Kimberly Emerson

It’s done, for now.

For thirty-eight days (not that I kept track), I worked on editing my novel, Perfectly Acceptable Woman.  At last, I decided I’d done all I could do, and sent it out for some agents to review.  A friend at work asked, “What happens after this?” I told her that I didn’t know, but I couldn’t wait until I could enlighten her.

While I sat, glued to my computer screen, my friends tried to lure me back into the outside world.  My response to almost every invitation was the same: “Let’s do that in November, when I’m finished editing!”  As a result, November has turned into my most social month for some time.  This past weekend, I ended up with three evenings of entertainment back to back (to back).  In some ways, the evenings were similar, and in other ways wildly different.  Each involved dinner and a show with a dear friend.  Each required me to drive for at least an hour.  (Okay, Saturday I got away with fifty minutes, but that was as good as it got.)  Each night saw me getting home later than usual.  After those facts, the roads diverged.

I tried writing a column describing all three nights, but had too much to say.  So, here goes: a three evening extravaganza in three blogposts.

THURSDAY NIGHT
I picked Diana up at 5:15 p.m., and we headed up to Hollywood to see a screening of Twelve Years a Slave.  As a SAG (Screen Actors Guild, for the layfolk) member, she occasionally gets cool perks.  (Since getting into SAG requires a wrinkle in the fabric of the universe, the achievement darn well better come with fringe benefits.)  She got both of us into the movie for free (no sneaking in the exit required) and the evening featured a talk-back with the director and two lead actors afterwards.  Unfortunately, we needed to be at the theater by 6:30.  AT this time of day, traffic in Hollywood looks like the entire county decided to participate in a reverse Grand Prix, vying to see who can go the slowest.  We made it to the Arclight Theater in time for the screening, but our dreams of dinner turned into hot dogs and popcorn from the snack bar.  (The hot dog was tasty, but starvation may have influenced my palate.)

Not my photo, obviously, but a movie you all should see. Immediately.

The movie ran over two hours, showing in detail how despicable humankind can be.  (Women came off no better than men in this particular narrative, I assure you.)  A couple of times, I snapped my eyes shut and coiled into my seat so that I wouldn’t have to watch the beatings anymore.  We humans have a mind-boggling capacity for de-humanizing each other in order to feel superior.  Want to take take out your anger on someone else?  Just point out to a group why they’re not like you, and tell them that this gives you the right to do whatever the hell you want.  You’re a different color, the opposite sex, you worship in an alternate way, you sleep with someone that I’m not attracted to.   Any excuse will do.  Then for good measure, tell them that you do this unspeakable violence in the name of God.  That’s the best part.

The one good thing – the ONLY good thing – about watching this kind of depravity is that is reminds you how small most of your problems are.  Not many worries stack up to the desolation of ritual rape condoned by the society around you.  If you get to leave the theater and go home to a place where no one has ever threatened to hang you from the nearest tree with the full consent of the authorities, you’re going to feel pretty good about your life.

I witnessed a variety of quality events this weekend, but when I told people about them later, this was the one our discussions kept coming back to.  (Big surprise, I know.)  It’s easy to feel superior about this, looking back from the safe distance of a hundred and fifty years.  We have a black man in the White House now, right?  Black and white people can marry and have children (except according to that one church in Appalachia, and maybe a few more that haven’t made the rounds on Facebook).  Slavery is illegal.  We don’t let anyone chain another human being up and beat them.  Well…we don’t let them do it in public.  Everyone knows that there are still sweatshops in the world, where people work insane hours for pennies and only get bathroom breaks on alternate Thursdays.  But come on – how else am I supposed to be able to buy cheap sneakers?

We have a ways to go yet, before we can stop cringing at our world.

My friend Paul challenged me to look at what people of the future might find repulsive about our own age.  The debate over marriage equality, I responded immediately.  A hundred years from now, people will say of course you should marry who you want, and wonder what all the fuss was about.  Sure, he told me, but what about things that weren’t that obvious?  We brainstormed.

Football.  Boxing.  Perhaps someday people will find it barbaric that we watched games that would cause the players such severe medical problems later on.

Trash.  Future generations will scratch their heads at our insane habit of setting aside valuable property for the sole purpose of holding garbage.  Did we think it was magically going to turn itself into a garden at some point?  Hopefully, five hundred years from now they’ll have learned how to turn manufacturing into a cycle, instead of a one-way trip to uselessness.

Twelve Years a Slave will sweep the Oscars, unless I miss my guess, and for good reason.  There isn’t a weak performance to be seen.  The story is compelling, based on a book by Solomon Northrup, one of the only African-Americans ever to be kidnapped and eventually regain his freedom through legal channels.  At the talk-back after the show, director Steve McQueen (the other one) pointed out that we all read about Anne Frank in high school, but no one reads about Solomon Northrup.  We should.  We need to learn about the world of slavery from a firsthand account – take a walk in the slave’s shoes bare feet and experience the callouses and blisters.  We need to realize that this isn’t just an American problem, it’s a global one.  As the European director and actors pointed out, the entire world was changed by the slave trade.  The effects didn’t stop here just because we were late in the game to outlaw it.  We need to understand that many of our society’s current problems started centuries ago, and complex problems may require complex solutions.

I went home that night and snuggled up with my cat.  Lying in bed, on my expensive mattress, under my soft duvet, staring at the roof that kept me from wind and weather, I felt privileged and sad.  My nephews deserve a world with a better history than this one can give them.

I can’t change anything that happened before.  All I can do – all any of us can do – is to remember our past and learn from it.  Maybe then we can give our children a better future.

This experience was rough for Kimberly and Zoe both.  As a cat, Zoe is indifferent to the woes of history, but she doesn’t like seeing Kimberly sad. 

Tags: film, history, racism, Screen Actors Guild, slavery, Steve McQueen, Twelve Years a Slave, violence