In the course of researching this book I asked scores of people, friends and strangers, if they could think of a time when they’d covered up their ignorance or felt pressure to refrain from saying “I don’t know.” Some responded instantly with detailed anecdotes, painful, funny, or both. Some offered more general associations they had with the feeling of being caught not knowing. Others mused about the underlying reasons they had felt, at various times in their lives and with various audiences, more or less secure about exposing what they didn’t know.
One person said, “No.”
“No?”
“Wow.”
“I believe telling the truth should never be an act of courage.”
“Oh.” My mind went all swimmy. “You mean,” I said, faltering, “telling the truth should be so much a given that doing so should never require an unusual feat of courage?”
“Yes.”
I was flooded with a rush of muddled admiration—muddled because it was tinged with the regrettable knowledge that I was not in her league. While I don’t think of myself as particularly craven or morally lax, for me telling the truth sometimes does require a special act of courage, not to say deliberate effort, a mustering of willpower, and occasionally even a period of private rehearsal.
But even as I marveled at her meritorious claim, I had a prickling, something’s-not-quite-right-about-this-picture feeling.
My interviewee was indisputably a force: an international consultant, extremely self-possessed and well-informed, with a keen intelligence and a vocal cadence that suggested a habit of evaluating every word—swiftly, proficiently—before it left her mouth. As a diplomat’s daughter, she’d had an upbringing unusually rich in travel, opportunity, exposure to ideas and experience, and access to information and power. She was poised, even polished, yet also palpably sympathetic and appealing. And I did not doubt her assertion; beyond all her other formidable attributes, she projected a profound sense of integrity.
So why my skepticism?
I thought of my partner, Mike, at that very moment with his kindergarten students, most of whom are children of color who qualify for free lunch, many whose first language is not English and whom the state classifies as “high needs.” I replayed the consultant’s maxim in my mind: Telling the truth should never be an act of courage. And thought of those little cherubs, those urchins, tearing around the playground or gathering on the rug; thought of their openness and their guardedness; thought of Mike pointing to the jumbled alphabet, saying, “Do you know what this letter is?” and of them composing their faces into masks, already at age four or five having learned how to be carefully inscrutable, and nodding: yes. And thought once more of the consultant, with her exceptional childhood and all its attendant advantages, not least of which was the fact that she had “always been encouraged to ask lots of questions.”
Telling the truth requires no special courage so long as the cost is nil. But the ability to say “I don’t know” derives in no small part from privilege.
• • •
When my brother, Andy, got his first job after earning a master’s degree in public policy, he was startled to receive clear messages that the primary reason he’d been hired was his color. I am white; my brother, black. I am the biological daughter and he the adopted son of our white parents.
This was the midnineties. Andy was hired as a research analyst for a nationally renowned company that conducts evaluations of programs such as Head Start, Medicaid, and WIC, the federal food and nutrition program for low-income women and children. His first day on the job, he was sitting in his new office when an e-mail to all staff appeared in his in-box. He suspects it wasn’t really meant for his eyes. It stated that the active recruitment effort for “minority hires” had concluded, the need having been met. It turned out that the woman who’d previously occupied his office was African-American. Andy was the only black professional on staff.
As a research analyst, Andy would make periodic site visits, flying with a coworker to one of the cities involved in an ongoing study. They’d stay in a motel for four or five days and spend their time interviewing both administrators of the program in question and consumers of that program’s services. Andy regularly got sent to the sites with the highest levels of poverty and violence—Watts, Memphis, Detroit. He remembers the fear and discomfort his white coworkers displayed when they visited particularly rough neighborhoods. Once, as Andy steered the rental car down a street lined by burned-out buildings alternating with storefront churches, liquor stores, and check-cashing places, an African-American man stepped off the curb, waiting for their car to go by so he could cross. Andy remembers his white colleague recoiling in the passenger seat and shrieking, “Please don’t hurt me!” Another time, interviewing a woman who lived in Section 8 housing, Andy noticed his coworker was visibly ill at ease in the dark, fusty apartment. At the interview’s conclusion, she scurried down the broken sidewalk to their car, locked the door quickly behind her, and exclaimed with revulsion, “How could someone live like that?”
The site visits, which generated the raw data, were considered entry-level work. After a year on the job, Andy asked his supervisor if he could take on some more challenging assignments—participating in some of the data analysis that constituted the meat of the reports—and was flatly turned down. “We need you on those site visits,” he was told. He was a “good escort in the ’hood.”
