The other day my five year old asked why different people have different colored skin. Ready to give my best answer to this innocent question, she followed by asking, “Why aren’t people’s skin blue, green, purple or red?” Her comment was so sweet it made me smile.
Shrugging my shoulders, I responded, “You know Bella – that’s a really good question!”
Perhaps she saw the above illustration to my story The Race of Innocence (you can read this story at www.jennisart.com) lying on my desk. Perhaps she thought this question up all by herself without the above image. Either way, her simple question confirms the message in my story, The Race of Innocence:
The race of innocence stands still
And does not really know
Why the world runs back and forth
With no real place to go
The children in their innocence
In their unknowing ways
Know more than we could ever hope
In all our living days
Part of my novel The Gossamer Thread takes place in South Africa during the apartheid years. The character Isabella immigrates to South Africa after being persecuted in Germany during the Holocaust for being Jewish. Here is a short passage depicting Isabella’s worldview as she visits an “all white” restaurant where her husband works:
As she watched the white customers breezing in and out of the restaurant, and then noticed the two black teenagers outside staring sorrowfully in at her through the window, she had wriggled uncomfortably in her seat. She was having a flashback of two Jewish teenagers in Auschwitz looking at her moments before they were gassed. One of the girls had slept above her the night before her death, and she had heard the young girl praying. Please let me see Mama again. Please let me see Mama. She was gone now, that beautiful young Jewish girl. Now as Isabella stared at the two African girls pressing their pinkish palms against the thick glass, she realized that the dead girl’s legacy of pain continued. All around her in this conflicted country, the spirit of that Jewish youngster walked—a glassy-eyed rag-doll, her sallow face now russet and brown, calling out to those who had murdered her, and to those who continued to put her to death.
Rubbing her hand back and forth against her newly grown hair, Isabella silently winced, as she often did, thinking of how many Jews had been murdered, and now how many Africans were now being persecuted.
The novel deals with this difficult contradiction of being the Persecuted and then the Persecutor.
In the Race of Innocence a Purple boy innocently plays with an Orange girl until his father comes over and yells:
We must race, we must race
With people of our kind
Can’t you see little boy
You must not be so blind!”
The novel also covers the American Civil Rights movement, depicting the character Alice who is persecuted by white Americans for being an African American. The message in the novel is similar to that in my children’s story:
Their blindness gives them honesty
Their laughter gives them hope
Their simplicty and truth tells us
The human race can cope
One day my daughter will grow up and learn all of the atrocities that have occurred in the history of the human race. And as her education slowly unfolds. her child-like question will fade into her memory, replaced with the weight of our hatred and hostility for one another.
It is up to us in the education of our youth to uncover the truth of what has occurred in our history while at the same time offer other perspectives, other ways of interpreting and shifting these views.
At the end of the novel, the character Feather meditates on her journey thus far:
She now felt certain that it was her mission to take part in what she had heard Rabbi Isaac praying for before he was murdered by the Nazis: “tikkun olam, tikkun olam,” a Hebrew phrase that meant “repair the world, repair the world.”
Feather was just a gossamer thread, a sheer and gauzy feather that one would pass by unawares or step on if they were not ready to grasp her majestic powers. Yet, through her journey on earth she had realized that it just takes one tiny feather to slowly make an impact on the world. And if she was acutely listening to the pleadings and prayers of others, she would repeatedly be called upon to become part of the earths’ reparation, its tikkun olam.
Feather remembered how terrified she had been to leave her mother’s wing and how Isaac’s prayer had been more powerful than even the safety and warmth of her skin. Isaac’s soft voice pulled her downward, magnetizing her toward his pure heart that had been so wrongly soiled and mistreated. And the tiny feather knew that if she did not act at that moment, tearing herself away from all that she knew, she could not live with herself. The time to act was now.
Through the earth’s atmosphere she fell toward his pleading soul, risking everything to come to his aid, chancing the very existence of her own being to provide him with reassurance that his dying prayer had been heard and honored. For Feather now knew that if any being did take the time to pray, to reach out beyond the earth’s surroundings into the realm of mystery, her mother and all the other Angels of Prayer who were watching over this tormented and abused planet—doing their best to maintain peace and balance in a world full of hostility, anger and hatred—would hear them.
And when she had looked into Isaac’s eyes before they went blank, she knew that he had felt that even in such an unthinkable Holocaust, there was still a power higher than himself watching over him. And in the bony hands of Isabella, the feather realized that even in the most dire of circumstances, one must continue to hope and pray, for if they do they will eventually move out of such unthinkable conditions and be saved.