By Erin Aubry Kaplan
Contributing Writer
In 1973, I was in sewing class in seventh grade and having a miserable time. I couldn’t sew and wasn’t interested in learning.
For the first time in my life, I was failing a subject in school, a fact that dragged on my frail sense of identity and self-worth. I felt like an outcast among geniuses who were easily making pillowcases, skirts, blouses. I would never catch up.
I was walking gloomily back to my sewing machine at our junior high in Gardena, when I suddenly noticed a Latina girl with a loose braid down her back who was bending over working, but not on a pillowcase or a skirt.
She was drawing a horse. It was accurately rendered and lively, its mane flowing, almost galloping off the page. I was so mesmerized that I forgot everything except the fact that I, too, drew horses. A sign!
“Nice horse!” I burst out. She turned around in her chair, eyed me a moment before grinning, responding, “Thanks,” and turning back to her work — her real work, it seemed to me.
Instantly, everything was different. The classroom that had been so isolating became a golden space of affirmation and possibility.
So began one of the most enduring friendships of my life. Even though Cathy and I more or less parted ways after junior high, we’ve stayed connected over the decades since, and the initial magic of mutual discovery never faded.
Until Trump.
In June, I went to visit Cathy in Tennessee, where she and her husband had moved six years ago. We had talked about me visiting them in Chattanooga for years, but much had intervened — not least the pandemic — until now.
It had been eight years since I saw her last. I was thrilled at the prospect of a five-day vacation away from L.A., and of seeing her, as always. But for the first time, I was also dreading it.
That’s partly because Tennessee had become Exhibit A in southern states’ efforts to disappear Black representation after the Supreme Court destroyed what was left of the Voting Rights Act — one of many concerted moves against people of color that has defined the Trump age.
But the bigger reason for my dread was that I didn’t know where Cathy stood on all this. Over the last decade or so her politics had shifted right, something that coincided with an embrace of religion and that she made public sometimes with Facebook posts.
The personal, political, even spiritual, had melded into a single stance that had immediate implications not just for us, but for democracy itself. I was going to Tennessee to answer a question that for over 50 years had never been in doubt: Was it possible for us to remain friends?
If she was MAGA and supported Trump, then absolutely not. As his administration has become more racist, more corrupt, more authoritarian, by the day, I have grown increasingly certain that I can’t embrace anyone who supports or even tolerates him and what he stands for.
For the first three days we didn’t talk about current events. I wasn’t compartmentalizing, just buying time, I told myself. Meanwhile, Cathy was being a wonderful host with a whole itinerary for us.
I confess that I was more than happy to let her take the lead and for me to play tourist, absorbing the sights and sounds of a new place and otherwise relaxing and having fun, something that had started to feel impossible in Trump 2.0.
Our time together felt natural, how it had always been between us. I had always admired her confidence, and aspired to it. I also admired how she always plotted her own direction in life and was never afraid to change course.
We didn’t plan to talk; it just happened. Instead of doing another planned thing on the vacation itinerary, Cathy, her husband and I sat at the dining room table and talked about what we had never talked about before: what we believed in, and why. How we saw and lived race, inequality, democracy, our place in this perilous moment in the history of the country.
As the tense but civil exchange progressed, it became clear to me that Cathy had no intention of cutting me off or throwing me out, even though she knew exactly where I stood on racial justice and all manner of issues that are anathema to the right
I was enormously relieved. And even more so when she told me she is not MAGA and does not support Trump. She described herself as more of an old-line conservative, the kind that has no real place in the GOP anymore. I told her I didn’t agree with that kind of conservative either, not least because MAGA evolved from it. Despite being currently estranged, they’re connected.
How connected they are for Cathy wasn’t entirely clear. But the big reveal for me was that after such an unprecedented and high-stakes confrontation, our friendship didn’t budge. During the conversation, through many moments of discomfort, frustration and downright weirdness, Cathy remained rooted in a very specific place in my heart that she’s occupied since we met.
We didn’t resolve anything that day. That first conversation, in fact, stirred up enough questions and uncertainty to fuel several more, equally heated ones.
But what was confirmed amid the uncertainty is how essential we remain to each other, how the friendship lives on as something magical but also as unadorned and heavy as rock. Even under threat of a profound split, we remain each other’s support and inspiration.
I know that though we see some reality differently now — and probably we always did — it isn’t the end. We have dreams in common, dreams that are still playing out. That doesn’t make us the same or even in sync, but it’s enough for us to draw on, over and over.
Erin Aubry Kaplan examines the persistent barriers to racial justice and opportunities for progress in an era of receding Black presence in Los Angeles and California for Capital & Main, a nonprofit publication focused on inequality. It is published here with permission.
LIFTOUT
After such an unprecedented and high-stakes confrontation, our friendship didn’t budge.
