Of
course, we were all prejudiced. But on the spectrum of prejudices in
our mostly white neighborhood, my parents, your grandparents, likely held the
least flagrant position, and I grew up believing that we were the one family
in town truly beyond the risk of prejudice, at least of any racial kind.
(Given my local, Catholic friends, I could see pretty easily that my mother was
quietly but stubbornly sectarian: she once suggested orange as a good
color for us kids to wear on St. Patrick’s Day, and she expressed
skepticism that the Pope was a Christian. “He might be, if he’s truly asked Jesus into his heart as His Lord and Savior,” she observed one evening at dinner, “But I doubt it.”)
In
the era of white flight, assassinations, riots, and the ongoing fight for Civil
Rights, my parents made a point of preaching racial tolerance and
equality to their children. One of the earliest children’s hymns I learned was
“Jesus Loves the Little Children,” and I learned it in the Hausa language, which my mother had learned
in Nigeria. From it and other cues, I got the gist that skin tone was irrelevant to Jesus, and
so should be irrelevant to us. Once, when we had stopped somewhere in rural Georgia on a
family trip to Florida, my mother made sure that I took note of a
segregated water fountain that she’d found, and then that I understood
why such an item was hateful and wrong. The summer that I turned five, 1967, the
summer of the nearby Newark riots, my parents had two children come to stay
with us from Harlem, on the Fresh Air Fund, for two weeks each, first a boy named Ronnie and
then a girl named Cheryl. My mother felt it would be helpful both to
them and to me and my little sister Alleene, given how white our neighborhood was then.
Before that time, I was so unused to encountering dark skin that, when
we visited Manhattan, which was scarcely twenty miles distant, I asked my mother
if this was “the country of the brown-skinned people.”
The
next year, 1968, a few months after Dr. King’s assassination, my
parents took me out of the local public school, which was nearly all
white, and enrolled me and my sister Alleene in a Baptist elementary
that was thoroughly integrated. The switch had more to do with the fact
that the public school felt uncomfortable about my disability and was
unwilling to let me attend regular classes when I was in a wheelchair,
whereas the church school didn’t care. But in practice it meant that, even before
the adoptions of my Korean, African-American, and mixed-race siblings, I
was habituated to interacting with Latin, Black, and Asian children as
playmates and classmates, from the age of six. At eight, I was given a
tri-color Afro pick with a folding handle by my best friend David
Mordecai. I took it home and proudly folded and and unfolded it for my
father, intoning solemnly, as David had taught me, “Black is for the people. (Point to the black
plastic comb.) Red is for the blood they shed. (Fold over the red half
of the handle.) Green is for the land. (Fold over the green half of the
handle.)” The land was Africa. My mother agreed it was green and that an awful lot of blood had been shed.
There were inconsistencies of course,
some that I'm sure I missed but some that I noticed. My father still held, at least jokingly, a
variety of ethnic stereotypes that he didn’t think were really
prejudices. Poles could be dumb, Scots were often skinflints, Irish
liked to drink and join the police. "But I'm not prejudiced," he'd say. His official policy was that Black
people as individuals were just as capable of accomplishing anything as White
people were, but that as a group they had a harder time of it because Africa
had fallen behind the rest of the world and was backwards, which made no
causal sense at all in 1960s New Jersey but satisfied him.
My
mother was a bit weirder. Her faith mandated that all humans were
identically wicked at birth and identically capable of salvation and
rebirth. She was also proud of being a New Englander, descended from centuries of New Englanders, on the right and
godly side of the slavery issue and of the U.S. Civil War. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was a
staple hymn of our church and household, and my mother always sang it as if
it were still a marching chant, hitting the stressed syllables like hammer
blows. “EYES! SEEN! GLOR! COME! LORD! TRAMP! VINT! GRAPES! WRATH!
STORED!”
Yet, she likewise held the rural New Englander’s pride in the great virtue of her own skepticism and common sense,
which led her into odd reasonings about race. She couldn’t see the
validity of calling one group of people “colored,” for instance (“We’re all colored
some kind of color!”), nor of referring to “White” and “Black” people (“‘Pink’ and
‘Brown’ is more like it! Why not say that?”). On one occasion, she
confided in me that she felt it was exceptionally stupid for “prejudiced
people” to compare Africans to apes because, after all, apes had thin
lips like Europeans and also had skin that, under their very straight ape hair, was pale. I
stared at her blankly, being all of about six or seven years old myself and
not yet acquainted with any apes, but she gave me a triumphant look, as
if she’d just solved a geometry proof, and said no more on the subject.
