texas – no power in the 'verse

of superheroes and soothsayers

December 13, 2015 by Salem Pearce Leave a Comment

I gave this d’var Torah at Nehar Shalom Community Synagogue on December 11, 2015.

Over Thanksgiving I was able to go home, to Texas, where all of my family lives. The most precious time was with my two nephews and my niece. The day after Thanksgiving, Archer, the four-year-old, pulled me upstairs to play. He decided he wanted to wear his Halloween costume, and so he showed me the basket for his dress-up clothes. He begin pulling out his pink tutu, cowboy hat, green dress, etc. He finally got to his firefighter costume. He carefully donned the hat and coat and asked me what I thought. When I suggested he might need shoes to be a firefighter, he obligingly strapped on his pink sandals. Ready? I said. Not yet, he replied. He pulled out of the pocket of his coat a laminated card with four illustrations. Okay, he announced. This is what we have to do. These are the different things that can happen, he said, pointing to the card. And so we went from room to room, first putting out a house fire; then a forest fire that spread from a campfire; and finally a kitchen fire that started from a pot left on the stove. And then we rescued a cat in a tree. What else can we do?, I asked. That’s all there is, he replied. Let’s do them again!

My brother is an engineer — and my grandfather was an engineer — and Archer has certainly inherited their exactitude and penchant for following directions precisely. So I know that it’s not just a child’s assurance of safety that encompasses his approach to make-believe. For Archer, the card that comes with the jacket tells you what to do. These, and only these, are the threats that firefighters face. They are circumscribed, and they are predictable.

I came to Texas for Thanksgiving with the heavy weight of the brokenness of the world. I continue to be sickened by the terrorist attacks at home and abroad, whether by knife-wielders in Jerusalem — where many of my classmates are now studying — or gun-toters here. The sense of insecurity that I feel on a daily basis is profound, and as I took part in Archer’s highly circumscribed set of crises, I wondered whether I will be able to give him — and my other nephew and niece — anything other than a world of out-of-control unpredictability.

I felt this again on Wednesday night, when a small group of us from Nehar Shalom went together to the Boston Candlelight Vigil Against Gun Violence, part of a week of similar events nationwide. The event took place in what I assume was the small sanctuary of the very large First Church of Boston in Back Bay.

There was a modest crowd, at least in comparison to my expectations — which provided a marked contrast to the number of victims of gun violence who were remembered. A candle was lit for each of the victims of gun violence this year in the Boston area. And then attendees were invited to light candles for their own loved ones who had been victims of gun violence. And then the pastor lit a candle for each of the fifty states and the District of Columbia while the number of victims of gun violence in each place were read aloud. I worried we might burn the church down with all of that fire. (And this was not one of the scenarios on Archer’s card!) Even the presence of the large Boston police officer who spoke briefly was diminished in the shadow of the flames. Before and after the service, on a large screen at the front of the sanctuary, a tribute video played, with pictures of victims of gun violence — a name, date, and location with each. The dates ranged back as far as 1990, with the dead all over the country. The enormity of what we face overwhelmed me, and I felt helpless and scared. I don’t mean to criticize the organizers of this important event — I mean only to share my experience.

In that moment, sitting in a small chapel memorializing the victims of this seemingly unending, volatile scourge, what we call “Gun Violence in the United States,” I flashed to an episode of my favorite TV show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Yes, you can laugh. What, you thought I was going to say the parshah? Themes of Chanukah? Words from our venerable rabbinic tradition? In my world, there are at least two Torahs, and one of them is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The show is about a superhero in Southern California who fights the forces of darkness — but on a metaphorical level, it’s also about what we do as human beings when the monsters come. In Buffy’s world, as in ours, the monsters always come. Of course, in Buffy’s case, it’s because the town of Sunnydale also happens to sit on the hellmouth.

The episode “The Wish” explores an alternate reality: What would the town be like if Buffy weren’t there? The vampires have taken over, but most of its human residents have adjusted to the constant fear. They have curfews, avoid the bright clothing that attracts vampires, and have weekly memorial services for the ever-accumulating dead. They can’t take on the vampires directly. Horrific death is a matter of when, not if. This is just how things are.

Throughout the episode, we see Buffy’s would-be mentor begin to realize that they’re living in an parallel universe. He came to the town to help Buffy, but she never showed up. And in the meantime, the town of Sunnydale surrendered to the darkness. He finally figures out that this reality is the result of a magical spell — and that he can break the spell by destroying the amulet that was used to cast it. As he prepares to smash it, the demon who cast the spell taunts him: How does he know the other world is any better than this one? “Because it has to be,” he says. With that leap of faith, he rights the world — monsters still exist, but does the person who fights those monsters.

