Alumni Association Home > Past Issues > 2007 > March-April 2007	Print View

‘‘So, what did you get for your birthday?” I asked, looking into the rearview mirror to the back seat.

“Some clothes and—hey, you didn’t get me anything!” cried my great niece.

“Well, that’s where we’re going, to buy you a present!” I shouted.

“Is it still my birthday?” she asked, having turned 6 a couple weeks earlier.

“Sure it is. I’m still celebrating that you were born!”

She opened the door to the toy store and zigged toward some funky dolls and then found a painting set for her age and older. She spotted a quilting kit that promised dream-filled naps after hours of knotting together dozens of pre-cut fleece squares. Then she zipped over to a bookshelf and plucked from it a slim volume. “It’s Martin Luther King!” she proclaimed to the entire store.

She plopped down onto a stuffed Clifford the Big Red Dog and flipped open the cover. I knelt down beside her. “Here he is as a baby,” she said, pointing to an illustration of a boy in a crib. “And here he is with his family,” she said turning the pages. “Here’s his wife. And here he’s marching.”

“He was a great man,” I said. “I was just 3 years old when he died. I don’t even remember him.”

“He was killed,” she said, correcting me. “Some white people killed him.”

“Yes,” I confirmed solemnly. I floundered for a moment, wondering whether the toy store was the proper place to deliver a lesson about wholesale injustices done to a class of people and the confusing reality of some in one group enacting horrible crimes against the entirety of another.

“But he’s still alive,” she said, cutting through my thoughts. She closed and shelved the book and took a slow lap around the store.

I had always dreaded the day she would start to notice skin color, meaningless differences, and manufactured divides. A few months earlier we were at the grocery store and while I bagged up the purchases she asked, “Why are the white people over there and the brown people over there?”

I looked up to see just that at the next lane over—one group at the checkout and another bagging their groceries. “Well, some of them are brown because they’re probably part of the same family and some of them are white because they’re probably part of the same family and sometimes it’s just random.” I stopped. Did she know what random meant? “I mean,” I continued, looking up at the ceiling, “sometimes we all just get mixed up together as friends or strangers and wind up in different groups and it doesn’t mean anything really.” Before I’d finished talking she was searching her pockets for her Hello Kitty gloves and heading for the door. I chased after her thinking it might be easier just to shrug and say nothing to these observations.

But I knew that wouldn’t be easier, or better, for her or the world that is widening for her. In fact, I’ve concluded that it isn’t enough simply to handle the questions that spill from children’s mouths revealing anew the brokenness of the world—whether about racism, anti-Semitism, or child labor—but that sometimes we have to poke through the rubble of past wrongs until the pieces are put in their proper place.

When we left the toy store that day, she chose the quilting kit and the painting set. “You don’t want the Martin Luther King, Jr., book?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “I know that story.”

I nodded, but promised myself that this conversation wasn’t over.

Shelly Fling can be reached at fling003@umn.edu.