Why I March (Or beyond the parrot trees)
Today is January 19,
2017. Tomorrow, a man who shall not be named, will be sworn in as the 45th
President of the United States. There is going to be a big party. I will not be going.
Rather, I will be marching. This is the story of why I march.
In
the late 1980s, my world consisted of a few square acres of forested farmland
tucked away in the southernmost corner of the newly independent country of
Belize. The hilltop we called home was ringed with “parrot trees” as we called
them because their small seedy fruit attracted flocks of the little green birds
every day. And every day, as I watched
the birds come and go, I would look out at the horizon and dream of a life
beyond the parrot trees.
Now, my world is mostly the ten square miles of the District
of Columbia. My children and I live in a
small row house in the Northeast part of the city. This morning, as the rising winter
sun crests above the trees along the Anacostia River, light fills the living
room, illuminating a framed family portrait hanging over the couch. It is a
picture of me, my little sister Rosie and our parents. The picture was taken when I was in the fifth
grade. It is the only family portrait that we have and half of my siblings aren’t
even in it. That’s because this was the
last time my father (Way) came to visit us in Michigan. And when we were in
Belize, well, we weren’t exactly sitting for family portraits.
In this photograph, my parents are beautiful and beaming,
like they have no care in the world. My sister and I, gussied up in our Sunday best,
look like the happiest little girls in the world. And maybe, in that moment, we are.
Dwight Sieggreen was my fifth grade science teacher. He was also an experienced amateur
photographer. He took this picture in 1985. He mostly photographed wild life,
which depending on how you define it, could possibly include my family. Mr.
Sieggreen was the coolest teacher at Silver Spring elementary school in
Northville, Michigan. His classroom had all kinds of creatures living in tanks
and terrariums. He wore sunglasses as he walked the halls. He was gregarious,
with a broad smile and a pronounced Michigan accent. He must have been bemused
by the quiet, scrawny brown girl who showed up in his class halfway through the
school year with stories of the jungle. Unlike the other teachers, he didn’t
just nod politely and say “that’s . . . . interesting” when I talked about my
other life in Belize. He wanted to know all about what living there was like.
What kind of house did we live in? Where did our water come from? What kinds of
animals did we see? His curiosity was genuine and steeped in compassion. I knew right away that to him, it wasn’t just
okay that I was different; it was interesting, it was cool.
My mom struck up a friendship with him too and soon she,
Rosie and I started to visit with Mr. Sieggreen and his family at their home.
His wife, Mary (like my mom) was a nurse practitioner and his daughters, Marisa
and Marcy were just a bit older than me.
They were the first girls I knew who didn’t play with dolls and who knew
exactly who they wanted to be when they grew up. Marisa, the oldest, wanted to be an astronaut. Marcy wanted to be a biologist. Up to that point, I thought that little girls
were supposed to want to be mothers and wives when they grew up. That was
pretty much the only thing to aspire to in a place like Belize.
When the Sieggreens would have us over for dinner, Rosie and
I would stare with fascination into the clear, quiet aquariums housing tropical
fish and strange ocean critters. I swear there was a moray eel in one of them.
After dinner, we shared stories about life in the jungle and Mr. Sieggreen
would tell us about his expeditions and adventures far and wide studying
animals or searching for artifacts. He was like a real life Indiana Jones. Hearing about his adventures was like being
transported from the confines of that small, Midwestern town and into a wider
world. Mr. Sieggreen was a citizen of
that world, and exactly the kind of person that I wanted to be: larger than his
surroundings, hungry for life, and daring to do things instead of just dream
about them. He was the kind of person who gave his all to everything he did and
it seemed that he did everything. No
wonder his daughters had big dreams of their own. I, for one, was certain they
would come true.
When my father came to visit in the spring, the Sieggreens
were eager to meet him. To them, he was a mythical jungle man who built houses
with his bare hands and killed deadly snakes with a single blow from his machete.
That’s how we talked about him, and it was all true. Mr. Sieggreen had a fancy new camera and
insisted on getting a picture of all of us. It was, after all, a rare occasion. It was the second and last time my father would
ever venture to the Detroit suburbs. As we sat together on a slope of brown
grass in the Sieggreens backyard, Mr. Sieggreen snapped away. He managed to capture the image of a happy
family: handsome father, glamourous mother, two sweet, perfect children. It was exactly the way I always wanted our
life to be – happy and together.
That’s the mission of photographers, to capture something essential
in suspended animation; to expose a piece of the subject’s soul. So there we are against a backdrop of a gray
Michigan sky exuding an infectious joy that both portrays and betrays reality.
