In remembrance
There was a black woman, ahead of me on the train. As she walked, unsteadily, her hips swayed out past their centre to compensate for the lurching of the journey, and her heels provided a counterpoint for the rhythmic clacking of the carriage wheels, travelling over old line. She was young and proud, straight backed and tastefully dressed. A hint of ruby lipstick, against powdered cocoa skin.
When we got off she waited in line with everyone else for the doors to sigh themselves open, retreat into their cavities and let the cold air rush in. I watched her as we walked down from the station. She moved through her own world, handbag on her arm, eyes on her road, thoughts inviolable. Another connection in the web of humanity that neither shimmered nor dulled beyond any other.
A thought crept in:
To suggest that her trousers should be ripped from her and replaced with the smearing of week old faeces is absurd. Exchanging her earrings with a heavy iron manacle, her lipstick for cracked and drying blood, her artfully pinned hair for a fraying, tangled nest of bacteria, simply sets a scene. For the walls of the train carriage to fall away and reveal a galley, stuffed with the noxious, crushing pressures of hell – filled not with su doku, and lattes, but with rape, banal with its frequency, and the semen of white men, splashed where they will – this is a cruelty and perversion beyond endurance.
To suck her life away in slavery, and to take her name and her spark from her – to excise her from the strands of human history and leave, in place of her legacy, a sorrowful void – this is madness. This is a horror so great that, once fully accepted, labelling it then not as nightmare but as history could cause the soul to crack, overburdened and unable to understand.
I gave thanks then that there was a black man in the seat of the white house. That the woman ahead of me could sit on the train with a moral and social impunity. That in Soho, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, beefed up men who love other men can wander around in pink tutus and bright wigs. That my gay best friend and I can sit in the open and wait for his boyfriend over a coffee. There are many pockets of prejudice that still linger, festering and repugnant over the world, but the larger battle is won. The paradigm shifting of fear and loathing to acceptance and promotion has almost completed, and like the filtering of acid rain through volcanic rock it will seep down through all the levels of society over the next hundred years. Inexorable, purifying, glorious.