Kara Walker and Uncle Remus...

When I was coming along in Georgia, I became black in more senses than just the kind of multicultural acceptance that I grew up with in California. Blackness became a very loaded subject, a very loaded thing to be--all about forbidden passions and desires, and all about a history that's still living, very present ... the shame of the South...

Kara Walker, artist

I know what she's talking about. Blackness and the South exist in a different way, than blackness and, say, Detroit. For one thing, there's a closeness between the races in peculiar ways. In Portnoy's Complaint, the narrator tells about seeing "the girl" who helped with the ironing, eating lunch alone in the kitchen, noshing on tuna salad made only for her. That's New Jersey for you. The South is more blatantly racist, and yet kinder, both together. For years, my family employed Mary and Dave and it says quite a lot that I never knew their last name, and don't know it today. At lunch, Mary ate the same food we did, but my grandmother ostentatiously left out handfuls of change, and marked the liquor bottles as some sort of test.

When Mary's daughter went to college for her Master's degree at OU, my grandparents paid her full tuition, drove her to the campus, and introduced her to the dean. And yet, my grandfather told me time and time again that black people were like little children and it was our duty as white people to care for them. This notion struck me as sickening, and I know I said as much, and at great loud length too. But I revolted against this view less as a civil rights enthusiast, and more from the standpoint of a child.

If you grew up in the South, at a certain time in this country, and in a certain way, you got fobbed off on black people. And as a child, you knew instinctively you'd rather be with them than anyone else around. As I said in one of my posts, I took many train trips alone, with only a note pinned to my ruffled front that said Mr. Porter, This is our little Writer-to-the Stars. She is going to visit her great-aunt in Sapulpa. Please make sure she buys a sandwich and gets off at the right station. Thank you. Mr. and Mrs. Writer-to-the-Stars. A very kind porter always looked after me. I can't recall any of them being less than impeccably polite.

I was also handed off to a succession of maids and cleaning ladies who told me wonderfullyPosting frightening stories, let me know when I was a pain in the butt, and sometimes took me home with them. I always had the feeling they were less hypocritical than the grown-up white people around me. They were certainly more controlled than most of the alcoholic white adults I knew, but that was through dire necessity. Still, if I found a racist anywhere around, I always stirred the pot. I can remember, at the dinner table, delighting as my grandmother broke out in racking sobs whenever I pointed out the half-moons on my nails...one of the sure signs you have black blood. While this Southern-style drama raged on, Mary would stoically pass around the cornbread. (No. We didn't have good manners. Not about race.)

It's complicated, this race stuff. In one way, it's hard for me to dump my To Kill A Mockingbird outlook, but I've got to. That time is gone, baby, gone. I see multi-racials all around me in every lovely permutation. The teenagers and people in their twenties don't seem to notice race much at all. Even here, even in Dallas, Texas.

All our weird convolutions, way back then, were the results of people living in an unholy situation. It deformed everyone. For those of us who baked and steamed through those hot drowsy years, feeling grubby and soiled from an unjust immovable system, we thought we'd have to overcome racism by inches and decades.

I know that's what I thought.

Didn't occur to me that a sweeping change could happen in one blast, like a cloudburst.

Never occurred to me at all.

A fifth grade racist....

One day, in the early part of spring, my fifth grade teacher announced that our class would put on a minstrel show. Our blank pie-plate faces must have told her that we had no idea what she was talking about. So, in answer to our unasked question (WTF?), Miss Taylor passed around some pamphlets. But these flabby little booklets didn't make anything clearer; if anything it compounded our confusion, making it richer and more complex, turning it into a deep loamy soil of plain bewilderment. As I recall, the booklets had a photograph showing lots of people poised on the stage in a semi-circle, their faces unaccountably blackened, and contained a script of sorts, written in the densest Uncle Remus dialect.

Miss Taylor liked to do things, usually ambitious things. We'd just returned from a week-long trip to Philadelphia, paid for by our own bare-knuckled grade-school labors. We'd sold coat-hangers back to the dry cleaner, washed pots and pans for the neighbors, walked dogs, etc. So we knew whatever this was about, it would be A Big Deal. Miss Taylor, however, was less forthcoming about the whys of our collective projects. She wasn't anyone you felt you could approach with a question, either. She had a big hard butt, eyebrows penciled into a cross expression, tight knotted calf muscles, and was very nearly bald. As her student, sensing that protest would be futile, you sighed and did what she wanted.

I took my booklet home and studied it. What I couldn't get my head around was the black-faced part and the Uncle Remus accents. Why would we do this? We were all little white kids. This was before Brown vs. The Board of Education, so none of us even knew any little black kids. I read the dialect and tried to puzzle it out. I finally decided that white people were involved because no black person would be stupid enough to volunteer. I didn't know the word offensive but I was probably groping towards it, when I thought, It's rude.

Miss Taylor was nothing if not professional. We worked and rehearsed like Broadway pros. I remember I was in something resembling a chorus, and I have dim memories of rattling a tamborine, shouting Hidey, hidey, ho! at various intervals during the show. It was fine with me. I didn't want to be a performer with lines, saying things like, Mistah Bones! Ah hea'd you wuz in de jail. Why fo' you be's lock-ed up? My parents were going to come to this and I could already envision their ashen faces.