Sitting in that sanctuary, I felt like the residents of Sunnydale. I don’t want for us Americans to accept gun violence as they do vampires — but we don’t have a superhero, and we don’t have a magic amulet. We do, however, have an example in the Jewish tradition. (Yes, now we’re getting to that Torah!)

Parshat Miketz also contains a looming menace that threatens death. In this part of Genesis we see the long-forgotten Yosef finally remembered by Paro’s cupbearer and called to interpret Paro’s dreams of fat and lean cows and of full and withered ears of grain. Like Archer’s firefighter card that precisely delineates scenarios, Yosef accurately predicts seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. And then he recommends preparation. The job is given to Yosef himself, who successfully executes his task — and then some, as he’s ultimately able during the famine to feed more than just the people of Egypt because of his careful planning.

As an activist, there is so much that I like about this story. I think we can see it as the beginning of community organizing in Jewish tradition. After the cosmology of the story of creation at the beginning of Genesis, the Torah focuses narrowly on family narrative: Avraham and Sarah, Yitzchak and Rivka, Ya’akov, Rachel, Leah. When Yosef’s brothers sell him into slavery down into Egypt, the scope begins to widen. With Yosef’s eventual rise to power, the actions of our ancestors begin to have national and historical implications. What we do matters to others.

Importantly, Yosef doesn’t just tell Paro what his dreams predict: He proposes a solution. And the solution, significantly, does not assume deliverance: Gd may have enabled Yosef to know what was coming, but Yosef suggests what to do about it. The text attributes the idea for action to Yosef — not Gd. לֵאלֹהִים פִּתְרֹנִים, “interpretations belong to Gd,” Yosef says — but the story shows that action belongs to human beings.

I imagine that the prospect of famine, of the potential starvation of the people of Egypt, was quite frightening. Knowing the threat is coming doesn’t blunt fear. The famine looms, but Yosef isn’t cowered by it. He doesn’t accept it. He sees a different world, and he works to bring it into being.

Like Archer’s fires, and Buffy’s monsters, and Joseph’s famine, there are and will continue be destructive forces in the world. We create them in these fictional forms to manage our fear. We can also do it in this world. We can and we must end gun violence. Let’s change this era of daily gun deaths so radically as to make it seem like it was an alternate universe. I want our moral imagination in this area to be as vibrant as our creative imagination.

Like the Maccabees of old, who defied the culture of their time that said that destiny could not be changed and instead, jumped in to write a new story, my hope for us is that we dare to dream of a different world — and then work together to bring it about. It’s not a superhero or a soothsayer — we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Filed Under: Boston, rabbinical school, social justice Tagged With: buffy, chanukah, children, d'var torah, family, magic, parshah, texas, torah

short in stature, outsize in personality

October 17, 2014 by Salem Pearce 2 Comments

i started trying to walk in my grandmother’s steps at an early age; photo by gay lee pearce

My grandmother died this summer.

She was 96 and had lived on her own until age 92, when she suffered a stroke on the same day as her identical twin sister, who was living 800 miles and three states away (and who sadly passed away just a few days later). Because of the selflessness of my aunt and uncle, the last four years of her life she was able to continue to live in her home of 30 years, in Austin, Texas — cared for by the two of them and two wonderful home aides.

Gay Barr Wilkes had a full life and passed away surrounded by people who loved her. Her death is the kind we probably all aspire to; it’s certainly not a tragedy. But it’s still hard. In some ways I lost the Granny Gay I knew my whole life on the day of the stroke that reduced her so much. But I could still hug her and talk to her, and even though she didn’t say my name anymore, I knew that she knew who I was. And I knew that she loved me as much as she always had.

My mom is struggling with mourning both her mom who was and the one who she became in those last years. I am struggling with feeling so far away from my family the vast majority of the time that the force of this important event seems to have only struck a glancing blow. Did I really say goodbye to Granny Gay when I moved 2,000 miles away? I couldn’t make it to say a final goodbye in person, when her body began to shut down and we knew the end was near, but I was incredibly privileged to be able to organize a final farewell — because my family let me design her memorial service.

In the conversations my aunt and I had in the weeks leading up her my grandmother’s death, I asked about plans for the memorial service. I am, after all, training to be clergy: I think about the rituals of life transitions all the time. My grandmother was a woman of faith more than of religion, and since the Methodist minister of the church that she and my grandfather would on occasion attend had since moved on, my aunt wasn’t left with a meaningful choice for an officiant. (Ever the planners, my grandparents had long ago purchased a package with a local funeral home — meaning that the location and other arrangements had long since been finalized.) With many deaths, a non-family clergy member is needed, or just wanted, to hold the space for mourners. My family wasn’t wracked with grief, though; more than that, I wanted to lead the service. It’s something I knew I could do, and do well, for my family. And my aunt was trusting enough to turn it over to me.

a note from my grandmother, in her familiar handwriting, about the picture of us (above) that won a Mother’s Day photo contest in the Houston Post; photo by salem pearce via instagram

Everyone got a part — daughters, sons-in-law, nephews, grandchildren. I was in awe of how eloquent they all were in sharing different parts of her life and talking about what she meant to them. I lost it when her oldest grandson, my cousin Seth, started crying when he spoke about Granny.

