Racial Baggage
© 2009 by H.B. Koplowitz
Like a lot of people, I lug
around
a certain amount of racial baggage as a result of some of my previous
interactions with people of other ethnic groups.
I grew up in Carbondale, a small and segregated college town in
southern Illinois, and the first black person I ever knew was Martha, a
maid who half raised me during the 1950s, because my mom was ahead of
her time and worked, along with my dad, at a dress shop they owned.
Back then blacks were called colored people, although my parents tended
to call Martha "the schwartza" behind her back.
When she was in her 50s and I was still in my single digits, Martha
seemed ancient and intimidating. She was short and stooped but wiry,
with rock-hard biceps from wringing out clothing by hand and pinning it
to the line in our backyard. Her face was dark and wrinkly, and her
short stiff hair was usually corn-rolled around something that looked
to me like black licorice sticks. I can't say that I distinctly liked
or disliked her. She was the enforcer when my parents weren't around,
and I respected her the same way I respected my parents -- grudgingly.
She cooked, cleaned and gave my brother and me our baths when we were
little, teaching us songs like "Mary Had a Baby" and reading us our
"Jack & Jill" and "Humpty Dumpty" magazines. She'd stink up the
house with "greens" she'd brought from home, watch her "stories" on our
TV, and as she ironed she'd talk to herself about things that had
happened at church, repeating conversations and laughing at the funny
parts.
She took a cab to our house on the west side of town, but many evenings
my parents would give her a ride to her home on the northeast side.
Sitting in the backseat with my brother and Martha, I'd peer wide-eyed
out the window as we passed sheds and clapboard dwellings with sagging
porches. I remember the embarrassment all around the car when I stuck
my finger out one evening and asked "what's that?" and my dad awkwardly
had to explain to me what an outhouse was. There was a husband who left
the scene early on and a grown son who wasn't around much either, but
Martha had relatives who lived next door with a big garden and some
farm animals, including chickens and mules. Martha was poor but she
wasn't bitter. She was basically a decent person.
One summer, when I was about 10 years old and school was out, I fell in
with some slightly older boys, a couple of whom were black, and it was
sitting on the sliding board at the playground at my school that I
first reflected on the word nigger. I'd heard the term before, but I'd
never thought about it before -- it wasn't part of my everyday
vocabulary. I don't recall how we got around to the subject, but I
remember one of the black kids explaining that a nigger was just a bad
person. I remember saying something like, "well, isn't it a bad colored
person?" and him disagreeing, saying anyone, black, white, blue or
green could be a nigger if they are evil.
Unfortunately, I didn't get the message. A day or two after that
conversation, I was outside and Martha told me it was time to come
inside to clean up. I didn't want to go inside and we had words. I
walked inside the garage, out of her sight, and hissed under my breath,
"nigger."
"What did you say?" Martha asked as she came in the garage after me,
seeming more surprised than enraged. I don't remember what happened
next, whether she balled me out or if I apologized. I do remember
feeling very ashamed, and I've never used the word again in anger, not
that I didn't have the opportunity.
My next exposure to black people would have been around the same time.
A new (white) family moved into the neighborhood with three sons. I
became friends with Dave, who was my age and also into monster movies.
But the middle brother, Tom, who was a year ahead of me in school and
precocious, also befriended me, and taught me about such adult things
as pinball and dirty pictures. Tom was also an amazing athlete, and
when it came time for everyone to join Little League, my dad made sure
I got on the same team with him -- the Cubs.
There were about eight teams in the Atom League -- the youngest
grouping of Little League at the time. Seven of the teams were all
white and one was all black -- the Sox. At the end of the season there
was a tournament, and Tom pitched the Cubs to the finals, where we met
the Sox, which had just as talented a pitcher, Lester, who was big and
scary. It was a tight game throughout, with Tom and Lester matching
each other strikeout for strikeout. For most of that season I had been
frozen at the plate, never swinging, hoping for a walk, and I did the
same thing during the championship game. So I don't know what got into
me, but during my last at bat, I suddenly took a swack at the ball and
sent a squibber toward the mound. I saw Lester reach down for the ball,
saw it dribble out of his glove, and realized I should be running to
first base. I took off, but he recovered the ball and threw me out by a
half-step.
