Pandemic Loss, Racial Reckoning, and a Cursed Toolbox

Hilary Herbold, University Health Services

Honorable Mention

Last month I bought a house in Trenton. Two blocks away from the house I’m renting, the new place seemed perfect: old, Italianate, painted a mellow shade of ochre, with a bright, generous kitchen and the warm details of a home built in 1857. I fell desperately in house-love, imagining dinner parties, family brunches, and quiet evenings by the fireplace, and made an offer within hours of seeing it. The owners—a professor of ethnic studies from Hawaii and her partner, an Indian artist—sent a message through their realtor that they liked me and, although there were several offers, wanted me to buy their home. I was thrilled.

It also felt like a new beginning for me. Over the course of one year four years ago, my twenty-year marriage ended, my mother (who had raised my seven siblings and me largely on her own) died, and the youngest of my four children left for college. My ex-partner and I sold our house and separated, and I rented an apartment near campus, where for many months I spent evenings cooking for one, walking my dogs, and watching bad reality TV. “I’ve been pruned,” I half-joked to friends; life without the rich foliage of my daily gestures as mother, daughter, and partner left me feeling bare and vaguely pathetic, unsure of what would come next and how life could feel green and satisfying again.

March 2020 brought the pandemic and a more enveloping isolation. In my workdays I sat in my spare room peering into my laptop day after day, listening to students from New Jersey to Taiwan to Mumbai sharing their experience of having been torn away from friends, faculty, in-person learning, and sports. I felt their grief deeply. Out of this void, the events of May 2020 drew me into what historian Nell Painter has drily called “The Great White Awakening.” Sickened by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others and by the violence directed at queer and BIPOC communities in America, I began to confront the ways in which white supremacy and anti-Black racism have shaped my identity as a straight, cisgender white woman. One warm evening a few days after the killing of George Floyd, I sat in silence on my porch in a power outage burning a candle as the darkness deepened, a township-wide curfew in place to curb protest, police cars accelerating by my house with lights flashing. It felt like a nadir. The center was not holding; something was slouching toward Bethlehem, ready to be born.

At last I started to work on acknowledging my whiteness and relating more consciously to my unearned privilege. Colleagues of color helped by honestly speaking up about white supremacy in our workplace interactions and asking white co-workers to do better. I found anti-racist groups and workshops on campus and elsewhere; I read, marched, did outreach events; I joined committees to support diversity and inclusion efforts on campus. I spoke up on social media. At night, I still watched bad TV. Last year, I moved into the diverse, close-knit urban neighborhood that’s now my home, renting with a plan to buy. I bought.

And then I encountered a toolbox with a curse.

One morning last month I took the morning off from work to follow Mike the Home Inspector around my new house. As I wandered around the basement half-listening to Mike’s lengthy tutorial about pumpkin pine and heating systems, my eye was drawn to a bright red metal toolbox embellished with Basquiat-like drawings and words in black Sharpie, resting unperturbed in a musty corner. On the top, a sketch of a sharp-toothed cartoon fish had “ART IS DEAD” coming out of its mouth, and above that, the message “Feed me money—if you want to live. This tool box is cursed.”

I laughed, delighted; the owner-artist’s toolbox graffiti was cautioning me about the money pit I was taking on. Drawing closer, I saw that the owner’s name and phone number were scrawled on the side, under which was written “P.S.: This tool box is cursed. Any non-Indian who touches this tool box is doomed to die by it.”

Delighted, I snapped a few pictures of the graffiti-embellished toolbox. Could this place be any cooler? I hoped the owners (who had already moved to another state) had left the toolbox as a welcome gift—another charmingly authentic feature, like the ceiling medallions and the turned bannister post.

I did not, however, touch it.

As my giddiness wore off over the next few days, the admonition on the toolbox stayed with me, and I circled it in my mind. It was whimsical, it was delightful, it was art; it was also speaking to me as a white person, “non-Indian.” The house and the toolbox were mine—or were they? I had projected my fantasies of a new life onto this space and indeed this neighborhood. Was I appropriating what was not yet mine to claim, things I had not taken the time to listen to and make space for?

The red toolbox and its black inscriptions began to seem grave with meaning, casting a spell heavier than my real estate romance. Warning me not to touch, the Sharpie message reminded me of something that my visions of home ownership had obscured: in some ways I would remain a newcomer in my neighborhood, a guest in this house. By buying the home, I was claiming a piece of history—in a neighborhood constructed on Lenape land, near the site of a Revolutionary War battle, predominately white and wealthy in the early 19th century, now a racially and ethnically mixed area in a city that is both vibrant and challenged. Glowing red, implacable in its dim corner, the toolbox had something to say: we were going to be sharing this house, and that might call upon me not just to lay claim but to step aside.

Now, as February teases us with a balmy day between blasts of raw cold, I begin packing boxes for the fourth time in four years. I hope we are emerging from pandemic aloneness and look forward to the flowering of new and revived relationships. At the same time, I now deeply appreciate the stripping-away of the past few years, enabling the new growth of belated, sometimes bitter, and necessary racial responsibility emerging in my social and work communities and in myself. I’m trying to see with new eyes and to remain aware of how I live in the world as a white woman. I’m drawn to connect with histories and perspectives previously unheard by me, to listen, to step back when I should, to see the American history around me with unsparing and honest eyes. In becoming part of a community, I expect to reckon with not just what I want but also what I owe. I’m looking forward to creating a life in my new house, to open doors and dinner parties at a crowded table. And, for the foreseeable future, I expect to be giving that red toolbox a friendly nod as I walk around it.