Columnists
From Bellingham to Boston,
Via Oak Creek
SARBPREET SINGH
Three Thousand One Hundred and Twenty-five miles.
The distance between C Street, Bellingham, Washington State, USA … and Copley Square in Boston.
One Hundred and Four years, Eleven months and Nineteen days.
The time that it took Sikh-Americans to complete the journey. A meandering, convoluted journey that was started by an act of bigotry, but ended rather inexplicably in compassion. A journey laced with serendipity that buffed a tiny piece of the mosaic that is America, forever ridding it of the patina of ignorance and suspicion that had shrouded it for a century.
August 5, 2012. An unexpected stop in this journey at Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
A sleepy suburb of Milwaukee. The same mix of bigotry and ignorance that sparked a riot in far away Bellingham, a century ago, rears its ugly head again. Six lie dead when the bloodletting is over, unaware of the ghosts of Bellingham, progenitors of the demons that invade the madman’s head, whose paranoid suspicion of the ‘Other’ turns a place of worship into a killing field.
September 4, 1907. The town of Bellingham explodes into violence. Five hundred white millworkers rampage through the town, targeting ‘Hindoos’, a term used for all immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, violently attacking them, looting their property and eventually running them all out of Bellingham.
Most of the ‘Hindoos’ are actually Sikhs and their targeting is mostly based on their otherness. The poet and writer Herman Scheffauer, in a racist article, ‘Tide of Turbans’, written a few years after Bellingham, laments:
“Always the turban remains the badge and symbol of their native land … whether repairing tracks on long stretches of the Canadian or North Pacific Railways, feeding logs into the screaming rotary saws of the lumber mills, picking fruit in the luxuriant orchards of California … the twisted turban shows white or brilliant, a strange, exotic thing in the Western landscape”.
The ghosts of Bellingham have not been idle in the century that has passed. Again and again, they have reared their ugly heads to strike terror in the hearts of men, women and children, whose only crime has been the pursuit of their version of the American Dream.
When Wade Michael Page walks into the Oak Creek Gurdwara, he is Herman Scheffaur, carrying not a pen that drips vitriol, but a gun, aimed squarely at this modern Tide of Turbans.
His failure, however, is stunning.
For in the aftermath of Oak Creek, America is steeped not in bigotry, but in compassion.
August 23, 2012. A warm summer’s day in Boston.
The sun shines brightly upon Trinity Church, one of the largest and most beautiful places of worship in this city. The stream of worshippers thronging to the church seems a little different today. This warm and welcoming place of Christian worship is host today to a congregation that would cause both Herman Scheffaur and Wade Michael Page considerable consternation.
There are Christians for sure, but also Jews and Muslims and ‘Hindoos’ of many stripes. And there are turbans. So many turbans; showing ‘white or brilliant’. Not just on the heads of Sikhs. Most in the church have their heads covered, as they would in a Sikh place of worship.
The church is packed to capacity. The hymnal lays in its resting place today. Unused.
Strains of beautiful melodies fill the sanctuary. Today this congregation, that is more mosaic than melting pot, joins in the singing of selections from the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh Scripture. Inspiring words, written centuries ago by Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus, that emphasize the bonds that unite all of humanity. Interspersed with the singing are gracious words of love, healing and compassion, delivered by religious leaders from every community.
Everyone rises for the Ardaas, the communal prayer that is an integral part of every Sikh service. The congregation slowly makes it way to the undercroft of the Church, where the Sikhs of Boston feed all fifteen hundred in a gesture of love and sharing which is a hallmark of the Sikh faith.
For today, Trinity Church is a Gurdwara and the undercroft is a Guru ka Langar, the Sikh community kitchen.
A resting place in the journey has been reached and the ghosts of Bellingham have been banished.
Hopefully, forever.
August 6, 2013