The truth portrayed in this image is the love that was always
there. The love that kept my parents revolving around one another for decades,
even when it pushed the limits of their individual sanity. The love that tied Rosie and I together at
the heart, a love so pure we constructed worlds within it. The love our parents had for us – my mother
relentlessly pouring the best parts of herself into us, knowing all the while
that, if we were anything like her, one day we would take the good stuff and
run; my father trying, in his own way, to be a part of a family when he had no
roadmap for doing so.
But the image betrays the truth, too. Because life is never
exactly as you want it to be, even when it appears that way. Life, unfortunately,
is not like portraiture. So the fights
over money, the days when Way didn’t come home, the nights with nothing but
rice to eat, the bouts with dengue fever, the constant uncertainly about whether
we would even be together as a family or not, and the palpable, sinking,
shrinking feeling that swept over me like paralysis every time my father
reminded me how much better it would have been if I were a boy - all of this
was swept away in the instant, blinding glare of a flashbulb.
When we returned to Belize several months later, my mother
had Mr. Sieggreen’s portrait with her.
She also has a stack of books that he had contributed to her effort to
homeschool us. When he learned that we would not be attending formal school in
Belize, he made sure we had all of the latest textbooks. Teacher’s editions, so
we could check our work. He saw a light
in Rosie and I, and he wanted to keep it burning. He believed in us. I learned long division,
fractions, algebra, social studies, biology and so much more from the books he
sent. I stayed up at night, pouring over
equations by candlelight until I got them right. Rosie used the books too because he always
sent materials for both of our grade levels.
Between our mom’s tutelage and Mr. Sieggreen’s text books we easily kept
up with our American peers even though it would be many years before either of
us stepped into a classroom again.
I will always owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Sieggreen for seeing
my thirst for knowledge and doing whatever he could do to foster that, even when
he wasn’t my teacher, even from ten thousand miles away. It didn’t matter to
him that I was a girl, that I was poor, that I might never see him again; he
wanted me to see my future the same way his daughters did – limited only by our
imagination and willingness to work for it.
Over the years, he sent dozens of books in all subjects.
These are the books that built the educational foundation upon which I still stand.
And for this immense gift the only form
of payment he accepted was insects and the occasional vampire bat. Atlas moths,
zebra butterflies, tarantulas, palmetto bugs, locusts, giant stick bugs,
katydids – we caught all kinds of things because they were our neighbors and roommates. If we saw a scorpion lurking on a beam in the
house, we’d take a stick and gently squash it – then drop it in a jar of
rubbing alcohol to preserve it. We would then carefully pack it up and ship it
to the United States. In this manner, we must have sent dozens and dozens of
scorpions to Mr. Sieggreen.
I can see it now. Rosie and I, in our torn and ragged
dresses scampering through the shaded underbrush, chasing blue morpho
butterflies until they alighted on a fallen baboon fruit or papaya. Then, with great aplomb, we’d swiftly pluck their
bodies with our fingers and squeeze the life out of them. Into one of Mr. Sieggreens’
packages, and off to a life in a display case at Cooke Middle School, where he
was teaching by then.
We might have bad karma from all of the bugs we dispatched
to Mr. Sieggreen, but I like to think it is offset by the good use to which
they were put: teaching other children, worlds away, about the importance of preserving
wild places and the wild things in them.
For me, it was a way to be a part of the world beyond the parrot
trees. I didn’t know how, but I knew
that someday I would get there. And eventually, I did.
Mr. Sieggreen remains a family friend. His daughter Marisa became an engineer and
Marcy a biologist specializing in amphibians. She was just like her dad –
intelligent, adventurous, and hungry for life. Sadly, Marcy is not with us anymore. When I
reflect on her life, I am comforted by the fullness of it. As a girl, her vision for her life was not
constrained by societal limitations. She, too, was looking beyond the parrot
tress and she persisted in her quest to follow her dreams. I see her, in my mind’s eye, in the Amazon
Rainforest cataloging rare tree frogs with the same zeal that I brought to my
bug collection years ago.
Now, as a woman, I look at the little girls in this
photograph in front of me and I want for them a world where they continue to be
free to be exactly what they want to be.
Marcy was just that. And I will
always strive to be that, too. Of
course, neither of us would have been as strident in our steps on this path without
the unwavering support of those who celebrated our shared humanity along the
way.
This Saturday, I will be marching for the little girls in
the frame, for Mr. Sieggreen, the man behind the camera, and his little girls,
too. I continue to lovingly embrace an
America where girls can dare to dream beyond their world, where the men in their
lives believe in them, and where the ability to realize these dreams is uninhibited.
This is what’s at stake. This is why I march.
