I grew up with this lady. I knew her just as “Jean” or when things were serious - Jean Trickey. She was just a lady a few concessions (roads) further into the hinterland, Cane township.
I grew up “in the sticks”, in Northern Ontario. My parents hung out and belong to a hippie community, many of them/us being American draft dodgers, escaping conscription into the Vietnam War. Jean was married to one, Roy, Roy Trickey.
It was a hard life for everyone. But also, full of many freedoms, music, campfires, and friendship. We grew marijuana and sold it in the big city. Filling the pickup truck with big green garbage bags of it, us kids piled in the back for the long drive south. Goats, living off the land, endlessly cutting firewood and always fighting nature, trying to stay alive.
My family was poor. Very poor. No electricity, or running water, for a number of years. But Jean and family were even poorer. Hard to even get your head around that, that people could have been worse off than us. But they were. We’d visit their farm from time to time and the kids, Isaiah, Morning Star, and the rest would be running around with tattered clothes and screams of delight chasing goats, chasing their big wolfhound. It was the 3rd world but happy in many ways.
Jean had it hard. There was the colossal struggle to survive, against the cold, against the land that didn’t yield too much, and against the problems of her marriage, violence and abuse. But she kept at it. She kept loving her family and she kept struggling to survive, even when a number of tragedies struck.
I relate all this about Jean because back then, me, a young boy reading books about Ho Chi Minh by flashlight, in my small bedroom … I didn’t know anything about racism. About civil rights. About how some people hate other people, for no reason at all. I didn’t know Jean’s story. Nobody had ever told me. We were just living life, nobody was special, we all were special.
Years later, I grew up, moved to the big city, and began traveling the world and living in the pages I had read as a young boy. I learned about 50s, 60s America and the fight for equality, and civil rights. I learned about Jean’s own part in all that - she was one of the Little Rock 9, Central High, Arkansas, escorted in by the National Guard. Later awarded the highest distinction in America - the Congressional Gold Medal.
Jean finally “escaped” Cane Township and Roy and her marriage. First Sudbury, then Ottawa. She struggled as a single mother, going to university and eventually getting her Masters' degree and starting a new portion of her life.
And that’s what for me, Jean, Minniejean is … a fighter. What we should all be. Her life is a great story and an example for everyone. It isn’t those 15 minutes that are important but what you do when the eyeballs aren’t on you.
I met Jean at one of her many speeches to young students, years later. Rosedale, Toronto. An affluent neighborhood, Branksome Hall, a top girls’ school in Canada. As I sat there listening to her marvelous words, I wondered to myself, "how many knew her story, the B side to her record?
I greeted Jean and she was the same wide-smiled, affable, loving person I’d known as a kid. She’d always got wrongly labeled as the “angry one” of the Little Rock 9, the first to be expelled because she poured chili over some boys taunting her. It wasn’t anger, I think - it was that she was a fighter, proud and insistent on her own worth and rights as a person. A value to admire and cherish.
These days, the whole world is supposed to be “woke”. I’m not sure what that means. If it is like what it seems to me, a Maoist cultural revolution and putsch and forced atonement for all whites, I’m against that. In that fashion, we’ll never get past the color and live in the world as I used to as a kid. But maybe I’m naive to believe in equality, enforcing laws, the rights, inalienable rights, we all as colorless individuals have and must fight for - as Jean did.
I got this out of one of my poetry notebooks while in Canada. I must have been 19 or 20 when I wrote this. It’s not anything special, let’s just call it a historical record. But I’ve always thought of Jean and think of her now, her and her legacy, and how she faced things as she was washed about by life.
To Minniejean
We only need a little rock
and the lucky number nine
to stand upon and throw dice
so to win a piece of heaven.
Sharp was the bitter wind
that blew from those white souls
and with history’s helping hand
more bitter glowed those racist coals.
This was in the land south
but any place it could have been
wherever the heart does sputter
and hate and pride are wed unseen.
Glory to the children
who wouldn’t look the other way.
Glory to the men
who kept the three-fingered at bay.
Glory to the man
who knew all the words not to say.
Glory to the truth
who shone its light and won the day.
All it took was a little rock
and the lucky number nine
to stand upon and throw dice
and win the day, send a sign.
Awash In Life