Only invasive flies die in her story.

Three months ago a nine year old girl, a Fourth Grader wearing pink glasses and named Bobbie Wilson was collecting Spotted Lanternflies. She’d learned about the dangerous-to-trees invasive species and how important it was to stomp them out. That’s what she was doing on the sidewalk where she’d lived since she was a baby: stomping on huge flies. The man who lived across the street watched her out his window and became frightened. He called the police to report her.

“There’s a little Black woman walking, spraying stuff on the sidewalks and trees on Elizabeth and Florence,” Lawshe told the dispatcher, according to a call obtained by CNN.

“I don’t know what the hell she’s doing. Scares me, though,” Lawshe added.

NPR, 3 February 2023

Want to guess the race of the two people in this news story?

It’s a special month, and one I routinely failed to adequately celebrate when I was teaching high school juniors. I did teach novels, stories and essays by Black authors. I liked using maps to track how the nineteenth century notion of passive resistance went to South Africa and India and led to Black people ordering coffee at the local Woolworth’s. “We Real Cool.” Poetry too.

One of the experiential teachings I have seen but not done involves chairs, a wastepaper basket, and crumpled paper. The goal is to get your crumpled paper into the wastepaper basket. The trick is that some of us sit three feet from the basket and have great aim. Some of us sit back a few more feet and never did learn to throw.

Throwing was the only skill I could not pass President John Kennedy’s Council on Physical Fitness requirements. Long jump, running, pull-ups, sit-ups, pushups—I could do everything else, but I could not throw a softball. President Eisenhower established the President’s Council on Youth Fitness with Executive Order 10673, issued on July 16, 1956 when I was three. The concern was that we were getting fat as a nation. A recent New York Times article complained about our “obsession with being thin.” I would argue that we are obsessed with junk food and snacking. Most Americans are overweight (73.6% in 2017-18) so maybe we should be at least concerned if not obsessed. I have heard many people claim that “diets don’t work.” They do work—of course they do!—only most of us have such bad habits to start with we have to make a permanent change to how and what we eat. The hardest thing about improving the way I eat was the habit of eating too much and too often and genuine fear of feeling hungry. Americans eat so very badly compared to most every other first world nations. We eat badly compared to the 1920s! Keeping track of what I put in my mouth has helped me to eat better food.

Mostly I am not fretting about thinness but about the storm keeping me indoors, our leaky roof, a trip the the AWP Conference in Seattle next month, a new warp on my loom, and a 1969 collection of award-winning science fiction and fantasy I’d never read before. First up was the novella I’d been avoiding for decades, “A Boy and His Dog,” which was later made into a movie I also avoided. I read only part of the short story yesterday. QAnon’s nastier brothers feature in an apocalyptic future. It’s rather ridiculous, and doing the math it’s supposed to be happening next year. Author Harlan Ellison was, by most measures and certainly mine, an ash-hat. Married five times (once for only a few weeks), off and on editor of a Playboy-competitor, twice awarded the title of Pornography King, and proudly self-proclaimed “troublemaker, malcontent, desperado.” These are the brags of bad boys, genuinely selfish people who think being “bad” makes them cool and clever while whining when they don’t get their way. Life it too short to spend it with such a person or their disgusting story.

The next story in the collection is “Nine Lives” by Ursula K. Le Guin (1969), which is not a happier story, but a smarter one and genuine hard science fiction (you could get there from here). I’d already read it in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. Two men wait for a relief team on a mining planet, one Welsh, one Argentine. Their relief turns out to be ten male and female clones who are more intelligent, prettier (“golden”), more calm, and entirely cooperative as a team. (Le Guin introduced racial diversity early.) It’s an adventure that reviews the implications of cloning, perhaps a precursor to the novel Cloned Lives by Pamela Sargent (1976). That later novel considers the lives of five clones following the controversy and struggles of the siblings both collectively and individually from birth. I think it’s worth noting that Ellison has a lengthy page for himself and for many of his stories and novels. Le Guin too. The Nebula-Award winning Sargent has twelve lines and a bibliography of 21 novels and 7 story collections, plus 8 anthologies as editor. It was one of those, the original Women of Wonder (1975) that I found at the University Book Store in Seattle, where I worked. That collection was a rare bird in those days when even Le Guin was just beginning to feature female protagonists. It has a page on Wikipedia. So does her YA novel Earthseed (1983). None of her other novels seem to have pages.

Studies back up my impression that women authors and scientists and other important women have been ignored on the website, and linking to inequity to the largely white and male editorial participation. An essay posted on Wikipedia acknowledges this. I send them money every year, so I feel entitled to cry foul. I am certain that Sargent is a nicer person that Ellison ever was, and she has publications and awards but not the Wikipedia presence to back her up. Physicist Jessica Wade is making changes by entering the names and scientific accomplishments of women on the Wikipedia website. Dr. Wade is generous in claiming that she does think the bias toward white male accomplishments is deliberate. You can decide for yourself.

Recently, the Yale School of Public Health honored Bobbie Wilson as a “donor scientist” for her work in documenting and calling attention to the threat of the invasive species and helping to stomp it out. The university entered her collection of 27 spotted lanternflies into the Peabody Museum of Natural History database. She’s what is known in my world as a “good girl.”