Allies?

A skinny white man with stringy yellow hair, few teeth, and wrinkles making him look older then I'm guessing he is has been making an effort to let me know he wants to ally with me and/or maybe womyn.

He has been carrying codepink posters, helping carrying our huge "DRONES: Making Enemies Faster Then We Can Kill Them" banner, letting me know where he is on the "controversial" women's area as in it's okay with him even if he doesn't understand why we would want such a thing.

Unfortunately, patriarchy is so dominant here, I now see him as one of our strongest male allies.

Today he tells me he has raised his daughters by himself. I ask him what has happened to their mother, thinking she died by the way he put his single fatherhood.

He tells me she's incarcerated in a mental institution because she's crazy. I silently look at him curious, waiting for him to continue.

He tells me she's crazy because she kept calling the police on him and having him put in jail.

"She's from Mexico, Indigenous" he explains, as if I should grasp the entire meaning of his insinuations.

I ask him point blank: did you hit her?

He hangs his head momentarily and lets me know he is going to tell me the truth. He used to drink and especially in the beginning, he hit her.

Like when she was pregnant, I think to myself, smoldering, feeling a smidgen of the helplessness of the mother of those girls.

"But," he defends himself, I grew up and stopped doing that. But she kept calling the police on him. Crazy, eh?

Finally, he takes the children and leaves her, goes to court and is awarded custody, this white american male, of this womon's two babies.

And she's in a mental institution now.

He feels no responsibility for how this womon he once claimed to love has ended up in life. He believes he has done the best for his girls who are now both in college and neither consider themselves "Indigenous" but "American" i.e. white.

This is one of my strongest allies on the plaza!??!@##?#?