What Is Common, What Is Rare: Why Extraordinary Events Cannot Eclipse Everyday Racism

The early August weekend that hate groups marched through Charlottesville, Virginia, my eclipse fever vanished. Just over a week before the first coast-to-coast solar eclipse on the North American continent in almost a century, my Twitter feed and BBC app exploded with too many images. White supremacists again gathered in the streets of a city less than 300 miles from my home in Charlotte—another namesake of the same English queen. Instead of considering the upcoming movement of the moon or searching out the perfect patch of earth within the band of totality, I stared at pictures of crowds. Torches and raised fists condemned the removal of a Confederate general’s statue. A young man thrust a flame before him, his face growling with chants and slogans and the shape of hate. Each time I saw that particular photograph, my shoulders tightened, wanting to prevent a shiver from coursing across my body.

A few months before, when I’d first learned about the upcoming solar eclipse in late August, giant surges of energy and curiosity drew me into an ongoing search for information. I pulled up digital maps and studied the grey line beginning in Oregon and sweeping across the land, exiting the continent near Charleston, South Carolina. Charlotte sat outside the band of totality, in the common world of partial eclipses, just beyond the sixty-mile-wide strip of land that could bear witness to a total eclipse. As a child, I’d witnessed a partial eclipse, but everything I read told me this couldn’t compare to experiencing a total eclipse. So each time I looked at the digital maps, I focused on this path of totality. I traced the band with my finger on the computer screen. I made notes of all the cities and towns within the border, a ripple of daytime darkness moving across the country in two-minute bursts. To view this, we couldn’t stay in Charlotte.

We’d denounce the torches and chants. When that moment passed, we’d continue to live with the ghosts of our country’s peculiar legacy. 

The summer prior, I’d left Charlotte and spent time in the mountains of North Carolina, breathing in the fragrant and fresh air as glorious and pure as people say. And during my time in those mountains, I wrote. For days, I wrote. One night toward the end of my stay, I stood at a podium beneath bright lights and read a short essay about being a black woman married to a black man. I looked up from my page and pretended to make occasional eye contact with the audience. In reality, though, all I could see were the images my words created: “Please, my love, keep your hands on the wheel, your registration close, your speed under the limit, and go straight home.” With the slightest shake in my voice, I read those words about watching my husband, Nyasha, drive away.

The following year, during that summer of hate rallies and solar eclipse fever, I received an email from a friend titled, An Issue of Concern. She’d heard a white person read a piece of their own work. A white writer from Virginia—perhaps not Charlottesville, but Virginia nonetheless—who’d been in the audience the night I’d shared my essay.

As far as I could tell, it was simply your words appropriated, twisted, undermined, my friend wrote of this other person’s piece. She went on, I cannot believe you would have condoned such appropriation, and I most certainly doubt you are even aware of it. She included a link to where the piece had found a publication home. I knew my friend wouldn’t lie, but how could what she said be true?

*

The obvious difference between Charlottesville and Charlotte is six letters: S V I L L E. Those six letters declare one a city of possession and the other a city of veneration—Charlotte’s city, versus using Queen Charlotte’s name to memorialize a place. That summer, I wondered if substantial difference existed between these two places.

The Sunday morning after the Charlottesville headlines, another friend sent me an email. I’m praying for Charlotte, she wrote. “It was bound to happen,” I told Nyasha during the car ride to church, when I mentioned my friend’s error.

When we arrived, my girls headed to the children’s classrooms, followed by Nyasha, who was helping in the nursery. I sat in the sanctuary, wedged in a corner near a window flush with streaming daylight. I checked my email before the service started and found a follow-up note from my friend with an apology for her mistake.

But Charlottesville could easily be Charlotte, I thought, and I knew this idea was true. I knew some people sharing this city with me and my family spoke of heritage and not hate. They talked of preserving memorials. They asked me, as a black woman, to understand how preserving this legacy of slavery was not the same as hate.

*

The last time I’d seen a solar eclipse—not total, just partial—I was eight years old. My third-grade teacher had shuffled my class out the side entrance of my elementary school in Anchorage, Alaska and handed us each a pair of special glasses. It was March. The frigid temperatures of not-quite-spring leached the heat from our bodies. “Look now,” the teacher said. The circle of the moon moved in front of the sun, leaving the sun in the shape of a crescent.

