When Darald got a job managing a supermarket in nearby Osage, the family was happy to move, although Elliott stayed on as a teacher in Riceville and continued to conduct the exercise. She still marvels that she wasn't fired, believing it was because four generations of her family had lived in the community.
"And I'm white, so I have credibility," she adds. "Every person of color in this country knows more about racism than I'll ever know, because they have to live with it every day. But if [they] say the things I do, nobody's gonna listen."
Elliott says she had many supporters in town, but they kept quiet because they didn't want to be shunned as well. She did worry that her children would grow up to hate her. They didn't.
Yet Elliott's outspoken personality clearly continues to chafe on many. She says friends her age are hard to make, and over the years her relationships with her family deteriorated. Her mother and siblings asked her not to come around because she made them uncomfortable. Elliott's mother died seven months ago; she did not attend the funeral.
I ask Elliott if the exercise and everything that came afterward was worth it. She looks at me oddly.
"Do you know what I did?" she finally asks, sounding piqued. "Did it make a difference to you when you heard about it?"
I think about a Midwestern girl who wasted years yearning to be white, who believed life would be easier, happier, better, if her brown eyes were not almond-shaped, who wavered between feeling insecure and invisible, and whose heart leaped upon learning of the blue-eyed woman who spoke of white privilege and institutionalized racism.
Did Jane Elliott's work make a difference to me? Yes, so much so that I felt the need to seek her out just to let her know. Elliott listens, then turns away and sighs. "Yeah," she says softly. "It was worth it."
And suddenly, we are two Iowans, remembering the pain of a connected past, one of us fulfilled to have met the woman who pointed the way toward a brighter future.
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corina.knoll@latimes.com
