On the one hand, you could say I'm writing this first-time diary because of my war on terror. And you would be, up to a point, correct. I just lost my job, my SO is disabled, and I am in treatment for colon cancer. Yeehaw. Yeppers, unemployment will have to stretch pretty far, and the only thing I know that absorbs any of that panic is to write. So here I am, fingers to the keyboard. I am a playwright/actor type, so my experience with tapping out my thoughts is neither new nor fatally intimidating. Certainly not as intimidating as having this freaking disease, no job, and having to cough up 700 bucks a month for health insurance.
But on the other hand, the story I'm about to tell has lain in the back of my head for years. And as I have watched Barack Obama float to the top of his game, I've kept thinking, hey, Joe Sweat, I hope you're still around somewhere, watching this wondrous history unfold.
I am white, female, of a certain age, and born in the south. Kentucky. One of my earliest and most indelible memories of other people's terror came in the form of a short narrative film shown at Vacation Bible School, which depicted a midnight KKK raid on a black sharecropper's farm. It was indeed terrifying; the hooded figures in sheets, the fear on the face of the children, the screams of the mother, the fiery cross blazing in the front yard, the savage whipping of the father whom they'd lashed to a tree. That terror entered me, I lost it completely, and my parents were called to come and take me home because I could not stop crying.
Those horrid times are in the past, praise whatever gods may be. Yet racism, as we have heard in the stinking vitriol bubbling up at some of the Palin rallys, just never seems to go out of style for some people. However, if we are wise and very fortunate, an elegant, massively smart scholar of a man will be sworn in as our next president. And his color couldn't keep him from getting what he wanted nor from doing what he knew must be done. And so for all the Joe Sweats that have ever had to back away from connecting with another human being just because that person was not the right color, this story is dedicated to you.
It was the summer of 1957, and that late July in southern Kentucky was a typical one, righteously humid with the temperature in the mid-90's. My mother woke me around 7 am that day to ride with her to Boxtown and pick up our maid, Ruby Sweat. Boxtown. A scab on the face of the universe if ever there was one. They called it Boxtown because most all the houses, if you could call them that, had started out as sturdy plywood crates in which enormous concert grand pianos were shipped to the Royal Music Company over in Bowling Green, about 20 miles northwest of our little town, Scottsville. In those days, concert grands were a fairly common site in middle-class homes in the south, and the Royal Music Company did a hopping business. These crates would somehow find their way to Boxtown, and be reinforced with scrap lumber, take on insulation made of rags and newspapers, and eventually get turned into homes with doors, windows, roofs, and tin chimneys. Ruby and her husband Leonard were lucky. They had somehow acquired a much sturdier dwelling, and they and their children, Nancy and Joe, 13 and 15 years old respectively, appeared to be much better off than most of the other citizens of Boxtown.
My mother told me, years later, that she and Ruby were actually good friends. Perhaps that was just her take on things, but it's possible. My mother was kind and funny, and really wanted nothing more out of life than to paint. The big kitchen of the old farmhouse where we lived was filled with the smell of oil paints, lindseed oil and turpentine. There were piles of half-emptied paint tubes on the counters, and always 10-20 stretched canvasses in the corners. She painted from postcards and photographs, and animals and seascapes were her favorite subjects. I thought she was a genius.
That day in July promised to be a busy one. My grandmother, who lived with us, was hosting the monthly Book Club party the following day, and Ruby was bringing Nancy and Joe with her to help out with the preparations. Ruby would be cleaning the whole house, two floors and a finished basement, Nancy would be helping my mother and grandmother make dozens of cream cheese and olive sandwiches, bake a ham and two angel-food cakes, and Joe was to mow the yard, which was fairly large. My brother Darryl, five years older than I, and with whom I had a rather dismal relationship, usually did the mowing, but he did such a rotten job, even taking two days to do it, and complained so much, that my parents had pretty much given up on him, which was of course exactly what he had in mind.
We all adored my grandmother, and considered her dramatic and legendary tales of her side of the family's southern aristocracy gone south, as it were, after the Civil War just part of her eccentricities. She referred to all black people as "nigras", and though never overtly rude or unkind to them, made it abundantly clear, on a regular basis, that they were the fetchers, the servants, the dark worker-bees and their attempts at anything other than those roles were amusing and silly, at best.
