Nobody's Property

According to the nonprofit California Against Slavery, seventy percent of slaves worldwide are now women; fifty percent are children. Human trafficking is now tied with weapons sales, and second only to the drug trade, in terms of profitability in the illicit global marketplace. What surprised me most when I met with Eduardo, Javier, Daena, Gaby, Laura, and Blanca was to learn that San Francisco is now a bustling center of trade in humans. Our conversation took place on Thursday, May 20, 2010.

Music by airtone: sometimes instrumental mix; and Alex Beroza: Be Free, featuring kCentric; both from ccMixter. Visit Creative Commons to view the license under which these works are used.

On Wednesday, May 19, 2010, I sat down with Marcela, Donaciano, Anet, Rocio, and Maria to discuss Arizona Senate Bill 1070, the widely protested new law requiring proof of citizenship or resident status on demand from peace officers or other government agents in that state. What emerged was a coversation about identity, aspiration, and the economic cycles that regularly make restrictive and discriminatory immigration policy the order of the day. Our talk inspired me to read the actual text of the law and think about the tricky language it uses to skirt the charge of racism. It also reminded me, once again, that when we talk about 'immigrants' or 'aliens' we are talking about people.

Music by airtone: sometimes instrumental mix; PhinkTink: el ciclo; both from ccMixter; and by Eternal Blue Moon: Mother; from Jamendo. Visit Creative Commons to view the license under which these works are used.

In Tübingen the houses sit along the River Neckar like nineteenth-century ladies on lounge chairs with flowing skirts and big hats: they look comfortable and bourgeois and unassailable. Like most of Germany. From the bridge over the river you can see a tower, painted yellow now, where the poet Hölderlin went crazy for 36 years: a long, slow burn that might, in other circumstances, be called life. This is where he wrote these words, which I found quoted by Paul Auster in The Invention of Solitude:

The lines of life are as various as roads or asThe limits of the mountains are, and what we areDown here, in harmonies, in recompense,In peace for ever, a god will finish there.

On the opposite side of the river is a park where I walked with my father under plane trees two hundred years old.

Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

Charles had given us maps and a police report when we visited him in Oklahoma City. He pulled out one map, of Hardheim and its surroundings, and pointed. “This is where Jennifer was…uh…murdered,” he told us. At the time, I wondered if his hesitancy over the word indicated uncertainty. But later I found that I, too, was reluctant to say it: murder. Not an easy word.

We had this itinerary we’d been given: Jennifer’s last stops on this earth. Did we think visiting them would make sense of things? I tried to tell myself we were on a kind of pilgrimage, which made it sound okay, even more than okay: important. Dignified. There were stations we had to visit. The first was Münchingen—the place where a truck driver had let Jenny off before first light on a cold November morning. The place where she drank a cup of coffee.

Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

We had our money out to pay the Lufthansa flight attendant for our drinks—my no-name red wine and Dad’s Glenlivet—and when she moved on without even looking at the fold of bills in Dad’s hand we were practically giddy. Free drinks! It made being stuck in a metal and plastic capsule for eleven hours seem worth it.

The flight attendant, a slim German woman with blond hair gathered expertly into a chignon, must have thought us such rubes. We didn’t care. Salt of the earth! Thankful for small favors! Not taking ourselves too seriously, over here in seats 34 A and C; able to live with light irony.

Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

“I’ve been thinking about a trip to Germany,” my father says on the phone one day. “I’m thinking I need to start thinking about Jenny in a new way.”

I’ve been thinking that too. And my father: the first thirty years of our time together are over; what are the next thirty going to be like?

What will we do in Germany? I’ve thought of going by myself, trying to find some things out. I see myself in a room with a man who was the last person to see Jenny alive. Did he kill her? Or did he just leave her by the side of the road? All these years I’ve waited for Jenny to haunt me, but she’s just kept her peace. That’s a nice way to think about it, that she’s out there somewhere keeping to herself (‘she is just away’). I know it’s not true; I know she’s gone. But him? He was a young guy in 1971. Odds are he’s out there.

He’s the one who’s been haunting me.

Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

Do you think you are free to live your life? We try to tell ourselves that the worst won’t happen, that we can leave the doors of our lives unlocked and the crazies won’t come through them, or if they do we can talk them down. We search the papers for the reasons behind the senseless murder—the plot. How can we still be doing this?

I grew up with the plot in my head: Jenny died hitchhiking. That was the “reason.” That was the “plot.” Her parents sent her there. That was the “pathos,” the “hook.” And so there were ways to prevent dying, to make sure it didn’t happen to you. There were rules to being safe, rather than dead, and these rules chiefly applied to women, because—let’s face it—women who don’t follow the rules don’t deserve to live.

Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry Go to sleepy little baby. When you wake, you will find All the pretty little horses.

Dapples and grays, pintos and bays All the pretty little horses.

Way down yonder, in the meadow, Poor little baby, crying “mama”. Birds and the butterflys flutter ‘round his eyes. Poor little baby crying “mama”.

Hush-a-bye....

Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

Sorry for the crazy German accent!

A few years ago, my father told me the story of how my Aunt Jenny's remains were shipped back to be put into different ground. Dad called me from Oklahoma to describe how my grandmother Edith stood by while workers dug up the urn from under the small brass marker that barely wrinkled the surface of the grass in Oak Park Cemetery. They opened the urn; Edith looked inside. I could see her standing there, in a tasteful suit and stockings and pumps, her light hair neatly and stiffly styled, bowing her head to see. “There were actually quite large bone fragments mixed with the ashes," Dad said. The urn was too heavy for Edith to take on the plane from California to Oklahoma. So she shipped it U.P.S. Ground.

Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

Some names may have been changed; I can't really remember.

After my father stopped living with Mom and me, he spent his nights in his woodshop, in the lemon packing house that my grandfather Charles owned. The remains of the citrus groves still grew all around us in Claremont, and an old guy sold wooden crates of local lemons off the loading dock of the packing house: the sole survivor. When I visited my dad's shop there, I was afraid to go to the bathroom, because it was all the way on the other side of the packing house, and the big, scarred wood floor seemed huge, while the hollow building seemed to whisper to me as I crossed it. The packing house sat on the old Santa Fe line, and freight trains would rumble past at random intervals during the day and night. Eucalyptus trees marched straight down the railroad right-of-way, and stony, stubbly fields and a few scattered industrial buildings stretched on either side of them. One night, somebody wandered in from the tracks and, while my dad slept nearby, robbed his jeans.

Music by Kristin Hersh: kristinhersh.cashmusic.org or www.kristinhersh.com

You can view some pictures of fieldstone structures just down Base Line from my old house. Seven blocks to paradise.