I got on the plane with no agenda, just a ticket in hand and a journey in mind.  My best intentions always packs a book to study: Energy Medicine this trip, or a yoga sutra translation.  But as soon as I hit the backpackers’ in Puerto Limon, Costa Rica, I started looking for novels.  I wanted a real vacation.  Letting mind and body wander in an unprescribed, meandering way, to find something I didn’t know I was looking for.

I pawed through the dusty mouldering piles of paperbacks at all the hotels.  Some were just a stack of four or five books, some in tall bookcases.  Many were in English, but always there was a strong showing of German and French and Spanish.  Some occasional Chinese.  I even found a Cyrillic children's book on the couch in one bar.

There’s always the smattering of highbrow literature, someone else with the idea to tackle Proust or Kierkegaard on vacation, soon abandoned for the hundreds of romance novels and crime-justice-detective fiction, which were always the lions share on these shelves.  I saw several Steig Larsson books, but none in English, and besides, I’d already read the Millennium trilogy and it was not what my vacation mind wanted.

When a Wilbur Smith book about Rhodesia appeared, I snapped it up.  Smith is that sort of huge canvas writer who transports you completely into his world.  Big themes and landscapes and ideas.   Its good luck when a Wilbur Smith book shows up - like Irving Stone - perfect travel reading.

So I stretched out in my hammock, and peeled back the soft and slightly smelly cover.

But this book, too, like Larsson's, was horrifying.  It depicted the forceable takeover of the beautiful, unspoiled, central African Savannah - lakes, rivers, huge game, towering trees - from the native tribes by the British under the rule of Cecil B. Rhodes - he of the famous scholarship.  It was brutal and devastating to read.   The white entitlement, the presumed slavery of the native black people, the civil war back and forth until the whites finally admitted defeat and returned Zimbabwe to its rightful owners.

It seemed such a strange thing to me, that these white people would show up on a piece of land, meet the people who were already living there, and instead of saying, ‘Hey, how’d’ya’do?  What a lovely spot you’re on.  Mind if I join you?’  They say, ‘Hey, too bad you were here first.  We’re here now, so scram.  Get out of here.  Or we’ll kill you.’

So much for British manners.

I was sick and it was raining, and there was nothing else to do so I went to the palapa across the road for a class on women’s empowerment.   There was a black dance teacher from New York, named Marika, who was talking about how women hold trauma in their hips and in their wombs. She said the slaves who had endured the worst hardships, those from Haiti and Congo, had developed dances that used the most hip movements.  These were considered the most sexually provocative, but the truth, she said, was just the opposite.  These women were dancing for their very lives, releasing the pain of unspeakable trauma with their wild hip flinging and stamping.  They were unwinding the awful horrors visited on them.  Many cultures know this ancient wisdom.  The Arabian peninsula women, consigned to lives in harems or burkahs, used the hip swaying bellydance.   Chinese women, tortured by foot-binding and powerless lives, used the deeply internal musculature of the female organs to release their trauma, similar to the Kegel exercises taught in modern yoga and childbirth classes.

Marika spoke softly but with a controlled power.  Her fingers were long and slim and topped by curling fingernails which drew attention to them, while she waved her hands in arcs and half circles as she spoke.  Her words were simple, so the woman translating into Spanish could easily do so, and the meaning was clearly understood.

Later, Marika told me she was pregnant.  But you wouldn’t know it by looking at her long flat stomach.  She had been a ballet dancer in her youth, but had since given that up for more traditional dance.  Her beautiful round and protruding behind would have, in any event, precluded her from a professional career as a ballerina, where excess of womanly curves was disallowed in preference for pubescent bodies.

Her breasts were perfect circles, inverted tea cups pressed to her chest.  They were taut and firm and stood up without the slightest bit of sag, though she wore no bra.  Her hair hung in thin braids and around her neck a large, silver stone.  When we all danced together, thumping and jumping, it was this stone she held to keep it from bouncing, while everyone else held their large breasts.

Later, when we drank pineapple juice together at the cafe, she told me about the father of her baby, who, now that the deed was done, didn’t want the child, not now, not yet, and had asked her to end it.

