Shake Terribly the Earth by Childers Sarah Beth;

Author:Childers, Sarah Beth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press

Standing in the concrete-floored airport in Port-au-Prince, my skirt and blouse rumpled from travel, I waited in line to receive a stamp on my brand-new passport. I reached the desk, a gray metal affair in a five-by-five-foot room, and a woman stamped at random a blue page without speaking. Her skin was dark as black coffee, more like the African converts who accompanied fund-raising missionaries from church to church than my mocha-tinted friend Brianna, the only nonwhite member of our twenty-person expedition.

The airport was nearly empty, and American tourists in flip-flops, ready for a tan on their pale feet, outnumbered the black airport workers. But with that stamp I felt the pallor of my skin. I sensed the teeming dark people beyond the walls, and I knew we were going to stand out.

I was prepared. I’d read about the country’s 95 percent black population, descendants of a successful slave uprising in 1791 that established Haiti as the first free black republic. Still, the feeling was startling. My part of southwestern West Virginia had few people of color. To my sixteen-year-old self, Huntington’s African American residents seemed limited to a few suit-wearing members of New Life Victory Center and tired mothers who fanned themselves on their front steps while their children played, either in the projects or a few blocks of near-condemned houses smaller than trailers, painted in garish shades of blue, red, and green.

I realize now that the situation is far more complex. Many of Huntington’s black residents still live on the streets around the shut-down Barnett Elementary School and Douglass High School, architectural relicts of the days when my grandparents watched Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the main floor of the theater and “coloreds” sat up in the balcony. However, a few years ago, my mother had a black gynecologist, who likely lived among Huntington’s wealthier whites in a neighborhood on a hill. The receptionist lowered her voice when my mother made the appointment. “He’s black,” she whispered into the phone. “I don’t care,” my mother said. “Well, I had to tell you,” the receptionist replied. “A lot of women care.” A black male inspecting their vaginas must be more than those women can bear.

My parents raised me not to feel superior to Huntington’s black residents because of skin color or money—we had white relatives in the projects, after all—but it was impossible to keep away from well-meaning, racist people. For track and field practices, Grace Christian borrowed an outdoor facility two blocks from old Douglass High School. A rusted fence and a shabby rainbow of dwellings surrounded the field. My high school track coach, a skinny, pale man with thinning brown hair, warned the team to be wary of the neighborhood’s dark-skinned inhabitants. “If you see any black folks around here, keep walking, and never, never look them in the eye,” he said. “They might have a gun, and you might not even see it.” My coach was as zealous as anyone at Grace Christian, reciting

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