Swimming to Cambodia and Marching Over the Bridge
You’ll recognize that as the title of a movie starring Spalding Gray based on his experiences working on a film called The Killing Fields. No, I’m not planning to swim to Cambodia, but the title came to mind when I woke from a dream the other night. The reason will be obvious: I arrived at a pool for a swimming lesson. The pool was huge, larger than Olympic size. It had the unique ability to create turbulence in the water, as if you could rock the entire structure back and forth to make the kind of waves you would encounter at an ocean beach. (I had once seen a fishtank in a science lab that was able to create these conditions.)
I don’t remember the lesson or the instructor, but I do remember that after the lesson the pool was returned to its pristine undisturbed surface, and I joyously and effortlessly glided from one end to the other. It felt more like ice skating than swimming. I woke up happy.
What’s so striking about the dream, apart from the fact that I, uncharacteristically, remembered it, is that it depicts a happy experience in the water. The ancients, in their wisdom, believed that the basic elements around which all of life revolves are Earth, Air, Water and Fire and people can be classified by which element predominates. I am definitely of the Earth persuasion, with water coming in dead last. I love gazing at it, dipping my body in it up to the waist, but that’s it. I’ve written about this before, but you probably don’t remember, so I’ll revisit it briefly.
That smooth pool of my dream was not present in my childhood. My water adventures, if you can call them that, were in the ocean at Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. It’s not a great place to learn how to swim. On most days the challenge was maintaining your footing against the onslaught of the waves. As a result, I didn’t learn how to swim until I was 10 or 11. I didn’t go to summer camp until I was in my teens, so there were no lessons, no instructions about breathing or putting your head in the water. Everything since has been a struggle – not making Eagle Scout because I couldn’t get the swimming merit badge; passing the swimming test in high school – a graduation requirement (I somehow managed to scrape by); being tested in summer camp, when I finally got there, to determine which swim class I would be assigned to (the lifeguard had to use a long vaulting pole he extended to me when I started flailing, as if I was his catch of the day.)
You get the picture. Water was not my happy place. Rosellen was my partner in favoring to keep her feet on solid ground. Several of the plot lines in her novels revolve around water disasters. Together we communicated our fears to our children, one of whom, determined to break the cycle of transmission, took lessons and became a regular at the gym pool. Our granddaughter started early and is as comfortable in the water as she is handling all the tech tools that she approaches as her birthright. All to say that you need not be defined and limited by yourinheritance. I just lacked the grit and determination to break the jinx, so my dream was, as Dr. Freud suggested, a wish fulfillment, one that never left my bedroom.
In the space I have left, I want to turn my attention to a much more serious subject. Today, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that, in effect, guts what remains of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This is the latest step in a conservative battle plan to straighten the bend in that hallowed arc of justice and return us to the racism and Social Darwinism that prevailed 90+ years ago. The ruling strikes down the remaining operative section of the Act which made it possible to fashion at least one Black congressional district in each of the states which had deprived Blacks, by legislation or by force, representation in their local and state governments. The galling grounds for the ruling lie in the argument that the creation of these districts constitute a violation of equal rights by discriminating against white people. This is the same government that “rescued” white South Africans, supposedly suffering discrimination, by granting them visas while dark-skinned people from “shithole” countries were denied them.This Alice in Wonderland turnaround rests on turning a blind eye toward the discrimination Black people have suffered, despite the passage of the 15th amendment since the Civil War.
Sometimes, personal and public histories intersect. In 1965, Rosellen and I arrived in Mississippi at a moment when the battle for voting rights was at its peak. Just months after our arrival, the infamous attack on demonstrators crossing the Pettus Bridge to demonstrate for voting rights for Blacks triggered the final push for the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the very law which now lies in tatters on the floor of the Supreme Court. From our vantage point, we saw up close the blood and sweat that went into the struggle for these rights. We listened to Mr. Hartman Turnbow, a Black farmer in Holmes County who dared go down to the courthouse to “reddish,” only to have his house burned down, while he was arrested for the destruction of his own home. We saw the scars on the face of Reverend Ed King caused by being forced off the road by racists who were outraged that a white native of Vicksburg, Mississippi would support the rights of Black people to vote.
Outsiders like us were only bit players in this struggle. It was the local folks like Mr. Turnbow and Rev. King who had been paying the price for speaking out for the past century. The results of thousands of acts of courage were erased yesterday by a court whose actions constituted, as President Roosevelt said about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, “a day that will live in infamy.” We’re witnessing a devastating setback in the campaign for rights for all, but the story is not over. The millions of people who are marching against those currently in power are not going to fade away. We’ve seen what demonstrating and pushing back can accomplish and admirers of John Lewis, one of the demonstrators who was bloodied on that Alabama bridge, will continue to “make good trouble.”