Increasingly conscious of being valued as a quota-filler and a glorified bodyguard, Andy gave enormous care to his writing when submitting reports of his site visits. In one instance, he sent a report to the senior researcher with a note explaining it was “a seasoned draft,” a reference to its being the most recent iteration of a paper that had already been through a series of revisions. The senior researcher, perhaps acting out of his own discomfort at being unfamiliar with the phrase, openly mocked him. “‘Seasoned’?” He gave a short laugh. “What, did you use salt and pepper?”
“I felt like it was a risk for me to say anything,” Andy reflects. “I constantly had to go that extra step to prove legitimacy. And the atmosphere made me absolutely less inclined to ask for help. If I made a mistake, it would be magnified. If I admitted not knowing something, I’d be judged as being less than what I’m capable of.”
This was at a company whose lengthy diversity statement reads, in part:
Here, diversity translates into an inclusive work environment, where differences in experience, ethnic backgrounds, cultures, and lifestyles add strength and value to our core mission—providing the social policy community with objective, high-quality information collection and analysis . . . [Our] ongoing commitment to diversity is also woven into everyday actions, policies, and practices. We are committed to maintaining a work environment in which everyone is treated with respect and dignity.
I doubt anyone at the company sought to create an environment that would have a chilling effect on my brother’s ability to say “I don’t know.” In fact, given the company’s ethos and the kinds of programs it focused its research on, I suspect his colleagues would be horrified to hear they’d contributed to such an environment. (Do you see where I’m going with this?) Chances are, they never thought about it. They acted out of limited understanding, out of ignorance. Chances are, they just didn’t know.
Whether intended or not, the effects of such an environment can be so galling and undermining as to stymie growth and impede the very goals the institution espouses. Valerie is a professor emerita of art at a small New England college. Her own work in photography has been widely praised and exhibited. Yet as a woman working in the latter part of the twentieth century, she frequently faced gender bias from both colleagues and students, manifested in the courses she was given to teach (often introductory level) and in the students’ unconcealed preference for male professors (automatically assumed to be the more technically knowledgeable in a field like photography).
In the early nineties, after Valerie had been teaching for over a quarter of a century, her college dismantled its darkrooms to make room for computers. Simultaneously, she was saddled with teaching a new course: digital photography. Digital cameras were just coming on the market, and Valerie found herself completely out of her element. For decades, she’d comported herself gracefully under the burden of others’ baseless condescension. Now, in a bitter irony, she found her skills matching people’s low expectations. Her expertise, built up with so much time and care, lay in the arenas of darkroom skills, artistic expression, and the meanings of images. Suddenly these counted for nothing. Students were marching up to her with their shiny new high-tech devices, all different models with different sets of operating instructions, expecting her to tell them how each and every one worked. “I was miserable and depressed,” she recalls. “They knew that I didn’t know.”
After having long prided herself on running an egalitarian classroom, she saw she could no longer afford to; she felt authority slipping from her as the technology in her field leapt ahead. Eventually, against her deepest sense of who she was and what she believed in, she found herself “throwing it back on them a little,” using the culture of shame and hierarchy to put her students on the defensive. She became adept at saying, with a disparaging little sniff, “I’m sorry. If you don’t bring in your manual, I can’t help.” The learning environment had become a face-saving environment, benefiting no one.
In time, Valerie gained the knowledge she needed to teach again with confidence. But looking back now on those interim efforts to hide her ignorance, she says, “It’s almost too painful to remember. I had learned to be a little bit mean.”
• • •
Refraining from saying “I don’t know” when we are conscious of making that choice is one thing, but what about all those times we don’t know we don’t know? Arguably a more pernicious problem, not least because it is by definition so much harder to identify. One arena in which it’s frequently played out is education—particularly when teachers do not share the culture of their students.
Lisa Delpit, an educator, author, and MacArthur Fellow, has criticized Teach For America—which sends predominantly white recruits into schools that are concentrated overwhelmingly in poor communities of color—not because of the cultural difference per se, but because of the lack of adequate preparation that would help orient these fledgling teachers to think about the implications of cultural difference. She has asked groups of young people about to embark on their first teaching experience, “How would you prepare yourselves if you learned you were going to be teaching in Kenya next September?”
The ready reply: “We’d learn about the culture.”
“How?”
