Why we all need to think about Ferguson and Michael Brown.

I'm a white mother of an African child.  Over six years ago, when I adopted Mitike from Ethiopia, I promised (via a required adoption agency online course) that I would do my best to become culturally aware and to surround my child with diverse experiences that would instill pride and a sense of belonging in her.  I can do better.  I'm raising my now seven-year-old in Boulder, CO, so we have to travel to get to the Ethiopian church in Aurora or to Ethiopian heritage camp outside of Chicago.  Even a regular trip to the Denver Zoo makes her exclaim, "Finally, other brown people!" I've written elsewhere of the gift it was to sit in the hair salon on Colfax for four hours while two Malian hairdressers divided Mitike's hair into tiny cornrowed braids. For the entire morning, I was the only white person in sight, and Mitike noticed.  "It's good for you," she told me later.

These are the stories I usually share about parenting a child of color.  Or I tell about Mitike's own growing awareness of her difference.  Or I detail the saga of my learning how to care for her hair.  Or I recount the story about the lady who told us that Halle Berry's mother just told her she was beautiful every day, which empowered her to stand up to a hostile world.

But the story of Michael Brown's shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, moves this conversation to a different place.  When I heard the news on NPR of the August 9 shooting, Mitike was coloring at the kitchen table.  I looked at her, and her brown eyes were wide, and I chose to not turn off the radio.  At dinner, we talked about it.  "I just don't understand why, if he wasn't doing anything wrong," she told me.  None of our conversation was about race.  I didn't want to make note of it unless she did, and she wanted to focus more on the unfairness of the situation, that an armed police officer would shoot an unarmed teenager who had correctly put his hands in the air.  I'm certain Mitike would have discussed the event in the same way if an unarmed white teenager had been shot by a black police officer, instead.

It's not that my 7-year-old is unaware of the complicated ways race intertwines with justice and opportunity in this country.  Every January, her class studies Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and finds out how he utilized non-violent resistance to insist segregation was wrong.  Last year, in first grade, they added Rosa Parks to this strangely isolated study of race relations in the U.S.  The chapter books Mitike finds to read now have overwhelmingly white protagonists; the few with protagonists of color are nearly all about the Civil Rights Movement.  Sometimes, she chooses books with white characters just so she can get a lighter-hearted story.  Someone needs to write a series of books that feature a strong African-American girl in the modern day, doing normal things, like trying to be a kid in a complicated world.

Mitike knows about slavery, again from children's books.  She knows about the Civil War.  She knows about segregation and poverty (largely from her love of the Ruby Bridges story).  But until this summer, she thought (and I let her think) that all of this racial strife was in this country's past.  Surely, the adults had fixed it, right?  It was only days after we heard the NPR coverage of Michael Brown's shooting that Mitike asked me at bedtime one night, "Did they shoot Michael Brown for the same reason they shot Dr. King?"

I'm sorry to say I'm not surprised that the Grand Jury in Ferguson failed to indict Darren Wilson, the white officer who shot Michael Brown.  Evidently, grand juries do not have a reputation for indicting police officers.  I'm not surprised, and I'm still angry.  The thousands of people protesting across the country tonight are not just protesting the death of Michael Brown; they're asking for a nation-wide examination of why a disproportionate number of people in prison are people of color; of why a disproportionate number of people in poverty are people of color; of why schools comprised predominately of kids of color often have fewer resources and inferior support.  An African American woman told an NPR reporter today in Ferguson that she hopes awareness and justice come from the tragedy of Michael Brown's death.  This has been a long, ugly road, this construction of "race" in the United States, and the road -- and the ugliness -- continue.

Of course, the conversation is even more complicated by class.  Mitike, as the daughter of a middle-class social studies teacher in Boulder, Colorado, is inevitably growing up differently than a 7-year-old girl in Ferguson, Missouri or Sanford, Florida, where Treyvon Martin was shot.  She's also a girl, which further shifts the perceptions strangers might have of her.  The conversation we should all be having is not just about race, but about the ways in which race, class and gender tangle in the United States, and what we can do about it.

