It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man. ("Walking Around," Pablo Neruda, Robert Bly translation)
Some translations go something like "It happens that I'm tired of being a man." Here's the Spanish if you want to have at it:
Sucede que me canso de mis pies y mis uñas
y mi pelo y mi sombra.
Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.
Fact is, I'm bone-sick-and-tired of racism, surfeited for mass and individual consumption (via dog-whistles) for too many still starved for scapegoats for their monumental or mundane, personal life failures.
I'm not a Catholic anymore but I'd be remiss for not crediting those poor, suffering nuns at a parochial grade school in Chicago, from 1961-70, who exposed us to their version of liberation theology and taught us to love our brothers and sisters, no matter what their race. For some of us, the message stuck, and needed to amid the ongoing racist gospel being delivered in our homes and segregated neighborhoods, too often by our own parents. Thank you, too, WVON and Motown, for penetrating the Iron Curtain racist indoctrination built around too many of our psyches with the genius of blues and R&B. (I can still hear my dad's "Turn that n****r noise down" and us kids either cowering or looking at him as if he were an intruder, which in fact, he was.) Today, I also accept as fact that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., helped save my life, for several reasons. Here are a couple.
Dr. King visited Chicago twice to lead marches, first in 1966 as part of the Chicago Freedom Movement to protest segregation in housing, employment, and other vital areas one associates with basic civil rights. Some (too many) Chicagoans' reception of him has never been a source of pride for me as a former Chicagoan, though his response to their reception certainly is elevating:
Transcript: Announcer: By moving North and concerning itself with equality in housing and employment, the Civil Rights Movement began to encounter increased resistance--the so-called "white backlash." During these marches, King and other demonstrators were struck by bricks and bottles.
Interviewer: Did you get hit with a rock?
Dr. King: Oh, I've been hit so many times I'm immune to it.
Interviewer: How do you feel about this reception?
Dr. King: Well, this is a terrible thing. I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen in Chicago.
Interviewer: Will the march go on anyway?
Dr. King: Oh, very definitely. We can't stop the march. [We'll be?] going on in a few minutes.
Interviewer: Do you feel you're in a closed society her on the Southwest side of Chicago?
Dr. King: Oh, yes, it's definitely a closed society and we're going to make it an open society, and we feel that we have to do it this way in order to bring the evil out into the open so that this community will be forced to deal with it.
In 1967, almost exactly a year before his assassination, Dr. King
returned to Chicago for a rally focused on ending the Vietnam War.
Dr. King at Soldier Field during the 1967 march for peace.
This is where I need to make this personal, in part because I am no historian of this or any other period, but I do recall those days. When I was 10 and 11 years old, during those years, I was appalled at and disgusted by the vile behavior of many of my neighbors (and many individuals in my family). Rampant hysteria got fed by fear and we kids were warned of marauding bands of Black youths. In reality, the only such bands I saw were white, "older kids" from my own neighborhood puking streams of race hatred, laughing ominously while imagining violent acts they planned to commit.
When rumors circulated that Dr. King was to lead a march up the middle of the expressway (this was before the rail got built from the Loop to O'Hare), these raging groups literally packed bags with rocks to hurl from overpasses or side streets on to the marchers. (I searched the Web to find some evidence this phase of the march actually took place and would love some help if someone has a link. Thanks.)
If this was manhood, I was in no hurry to join them. To me, they seemed crazy with hatred directed toward what? Toward people marching for peace, equality, or brotherhood? It was both baffling and painful to watch. And how celebratory these same individuals would be (and fearful of reprisals) a year later on April 4, 1968, three days before my own 12th birthday, when their wish appeared to be fulfilled and Dr. King lay dead.
And I did weep for this remarkable man, for his beautiful, amazing wife, Coretta, and their lovely children, though I never let anyone see that. Later, I got angry, eventually coming to feel hatred to "my own race," white people, for the injustices perpetrated at their hands to all people of color.
This is not a healthy place to be, either, I would one day learn. It would be ten years later, when I was a young Army veteran, struggling again as I did through high school with alcohol and drugs, considering dropping out of Wright College, one of Chicago City College's campuses, feeling I didn't have a place there. After a mediocre semester, I was wandering through the library, scanning titles, wondering if I was wasting the GI Bill money that was paying for my classes.
I almost passed by this book, but out of the corner of my eye, a black-bound cover seemed to jut from the others on the shelf. I swear I couldn't even see the title, it was so worn. In fact, it was a first edition copy of Dr. King's Strength to Love. Removing it, I sat in the college library and read it until the library closed, then checked it out and read the rest at home.
I'd like to say that everything after that worked out just fine. Realists or just plain old-timers like me tend to agree that "everything" never works out just fine. Lift just ain't geared that way.
Still, when I read a young poster's diary that looked at Dr. King's so-called "character issues" earlier this week, that is, his marital infidelity and alleged plagiarism, it got me thinking. I don't do "call out" diaries, don't like getting into "flame wars" online, so I'm not going to even mention the piece. In fact, I'm sure the writer's motives were pure enough. I'll leave it at that.
See, I have worked and continue to work hard to achieve peace in this life. I've grown as weary of fighting imagined battles as I am genuinely bone-tired of racism. What I do know is I hope people who know me well or even marginally don't take too much time judging my current character or what I might leave behind that is constructive based on my real and perceived character flaws, behavioral shortcomings, or outright derelictions (I've been down that suicidal road before, and have even done time in jail, which, though like Dr. King, was not for so noble a cause as civil liberties).
What I'd like to say finally is that though I never met the man, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I love what he represented to me and still does. I love that his words, his courage, and what character I did see as a young person awakened me to our innate equality as human beings, our need to be treated with dignity and respect before the law and within society. Quite frankly, despite his flaws or perceived flaws, I love the man. And it is love, in the end, that saves us all.