Remembering Jesse Jackson as a Kind Man
As you doubtless know now, Jesse Jackson has left us to make our way without him. People have been speaking of the broad sweep of Jackson’s life, how he trailblazed for the rights of many marginalized. That he gave speeches for years which inspired the Democrats, and America, towards the More Perfect Union Obama would offer us in 2008.
I remember him as the guy seated in front of me on a flight to San Francisco.
I was eleven, and he was surrounded by a gaggle of press who were honestly kind of scary to an eleven year old girl flying alone. I should admit, I did know who he was — even then I had political leanings. It was 1984, and Jesse Jackson was on the campaign trail.
I was flying alone. As a child of divorced and dysfunctional parents, all the flying I did as a child was alone. I was not inclined to expect much from adults in general, but I did like talking to people, then as now.
I don’t remember how it started, but given the situation we were in, I suspect I passed the first note. He took it, managed to decipher my terrible penmanship, and wrote me a reply. I didn’t ask him weighty questions about politics, I think I probably asked his favorite color. People’s favorite color was a major interest for me when I was eleven.
He wrote some questions for me, (perhaps also my favorite color, which was blue.) and soon we were in a conversation, the kind of sweet conversation where a thoughtful grown-up pays attention to a child. Not to what the child is doing, or how they are behaving, or how they are ranking in school and life, but attention to what the child wants to talk about. This is what I remember most about the conversation on that flight — his genuine interest. That he treated me like a person. Jackson had no way of knowing it, but I didn’t get treated like a person very often at that age.
Sometimes you never get to know the good you do.
The media were there, lobbing questions, trying to get his attention, presumably to get quotes. He didn’t completely ignore them, but they weren’t the priority right then. Talking to me was.
The press were not easy to ignore, the media could still get right in your face on a plane. This was long before TSA, planes could be more chaotic and free wheeling than they are now. He broke off passing the note a few times to chat with the other adults interrupting us, but he always came back to me. He answered my little girl questions, as important as anyone else’s, and passed me a few bits of grown-up wisdom. I vaguely remember that he told me to do my homework. I didn’t much like homework, it was one of those things adults seemed contractually obligated to tell children. I forgave him.
Me as a young child. Not only was my favorite color blue, I was really into dolphins. Maybe a bit too much.
It wasn’t a long flight, but before we went our separate ways forever I told him that I hoped he would win. He gave the note to me and told me to keep it. (I lost it shortly after, I was an eleven year old kid.) I’m not sure if we said anything else out loud, but we didn’t need to.
He did not hug me in front of the press. He never held my hand, or mentioned me in any way. The media never noticed me. The flight was a moment, just for me and Jesse Jackson. He was kind, he paid attention to what I wrote, and told me he liked the pictures I drew for him. There was no angle in this for him, except the human one. There was no benefit, other than getting little pictures and misspelled words from me.
When we landed I went to my father, and he vanished into a crowd of even more excited grown-ups. I would never see him again, except on TV.
Jesse Jackson was deeply humane. He choose to pay attention to the least important person, a child flying alone. I was someone who couldn’t give him any benefit, accomplish any political goal. I don’t even think anyone trying to get quotes from him even noticed him quietly passing notes with the little girl in the next row.
Jesse Jackson delivering the speech that would help start the process of bringing LGBTQ+ people into the Democratic coalition, and into normal life.
What I didn’t know, and wouldn’t for years, was that Jackson was going to San Francisco to give the first speech at a national convention that not only acknowledge the queer community, but held us in the light. Jesse Jackson was the first person to say the words “gay and lesbian” To the American public in the formal election process. “The Rainbow includes lesbians and gays. No American citizen ought be denied equal protection from the law,” he fearlessly told the Democrats and the world, in that long ago San Francisco summer.
What he never knew was that the little girl he passed notes with was one of the beneficiaries of his words. He didn’t know I was queer (I cannot overstate how eleven I was). He never would know that the work he did at that convention would be of benefit and comfort to the little girl who sat behind him on the plane, passing him a note.
In his loud and rhyming way, Jesse Jackson bashed down the door which, years later, Barack Obama would walk through with an air of calm and cool. Obama’s chill and comfortable charisma took him from senator to president. But without Jackson’s furious energy and the furious energy of the civil rights era, Obama’s calm demeanor would have never registered. All of that is true and important.
But for me, Jesse Jackson isn’t a distant historical figure. He was just a person, a kind and considerate man, someone who took time away from his work to share a moment with a child traveling alone.