I
remained innocent of the capacity for prejudice in myself or in my friends until I was a
teenager in boarding school. (It’s amazing that any naïveté at all
about one’s self survives high school.) My junior year, I befriended an introverted giant of a boy, a senior named Scott, who could have
been typecast as a Viking. He had shaggy blonde hair, stood just shy of
6’4,” and had powerful arms. He was the kind of guy automatically
recruited to be a linebacker for the football team, even though he didn't particularly care for football, wore
thick glasses, was painfully shy, and always strode about campus in a hangdog attitude, staring at the ground.
We
had a fondness for punk music and science fiction in common, otherwise not much, and yet we
bonded. In addition to being a football player and a star wrestler, Scott was a townie and
an art geek who was constantly sketching and who obsessively collected Marvel comic
books. I was a disabled boarding student who couldn’t draw a straight
line, knew next to nothing of Marvel comics beyond the Spider-Man and
Wolverine characters, and whose own obsession was novels. I wanted to act in plays.
Scott wanted never to have to see a play.
What
united us was really just loneliness and marginal status. From a schoolmaster's description, you
might not think we were outcasts: he was a jock, the son and grandson of prominent
alums; I was a goody-goody, a scholarship boy, a dorm prefect, an academic standout,
and an occasional actor. But we were weird. We looked weird, especially
as friends, the huge Viking and the little crip. Moreover, in some way
that we couldn’t quite define to ourselves, we were cynical about enthusiasms other students took seriously and, no
matter how involved we were in those officially important high-school sorts of
activities, we didn’t fit in. So, we were friends.
About
this time, one of the most popular seniors in my dorm was a jovial,
roaring, good-looking Southerner named Jon who enjoyed sounding like Foghorn T.
Leghorn, booming out “Boy!” this and “Yo, boy!” that. I never picked up
on the fact that he only addressed fellow white boys in this manner, much less what it meant. I wasn't part of his circle. My only
pals in the dorm that year were a literary-minded Chinese-American named David Yuan and a rich, ugly Venezuelan kid named Sam. (Sam had a Frida Kahlo unibrow. If we teased him, he would mutter, without apparent irony or humor, "Dafid! Mark! You are my berry, berry good friends. But now I'm go-eeng to haf to keel you." David and I would fall about laughing at this, Sam would frown as if trying to concentrate his magnificent eyebrow into a single exclamation point, and then our conversation, which was usually about music, would move on.) We didn’t hang out with either the cool White boys or the cool Black
packs. So, I was ripe for stupidly walking into the middle of a nastiness
I didn’t yet understand.
One Saturday
night, I was hanging out in the dorm’s lobby, by myself, doing nothing
that I can recall, probably reading a book. A senior named Dave, who was the most popular of the
upperclass African-American guys in the dorm, swaggered by with a couple of his
younger friends and teased me about something irrelevant. I tried being cool and
jovial in my response, imitating the retort style of that very popular boy, Southern Jon. I don’t know what I
said, exactly, but I do know that I tossed a “boy!” in somewhere in my
witty reply.
In a split second, my dormitory Tiny-Tim mascot status
notwithstanding, Dave had grabbed me, literally, by the throat and was
cursing me to my face. Before I could even get past the immediate shock, I
heard a roar over my shoulder and Dave himself was being lifted into the
air by Scott, who had just stopped by to say hi. There was more cursing
and even some body slamming, thankfully on the other side of the lobby from me, and then our dorm master, Russell
Witherspoon, popped his head out of his doorway down the hall to see
what the hell was going on. A lean, dark-skinned Black man, nearly as tall as
Scott, with a lilting baritone purr of a voice, 'Spoon had all the combatants separated in a second or two.
Afterward,
in the sit-down interview with Mr. Witherspoon, I learned exactly what it meant for me to call a
Black man "boy." I was shaken. I protested my innocence as well as my
ignorance and cited popular Southern Jon’s bluff habit of calling people “boy,”
but I apologized. Dave calmed down. Witherspoon excused us. Scott stalked home.
That
lesson about the danger of using "boy" was embarrassing but easy to absorb. It was like the time in
fifth grade that I had gotten in trouble for a caricature. I had been
doodling at my desk, trying to make something interesting-looking by drawing
with a compass. I had gotten as far as a neat semicircle with a triangle
on top, but I was stuck. The girl who shared my desk looked over at my
drawing and hissed, “give it a face with slanty eyes.” I complied, then
looked at her for further advice. Our fifth-grade teacher, Miss Storm
had just been engaged to a man by the name of Eng. “Now, write ‘Mr. Eng’
on it and hide it on Miss Storm’s desk,” the girl giggled. Thinking
that I was impressing my classmate, I did as she said. When Miss Storm
found the drawing, she was visibly shaken and demanded to know who did
it. I knew nothing yet of the coolie stereotype I'd just drawn, but I was ashamed and
confessed. It was an embarrassing lesson in prejudice, but easily learned.
So should have been the lesson in high school, but it
was the discovery in the wake of the “boy” incident that was harder to process.