Decades later, my smile grew each time I told people about the band of totality bringing approximately two minutes of twilight in the midst of an ordinary day. I wanted to stand within that band. I wanted to be in the dark when it was still day. I wanted to see the moon settle in front of the sun, our perfect moon, the right size and distance from our spinning planet to give the illusion that this mass of rock is the same size as our sun. I longed to see this moment of alignment between heavenly bodies when twilight descended and the signs of time flipped in on themselves.

The editor told me I’d made this a black/white issue. That is unfortunate, the editor added.

As I considered the eclipse last summer, I pondered that essay I’d written about watching Nyasha drive away. I’d taken threads of my experience, stitched together images and aromas of the mountains, of an art gallery, of Nyasha’s hand holding mine. I’d formed something drawn from deep places of myself. I’d offered those words to a room of white listeners. A white writer in that audience heard my words and used part of my story, forming something derivative they’d named their own.

I wrote the editor who published this white writer’s piece. I included a link to my own essay, exposing the parallels. I explained how the other author knew me—and, more importantly, my work. I talked about the perpetuation of injustice by allowing a white person to take my story about race and use it to benefit their writing career.

The editor told me that I’d made this a black/white issue. That is unfortunate, the editor added, sandwiched between the rest of the lengthy response.

*

I often think the silver nights of August lack true rest. The temperatures oscillate between stuffy and a little too cool. My dreams rouse me from sleep long before the first hints of light. Before dawn wakens, I live in the in-between spaces of my world, the time when my part of the earth spins toward the gold of the sun, and the reflected sunlight illuminating the moon begins to fade. Before dawn wakens, I think of flowers closed in on themselves, curled in a state of rest. Before dawn wakens, whatever I carried with me into sleep the night before, whatever thoughts weighed me down then, seem lifted as if forgotten—not made new with a new day, but instead ignored, pushed aside, a momentary sensation that challenges don’t exist and that goosebumps are not truly a sign of the cold.

On an early August night much like that, after I stared too long at men raising fists and holding flaming torches in the darkness and chanting words I was thankful I couldn’t hear, I shook Nyasha’s shoulder. “Should we move?” I asked.

I wasn’t sure what I wanted in response. An assurance that Charlotte wasn’t Charlottesville, that fear was far away, that whatever we read about could not creep into the life we carried out in this city we referred to as home.

“Maybe,” he said. He turned on his side, his breath slowing back to sleep. In the splitting silence of all that happens between twilight and the waking dawn, I kept my palm on his shoulder and lay awake, waiting for the creak of morning.

*

In the days after the Charlottesville rally, leading up to the late-August eclipse, I noticed people began to reorganize their lives around a moment in time. A mounting connection with strangers built as I overheard conversations about viewing spots and day trips into the path of totality.

In Charlotte, we existed beyond the edge of what was possible, but near enough that we could go and take part. How odd, it seemed, that this unusual sight would settle across the width of the country, and we wouldn’t be able to keep from turning our gaze toward it. A moment of time when the earth, the moon, and the sun formed a perfect path of alignment. A moment of syzygy. Syzygy, derived from the Greek suzugos meaning ‘yoked, paired.’

And in a way, all of us who plotted our perfect viewing spots were yoked or paired with the events that would unfold above us in the sky. Through the special lenses, we’d lift our heads upward. When the anomaly left, the heavenly bodies and starry hosts would return to predictability, limbs of outer space no longer tangled together. Instinctively, we’d return to shifting our gaze from the sun and protecting our eyes from the severity of the light. We’d return to our lives, the sun still holding the power to blind us with its rays. In the absence of the moon’s covering and the special lenses, we would once again turn away.

Somewhere in Virginia, a white writer took something from me. A personal story that I’d shaped into an artifact. The lived experience I’d chosen to share. After several email exchanges, the editor never conceded any form of wrongdoing. The closest thing to an apology came when the editor informed me that the author of the derived piece was sorry I was upset.

Is a created work like a living being formed from a skeleton, fit together with muscles, sinew, and flesh, presented as a breathing entity with its own reason for existence? Perhaps so. Maybe what this person did in deriving work from my essay was attempt to take the beating heart of this living work and reconstruct it with foreign bits of flesh. Unfortunate, the editor had said about my attempts to address the situation. With those words, I retreated from the conversation and waited for the moment to pass. I believed another person couldn’t eclipse the heart of my creation.

