Conviction
My dad’s dad was a reader. The house he shared with grandma on the corner of Plato Road had a library right off the front living room that was stuffed like a sausage with books and collections of periodicals. The occasional table beside his chair in the living room always housed three things: a pipe, a magnifying glass, and at least one or two editions of National Geographic magazine. Back editions of the clearly identifiable yellow rimmed covers formed a tower in the corner of the library floor. I never knew if Grandpa Buben saved them all or just his favorites, but they drew me like a magnet, mostly for the pictures, of course. That’s the way National Geographic told the stories of the world.
Since 1888, yeah that’s not a typo, National Geographic magazine has been the photo album of our values, our lifestyles, and our relationships with ourselves and one another. A close look at the historical documentation shows a chronology of shifting norms and customs, an evolution of people and ideas, and the societies that grow from those collisions. It displays our triumphs, our tragedies, our gaffes and our change-the-world moments in time. It’s all there in perfect focus and glowing color for anybody who wants to look. Like the untouched skin of an elderly woman’s face, the story of our life is there.
At the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City last week, Susan Goldberg, Editor-in-Chief of National Geographic—the first and only female to hold that position at the magazine--was honored by the Annie Oakley Society. When she opened her mouth to speak about the iconic magazine, the floodgates of my memory opened with it, and I could smell my grandpa’s pipe, see my brother’s ginormous fish eye through the back side of the magnifying glass, and feel the brazen resignation of the Nigerian woman with steely eyes, a ring in her nose and golden earrings as big as her head, gracing the cover of the National Geographic. I had never seen anything like her. Thumbing through that magazine stretched the boundaries of my world. Photographs can do that in ways sometimes words just can’t. In her acceptance speech at the Annie Oakley Awards, Susan said a lot of important, and impressive and funny things about her journalistic path and her life inside the belly of this historic publication, National Geographic, but what stuck with me was the photo from a series on women in the military that she put up on the screen. It hangs on the wall in her office.
It’s a photograph of USMC Corporal Gabrielle Green carrying a 200 plus pound fellow Marine across her shoulders as she runs up a ramp. You can’t be a Marine if you can’t do this. Everybody, regardless of gender understands why. But, the juxtaposition of the woman and the man both wearing Nikes and military greens is arresting. The physical arrangement is not the one we expect. And when we look at it, it’s as if the ghosts of the road less traveled seep through the pixels to our eyes. We see Corporal Green’s quadricep billboard, and though we mostly can’t relate to the power it exudes, we feel the words tattooed there in the chambers of our soul.
“The fire inside me burns brighter than the fire around me.”
Who among us hasn’t had to summon that to get from our own respective here to there?
We see Corporal Green’s quadricep billboard, and though we mostly can’t relate to the power it exudes, we feel the words tattooed there in the chambers of our soul
National Geographic’s Editor-in-Chief said she loves the look in the corporal’s eyes and the words inked on her thigh. She said the photo synthesizes resilience for her. And that she finds all that the picture shows and everything that it represents empowering. She also said it serves as a literal reminder of the responsibility we all have to lift one another as we go.
Amen. It made me think about all of that, too.
But it also made me think about Mary Lou Retton. I was a freshman in college when she looked straight into the camera before vaulting into the all- around gold medal at the 1984 Olympics. Her vault was historic. A perfect 10. Beautiful and emphatic, because of the moment and the stage, but also because of the extraordinary skill that a lifetime of commitment to a craft put on display. I don’t remember anything about the vault, however, except that she stuck it. But the look in her eye before she did it is burned into the grey matter of my brain. She not only knew she could, she knew she was about to, and her conviction lassoed every heart that watched her do that thing she loved to do.
And it made me think about a picture I moved from my office at the gym to the office at my house of Stacey Dales at center court at the Alamodome immediately following game one of the 2002 Final Four. The picture caught her bravado in its most authentic state. She oozed of conviction, the kind you tie your wagon to, which is exactly how we ended up in San Antonio playing for all the marbles in the first place. I see her fairly often still, but when I think of her, in my mind’s eye, I always remember her exactly in that way.
And it made me think of Mary Jane Noble and my Granny and Marita Hynes. I have pictures of each of them in frames, too. Iconic women in my life who walked to the beat in their own heads regardless of the music the world was playing at the time. Women who did both common and uncommon things extraordinary well, mostly because they knew exactly who they were. Conviction. The unapologetic kind that builds roads where there were none. The kind that makes the world a better place.
I don’t know anything about Corporal Green, but I suspect that she wanted to be a Marine for a long time before she became one, probably more than she wanted anything in the world. The no look look on her face says that she is precisely where she had planned to be, doing things she’s absolutely sure she can do. Carrying this guy to the top of the ramp was not the culmination of anything. It’s just one of a myriad of things she does because she is a Marine. That is who she is, who she was in her heart all along even before she passed the tests and they put the stripes on her cuff. When I look at the photo of her, I see a woman in the middle of the muscle convicted about her ability to do whatever it is she needs to do.
The look in her eyes is eerily similar to the one I remember so vividly of the Nigerian woman on the cover of National Geographic in 1975. Different decades. Different countries. Different cultures. Different opportunities, different fences. Similar conviction.
The eyes of determined women look the same.
Sherri Coale
P.S. The poem "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost