Jenny Torres Sanchez
I was in seventh grade and late for the bus again. I was wearing light pink jeans as I ran across my front yard on a rainy morning, just barely making it on to the bus, and collapsed in my seat. Another fine morning.
When I got to school, my friend yelled, “Jenny! You have a bunch of crap all over your jeans!” She pointed and laughed as others turned to look at me. Sometimes I wondered why that girl and I were friends.
I rushed to the bathroom and saw how splattered and stained my jeans were with mud. I was angry and I started to cry. I didn’t like to cry, and definitely not at school. But it was too much, and I guess I cried in a way that my friend knew wasn’t really about my jeans.
Later that day, the school guidance counselor called me into his office. It was a small, claustrophobic room. Maybe that was part of the reason I didn’t tell him my father was being chased by Ku Klux Klan members. Maybe that’s why I didn’t tell him that in that very moment, while we sat in his tiny office and he looked at me curiously and asked me questions, a group of men could be beating my father to death.
I sat on a small leather couch.
“Someone said they were worried about you,” he said.
My friend who was sometimes mean and sometimes nice came to mind. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Is something bothering you these days, Jenny? Anything you want to talk about?”
“No.”
He tried several times, rephrased questions, tried different angles. But I shot him down each time. And when he told me to please come back if I ever wanted to talk, I knew I never would. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
In the weeks before I found myself on that leather couch, I sat on the floor of my living room with my older sister and baby brother because my parents had gathered us together. My sister and I exchanged looks. We knew something was up. We’d never been gathered like this before. We didn’t have family meetings or family game nights. Something was wrong.
My father looked at us and proceeded to tell us he wouldn’t be home regularly. As an interstate trucker who ran routes up and down the East Coast, he was hardly home as it was, but his schedule did bring him home at least a couple days a week. But now, he said, he would be home even less.
“Why?” we asked.
“There’s a problem,” he said. He didn’t want to tell us, but he also needed to explain his absence. He didn’t want to scare us, he said, but he wanted to tell us the truth. So, my dad explained to us about the men who were following him. “They tell me they’re in the KKK. I think it’s better if I don’t come home. I don’t want them to know where we live. I lose them before I come here, but it’d just be safer not to come home as much. They keep finding me on the road again.” I could see him trying to stay strong and calm for us. But underneath it, I saw fear.
I looked at my sister. I always looked to her. And she looked worried.
My dad told us about the trucker who’d been asking for directions over the CB radio in Spanish because he didn’t speak English and was trying to find the warehouse where he had to make a delivery. My father had given him directions in Spanish even though some other truckers told him to Shut up! Speak English! Go back to your own country! Grown men were upset over my father’s kindness and willingness to help. Grown men decided to terrorize him because of it.
Truckers often run the same routes. They sometimes travel together. The men who heard my father were near him. They figured out what truck he was driving, and they began following him, not just that day, but repeatedly. You can’t hide an eighteen-wheel semitruck or easily lose someone who is following you. And you can’t follow someone very well when you’re in a semi, so eventually these men abandoned their own trucks, their own livelihoods, so they could more easily and stealthily play their game and follow my father in cars and vans. I wondered what kind of hate would make you put aside your own livelihood to terrorize someone else. At that age, I had underestimated how much hate people had. I had seen hate in school, sure, but I never felt like I would be killed over it. Years later, my dad told us about the kinds of things they said to him over and over again on the CB radio, the things they threatened to do to him, to his body, to us, his wife and children. For months they did this while we wondered if he was safe. I would sometimes imagine him being cornered somewhere. I’d think of him in his truck, afraid to sleep even after hours and hours of being on the road. Or worse, being dragged from sleep when they finally spotted his truck in a rest area.
My dad grew up with certain notions of how men should be—tough, showing little to no vulnerability or pain or emotion. The only time I had seen him cry was at his father’s funeral. And even then, there were only a few tears that slid down his stern, stoic face. But the day he told us about what was happening, my father’s eyes filled up with tears. It scared me because it signaled to me the severity of the situation.
