Elizabeth K. Gordon

For anyone who wants to understand cultural differences, who wants to understand the roots of poverty, ignorance and bigotry, Elizabeth Gordon has given us a window into that world. She shares her acquired wisdom (and continuing feeling of insufficiency) with palpable honesty and elegant metaphor. She sees second graders "whirled away like leaves in a gust to decorate the playground with their happy cries." She describes her young charge as "caught by accident under the bell jar of her misery" and, later, as "a nail head under the hammer of minimum wage." She is a writer who thinks visually and paints with her pen.

The blurb on the back cover of Walk With Us and the subtitle, Triplet Boys, Their Teen Parents, & Two White Women Who Tagged Along, did not prepare me for the world in which Elizabeth Gordon immersed me. For nearly 50 pages, I colored my comprehension with the hidden impression that I was reading the story of a couple of middle-class do-gooders who were proving that homosexuals can be as socially conscious as heterosexuals (a credit to their gender, my inner bigot whispered), while happily bringing ghetto-living have-nots into the illuminated world of haves.

And then the raw reality of it finally penetrated my shield of self-congratulatory liberal smugness. The gender of two privileged whites is beside the point, though perhaps their backgrounds are not. They represent two classic caricatures of white society—the middle-class, well-fed American from a prosperous family and the working-class, first-in-the-family-to-have-a-college-degree American from a stretched-thin family plagued with alcoholism and abuse.

Elizabeth and her partner Kaki plunge themselves into a culture about which they know nothing. This is not a simple tale. It is not the story of someone given the gift of enough to eat and a college education and living happily ever after.

Tahija is fifteen years old, pregnant with triplets, drifting from one relative's home to the next while her mother completes a stay in drug rehab. Her friends and relatives live in subsidized housing, where someone can be evicted by having a guest who stays longer than a few days. Enter Elizabeth and Kaki, who create a safe haven for Tahija, including a room of her own, a nursery for the babies and a healthy, balanced diet. It is Tahija's seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Lamarr (father of her babies), who makes the connection through Kaki, whom he met while attending an AVP (Alternatives to Violence Project) workshop that she was leading.

In the course of their association with the young black couple, Elizabeth and Kaki get a first-hand appreciation of a world where people expect to spend more time standing in queue for services than receiving services, where people expect to be treated with bored disregard, where people expect to be defined by what they don't have and can't do. Like most family groups bound together by mutual need and caring, the serendipitous family of two middle-aged white women, two black teenagers and three growing babies explodes into pieces of hurt and misunderstanding, suffers the pain of humility learned, then reassembles in a form more supportive of the people they have become through the experience. Gordon quotes Hannah Arendt: "The only power we can have over the past is forgiveness."

One of the themes that color this narrative is that long-term racism does not remain one-sided, but bifurcates into a two-way mistrust, creating a balance that erects a wall between human beings. These seven people lay themselves bare to show us how this works and point us in a better direction. I had expected a story about the difficulties of being lesbian and the problems of cultural differences. I was blind-sided by a story of love and hope and excruciating, debilitating racism. Elizabeth Gordon has produced a classic work about the personal face of racism. It should be required reading in every secondary and tertiary classroom that touches on the subject.… (more)