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March 28, 2009

Stephanie Salter: A story of memory and misunderstanding

His look of resentment as I drove away in the night rain was withering. For a moment I thought about turning around, going back into the parking lot and trying to explain.

In my mind I couldn’t get past his hurt, offended stare and my own opening sentence:

“I’m sorry, but I was robbed and knifed once by a guy who looked just enough like you, I reflexively reacted before I could see you were no threat.”

How I reacted the other night as I left an all-night drug store with yet another cold remedy in my hands was nothing overt, nothing most people would notice even from a car parked nearby.

But to a young, African American male in his late teens, who’d learned early to read the subtlest eye twitches and body language of white people, I might as well have hissed the N-word.

What happened was this, and it took perhaps four seconds:

Barreling out of the drug store, I raised my eyes from my package and spotted the young man, who was standing alone just out of the light of the doorway about six feet from my car. He was wearing the hood of his dark sweatshirt up and his inner forearms rested at his hip bones.

I stopped in my tracks and my eyes rapidly shifted from the young man to the path between him and my car, then back to his eyes. That was all it took.

“I’m no crook,” he said, turning his head away, and I could see that he, too, had some kind of half-opened package in his hands. A nice bicycle was propped up on a short traffic post near him.

I tried to recover, adopting a breezy voice that sounded like a 1950s TV sit-com mom.

“Oh, I know you’re not a crook,” I almost sang as I resumed walking toward my car.

“I’m wearing my hood ’cause of …” he said, gesturing at the rain, but his voice already was dry with disdain.

I jumped on the weather, trying to commiserate. He was having none of it. The power had shifted. He was the wronged party, I was the racist perpetrator.

“I’m not violent,” he said, as I opened my car door.

“I know that,” I said, less sing-songy, but still too cheerful. “I mean, I assume you aren’t violent.”

He stared at me, unforgiving.

I knew what I represented, what our brief encounter represented. If he had given my humanity one flicker of interest, I might have told him about that night so many years ago, about the similarities — not just in his race — but in his gender, the covered head and dark clothes, the stance, the surprise at encountering him there in the shadows.

But I saw no flicker, so I only said, in my authentic flat voice, “Try to stay dry.”

Then I closed my car door, turned on the ignition and drove away, feeling a swarm of conflicting emotions. It was such a long story to tell a stranger.

I was living on a quiet street in San Francisco near the top of a hill a few blocks from the housing projects in which O.J. Simpson grew up. For nine years I had been coming home — early, late, in daylight and dark — parking my car on the street and walking 30 or 40 feet to the front stairs of my flat in a remodeled Victorian.

It was a little before midnight with a full moon climbing in the sky. My evening had been a good one, spent with many friends at the spirited anniversary party of a popular restaurant across town.

Before I got out of my car, I looked around at the deserted street and gathered my purse and tote bag, something women alone in big cities know to do when they exit a vehicle. I locked my car and, again, from years of vigilance, curled my hand into a fist around my keys, making sure the two longest keys jutted out on either side of my middle finger.

The configuration was supposed to be good for use as a weapon on an attacker’s eyes.

As I neared the sidewalk, a man with a dark stocking cap worn low on his head suddenly emerged from the shadows in front of my next-door neighbor’s house. For a split-second I thought about rushing back, jumping in my car and locking the door. As the cops and a self-defense instructor later told me, that was my primitive, dead-on survival instinct kicking in, and I should have followed it.

Instead, because the man was black, my cognitive brain interrupted and said, “I don’t want him to think I’m a racist.”

I still had the keys jutting from my hand when a neighbor drove me to the emergency room of San Francisco General Hospital about five minutes later. The man in the stocking cap had recognized easy prey, grabbed me, told me not to scream, and when I did, slashed my right forearm to the bone as he cut the shoulder strap of my purse.

Then he was gone.

The surgeon said it appeared the man had used a straight razor. The tendons of my arm had been cut through and had snapped back toward my elbow like rolled window blinds. I was in a bizarre cast for a month, could not work or do my own hair or cooking, and had to spend several months in physical therapy to regain the use of my right hand.

Even though I soon moved to a new neighborhood on a busier street, it took me many years (and the self-defense class and a Mace permit) to get out of my car at night without being wrapped in fear. If I then spotted a lone man in dark clothes — whatever his race — adrenaline would surge through my body.

It’s been nearly two decades, but I still tend to feel a heightening of attention when I leave my car alone and walk to my door in the night. No matter where I am.

The memory is long. Revisiting the details of the attack prompts an aching and burning just beneath the 4-inch, L-shaped scar I have carried all these years.

Even if I had shown the scar to the young man in the drug store parking lot the other night, I would have had to explain the whole story. (It’s a thin, white line that doesn’t look like much now.) I would have had to say things like, “A white guy in a dark hood would have scared me, too,” and the young man would not have believed me.

We have come far in this nation with race relations. So many of our worst problems have been acknowledged and are out in the open where we can work on them, together. But the baggage each of us brings along can still weigh us down.

Some of the bags are packed with the collective abuse of centuries, some with the deep memory of a single act of violence on a summer night. But we all carry bags, and few of us travel light.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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