AUTHOR’S SUGGESTED MUSICAL PAIRING:

The Slow Process

There is a function to our pain. It prompts us to remove ourselves from situations that are injurious, or could be, and to avoid similar experiences in the future.

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The term lingchi, a form of torture and execution that was legal into the twentieth century, was first seen in a text attributed to Confucian philosopher Xun Kuang, also known as Xunzi. The word was originally used to explain the challenge of traveling by horse-drawn carriage on uneven ground.

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I learned in school that racism was something that happened a long time ago in Southern cities like Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham, not in the West where I lived. Rosa Parks was tired from a long day at work and refused to give up her seat on the bus, out of weariness. I heard Dr. King’s speech about his dreams, addressed to a quarter of a million people, a reflecting pool, and a hollow obelisk made of marble, granite, and bluestone gneiss; I was told these dreams had come true.

These are the things I believed.

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I am a third generation Oregonian on my maternal grandmother's side, who was called Anne. I was born in Portland, a small city severed by the north-flowing Willamette, in a hospital blocks away from the house where my mother still lives. My mother was born in Portland, too, on the west side, and her mother before her was born on a small ranch in the northeast part of the state, called Lone Pine, the second of three girls, born to two Irish immigrants.

My grandmother often mentioned to my mother and I that she believed perhaps her father-in-law could “pass”– that is, pass for white. And my grandfather had curly hair and brown skin in the summertime, she said, which seemed to settle the matter. The assertion seemed to give her some satisfaction, but maybe also some pain.

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Exact methodologies varied, but most instances of lingchi included being tied to a post while cuts, stabs, and dismemberment were administered.

The number of wounds ranged from one hundred to, in some later dynasties, three thousand.

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There is an entire international association for the study of pain. They describe it as a disagreeable experience that is both sensory and emotional, linked to not only the actuality of tissue damage, but also, the potentiality of it.

Something can hurt you before it hurts you. The inevitability of damage can also be another kind of pain.

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The walls of the commuter trains in Portland are filled with posters encouraging wariness on the part of the passengers. See something? Say something, they advise. One shows a young, blonde white woman looking skeptically out of the corner of her eye.

Something. Something could mean anything. I don’t know when it first occurred to me that I might look like something.

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Upon being granted statehood in 1859, Oregon was the only state in the Union whose constitution explicitly forbade black folks from owning property, working, or taking up residence in the state. Portland, its largest city, is considered one of the whitest cities in America.

My mother, a white woman, was my primary caregiver. My older half-siblings from my mother's second marriage are white. My father, a black man, had never been with a woman who wasn’t white; I heard him brag about this to his friends, to me. He rarely spoke to or saw his family for most of my early years. Almost all of my parents' friends were white, as well as mine. I didn’t have a black teacher until my second year of college.

When people saw our family photos—my single mom, my half-siblings, me—they asked if I was adopted. People assumed my brother was my boyfriend. Black women kindly stopped my mother and I in the ethnic hair section at the supermarket and offered their advice, touching my hair, which was considered “good.”

I knew I wasn't white. I knew I must be something else. When I asked my mother what I was, she said, you are my daughter.

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A wound is a breaking down of the protective components of tissue. A wound, acute or chronic, must be managed through to symptom resolution, and eventually, hopefully, healing.

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When I first met my partner, I was taking prerequisite courses at Portland Community College to get into nursing school. I started my first section of Anatomy and Physiology just two weeks after our first date. I was amazed by all the things there were to know about the body: its planes, the names and classifications of muscle and sinew and bone, about the different chambers of the heart.

My favorite unit was on the epidermis, our largest organ, our skin. I learned that melanin is the comprehensive name given to a set of naturally occurring pigments. Most organisms have them. These pigments are produced by special cells called melanocytes. It is what gives skin its color, its ability to protect the body from the sun. Ephiledes, or freckles are concentrated points of melaninized cells in the epidermis, the outermost layer of skin.

I remember trying to focus on my textbook, but instead picturing him propped up on one elbow, naked, leaning on the peach-colored wall next to my bed, his white skin shaded pink from summer, his shoulders mantled in an astonishing number of freckles. I sent him a message: I’m trying to focus, but you’re distracting me. I wanted him so badly it hurt.

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I bear a striking resemblance to my grandfather, and even more to his sister, Dorothy. I have a fading sepia photo of her, standing in what looks to be a sturdy woolen skirt and jacket in front of a field, squinting. I can just make out a fine dusting of freckles on the bridge of her nose and just below her eyes, from a life spent under the Oregon sun.

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Unlike most styles of execution, dealt swiftly regardless of the level of savagery, lingchi hinges on its prolongation, sometimes lasting for days. It is called, amongst other things, “lingering death,” “death by one thousand cuts,” and “the slow process.”

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In the inflammatory phase of the healing of a wound, the body begins its natural response to the injury. Once the flow of blood ebbs, the vessels dilate and allow the necessary cells to reach the wounded area: antibodies, nutrients, enzymes, white blood cells. One begins to see the particular identifying signs of inflammation around the wound – a giving off of heat, a reddening of the skin, fluid collected in the surrounding tissue, sensitivity to touch.

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By July of 2016, 651 people had been murdered by police. Almost all of them were men, and most of these men were black or of color. At killedbypolice.net, you can see what seems to be a full, comprehensive list. Some names on the list contain a link next to it that reads “raw video.”

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According to Confucian principles, any kind of mutilation of one's body is prohibited. What is so particularly damning about lingchi, then, is that the condemned are punished not only in this life but also in the next, their body never made whole again.

