond removing my father from the speaker’s list, was to let people who had learned of him only in a positive light know the larger truth of his actions over the past 40 years, in an effort to prevent him from gaining enough trust with a new community to allow him to rape or otherwise abuse new victims.

In the end, I am glad an online flyer was created publicizing the statistics of child sexual assault in the US, naming my father as someone who has committed repeated acts of rape and other forms of violence, and demanding the New World’s Fair publicly address why my father was removed from the event. It was so heartening to see this flyer be posted and reposted throughout Facebook, tumblr, and beyond. I had no idea it would go “viral” to that extent, but given the number of survivors of child sexual assault in the world, I was not surprised.

AS: I hope other survivors of Child Sexual Assault are encouraged to speak up and speak out after seeing my example. Yet I am also conscious it’s taken me 20 years (the past three of which have been spent publicly performing my survivorship) to gain the personal power, courage, and network of support to feel safe taking this kind of public step. And even now, I struggle with very real anxiety about retaliation from my father against me or other members of my family.

We live in a culture that is quick to blame survivors for speaking out and slow to hold people accountable for acts of interpersonal sexual violence. When the online Facebook flyer began to go viral and was posted multiple times on the New World’s Fair event page, event organizers took the page down rather than address the calls to publicly discuss why my father was removed from the speaker’s lineup. Given the co-organizer Kevin is also one of the leaders behind The Global Movement (a nonprofit growing out of a slice of the Occupy Wall Street movement, that has produced a number of videos documenting the movement), I have been reflecting on the parallels and connections between his attempts to silence me, and the attempts that some members of the Occupy Wall Street community made to silence/shame of women who spoke out for being sexually assaulted within the Occupy Wall Street space, calling them ‘divisive.’ In both cases, comrades committed to transformative justice (a form of justice which holds perpetrators of violence accountable for causing harm without furthering harm by engaging the criminal legal system or shaming the perpetrator of harm) stepped forward to support survivors.

On the flip side, some people within my extended community have shared with me they disapproved of my decision to name my father so publicly, pointing out my actions are veering towards these shaming tactics that are in direct opposition to a transformative justice approach. I’ve been reflecting on this a lot in the past two months, and have concluded that while I remain committed to the politic of transformative justice, and while I do not believe the prison industrial complex will ever result in justice (given it is inherently a tool of oppression), I and many other survivors are left with very real questions about how to function safely in a world in which the people who have harmed us (and often, as in my father’s case, have gone on to harm others) roam free among us.

I know my father was sexually assaulted when he was a child, because he shared that with me, my mother and sister when I first spoke out about his violence, 21 years ago. I believe he deserves to heal. However, I also know he has sexually assaulted at least 7 young women and girls within his community, and continues to have no remorse and no accountability for his actions. He is poised to continue his violence unless we can craft a creative intervention to prevent that from happening, and I feel a great responsibility to do my part in that effort. I also feel there is a collective responsibility to hold him accountable, and know such efforts will ultimately require the communities he is part of to take action.

Finally, something I’ve asked Kevin and Renee to reflect on and I hope we all will take time to think about is how endemic the violence of sexual assault is to our world. We walk among rapists each and every day; they are our colleagues, our neighbors, our spiritual leaders, our teachers, our coaches, our friends and our family members. I do not blame anyone for not knowing the truth about interpersonal acts of violence – these acts are committed in the private sphere, after all. What matters most to me is what people do when a survivor steps forward to speak their truth. I want to see a world in which all survivors can tell the truth, get support, begin to heal, and craft creative and compassionate ways to achieve accountability.

BR: I consider the Secret Survivors project to be a truly creative method to build community and healing. Could you talk a little bit about it?

AS:  Secret Survivors is a project I conceived for the NYC-based performance group Ping Chong & Co. in 2009. I was in graduate school at the time, working towards my Master’s degree in public policy, and beginning to re-immerse myself in the research about sexual violence and child sexual assault for the first time in a decade. I realized in order for policymakers to be able to craft effective and viable intervention and prevention strategies to end child sexual assault, they first needed to understand the scope and reality of this violence. Given the taboos and stigma survivors face, most never tell their story to anyone, let alone publicly. When survivors do speak out, they are often celebrated as exceptional and nearly invincible (ex: Oprah, Maya Angelou, etc.). I wanted to create a platform for survivors to speak out collectively and to be honest about our resilience and our struggles.

