Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

In her memoir, Mira Jacobs illuminates the magnitude of impact that both history and one’s personal past can have on the present. The experiences Mira has in her life surrounding racism, family relationships, and love shape the person she becomes as well as the way she views the world around her. Similarly, historical events like 9/11 have a ripple effect that extends across time and also tends to be restarted with new political upheavals, much like a hibernating virus often remerges again years later. Mira worries for her son Z and the ways the political messages he absorbs both through the media and through her might affect his development. She wants desperately for Z to know most of all that his “heart is a good one, and that [his] capacity to feel love, in all its complexity, is a gift” (346).

Growing up in America, Z is exposed to a large amount of violence and racism. Because he is a child, it is for the most part still only through the news and protests he witnesses on the streets, but he begins asking questions and relating it to his own identity. When Michael Brown is shot and killed by a policeman in Ferguson, Z (who is six) asks, “Are white people afraid of brown people?” (17), which eventually leads him to wonder if his own father, who is white, is afraid of him. Mira has a similar experience when she is five and her family travels to India to visit her extended family. She remembers being given a bottle of skin lightener and how it affected her self-image: “For the rest of the trip, every time I looked at myself, I would imagine the lighter, prettier, happier me” (38). She feels relieved to return to America where brown was “just brown” (39), but the things her family in India told her still affect her. She feels like she has been “the wrong color in America” (42) and cannot reconcile these feelings. Mira asks her friend Alison if she might be confusing Z or telling him too much, but Alison assures her that she is doing exactly what she should be: making sure Z knows his questions are important.

After 9/11, the buildings burn for months, as does hatred and fear toward brown people. Mira experiences covert and overt racism in bars, at work, and wherever else she may find herself. She is hired on as a private writer, and the woman who hired her assumes she is a thief. In another experience, two men at a party think she is the hired help. Just as racial tensions seem to be dying down, Donald Trump begins surging through the media. His rhetoric of banning Muslims instills fear and suspicion in many Americans once again, and Mira experiences a new height of racism unlike anything she has before. She is assaulted on a subway and told to “speak English” when she had not done anything. She is also spat on and ostracized at a restaurant. These experiences linger for years after they occur, and Mira fears her son will go through similar things as he grows up as a brown person in America. The past is not really the past, and minorities like Mira know this best of all; historical events and political discourse can shape the way people see each other for years or even centuries to come.