What can we do about it?  Well, I could close my eyes.  I could tell myself that my daughter is safe here in Boulder, and that this problem is distant from us.  But I could only pretend that because I'm white.  Because I can walk into a public space and hold all kinds of power because my skin color is perceived to be white.  Talk to me long enough and find out I'm lesbian, find out I've got an African child, and that one category -- skin color -- gets complicated, but because the first wave of perception in this country is of skin color, I could accept the tempting comfort of dominant culture.  I could say the story of Michael Brown is a tragedy but that it doesn't apply to me.  And I'd be wrong.  Not just because I'm the parent of a child of color, but because I'm a citizen of this country, and I want it to change.  I can do something about it (read "12 Things White People Can Do").  Every day that I teach middle school social studies, I push my students to see the connections between then and now, to ask questions and more questions about what has shaped and continues to shape this country.  There's always more I can do, but getting the next generation to ask questions seems like an important start.

Just now, I sat at the foot of my daughter's bed and watched her sleep awhile.  She looked so perfectly peaceful, secure beneath her purple comforter, surrounded by a crowd of stuffed animals.  I don't know what to tell her about this country I've given her.  I don't know how to keep her safe.  I don't know how to explain why, yes, even now I believe things could get better.  They do, here.  Again and again, history's surprised us like that.  It all begins with a few voices demanding justice.

Mitike's voice will be one of those, I'm certain.  And maybe strengthening that voice is the most important job I have.

On archiving difference

Image of Boulder in 1859, from the Boulder History Museum.

In my day-job role as a middle school social studies teacher, I'm currently planning a week-long study of the Sand Creek Massacre (November 29, 1864), which will include visits to the Carnegie Archives, the Boulder History Museum, Bent's Old Fort National Historic Site and the Sand Creek Massacre Site way out in eastern Colorado.  I've spent all night tonight searching the online archives Carnegie holds for Boulder County, deciding which documents and maps and photographs would best help my 7th and 8th graders understand the tensions between miners/settlers and the Cheyenne and Arapaho in this area.

When I emailed the librarian at Carnegie, she replied kindly that the archives don't hold many specific resources on Sand Creek, since the event happened far from Boulder County.  I asked her for any newspapers, photographs, reports she could dig up for us from the years building up to the massacre. How could there be no records?  Boulder became an incorporated town in 1859.  According to an 1851 treaty with the U.S. government, the Cheyenne and Arapaho were entitled to a protected tract of land that included most of Colorado east of the Rockies, the southeastern corner of Wyoming, the southwestern corner of Nebraska, and the northwestern corner of Kansas.  This included Boulder County.  Where are the photographs, documents, artifacts that record the presence of those tribes, recognized by that 1851 treaty as the people who rightfully called this area home?

The answer is complicated, I think.  Racist attitudes, differing goals for the keeping of those early records, the 1861 treaty that reduced the Cheyenne and Arapaho land to a small tract out in eastern Colorado, just north of the Arkansas River, by today's towns of Eads and Lamar.  But the silence of the archives disturbs me.  I find an 1820 account of a surveyor who was attacked by a band of Mohave.  I find the original document of a court case the Arapaho and Cheyenne brought against the U.S. government in a Boulder court.  Otherwise, the documentation is elsewhere -- in other museums, at the national historic sites, lost.  That's what the librarian told me, anyway.

I've been thinking quite a bit about the silence of archives about certain populations -- and certain people.  All summer, I read Lillian Faderman's books -- especially To Believe In Women:  Lesbians Who Changed America and Surpassing the Love of Men:  Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present.  All summer, I felt amazed that, at 37, I knew so little about the lesbian archives.  That the archives are so hidden one has to wear the right glasses to see what's there.  That Susan B. Anthony was a great suffragette and a renowned lesbian.  That both pieces of information matter, but only the former has been well archived.

To even mention the lesbian archives alongside what happened to the Cheyenne and Arapaho in Boulder County seems wrong, and yet the realities and risks of erasure and silence are not so different.  I keep thinking of what Adrienne Rich said, about how being lesbian puts us outside the norm -- into the different --  that it helps us see everything differently.  That's what I can do as a teacher, then, since I have that altered vision.  I can help my students see the gaps, the silences, the biases, the empty space where once there was something.

For what?  A student asked me today, "Why look at these old treaties, when we can't even change what happened?"  I didn't respond adequately because other students were trying to hand me permission slips, and one of them had started vacuuming, and two boys were arm wrestling in the back of the room.  But I wish I had said:  we have to be the ones who help the archives speak.  We have to create space for the silences to become loud.

