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Black Like ThemMy first "girlfriend" lived in Detroit. She was a nice gal named Leslie. I had a huge crush on her. It was 1963. I was in second grade. She happened to be black. Leslie was pretty and interesting. She couldn't help but notice that I liked her. It was apparently a test when she decided to ask me a question about our relationship, such as it was for two six-year-olds. Her brother was standing there with her, so maybe this was something her family had suggested. She asked if I realized she was black and if it mattered to me. Why was I her friend? Did I feel sorry for her because she was black? I was a dolt, and had never even considered this lovely little girl's race, so I had no good answer to the question. Instead, I made up something based on what I thought she wanted to hear. Somehow I had gotten the impression that all the black people wanted was some kindness and understanding from the white folks. All that civil rights stuff had been interpreted by my seven-year-old mind as a plea for sympathy. I said yeah, I was her friend because I felt sorry for her. That sounded like the right answer. Leslie rephrased my answer in the form of a question. "You feel sorry for me because I'm black?" "Uh, yeah!" was my dimwit reply. I just threw that out there, hoping it was the right answer. Her brother scowled. So did Leslie, but in a sadder way. Well, that was the last time I ever talked to Leslie. Forty years later I'm still kicking myself. Growing up middle class and white in a series of white suburbs meant that any exposures to people of color that we Kincaid boys had were rare. Race was a big issue in the Sixties, obviously, but it took place in some world other than the one we lived in. Even when there were race riots in Detroit while we lived near downtown, only our parents cared about them. So, we assembled our sketchy knowledge of black people and culture mainly from books and other media. That's where I got the idea that black people wanted sympathy for what I saw as their struggles to live in white society. I read several grown-up books that dealt with race. One was Richard Wright's monumental "Black like Me", quite an eye-opening story for a kid in elementary school. I also read some books by Malcolm X and other black authors. I saw some movies with my folks, too, like "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "The Defiant Ones". Television news was another place where we saw people who weren't white. They weren't anchoring the news. That was up to white people back then, the black folks were making it, getting whacked with clubs by police, carrying protest signs, and getting shot with fire hoses. In the Sixties every white kid was taught that George Washington Carver was the guy who foresaw the future of the peanut. We didn't know anything else about black history, just the peanut thing. Later, Martin Luther King was added to the curriculum. That was all the black history that we were taught. My mom was more liberal on race than my father. She may have commented jokingly about a Polack once in a while, but that was just Southside Chicago showing. Pops had a split personality in racial matters. He was always kind and friendly with black people. As a boy, Pops had a black nanny in his home. Pops referred to her as a mammy (same for when Grandpa was little, and for our great-grandfather as well). Pops had been mentored as a kid by Sam, a black mechanic at my grandfather's car dealership in West Virginia. Pops talked warmly of Sam. Any black visitor to our home was welcomed. Yet Pops let me know how mad he would be if I dated a black girl, and that he thought black people were lazy. Pops never had any black friends that I knew of. Pops even used the N-word sometimes, usually with a fake Southern accent. Charlie Richardson, Florida's husband, did our yard work. Charlie was a skinny old guy who was as friendly as his wife. We didn't see him as much as Florida Mae. Once Pops decided to clear our entire half acre of leaves. Pops tried to get his useless sons to clean and rake it, but we didn't get far and he gave up on us. He hired Charlie, and he showed up with his three boys. One kid was wearing a t-shirt with a black power fist, and all three had big poofy afros. They glowered at us as we goofed around while they raked. Charlie said something to them and they went back to their work, looking down at the ground. It seemed like our rare interactions with urban black people were carried out on a foundation of unspoken, concealed hostility. Venturing to downtown Atlanta demanded that a white boy stay alert and on his guard. Ask a black guy how to get somewhere, and the directions would invariably lead you on a wild goose chase ending up nowhere near where you wanted to go. Believe what a black guy told you, and wind up thinking that you should lend him $10 to get gas for his car so he could drive to get his paycheck, and he would be right back with your money if you would just wait here on the corner. That Rolex the black guy was selling for $50 was a fake that wasn't worth $5. Buy a bag of dope from a black guy, and you wound up with worthless trash, worse than the poorest ditchweed. Inevitably we got the message: stay with your own people and you'll be just fine, honky. I can't remember seeing many black people on TV shows in the late Sixties, unless they were playing a "black person" character. Once on Daniel Boone Daniel helped a slave get away. The white hero saving the poor black man couldn't be satisfying for black people to watch, especially if they