Eagerly: “We’d study the idioms, music, history, literature, geography, food, politics, gender roles, religious beliefs, folk tales, family structure, dress . . .”
“And what,” she asks, “have you been doing to prepare yourselves to teach the students you’ll be working with next September in this country?”
The silence this question invariably meets hangs swollen with epiphany.
In an interview with Education Week, Delpit has said:
I want black children to have the opportunity to have teachers who understand their culture, their intellectual legacy, their communities, the best ways to teach them, the best ways to motivate them, the best ways to connect to their parents, etc. Those people can be of any color. It is not the color that matters as much as the connections. While many black teachers have an easier time connecting, I have seen black teachers who cannot connect with certain black children because their backgrounds were so different. I have seen many white teachers who can connect because they have been humble enough to know that they have to learn a great deal about their students to be good teachers.
Some people embrace the idea that the solution to racism is willed blindness. If we “overlook” differences, the problems will go away. This is a lot like treating ignorance with ignorance: What I don’t know about you won’t hurt, so long as we both pretend not to notice the gap. This practice might work out pretty well for those with power, less so for the disenfranchised—and for anyone interested in increasing the opportunities for and caliber of connections between people. When we strive for “color blindness,” we foreclose not only on the examination of our own unconscious biases, but also on the possibility of knowing others in all their nuanced complexity.
Christine Sleeter, an education reformer and antiracism activist, describes in an interview with Rethinking Schools magazine why this may be particularly problematic in the classroom:
In a color-blind approach, there is a whole lot about a student that you are not seeing. For example, if you take a kid who is of Mexican descent and you say, “I don’t see a Mexican kid, I just see a kid,” you are preventing yourself from knowing something about that student’s culture and community—and an important part of the student.
To prevent yourself from knowing something about your students—doesn’t quite have the ring of sound pedagogy, does it? Even if one subscribes to the most rigid, traditional model of education, perceiving it as nothing more than the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student (much like the baton handoff in a relay race), it nevertheless follows that the transaction is most likely to succeed (the baton most likely to fit snugly into the palm of the receiving runner) if the teacher is able to see the student she’s handing off to.
The ignorance we’re ignorant of is the ignorance most difficult to remedy.
• • •
On a freezing January afternoon in 1982, a Florida-bound Boeing 737 sat on the runway at Washington National Airport. Earlier in the day, the airport had been closed due to heavy snow. Now, although the storm had slackened, flakes continued to fall. Sitting in the cockpit, waiting to be cleared for takeoff, the copilot engaged the captain in conversation about the weather.
Copilot: (Talking about another aircraft visible through the windshield.) Look how the ice is just hanging on his, ah, back, back there, see that?
Captain: . . .
Copilot: See all those icicles on the back there and everything?
Captain: Yeah.
A little later, the copilot referred to the long period of time that had elapsed since their own wings had been deiced:
Copilot: Boy, this is a, this is a losing battle here on trying to deice those things, it [gives] you a false feeling of security, that’s all it does.
He brought up the topic of the weather again after they received clearance:
Copilot: Let’s check these tops again since we been setting here awhile.
Captain: I think we get to go here in a minute.
And once more, looking at the instrument readings just before takeoff:
Copilot: That don’t seem right, does it? Ah, that’s not right.
Captain: Yes it is, there’s eighty.
Copilot: Naw, I don’t think that’s right. Ah, maybe it is.
Captain: Hundred and twenty.
Copilot: I don’t know.
Then, its wings crusted with snow and ice, the plane sped down the runway. It got off the ground, but would not properly climb. It remained airborne for thirty-seven seconds before crashing into the 14th Street Bridge, where it sheared the tops off cars and plunged into the ice-clogged Potomac. All but five of the seventy-nine people on board died, along with four motorists. Upon analyzing the black box recorder found in the submerged wreckage, the National Transportation Safety Board determined the probable cause of the crash to be pilot error: specifically, a failure of communication within the cockpit. The copilot had been trying to warn the captain. The captain apparently did not know it.
Or wasn’t able to hear it. Or, not wanting to return to the gate for deicing after having waited in a taxi line for close to an hour before reaching the runway, chose not to realize it. Interestingly, the NTSB’s official accident report said that while the captain had “good operational skills and knowledge,” he had twice failed a line check—once for receiving unsatisfactory grades in “adherence to regulations, checklist usage, [and] flight procedures,” and another time for deficiencies in knowledge of aircraft limitations. The same report described the copilot as a “witty, sharp individual,” and reported that people who’d flown with him during stressful operations (he had been a fighter pilot in the Air Force) referred to him as someone “who knew his limitations.”