He had lived with her and Papa as when he finally finished his undergraduate degree almost 10 years after high school. Discouraged by his slow progress, he complained to her that he would be 27 by the time he finished at the University of Texas at Austin. Her response is a piece of advice I’ve turned to many a time during my winding journey to where I am today. “You’re going to be 27 anyway.” Time passes by regardless, she had reason to know, so you might as well do what you want to do.

Seth also provided an important antidote to the rhapsody that inevitably occurs at funerals. He talked about a time when she was wrong, admitted it, and changed her behavior. Of course, that ultimately makes her even more worthy of praise.

I lived in Austin for five years, from 1997 to 2002, the only of her children and grandchildren there at that time. I got to spend lots of time with her and my grandfather, precious time of eating dinner, doing laundry, and studying at their house. I am thankful that I was smart enough to recognize it even then for the gift that it was. After college I moved to Raleigh, then to D.C., and finally to Boston, my trip up the Atlantic coast taking me farther and farther away from her. I don’t know how much of my new path to rabbinical school she ever understood (and I mean that literally, as she had already begun deteriorating from the stroke when I went back to school), but I am sure she was proud of me to the end.

When I was very young, she told me, “Salem you can be whatever you want to be.” As a child I later slightly reinterpreted her words when my mother announced it was time for bed: “Nope! Granny said I can do whatever I want to do.”

I’ll be almost 40 be the time I’m ordained as rabbi, but I’ll be almost 40 (bs”d) anyway. And I’ll be what I want to be.

Filed Under: memories, rabbinical school, travel Tagged With: death, family, funeral, grandparents, grieving, ritual, texas

“yesterday we learned that it’s okay to kill a black kid”

July 14, 2013 by Salem Pearce 7 Comments

Last night after dinner my husband and I walked to J.P. Licks — the local ice cream shop, about a mile away — and we were able to return from that outing to our home unaccosted. This is one of the many privileges we enjoy as white people.

I had just settled into a chair in the living room to read when my phone buzzed with an alert from The New York Times: “George Zimmerman acquitted in killing of Trayvon Martin.” I yelped. I read the alert to my husband, who sighed and said, “I’m not surprised.” I abandoned my book for the night and begin to watch reaction to the verdict unfold on social media. (I don’t have TV, so I wasn’t able to watch anything live.)

I wasn’t alone in being upset. I know there are plenty of people who exulted in last night’s verdict, but thanks to the wonder of feed curation, I don’t have to know anything about them (except when someone, say, makes the unfortunate decision to retweet Ann Coulter).

The eternal optimist in me was surprised at the verdict. And then just as quickly, the realist in me was not. Other people who have followed the case more closely than I have written — and will write — better analyses of the trial: Andrew Cohen, for one, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, for another. As far as I can tell, the verdict was proof that our criminal justice system works exactly as it is designed to do: Maintain white privilege, power, and control. Mission accomplished. (And if you’re not convinced that is what it is supposed to do, I beg you to read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.)

And from my limited perspective — and by the way, unless you were one of the six women on the jury, your perspective on this will always be limited — the verdict was probably basically right. Zimmerman was probably “not guilty” (in the strict legal sense) according to the law as written in Florida. And everything about that sucks.

Following are a few notes, in highly unparallel form, mostly directed at my fellow white people, based on the social media activity that I observed..

1. Yesterday was not “the day we all learned that it’s okay to kill a black kid” (or some variation on this melodramatic statement). Maybe yesterday was the day *you* learned that. But lots of folks, particularly people of color, already knew that. Have always known that. Because their lives have depended on their knowing that.

2. You are not Trayvon Martin. If you think that “we are all Trayvon Martin” — and you’re including white folks in that “we” — then you’re missing the point entirely. This situation does not happen to white kids.

2b. A corollary: Don’t wear a hoodie. Find another way to express solidarity. Start by calling people out on their racism. And when when you say something racist (and yes, you have and you will), own up to it without defensiveness, apologize for it, and work to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

3. This is not the time (and I actually think it’s never the time) to try to convince folks that not all white people are racist. That makes the conversation about you. It’s called derailing, and it is unhelpful. Destructive, even.

4. You don’t understand exactly what people of color are going through just because you’re Jewish, or disabled, or gay, or [insert minority to which you belong]. Nobody wins Oppression Olympics.