Ping Chong & Co. and I worked together to create a live theater performance featuring me and four other survivors: Gabriella Callender, Lucia Leandro Gimeno, RJ Maccani, Diana Sands. Sara Zatz wrote and directed the show, Secret Survivors, based on our journals and recorded conversations from a creative writing workshop and from individual interviews with each of us. Secret Survivors premiered at El Museo del Barrio in March 2011, and has been seen in part or full by about 1,000 people nationwide so far. Thanks to our funders, we have been able to create a documentary version of the project that expands on the theater performance and includes other voices (advocates, survivors, and survivors who are advocates).

We’ll be performing the live show one last time from October 25-28 at La MaMa theater in Manhattan, and we have recently released the documentary on DVD (including a curriculum guide and educational toolkit) via our website. Folks who can’t make it to New York for the performance can live stream it on October 28^th for free.

Ping Chong & Co. is now exploring ways to partner with other organizations and communities across the country to replicate the show with different casts of survivors, as a way to uplift more survivors’ voices and continue to break the taboo against speaking out against child sexual assault. For more background on the show, people can also access a webinar I recently presented for the Ms. Foundation and PreventConnect.

BR: I do believe Child Sexual Abuse is an epidemic that can be eliminated for coming generations if we take action today, and I have great admiration for your work. Thank you for taking the time to write your thoughts. Do you have any final resources you’d like to share?  

AS: Yes. RAINN has a hotline: 1.800.656.HOPE. Generation FIVE is another good resource, as is Creative Interventions. There are also resources on the Secret Survivors website.

*The opinions and facts expressed in this article are solely the responsibility of the author and interviewee.*

_______________________________________________________

Amita Swadhin is an LA-based, NYC-bred educator, storyteller, activist and consultant dedicated to fighting interpersonal and institutional violence against young people. She loves spending time with her partner and her pitbull, writing and performing poetry, building interdependence with other QTPOC organizers, and enjoying all the beauty that California has to offer.

Each day I tried to work. I felt myself covered with dust.  I read of the erasure of Palestinian names from Israeli maps and how each erasure was attended by a massacre of innocents. I felt myself consumed in darkness while reading stories of Al-Dawayima where an entire village of Palestinian citizens was murdered, beaten, some raped, their bodies thrown down into the town well by Israeli soldiers. [i] I tried to write of the massacre of the people of Nasir al-din, Tantura, Eilabun, but the ghosts silenced me with their hunger.  If you don’t believe me, read and read.

These massacres are the seeds of Israel’s creation.  The occupation of Palestinian land and apartheid conditions for Palestinians continues to the present day. At the same time there is forced ignorance of the history of Israel and its current crimes. As a Muslim-raised New Yorker, I am baffled and horrified almost every day by how little people know about Palestine. I cannot read the New York Times without gagging. There is a creation of a fake history right before our eyes, the kind of history that hurts the most.

It is always difficult to find the words to say what I know and feel about Palestine and the ways in which we in the United States are complicit in Israel’s crimes because when I do, I hear cries of “Anti-Semite” thrown like dirt in my eyes. This is what is done when someone tries to tell the truth of Palestine, even though Zionism in current practice has been included in the African Union’s Charter on Human and People’s Rights on par with apartheid and neocolonialism. This Charter has been ratified by 53 African countries.

Before they were bullied into changing the definition, the UN General Assembly also defined Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination” and added that “any doctrine of racial differentiation of superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust, and dangerous.” This was in 1975. Due to pressure from the United States and Israel, the UN had to change its tune.  At the UN Conference on Racism in 2001, the United States and Israel threatened to walk away from the conference if Zionism continued to be associated with racism.  Thus, Zionism wasn’t labeled as racism in the UN anymore.  However, an independent Human Rights Forum at the same conference did connect Zionism with racism and cited Israel’s racially inspired brutality, acts of genocide, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as obvious forms of racism.