“Jenny, is something bothering you these days?” I stared at the guidance counselor’s black dress socks and loafers.
“No.”
My family was private. I think this is why I didn’t say a word to that counselor. My parents had an aversion to sharing any of our problems with anyone else, and so the attitude in my house was always you handle your own problems. I also think the prejudice and hate my parents suffered as immigrants made them raise us to trust only each other. What happened to us and our family was no one else’s concern. Maybe I worried that if I told what was going on, it would put my father in more danger. So I kept it to myself.
“Can’t the police help?” I remember asking my dad. He shook his head. “They won’t do anything, not unless something happens. Besides . . .” He didn’t finish or express his distrust of law enforcement, but I sensed it. Besides, they were following him through several states up and down the East Coast and no single police department would be in charge or care much what happened outside their district. Besides, my dad had experienced discrimination from law enforcement already, especially in the Southern states, where he was threatened the most, where these men felt especially emboldened. I remember wondering why my dad was so distrusting of police.
Years after this incident, he would falsely be accused of trafficking drugs among the tomatoes and limes he delivered and he would be hauled away for questioning before ultimately being released. The produce he was hauling would rot and he would not be paid. No lawyer would take his case though they told him it was a clear violation of his rights. Years later, I would watch news clips of Black men being gunned down by police on television and hear people deny there’s a problem or that there’s a need for police reform.
So I stopped wondering.
“Don’t go,” I told him. But my father couldn’t afford to miss a trip. There were bills to pay. There was produce to be delivered. This was our family’s livelihood.
“It’ll be okay,” he said. “I’ll be okay.” He smiled, but it didn’t fool me.
Every day, for months, between infrequent phone calls in a time before cell phones, I wondered if he was okay. I wondered if they got him. If they cornered him somewhere. If they forced him off the road. If he was in a ditch somewhere. If they would kill him right away or torture him before killing him. I’d learned about the cruelty of the Ku Klux Klan; I knew what they’d done to people. I knew they liked to hide their faces. I learned that sometimes hate and cruelty is flaunted and other times it is carefully covered up.
We’d moved down to Florida from New York two years before my dad was followed by those men. I didn’t like Florida once I got here. I wanted to go back to New York and told my dad every chance I could how much I didn’t like it. One of the main reasons I didn’t like it was that I felt something in the air, something I couldn’t name, something that scared me.
When I went into certain stores, I felt it. A thick air, weighty with judgment, discomfort, fear, disgust. It was something I’d never felt before. It made me want to brush at my arms. It made the back of my neck tingle. It made me feel afraid. Ashamed. Hated.
I didn’t know it then, but I realized over the years it was racism and prejudice. That’s what it feels like. I saw Confederate flags waving from the back of trucks, on T-shirts and belt buckles. Until then I hadn’t noticed how some people looked at my parents when they heard their heavy accents and broken English. I wanted to move back to my old New York neighborhood, where my friends were brown and I didn’t feel hated or judged or glared at, where my father wasn’t in danger or threatened. I wanted to run, to leave. But we stayed.
Those men eventually grew tired of terrorizing and threatening my father. Little by little, it tapered off. Just like that.
They grew tired.
Like little boys who’d lost interest in a new toy. Who decided they were tired and needed to move on to another game.
But they were not little boys. They were grown men. And what they did was not child’s play. It was a crime for which they never had to answer. For a long time my father was looking over his shoulder. For a long time I did not see peace in his face. And it was a long time before I didn’t worry each time he left for another trip or I could fall asleep without the images of terrible things happening to him.
Over the years, I saw my city change. I saw more people of color when I went to the store. I saw more same-sex couples holding hands. I felt the heavy, thick air of my youth thin out some, and it became easier to breathe. I still see the Confederate flag, but I also see more acceptance and unity. And twenty-eight years later, my city looks and feels different. I like living here. I’m proud to live here.