5. Banning Florida, and Texas, and North Carolina, and [state that has passed or upheld a law you find repugnant] is not the solution. You are sorely mistaken if you think that state-sanctioned racism doesn’t happen in blue states.

6. Vote in every election, advocate to change laws (and to prevent laws like Florida’s from being passed in your own state), and DON’T TRY TO GET OUT OF JURY DUTY.

As I went to bed last night — and slept fitfully — I wondered how Tracy Martin and Sybrina Fulton could bear this. But I quickly realized that I’m not able to go there, not least because I’m not a parent. Whatever children I might have won’t be at risk of being shot as they walk through whatever neighborhood we might live in.

As the brilliant Audre Lorde wrote in Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference (h/t Blue Milk):

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying.

Filed Under: social justice Tagged With: children, criminal justice, murder, organizing, politics, privilege, racism, texas, trayvon martin, voting, white privilege

race and the abortion fight in texas

July 1, 2013 by Salem Pearce Leave a Comment

On Tuesday, the last day of a special session of the Texas Legislature, Texas state Senator Wendy Davis made good on her promise to filibuster Senate Bill 5 (SB5) — which would essentially eliminate clinical access to abortion in the state; Davis stood and spoke for more than 13 hours, and she and her 400-plus supporters inside the state capitol kept the Republican-controlled body (pun intended) from voting on the measure before midnight, the end of the special session. Davis became a superstar in that half-day as thousands watched a live stream of her Herculean effort; social media sites exploded with their own blow-by-blow accounts of the action.

burnt orange in solidarity with protests at texas capitol; photo by salem pearce via instagram

Today, as a result of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s convening of a second special session, the legislature is poised to vote again. Specifically, the bill would prohibit abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, regulate first-trimester abortion clinics as ambulatory surgical centers, and restrict access to medication abortions. Make no mistake: This is not about the safety of Texas women. This is about controlling their choices and their access to reproductive care.

I wore my burnt orange today. If I were still in Austin, I would do everything I could to be at the opening of the special session, set for 2:00 p.m. CST. (I am super impressed by everyone who is making the effort to be there, especially since many of y’all were probably there last week — and both times probably had to take time off from your livelihood to do so.) In captioning my photo, I used the hashtag #standwithwendy, created last week and apparently still going strong.

I did this despite my skepticism about clicktivism (though I suppose I could make the argument that this act went one step further, since I took my “raising awareness” into the real world). I also later, after I took this photograph, added my DC Abortion Fund necklace, a silver coat hanger, which generally elicits lots of questions.

I wholeheartedly support the fine people of Texas who will turn out today at the Capitol. And I have grown distinctly uncomfortable with this project.

#standwithTX women

To the right is the graphic advertising today’s actions. Six pretty white ladies. (Included among them a pretty Jewish lady!)

Not only are these women not representative of the Texas women who will be disproportionately affected by SB5 — rich white women are much more likely have access to the resources to get an abortion out-of-state if this bill is passed — but this represents an unconscionable exclusion of the women of color who are fighting this fight, too. And have been. And will keep on doing. Because they have to. Because their communities will be devastated by lack of access to clinical abortions in a way that wealthy white communities will not.

This is not call for tokenism: The leaders of this rally should not have a woman of color featured just to feature a woman of color. There already exist in Texas women of color leading their communities in this fight. They’re not being sought out and worked with. In the modified words of a woman working on advancing female leadership in the Jewish communal professional world (which is dominated by men): If you come up with a list of leaders that is all-white, something is wrong with your criteria. The dearth is not in availability but in the scope. (The black youth project has a great post on this topic, using the example of Texas state Senator Leticia Van de Putte.)

And this issue couldn’t be more important right now, coming as it does on the heels of the Supreme Court decisions last week. While white gay and allied America jubilantly celebrated the end of DOMA and the resumption of equality marriage in California, many others were dismayed at the repeal of the key provision of the Voting Rights Act that ensured that communities of color have equal access to voting rights as do white communities. (Over at Black Girl Dangerous, Mia McKenzie elucidates this disconnect more eloquently that I could.) If you’re queer you can get married, but if you’re a queer person of color, you might not get to vote.

It is incumbent upon me as a white woman to say no to all-white leadership in social justice movements. Because intersectionality is a thing. Because none of us is free until we are all free, and we white people cannot make everyone free (no matter how well-intentioned we are).

If we’re going to #standwithtxwomen, as we ought, we should #standwithALLtxwomen, and that includes seeking out the female leadership in communities of color, and not being okay with a sea of white faces representing Texas.*

*And this is true at the very least because of the changing demographics of Texas, which NPR is chronicling in its special series, Texas 2020.