The next inning, Tom's arm gave out. He walked a batter, which in the
Atom League was as good as a triple, because the batter soon stole
second and third. Tom got a strikeout, but the next batter hit a
grounder up the middle. From shortstop, I watched as the ball skipped
over second base and into center field. Game over. Tom stood on the
pitcher's mound, crying. The rest of us threw our gloves in the air.
Time for ice cream. I don't remember feeling upset that we'd been
beaten by some black kids. I do remember thinking that black kids sure
are good at sports.
A year or two later, I must have been in the Bantam League by then and
Tom had moved away, my new team played another black team -- well,
actually, pretty much the same team, except older, and they were still
good at sports. By this time I had come to seriously dislike playing
the black team, not because they were black, but because they all
seemed to hit the ball to the shortstop, and I was the shortstop. One
night we had to play the black team on its home field on the east side,
and the infield was full of dirt clods because it hadn't been watered
and graded. Before the game, we all went onto the field to throw the
dirt clods away, but we couldn't get them all, and midway through the
game, sure enough, a batter hit a grounder to short that ricocheted off
a clump of clay and smacked me in the nose.
I stood there for a second, stunned as the blood came streaming down my
face, and then I just started bawling. My dad ran onto the field and
carried me off. My only solace was that it had happened on the east
side, where nobody I knew except my teammates had seen me crying in
baseball. Until the next morning, when Martha showed up at our house
and saw my bruised face.
"I heard some white boy got hit by a baseball last night
and cried all the way home," she said. "That was you?"
What could I say.
My parents liked movies, and they took my brother and me to the ones
they thought we'd like, such as "I was a Teenage Werewolf" and "Green
Men From Mars." But also "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Defiant
Ones," starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as escaped prisoners
shackled together, and "Porgy and Bess," the George Gershwin folk opera
turned into a movie musical that was shunned by most blacks and whites
alike. But I became a big fan of Sammy Davis Jr. as well as Poitier.
The movies weren't black culture, but they gave me a liberal
sensibility toward blacks from afar.
There were three high schools in Carbondale -- Carbondale Community
High School for the townies, Attucks for the colored kids and
University High School, a lab school on the campus of Southern Illinois
University, which was a K-12 where the children of faculty and the few
Jewish kids went, me among them. There were a token number of black
students, who mostly got along with everyone or were in the special
education classroom, and I didn't have much contact with them. Most of
the classes had student teachers from the college, and when I was in
about the fifth grade, we got a pretty young black woman who was
teaching geography. The subject happened to be rivers of the world, and
she asked each of us to read a paragraph out of the textbook. I was a
pretty good reader, but when it got to be my turn, I suddenly sputtered
to a stop. I couldn't believe what I was
seeing. Niger, as in the Niger River. But I could only figure out one
way to pronounce it. This should have been a moment of mirth, but
perhaps because of my experience with Martha, I was mortified.
"Go on," the teacher prompted.
"Neggrer?" I said, trying to make it sound like negro.
She didn't seem to understand my consternation. "Niger, like Nigeria,"
she said matter-of-factly.
I finished the paragraph, red as a beet.
In the 1960s, the civil rights movement came to Carbondale in the form
of SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, a chapter of
which formed on the campus. One of their first actions was to picket
the Family Fun restaurant on the east side of town, which had a few
blacks working in the kitchen, but none that worked with customers. The
dad of one of the three other Jewish kids in my class was in SNCC, and
so was his son, who was my friend. But I had other friends who were
against mixing the races, and my parents, although sympathetic to the
cause, were opposed to having anyone tell them who they had to hire.
Many of the local Jewish families were of the merchant class, and
although the owner of Family Fun was not Jewish, on the Sunday when
SNCC set
up their picket line, after services at my temple, the congregation
went en masse to have lunch at Family Fun, except for my friend and his
dad, who joined the protesters.