But that morning after the election.
That morning, the air felt thick again. I felt the staleness of the past find its way back. And I felt betrayed. I had believed in change and thought I’d witnessed it. But I felt deceived. In many ways, I felt like the kid on that couch in the counselor’s office.
Is anything bothering you, Jenny?
Yes, something was bothering me!
I’d felt a knot in my stomach for months.
I’d felt impending doom.
I’d feared the worst and it happened.
I felt gutted and without a voice.
I felt small and as if this world did not understand or care about me.
I felt betrayed.
And angry. So angry.
Because wasn’t it obvious? Hadn’t it been obvious?
It was nationalized on television. Mexican men like my husband, my son, were called rapists by a man who embodies hate. Immigrants like my parents, my grandparents, most of my extended family, were called criminals.
Is something bothering you, Jenny?
And there were people who worshipped and fed off that hate, lots of people. They rejoiced at the way hate spoke, at the assumptions it made, at the way it lashed out with astounding regularity. This hate wore a suit. It came under the guise of success. And the people around him dressed up their hate too. They wore shirts and hats promoting it. They aligned themselves with it and started vocalizing their own hate. They felt empowered. I saw them standing there, behind their leader, on television. I spent a lot of time just looking at their faces. They looked like the mothers who picked up their children at the same school I pick up my children. They looked like men who played with their kids at the park down the street. They looked like teachers. They looked like people who checked out my groceries. Except here, their faces were all twisted up. They were beaming with hate. No, they did not wear hooded cloaks. They made hate look professional and polished and astoundingly normal.
Is something bothering you, Jenny?
Everyday people, all around me. I started hearing more and more excuses for the hate being spewed. I saw some rally around it and others quietly accept it because it would not affect them, or because it was advantageous for them, or because even though they knew it was wrong, it felt good to hear someone give voice to the secret hate they kept in their heart.
I searched the faces of strangers everywhere I went the day after the election. I wanted to catch somebody’s eye, exchange a look of understanding. But I felt like no one would look at me. I felt like nobody cared. I searched and searched for something. Grief or hate. Either one. I just wanted to know, wanted to see, who stood with me and who stood against me. But I saw so much apathy, which only made me feel worse. I wondered if I could read what people saw when they looked at me. A man came into the coffee shop where I sat trying write. He was wearing a Trump shirt. His back was turned to me and I sat there wondering, if he had turned around, would he have glared at me? Or would he not have seen me at all?
For the first time in a very long time, I felt hopeless. The sobering truth sank in. I’ve gone through difficult times in my life, and the one thing I always held on to was hope. I’ve always believed in hope. Even during the situation with my father, I had hoped with all my heart it would stop.
But the moment the 2016 presidential election results were official, I felt hope had betrayed me.
The man who was now our president seemed just as dangerous to me as the men who had terrorized my father.
Is something bothering you, Jenny?
Yes. But unlike that day in the guidance counselor’s office, this time I will not stay silent.
As I type these words, he is being sworn in. It is a reality I cannot watch. I will instead do something to work against it. I will write this essay for you and hope it awakens something in you. I think others are doing the same. I think so many did not want to see the seedy underbelly of America, the part where racism and homophobia and misogyny and fear of anything different exists. So many people could not understand the way someone could so easily step in and awaken the hate in others. They did not understand that hate has always been there and it was just waiting. For this moment.
But now I am sensing something else, too.
Other sleeping dragons have been awakened.
Social justice warriors.
And they are raging mad and breathing fire.
I have found hope again. I am hoping now. I will continue to hope. But my hope is accompanied by action now. Because I am not helpless. I am not small. And others in this world do understand and care about me just as I understand and care about them. I am not afraid to speak now. And so with others, I will unite, in voice, in written word, in petitions and resistance. Together we will hold those in power accountable for their actions and we will make them answer.
We will hope.
And we will bring about change.