The ability to know one’s limitations, to recognize the bounds of one’s own comprehension—this is a kind of knowing that approaches wisdom. But are there circumstances in which our own psyches flout us, stand in the way of our abilities to discern what we know from what we don’t?
My friend Jane was nine when her family moved into a new suburban development in Southern California. Three houses down lived an older, childless couple, Mr. and Mrs. W, who seemed to Jane wonderfully bookish and cultured. Mr. W wore three-piece suits, played the violin, and spent hours in his study, researching and writing books about classical music. Jane began to spend afternoons at the Ws’ house, helping Mr. W organize his notes, thrilled by his promise to mention her name in his next book. The Ws were like highly cultured substitute grandparents. They took her out to elegant restaurants, even brought her on weekend trips to Mexico. Jane’s younger sister, Karen, wheedled to go along, but their parents told her she was too young. “These are Jane’s special friends,” they explained, amused and perhaps flattered that their daughter had been singled out for such special attentions from this refined, dignified couple. This was the late sixties.
One day Mr. W showed Jane a roomful of pornography, all of it meticulously indexed and organized. He began inviting her to sit in the master bedroom while he shaved in the adjoining bathroom. He began to touch her, just a little. He began, when they went away together for the weekend, to rise during the night from the bed he shared with his wife and slip into Jane’s bed. Through it all, striving to be seen as good, as mannerly, as refined and worthy of the attentions of this estimable figure, she kept her silence. Then one day Mr. W removed his belt, saying he had something special to show Jane, and all at once she regained custody of her tongue. “No,” she said. “No. No.” And got up and walked straight out the front door and didn’t stop until she reached home.
She never told her family the reason she stopped visiting the Ws. “I made up something about being too old.” Her parents seemed incurious; her younger sister saw opportunity.
Karen was six when she began spending afternoons at the Ws. Jane remembers a day, bright with sunshine, when Karen stood in the kitchen, poised to go out, her hand on the knob, the door ajar, the knob glinting gold in the sun. “Where are you going?” asked Jane. “The Ws,” Karen replied, and paused. She seemed to wait. For a queer, protracted moment, the sisters looked into each other’s eyes. “Okay, then,” said Jane, as if from a fog. “See you later.”
Karen, as her sister had done before her, began spending nearly every afternoon at the Ws’, as well as some evenings, and also going away with them on weekends. After a year of this there came a day when she fell suddenly and strangely ill. Their mother in a panic called the doctor, who rushed to the house, laid the seven-year-old down on the bathroom floor, and pumped her stomach. She had swallowed the entire contents of a bottle of baby aspirin. All the little pink chewable pills came up out of her body.
Their mother turned to Jane, who stood watching from the doorway. “Do you know anything about this?”
“No,” Jane heard herself say. Slowly shaking her head: “I don’t know.”
In adulthood, Karen came across Mr. W’s obituary in the local paper. This led to her telling Jane about the abuse, which was horrific; it included being raped by Mr. W while his wife watched, and being filmed by Mr. W while other men raped her. Mr. W said if she told anyone he’d kill her dog, describing in detail the way he would do it.
These revelations released in Jane her own locked-away memories. Together the sisters told their parents the story, but gently, tempering it, not wanting to inflict unbearable guilt. Even so, their parents were sickened and distraught. How could they have failed to know or suspect? Neither Jane nor Karen ever blamed them. “The Ws were so outwardly respectable,” Jane says. “It was a much more innocent time. There was nothing about sexual abuse on TV or in the movies, in books or in school.” The first federal legislation addressing the issue, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, would not be enacted until 1974, seven years after Karen’s ordeal. “And,” adds Jane, “children can be very good secret keepers.”
For a long time Jane felt her own guilt might tear her apart. She still thinks often of that single moment, a year before her sister’s suicide attempt, when Karen paused with her hand on the bright doorknob, as if waiting for Jane to speak. How Jane wishes she had said, “Don’t go!”
But for all her regrets and all her sorrow, Jane understands that in that moment she had been incapable of rescuing her sister. Incapable because she had been cut off not simply from speech but from knowledge. “My brain,” she says, “had already decided not to know.”