Filed Under: social justice Tagged With: abortion, intersectionality, politics, racism, reproductive justice, texas, white privilege

things i ate in texas that i loved

January 14, 2013 by Salem Pearce Leave a Comment

migas from Goode Company Taqueria; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

When I go back to Texas, which I am usually able to do about three times a year, I have two priorities: seeing my family (parents; brother, sister-in-law, and nephew; cousin and her husband; aunt and uncle; and grandmother) and eating Tex-Mex — which is often just called “Mexican food” by locals. Inspired by Mexican food, Tex-Mex is actually not Mexican food proper but its own type of cuisine.

I haven’t lived in Texas in more than 10 years, and there is no good Tex-Mex anywhere on the East Coast — and anyone who says differently is (a) wrong or (b) selling something. Even the restaurants that look promising aren’t: When my husband and I first arrived in Boston, we found a Tex-Mex joint run by a man from Houston: It was awful.

butter crunch blue bell ice cream; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

So when I’m in Texas, I make my family eat Tex-Mex at just about every meal. During my most successful trip, I managed to eat at Pappasito’s, Chuy’s, Ninfa’s, Lupe’s, Berryhill, and Goode Company Taqueria (my favorites). My New Jersey-native husband usually cries uncle after about two days, and of course my own family doesn’t normally eat that much. (They often refrain for a few weeks before I arrive to prepare themselves.) I’m like a Tex-Mex chipmunk: I have to store it all away until my next visit.

frozen margarita with salt from Pappasito’s; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

My favorite breakfast is migas (without chorizo) from Goode Company Taqueria (above), which come with refried beans, rice, and flour tortillas. I ate them three times last week. The breakfast menu is extensive, and I’m told other items on the menu are also great. On our last day my husband got huevos con napolitos (eggs with cactus), a favorite of my brother’s. This trip my mom did manage to convince me one morning to try breakfast tacos from Maria’s Tacos near their house in the Heights: They were indeed excellent.

shipley’s chocolate iced nut and cinnamon sugar do-nuts; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

For dinners, we did Chuy’s and Ninfa’s on Navigation, at the latter of which we saw a family whose daughters went to school with me and my brother. The oldest daughter also lives in Boston with her husband and two daughters and during her visit was also doing the Tex-Mex tour of Houston. (See, I’m not the only one!) And I had Pappasito’s at Hobby airport on the way out of town.

This trip I also managed to work in a few non-Tex-Mex local Texas food. One afternoon we got stuck in some traffic on what should have been a quick detour to get a doughnut at Shipley; my husband griped that it had better be worth it — and he later confirmed that it was. I ate Blue Bell (new-to-me flavor Butter Crunch) in Brenham, Texas, the home of the Texas-made ice cream. My parents and brother and sister-in-law and I drove there one day to meet my aunt, uncle, and grandmother, since the town is about halfway between Houston and Austin, where the latter live. We ate lunch at the Brenham institution Must Be Heaven, known for its homemade pies (I had a slice of the peach praline).

Now we’re back in Boston, and my husband has declared that he needs to fast for the next five days to make up for the excess of Texas. I, on the other hand, could eat more Tex-Mex.

Filed Under: travel Tagged With: food, tex mex, texas

let the people in

January 12, 2013 by Salem Pearce 2 Comments

When asked what she would have done differently if she’d known she was to be only a one-term governor, Ann Richards grinned and said, “I would probably have raised more hell.”

While I was at the ashram, I read Jan Reid’s Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards. I laughed with delight at the introductory chapter, and I cried with despair at the ending — at both endings. There was the end of her rather short political career in 1994, and then there was her death in 2006 from cancer.

My introduction to this bawdy, loud, wonderful lady was during her second and failed race for governor. As I wrote for my introduction when I was asked to speak during the feminist fishbowl, “Salem has identified as a feminist since 1994, when as an impressionable 16-year-old she watched Ann Richards lose her re-election bid for governor of Texas to one George W. Bush.” I remember feeling like the world was going to end that fall — and then being sure of it six years later in the fall of 2000. But here we all are.

And thank goodness for that, because the world that I live in is one that Ann Richards helped to create. As Reid notes,

Her greatest accomplishment was to bring to positions of responsibility and power in Texas the women, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, gay men, lesbians, and disabled persons who had been so long denied. Because of that, state government centered in Austin will never be the same. Whatever party wins the elections and controls the appointed boards that keep the bureaucratic agencies and institutions of higher education running, democracy in Texas is better because she won.

