What Is It With Me and The Feds?

If you go to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) in New Haven and they hold off your clearance, because, they say, your fingerprint pictures were, “not clear enough” and therefore the FBI must do a “background check,” it’s annoying, but not particularly disturbing.

I said to the woman on the phone, who gave me this information,  “But I am eighty years old and I don’t have any background.”

This is not strictly true. During my civil rights activist years in the 1970s, I, and a few friends, raised some money to buy a printing machine for the Toledo, Ohio chapter of the Black Panthers—there were eight of them and I knew them all. Some months later, the FBI sent two “Suits” to the First National Bank to question my husband about his wife’s “association” with the Panthers.

He was pretty mad when he came home. Me? I was furious.  Wait a minute! The FBI called on you about me? They didn’t come to me directly?  If they want to know about me, they can ask me!

Ah. Those were the days. But if we ask Senator Tom Cotton, Republican from Arkansas, the days haven’t changed all that much. “Men are simple creatures,” Cotton is quoted as saying. “It doesn’t take much to please us. The problem is women.” I think my former husband would have agreed with the senator.

My national TSA clearance hanging in abeyance, my next stop is at JFK with my daughter, who has already achieved Global Entry clearance and knows the ropes. I have filled out all the necessary data online and, armed with appropriate ID etc., I’m ready for my 9:00 AM appointment before we catch a plane to California.

 I am invited into the agent’s office by myself and everything goes smoothly until the very nice woman asks me to put my hands on the glass plate for the fingerprinting, which I do.

She looks puzzled and presses my hand down with hers. A couple of picture failures later, she gives me some white cream and instructs me to rub it thoroughly over all of my fingertips. I have on too much hand lotion? Something is clearly amiss.

We try again. No luck. “What is going on?” I ask. She smiles and rises, “I am going to get your daughter.”

My daughter? Why? I study my fingers.

She comes back with Taylor and explains to her, as if I were not sitting there, that I do not have photographable prints.  Therefore, although I will be given international clearance, when I am re-entering the country, and I slide my passport into the Trusted Traveler slot, I will receive a slip of paper with my info covered by a big black X. This, she tells Taylor, I must hand to the TSA agent nearby and then he will do something with that and I will be cleared. She then shows Taylor a sample X-marked paper.

“I don’t have fingerprints? Everyone has fingerprints,” I say. I am still incredulous.

“It happens.” She shrugs.

I do not like the look of the sample paper with the thick, black X crisscrossing it and I am beginning to wonder why she is telling my daughter all this since I am the one with the no fingerprint problem. It appears that not only do I not have visible fingerprints, but that I am invisible in other ways as well.

 What is it with federal agents? Once it was the infuriating uncontrollable-radical-wife-thing and now it’s the insulting blurred-out-incompetent-old-lady thing?

Something in me twitches and I can’t help myself. Holding out my hands, palms up, I say with a smile, “I had my fingerprints rubbed out when I was an international spy."

Whoops! Taylor kicks my leg under the table and the woman’s face freezes. I, however, am really laughing.