And so I know I am not completely alone, but still the words stayed stifled in me whenever I sat down to write this series.  I could only begin writing this piece after John Murillo, a poet, teacher, and friend of friends, shared during a Cave Canem workshop, Lorca’s Theory and Play of the Duende.  Lorca spoke of the darkness.  The beauty of his words were branches I could grasp to see me to the other side.  In the end, my first response, before I could write any of what I wrote above, was a poem, a loose cento created from a patchwork of Gabriel Garcia Lorca’s words:

The Endless Baptism

I was covered in fine ash

peppery sneezes racked my body

from the soles of his feet, my father

diminutive as a green almond,

tired of lines and circles,

went down to the docks by himself

he came upon a drunken soldier

who laughed and passed roses

through his arms. A weeping prophet

my father grasped saltpetre flowers,

the verses of Jeremiah[iv],

broke them

under his tender rosy foot

broke the razor, the wheel of the cart,

the hut. The soldier

sobered up, shook wormy

pages of Testament in his fist,

dusted dried blood-pollen from their buds

his profile cut like the edge of a barber’s razor, but

my father with the prickly beard of shepherd

prophets, with the heads of his children

threaded with barbed wire, sleeping in dust,

with the minds of his children made ill

with limitation, hurled a pot of ink

at the talking monkey soldier

it missed, wounded the eaves and balconies

of the soldier’s ill-begotten city,

released the fragrance of bees

The soldier fearing the scent of violets

repeated in a voice of beaten tin, Hertzl[v]

warned, people will say we are butchers, but

let the blood of the poor and the thieves flow

with the fragrant cypress

of a barren butter moon, with nothing

left to lose, but a voice of scorched centuries,

my father spoke:  A country of death,

the vast night will press its waist against you

until your children, too, will sleep in the weeds

with the eyes of dead fish at dawn.

God forbid, all of this.

Bushra Rehman

www.bushrarehman.com

Each day I tried to work. I felt myself covered with dust.  I read of the erasure of Palestinian names from Israeli maps and how each erasure was attended by a massacre of innocents. I felt myself consumed in darkness while reading stories of Al-Dawayima where an entire village of Palestinian citizens was murdered, beaten, some raped, their bodies thrown down into the town well by Israeli soldiers. [i] I tried to write of the massacre of the people of Nasir al-din, Tantura, Eilabun, but the ghosts silenced me with their hunger.  If you don’t believe me, read and read.

These massacres are the seeds of Israel’s creation.  The occupation of Palestinian land and apartheid conditions for Palestinians continues to the present day. At the same time there is forced ignorance of the history of Israel and its current crimes. As a Muslim-raised New Yorker, I am baffled and horrified almost every day by how little people know about Palestine. I cannot read the New York Times without gagging. There is a creation of a fake history right before our eyes, the kind of history that hurts the most.

It is always difficult to find the words to say what I know and feel about Palestine and the ways in which we in the United States are complicit in Israel’s crimes because when I do, I hear cries of “Anti-Semite” thrown like dirt in my eyes. This is what is done when someone tries to tell the truth of Palestine, even though Zionism in current practice has been included in the African Union’s Charter on Human and People’s Rights on par with apartheid and neocolonialism. This Charter has been ratified by 53 African countries.

Before they were bullied into changing the definition, the UN General Assembly also defined Zionism as “a form of racism and racial discrimination” and added that “any doctrine of racial differentiation of superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust, and dangerous.” This was in 1975. Due to pressure from the United States and Israel, the UN had to change its tune.  At the UN Conference on Racism in 2001, the United States and Israel threatened to walk away from the conference if Zionism continued to be associated with racism.  Thus, Zionism wasn’t labeled as racism in the UN anymore.  However, an independent Human Rights Forum at the same conference did connect Zionism with racism and cited Israel’s racially inspired brutality, acts of genocide, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians as obvious forms of racism.