That's what I'm thinking about tonight.

The tools I could give my child. . .

Exactly six years ago, on August 22, 2008, I arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, set my duffle bag on a bed and then waited for the moment the shuttle bus would arrive to take us to the Care Center.  My daughter Mitike was there.  My daughter.  The seven other families in the guest house, all white, milled restlessly around the courtyard, the living room with its black leather couches.  Our children were waiting for us.  We'd received the emails, filed the proper paperwork, paid the required legal fees, allowed social workers to interview us and inspect our homes, and we'd waited and waited and waited.  Now, we'd arrived.  Ready.

I've written much elsewhere (see the blog I kept in those first few years) about what it was like to bring Mitike home and to learn to be a mama.  I've also written about skin color and being a white mother raising a little girl with different hair and a different awareness than I might ever understand.

But now that I have a seven-year-old -- a wise seven-year-old who asks poignant questions and notices everything -- the world is getting more complicated.  Mama, why was a teenage boy shot in Ferguson?  Mama, why did Dr. King have to tell people it was wrong to segregate everything?  Wasn't it obvious?  Mommy, why did the American doctor get medicine for ebola but they're not giving it to all the Africans?

I could turn off NPR while we're cooking dinner together.  But we have these important conversations over our soup or our hamburgers.  We talk about the world, and I say I'm not always sure why it is the way it is, but I know people can make it better.  I say this even when I'm not sure.  Even when I'm planning a social studies lesson on the decimation of the Native Americans in the 1800s and thinking about race riots in current-day Missouri.

What do I tell a seven-year-old?  My white privilege makes me blind sometimes.  I feel guilty when I think, thank goodness, she's a girl.  Gender connects us, I say, and we're so similar (we are).  But I forget to celebrate her difference.  I forget she needs that, because I don't always see it.

Two weeks ago, I sat on a couch in a beauty salon on East Colfax in Denver while a Nigerian woman braided Mitike's hair into tiny rows.  Mitike sat on a high black swivel chair beside a woman getting her twisties taken out and a woman getting extensions put in.  The other two hair stylists were from Mali, and they were all switching between English, French, and something else while they worked, commenting on a dramatic Nigerian soap opera on the TV screen beside my couch.  Mitike sat in the swivel chair for four whole hours, and the women doted on her, bringing her into a world I could only peer into.  They mostly ignored me and my New Yorker on the couch, and I was uncomfortable.  Except for the pain of tight braids, Mitike was completely at ease.

Six years.  I've been a single mother for half that time.  Next year, the majority of Mitike's life, she will have had a single lesbian mother, a family of only two.  It's time for me to start pushing us both out into the world a bit more.  It's time to make myself more uncomfortable more often.  More trips to Aurora and the Ethiopian community there, commitment to a heritage camp this summer, maybe a trip to D.C.  I know:  I could relax into her regular little girl concerns:  who her friends are, what she'll wear tomorrow, what she can put into her lunch now that she's making it herself.  I think she'd let me.  But the news on the radio each day challenges us both to do more.  We are not the same, she and I.  In a world still spewing judgment on skin color, my job as a mother is to help her find pride in all that she is.

I've been thinking about how Adrienne Rich said in "Compulsory Heterosexuality" that lesbians, because they live outside of the expected social structure of heterosexual marriage, begin to gain a new perspective on other aspects of life, too.  I do not know how it feels to be the only person of color in my neighborhood and my school every single day.  I do know how it feels to be different, to feel different.  I know I need to find my history.  I know to question those who judge me.  I know to share my pride in who I am with those around me.  These are gifts I can give my child in this seventh year of getting to be her mama.  Maybe, to allude to Audre Lorde, these could become tools she could use to dismantle the master's house. . .

From "A Woman on Longs Peak"

An excerpt from a much longer essay I submitted to the Flatirons Literary Review today.  I'll post a link to the whole essay if they publish it.  

