I’ll preface this by stating we’ve only shared one Thanksgiving with my in-laws. It was our first Thanksgiving as a married couple and the last one my husband spent surrounded by blood relatives.
How did we get here? It all started with a boundary, or more accurately the lack thereof. By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, we’d been married about six months. Six long emotionally painful months. The constant covert and at times overt fucking racism exuding from the “community” of people he was hoping to integrate me into had placed a wedge squarely between the two of us, and we’re still navigating that chasm almost seven years later.
I was more than content to have separate celebrations like we did when we were dating. I would stay home and make a meal with my kids and he could go be with his family. I thought it was a reasonable compromise. He wanted everyone to be together, still hung up on the fantasy that the two worlds he was trying to balance between would somehow mesh into one absolving him of needing to make hard choices about who he claimed to be and who he was actually willing to be. His solution, we host Thanksgiving.
Looking back I should have protested, insisted he keep his family traditions, and leave me to mine. For 13 years my Thanksgivings had been peaceful affairs. I would spend the morning cooking, up before anyone in the house even thought of stirring, basking in the hum of the kitchen and the rare quiet of the house. After food was served the children would binge-watch holiday movies while stuffing their faces. During my first marriage, half the time my ex-husband would be gone, and the other half of the time he would be laid out on the couch watching right along with the kids. After the divorce, it was me and my minions. No “well-meaning” family or trauma landmines to navigate, just good food, movies full of nostalgia, and peace.
I agreed to the compromise, we’d host. After I said yes the spectacle began. While my current husband isn’t my first white husband -or first white man period-, he is my first WASP. Regardless of what white folks want to believe about themselves, they aren’t these beacons of individualism. They are comically predictable along socioeconomic lines and geographic location.
I should have foreseen that someone who had not once looked critically at his family dynamic would steer us into a trainwreck, but, the tiny optimist that I normally keep chained really wanted it all to go well so, I let my husband’s childhood trauma dictate how we handled everything. Instead of my usual, large, affordable, and on-sale turkey, he insisted on one that was half the size and 3x the price from a butcher. “No one will know the difference” I lamented as I mentally worked out the monthly impact that one damn bird would have on our budget. “They will know” he insisted “I can’t serve my parents just any bird”. I bit my tongue. You can lead a man to therapy but you can’t make him address the trauma in the room.
For the record, the damn bird tasted the same and we had fewer leftovers due to the smaller size. Get the affordable bird folks! You either know how to cook it or you don’t, a more expensive bird won’t change that fact!
By the time the big day rolled around I was ready to be done before it even started. Everything had to be perfect. What I wanted was to be jamming in my pajamas to Al Green while cooking, that’s not what I got. WASP live in a world of social one-upmanship. Always striving to prove they have worth by capitalist standards. The amount of money they make, the type of car they drive, the size of their home, the number of vacations they take, and to where. All of it determines if you’re worthy of being seen as a human being or not. My Black ass knew I never stood a chance of being viewed as having true worth and value because my labor was always meant to be free for white consumption in this country. So I saw all of his panicked efforts as fruitless from the start, but I wanted to have compassion and hope that maybe this time around the white folks would surprise me.
Spoiler alert, they did not.
The gathering started with his sister showcasing the photos from her and her husband’s trip to Africa that they had recently taken. From there it was like watching a sad game of checkers because there wasn’t enough thought for it to be chess. She’d brag, then my husband would chime in with something, then she’d cut him off and slip in an insult. Back and forth while their parents sat and watched the show. At one point, I decided that while I couldn’t kill the WASP I could at least spray a bit of Raid, so I called in one of my kids and asked them to collect an item from their room.
The month prior, I had taken them out for an activity, just the two of us. It was pottery painting and we had a blast. My son had used my husband as inspiration for the piece of pottery he painted. I showed it off, but kept my eyes on my husband, as I gave thanks to him. I wanted him to know that he mattered beyond the spectacle he had been trained to take part in, and also that the spectacle I was being forced to sit through was getting old. I handed the pottery back to my son and he went back to enjoying the holiday movies. I briefly debated leaving the table and joining them in the living room. The issues at that table predated me and all my presence did was give them a new target to cut at. While I knew none of it was about me, I cared about the person on the other side of the table from me so I stayed.
Somedays I wish I had just gotten up. Most days I wish I had swung.
Once my son was out of the room, my sister-in-law’s husband turned to her and whispered “Tell them about the stick”. A sick look of joy crept along her face as she launched into the story. They had gone to a village while in Africa, to partake in poverty porn as the well-off do, and they had been invited into a hut where they were given a stick. They were told it had great meaning. I am still amazed that my eyes didn’t literally roll out of my head as she spoke. Then she hit us with it, that special brand of racism that only white women who wear safety pins and blue bracelets can dream up, “We call it the ebola stick” she said. She was giddy. She thought it was the funniest shit ever. She went on to say that when company touches it they say they have ebola and that all their friends get a kick out of it.
Looking back I should have swung, but we had spent damn near 100$ on a fucking turkey and I didn’t have bail money. Instead, I fought my intrusive thoughts while staring at my husband who looked like a deer in headlights. My husband’s parents could clearly read a room and the meal abruptly ended with them ushering themselves and his sister and her husband out the door.
As the door clicked closed my husband, who still looked like a deer in headlights, apologized. When I finally put the fork I was holding down, torn between whether it was a victory or a failure that I didn’t let my intrusive thoughts win, I told him that she was not allowed back into our home.
After that Thanksgiving, my husband wrote his sister a letter. He wanted to believe if she understood the issue she would do the right thing. I knew then, what I think he knows now, that she was well aware of what she was doing and chose to do it anyways. I told him when he mailed it that she would most likely cry and make herself the victim because the one thing white folks have in spades is consistent audacity. True to form she did in fact cry and play the victim launching his parents into protector mode because the one thing white supremacy will do above all else is protect the feelings of “helpless” white women. They insisted that she couldn’t be racist because she had taken an African studies course in college there was also that one Black guy she dated in school. So she obviously was not racist. It was just a joke, I needed to lighten up.
It was malicious. And no matter what sort of mental gymnastics you attempt to do you will never Simone Biles your way into making it anything other than a malicious act by a grown adult who still thinks it's acceptable to behave like a brat.
In true WASP fashion, though, my husband grabbed onto the tiny thread his parents had offered him. “Maybe they’re right”, he looked pathetic when he said it. I swear my level of self-control should earn me a goddamn trophy because I should have swung on him for even entertaining the thought. Instead, I channeled my inner Michelle Obama and took the high road. I reiterated that a white woman taking an African studies course in college and blowing a Black guy in her youth does not trump over 30 years of lived experience and anyone with half a brain cell could see how that “joke” was racist as fuck.
You don’t need a PhD in African studies to see the racism, you just need a fucking heart.
That Thanksgiving tore an even deeper chasm in the fabric of our relationship and we’ve never fully recovered from the behavior exhibited by his family and ex-friends during those first few years of our marriage. The reality is we probably never will and we both have to make peace with the impact that has on us as people and a couple. There will always be a chasm, how or if it's crossed is still being determined but what I do know for sure is…
I should have fucking swung.
Don't be like me, folks. This Thanksgiving, swing on them fuckers!
Copyright(c)2024 Rayven Holmes
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