And so I know I am not completely alone, but still the words stayed stifled in me whenever I sat down to write this series.  I could only begin writing this piece after John Murillo, a poet, teacher, and friend of friends, shared during a Cave Canem workshop, Lorca’s Theory and Play of the Duende.  Lorca spoke of the darkness.  The beauty of his words were branches I could grasp to see me to the other side.  In the end, my first response, before I could write any of what I wrote above, was a poem, a loose cento created from a patchwork of Gabriel Garcia Lorca’s words:

The Endless Baptism

I was covered in fine ash

peppery sneezes racked my body

from the soles of his feet, my father

diminutive as a green almond,

tired of lines and circles,

went down to the docks by himself

he came upon a drunken soldier

who laughed and passed roses

through his arms. A weeping prophet

my father grasped saltpetre flowers,

the verses of Jeremiah[iv],

broke them

under his tender rosy foot

broke the razor, the wheel of the cart,

the hut. The soldier

sobered up, shook wormy

pages of Testament in his fist,

dusted dried blood-pollen from their buds

his profile cut like the edge of a barber’s razor, but

my father with the prickly beard of shepherd

prophets, with the heads of his children

threaded with barbed wire, sleeping in dust,

with the minds of his children made ill

with limitation, hurled a pot of ink

at the talking monkey soldier

it missed, wounded the eaves and balconies

of the soldier’s ill-begotten city,

released the fragrance of bees

The soldier fearing the scent of violets

repeated in a voice of beaten tin, Hertzl[v]

warned, people will say we are butchers, but

let the blood of the poor and the thieves flow

with the fragrant cypress

of a barren butter moon, with nothing

left to lose, but a voice of scorched centuries,

my father spoke:  A country of death,

the vast night will press its waist against you

until your children, too, will sleep in the weeds

with the eyes of dead fish at dawn.

God forbid, all of this.

Bushra Rehman

www.bushrarehman.com

It is the missing clasp of your body
that shudders me awake,
and before I fall asleep,
I replay all the tightly
wound metal
of our kisses, all
the ways our bodies
resisted, all
the ways we
came unhinged,
let a thousand doors
fall from their
places, a thousand
bees fly from
their nests.

I’m talking about a little village perched under the number 7 train in Queens between Junction Boulevard and 111th St. I’m talking about the Corona Ice King, Spaghetti Park and PS 19. The Corona F. Scott Fitzgerald called the valley of ashes as the Great Gatsby drove past it on his night of carousal, but what me and my own know as home. And we didn’t know about any valley of ashes because by then it had been topped off by our houses. You know the kind made from brick this tan color no self-respecting brick would be at all. That’s Corona.

And you know that song by Paul Simon, the one where he says, “I’m on my way… I don’t know where I’m going… I’m on my way… I’m taking my time and I don’t know where. Good-bye Rosie, queen of Corona. Singing me and Julio down by the school yard… ”

Well, I used to always tell people it was Corona he was singing about, but I didn’t know if it was true because why would Paul Simon be singing about Corona? I mean, I didn’t see many white people there unless they were policemen or firemen and I didn’t think Paul Simon had ever been one of those.

Then I saw these pictures of Simon and Garfunkel young, the kind of pictures where you are like, “No way could that old person have ever been that young.” And there was Paul Simon standing in front of one of those tan brick homes. I couldn’t believe it. All this time I was trying to have fake Corona pride, that was real Corona pride. The lie I thought was a lie was actually true.

“Good-bye Rosie, queen of Corona. Singing me and Julio down by the school yard, singing me and Julio down by the school yard…”

* * *

I actually had a Julio too. We didn’t hang out down by the school yard like Paul Simon must have with his Julio. Actually, we didn’t hang out anywhere at all. But I was in love with him. Julio had beauty marks all over, as if it wasn’t obvious to everyone how he looked.He carried his body like fire, a matchstick, rope.

All the girls in school showed off for Julio, jumping rope, cursing and fighting. In Corona, girls learned early to flash skin, flirt, chew gum and play games to bring the boys down to their knees in front of them, even though it would usually end up the other way around. But I was not one of them. My mother didn’t let me wear skirts, especially the kind of short skirts the other girls wore with their hairless legs and their fearless way of flicking their hips. I watched them flirt with Julio, my back against the brick wall.

Julio was my next door neighbor and in my same fourth grade class in school. We walked the same way home. Not together of course. He walked ahead of me with his friends, and they’d be whooping and screaming and pulling roses out whenever we went past this Korean house that had so many roses they grew up and over through the fence like they were some kind of convicts trying to scale the walls.

The Korean grandmother would have to stand in the yard as soon as the school bell rang and wave her stick and scream at all of us so we wouldn’t pull out every last one. But Julio would always manage to steal a rose. He was quick and thin. All the other boys rallied around him. He could leap almost to the top of the fence, grab a rose and then fall back on the pack of boys, pushing one of them nearly into the street, partly from the impact and partly for the joy of it. He would shake the hair out of his eyes and laugh.