Ann Richards was born near Waco, Texas, at the end of 1933, and she was almost immediately ill suited to her time. She was a wife (to David Richards), mother (to Cecile, Daniel, Clark, and Ellen), and teacher because that’s what women did; she was honest even in her lifetime about how those roles made her just about go out of her mind with boredom. Even when she served as chief of staff for Sarah Weddington (before the latter went to D.C. to argue Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court), Richards had to negotiate a special arrangement with her boss to leave work early be able to cook dinner for her family. On the one hand, we should all be able to so organize our lives to spend more time with our families. On the other hand, of course Richards’ demanding job did not excuse her from her unpaid work, as it did her husband. Indeed, even as she began to field requests for appearances all over the country, Richards answered a phone call from Midge Costanza, the highest ranking woman in the Carter administration, with the breezy, “Hi, Midge, what do you want? I’m cooking David’s supper.”

ann richards at the 1988 democratic national convention

Richards rose through Texas politics as a campaign volunteer, political staffer, county commissioner, state treasurer, and then governor. (Her career is a good reminder that it wasn’t so long ago that Texas was not the monolithically Republican state that it’s now considered to be.) Her spunk brought her to the attention of the national scene even when she was just a local politician, but she became a star during the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, where she gave the keynote address. She “talked Texas” and delivered the now well-known zinger about the Republic presidential candidate: “Poor George, he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

In 1990, Richards’s first race for governor, against millionaire businessman and good ole boy Claytie Williams, is one of the most amusingly horrifying tales in Texas history — and is chronicled brilliantly in Molly Ivins’ book Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, a collection of the columnist’s political coverage, from which Reid draws liberally (no pun intended). Richards became the first female governor of Texas since 1924, when the wife of a former governor was elected. (They are still the only two women to have held that office.)

As Reid tells it, Richards tried to do too much: Her inauguration speech included 15 massive projects as top priorities. She made progressive headway in many, but ultimately, she would preside over the largest expansion of the criminal justice system in the country, doubling the number of incarcerated persons in Texas. In so doing, she did pioneer a revolutionary model of drug and alcohol treatment for non-violent offenders (she herself was a recovering alcoholic and drug user). And in her defense, she inherited a state prison crisis that had been broiling since the early 1970s, when an inmate brought a federal case against the state for violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Adding pressure to the impetus for change were several high profile killings, most notably the Luby’s massacre in Killeen in 1991 and the siege on the Branch Davidians in Waco in 1993. But the number of executions on her watch reached 48, and her only acts of clemency in four years were two 30-day stays. It is an indelible stain on her legacy that by the year 2000, Texas had the largest prison population of any Western democracy.

The book suffered slightly, not from its subject, but from its writing, which swung between not enough repetition and too much. The text was full of awkward segues that didn’t properly introduce new characters, and recurring characters were not given enough context to remind the reader of his or her significance. But as the author touched on a subject and later returned to it, entire passages (as for example, on the history of prison reform in Texas) would be repeated almost verbatim.

But Reid was a friend of Richards (and his wife was in her employ for more than a decade). The reader can’t help but feel his affection for her. Oddly enough, he refers to her as “Ann” throughout; it’s hard to tell whether this is simply familiarity, but it is certainly not customary in biography.

It is indeed easy to root for Ann Richards, who said on her inauguration: “Today we have a vision of a Texas where opportunity knows no race, no gender, no color — a glimpse of what can happen in government if we simply open the doors and let the people in.”

Filed Under: books Tagged With: drug war, feminism, politics, texas

fall . . . winter?

November 10, 2012 by Salem Pearce Leave a Comment

fall leaves in jamaica plain; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

I began this post a mere two weeks ago, and it’s already somewhat obsolete. Superstorm Sandy and an early snowfall knocked leaves off of most trees, essentially putting an end to the visual signs of fall. It’s already to gotten warmer again this weekend, so it’s still not quite winter yet. But I wasn’t sure about that on Wednesday evening.

But first! My original post included the observation that life is different in New England. And it’s not just the crazy sports fans and crazier accents. The passing of time is more clearly reflected in nature. There are distinct seasons — although I’m speculating about two, having experienced only two so far. It felt like summer when we moved to Boston, and it’s felt like fall for the past few months. But it’s not just a feeling: it’s looked like the seasons, too: a lush green summer with clear blue skies gave way to a bright, warm palette in the trees.

This is different from my experience growing up in Texas, where the seasons were “hot” and “less hot.” Green slowly turned into brown, which later became green again. But I spent my childhood and early adulthood thinking that we were in some ways faking it. Halloween and Thanksgiving could generally only qualify as “bearable,” and I remember spending a fair number of Christmas afternoons reading on the porch of my grandparents’ house. Chain stores stocked fall and winter clothing as a matter of course, but how many wool sweaters does one need when the temperature never really dips below 45 degrees (and that only in the middle of the night)? With the exception of the appearance of bluebonnets in April on the side of the road between Houston and Austin, the passing of time is in the mind.

first snow at hebrew college; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

On Wednesday I woke up to a grey day with a forecast of heavy rain, but early in the afternoon it started snowing. By the time I left school at 9:00 p.m. (after working at the front desk), there were a couple of inches on the ground, and it was still coming down. First, after years in D.C. — which panics at even the prospect of flakes — I’ve never been surprised by snow before. More to the point, I’d never driven in snow before (since I grew up in Texas and only walked and took public transportation in D.C.). I made my way home slowly, feeling for the sidewalk from the parking lot to our townhouse under the blanket of powder. I kept thinking, “It’s the beginning of November.”