heard that Daniel Boone had owned some slaves himself. The real black television shows were the ones that were made just for black people. These shows were so black they could clear a room of white people faster than a fire alarm. I'm talking about shows like Soul Train, or The James Brown Show. The James Brown Show was an unforgettable low budget show taped and seen only in Atlanta, starring Mr. Dynamite, Soul Brother Number One, the Godfather of Soul, Ja-a-a-a-a-a-mes Brown! The first time Dougie and I saw it, James Brown, looking superbad in a satin shirt and glittery platform shoes, burst out of a box covered in tin foil. The door was labeled "The Million Seller" in red construction paper letters. When James stepped out he closed the door, but it slowly swung back open behind him. Then he tried to lipsynch one of his new songs. It was a slow romantic ballad. "I love you, for sentimental reasonsÖ Say we'll never partÖ Let's MAKE IT! GOOD GOD! EEEEEEEEEEAAAAAH!" His mouth didn't match what he was singing. Evidently he hadn't practiced. He busted out sweating with his eyes searching in vain for the forgotten lyrics. Since it was a "one take" show, he had to think fast so nobody would see his lips. He sang with his back turned, and with his shiny, perspiring face concealed in his hands so his mouth wouldn't show. He kept moving away from the camera, and it kept after him relentlessly. We watched it all the time after that. Most black roles in 1970's movies were either criminals or sidekicks that got killed. There were better ones out there, if you knew where to look. The pure stuff, not for beginners. We sometimes went downtown to get it on Peachtree Street. To the Rialto Theater, where they showed all the Blacksploitation and Kung-Fu films. There was a time when there were lots of Blacksploitation films made. They are a unique and violent genre that fature sassy talking, hard fighting, sexually active black heroes and antiheroes. Each one has evil white organized crime figures or politicians taking advantage of the ghetto people. There is the occasional dopey but good-hearted white character that helps. Foxy Brown, Dolemite, Shaft, Cleopatra Jones, Superfly, all revolve around the bold black main character. You know when you see those opening credits showing the star strutting along dressed all ghetto fabulous, that some super-bad honky-ass-kickin' and sweet lovin' gonna soon follow. There was a Blacksploitation moment in Enter the Dragon starring the legendary Bruce Lee. It was uncommon for a Kung-Fu movie to feature black characters playing anything other than criminals, but Enter the Dragon was far better than your average Kung-Fu flick. Tom, Doug and I went to see it at the Rialto on a Saturday. There were perhaps six or seven other white people in the audience, and the rest of the large urban theater was filled with black people. We sat in the Rialto's musty seats surrounded by our fellow martial arts fans, enjoying every whack and kick. Everything was fine until the scene where Jim Williamson, a tall, black Kung-Fu expert, is harassed by two lily-white cops on his way to the airport. One cop said "Hey, this jig's got a passport. Where you going, jig?" This got the audience agitated. All over the theater, I could hear people muttering and cursing. Then one of the cops started roughing Jim Williamson up. The big guy sitting in front of Tom loudly said, to nobody in particular, something like "I'd like to get my hands on that white muthaf**ka". His comment was cheered by a lot of sympathizers. So was the tremendous thrashing that Jim Williamson dished out to both white cops before escaping. Tom, Dougie and I decided to see just how low we could sink into our seats. It may have been those movie-going experiences that gave my brother Tom the chronic Negrophobia he suffers from to this day. Tom sometimes went to the Carnegie Library in downtown Atlanta during high school. He stayed until closing one night. On the way to the door Tom saw two round bushy shapes outside the library entrance silhouetted through the frosted glass windows. Tom was so sure that two black guys with Afros were waiting for him outside that he made the security guard walk him out. As he passed out the door, nearly shaking in fear, he saw that the Afros were just a couple of well trimmed shrubs growing in pots on each side of the doorway. One afternoon thirty years later I visited Atlanta on business. Luckily I had a little extra time to stop by and see my brother Tom. He lives in a nice area of Lawrenceville, a rural town gone gentrified. As I drove through suburban Lawrenceville on my way to his house, I called Tom on my cell. Tom views the world as a grim, us-versus-them battleground where you have to be on your guard all the time. At least he was now expanding his paranoia to include foreigners and not just blaming all crime on blacks. Guess he was getting more of an open mind. The carjacking thing reminded me of another Atlanta trip a couple of years before. I called Tom from another nice suburban area and immediately got the local crime warning with a lengthy description of the terrible effects of allowing all those foreigners to move into formerly nice areas of town. Real estate values plummeted, whites moved away, and the streets became a jungle roamed by ethnic gangs, blah blah blah. I looked around and didn't see any gang graffiti on the buildings. I just saw a brand new Starbucks, a giant Linens and Things, and a Barnes and Noble bookstore where, no doubt, there had once been farms and the occasional tiny country store. If you ask me, suburbia's