But one day the Korean grandmother got smart. She wasn’t waiting inside the fence yelling like she usually was. She hid behind a car across the street and when Julio and his friends came around, she was right behind them. I was just as surprised as the rest. She grabbed Julio by one of his skinny arms and pulled him into the garden. “You bad boy! Where do you live? Tell me where you live!” And she shook him again. “Tell me where you live!”

Julio’s friends stopped. Their hands were still pushed through the gaps in the fence. This was new. They didn’t know whether to run away or run in. They stood like statues waiting for someone to do or say something to make things normal again. Julio was the one who did. He pulled back with all his thin weight and said to her face, “I don’t need to tell you where I live you smelly ching chong.”
The grandmother gasped and stopped shaking him. Something in her face began to twitch. Her mouth opened and closed again. One of Julio’s friends picked up a beer can from the street and threw it. It missed her, but the next thing I knew there was a howl and a rush. All the boys started picking up litter and glass bottles that had been left on the street and throwing them.

The grandmother’s fingers lost their grip and when she ran into the house, all the boys ran into the garden and started pulling roses off the branches. All of them, the tea lemon, the hot pink, the deep red, the little ones with flecks of gold in their skin. The thorns tore through their fingers, but they didn’t let it stop them. It was their first time in the garden and now it was theirs.

By this time all the kids who walked home that way and even some who didn’t had stopped to see what was happening. I stood with my face and hands pressed against the chain link fence, afraid to go in.

Then I saw Julio. He was smiling and his arms were full of tattered roses. He looked like a king prince as he walked out of the garden and started throwing roses at the children who were too scared to run in. When he saw me, he stopped. For a second, I could see he didn’t know if he could trust me not to tell. Then he looked inside of me, and I felt upturned like an x-ray on a skeleton.

He smiled, the first time he had ever really smiled at me. He picked out a rose. It was hot pink, stiff, just beginning to open. “Here,” he said and threw the rose at my feet.

My first summer away from Queens, I worked in Salem, a city so famous for burning women its whole economy was based on it. I got a job at a recreated seventeenth century village called Pioneer Spirit. It was like a run down Plimoth Plantation, the bastard child where all the druggies and misfits went, the ones who couldn’t be trusted to stay in character in Plimoth, the ones who would forget.

Pioneer Spirit was different than Plimoth in that we didn’t have to act like we were pilgrims. Mostly we just hung out in costume. Once or twice a day each of us gave tours. We had a line-up and when it was your turn and you heard the bell, you went up to the governor’s house to see who had shown up, what poor tourist had been led astray, had come to Salem to see the witches and somehow got duped into taking our tour of pre-witch trial Salem: Pioneer Spirit 1630, a living history museum.

Some of the folks who worked there were history buffs. They wore their costumes even when they weren’t working and actually read about Salem’s history. But most of us, Walter, June and me were just folks who couldn’t deal with having any kind of real job, stoners who liked the idea of dressing up in costumes from the 1600s. We got by on one history book we rotated among us and our imaginations.

On my first day, they gave me a white bonnet, a red jacket, white undershirt and brown wool skirt. The woman who was training us warned me it was extremely flammable, so I should try not to get too close to the fire when I was demonstrating how to make johnny cakes for the tourists. She said it in this way that made me feel she wasn’t kidding. That many women had come and gone before me, up in flames.
Johnny cakes were made out of corn meal and a little sugar. Puritans took them along when they went on journeys, but they couldn’t pronounce “journey” right so the cakes were called johnny cakes. I didn’t really know if this was true but I said it on every tour. I would stand back from the fire and hitch up my skirt (in a very non-Puritan way) and cook those cakes in cast iron pans which could really have been from the 1600s, they were so old and dirty. I wasn’t allowed to let the tourists taste the cakes, but mine always came out so burnt no one ever asked.

* * *

At the end of my first week, I got a group made up of seven Harley bikers and one older white couple. The bikers were grizzly bearded and big and made me look like a tiny Puritan doll when I stood next to them. I was terrified, but I pulled myself up to my full five feet and looked them in their bearded faces. If I took away their motorcycles and muscles, they looked just like my bearded Muslim uncles in Queens. Somehow my costume had me feeling brave, as if I really was a ghost of the past. If anyone tried to touch me, their hands would just pass through.