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I watch a video of Alton Sterling being shot by police, pinned to the ground. I watch Delrawn Small shot twice after he crossed lanes of traffic to confront a man who cut him off, an off-duty cop using his service weapon. I watch Philando Castile in the passenger seat while his partner, Diamond Reynolds, is at the wheel, screaming as blood spreads across his white shirt from seven bullet wounds. Her four-year-old daughter is in the backseat. 

I watch these videos on Independence Day. The anger I feel is extinguished by a sadness so vast it is like a sea. It felt wrong to be falling in love while so many were dying, had been dying.

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You can't let all this political stuff stress you out, sweetie. Stress will make you sick, my mother says, some months later, over the phone.

But this political stuff is my life, I shout into the receiver. I was, as I often am on long phone calls, pacing a circuit around my living room table, down the hall and around the bedroom, through to the kitchen, and then back to the living room again. Black people are being shot. In the street. I could be shot, for no reason! Are you okay with that?

Well, of course not, she told me. If anything happened to you that is a loss I would have to mourn.

But what else do you want me to do?

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Some wounds don't hurt. Heightened levels of adrenaline and serotonin can cause the injured to feel no pain for long periods of time, even if the nature of their wound is severe.

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The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom, said D.H. Lawrence in “The Spirit of Place,” his short essay on the myth and promise of America.

It's not clear when exactly Lawrence wrote this piece. Some scholars think it was written before he had lived there at all; some records show he may still have been in England.

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My father always told the story this way: he heard Otis Redding's “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” on the radio in 1968 and it occurred to him that he could leave. Not just leave to Atlanta, or Jackson, or even Chicago or New York, but go west. He imagined the Pacific Ocean and its patterned, senseless beating against the shore. He imagined sunshine and beautiful women and found them, somewhere no one knew him.

My father was born toward the end of Jim Crow, second oldest of eight children. He was one of the first black children to integrate his school. His father was an alcoholic, a mean one, and not long after the youngest of their children was born, his mother—God-fearing and not terribly gentle herself, left him. This is most of what I know of my father’s life before he came out West.

He told me a few stories of his days living in caves by the sea in Carmel, where he ate fresh-caught fish every day, or on the streets and in crowded houses in San Francisco, making love, acting in plays, hitchhiking up and down the 101.

Whenever he cooked fish for us, which we often ate with our hands, he'd say, Mmm, mmm, good, but not as good as those California fish.

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Proliferation of a wound is characterized by its rebuilding. If the cells in the connective tissue that produce the fibrous materials of skin such as collagen have received adequate oxygen and nutrients, healthy tissue can develop. The appearance of this new skin—its textures, its colors— is often a measure of how well the wound is healing.

Proliferation is the most active stage of healing, and the most delicate. While new cells are being generated, it is at this stage that the wound holds the highest risk of infection.

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What my father wanted, what he hoped for, was a kind of freedom.

The most unfree souls go west, and shout of freedom, is only the beginning. The quote ends with that shout is a rattling of chains, always was.

As true as the stories are of my father's days as an actor and a lover and a bohemian and a fisherman, just as true are the stories of his drinking and his anger and his brutality. He wanted to fling everything he brought with him into the Pacific, the cycles of violence and absolution and then violence again, but these things didn't know how to leave him.

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Anne never liked my father. The summer she began to die, she told me she suspected my mother dated black men because of her low self-esteem. I stared at her hard as she continued to chew her cheese and pickle sandwich. We were eating lunch on her special plates, flowered with scalloped edges, that I had loved since I was a little girl.

What? I asked her.

She looked up at me. She must have seen the disbelief in my face and began to fuss in her chair, the corners of her mouth turning down, her crystal blue eyes, glassy with age, narrowing, as if in thought, as if only now wondering about what it was she had just said. Now, well, I-

Grandma, I said, loudly but not unkindly. My father is a black man. I began to cry. How do you think that makes me feel? How do you want me to feel, hearing that?

Oh, she said, her lined face crumpling. Oh, Katie, my Katie, I shouldn't have said that.

I cleared the plates and took them into the kitchen. I took a long time washing them. She was silent.

It's okay, I finally called out to her, softly. Even though it wasn't. Even though she hadn't apologized, only told me that it was something she oughtn’t have said.

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Proliferation of a wound is potentially more dangerous than the wound itself.

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There is always a master, said Lawrence. And men either live in glad obedience to the master they believe in, or they live in frictional opposition to the master they wish to undermine.

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In 1905, Shen Jiaben amended the Chinese penal code and lingchi was outlawed. The last sentence was performed in April of that year.

In the middle of an April over eighty years later, I was born to my mother via C-Section. The week before my birth, my father had left and fell off the wagon. My mother’s best friend since high school, Patti, was by her side during the operation. To this day, Patti swears I pulled myself up and out of my mother’s stomach, looking around at everything, tired but full of awe.

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Maturation is the third and final stage of healing, and only occurs when the wound has closed. 

In this phase, the cells and blood vessels grow quiet and still, as if listening.

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You’re getting freckles this summer, my partner observed to me in bed one afternoon or morning, lightly touching my cheeks, the bridge of my nose. I was incredulous; my dearest desire as a young girl had been to have freckles. I thought I had noticed them coming in but figured it must have been a trick of the light.

I rushed to the bathroom mirror. Yes; there they were. I recalled the photo of my Great Aunt Dot, Dorothy, whose father may have passed, who I resemble more than both of my parents, with her freckles, feet on Western soil, squinting into the sun.