A few days before the solar eclipse, my family and I left behind the scalding, sticky summer days in Charlotte and spent a morning in the mountains tugging tart apples from the arms of an orchard. When we’d finished, we drove a short distance to a little café that made fresh sandwiches and thin-crust pizzas. On our way, we passed a road named for the same Confederate general whose statue—or the planned removal of whose statue—served as a catalyst for the riots and marches. I looked at the sign and then turned my head away.

*

The day of the solar eclipse, my family and I traveled to a small town just north of Columbia, South Carolina. We parked in a field across from the town park and joined a handful of people in the shade, wandering to the open expanse for occasional views of the moon’s movement. For over an hour, we went through the act of putting on our glasses and looking up and looking away until there was but a sliver of orange in the sky. Then black. The temperature dropped, and the summer day turned to evening against my face. We stood in the longest shadow I’d ever known, the shadow of the moon across the earth. When I looked again through the glasses, the orange sliver of sun just there had disappeared. For two minutes, darkness akin to twilight enveloped us. I removed my glasses and told my daughters to do the same.

Totality. The moon surrounded by the sun’s corona. For a moment, just a moment, a ring of pale purple light. We stood in that shadow, amazed by a sight that, of course, would not remain.

And on that day, though perhaps not in that moment, I thought about a white writer in Virginia who’d lifted something from my life and derived words from the essay I’d already used my voice to tell. Please take those words down. Please remove this more than inspired work, I’d written to the editor. Still, the work stayed. At some point that summer, I realized I was weary—just plain weary—of pointing out the problem and hoping someone would make a change. In truth, I instead chose to slink away.

I knew there would be readings I would do in the future, at independent bookstores or on a college campus, at writing workshops, in places where I would be unable to know who sat in the audience. I’d flip through my unpublished work, and I’d wonder who might be out there taking notes about what I would say. What is it that we are aligned for? Why do human orbits cross? And what shadow might fall, without humility or concern, refusing to let my world return to order and predictability?

That afternoon we stood in the midst of what is common and what is rare.

That August, I believed in the days, weeks, months, and years to come, the monuments and memorials paying homage to a past riddled with the practice of slavery would disappear from public life. Sometimes one at a time, sometimes in large groups. But I still believed that in the totality of this moment in history, we would see fallen statues and ripped-down signs. We would hear voices that spoke of choosing to not look away. On a future apple-picking excursion, I wouldn’t pass a road sign named for a general who fought to ensure certain human beings lived out their days in slavery.

Despite the general solar eclipse excitement and anticipation, it’s a misconception to believe that this phenomenon is an unusual event. In fact, a total solar eclipse occurs about every eighteen months somewhere on our planet. However, it had been almost one hundred years since the last coast-to-coast eclipse tumbled across the width of the United States. That afternoon we stood in the midst of what is common and what is rare.

Days before, hate groups had marched publicly through city streets. When that moment in history would continue on its orbit, moving beyond a time of syzygy—when the vigils ceased, when candles were snuffed and songs of resistance quieted to their typical pitch—our world would still be left with white writers who use a black woman’s story, and editors who defend those choices. We’d denounce the marches and torches and chants. When that moment passed—as it surely would—we’d continue to live with the ghosts of our country’s peculiar legacy. A reality that hate groups marching through streets cannot eclipse.

Out in that open field, gathered with strangers, the opposite sliver of orange appeared, a stark reminder of the temporary nature of totality. All around, arms raised and returned those glasses to our eyes, the moon continued its orbit, and the Earth did the same. The moment of syzygy slipped away, replaced instead by the shimmer of late afternoon.

We took one last look at the growing crescent of sun, now in reverse of what we saw prior to totality. We took our blanket, our glasses, our family, and piled back into the car, joining the crowd of eclipse viewers winding their way up the highway, headed toward Charlotte. Threads of vehicles disappeared in the distance, backing the highway up for miles. Inside the cars, people surely swapped eclipse stories and had eclipse glasses and worn picnic blankets and knew that the cars ahead and behind and on either side all had the same. By the time my family pulled into our driveway several hours later, the moon had moved out of the path of the sun. We returned to our home beneath an ordinary light.

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