Compounding the already pronounced effects of the onset of winter was daylight savings time just a few days earlier. It’s now dark when I get home after class most days (which also means that I think it’s time to go to bed at 8:00 p.m.).

So it’s not quite winter yet, but it doesn’t look like fall anymore. But at least it’s not still 80 degrees, as it was in Houston today!

Filed Under: Boston Tagged With: snow, texas, weather

return

September 25, 2012 by Salem Pearce 2 Comments

empty road sign; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)

I opened the front passenger-side door and sat down, glancing at the three other people waiting for me in the car as I shut the door. He smiled at me: “You miss home. Not just your family. You must if you’re taking pictures of a sign by the side of an empty road.”

I felt the tears begin to form. “I do miss home. Sometimes so much I can’t allow myself to think about it.”

I’ve never been to this particular place before, but I instinctively feel it as familiar.

I’m at a rest stop in Ellinger, Texas, on Highway 71 between Austin and Houston. I stand at the edge of the small parking lot, on a curb that gives way to a shallow ditch that runs alongside that empty road that passes by green fields and that seems to end at the horizon a couple hundred feet away. Even in mid-September, the heat rises from the road in shimmery waves, the exhaust from cars on the highway and in the parking lot adding to the 90-degree air temperature.

The empty road dead ends into the highway, and across the intersection the arrows of two black-and-white signs, both with “71” inside an outline of the shape of Texas, point in opposite directions: north and south. A few abandoned tin-walled structures sit behind the wooden fence that separates highway from field.

Back on my side of the highway, three signs give the distances to the local Baptist, Lutheran, and Catholic churches, down the empty road that must become fuller past the horizon. Another sign advertises pecans for sale beyond the furthest church.

Peh-CANHS, I think. That’s how we say it here. Not PEE-cans, as they do elsewhere.

Walking across the empty road to take my photograph, I see an enormous white canvas that the church signs have obscured. “Romney-Ryan 2012” is backwards, since the logo faces the highway. I wonder whether it sits on public land at the same time that I know that few will care. This stretch of highway and this empty road is red.

Small white clouds only intermittently dot the expansive blue sky, which I always think seems bigger in Texas. Or was I just taught to think it so? Would I really recognize this landscape as Texas if the outline of the state were removed from the road sign?

I am a Texan, but I haven’t lived in Texas in 12 years. And there’s a chance that I might not again. When my nephew was born, the hospital gave his parents a discharge sheet congratulating them on “the birth of your new little Texan.” Will my children be so-called? What does it mean that he is a “Texan”? What does it mean that I am?

I love my family and Tex-Mex and Shiner Bock and Longhorn football and Astros baseball and bluebonnets and mesquite trees and the hill country and the car ride from Houston to Austin on a hot day.

I don’t love the death penalty and retrograde politics and homegrown presidential candidates and heat and humidity and traffic and suburban sprawl. I’ve become an East Coast urban Jew, like my husband, and so much of my former home has become an anathema to me. And perhaps I have become an anathema to it.

Molly Ivins said, “I dearly love the state of Texas, but I consider that a harmless perversion on my part, and discuss it only with consenting adults.” She knows the mixed feelings that come with loyalty to a state that is often easy to deride as buffoonish. How can I be homesick and horrified at the same time?

In his memoir of his life under the ayatollah’s fatwa, Salman Rushdie writes about his and others’ dilemma as Indian writers but expats in the United Kingdom:

Who were they, and to what and whom did they belong? Or was the idea of belonging itself a trap, a cage from which they had been lucky enough to escape? He had concluded that the questions needed to be rephrased. The questions he knew how to answer were not about place or roots, but about love. Who do you love? What can you leave behind, and what do you need to hold on to? Where does your heart feel full?

He is surprised when a writer still living in India explains that his writing, that of a native son, is “highly problematic” in the country.

I claim Texas, but would Texas claim me?

As I fly back to Boston, it doesn’t feel like home. I like it, and I may one day grow to love it, as I did D.C. I think that home is Texas, and I always leave a part of me there. It’s a part that wouldn’t know what to do in Boston.

Rushdie calls this migrant consciousness. I moved because I couldn’t do what I want to do there. So I’m here now, and I am grateful and blessed. But the move required the construct of a new identity. You can’t ever go home again.

My parents have lived in Texas for more than 40 years. My grandparents were born and went to school in Texas – and moved back in retirement; my aunt and uncle did the same. My cousin moved to Madison after college for graduate school and then work and moved back several years later. My brother never left.