Repressed knowledge is the flip side of the false knowledge discussed in the last chapter: the innocents who “know” they committed crimes, the study subjects who “know” they got lost in the mall. Together, these represent the most chilling kinds of not knowing: the ignorance which is beyond not simply our control but also our ability to realize—at least without a healing epiphany or therapeutic care. Chilling, but not hopeless. The more we talk about the limits of knowledge and the dangers of false knowledge, the more we create a landscape in which true knowledge may be discerned.
And these landscapes are as badly needed in large arenas as in small. For just as one psyche may wall off painful knowledge as a defense against what the individual finds intolerable, whole institutions may engage in similar behavior on a broad scale: Witness the Catholic Church, still reeling from a clergy sex abuse scandal that spans decades and continents. Although the original crimes are sexual in nature, the more grievous crime might be that of institutional-level willed ignorance, judging from the fact that most of the public outrage has focused not on the individuals who committed the assaults but on the Church’s efforts to cloak itself in a shroud of not knowing.
Is there a wrong way to say “I don’t know”? Yes. When we declare ignorance, it should be a) honest and b) in the spirit of opening ourselves up to hearing, to learning, to receiving. When we say “I don’t know” under these conditions, the words can forge connection, healing, growth. But when we resist or disavow knowledge, when we profess ignorance as a way of donning armor and evading accountability, then we make a mockery of those words, and we rupture connections not only with others but within ourselves, within our souls.
Of course the flagrant refusal to know is hardly limited to situations involving sexual abuse. Perhaps the most infamous example of a nation adopting a posture of not knowing is World War II–era Germany, where official state policies facilitated Holocaust denial in a multitude of ways, even as the genocide was unfolding. Heinrich Himmler, in a speech to SS generals, declared the mass murder of Jews a secret, never to be recorded; Nazis destroyed evidence of mass graves at many killing centers; Hitler ordered the use of euphemisms such as “action” for violent operations and “special treatment” for killing. And of course there is the infamous story of Theresienstadt, the ghetto/labor camp that in June 1944 was temporarily spruced up in order to show representatives from the International Red Cross how well the Nazis treated the Jews. In his novel Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald describes the hoax:
[The representatives] could see for themselves the friendly, happy folk who had been spared the horrors of war and were looking out of the windows, could see how smartly they were all dressed, how well the few sick people were cared for, how they were given proper meals served on plates, how the bread ration was handed out by people in white drill gloves, how posters advertising sporting events, cabarets, theatrical performances, and concerts were being put on every corner and how, when the day’s work was over, the residents of the town flocked out in their thousands on the ramparts and bastions to take the air, almost as if they were passengers enjoying an evening stroll on the deck of an oceangoing steamer, a most reassuring spectacle, all things considered, which the Germans [filmed], whether for propaganda purposes or in order to justify their actions and conduct to themselves.
Such an elaborate sham. All that energy, expended not simply to prevent the world at large from knowing the truth but perhaps also, as Sebald suggests, as a way the Nazis tried to manage their own psychic dilemma: that is, a way of simultaneously knowing and not knowing the atrocities they were committing.
Another example of state-sponsored not-knowing and erasing—although not nearly at the same proportions or with the same motivations as Nazi Germany—may be found in present-day Israel. Yishai, a lawyer and law professor who grew up in Israel, served as a paratrooper in the Israeli Defense Forces in the nineties. Although military service is obligatory, Yishai joined with a real sense of enthusiasm, a belief in the honor and nobility of serving that easily trumped any concerns about the political reality in Israel and Palestine and what role he might play in the conflict as a soldier. “As a young Israeli,” he says, “a certain narrative is constructed for you: what it means to a Jew, an Israeli.” This narrative hinges largely on the Holocaust and the idea that ensuring the viability and safety of the Jewish state is a moral imperative, necessary to prevent such an atrocity from ever happening again. Yishai recounts the plethora of ways the Holocaust gets intertwined with the existence of the Jewish state, not least by the services and celebrations that mark Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Yom Ha’atzmaut, or Independence Day, which fall close together on the calendar. From the time children are small, an inextricable link is made between the two, in schools as well as in media, which display graphic images of wide-eyed toddlers wearing Stars of David, crates of confiscated wedding rings, emaciated prisoners marching at gunpoint, and heaps and heaps of naked bodies.