biggest fear shouldn't be prowling Vietnamese street gangs. It ought to be the replacement of any true cultural flavor with cloned, colorless strip malls and chain restaurants. But that's just me. On that trip I visited Tom's house and took him out for lunch. He and his wife Denise live in a big two-story in a nice area of Lawrenceburg. Really, if you aren't reasonably safe from crime in a neighborhood like that, where in the heck are you safe? Before we left, he relocated a few large dog toys to a spot near the sliding glass patio doors. Tom asked, "What do you think a burglar thinks when he looks in a door and sees those big dog toys?" I was too busy wondering what was going on in Tom's head to think about what a burglar was thinking. Tom and I were walking through University City with his Denise. I thought they would enjoy the fun little shops along Delmar, but they seemed a little tense. Then Tom looked over his shoulder and whispered "Yikes!" out of one side of his mouth to Denise as she peered into a store window. She nodded and looked all around quickly. I asked, "Hey, Tom. What was that for?" "Oh, that's just the little signal we use when one of us sees....(then in a whisper)... a black. To let the other know." Tom held out a bent finger that he briefly straightened to point at a middle aged black guy hurrying by with a large Starbucks cup, then the finger quickly bent back into its apparently stealthier shape. Denise nodded, a gravely serious look on her face. "You mean that guy? The guy wearing the Tivoli Theater name-badge?" I had to ask. The guy headed into the Tivoli to start his shift, so we were safe for now. As we walked further I heard "Yikes!" twenty more times in a block and a half, either Tom or Denise saying it. I broke it to him gently. "Tom, this is a mostly black neighborhood. Yikes is frankly just kind of redundant on Delmar in U-City!" Tom didn't care. "Doesn't matter. You know who commits 80% of the felonies in this country?" Before I could reply "the Republicans?" Tom said it again. "Yikes!" Another sighting. I blurted out "Jeez Louise!" Tom said "That person could be a mugger, just waiting for us to go one of these alleys to our car!" "Tom, that lady is no threat. While she's robbing us, what'll she do with that kid she's pushing in the stroller?" He didn't care. I gave up. But next time they come to town, there are some nice little shops down on Martin Luther King Drive I want to show them. Hard to believe this guy, as jittery as the paint mixing machine at Home Depot, was the same brother that took Dougie and me all the way to downtown Atlanta to see Enter the Dragon at the Rialto. But maybe escorting his two younger brothers to see that movie under the stressful condition of being white in a black area was a little too much for Tommy. Then there was the delicious Mandingo. Mandingo, in case you haven't seen it, was a dreadful 1970's movie version of a scandalous old novel. My mother read it back when she was in high school. Mandingo presented issues of race like a smack in the face with a wet towel. It didn't discriminateÖ it insulted all races equally. Watching the film unfold on the Rialto's screen, one must ask "what sin did James Mason commit to have been sentenced to starring in this movie?" There are many heartwarming scenes of family life on a rundown plantation, with the evil, lazy aristocrats plagued by bouts of acute horniness. The racial offensiveness guaranteed that any white person sitting in the theater had better step lively on the way out to the car after the movie was over. Ultimately, the movie ends with the demise of the noble, abused Mandingo slave Mede in a big boiling pot, to the dismay of all in the audience, especially to the handful of fearful white kids in the theater who have to ride the bus home in the dark. The kids I went to school with had inherited a variety of derogatory terms to describe African Americans, and used them freely. There was "nigger", of course. It was jarring to hear the N-word casually used over dinner while a guest at someone's nice suburban home. To slobber on a cigarette was to nigger-lip it; a person who sympathized with blacks was a nigger-lover; to improvise a shoddy repair was to nigger-rig it; a car with too many ornamentations was all niggered up; someone who spent their paycheck like water was nigger-rich; and it was believed that any white person might be attacked by a nigger-dog if they wandered into Nigger-town. If you had a bad car, "a nigger might buy that". If you painted your house a ridiculous color, "a nigger'd like it". Why the whites were so angry about the blacks is anybody's guess, but we all heard that "the sun don't set on a nigger's ass in Forsythe County" due to the sheriff being high ranking in the Klan. I had a Peachtree High School pal whose father Joe was an old country guy. One time I was showing him a replica of a Confederate Civil War pistol that I had built from a kit. Knowing how inaccurate the gun must have been, Joe said "Bet you'd have to aim this pretty close in a nigger whorehouse!" Probably so, Joe. Hadn't thought about that. There were also colorful terms like jigaboo, porch monkey, jungle bunny, coon, spook, tar baby and smoke. Legitimate terminology had evolved over many years. "Darkie" became "colored", then changed to "Negro", "Afro-American", then "black", then "African-American". Why it is even necessary to attach a term to people of African origin that ultimately separates them from everyone else is not clear to me. I mean, my ancestors came here from Scotland later than many African slaves did, but nobody