. . .The sky begins to lighten for an hour before we see the sun.  Now I can see the path switch-backing up through the tundra, the hump of Storm Peak to the right, the craggy triangle of Mount Lady Washington to the left.  Behind us, layers of purple peaks give way to the endless plains, a hazy horizon and clouds just beginning to pink.  The trail rises past the tranquil Peacock Pool and then:  Longs Peak.  I’ve been worrying about whether or not to write the name with its apostrophe, but now I see the mountain and know names matter not at all.  This mountain -- the cut granite of the diamond face, the rock formation we call the Beaver, the deceptively tranquil snowfield we call the Dove – has been uplifted, eroded, scoured by wind and weather for millions of years.  Any name a human gives it is a passing whisper.  I stand still in the trail and gaze up at the mountain.  Words are dust here.

The sun rises.  At this elevation, it is a sudden event, the world progressively lighter until There! the sun appears fuscia between two eastern peaks, and then rises with surprising speed, turning golden, warming the world.  Normally, I’d watch, but I only have eyes for Longs Peak.  The diamond face catches fire, turns golden.  Hardy columbine and yellow arnica nod in the wind, and wisps of gilded cloud move across the rounded top of the peak.  We hike onward, our eyes on the great rounded summit.  It is not holy, because holy is what people make things.  It just is, and we are here, and I am grateful.  Grateful even though I cannot feel my fingers in my thick gloves, even though my four layers of fleece and my windbreaker do not keep out the chill wind, even though we have hiked only half of our journey to the summit.

*

Many sources, including the popular book Longs Peak:  a Rocky Mountain Chronicle, by Stephen Trimble, claim that a woman named Anna Dickinson was the first to summit Longs when she stepped onto the summit in mid-September of 1873.  However, although Dickinson was only the third woman to successfully climb the peak (the Boulder County News reported a Miss Bartlett summited a few weeks after Addie Alexander), she was the most famous.  In 1873, the 31-year-old Dickinson was a well-known orator who had been an instrumental abolitionist and now was actively involved in the women’s movement.  She was also what we would call today a lesbian.  Through her study of their correspondence, historian Lillian Faderman documents Dickinson’s close, intimate relationship with Susan B. Anthony, as well as with other women.  This isn’t relevant to Dickinson’s ascent up Longs except that it is nearly always omitted from biographical accounts of her.  One thinks about many things in the long ascent of Longs.  It’s possible Dickinson was thinking about Anthony’s latest letter, her expressed wish to “snuggle. . .closer than ever,” her cheeky assertion that her bed was “big enough and good enough to take” Anna in (Faderman 26). 

Dickinson had already summited Pikes Peak, Mount Lincoln, Grays Peak, and Mount Elbert.  She’d ridden up these other 14ers on horseback or burro, and she’d rolled boulders from the top of Elbert just to delight in watching them fall.  She was a passionate mountain climber who had climbed New Hampshire’s Mount Washington over twenty-eight times.  Longs Peak would be another peak to add to her list, and, since she was with the famous Hayden survey party, she hoped the climb would help her career, which was floundering.

In The Magnificent Mountain Women: Adventures in the Colorado Rockies, Janet Robertson describes the morning of Dickinson’s ascent:  the party had a large breakfast at 4 a.m. on September 13 at their campsite in what is now known as Jim’s Grove, then rode up toward the Boulderfield.  To cries of scandal later when it was reported in the Boulder County News, Dickinson wore trousers.  Even more scandalous, she split the trousers on her descent.

*

I’ve climbed this mountain before.  When I was 14, my dad took me to the summit on a cloudless July day.  I remember my lungs ached, and that I didn’t want him to know I was tired.  I wore cut-off jean shorts, a red cotton sweatshirt, pink and turquoise hiking boots.  It was 1991.  We tried again four years later, when I was 18, but sleet that coated the rocks in the Boulderfield with ice turned us back.  Today, I’m thirty-seven, hiking the mountain with two of my cousins, both of whom first summited as teenagers, too.  It was the required rite of passage in our family.

Just below the Keyhole, the eponymous gap in the rock ridge at the top of the Boulderfield, the wind increases, the temperature drops.  Ominous grey clouds speed through the Keyhole and swirl across the Diamond face, then obscure it, then obscure everything.  My fingers ache because I’ve ripped open a package of hand-warmers and inserted them into my gloves, and my face is numb.  My cousin Anthony is wearing shorts, and my cousin Johanna has wrapped herself in all the clothes she’s brought.  The three of us look at each other.  We’ve all summited before, but we’ve also all turned back before.  This mountain creates its own weather, and it’s serious.  Dangerous.  When Anthony, who is 6’5”, climbs to the Keyhole to peer over the other side, the wind unbalances him.