Re-entry into my “real life” has been very hard this time around. Enrollment in rabbinical school has amplified the differences between who I was and who I am. Will I ever feel whole in either place?

Filed Under: memories, travel Tagged With: conversion, family, texas

the first night (and day)

June 8, 2010 by Salem Pearce Leave a Comment

I’ve just turned 18 years old, and I am on my first trip abroad. (Or perhaps my second, if you count the spring break seven months earlier that I spent in Cancún, which I don’t, because back then you didn’t need a passport to go to Mexico, and I didn’t speak a word of Spanish either at the resort pool or at the local bars, the only places I went the entire week.)

I’ve just gotten off the plane in San José, Costa Rica. I should be at college, but six months earlier I had collapsed, a sobbing mess, on the floor of my bedroom when my mom told me that she and my dad couldn’t afford my dream of Brown University. Through my tears, I cursed the college counselor who had gotten me excited about Brown but had never warned me that the financial aid package might fall short — even after my mom’s negotiations with the admissions office.

I had earned a National Merit Scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin, where both my parents and my maternal grandparents had matriculated, and I had been accepted to its prestigious Plan II Honors Program. The award covered tuition and fees for four years. But I was 17 and wanted to get as far away from my parents as possible — not to mention not do anything remotely like what they had done.

Declaring it “unfair” that they were unwilling to pay $20,000 a year for my education, I announced that I wasn’t going to college after all — at least not right away. I deferred acceptance to UT and Plan II and arranged for my scholarship to go into effect the next fall. Then I used the earnings from my summer job as as administrative assistant at an oil and gas company — at a rate of $7.50 an hour, which I remember seemed like a fortune at the time — to sign up with a program called Interim.

Interim was a fairly unsophisticated, family-run program when I got involved, led still by its founder and his daughter. They connected me with the Centro de Educación Creativa, which accepted me as a volunteer for three months. The Centro was then a bilingual elementary school (it now goes up to grade 11) in Monteverde, a small mountain town in the country’s famed cloud forest. Upon arriving in San José, I was make my way to the Hotel Aranjuez. The next day, I would take the twice-daily bus to Monteverde, where a man named Chris, the school’s executive director, would meet the bus and take me to my new home.

But I’m still in the airport, paralyzed by the tasks that lay before me: I have to exchange money, and find a cab, and communicate my destination to the cab, and then spend the night by myself in a hotel. My mom later told me that putting me on the plane to San José was the hardest thing she had ever done. Of course, I was blissfully unaware of her concerns. Hell, I didn’t even know enough to be concerned myself. I was too excited about leaving Houston, about doing something different. It was only as the plane began to descend in Central America, a place I had never been and where I knew no one, that I began to wonder what exactly I was doing.

I don’t remember exchanging money and only vaguely recall the cab ride, which seemed to take forever (and to wind through some sketchy neighborhoods). Since I had no idea where the hotel was, I could only fervently hope that the cab driver was actually making his way to it.

I checked in — that Chris fellow made good on his word and had made a reservation in my name, as promised! — and was shown to my room. I remember the feeling of utter terror that I felt when the door closed and I was all alone in a foreign room in a foreign country. What had I been thinking?

I called my mom with her credit card and tried to hold back my tears — and my desire to beg her to let me come home again that night. I fell asleep crying into my pillow.

My bus wasn’t until 2:30 p.m. the next afternoon, and I spent the entire morning in the hotel. I tried to talk myself into at least walking around the neighborhood, but I was too scared. (It was a sketchy neighborhood!) I ate breakfast in the lobby/dining area and read until it seemed reasonable to call a taxi to take me to the bus station. I arrived an hour before the bus was scheduled to depart, and I waited, still terrified. (Did San José have nothing but sketchy neighborhoods?) The time of departure came and went, and there wasn’t even a sign of the bus. I began to panic. What if I had missed the bus? What if Chris had gotten the time wrong? What if everyone in Costa Rica was having a laugh at my expense and there was no bus to Monteverde?

At about 3, a taxi deposited at the station what was obviously another American student, and he seemed to be waiting for the bus to Monteverde, too. He had with him only small duffel bag and a guitar, and he sat down and began to pluck at its strings, totally unconcerned with a) the fact that he was late to the bus and b) the fact that there was no bus! His cool, collected calm grated on me in my disquiet. He noticed me and introduced himself. “You going to Monteverde?” Relieved, despite myself, to be able to talk to someone about my bus concerns, I opened the flood gates, confiding in him my theory that in all likelihood, the bus to Monteverde didn’t even exist!

He stared at me for a long second before snorting and bending back over his guitar. “We’re in a different time zone now,” he said drily. “It’s only 2 o’clock.”

Filed Under: memories, travel Tagged With: texas