I'd spent the major part of the day playing in the back yard, dragging my dolls from one shadey spot to the next, and by mid-afternoon had decided to start digging holes for mud pie preparation. I was filling up several holes with water from the hose, when I saw Joe Sweat standing at the edge of the back yard, holding an empty Mason Jar my mother had given him for drinking water. He didn't say anything but smiled and held up the jar.
"You want some more water?" I shouted.
"I sure do," he said, and moved a little closer.
"OK, here ya go," I said, and walked over with the hose. I filled up the jar, and he drained it in about four big gulps.
"Want a refill?," I asked, and he nodded. I filled up the jar again, and he drank it down.
"I bet you sure are hot," I observed.
"Aw yeah, it's bad hot out there. I finished with that big old yard."
I looked down the hill, and couldn't believe it. He was finished with the whole damn thing, and it looked great. Darryl was off the hook forever, looked like.
"Wow, you're fast!"
He laughed, and said,"Well, I mow a lot of yards in the summer."
I said, "well, you wanna help me make mud pies, then?"
Joe laughed again and said he didn't think so. I asked him if he wanted to do something else. He squinted at me and said "Like what?"
"Like this," I yelled, suddenly inspired and spraying the water on him. I figured he could use some cool water on the outside of him in all that heat. He yelped and started laughing and running away. I followed in hot pursuit and totally soaked him. Suddenly, he back-tracked and grabbed the hose out of my hand and let me have it. I ran like mad, but he was faster and got me good. By that point, we were both screaming with laughter, sliding along in the muddy grass, and I finally slipped and lay gasping for air.
"You okay?" he said, dropping the hose.
"Yeah," I panted, "just outta breath."
"Ok, here now" he said, "take it easy," and slipping his hands under my armpits, carefully pulled me up. Then he got this huge grin on his face and said, "Let's dry you off." And slowly he began to whirl me around in a circle, and my legs flew out and I was flying. I stared at Joe's brown face as we went round and round, faster and faster. His smile was so beautiful and white as snow. Darryl would've preferred to slit his own throat rather than play with me but now I was in heaven, flying through the summer air and I wanted it to never end. But suddenly Joe stopped and set me down.
"Your grannie is calling you," he said, "right there on the porch."
I looked toward the house, and sure enough, there she was, waving furiously and calling my name.
"Coming", I called, and headed toward the screen door. "Don't go anywhere,OK?" I shouted at Joe. "I'll be back in a minute."
By the time I got to the porch, I could tell something was wrong, terribly wrong. My grandmother almost never fussed at Darryl or me, but now she had this tight, angry expression on her face, and as I went through the screen door, she grabbed my arm and dragged me on into the hallway.
"Just what do you think you're doing out there?" she hissed, and pushed me down on a bench next to the wall. I just stared at her, my stomach suddenly turning over and my mouth hanging open.
"What do you mean? I didn't do anything wrong." I'd never seen her like this. She was a stranger, and the sweet old lady I knew as Em had disappeared.
"Sally, listen to me. Maybe you're just too young to understand this, but young ladies, well-bred young white girls, do NOT let nigra boys touch them, do you understand me?"
I stared at her, and felt the blood rush to my head. I was only eight years old, but I wasn't an idiot and I knew what she was thinking, and it made me sick. I felt like I wanted to leave my body, and worst of all, I felt dirty and vaguely guilty for something I had not done.
"But Em, we were just playing," I squeaked in a voice I barely recognized as my own.
She sighed, and sat down beside me. "I know you didn't mean to do anything wrong. But you will have to learn this, sooner or later. You do not let nigra men touch you, not ever. And you don't play with colored boys. It's not fair to them and it makes you look like white trash. Do you want to look like white trash? I don't think so," she sniffed. "Now go on upstairs and get cleaned up."
I walked woodenly up the carpeted steps to my room and suddenly ran to the bathroom, shut the door, and let the water run and run. I don't know how long I stayed in there, but when I came out, I looked out the window directly above the porch and Joe was nowhere to be seen.
Joe never came back. Nancy got married and moved to Detroit. Ruby may or may not have gotten an idea of what happened, but I don't think she ever mentioned it. She continued to work for my mother for several more years, and I later heard that Joe had gone on to college out west somewhere. I told my mother about that day much, much later, when she was a grandmother herself, and she bowed her head for second or two, then looked up and patted my cheek. "I'm so sorry," was all she said. We never spoke of it again.
So I say to Joe, wherever he may be, thank you for being so kind to a lonely little girl. I hope your children grew up knowing how sweet you were, felt the glow of that wonderful smile, and have loving friends and family of every color and shape imaginable.