That day was pretty hot, and my wool skirt and jacket were itching. I started off the tour by taking the bikers and the older couple to the dugouts. There were seven bikers, all different heights and widths, but they all looked like they had been caked with the same dirt from the open road. Standing next to them, the older couple seemed ironed out, pink and unbelievably clean.

The village was set up to go chronologically, from how the Puritans first lived when they were FOBs, to how they “advanced”, until they were living just like the English in London, except surrounded by “savages” and wilderness, instead of the ash and sin they had left behind. When everyone was gathered around, I began my tour:

“The Puritans got here during a dreadful winter. They had been lost at sea, and when they arrived the snow was yea high.” I put my hand up to my chest. “There were no houses set up with fireplaces and maids, so Someone had a brilliant idea to dig homes into the sides of the hills. These dugouts.” I waved my arms grandly at the not so grand entrance. “You can come closer and look in.” The old couple pushed ahead of the Harley bikers to take a peek. I put my hand on my hip and continued, “Kind of dark and spooky. Not really welcoming. Now imagine fifteen to twenty men, women and children, all cramped in, stuck and homesick, and really sick too.” Whenever I said that part of the tour I realized it sounded like the Pakistani families I knew back in Queens, but no, I had to focus.

“Most of the Puritans died that first winter when they arrived. Of course the Native Americans probably would have been happy if all of them had died.” The bikers chuckled, but the old couple looked shocked. They seemed to get paler, and I made a mental note to never use that joke again on a tour.

“Alrighty then.” I moved the group a bit abruptly to the pen next to the dugouts where we kept our historically accurate goats. The couple and the Harley bikers thankfully followed me.

“Well these are our goats. There’s Snowball and that’s Rosemary and Thyme. Now these goats are not your average goats. They’re historical goats. Not stuffed, they’re real.” The goats bleated in affirmation. “But they are pure bred so they look, act, sound, eat, chew and well I guess every other goat activity, they do it just like the goats back then.”

The lady knelt down by the pen and started luring Rosemary with a blade of grass. “These goats are pretty big,” she noted. Rosemary ignored her, nonchalantly turned her head and bleated. I don’t think she appreciated the crack on her weight.

“Yes, please don’t get too close to the goats. Remember they’re not petting goats and can get pretty nasty. They’re big because they’re pregnant. And they actually look just like the pregnant Puritan goats from historical times. If you come back in a few weeks, there will be babies.” I was told by Ron, my boss to promote Pioneer Spirit since it was on the verge of being shut down.

The older man said in a dry voice, “Where’s the father?”

“Oh, we’ll meet Winthrop, the daddy in a moment. He’s named after one of the first governors of Massachusetts, but he had to be fenced off in another part of the village for getting a little too frisky and believe me Puritan goats get frisky just like the rest.” The Harley bikers laughed which was a relief for me, but the old man turned pink.

Like Winthrop on the ill-fated Arabella, I turned and motioned for them to follow me.
“We used to have Puritan chickens too but those, well those, had to be taken away because you see Puritan chickens weren’t like the scrawny weaklings we eat nowadays. They had wings long enough to fly. Yes, fly. So they always ended up on top of the governor’s house. We spent so much time pulling them down, we barely had any time for doing other Puritan things. Like, um” I had to think of what Puritans did, “Like praying.”

We came to the bottom of a hill. “Okay then, if you follow me, up this hill along the stream. . .”

“What stream?” The older man looked annoyed.

“Oh, the stream.” Shit. Will the Blacksmith was supposed to turn it on in the morning. “Just one second.” I ran up the hill, cursing Will and found the water tap in the rocks that was supposed to create the stream. At first I thought it was stuck, but I finally got it to twist. Brown water shot out and after a few seconds it was clear. I ran back trying not to trip on my skirt.

“Okay, here’s the stream!” They all looked up and down the rocks, a trickle of water was slowly inching towards us. “It hasn’t rained, so it’s drying up. But yes, if you follow me. . .” I could tell the Harley bikers were getting a kick out of my tour. The other couple, I could still try to win over. The Harley bikers were kicking up dust and the old man and lady were doing everything to dodge the clouds that were rising to the surface. Still, they all had to be impressed by the next part.

