My dad hated the North. Dad was enigmatic, He’d been born in southern Illinois and said some things about growing up in Arkansas when I was young, but his early life is mostly a mystery to me. My southern grandma, all the aunts and uncles, lived in southern Illinois and we were in Rockford, on the border to Wisconsin- four hundred miles? Maybe, not far but an almost unimaginable gap between cultures.
If you listened to him and his cronies, though, they were exiles from the deepest Mason/Dixon paradise. They had all, as I understand it, come up from the south to get the automotive jobs, Chrysler was in Rockford and thus, so were they. But they hated it up there and they hated the people they had to work and live beside.
Mom was a northerner and seeing dad loudly complain about all the icky Northern food on the tables at Christmas get togethers, complaining that if stuffing wasn’t made with corn meal it was too gummy to be edible and pissing off the aunts, mom and grandma- that was epic when I was little!
As I grew older I became embarrassed by his lack of manners, manners which he told me every day I was supposed to have- but dad was dad, he did what he wanted to do. None of them liked each other- but on one subject, northerner or southerner, they agreed.
They all hated black and brown people.
Racism was all pervasive but when you’re six or seven years old you don’t notice it for what is is. My neighborhood was 100 percent white when I went to first grade in 1969- then an Italian immigrant family moved in on our street, black people were mainly in downtown Rockford and I lived in a suburb of that city.
You didn’t notice the sort of propaganda you were exposed to. People, living, breathing, loving people were always being referred to as “Them” or “Those people”- from everyone. From your teachers, the principal, that cop talking to your dad in the diner while you ate a too crunchy french fry, the deacon talking to your uncle about how they wanted to move the church to a white part of town to get away from “Them”- it was everywhere.
I live in Germany, now, and many, many times in the past I’ve been asked by Germans to explain American race hatred. Everyone has their hate, but at the time, for Germans, it wasn’t toward black people. The only black people they knew were American soldiers. the ones they hated were the Turks that they imported to work in their economy because, well, they didn’t have enough workers. Unreasonable? Sure, but hate always is.
I’ve always figured I could tell them about American racism and the absolute depths of that violent hatred best by relating a memory I cannot and will not forget.
I was six years old, my older brother is exactly, to the day and nearly the minute, eighteen months older than I and my younger brother the same, off by 13 days, the other way. So, we were young and dad took us with him to the diner one day as he had coffee. It was a treat because it didn’t happen very often.
We sat at the counter, they served “Made Rite” burgers that were loose ground beef which always fell off the bun (I detested those things) and it was 1970. Dad, surrounded by the rest of the customers and the quietly approving waitress decided to teach us boys about “Black men”, this is how he did it.
“Boys, listen up!” In those days, when a man who beat the hell out of you every day for any reason said listen up, you listened up and you sat straight too, you did not give him a reason to decide he needed to show the other men what a great disciplinarian he was.
“Boys, you need to know about black men.” Thinking back it occurs to me that no one ever said anything about black women, it was always the black men. Black women were off the radar until the Reagan period, I guess, where it became a must to portray them as lazy and sub human. But at that time, what moved him was black men.
He sipped his coffee and yes, I can still see him in my mind’s eye, he sat back looking all sagacious and he was enjoying himself immensely.
“Now, there are three kinds of black men, boys. There’s the black man who calls you sir and offers you his seat. That’s a good black man.” I wasn’t really listening, but everyone else in the place was and their friggin’ self satisfied nodding heads will never leave my memory.
He continued. “Then, you have the bad black man. He usually has gold teeth, drives a big flashy car and thinks he’s better than you. He steals white women and turns them to bad things! We call them *******! That’s a BAD black man and y’all need to stay away from those like that.”
I’m going to pause right here to remind you that I was six and my younger brother was four. Many years later, this same male took a day off of work so he could celebrate the fact that “Somebody finally shot that liberal sumbitch Lennon.” I was not raised by good people.
But dad wasn’t finished and I can’t forget what he then told us.
“Then, boys, you have the last kind of black man. The best kind of black man is a DEAD black man. Y’all remember that!”
The waitress was nodding as she poured him more coffee, the other men were agreeing before moving back to their papers or other conversations. I had no feelings, I was six, but my subconscious filed it and has never let it go.
Because, that seemed wrong then and as I grew older I found out for myself how damned wrong it is and I will never forgive him for trying to warp my soul. Writing this, I feel the anger rise up in me, even after all these years- he and mom may have fought like cats and dogs about northern versus southern cuisine but she was a bad as he was.
When black people started moving into our suburb, she didn’t get as vulgar as dad but the “You can’t play with those people!” shit started and never stopped. Racism was poured into my veins with every pump of my heart. But racism doesn’t make SENSE! It is hateful and I was never that.
To be honest, it didn’t impact me much until I joined the army. I’m a May child, logic is one of my things, truth and pragmatism are ideals that I strive for. All of my life I’d been told that I was inherently better than “Those people” that I was superior and that they were actually low brow and a sub race.
Then I met them, lived with them and came to understand what a load of rotten baloney I’d been fed. I do okay in my endeavors, but there were men and women of color, black, brown, yellow- hate don’t care but neither does truth- that I could do nothing save respect and admire. I came to really KNOW that we are one people, human.
Gods, they were GOOD at what they did and many of them ran circles around me. Some of them even fell back to help me make it, long distance runs were my weakness- they didn’t have to, but they did, they put black, brown and yellow hands on my shoulders and said- “C’mon man, you can make it, we got you!” And they did have me, over and over again, just as when it was needful, I had them. And they were kind, kind in a way my father had never once been in his life.
And didn’t my eyes well up with tears now, remembering them and all those times.
I came home from the army and I was pariah, because I could no longer, ever, say the things they needed me to say. I cannot, I will not- none of it is true.
I was raised to be a racist, but I can’t be that. Judging a human because of a pigment in their skin is perhaps one of the most decidedly stupid things I can think of. It is “Stump stupid” to use my dad’s idiom.
He wasn’t successful with me, he was, sadly, with my brothers and we’ve not talked in many years. I will not speak with roiling fountains of stupid hate nor will I call them family.
With the turmoils of the time I see calls to forgive them their hatred- they were raised that way! They were indoctrinated by family and community! So was I, they have the same choice I had and if they don’t take it, if they won’t willfully open their eyes and admit it’s all hooey designed to bolster a HUGE and hidden inferiority complex and prop up weak souls who can’t admit they’re wrong- then I can’t and won’t forgive them this. They can do better.
I can’t respect hate or the people who cling to it.
On that note, here’s to hoping today is another day in the creation of a better world, a good day for all of us.
Peace and health to all of you.
Kell
Also published to Kell's World