In my families’ minivan, outside a history museum, pain forced me to meditate on an uncomfortable truth and showed me more of my love for my sister.
Several years ago my family hopped into our minivan and headed for, “Sweet Home Alabama” to visit some relatives. Along the way, we pulled into the parking lot of the National Voting Rights Museum. The whole family tumbled out of our van as my younger sister, Ruby, and I complained about having to stop for a history lesson.
Inside the museum, the lights were dimmed down low to protect the artifacts lining the walls, all witnesses of the Selma to Montgomery March. While I was wandering through the exhibits looking at the atrocities these men, women, and children endured for the black vote, I realized my sister was not with the rest of us. I did not think much of it assuming she wanted some respite from the wall-to-wall images of men in pointy, white masks. I was right. After I looped around the exhibits a few more times, flipping up the flaps to display various facts and trying to comprehend the weight of the stories told, I decided to go find Ruby.
As I walked outside into the sizzling Alabama sunshine, I saw my family's minivan through the spots exploding across my eyes. The van was unmistakable with a dent rivaling the Grand Canyon across one side, and its bumper covered in a collage of bumper stickers and spray paint in an attempt to camouflage the duct tape binding the whole car together. When I reached the van I found Ruby sitting still and silent. The first words to escape my mouth were, "Are you okay?" though I could see clearly the answer in her face. It was weary from all the emotion she could not express in words. Tears started dribbling down her cocoa-tinted cheeks. Soon those few drops turned into a shoulder-shaking, head-buried-in-a-blanket, gut-wrenching storm. My arms reached out awkwardly to embrace her while I tried to give reassurance with the automatic phrases, "Everything will be okay,” and “I understand." In that moment though, I realized that I would never be able to truthfully say the simple words, "I understand." Try as I might to imagine, I would never understand. I could not understand what it means to be black. My eyes could not understand how traumatic it was for my sister’s eyes to view images of people being persecuted simply because they shared her skin color. My feet could not understand how difficult it was for hers to walk through these stories among her pale as pale could possibly be, adopted family.
That comprehension sent an ache through my body: an ache worse than my teeth crashing into wood, worse than seeing a lifeless bird laying askew in the snow, worse than forgetting a death only to remember it upon waking. The pain coursed through me with every violent sob that met my ears. Family members are meant to be the people who, no matter the distance, no matter the change, no matter the tension, at least understand what you have been through because it is also their experience.
I do not have a fairytale remembrance of what happened next. We did not have an in- depth talk on race and family. We did not say much of anything. Ruby eventually calmed down and life went on as it had before.
Looking back on this event though, I have realized something else. Though no, I cannot understand what my sister feels, the pain I felt then would not have been there six years before when she was first adopted. She was not my sister yet; she was a small stranger with a wild mane of hair who was living in what I thought of as my home. Somehow though in the midst of our almost daily quarrels, Parks and Recreation marathons, and awkward rap battles this girl has worked her way into my deepest affections and I into hers. The love between us covers the cavern of misunderstanding; of course there are rips and tears in the covering but it stills remains taunt.
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