halloween with the klan

you need to call your mother insists the voice on the answering machine. it is the middle sister, the one earliest identified as being "vocal" about things. the one whose first nickname had an actual expletive in it. you need to tell her you remember that they made us trick or treat... and i know before i hear the rest of the message what she is talking about. forced trick or treating. while it was not the trail of tears and not the bataan death march, to a small child it had a similar flavor.

we did not want to go to a particular house to trick or treat. it wasn't an old ramshackle house we figured might be haunted nor did the folks inside seem like the type to fill candy with poisons or razor blades. we never envisioned the homeowner flying off nights on a broom. but the man who lived behind those walls and windows just like ours was horrifying to us. he was worse than all the scary monsters because he was real. he was everything our parents had raised us to steer clear of, a man so full of hate he needed to join up with an organization dedicated solely to the practice of focusing that hate. he was a proud and powerful member of the klan. yes, that klan.

but our parents, who in their own calm way had raised us to be unafraid of the gifts and opportunities available in a world filled with so much that was not us, stood firm in their insistence that we go trick or treating at the house of a man who some evenings dressed up in his own awful costume to terrorize others. maybe they hoped that we would connect with this man so lost to the world. maybe they knew, even then, that the ugliness in him would ruin him soon enough. i suspect they just felt sorry for him, knew he was so sick from his hate that there was not much they could do to help but send over children dressed as wildness begging for candy.

and so we went. i could not tell you what the man looked like. this is not because of failing memory but because i don't believe i ever looked him full in the face in all the time i knew him. he isn't important. he was never important. what i remember from that halloween is that they wanted us to go, the parents. it didn't matter who he was or what he had done. it mattered who we were and what we would do. this is how we figure out who we are. so we took our dressed up selves and our plastic jack-o-lanterns and we rang his bell and waited.