“Of course, there is reality in that narrative,” says Yishai, whose grandmother is a survivor, and who has many other family members who were killed in the Holocaust. “But it also gets used in the service of a nationalistic agenda to justify actions that in my view—based on my sense of myself as a human being and as a Jew—are morally wrong.” The irony is that the same nation that has dedicated so much energy to refusing to forget—committed itself to bearing eternal witness so that what happened may never happen again—that same nation cultivates a different kind of not knowing.
As a teenager on hikes with his friends in the mountains surrounding Jerusalem, Yishai remembers being touched with something like melancholy wonder whenever they’d come across an old olive grove or a cluster of prickly pears—likely signs that a Palestinian village had once thrived in that spot. Some 250 Palestinian villages were erased in the vicinity of Jerusalem when the modern state of Israel was established. But if ever Yishai said, “You know, people lived here not so long ago,” his friends mocked him for his sentimentality. It was a silly thing, something you weren’t supposed to notice or, if you did notice, care about. “The olive trees became a running joke with my friends. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Jewish settlers target olives trees for mutilation in the West Bank and that Jerusalem’s surroundings were forested with European pine trees soon after 1967—the olive trees, some of which are hundreds of years old, are a reminder, a memory of a people in a place.
“I think there’s a deliberate effort to keep young people from knowing or thinking about these issues in this way,” says Yishai. “On a national level, you want to forget that there are fellow human beings who paid a price—and continue to do so—for you having a homeland.”
For him, the end of forgetting came at age nineteen. He was on duty with three other soldiers, patrolling the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza. It was 1992, a time of relative calm. As they walked through the poor Arab neighborhood, through the narrow alleyways, dressed in their uniforms and carrying their guns, they turned a corner only to surprise some children who’d been playing there, squatting in the alley: a pair of boys, perhaps two and four years old. The children looked up and immediately the color drained from their faces. Crying, screaming in abject terror, they fled on their small, panicked legs.
“Whatever idea I had of myself,” says Yishai, “I was perceived by them as a monster.” This relatively benign interaction—absent any violence save for the violence of the children’s fright—shook him to his core. He did not discuss it with his comrades. “As a soldier,” he says, “you’re trained to forget parts of yourself.” But from then on it became impossible to forget, impossible to disavow his awareness that his own humanity was linked to the humanity of the Palestinians in the camps he was ordered to patrol. And although he remained in the service for the full three years and went on to become a sergeant, from that moment forth he hated being a soldier, especially when it placed him in direct contact with Palestinian people.
How does one reconcile knowledge with the shutting off of knowledge? In Yishai’s case, he finished his military service, grew out his hair, went backpacking in South America, and began a long process of recovery that involved studying modern Hebrew poetry, Arabic, and law, with the goal of becoming a human rights attorney who would represent Palestinians in the Israeli court system. He now specializes in mediation, a field that requires the ability to “contain different perspectives.”
In the case of Frances Pratt, being told to suppress knowledge of injustice in childhood led to a lifetime’s commitment to bringing such knowledge to light. Mrs. Pratt was born in 1935 in Chester County, South Carolina. “It was so rural,” she says, “we lived plum nearly out of the state. It was so small, the train wouldn’t stop. It’d just slow down so you could jump out into the sawdust pile.” Then, just in case you didn’t realize, she adds kindly, “That’s my joke about it.”
In 1947, when she was twelve years old, Frances and her mother took a bus to Raleigh, North Carolina. Her mother, a sharecropper who raised cotton and corn, had little time or money for travel, but Frances’s older brother had sent them bus tickets so they could visit him in his new hometown. They went in high summer, in between planting and harvesting seasons. When they arrived in Raleigh, it was hot as blazes. They saw an ice cream parlor near the station. Frances’s mother said, “I’m going to buy you an ice cream,” and they stepped inside the shop.
“We don’t serve niggers in here,” called the clerk. (“That’s the word he used,” Mrs. Pratt explains when she tells the story today. “I’m telling it like it is.”) “Y’all go around the side,” he instructed. “I stick it through the window.”
Frances was angry and afraid. “Let’s not have any,” she whispered.
Her mother repeated: “I’m going to buy you an ice cream.”
They went around the side of the building. Frances’s mother put her money through the window and the clerk stuck out two vanilla cones. “Don’t tell your brother,” her mother warned. “He’ll come down here and start something and they’ll put him in jail.”
