The Empire
By Virginia Ritter

I’ve lived in Europe for 5 years, and in the city of Amsterdam for 3 of those 5 years. Since I work in hospitality (and it is clear I am not Dutch) I get the same few questions almost every day.
“Where are you from? Why did you move? What’s it like living in the States?”
Since these questions come in between pouring beers, I usually answer in a short quips about a better life and try and move the conversation along.
But the longer I have lived here the longer this question “where are you from?” has weighed on me. How would I answer if I told the truth?
Where am I from? I’m from The Empire.
I was born in a city near a major river in the south east of what is now called the United States of America. My soul was guided to this land by yellow day lilies and purple cone flowers. Land that used to nurtured the Three Sisters of maize, beans, and squash.
Land that was stolen from the Chickasaw people on July 4th 1838 by the President Andrew Jackson in a colonial expansion project known as “the Indian Removal Act.”
My mom and dad took me from that riverside hospital and didn’t stop moving me until I was 11 years old. And by that time, they’d had a second, better child. One they intended to have. Not one sprung on them by lust and lack of options.
I grew up traveling through the foothills of the Appalachia mountains to visit my extended family. Some city rats, some country mice, all with something to teach me about myself and the world around me. All varieties of racist and homophobic.
They finally settled us on a 2 story home with a far off view of a man-made lake just outside a major railroad city. In a place people once called a “sun down town.” A warning to anyone with dark skin to be out of the city limits by sunset.
I remember my English teacher when I was 13 years old telling our class about the time Oprah came to visit. To prove to people elsewhere in the country that this kind of racism still existed. It was 1987 and white supremacist marched in the streets. When I moved there in 2002, it was rumored the KKK met at the Biscuit Barn on Sunday evenings. That’s when the shades were drawn.
The town was mostly sustained by white northern transplants (who were too afraid of black people to live closer to the city) and the Tyson Chicken processing plant located just down wind. My father would drive me to school behind trucks filled with rows of live chickens, on their way to be “processed”. Then we pull into a drive thru for a deep friend chicken breakfast sandwich. At least the fast food chain aligned with his Christian morals.
During the relative freedom of my teenage years, friends and I would explore around the dam and watch the water burst from it in measured intervals decided on by people with vested interests.
The wailing siren, the methodical verbal warnings, then three loud horn blasts and the frigid water, sucked from the bottom of the lake, would roar and rage through the concrete canals until it settled into a swift high flow in the river below. The birds and fish scattered flushed down river by the abhorrent wave of destruction.
One year, the valves were left open and the lake was almost drained. 3,000 tons of water dumped into the Chattahoochee River unexpectedly. Human error.
It was then, that the top of a church steeple saw the sun for the first time since it had been flooded.
It was a black church. It was a black town.
A black town flooded in 1950 by white people.
A black town burned in 1912 by white people.
And the white people I was raised by, poisoned by, told me everything was fine.
That we could rent a boat and learn to wake board on a graves of Black hopes and dreams and escape with our souls intact. That we could dive and jump and splash and laugh where our ancestors had brutalized generations, and no evil eye would find us.
No spirit called up would claim us.
If Evil is drawn to evil, and how many more evil acts can one place take before it is filled with malevolent spirits? I bathed in that lake’s waters. Unaware of the malevolence seeping in through the pours of my skin, splashing into my mouth and eyes, sticking in my ears.
And all the while, I was taught about pain. Taught to close myself off to other’s pain. Punished for showing my own pain. Rewarded for inflicting pain.
Taught to enact evil, embrace evil. Be proud of my evilness.
Watch and cheer as we bomb Baghdad. Evil.
Support the troops at Abu Ghraib. Evil.
Take the oil, destroy the people. Evil.
Where am I from? I’m from the Empire. I’m from the Evil.
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