An Old Maid Finds Meaning - Social Activism, The Dildo Of The Spirit

Fanny Ouellette grew up in a small town in Northern Maine, not far from the Canadian border.  Her family was originally from James Bay, but had migrated south to a small town, Charleroi, where her grandfather worked as a seed and grain merchant and her grandmother was a teacher.  Shortly after WWII, her grandfather Odile moved the family across the border to Maine where he joined his cousin in a similar trade. 

 

Fanny grew up speaking French, but enrolled in public schools, she quickly mastered English and many years later one would never suspect her native tongue.  In fact Fanny was such a good speaker that she was often asked to open sessions at the hospital auxiliary's annual meetings.   

She lived alone in a small apartment in a working class suburb of Washington, DC where she was a librarian at a Montgomery County library.  The job suited her - she had majored in library science at Montgomery College and as a girl always could be found in the carrels of her local library in Maine.  The move to the Washington area was a matter of circumstance - Montgomery College required only county residency for admission, had a good library science department, and housing in the area was inexpensive. 

Fanny was an ordinary woman in an ordinary job living in a very ordinary place; but she had intimations of something far better - something that might lift her spirits, give her energy and purpose, and to be honest, throw herself in the arms of a good man. 

This was not to be.  Fanny inherited the worst traits from both parents - her father's doughy pastiness, underslung jaw, and short stature; and her mother's wide set eyes, prominent nose, and fleshy lips.  Fanny couldn't have been more unfortunate.  The luck of the genetic draw was never meant to be so arbitrarily cruel, but there it was; and no matter how much she fiddled and fussed with her appearance, she was still sadly ugly.

In her mid-forties, a time when most women are either married or are in a relationship, Fanny was still living alone; and suddenly one day she realized that it was all wrong.  She was captive in a vicious circle of unremarkable ordinariness.  Job, residence, friends, and activities all were of the same cast and character - unappealing, unappetizing, uninspiring - and sex by her own hand seemed revolting, although necessary.  Something had to change. 

As it happened, the Progressive Coalition of Greater Montgomery County had their bi-monthly meeting at Fanny's branch library, and because she was on duty that day, she listened in. Speaker after speaker spoke in passionate terms about the climate, the black man, the gay, lesbian, and transgender, and the predatory greed of Wall Street capitalism.  The audience was ecstatic.  It was like a Southern Baptist revival.   Women turned to each other and embraced, raised their fists in anger and solidarity, and some cried. 

'The black man is still chattel', the first speaker said - a large black woman from Anacostia, one of Washington's most dysfunctional, horrid slums.  'Jim Crow ain't gone.  He alive and well.  He like the Black Plague, a rat scurrying from the sewer. He the stinking, foul spawn of the devil'.

She was a whirling dervish possessed, a flailing wonder.  She stood with her hands on her hips, defiance seething, waiting for her words to percolate and set in. 

Fanny was transfixed.  She was not a churchgoer, had never attended political rallies, and rarely raised her voice.  The library was all about whispers and inner voices, but this, this stormed in like gangbusters, turned the quiet requiem into ecstasy. Where had she been?

It was what she had been waiting for but never knew it.  It was the answer, the release, the satisfaction that she had dreamed of. 

Did she really care about the black man? No, and in fact was quite happy that he stayed where he belonged far from her; but LaShonda's words touched another chord - the resonant sound of righteousness. 

 

It didn't matter that she was more than happy that the black man never set foot west of the park.  It was his cause that mattered, and she for too long had been ignorant of his plight. 

The other speakers in favor of gay queens, the climate, and the wolves of Wall Street were just as passionate and eager, but nothing made her quiver and feel excitement like LaShonda Evans. 

In fact - and she hesitated admit this to anyone - LaShonda gave her a strangely weird sexual moment, a feeling so remote from 'Henry', as she had come to call her bedtime 'insertion' who brought her to sexual release, that she saw what she had been missing. 

Not that she had any feelings 'that way' for LaShonda herself but for the feeling of heightened pleasure evoked by her words.  Life was not to be led alone, disconsolate, and unsatisfied but fully. 

LaShonda wondered what this white woman wanted when she came up to her after her presentation and said, 'I want what you have'; but so it was that Fanny Ouellette gave her body and soul to The Movement.  

'I'm in', Fanny said to LaShonda, and the young woman, filled with the spirit and generous in her support of the black man. preached love, accommodation, and racial justice to the congregation at the Methodist Congregationalist Church of the Redeemer back in her part of town and invited LaShonda to reprise her successful library moment.   

The brothers in the projects wondered why LaShonda was wasting her time.  Let her come up in here, Pharoah Jones said, and we'll run a train on the bitch, 'that's what she want'.  

Despite her raw sexual fantasies, Fanny was not in it to get tapped by a black buck, but to live the black experience to the fullest - to live the history of the slave who picked cotton from dawn till dusk, ate cornpone and leavings, and was at the Massa's bidding; but her resentment of 'Henry' was impertinent. She wanted the real thing. 

'I'm ugly and I know it', Fanny said, 'but I didn't know I was that ugly', she said at the indifference of men and in particular black men who were supposed to have few sexual inhibitions.  And so it was that she delved further into the black experience in general rather than as matter of fact.  'Henry' her dildo companion still was her bedmate. 

The women with whom she associated after the library convocation - liberal matrons from Bethesda and Chevy Chase - were confiding but unmoving.  They unlike her had a life of husbands, children, and family patrons and social activism was merely a dalliance, a pastime.  No matter how may Democracy Matters, Hate Has No Home Here, or Black Lives Matter festoons adorned their lawns, they were still politically sedentary suburbanites. 

For Fanny after Library I, the cause was more significant.  Investment had been made, life put on the line for he black man. 

But still, and all in all, she was still a walleyed, doughy reproduction of the Ouellette men - of no interest whatsoever to white, patrician males for whom she had an eye or for the ghetto males of Anacostia. 

She had found meaning, but no lay. 

In other words, progressivism is good up to a point; but if its appeal ends with toasty blandishments and armchair aspirations, it is worth no more than stale pizza; and Fanny wanted a taste of a good Naples pepperoni double cheese. 

She, like most liberals if they live long enough, became conservative.  Idealism fades quickly in the light of day; but her conversion or rather reversion was more profound and abrupt than most.  'Bullshit' she was heard howling in the middle of the night, the niggling taunts of not doing enough tossed in the emotional dumpster with a shout. 

Too ugly to join the phalanx of beautiful blonde, blue-eyed, flaxen haired women in and out of the White House, she could still march with the standard of conservative values held high. The conversion felt good, very good, and while 'Henry' remained her dutiful, faithful friend, she reached for him only every other night.