“What is that?” The wife pointed to what looked like a giant piece of Shredded Wheat.

I walked them up the hill “Well, this strange looking structure you see is an English Wigwam. Basically the English got tired of living like cave people in the dugouts. And you know the saying if you live with Romans act like Romans or something like that. Well the Puritans didn’t really want to act like Native Americans, but they just looked so warm and healthy and with the Puritans dying off so fast, they knew they would have to do something to adapt, so they copied Native American wigwams. But they couldn’t give up their Englishness. They missed their thatched roofs so much, they decided to thatch their wigwams instead of using leaves like the Native Americans.”

I brought them inside where it was cool and dark.

“The only problem was these English wigwams were basically stacks of hay which could burn down in a matter of seconds with nothing more than a spark. And since the inside of the wigwam was used for cooking food like johnny cakes, many families died, this time not from the cold, but from being burned alive. ”

“Anybody got a light?” It was one of the Harley bikers. I loved it and nicknamed him Chuckles in my head. But I could feel the old man getting wound up right behind me, even though it was dark and I couldn’t see his face.

I was getting pretty tired of giving the tour and I couldn’t wait to get out of my bonnet and meet up with the rest of the Puritan gang for lunch. We usually got high behind the Blacksmith’s shop. So I skipped a few stops and brought them to the Governor’s house. It was two stories with real glass windows. Compared to the other homes, it was a mansion. I guess some things never change. “Okay, next is Winthrop’s house. The governor, not the goat.” They laughed, but their laugher sounded more like bleating than anything else.

I brought them into the front room where there was a stuffed turkey and gun hanging above the fireplace. I waited for everyone to gather around. The old man and woman were lagging behind. They looked like they were disagreeing. He was whispering to her angrily.

I tried hard not to look worried. There had already been complaints about our tours. But a few minutes later, they joined us and I was able to breathe. I continued. “The Puritans were terrible hunters. They would rush through the forest trampling everything in sight, making a ton of noise, shouting left and right, letting the animals know for miles around they were coming. So for months, the Puritans had nothing to eat, but johnny cakes. Lucky for them, they discovered wild turkey. Now, wild turkeys were stupid birds and easy to catch even for the Puritans. The Puritans were beside themselves with joy when they discovered wild turkey.”

“I’ll bet!” It was Chuckles again. “Wild Turkey!” All the bikers started cracking up. I wasn’t sure why they were laughing, but I smiled along.

The old man broke in. “This is ridiculous! Turkeys were not stupid birds!”

Everyone stopped and turned to him. He had turned bright red. Being a person whose skin color made it impossible to blush, I was impressed. Even the Harley bikers stepped back.

“This is the most historically inaccurate, ridiculous tour I have ever seen, even in Salem. Anyone who actually knows American history,” he gave me a look, “would know wild turkeys were not stupid birds. They were so intelligent Benjamin Franklin wanted them to be our national bird instead of the eagle.”

“What’s wrong with eagles?” One of the larger Harley bikers stepped close. I noticed he had an eagle tattooed on his left arm.

“There is nothing wrong with eagles!” This man was on fire. “But I don’t enjoy the fact that I paid for a historical tour and have gotten nothing but superficial nonsense!”

I winced. I knew my tour wasn’t perfect, but superficial nonsense?

“I teach American history and almost everything this young lady has said is wrong, wrong, wrong.” Each time he said “wrong” his face deepened in color. “It’s because of people like her that this country is going to shit.”

There was silence for a moment and I could feel the hair bristle on the back of my neck. I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry sir. I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m sure you can get your money back.”

“Oh I’ll get more than my money back.” He turned and stormed out the door of the governor’s house.

His wife looked embarrassed. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “He retired early this year and he just misses teaching history. I enjoyed your tour. Really.” Then she ran after him.

There was an uncomfortable silence. Chuckles looked at me. “So where’s this frisky old goat you were talking about?”

They all looked at me gently and suddenly I felt so homesick for Queens, where the men who looked scary used to be the men who took care of me.

