Their Verdict Is Not My Name

Simone read one sentence on a bus and her own name came loose in her hands.

She had not gone looking. That is worth saying, because people assume you must have been. She was checking something completely unrelated and a thing appeared underneath it, and it was a comment by somebody she has never met and will never meet, and it was one line long.

It was not the worst thing that has been written. It was not even in the top thirty. It was a summary. Somebody who had read about her for perhaps ninety seconds had produced a sentence that put the whole of her into about nine words, confidently, in the way people do when nothing is at stake for them.

And she sat on the bus and read it four times and something came loose.

Here is what came loose, and it took her a long time to find the words for it.

It was not her reputation. She had already lost that in the ordinary sense and she had, more or less, made her peace with the loss.

It was her name. The interior thing. The private sense of being a specific person with a history and a set of loves and a way of laughing and a grandmother who called her something nobody else uses. For about four minutes on a bus, nine words written by a stranger were bigger than all of that, and she could not get her own version back into the front of her mind.

And here is the part that has to stay in.

The stranger was not lying. That is the difficulty. The nine words were a fair summary of a public account of something that genuinely happened and that genuinely hurt people. Simone is not a woman being slandered. She is a woman being compressed. Those are not the same injury and only one of them can be answered by saying it is not true.

And this is where I stop writing about Simone, because you have read a sentence about yourself.

I am not going to ask what happened, and I am not going to tell you the stranger was wrong, because that is not the problem you actually have.

What David said in the middle of it

I want to take you to a psalm written by somebody who had become a nine word summary in his own city, and I want you to see the exact hinge in it.

But I trusted in thee, O LORD: I said, Thou art my God.Psalm 31:14

Read the two verses before it sometime. He says he is a reproach among his neighbors, a fear to his acquaintance, that people who see him in the street go the other way. He says he is forgotten as a dead man out of mind, and then, unforgettably, that he is like a broken vessel.

That is a man describing exactly what Simone felt on the bus. Not being lied about. Being compressed into an object.

And then comes the hinge, and it is one word long: But.

He does not argue with the city. He does not produce a defense. He does not list what they got wrong. He turns, mid psalm, and he does something in the first person: I trusted, I said.

Look at how active that is. Not I felt. Not I was comforted. He speaks, deliberately, into a situation that has not changed at all, and he says four words: Thou art my God.

So take that on the bus with the phone still in your hand. You are held by something you can say out loud when nothing else is in your control, and Psalm 31:14 says but I trusted in thee and I said thou art my God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts that sentence in a person's mouth when everything else has gone loose.

And notice what the psalm does not do. It never says the city was wrong. It never says he was innocent. It says where he put his weight while the whole thing stood, and the written word is content to leave the verdict of the street unaddressed, because the Spirit of God was never going to be outvoted by nine words.