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Thursday, April 12, 2012

Keeping the Receipts


          When old teacher friends call, we greet each other jokingly, “Hey, do you still have your receipts?”
            “Of course I do. Do you?”
            “You know it. I’m goin’ to keep them ‘til I die.”
            It’s a private joke, but Rhonda, Jeri and I still have the receipts from an unforgettable trip in 1986. Even 25 years later, we still expect the Tribal Office will call, asking for that debt to be repaid. We are ready. We keep our receipts.
            That summer the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma sent us, three Tribal boarding school teachers, to San Francisco to do training with the National Reading Teacher of the Year. Not to a conference with hundreds of other teachers, we went to his high school classes, sat in front row desks and learned the techniques personally.
 Our principal handed us plane tickets, a detailed agenda, and one American Express card to pay for everything: meals, rooms, and transportation.
            “Of course, you must turn in all receipts with the card when you return,” he advised us. “You are not allowed to use it for personal purchases.”
            Checking into our rooms in Healdsburg, California, we learned “American Express” is not welcome 82 miles north of San Francisco. Between us we had $1500 cash for souvenirs; now it paid all expenses: motel, meals, and transportation.
Back in San Francisco waiting for our plane home, I spoke up, “Okay, I can’t go home without souvenirs for my kids. So,” dramatically I pulled out the blue-silver card, and said, “If we keep our receipts and don’t spend over the allotted amount the Tribe owes us for our cash, we won’t have to pay them any thing.” I smiled at my reasoning. They agreed.
            We dashed from vendor to vendor, buying sweatshirts, tee shirts, and postcards, keeping the receipts.
            Of course, all heck broke loose weeks later. We had to report to the Tribal Complex. A financial officer yelled at us for illegal use of Tribal money. The only comment the Assistant Chief  made was, “The Chief will talk to you about this.” 
Subdued but stubborn, we knew Chief Wilma Mankiller had the power to fire us or make us pay, with our jobs or the money. We stuck to our reasoning and receipts.
“After we spent our cash for the trip expenses, we had to use the card for souvenirs. But we kept track of everything. We spent $1500—our cash amount. You don’t have to reimburse us any money,” I said.
Expressionless, Chief Mankiller asked, “So we don’t owe you any money? It came out exactly?”
            “Well, it might be off two or three dollars, but we will call it even.” Jeri responded.
            Her loud laugh surprised us. “Okay, let’s call it even. I’ll tell the finance office. But, don’t ever use our card like that again.”           
As we left, I whispered, “The Cherokee Nation will never trust us with their American Express credit card, will they?”
            Rhonda laughed before saying, “They won’t trust us, period.”
            Really, it was not our fault, but we hold on to our receipts, just in case.  (508)

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2 comments:

  1. AnonymousApril 15, 2012 at 1:31 PM

    Did you teach math or law? ;)
    As a receipt keeper myself, I know this all too well.

    ReplyDelete
  2. BrendaBApril 17, 2012 at 12:32 PM

    No, I taught English at a Federal Tribal school, which means that it was Federal money that had to be accounted very carefully.
    Thanks for the comment.

    ReplyDelete

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The Help: the film dividing America

By Philip Sherwell 7:30AM BST 23 Oct 20115 Her book has sold 1.3 million copies in Britain and 10 million in the States, the film adaptation has already earned $160 million as the movie hit of the summer in America, and now Oscar buzz is mounting ahead of its release in the UK this week. These should be heady days for Kathryn Stockett, author of bestselling debut novel The Help, a publishing phenomenon that earned the devotion of book clubs and legions of predominantly female fans on both sides of the Atlantic. The Help is the emotive story of black maids in the segregated world of Sixties Mississippi at the height of the civil rights struggle – their narratives recounted by a sympathetic, young white woman who rejects the virulent inbred racism of her old school friends. There are clear autobiographical parallels with Stockett, 42, herself, a blonde Southern belle raised by a beloved African-American nanny in Jackson, the Mississippi state capital where the story is set. And her success is all the more remarkable, as the manuscript, five years in the writing, was rejected by some 60 literary agents (she stopped counting at 45). The Disney film version is being marketed as an inspiring mixture of chick lit and civil rights, based on a heart-warming sorority between the races. And there is growing speculation about Oscar nods for Viola Davis (who plays the central character, Aibileen Clark), Octavia Spencer (her feisty friend, Minny) and newcomer Emma Stone (as white socialite Skeeter Phelan). But not everyone in the US is feeling so good about the “feel-good” juggernaut that is The Help. Certainly not Ablene Cooper, the black housekeeper for Stockett’s brother, who brought a lawsuit against the writer, claiming she was the unwitting and humiliated model for the similarly named lead figure. Nor a leading black actor, or the commentators – many of them also African-American – who view the book and film as patronising portrayals that sugar-coat one of the most violent eras in modern history. Those visceral responses reflect deep and enduring fault lines about race in a country where the horrors of segregation, a painful living memory for many, were not washed away by the election of Barack Obama as the first African-American president. In Mississippi, the scene of some of the most brutal acts of the freedom struggles five decades ago, those sensitivities are particularly raw. And that violent past reared its ugly head again recently when a black man was viciously beaten up by a gang of young whites and then mowed down and killed by a pick-up truck in what prosecutors claim was a racially driven hate crime. Against that turbulent backdrop, Stockett was perhaps always courting controversy. Most poignant among the objecting voices is that of Mrs Cooper, who sued the writer for $75,000, a humble sum by America’s litigious standards, for using her likeness without permission. She said she was distressed that in the book Aibileen lost her son – just as she had – and that in one exchange the maid said her skin was blacker than a cockroach. The case was thrown out under the statute of limitations, as Mrs Cooper failed to lodge it within a year of being sent the book. Still, she was not alone in her complaints. Wendell Pierce, New Orleans-born star of The Wire and Treme, launched a blistering attack on the film after watching it with his mother, who told him afterwards for the first time that she too had once worked as “the help." In a series of scathing tweets, he called the film “passive segregation lite that was painful to watch”, said his mother thought it was an “insult”, that it was a “passive version of the terror of the South” and a “sentimental primer of a palatable segregation history." Mr Pierce was at pains to praise the cast, particularly Davis and Spencer, but added that Hollywood often seeks films with black actors as long as there is also a “great white saviour." The most damning verdict on its allegedly saccharine version of reality was delivered by Max Gordon, an African-American, New York-based writer, who described his outrage as he watched the film. “The phenomenon of The Help is so depressing, as it undercuts the real heroes of the era by ignoring the real horrors,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “This is not the South of lynchings and beatings, it’s the comfortable Hollywood take of the civil rights era. “I don’t think you can compare suffering and oppression, but what would people say if there was an executive decision to make a movie about the Holocaust and the Nazis without brutality, featuring only German officers’ wives and Jewish women, with no concentration camps or trains to Auschwitz?” But the two black stars are defending the film. Spencer, a friend of Stockett, was particularly combative. “We’ve gotten so PC and we’ve gotten so weirded out. We start labelling. You have to be a black person to write about black people, you have to be a white person…” she bemoaned in one interview, not needing to finish the thought process. “I have a problem with the fact that some people are making that an issue.” The book also received the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey, the Mississippi-born talk- show queen whose views carry great weight with her overwhelmingly female and African-American audiences. The Help was described as a “favourite book” on her website. Stockett, a recently divorced mother of an eight-year-old daughter who worked in the magazine industry in New York before moving back to the South, is now working on her second novel, another tale of women, this one set during the Great Depression. The writer addresses some of the criticisms of The Help in a newly published version of the book. She denied that, despite the coincidence of names, her brother’s housekeeper was a model, saying she had barely met the woman. Rather, she wrote that the inspiration for the character was Demetrie, her beloved childhood maid who largely raised her after her parents divorced when she was six. “The Help is fiction, by and large,” she continued. Yet as she wrote it, she wondered what her family would say – and also what Demetrie, by then long dead, would have thought. She acknowledged that she was breaking what some have seen as a cultural and literary taboo. “I was scared a lot of the time that I was crossing a terrible line, writing in the voice of a black person,” she said. “What I am sure about is this: I don’t presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi, especially in the Sixties. I don’t think it is something any white woman at the other end of a black woman’s paycheck could ever truly understand.” But, she concluded, “trying to understand is vital to our humanity”. Loyal readers and cinema-goers might agree with these motives. Her critics, as adamantly, do not. As British box offices prepare for a lucrative new release, the polarisation shows no signs of abating. 'The Help’ is released on Wednesday in Britan.