Kaleidoscope
I hold my new kaleidoscope up to the light. I am five years old, and it’s snowing outside on Christmas morning, like it never does anymore. Well-kempt lawns throughout my neighborhood lie blanketed in white. I turn the soft cardboard slowly to reveal the fragmented shadows of brilliant blues, reds, purples, and greens. I long for the world inside that pulses festive rhythms of regularity which I control.
A kaleidoscope is an instrument containing loose bits of colored material such as glass, between two flat plates and two plane mirrors. With each turn of the glass-filled tube, the pieces of glass tumble, and a new image appears. The patterns a kaleidoscope can display are endless.
I lift the kaleidoscope to my right eye, and the first image appears.
Kindergarten. Phill, my best friend’s dad, pulls a fistful of loose change from his pocket and places the coins on our kitchen island. From the pile of coins, he removes one quarter, one dime, one nickel, and one penny. In that same order, he lines them up, the presidents all facing me.
“Kerr, do you know why Abraham Lincoln, the man on the penny, is facing a different direction than the rest of the men on the other coins?”
“No, why?”
My parents jump in, “Stop, Phill, stop. Shut it. What are you doing? Stop, Jesus. What’s wrong with you?”
I lift my bare legs, tuck them in the leather stool, and lean towards Phill, “Why?”
Phill’s laughing, and he leans in. “It’s because Abraham Lincoln turned his back on America. By freeing the slaves. See, he faces right, away from the men on the silver coins. And his coin is brown rather than silver. See? And it’s just a worthless penny. See that?”
And I do. He is right about that penny. It is different from all the other coins. But my parents seem angry and Phill is laughing, and I don’t know if I should laugh or scooch away.
With my left hand, I turn the end of the kaleidoscope. The pieces of glass tumble over each other, resulting in a completely new image.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote in “The Death of Evil Upon the Seashore” (1956), “There is hardly anything more obvious than the fact that evil is present in the universe.” However, King also wrote, “We must believe that a prejudiced mind can be changed, and that man, by the grace of God, can be lifted from the valley of hate to the high mountain of love.” Dr. King believed that all of the evil on Earth was transformable.
With another turn, the picture changes once again.
It’s hot. July in Downeast Maine is never hot. Especially on the water, five miles off shore where we haul traps. I’m going sternman on Jayson Wyman’s lobster boat between my sophomore and junior year.
Jayson pulls off his sweatshirt and says, “I haven’t been this hot since marine boot camp on Paris Island.”
I didn’t know he had ever left Winter Harbor, Maine.
“You see a lot of different type people down there. Mexicans and blacks, mostly. I’d never been around people like that before. But lemme tell ya, when you’re heading into battle, you’re not worried about skin color; you’re only worried about them having your back.”
I turn it again.
In speech-making class at Phillip’s Exeter Academy, students are assigned to give a speech to persuade the rest of the class. Ervin’s speech touches on the corruption of police in America. Slam poetry style, he describes the struggles of being a young black man in the United States. He explains one instance when he is walking through downtown Exeter holding hands with his girlfriend.
A cop pulls near and yells, “Is he bothering you?”
His girlfriend responds no.
The cop pulls away and yells, “Be careful.”
Ervin explains how the officer makes him feel like he’s doing something wrong. He says he feels like a threat; like he is dangerous. When I walk through downtown Exeter with a girl, policemen don’t stop to make sure the girl is okay. I’m not made to feel like I’m doing something wrong. I’m never perceived as a threat, so unlike Ervin, I have the freedom to walk down the sidewalk unseen, unjudged.
I spin the tube a final time, a last image before putting the kaleidoscope down on my bedside table, ready for the next time I need to escape the white world around me.
As a straight, Christian, conservative, white male at Exeter, I have gotten very used to silencing my opinions. After all, history says I am part of the problem – no I am the problem. On MLK Day, when I attend workshops at school, I feel like the enemy. Isn’t everyone railing against me? Isn’t everyone judging me and my ancestors? My great, great, great, great, great grandfather was vice president under James Polk, one of the most racist presidents in American history. If black students today feel the pain of their ancestors, do they see the sins of mine? Can I separate myself from my history, my appearance, people that I love that haven’t moved away from jokes, from judgments, from generalizations?
Ibram X. Kendi was the keynote speaker for this year’s Exeter MLK Day. In his speech, he drew the line between non-racism and anti-racism. Kendi explained how non-racism describes one who is in no way racist but who does not take any steps to combat and resist racism. An anti-racist is someone who not only is a non-racist but also actively fights against racism. He stated that in order to end racism, we must all be anti-racists.
Today, when I see a penny, I recognize that Abraham Lincoln faces right instead of left, just as Phill taught me, but I see clearly now a president who justly turned his back on the America of his day, a president who needed to turn his back in a valiant act of anti-racism.
However, on Martin Luther King Day, instead of being a voice of change, I turned inward. I examined the endless, colorful perspectives of the people around me and the people who came before me, and I stayed silent. I only know how to learn. I can’t yet see through the kaleidoscope to a place where I have a voice.
Kerr Heidinger is a senior at Phillips Exeter Academy. This article appears here with permission from Kerr Heidinger.
Like most of the pictures on TeensParentsTeachers, the picture posted with this article is courtesy of a free download from Pixabay.com.