Fester, Fester, Fester

Picture of a black smoke covered sun, with an orange pink gradient behind it’s red orb.

By. Victory Witherkeigh

Content Warning- Racial Violence

I was six years old the first time I felt the surge of hatred coupled with hopelessness.   

It was March 1991, a day that began ordinarily enough for me as an almost six-year-old. My mom dropped me off at the private school I attended, and I lined up for my first-grade class. Instead of walking to the classroom, the nun directed us to follow her up to the church. We were having an emergency Mass that morning, and it appeared I was the only student who did not know why. As I shifted my backpack on my shoulders, I noticed for the first time how quiet my classmates were. We were usually much more rambunctious and talkative walking as a group, but we marched in silence that day. Some of my classmates looked pale, frightened as we walked. Others had their eyes downcast, frowning, and scowling at the exercise.

I desperately wanted to ask one of them what we were doing. As a school, they only required Mass for the students on Fridays, and it was not a Friday. I knew that I would look stupid, but something kept telling me that this was wrong. The nun marched us to our pew, and I spent an hour glancing around quietly, trying to get a hint of what was going on. I noticed some of my classmates were missing, a few of the girls in the class, along with some boys. The priest was going on about violence and reserving judgment, but the look on the nun's face spoke volumes. She was uncomfortable, fidgeting, and unsure of what was happening.

It was only on our way out the door, walking back to the classroom, I finally got enough nerve to ask one of my classmates why we had a mass today. Their eyebrows shot up faster than Bugs Bunny after a carrot.

"How could you not know?" he hissed, stunned and appalled, "It's all over the T.V. There was a black guy who was beaten up by the cops, and they caught them on tape! Our classmates' dad is one cop who did it!?

I don't remember what I said in reply to him. At that age, I'm sure it was something trying to hide my embarrassment at being caught not knowing something everyone else knew. I remember when I got home that day, I told my parents about the forced Mass to pray for our classmate's dad, and as I spoke out loud about it, that was when the anger took root.

My parents were both immigrants from the Philippines when a dictator was in power and implementing martial law on the nation. They fled to the United States and took with them a healthy distrust of government and the police forces. They both had seen the extent of corruption in their homeland. We are a brown-skinned skin family living in a quiet suburb of Los Angeles. I was not blind or deaf to the fact that our neighborhood and my classmates were predominantly white. There were only two other Filipino kids in my class, only 2 Black children in the entire school. The rest of the student body was a mixture of Caucasians.

Why the fuck was I at six years old supposed to pray for a man that had helped beat a man with baton fifty-six times?

This was my thought as my father explained the news coverage. It was playing the day before, but as a six-year-old, I didn't watch the news with my parents. I spent my free time playing in my room, reading, or drawing. He made me watch the video on the television, this man on the ground, unable to get up as four scary men, repeatedly went at him. At no point did I see the guy on the ground as a threat to anyone. Then the soundbites from my classmate's dad aired, and I didn't know that I could draw blood from clenching my fists until that moment.

How dare these stupid teachers talk to us about praying for these cops when they weren't even sorry they did it?

The classroom was on edge for the next few months. Tensions bubbled over on all sides. Students and their parents complained to the principal about this cop's kids being allowed to attend the school. My classmates had an older brother who arrived some mornings to find the headlines taped to his desk, asking him if he hated black people like his dad. The kids in my class found that the cop's daughters just became bigger bullies than they were before. They started talking back to the nuns in class. At recess, they would push my friends and me out of the way if they wanted to play with something that we were using. They made fun of me for being nerdy and a goodie-two-shoes. I wanted to yell back that at least my dad wasn't a racist asshole. That at least my family wasn't full of redneck idiots. But I didn't.

I was afraid of them. I was scared and angry. Their dad made me frightened of being Brown.

Until that age, I hadn't walked around, questioning the difference between how I was treated versus white children. I had no qualms when I walked to the parks to play with my friends. I believed that we called police officers to help save the day, not destroy it. Rage poured into my face as I looked at this man's kids. I hated them and what they stood for - the destruction of my innocence. I couldn't unsee the pain on the faces of the other Black kids at the school. I remembered when they stopped showing up, rumors coming down about how they requested to transfer out as they no longer felt comfortable.

How the other teachers and adults working at the school reacted to the crisis only made it worse. They never addressed us as a class other than that Mass and to say we should pray for their family. When the other minority parents complained, they said nothing, speaking they would remain neutral on the issue. As a child and as a woman living in a city burning from riots about the same crime occurring continuously for the past twenty-nine years, I still knew at six that hatred and neutrality can never coincide. Silence by that school, by my teachers and those administrators, was still a choice. They chose the easy way, the cowardly way, hiding behind tropes of forgiveness and grace.