The whole show was two hours long, and we performed it gamely, if depressively, on stage, in the school auditorium. Miss Taylor, grim as usual, took her bows. Afterwards, still blacked up with a big white-ringed mouth, I rode home with my parents in one of those stark silences, still not understanding why this show even existed.

I suppose my parents, especially my father, didn't descend on Miss Taylor like the furies from hell, because of her Miss Taylorishness, for one. And because she periodically called them in to explain that I was a genius. As proof, my paintings, including the acclaimed What Music Feels Like to Me, were flapped in their faces with a gale force. Most of the time, instead of being in class, I toiled in the hallway, beavering on murals with other talented souls. It was an easy gig and I wasn't willing to give it up and rejoin the Blue Bird Reading Circle. My mom and dad probably sensed that, so they let things ride.

We never talked about the minstrel show, my parents and I. The event just settled within me as one of those icky experiences I didn't have much control over.

So here that memory still sits, occupying some thinly inhabited part of my brain, along with Colored Only signs I saw growing up, and the sight of black men in chain gangs. Recollections like that have been with me so long, they might even seem natural.

Except there was nothing natural about any of it.

Ralph Nader is stupider than eight chickens...

Uncle Tom

Today I read that Ralph Nader called our President-elect an Uncle Tom, and nearly swallowed my bridgework. For one thing, this is a dog-whistle to us sixties types that Ralph may be past his sell-by date. It's such a moldy label now that I wonder if our text-messaging youth even knows what it means. Back in the day, a lot of whities didn't know what it meant.

Calling an African American an Uncle Tom started around 1967, and was interchangeable with hankie-head and Oreo. I first heard it used by Black Panthers in the East Coast, and I often heard it in reference to Martin Luther King. In the counter-culture, there was a feeling floating around that social justice for blacks was just taking too damned long. A lot of people were sick of police corruption, sick of getting beat to shit in demonstrations, and were about to blow-off non-violence as a strategy.

Anyway, calling a black an Uncle Tom meant he was a black appeaser, someone who made nice with Mr. Charlie, a yassuh, yessuh guy and was, rightfully, an incredible insult. This is pretty ironic, since Uncle Tom is a stand-up character in the book, and defies his white oppressors. But, despite Woodstock and anything else you might have read or seen, most white people weren't thinking much about Uncle Tom or Martin Luther King. Instead they spent their time watching The Smothers Brothers, working their day jobs, and wishing the goddamned war would end. Given the obliviousness of the general public, I'm fairly sure a number of whites and maybe blacks too got Uncle Tom mixed up with Uncle Ben (see below).

Uncle Ben

A confession here: I've never read Uncle Tom's Cabin: Life Among the Lowly. I don't think I ever will either, after peering into it from time to time. It's pretty sticky, heavily Christian with a Puritan slant, and the characters have long since been absorbed into stereotypes. As to Uncle Ben, I was sad when he disappeared off the rice box. Turns out, I thought he was a train porter instead of a waiter. (Why I thought a train porter would bring anyone a hot dish of rice is one of those mysteries. Nonetheless, I greatly admired porters, since I'd often been turned over to their care during solitary childhood train trips.)

I imagine we'll hear all the old crap in the years ahead. Hopefully it'll be ridiculed out of existence and I stand ready to ridicule as my citizen duty. The years ahead will be hard on racists of all stripes. The old epithets just don't apply.

And Ralph Nader should shut up.

A bad page...and a new chapter...

K and L Streets, Washington D.C. by Gordon Parks

This is only one of the black tenements that blighted Washington DC in the 1950's. It's located between K and L Streets. The running water and the outhouse are located in the yard. My family used to drive by a similar stretch of slums every day in southwest Washington, on our way to the Officers Club where we went swimming at a military base on the Maryland side. Whenever we reached this part of town, I'd stare out the windows of our Pontiac, see the expressionless black faces looking back. Big men often sprawled on the steps drinking beer, while tiny children played on the sidewalks and their mothers slumped in the doorways.

The DC ghettos fascinated and confused me. I wondered why so few of the buildings had doors. Usually there was only a gaping black hole, like a missing tooth in a mouth. The windows were broken too, some boarded up, but in those steaming summers, most windows just showed the empty sashes, with occasional flashes of shattered glass embedded in their frames. Each entryway had a small, beaten earth yard, often littered with trash and a sleeping dog, and bordered with a low tipping black wrought iron fence. In some of these yards, fragments of colored glass were pressed into the dirt in simple or intricate designs. In the sunset, driving home, the glass would pick up the last bits of light and glittered like jewelry.

This morning, the day after Obama was elected our president, I am trying to remember what I thought about those terrible DC slums. I didn't understand why black people lived there, but I also understood in a dim childish way, that their condition was unhelpable: as ancient as superstition.

Obama has said it's time to turn the page on race. I hope we do, because we've got a book full of ugly pages.

Last night, when I was finally able to sleep, I dreamed about Cutter Bob, my gleaming black cat who died a few months back. I dreamed I spotted him in the house, lying on his side dozing, and that I stroked his coarse bearish fur. He woke up and, as he did in life, he greeted me with his open-mouthed cat grin. I called out to my husband incredulously, Cutter's alive! And in my dream, my husband said matter of factly, Well, of course he is.

You leave the unconscious alone, and it'll grind you out some poetry. This was an Obama dream, I decided on waking. In my mind's eye, for a moment, I envisioned more than one beautiful black cat--one still alive and glittery with promise.

Today, I hope America has, finally, used up its dark hunger for terrible endings.