Blanketed
In Hillsborough, North Carolina, when it’s winter, the snow falls heavily and steadily. It disguises the natural slopes of Earth in an icy thick blanket. Every staircase is frozen over in a shield of slippery ice. It covers and impedes any aspiration of inclination among any toe that dares to tread the road frozen over, yet significantly traveled. To open my eyes is to blind me with these whimsical ultralight beams I can’t quite concede, so blinding, she thinks. This phenomena occurring to a little girl from South Georgia who had only seen snow once, one inch off the ground, melting immediately due to the sweltering sun that holds the promise of day, is transcendental. The ground, air, and those flakes – too tiny to see but too cold to avoid – aren’t the only thing covered by the weight of blanketed snow; the entire city is overrun with it, minus the occasional trailer park or project duplex with dark splotches of life. The tiny town of Orange County is something like a suburb with only the natives knowing where their next meal will come from and spreading their frosty authority into black homes givin’ their intonations from the frosts, opposite the sun, of course.
Not just black homes, but my home, she thinks while crumbling under the innumerable weight of millions of snow-flakes, but no, she’d only see one big blanket supposedly dented by the 36% of the minority population of this terribly cold County. The influence of the snowfall presented itself in so many daunting ways, from Klan parades to child protective service raids. Engulfed with the absence of the free flow of blizzard storm air and without a blanket of comfort, was the existence of a small child living on a hill in a place totally unknown to her. Drugs infested her neighborhood, catching hold of anyone it could grasp, and it paralyzes their mind. This phenomenon swept up her mom, leaving the child and her siblings as prey to the hateful flurry of the locals and indoctrinated self-hate.
The avalanche of influence first poured in as the welfare consumed what little hope of escape she had. It followed with her dreams of a happy family slowly melting in conversations with guidance counselors, asking her single mother in confidence, “Who’s with the child when you’re away?”
As she’d mutter “no one,” under her breath, no one would hear her either. So began the dwindling of light she once had turned into sorrow at the threat of losing what little family she had left. Over time they began not to care about just one little splotch in their perfect and pure society. She had one less thing to fear, she thought engulfed with the false security of societal invisibility. Still the snow persisted, and the matter of her denial’s liquidity became like ice, just like the cold water that flowed into her house. Along with it came the chilling winter air because they couldn’t afford the heat, and so she’d stolen the water from the abandoned crack house next door.
The winter passed, but the pressure of the snow remained because, as spring came, so did the most frightening event a young child could ever see. She looked out of her low window from the couch to see a little black doll on a crucifix, but that little doll didn’t look like her or an odd incarnation of Christ. An anonymous black body was charred beyond recognition and in the hands of a man in a long white robe hooded with a pointy tip.
She remembers not having a clue what she was looking at but feeling this intense pit at the bottom of her stomach and unexplainable fear. Then hearing her babysitter say, “They can’t make us leave, they’re just men in hoods.” Why do they want us to leave? Is it because of the child? She’d constantly think to herself as she sank into the couch and shut her eyes until she convinced herself she was asleep…she slept for years. The Ku Klux Klan has been operating since 1885, but until that Spring in 2015, she had never seen them in action. Their existence was as chilling as they intended it to be for a little brown girl who’d never seen hate in its purest form.
It was as if they poured it down and left it on the same streets she’d walked every day since she moved to Hillsborough, and that hatred locked them in their home for 24 hours with no News broadcast telling them they probably should take cover from the storm. The month of new beginnings coated itself in a thick block of snow like a little girl blanketed in a back room. She constructed it with fear of being unable to to leave her home, bitten by the cold. The calmness of the cold froze over her in a panic of her innocence being stolen, she thought she would never see the everyday white person the same. Because, in the mass of hateful marchers, she saw a man that she had seen at the library every visit. She was always interested in the secrets books held because she couldn’t read the best.
When she saw him then, the typical rosy blush on his cheeks was hidden behind the white blanket of hate he had put away the rest of the year. All that was exposed of him was his eyes, and behind them was no greeting, but instead, an icy shield demanding we leave or never live in peace. All she knew was that she wasn’t allowed to go to the library anymore, at least not alone. The blossom of a spark had enveloped her, and with the coming of the spring, a new outlook on the world began to appear to her. Those rosy cheeks of a sinister smile came to look more like fear than happiness. Her smile began to dwindle. I don’t think she smiled until she moved back to Georgia months later.
I guess those frightened men disguised as defenders of snow got what they were demanding, but with that, they pushed away the only light that the neighborhood of sorrows had left. After the last declined call from shelters for single mothers running from this thing or another, her mother gave up her inquisition for a freed mind. When she moved back with her three babies and one in the oven. Later the child found out from her mother, that the house the family survived in was condemned for not having the adequate structure to insulate it. This meant the cold couldn’t get to any black families ever again in the wondrous imagination of a little black girl.
The funny thing about snow is that thousands of flakes form a formidable shield that withstands the heat of light by refracting it back into the atmosphere. Just as one Klansman wouldn’t hide under his cloak because he’d stand out like a glacier on an open sea. Instead he might disguise his dismay in his cheery display of cherry cheeks and blur his face with the numbers of his men. There underlies a grin that would scare the bogeyman himself. This is because, like the snowfall of politics, there is power in numbers. Even in a “terrorist” organization like the Ku Klux Klan, there is some form of order, even if they do give her the chills.
Also, normal terrorists don’t often hide in plain sight like arctic foxes – well, in uniforms. The branch of the Loyal White Knights based in North Carolina is said to be the most active group in the Klan recently, which means even though she only recognized one person under the cloak, many more of them were just everyday people that spread hate in their free time. All that passive hatred she’d never seen before was plastered all over that scary day in the spring. The frost was formally hidden in the breeze coming out as ice, threatening to push through the sun as it barely peaked above the cool, dense clouds.