From then on, I learned quickly to play the model minority game. I stayed quiet, hoping to be unnoticed. I worked on keeping my grades high and avoiding those classmates who were the cop's kids. All of their friends were only other Caucasians and, ironically, blonde. They became a clique of bullies known as the dumb jocks in our class - playing softball and basketball. When they tried to tease me or make fun of me, I learned to say nothing. They acquitted their father after a year of news coverage, and the City of Los Angeles rioted. The news condemned the riots, using the same rhetoric I heard tonight. Talking about property damage with greater importance than the fact that the people destroyed a man's life who were supposed to uphold the law.

 The waves of rage ebbed and flowed with the years. I fantasized about taking revenge in perverse ways, humiliating those kids, beating them up and showing them I was cooler than they gave me credit for. When we hit puberty, it became an all-out girl's war. We fought over who got to sit on the "cool" bench, which new kids hung out with us, who made the various extracurricular teams. It sounds childish now, but it was a chance I had to take away something from them, to make them suffer. An opportunity for them to experience what it was like to not get your way.

Once we went our separate ways into high school, I learned even more about the odd significance of being attached to that portion of the conflict. I yearned to have more power, distressed that I was living in a suburb and not in the streets of downtown Los Angeles amongst the people whose rage I identified with. I was a complete fish out of water as my body changed, and I developed with puberty. The tones of my brown complexion became more yellowed, and my peers often wondered if I was "actually Filipino." I was now not Brown enough for my people but not white enough to claim anything else. I was isolated and lonely. What I once proudly proclaimed as an identity of mine, I started shying away from. I ate less Filipino food and didn't join the Filipino cultural clubs of high school and college. My electives focused on European history and chemistry. I spoke more English with my relatives, answering their Tagalog, our native language, with English more often than not.

 As I write this piece, less than half a mile from my apartment, people were peacefully protesting another murder by a police officer against an unarmed Black man - George Floyd. They met the protesters with officers who began the shoving and threw tear gas into the crowd. This set of a riot that burned police cars and opened up some department stores to looting. The rage burns through the city like an electric storm. Armed vehicles and sirens pepper my background music as I type. Dylan Thomas's words echo in my ears.

 "Do not go gentle into that good night... Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

I am writing because the rage burns in my veins and threatens to swallow my very heart. I find myself impatient, tired, and vengeful as the news articles trickle past about the "rightness" or "wrongness" of violent protests. Every cell in my body points to history moving when violence was the final straw, when the attempts to reason with those in the majority were continually ignored. I feel the coldness, the indifference to those who want to discuss the loss of products or buildings. Lives are at stake. Our nation is at stake. We can rebuild a structure, that's why there is insurance. We cannot revive the dead. They built this nation off the ideals of a majority who used the cheap and free labor of an enslaved minority. 

I don't want to hear tropes about peace and love. They are empty, and that time has gone. Those changes have wafted away with the smoke and ash rising around the buildings witnessing this.

My social media has images of discussions of healing and conversation, but I honestly don't believe we're in that stage of grief. I am still angry, still vengeful, and spiteful at this system. It seems hopeless, beyond solutions and caring. Those in power seem to just be waiting until we're all dead so they can sift through the bodies like hyenas, grave-digging for treasure.

I cannot hold it in anymore. I cannot walk through the day with my head down, a smile plastered on my face pretending that the normal of a few months ago was okay. That should never have been normal. Watching people lose their lives for the color of their skin should never have been normal. Watching a pandemic then ravage that population because of how it has set them up to live the past few decades is reprehensible. Whatever the violence purges and catalyzes for us, the nightmare I have is that the rage produces no change.

Nothing is more terrifying than destroying everything around you only to see that what you killed could revive itself. We cannot go back to "normal." That normal is no longer acceptable, there is only forward.

Not changing is the veritable nightmare.

Victory Witherkeigh is a first-time female Filipino author originally from Los Angeles, CA and now based in the Pacific Northwest. Victory has been a finalist for Killer Nashville’s 2020 Claymore Award and Wingless Dreamer’s 2020 Overcoming Fear Short Story award. Her work has appeared in online literary magazines, Allegory Ridge, Bad Bride, Thought Catalog. She has her debut print publication in a horror anthology, The Hollow Horror Anthology Book #3, for sale beginning May 2020 containing her fiction short story, “Passion,” under Breaking Rules Publishing.