My Stories

If you say that to one of them to his face he’ll slit your throat.

Her remonstrance is intact but I’m only sure the last three words were my momma’s. I couldn’t have been older than five. We were sitting in the car outside a honky-tonk one night waiting for my father. The entire front of the joint was an ad for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer complete with the Gay 90s bartender they used back then (say, about 1959).

The object of her warning was a black man who passed on the street. I can only guess I’d used the word ‘nigger.’

Since I can’t recall a racist moment in my life I don’t think I was getting ready to don a junior size white sheet. I was just using a word others had used around me. Just as the time I later innocently wrote shit or hell (I can’t remember) on a blackboard, earning a reprimand from my father.

Which is more chilling really. I might’ve continued to use nigger with the absence of malice straight men use faggot among their own kind.

Sure, my momma could’ve tried to educate me about racism. But I doubt she thought anything about it. I don’t know if she ever did. Protecting me from hurt was always her first impulse. Desegregation would come later. And I was sent to a distant school as a part of the quest for racial balance. I don’t remember either of my parents bitching about bussing as it was called.

I was grateful for integration. It insured that no nutty, diseased ideas about black people slunk into any part of my mind. Integration hit the first my first year of junior high. Most of the teachers and students names have dropped off into oblivion. But I do remember my black friend, Larry Williams, who went to the public library with me every week.

My first math teacher in junior high was a black woman. Once when the class was making too much noise she told everybody to shut up, they weren’t in church. It was a few decades before I figured that out.

High School was filled with bomb threats from the racists. Callow kid that I was my only feeling was being glad I could get out of prison, stand in the park across from the school and read instead of having to look at my teachers.

Momma did have some race fear. She’d make sure all of the car doors were locked when we drove through a black neighborhood. There were lots of those in Savannah. No matter where we lived we were always near a black neighborhood. When I moved to Atlanta I was surprised that most of the black people lived on ‘the other side’ of town. There are two very confusing things about moving around Atlanta. Every variation of Peachtree has been used in naming streets. Another is the streets change name when they cross Ponce de Leon Avenue that bisects the city. I was told that long ago the white people wanted to make sure they didn’t live on the same street as black folk.

When I was a little kid I we always had black maids. An easy thing when you could hire one for $20.00 a week. That ended when my momma came home to find one holding me over the gas stove with the flame off trying to put me to sleep. Sadly I don’t remember any of them in detail. All I remember is that my father always drove them home when he got in from work.

Neither of my parents uttered a racist epithet that I can recall.

A kid in the nearby black neighborhood and I started palling around in my mid-teens. One day when he was over at my house my father came home. After he left my father sat me down for a talk. Did I want my sister marrying one, he asked.

His whole thrust was that if it happened she’d be ostracized by her friends and family. He never said anything remotely racist. As much as I hated him I was still deeply disappointed and disgusted.

Eerily enough my black friend’s father didn’t want him hanging out with a white boy.

A few years later in Savannah I could help but smile at the young black with his white girlfriend walking through the park.