So Frances stood in the glaring heat of the yard, her cone melting in her hand, rocked by the suddenly urgent need to protect her brother from knowing what had happened; rocked, too, by a new kind of ache for her mother. Back in Chester County, she had never seen her mother treated in this detestable way. Fear made her keep her mouth shut, but she promised herself there under the punishing sun that when she grew bigger she would not keep quiet about what she knew, especially where injustice was concerned. And as a teenager she took a bus north (wearing an outfit supplied by the local undertaker), where she studied to become a nurse and eventually was elected president of the Nyack, New York, branch of the NAACP, a position she has held for over thirty years and in which she has made good on that childhood promise.
• • •
We can feel pressure to pretend we know. We can feel pressure to pretend we don’t know. Either way, there are sometimes extremely compelling reasons for going along with the pretense. In the case of Mrs. Pratt, keeping silent about what she’d witnessed might have prevented her brother not just from being jailed but from being lynched.
At the other end of the spectrum, we find less dire, but no less caring, reasons to keep silent: to spare the feelings of another. Suppose a person you do not recall having laid eyes on strikes up a conversation in which it becomes clear you have previously met. Not only that, it emerges he remembers all sorts of things about you: your occupation, what kind of dog you have, how you like your eggs. At that point do you say, Er . . . what was your name? Miss Manners would have you do precisely that (actually, Miss Manners advises “total self-abasement”), but I myself have been known simply to smile and hold my tongue.
Or suppose your very own sweetheart comes up to you and says, with tender conviction: “You know that time when we took the gondola ride in the sunset and you said my eyes were like limpid pools?” Do you say, No, dearest, I do not, or do you squint in a fond, vague sort of way and say, Mmm . . . I think so. When was that? Sociolinguists call this, rather marvelously, dispreferred response avoidance. In other words, sometimes we avoid saying “I don’t know” less from a desire to save face than from a desire to gratify the other party. To facilitate positive social intercourse. To be kind.
But pretense for the sake of courtesy has its dangers—regardless of whether it’s knowledge or ignorance we’re pretending to have. A friend shares a story about her long-ago marriage:
In the midst of the great sadness of my divorce, one of the most helpful things a counselor asked me was, “Are you stupid?” This may sound harsh, but it was asked matter-of-factly, not insultingly, and helped begin the long process of bringing me back to myself, into my own form of knowledge, out of the too-long-held posture of my ceding all “knowing” to my husband.
In an effort to accommodate her husband’s need to occupy the role of “knower” in their relationship, she had effaced her own wisdom and intelligence to the point where she hardly knew herself anymore.
Anya Malcolm tells a story about just the opposite: that is, about refusing to cede her “knowing,” even when it entailed resorting to a bold, risky decision. As a college freshman in the late eighties, at a large West Coast university, she enrolled in a philosophy seminar taught by a professor reputed to be brilliant but sexist. This didn’t worry her until she got her first paper back—with a C minus. She knew it was a good paper, even an excellent paper, and soon discovered that while a few men in the class had gotten A’s and B’s, among the women the grades were uniformly lower. She went back to her dorm room and thought hard. Asking to meet with the professor and discuss the paper was out; by then she’d heard more stories confirming his categorical dismissal of women’s cognitive abilities, and she’d experienced firsthand his undisguised contempt. The other female students seemed resigned to accept his version of who they were, at least within the arena of his classroom: to cower politely and play the feebleminded bimbos he thought they were.
Anya could not. Every fiber of her being railed against it: against submitting to his version of her, against becoming complicit in his pretense of “knowing” women are dumb. But no matter how hard she thought, she could see no way around the problem—nothing short of becoming a man. So, like a heroine in a Shakespeare comedy, that’s what she did. She handed in her next paper under the name Adam Malcolm.
On the day their graded papers were due back, the professor plucked one from the pile and sang its praises at length, extolling it as one of the best essays an undergraduate had ever submitted, elaborating on its robust and original thesis, the supple lucidity of its argument, the elegant concision of its prose. At last he said, “Will Adam Malcolm please stand?”
Anya rose.
He turned to her with displeasure. “I didn’t call on you.”
“Yes,” she told him. “You did.”
Decades later, hearing this story, I feel a shiver of trepidation even as I thrill at her bravery. “Weren’t you afraid?” I ask.
“No.”
What did she feel, in that moment after revealing her identity, standing there, exposed and proud, having dared to know herself in all her intelligence and personhood?
“I felt,” she says, “as though every ounce of oxygen in the room had made a quick exit. I felt frozen in time. I felt . . .” And here she pauses, and when she next speaks it is with quiet aplomb. “A wonderful sense of peace and composure.”