Soon SNCC was sending "salt and pepper" teams to apply for jobs at
local stores. If the owner hired the white but not the black, SNCC
would threaten to set up another picket line. My parents found a way
around the problem -- they hired a colored woman. And they soon
discovered that integration wasn't so bad, as more colored women
started
streaming into the store to be waited on by the new colored
saleslady.
In 1967, when I was a sophomore, Carbondale came up with a nifty
solution for integrating the schools. Whether by design or
happenstance, Attucks and U-School were closed, and all the high school
kids were sent to Community. During my last year at U-School, I entered
the sphere of another precocious older boy named Jerry, who
experimented with pot, went to protest rallies and put out underground
newspapers. Shortly after I transferred to CCHS, he decided to do an
issue on race, with an opinion survey, stories about race relations and
other provocative stuff. He also wanted to interview the local black
gang, the Blackstone Rangers, who for some reason had periodic
gatherings in a room at City Hall, and he invited me along. I was
terrified, and so were my parents, but I was as curious as I was
scared, and my parents let me go.
When Jerry and I arrived at the gang meeting I was giddy, and nervously
stuck out my hand to shake that of a gang member. Picking up on my
nervousness, he glared at me and refused to take my hand. I didn't say
much after that, and I don't remember much of what was said during the
meeting. Just the titillation of being in a room surrounded by menacing
dudes.
A few days later, I spotted Lester in the library, sitting at a table
during study hall, and decided to interview him for the survey. I sat
down across from him and asked if he would participate in a survey.
Les, who had become the star center for the basketball team, glowered
at me but didn't say no, so I read the first question: "Do you think
Teen Town should be integrated?" Without saying a word, he reached
across the table, took the pencil from my hand and snapped it in half
with his massive fingers, then stared at me as if I were the pencil. We
never finished the newspaper.
Some months later I ran into Lester again outside a Teen Town dance. He
was with his crew and I was alone, and they wanted my money. Seized by
the same uncharacteristic competitive instinct that caused me to swing
at Lester's Little League pitch, I told them no. They swarmed around me
and began clubbing me with their fists as I tried to cover my head with
my arms. Suddenly they ambled off as a squad car cruised up the street.
My friend, who had dispassionately watched my mugging from across the
street, came over to see if I was OK. I was. He said I was pretty
lucky, especially since Lester had tried to kick me in the balls.
A few years later, I was a hippie dropout by then, trying to make money
selling pot, and a blind friend said he had a blind black friend who
wanted to buy a quarter pound. A blind black guy didn't sound too
risky, but when I went to the dorm to deliver the pot, it turned out
that the blind black friend had a bunch of black friends who weren't
blind, and one of them pulled out a gun and pointed it at my head. This
time my competitive instincts were not aroused. Not saying a word, I
stuck the bag of pot in his hand, turned around and began walking down
the hallway.
"Come back here," he shouted at me.
I kept walking, imagining a hole the size of a silver dollar in my
forehead. I reached the exit and left, never looking back.
During that period there was one other time that I ran into a bunch of
black guys. I was walking up to my favorite hangout, Spudnuts doughnut
shop, when I noticed something very out of place -- several black guys
lounging outside.
"C'mere," one of them said.
Again, I didn't say a word but did a 180 and began truckin' in the
opposite direction.
"I can dig it," one of them said as I was retreating, confirming what I
thought.
I like soul music nowadays, but when I was in high school, not so much,
for the same reason I initially didn't like The Beatles -- white girls
seemed to love soul music, and some got into inter-racial flings (or
swooned over any guy with a British accent), and I connected the two. I
didn't begrudge black guys for going out with white girls, but I was
insecure about the competition. And I knew from the locker room that it
really wasn't just folklore that a lot of black guys were hung,
and I don't mean lynched. So I was relieved when I discovered that many
of them seemed to prefer big-boned blonds.
After my first high school girlfriend and I broke up, she had a fling
with a black guy, which didn't make me angry, but did make me feel
ambivalent. And when I later joined an integrated school club to
promote inter-racial harmony, and my new girlfriend wanted to join,
too, I dropped out of the club and got her to do the same. I was all
for harmony, just not with my girlfriend.
