It's Brigid's Day; and how kids learn racism.

Several years' worth of Brigid's crosses. 
Lynne Cantwell | 2025

Blessed Imbolc! Today is the first day of spring in Ireland, and it's one of those Pagan sabbats where Americans wonder why folks in the UK are rushing the seasons. Because it's still definitely winter here, no matter what that Pennsylvania groundhog will say tomorrow; my daughters still haven't finished digging their car out from under the freakish ice storm that DC experienced last week. But the daylight hours are perceptibly lengthening, and within a few weeks, spring will be here for us, too.

Imbolc is the day to celebrate Brigid, the Irish goddess of poetry, healing and smithcraft. (It's also a day to honor the Christian saint of the same name, but I'm talking about Paganism here.) I saw a post on Facebook over the past couple of days in which the author tried to argue that Brigid was also a goddess of conflict. Don't bother asking Google's A.I. -- you'll get the usual conflation of Brigid the Irish goddess with both St. Brigid and Brigantia, a goddess of Celtic Britain who's also linked to Boudica, a queen of Icenic tribe who managed to hold off the Romans for a while in CE 61 or so. Maybe that's where the idea originates of a link between Brigid and conflict.

But Brigid is not the Morrigan. Hers is instead the gentler art of conflict resolution -- of poetry and healing, and of lamenting the dead (she's credited with inventing keening). If She carries a hammer, it's because She uses it at Her forge. Making weaponry is not the same as wielding it. And iron can be shaped into more than just swords.

That's my experience of it, anyway.

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I guess you could say that conflict is a theme of both halves of this post.

Earlier today, I read a remembrance by someone who's about my age. She said that when she was in elementary school, she made friends with another girl and invited her home one day -- and her mother ordered the friend to leave, then beat the crap out of the daughter because the friend was Black and she'd brought her into their house and don't ever do that again.

Which reminded me of a similar incident in my own childhood. Although mine was, thankfully, less violent.

This would have been in the mid to late '60s. Our neighborhood was white, but there were some houses along the railroad tracks where some Black families lived. Of course we all went to school together (and our neighborhood got shifted from one elementary school to another, depending on which school needed more Black kids that year, but I digress). I knew the kids by sight -- we all rode the same bus, after all -- although I didn't hang around with them. 

One day, one of the little Black girls ventured into our neighborhood. We ended up playing together in my yard, and at one point we decided to go inside. And my mother threw a fit. She told the girl to leave and told me I was never to bring any Black kids home again, ever.

Well, she didn't use the word "Black". This was the '60s, after all.

Anyway, the girl was nice, and I didn't understand what the color of her skin had to do with anything. I was too young then to give voice to my thoughts, and of course I was a good girl and obeyed my parents. But my belief that we are all human, and therefore worthy of respect, may have been born that day.

The hell of it is that my father had built our house with help from my uncle John, who was a carpenter, and Mr. Farmer, a Black man who lived in one of those houses along the railroad tracks.

A Black man was good enough to build our house, but a little Black girl couldn't be allowed inside to play? How crazy is that?

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Later on, when my own kids went to school and learned about Black History Month, they practically yelled at me: "Why didn't you tell us any of this?"

What, that Black folks were different from white folks? It never occurred to me. When I was a kid, I'd learned that "different" meant bad. I thought the idea was to treat everybody the same, because we are all the same. We're all human beings. 

That's what equality means to me still. I want to learn about our differences, sure, but I want to celebrate them. I want to honor everyone's stories and all the heroes from every culture. I want us all to be proud of each other.

Pie in the sky? Maybe so. But we can't get there if we don't dream it first.

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These moments of bloggy conflict resolution have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Blessed Imbolc and happy Black History Month, too.

Why it took me so long to read To Kill a Mockingbird.

This week, I made Harper Lee a Rursday. Unfortunately, it was a posthumous honor, but at least I managed to read To Kill a Mockingbird before she died.

As I said in my review, it began when I admitted on Facebook not long ago that I had never read the novel. A number of people whose opinions I respect were surprised, and told me I needed to get on it right away. So I did.

But why did it take me so long?

I suspect it's partly my Northern upbringing. I understood that To Kill a Mockingbird is a Southern novel, and even in the 1960s and '70s, the South was thought of as a different sort of place than where I grew up. And yet, Maycomb, Alabama, in the 1930s is not all that unlike northern Indiana in the 1960s, in terms of the way whites treated blacks. Our schools were integrated, but our neighborhoods were not. We didn't have separate water fountains for whites and "coloreds," as the South did, but the prejudice was certainly there, and so was the mistrust between the races.

A few blocks from the house where I grew up was a little neighborhood beside the railroad tracks where several black families lived. (At the time, the correct term was Negro; it became "black" while I was still in school. Eventually, America realized that not every "black" person is actually black, so the preferred term now is African-American. The derogatory term has remained consistent; I don't use it, although some of my relatives did, and do.) I have a clear memory of a girl who lived in one of those houses riding her bike down my street. She wasn't in my grade, but we rode the same bus to school. She came into the yard, and we played outside for a little while. Then we went inside. I don't remember which of us proposed it, and it doesn't matter; what matters is that my mother immediately told us to go back outside. And she made it very clear to me later on that it was not to happen again.

I thought the whole thing was crazy. We went to the same school. And my father was friends with one of the men who lived in the girl's neighborhood; the gentleman in question had helped my father and my uncle build our house.

Anyway, when I had kids of my own, I was determined to raise them without any sort of prejudice. We lived in an integrated neighborhood, and my kids' books and TV shows had characters of all sorts of colors and ethnicities. I remember practically bending over backwards to describe people in terms other than skin color. And it worked -- until the first time the girls' school had a Black History Month program. Kitty came home from school incensed: "Why didn't you tell us any of this stuff?"

Well, because I wanted my kids to think skin color doesn't matter. Because it doesn't matter -- any more than does eye color or hair color or native language, or headscarves, or henna, or that dab of ashes Catholics wear on their foreheads in the spring.

And yet, of course, it does matter. Because humans have not yet reached the level of maturity at which skin color and religion are just another way to describe our fellow humans -- and not a reason to hate, mistrust, and even kill them.

Tomorrow is the last day of this year's Black History Month. I wish we lived in a post-racial world, but we don't. In too many ways, we're still stuck in the mindset of Maycomb, Alabama, circa 1935.

And yet I still hope that someday, we can get to the place where religion and skin color are nothing but ways to describe our fellow human beings.

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These moments of bloggy diversity have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.