Giant Scott, my friend and my rescuer, my hero of sorts, couldn’t let it go. The next summer,
after he’d already graduated and I’d gone to work as a camp counselor, I would
get letters from him containing sketches of new superhero characters
he'd invented and, uncomfortably, edgy rantings about “our Black friends.” At first, I
tried to pretend Scott meant only Dave and his pals, that their blackness was incidental to his irritation with their behavior to me, but the queasy
feeling in my gut kept indicating that my hero friend was probably a racist. Or,
as I passed it off to myself then, my pal Scott was “very prejudiced.”
I
had another friend like that, the same year, and although he and Scott
never met, in my mind now the two are lumped together. Jim was another
outsider type, smart and sarcastic, but he lived in ‘Jersey, the oldest
son of a church friend of my father’s. Jim was
superficially unlike either Scott or me. He was pale, runty, and thin.
He played the piano and composed meandering songs out of batches of
chords as if he were tossing logs on the keyboard. His hobbies were camping, beer, and affecting a corncob pipe as if he were Huck Finn. He
and I took canoeing trips together that summer. He was smart and
creative, but it slowly dawned on me that Jim, like Scott, had a
festering resentment within. He and I had both taken a couple of years of high
school German. At first, it was an easy bonding routine, to exchange
greetings and trivial conversations in our execrable Deutsch. We’d both
been to see Apocalypse Now, and I thought it was merely funny when Jim strapped a cheap tape-deck to a strut of the canoe and played
“Ride of the Valkyrie” one afternoon as we paddled down a quiet stream. But then he
started asking me what I thought of an idea he had for a club he was
calling “Viertel Reich,” and he asked me to help him work up a sketch
for a modified swastika logo for it.
Feeling queasy
again, I attempted a redirect. I told Jim that we should make it clear that
this club of his was ironic and clever and mocking of anything like an actual fascination
with the Nazis. I drew him a “swastika” that was composed of four
question marks rotating clockwise, like a pinwheel, around a single
period. Jim didn’t like it. We drifted apart pretty soon, and, except at his father's funeral, I never saw him again.
I
stayed friends with Scott, however, at least through our correspondences, and I excused myself by carefully avoiding any direct reply whenever he asked me a leading question in a letter about how things
were the next year in my dorm with "our Black friends." I visited him one time in Chicago, several years later, after he had graduated from an evangelical college and
married into money. He and his bride were only twenty-three but owners of a lofty condo opposite the Lincoln Park Zoo. Scott was struggling to sell
his drawings and lived off his wife's trust fund. We never mentioned race at dinner that night, I should say, not in any
way. Outside their guest bedroom window in the wee morning, I could hear the eerie
combination of sirens and lions roaring. That was the last time I visited them.
As
for the Dave whom I'd insulted, incidentally, although he and I were never very friendly,
and although I doubt he really believed that I hadn’t meant anything racist by
addressing him as “boy” that evening that Scott had tackled him, he did do me the
favor of introducing me to the music of George Clinton and P-Funk the next school year, and
for that I remain grateful to him. His own best friend, Louis, who was
there in the lobby the night we all scrapped, ended up at Princeton with me. Unlike me, Louis graduated.
The past is a pond, pretty much like the one
on my Grandma Wetherbe’s farm. It's pretty from a distance and it silts up over time. Plants shove in
from all sides, if you don’t disturb it or dredge it, and the surface
can paper over solidly with water lilies, as if it a were a grounded flowerbed. There’s plenty of muck at the bottom and clear water that will
run, with some work, even then. These days, I think of boys like Scott and Jim and me whenever I
read of some punk white kid who’s snuck off to join up with white
supremacists or ISIS. There’s that dream of belonging to a unified,
dangerous outsider’s club that haunts certain uncool young loners,
always has and will. And, once caught in that dream, a prejudice, of whatever type, is body
armor against the demons.
In the decades after high school, I
never hesitated to tell people how my mother, her evangelical sectarianism aside,
had raised me to see all others as equals and race as irrelevant. I told
stories of her and of my multiracial siblings to my fellow grad students,
then to my students at Utah, Alabama, and Morehouse. I still believe it was a
good thing to have grown up singing, “all are precious in His sight," whatever the language I sang it in.
But there was a day in the late nineties, I forget exactly when, perhaps just
after my father had died, just before the millenium, when my brother Jimmy and I were going through an
old cardboard box of family snapshots that included a few early pictures
of our parents as a couple, from before I was born. And there we found a
Kodachrome square, blurry but still lurid, of Dad and Mom dressed up for
a Halloween party, a few weeks after their wedding, in1961. What costume my father was wearing in the photo, I forget. I
was too startled by my mother’s get-up to notice him. There she sat, smiling broadly,
in a floral apron and with a red polka-dot bandanna knotted around her head,
completely made up in blackface.
I never did talk to her about that. And now it's too late.
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