For a brief time I shared a house with a black woman who only went out
with white guys, and my next housemate was a white woman who only went
out with black guys. When I asked the black chick why, she said black
guys are too macho while white guys are gentle. And when I asked the
white chick, she said white guys are too macho while black guys are
gentle. Go figure.
You may have noticed that in my list of seminal encounters with people
of color, there has been no mention of people of brown color, and
that's because before going to college I had nearly no contact with
Latinos, to the point of not recognizing them as a separate ethnic
group. Rather than lumping them in with blacks, I perceived them more
as white. I certainly did when I went away to UCLA in 1969, and one of
my best friends there was a guy named Ed, who happened to have a
Hispanic last name. It didn't occur to me until years later that he was
my first Hispanic friend. At the time he was just a friend.
That sort of changed the next year. I had dropped out of UCLA to join
the revolution, or at least hitchhike around the country and get
stoned, but I was still hanging out in my old dorm, sneaking meals in
the cafeteria and crashing with friends still in school. I'd seen a new
guy around the dorm, a Chicano I'll call Tony, whom I had immediately
sensed was not only precocious but charismatic. We were the same size
-- short and thin -- and even wore the same pair of Army surplus swamp
boots. I recognized a lot of myself in him, especially ego. In the
past, as with Tom and Jerry, I might have tried to enter his orbit. But
as he swaggered about with his coterie of friends, I resented him for
being new school, while I was OG.
One night I went to the dorm to see a girl about sex, full of
testosterone and LSD, sporting stitches on my face from an
ill-conceived antiwar protest I had recently attended at the UCLA track
stadium. We had crashed a graduation ceremony for ROTC, where
the dignitaries had included actor John Wayne and then-Gov. Ronald
Reagan. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to
heckle, but it wasn't. Standing at the top of the bleachers, we chanted
"bullshit" during the National Anthem and yelled insults at the
dignitaries and the graduates, whom we accused of being lackeys for the
imperialist war machine. Then someone got the bright idea to take our
protest to the bottom of the bleachers, and as we waded into the crowd
of enraged parents, a scuffle broke out and some white guy sucker
punched me in the face, chipping my glasses and opening a cut under my
eye.
Once again, my flight instinct easily won out over my fight instinct,
and after picking up my glasses I tried to walk back up the bleachers
to the exit. Halfway up I was confronted by a little old lady,
probably somebody's grandmother, who had to stand on her tiptoes to
clunk me over the head with her purse. Then a cute hippie chick came
up, gave me a hug and tried to wipe my blood away. "Let it bleed," I
said sullenly. What I was thinking was that I had deserved what I got.
Still smarting from that fiasco, I arrived at the dorm, where I had an
hour to kill because my date was at a night class. So I stationed
myself in my favorite chair in the lobby to watch the passing parade.
And who should show up but Tony, with about a half-dozen of his
friends, and he began holding court. I wasn't the only one full of
testosterone, and a few minutes later a couple of muscular black guys
started showing off their martial arts moves, especially jump kicks, as
a crowd of spectators gathered around them.
The exhibition over, I returned to my seat, as did Tony and his
friends, who began talking politics again. I eavesdropped as they
talked about Chicano power and organizing this and that, and I must
have been rolling my eyes or snorting, because Tony asked me what was
the matter. Unversed in and ignorant of Latino issues, rather than
attempting to understand what they were about, I went into a devil's
advocate mode and said something along the lines of rather than
starting their own little clique with petty side issues, they should
join the real revolution and help stop the war.
It didn't help that on my jean jacket I had pinned a peace sign on one
pocket and a George Wallace for president campaign button on the other.
Tony had been trying to be civil to me, but he became somewhat less so
when he noticed the Wallace button, and asked what's up with that?
Instead of coming up with some Stanley Kubrick riff on "the duality of
man," I told him that the federal government was becoming too powerful,
and especially with Nixon in the White House, I was for state's rights.
