After lunch, I pass the muslim school on fourth avenue. You see the kids out waiting and the girls in their head gear. Around the corner, a woman appeared in a vision of total black burqa. It was visually arresting in the brick wide open sky. She had only a postal slot to peer out of. Even her hands were hidden in velveteen black gloves and she looked a little like the yin to the KKK yang… or a witch. I was thinking about how maybe the European fairy tale image of a witch might be based on crusaders seeing women in burqa, or is it that muslim men put women in burqas from the same fear of women that led led to burning them as witches? Then again, wasn’t a lot of that witch burning going on in Spain (where there certainly were plenty of muslims) and so maybe burning witches is a sort of euphemism for burning muslim women? A string of thoughts ran through my head as she adjusted the burqa in the humid breeze and you could see her hands moving black against the concrete background and I think I’ve never looked at anyones hands this way….. following them the way you would a face and she was off down the street looking like a punctuation mark in the landscape. An exclamation point at first and then a question mark as I crossed the street towards the draw bridge.