She had balked at that, and instead kept her appointment to teach in Costa Rica.  The distance and the warm, wet air, and the community of women gathering wherever she spoke to learn about the healing power of dance, convinced her that she would have this child no matter what.

When our food came she ate slowly and precisely.  I had finished my plate before she was half done.  

I wanted to tell her things.  Things that I hadn’t told anyone else.  Things of my own trauma, my own despair.  Things that I’d kept hidden even from my dearest friends.  The tears that fell when I finally spoke my secrets were fewer than usual and I said what I wanted to say all the way through without stopping.  And then I felt better.  Brighter.  I reached over and touched the silver stone at her throat.  It was cold, despite the heat of the day, and she just smiled at me.

I often found myself drawn to black people.  I lived most often in very northern climes, and whether the cliché that black people don’t like the cold is true or not, there were invariably few black people there.  

I was curious about them.  They seemed so different from me.  Their skin, absorbing light, difficult to see into.  Their facial features and hair, selected for such different worlds than my pale skin and narrow nose.  But really what I wanted to know about, was their trauma.  I wanted to understand how they could transcend it.  I too had been the victim of discrimination.  I am, after all, a woman.  I am also a Jew and had pennies pitched at me in grammar school, and still cringe at the slander built into the language about Jews.  Although I couldn’t hide my gender, that discrimination was hardly ever felt in my life any more.  And I could hide my Jewishness, as I didn’t have the traditional looks of a ‘typical’ Jew.  But you couldn’t hide being black.

I sometimes wondered if my fascination weren’t some kind of racism in reverse.  It seemed so obvious to me that the African was superior.  They had rhythm and grace, incredible strength.  Clearly they excelled and dominated every sport they entered.  They were simply physically superior.  How could anyone deny that?  Their skin was magnificent and not prone to the wrinkled decay of the white skin.  They invented and then dominated jazz, rap, hip hop, every corner of music and culture.  

I was indeed a racist, I thought.  There was simply no question in my mind that the African was a superior race.

Later that night I sat in my hammock, the rain pounding away on the tin roof.  I was tired from the dancing and being sick and thinking too many jumbled thoughts.  I was still reading the Wilbur Smith book, now set in the 1970’s when the results of the takeover of Rhodesia were still being fought in the ongoing and escalating civil war that would eventually lead to independence, but with horrific and brutal consequences that still plague the land today.

It made me sick, this story.  This horrible, avoidable story.  The injustice, palpable and sad.  I have a deep sense of fairness - moon in Libra - and I’m always seeking balance, equality.  

The irony was not lost that here was this black woman teaching me how to rid myself of trauma, something she’d learned from her ancestors, the slaves that had been forced off their land by white people to begin with.  Here we were hundreds of years later and we were not in a post-racial world simply because of a black American president.  Half the Congress wanted him to fail simply because he was black.  Oh, they said it was because of his policies.  But even when his policies were the same as theirs they wanted him to fail.  These fat old white men and stupid white women wanted him to fail because he was black.  They could not stand to see a successful black man - the most powerful man in the world - and they’d rather see the country fail then see him succeed.

I wanted to run over to Marika and beseech her, I’m sorry for my people oppressing your people.  Then.  Now.  I’m so sorry.  It was a childish thought, I knew.  What could possibly be accomplished.  Nothing would be changed.  Would she just think I was crazy.  The sins of the fathers and all that.  But I was sorry.  So, so, sorry.  And if I was alive then, I would have killed Cecil Rhodes with my own bare hands.

But what was my apology worth?  Was it guilt?  Shame?  Grief?  I was a Jew anyway, and my people too had been victim of the western white culture as much as hers.

But somehow, too, it didn’t matter.  My feeling was pure.  And maybe, just as the yoga sages say, the wold changes by each one of us changing.  Maybe restitution will come one by one.  Each person saying, ‘I am profoundly and truly sorry for what happened.’

For haven’t I been the beneficiary of a culture that treats white people as superior to black people.  Wasn’t I in some way complicit in this?

All I knew then, was that the impulse to apologize to my new friend was overpowering.  I pushed up from my hammock, threw my book down to the ground, and ran out into the rain.