We went back and forth a bit more, and as I had feared, Tony seemed to
know his stuff, while I was mostly ad libbing. But I was holding my
own, enough so that one of the cute Latinas told me through a thick
accent that I was slippery or slimy, she couldn't decide which. Fed up
with my act, they eventually started to ignore me, which was fine with
me, since my date had finally arrived.
To explain what happened next, I need to remind you about the
testosterone and the LSD, and also tell you about this other guy I knew
who had joined ROTC to avoid going to jail for possession of crystal
meth, which he still possessed. Hard and cynical, he had an unusual way
of saying good bye, a macho variation of "take care." My date and I
were almost to the elevator when I decided to say good bye to Tony. So
I walked back over to him and uttered my ROTC friend's line: "Keep a
tight asshole."
Well, "keep a tight asshole" tends to mean something else in East L.A.,
and most places, and Tony slowly got out of his chair, walked over to
me, smiled as he took off his glasses and took a swing at me. He
missed, but in a flash, a crowd encircled us and he was dancing around
waving his fists, waiting for me to put up my dukes.
Except for getting mugged, I hadn't been in a fight since about first
grade, and it looked like Tony had gone a few rounds. Plus, I wasn't
really mad at Tony, and he was seriously pissed at me. But after the
earlier exhibition of street fighting skills, the crowd was expecting
some action, and I couldn't just back down and apologize, or try to
explain I'd meant for him to beware of the man, not of me. No, I
figured I'd just have to take my licking, but try to do it with some
dignity, which meant I'd have to fight him. So I put up my dukes.
He took a couple swings at me, but I was able to dodge or turn them
into glancing blows. Someone warned me to take off my glasses, but I
declined -- I was having enough trouble seeing through my
hallucinations. Then he showed off his roundhouse kick. I tried to grab
his ankle and twist him to the ground, but only managed to stub my
fingers. I kept waiting for my adrenaline to kick in, but it was like I
was disembodied, watching myself fighting instead of fighting.
More embarrassed than angry, it occurred to me that I wasn't putting on
much of a show, and that at some point I had to at least pretend to go
on offense. So I stopped circling backwards, took a step forward and
punched, sort of. Instead of leaning into the punch, I pulled away, as
if dodging my own fist. Besides, the last thing I wanted to do was
actually hit Tony, because that might really piss him off. But for just
a second after I threw the punch, Tony backed up, went into a tighter
crouch, and a flicker of concern crossed his face. Nobody else noticed,
but it was the high point of the fight for me.
After that I went back into my defensive mode and Tony's punches
started getting closer. He threw one to my face that came up short, but
his finger snagged on my glasses, tearing them off, in the process
breaking open the stitches under my eye. Someone said I was bleeding,
someone else said the cops were on their way, and Tony's friends pulled
him away. I had never been more relieved in my life.
One of Tony's friends came over to me and asked, "why'd you do that?"
"Just horny," I said, probably the only honest thing I said all night.
I would be remiss not to mention one more encounter. At one point in my
life I was a flack for a state agency that funded services for the
disabled, and the white male director of the agency changed to a black
disabled female. Being white male and Jewish, I was not her kind of
patronage hire, and constantly felt my job was in jeopardy. Especially
the time I was assigned to write a warm and fuzzy feature story about a
new project we were funding -- a laundry in a Hispanic neighborhood in
Chicago that was going to employ mostly disabled Latinos.
As I was heading out for the ribbon-cutting, one of my white and
disabled friends at the agency asked me where I was going, and when I
told him, he quipped that they should call the business Spic 'n' Span,
which I thought was pretty funny. So when I arrived at the event, I
told
the joke to the head of Hispanic Services. He did not find the joke as
amusing and wrote a two-page memo to the director, and it looked like I
was a goner. But after apologizing profusely and being forced to rat on
my disabled friend who made up the joke, I survived with just a letter
placed in my personnel file. As did my friend.
So what's the point? Well, when you multiply my racial baggage by the
number of individuals of all races, religions and sexual orientations
who have had similar or in many cases way more traumatic inter-ethnic
moments, America begins to resemble rush hour in Los Angeles --
millions of people driving around with simmering road rage. And yet,
somehow, everybody makes it home.
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