Friday 28 August 2015

This piece was written for a creative non-fiction class. It is an example of flash non-fiction.

I was across the street, and as a result, I didn’t hear the words. The main street in the town of Luray, Virginia is in the midst of a process of gentrification. Where once stood most likely general stores, hardware stores, and other stores selling local things for local people, there are boutiques, bookshops and cafes that cater for out-of-towners. It is such a café that I am exiting at the time the words were spoken. My fiancée and I are making last minute wedding plans, wishing we could find local stores with local prices, but finding only smiles hastily assembled below calculating eyes. Eyes that have narrowed more than once as my friends and I carelessly and happily walk along Main Street reunited on foreign soil. Narrowing eyes don’t do anything to dampen our spirits, but words? Words are powerful.

I haven’t seen my friends more than two or three times in the last 2 years. I moved to Costa Rica, and they did not. Maybe they didn’t need to find themselves; maybe they didn’t need to leave. I needed to leave, and so I boarded an aeroplane alone. Now we walk down Main Street in Luray, Virginia together, and everything that has happened has happened so that we may be together again. It may well be true that you can’t put a price on friendship, but my friends have estimated it at around two thousand pounds. Luckily, the pound is stronger than the dollar, and we feel it as we drink five-dollar lattes; we feel good. The caffeine, the camaraderie and the occasion have infected all of us with an incorrigible joy. Our jokes are funnier; our laughs louder, and nothing can spoil this moment.

My friend Rebekah is a truly incredible person. Warm, kind, dependable. She is just the kind of friend that everyone should have. She has flown from Barcelona, Spain to be one of my groomsmen, possibly the first groomsmaid in the history of Luray, Virginia. She has skin the colour of dark honey, and hair that cascades from her scalp in all directions, tight curls that bounce as she bounces, full of energy and life. She has finished her fruit tea, paid and tipped, and has taken a stroll with another of my friends, Jon or Kieran, maybe both. We are not all specific people when we are together; it doesn’t matter who said or did what, only that it was done. We are simply a group, a family.

As we finish our lattes and politely decline a look at the dessert menu, life could not feel any sweeter. As we emerge from the café and pour onto Main Street, we see Rebekah and her attendants standing, still. They look, different somehow. Bek has the look of someone pretending they are ok, and Jon and Kieran look utterly helpless, so we move, as one unit, across the street to find out what is wrong.

“A girl on that school bus called me a nigger.” Says Bek. She is almost apologetic, as if she wants it to be a misunderstanding. And ironically, at that moment, all the colour drains from the world. I feel sick. It is not nausea; I do not want to vomit. It is the deep, aching feeling that something has happened that is wrong. The feeling one gets when they witness domestic violence, or watch a bully hit someone who has done nothing, those viral videos that make us feel disassociated with the society we inhabit. It is an empty feeling that grips your internal organs and squeezes. We close ranks around Rebekah, and we mourn as if we truly are a family. None of my friends has ever been called a nigger before, and we don’t know how to deal with it. I want to chase after the school bus, find the child who said these words, make them apologise, tell their parents, complain to the police, anyone who can make amend this situation. But there is nobody. The bus has driven away, and we are not local people.


Maybe half of my friends from the UK who have paid two thousand pounds to be at my wedding are not white. Sunny has a master’s degree and is a chartered surveyor. James is an economist. Emma is an events manager. Rebekah is a kindergarten teacher. Her mother is white. To a child in the town of Luray, Virginia, she is a lesser being.  Somebody perhaps seven years old has the power to rob my friend of her humanity. The shock and disgust that we feel collectively soon turns to something else, pity perhaps; pity for a child who has already been taught to hate in the second most popular wedding destination in the United States, a town that sells love to lovers and their loved ones. My fiancée and I will be married in 2 days, and Rebekah will by my groomsmaid. The town of Luray is in the midst of a process of gentrification, but the people of Luray are in need of much more than boutiques and five-dollar lattes.

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