We huddle in the stone hut just below the Keyhole.  The hut is a memorial to the climber Agnes Vaille, who died after a successful winter ascent of the East Face went awry in January 1925.  Ten hikers are already crammed into the tiny hut.  One of them is a shivering little boy of nine.  I close my eyes and think of the black and white photo I’ve seen of Agnes Vaille.  She wears a long, dark, loose dress, and she’s tied up her hair.  She’s leaning back with one hand on a boulder, the other on her lap.  She wears wire spectacles, but she looks young, and her neck is slender and lovely.  I love the way she looks not at the camera but into the distance, a half-smile on her lips.  She was in the Red Cross in France in WWI. 

When the rescue party found Vaille after her climbing partner, Walter Kiener, stumbled down the mountain for help, the extreme conditions – temperatures they recorded at 50 degrees below zero, 100 mile-per-hour winds – she had already died of fatigue and hypothermia.  One of the rescue party members also died.  Kiener lost fingers and toes to frostbite. 

Today, it is August 6.  The temperature outside is probably forty degrees, but inside the hut, we are all waiting for the mountain, knowing enough to respect its warnings.  It could clear, a man in bright orange yells from his perch at the Keyhole.  He waves a cellphone.  I got a signal for a moment, and the radar showed the front is moving through!  But cloud has obscured the Boulderfield below us, and we’re cold.  The nine-year-old’s teeth are chattering.  With every gust of wind, the windows in the tiny hut built for Agnes Vaille rattle.

*

Janet Robertson writes of Anna Dickinson in her later life:  “Although she had many suitors, she spurned them all and chose to remain single.”  Lillian Faderman documents the kind of single life Dickinson lived, in letters like this one she wrote to Susan B. Anthony:  “[I long] to hold your hand in mine, to hear your voice, in a word, I want you – I can’t have you?  Well, I will at least put down a little fragment of my foolish self and send it to look up at you” (26).

Whether her successful ascent of Longs on September 13, 1873, mattered to Dickinson is difficult to know.  In the autobiography she wrote several years later, she barely mentioned the ascent, since she had more to say about the part she’d played in American politics and in the social movements of her time.  Longs Peak was one more mountain she had climbed.  Her companions on Longs probably named Mount Lady Washington in her honor, giving her that nickname because of her love for the New Hampshire peak, but it’s difficult to discern whether Longs meant something special to Dickinson in the way it did to others.

Nine years later, in 1882, Dickinson performed as Hamlet on Broadway.  This is unrelated to her ascent of Longs Peak, except for the courage it took to do both.  And except that she was ridiculed for wearing trousers in both.   In 1891, her sister Susan had her incarcerated at the Danville State Hospital for the Insane.  Some sources say she was paranoid, some say she was alcoholic, some say she was wrongly accused.  When she emerged, she sued for her reputation and won, but then lived the last forty years of her life in quiet obscurity, unknown. 

*

I re-name the triangular Mt. Lady Washington Anna Peak.  In the Agnes Vaille Hut, Johanna shivers and says we need to make a decision, now.  Up or down.  I run up to the Keyhole edge and find clearing clouds.  The wind has lessened.  I suggest we go on, and so we do.

The route from the Keyhole to the summit of Longs is marked by bright yellow painted circles enclosed with red, the bullseyes hikers call the Fried Egg Trail.  It’s more perilous than I remember from twenty-three years ago, but the wind has calmed to a breeze and the sun emerges sometimes from the clouds to warm us.  The steep, slick granite western side of the great mountain drops 2,000 feet to turquoise alpine lakes.  On the other side of the deep canyon, jagged peaks snag the clouds as far west as I can see.  Two years ago, I hiked to the top of the gentle green Mount Audubon, just across the canyon, and I shuddered to see the vertiginous sides of Longs Peak.  I swore I never needed to climb it again, but here I am.

The fried eggs lead us along narrow ledges.  If we slipped, we’d die.  In June this summer, a Fort Collins man fell to his death from the Trough.  Last August, a Missouri man died falling from the Narrows.  The risk is real. The climbers with their ropes and helmets might be safer. . .