calls me Scottish-American. I'm just another American guy. However, the immortal n-word lives on. By ninth grade, I had cultivated the smoking habit, part of my program to transform myself from poindexter to hoodlum. The bathrooms were the smoking lounge of choice for the school's degenerates. We would cram into them at each break. The puffers were hounded by our dreaded Assistant Principal, Dewey Holbrook, and his henchmen, the teachers. I was so nervous about getting caught it spoiled all the fun of smoking in school. Tim Spivey was a boy's room regular. He looked relaxed but was as alert as a june bug in a chickenhouse. When a teacher stepped into the smoke-filled bathroom, he was the first to flush his cigarette. My own reflexes were dull from disuse through many years of innocence. I was slower so I had to be smarter. Once, I stepped into the boy's room to smoke after the bell had rung. I figured that most of the teachers had gone to their classrooms. After lighting up, I heard a stall door opening and turned to see "Bosco", Peachtree High's one black student, lumbering toward me like a bear. The rumor was that Bosco had been held back for killing a white kid. Considering he was called "Bosco" after a chocolaty drink, and had not a friend in the whole school, I wouldn't have blamed him if he had. Now I was alone in a bathroom facing him. Bosco was two feet taller than me, and a hundred pounds heavier. Towering over me, he said "Gimme a drag." This presented a dilemma. If I refused to give up my Camel, I would have insulted him. If I gave it to him, I would have to accept it and return to smoking normally when he handed it back. Now, every time, and I mean every time, when one white kid handed a cigarette to another white kid for a few puffs, it was always accompanied by the order "Hey, don't niggerlip it!" To niggerlip a cigarette was to slobber on it with enthusiasm. Bosco took my cigarette. The words instantly popped into my head and wouldn't leave, "DON'T NIGGERLIP IT, BOSCO!" Terrified of the black giant, I was even more afraid of that sentence slipping out of my mouth before I could stop it. Bosco handed my cigarette back to me, staring at my face. If I didn't take a puff after Bosco, I figured I would be declaring myself a racist. I snuck a peek at the filter. I was horrified. The filter had been gnawed into a crumpled mess with a blob of foamy spittle at the tip. Bosco had called my bluff. What the hell was I going to do now? I forced my arm to bring the spit-soaked tip to my lips. With teeth gritted and a shaking hand I took one bubbling puff. It was hard not to gag. Then I handed it back to Bosco and said, "hey, uh, man, youÖ uhÖ can keep itÖ" We lived in Georgia in the last years of overt racism. We kids were stunned to see ads for Klan meetings right in the Atlanta Journal. You wouldn't see ads like these today. The papers just wouldn't run ëem. These ads said stuff like "Wake up, white people!" and "The black man wants your woman and your job!" At the time, I had no woman to speak of and worked as a dishwasher at Bonanza Sirloin Pit. Believe me, if the black man wanted my shitty job, he could damn well have it. One election year, we had a serious racist run for governor, J.B. Stoner. J.B. starred in his own TV commercial where he explained the striking differences between black and white. J.B. believed that blacks were primitive, stupid primates closely related to apes, and he displayed diagrams of various ape, negro, and white skulls to prove it. To J.B., segregation was the only fair thing for the inferior wretches. J.B.'s theories captivated my father. Pops recreated J.B.'s diagrams for us on his yellow memo pad at dinner during his own increasingly scientific-sounding lectures on issues of race. The commercials became the talk of Peachtree High. Everyone called our classmate Jim Stoner "J.B." from eighth grade through graduation. He probably still is today. I'm not going to criticize the South for its race relations, although it seems racism runs stronger there. There has been excessive behavior in the South, sure. The South is the place where assassins shot John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, for example. However, they also shot George Wallace, and Larry Flynt. In the South, they're equal opportunity snipers. There has been a lot of friendly mixing of the races as well. Walking into a plant a few years ago in Ripley, Tennessee, I noticed that everyone on the street greeted me, regardless of color. About two thirds of the plant employees are black. All said "hey" or "mornin'" or something like that. An old black guy stepped up beside me on the way in. He struck up a pleasant conversation about farming, his other source of income. He had a lot to say. There was no perceptible barrier between the races in this warm place. In fact, there were no races at that moment. We were just an old farmer and a guy from the city having a talk. Some white people that I know go well out of their way to prove that they are not prejudiced. Nothing wrong with that. It's far better than going out of one's way to show one's bigotry. These folks want liberal credentials and are willing to work for them, and that's OK. They shoot dirty looks at someone who says something that refers to matters of race in any way. They fawn over a black person at a party. They even might invite a black person to their homes once in a while. Nice tries, sure. But none of it is as natural as a mere conversation between two people, a farmer and a city boy. by William Kincaid |
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