* * *

When I got off the tour, one of the other fake Puritans, Walter, was waiting. Walter was tall and thin and had stringy red hair down to his chin. His face was freckled and my first thought when I met him was Ichabod Crane, but if Ichabod was a stoner who did gravity bong hits and had a punk band.

We had become friends after I tagged along on one of his tours to see if I could learn any new “facts.” His tour was so funny I almost died from not laughing. When we got to the part where there was a fake burial ground, he turned to the group and said, “So this is where the Puritans were buried. Of course these wooden posts aren’t the original wooden posts. They don’t exist anymore. They rotted. Just like Puritans, and that’s why we don’t see them much either.”

I guess he hadn’t had that history teacher on his tour.

“Hey Injun.” That was Walter’s nickname for me. He got a big kick out of the fact that I was Pakistani and working as an English Puritan. “Ron wants to see you.”

“Did he tell you about the old guy?”

“Don’t worry about it. We get crazies here all the time. Who else would pay for one of our tours?” He had a point.

When I went to the old barn which was our office, Ron was waiting at his desk. He rubbed his hand over his face. “Razia. I guess you know what this is about.”

“The old guy.”

“You didn’t call him that did you?”

“Of course not.” Now it was my turn to be offended. I had more respect for my elders than that.

“Well, that was David Green.” I looked blank. “He’s one of the board members for the Historical Society in Salem. It’s because of him we stay open.”

I picked up some trousers which were thrown across the chair, tossed them on the floor and sat down across the desk from Ron. “I don’t think he really enjoyed my tour.”

“No, he didn’t. He thinks you should be fired.”

“Really?”

“He said, well . . .” Ron hesitated. “He didn’t think your tour was historically accurate.”

“But no one’s tour here is historically accurate.” I began to feel sick like the time I had eaten one of my own johnny cakes.

Ron looked embarrassed. Everyone knew he had used the money for training to have “Ye Olde Keg Party” for the entire staff. He’d insisted Puritans drank a lot of ale. Most of us had gotten so drunk and done such embarrassing things we couldn’t even look each other in the eye the next morning.

“Well, he also said your presentation wasn’t historically accurate.”

“My presentation?”

“The way you look.” Ron looked down and then up again. “But I talked to him and said you were great and we agreed you could keep your job. You could be an Indian. I could arrange for a costume and you wouldn’t have to do or say anything. Just stand around. And you know, act like an Indian.”

“But I’m not that kind of Indian.”

“I know.” He seemed depressed by this.

“And it’s not like they were just standing around?”

Ron took a long drag and started having a coughing fit. “Razia, we’re barely keeping our doors open.”

He walked to the back door, hacking all the way. It looked out onto the ocean, and it occurred to me that this was the real reason Pioneer Spirit was being taken. Real estate. Ron spit outside before he continued. “No one cares about Salem pre-witch trials. They come here to hear about the burnings, stonings, hangings, about death. They don’t give a shit about what really happened to people when they first got here.”

“Why don’t you just put me on a stake then? That’ll bring people in.”

“Razia. . . ”

“Ron. This isn’t fair.”

He looked at me. I knew he was thinking I didn’t look like an English Puritan. But it was one thing to disrespect Puritans and another to disrespect Native Americans.

“Look, think about it.” I could see Ron was upset. “Come in the morning and we can talk, okay?”

I didn’t say anything. I just walked out and down the dirt road towards the exit, still wearing my costume. It didn’t really matter in Salem. You could walk down the street in full seventeenth century garb and no one noticed. Half the population did. Everyone was stuck in the past, wearing costumes, pretending they were someone they weren’t. I thought of the Harley bikers and my uncles.

And then I thought of my father, the day he told me I had to leave. All too often, his face, ash grey, would rise up in my mind and each time it would shock me, the way the full moon shocked me when it rose against the buildings in Queens.

I walked faster. Outside the gate, the Harley biker clan was hanging out in the parking lot. They were smoking and passing around a brown bag.

“Hey there sweetie. Out early?” It was Chuckles and his gang. They looked happy to see me.

“No, I think I just got fired.”

There was a general growl. “Fuckers.” Chuckles said. And on cue, all of the rest of them spit or mumbled curses. Chuckles passed me the brown paper bag. “Wild Turkey.”

I looked inside and then laughed. I raised the bag to my mouth and let the whisky burn through my body. I could taste Chuckles mouth on the neck.