Reaching for the Moon

I just watched the film "Reaching for the Moon" (2013), an important and beautifully constructed story about the poet Elizabeth Bishop and her fifteen-year relationship with the Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares.  I'm still overcome by the tragedy (and complex sweetness) of the story.  Maybe Ms. Bishop's words are the only appropriate ones:

One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.

Source: The Complete Poems 1926-1979 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)

Lesbian HERstories

This summer, I've gotten interested in lesbian history.  More than that:  I've gotten interested in how much I haven't been told, in how so much of the "official" history has erased or edited out lesbian lives.  In Naropa's Allen Ginsberg Library, I found Joan Nestle's book, A Restricted Country, which is part memoir of becoming and being a lesbian in the 1940s and on, part fiction about lesbian lives, and part essay.  In one of Nestle's essays, I discovered she was instrumental in opening the Lesbian HERstory Archives in Brooklyn.  What?  There's a Lesbian HERstory Archives?

I kept reading.  On the same shelf with Nestle's book, I found Lillian Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men:  Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present.  This history tome examines primary source documents like diaries and letters to demonstrate that women have desired and achieved relationships with other women for centuries.  In the chapters about the American suffragette movement, I realized how much had been left out of my education.  Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Blackwell, Carrie Catt, Jane Addams -- their correspondence and others' confirm committed relationships between these powerful women and other women.  For many of these women, these partnerships lasted for decades, into their old age.

Currently, I'm reading Faderman's To Believe in Women:  What Lesbians Have Done for America.  In well-researched chapters, the historian seeks to demonstrate the ways in which lesbian life -- and the freedom from what Adrienne Rich called "compulsory heterosexuality" -- empowered women in various eras to work toward social change.  Women in the late 19th century even lived openly in their relationships with other women (not termed "lesbian" yet, but more often "romantic friendship" or "Boston marriage").  It wasn't until psychoanalysis and the cultural phenomenon of the "feminine mystique" gripped America in the 1940s and 50s that lesbianism became labeled as "sexual inversion".  Our foremothers simply knew their love for other women as a different way to be in the world -- for many of them, it was a way that comforted and supported them as they pursued difficult social reform and otherwise lonely lives.

I'm 37, and I'm learning nearly all of this lesbian HERstory for the first time.  When I came out in 2005, I searched wildly for stories similar to mine.  I found whispers in Emily Dickinson's letters to her sister-in-law, in Eleanor Roosevelt's correspondence with Lorena Hicks, in the relationship between Annie Liebowitz and Susan Sontag.  I found books like Living Two Lives:  Married to a Man but in Love with a Woman.  I wish I'd found Faderman's books.  Nestle's book would have frightened me -- I wasn't ready to hear about the difficulties yet, the legal battles, the discrimination.  But I desperately needed to know that I was not the only woman in the world who had fallen in love with another woman.

Once, when I was in 7th grade, my social studies teacher put us in small groups and asked us to write, design and perform a skit that would make one of the 19th century reform movements come alive.  My small group -- all girls -- chose the suffragette movement.  One girl was Carrie Nation (the hatchet-wielding temperance fighter), one girl was Sojourner Truth, and I was Susan B. Anthony.

No encyclopedia entry I read to prepare for the skit told me Susan B. was a lesbian.  But she was.

Was Alice Paul, the suffragette who helped push through the 19th Amendment, a lesbian, too?  The film Iron-Jawed Angels, which I love, seems to seek to deny any rumor that Paul had lesbian relationships, giving Hillary Swank fantasies about a certain young man.  Does it matter whether Alice Paul was a lesbian, or does it only matter what she did for women?  Film-maker Paul Barnes defended his omission of Susan B. Anthony's lesbian relationships in his film "Not for Ourselves Alone" by explaining, "we did not have the time to explore this part of her life."

But I know this:  we do ourselves and our children and their children no favors if we cover truth, mask truth, twist truth.  How do we dig deeply enough?  How do we ask the right questions?  More and more, I understand that my sole job as a middle school social studies teacher is to push my students to uncover what has not been told, what is missing.

As a lesbian, my job may be to be a carrier of the lesbian HERstory torch, to keep unearthing stories, to tell and tell their names so that no one forgets.

We must make the time to keep learning -- and telling -- these stories.