Tar Babies
There are few issues
in the United States more highly charged than race, particularly
the relationship between blacks and whites. It's something that
everyone tiptoes around and tries to sweep under the carpet, but
which nevertheless remains embarrassingly obvious, like an alcoholic
raincoat-flasher uncle snoring loudly and sleeping off a bender
on the living room sofa while the family tries to entertain dinner
guests.
And yes, that's right,
I said blacks. I refuse to use the term African-American. If black
people whose ancestors came from Africa are African-American,
then all white people whose ancestors came from Europe should
be called European-American. The term seems to denote a grudging
acceptance, as if to say 'you're not really 100% American. We
were here first and the toys, i.e. the guns, belong to us, but
we'll let you into the clubhouse on a trial basis if you promise
to play nice.'
All of us are caught
up, to one degree or another, in this national drama full of fear,
recrimination, and unresolved pain and anger; a tragic one-act
play about a dysfunctional family harboring deep currents of bitterness
and powerful emotions rarely voiced, occasionally erupting into
violence and accusations, and the fragile threads of love attempting
to hold the broken bones together until they mend.
My own participation
in this tragic dance began in the Philadelphia neighborhood where
I lived as a small child, and where I was the only white kid on
the block, all my friends being black. When my parents first moved
into the neighborhood in the late 50s, it was all white, but as
the blacks moved in, the whites moved out, and by the early 60s,
there were very few white people left and none with any children.
My parents, being liberals and believers in racial integration,
had stayed put. And because my parents accepted their new neighbors
as equals, I did not have any barriers preventing me from making
friends. Of course, we were all little kids then and had not yet
learned that we were supposed to hate or be afraid of people that
were different. Still, thanks to my parents, the idea of racial
prejudice was completely alien to me. I did not understand when
my mother told me not to sing the song 'Colored Spade' from the
soundtrack to the musical Hair, a satirical listing of nasty epithets
for blacks, outside the house. It did not register that these
were words used to hurt people simply for being a different color.
I loved my friends with their beautiful skin, a rich spectrum
of browns, ranging from the light feathery gold color of buttered
toast to the creamy bluish-black of dark chocolate. I loved their
hair and the way they spoke and the way they laughed. I loved
everything about them that was different from me because I had
learned that variety in human beings was a valuable and positive
thing. Roosevelt Franklin sang 'I Love The Skin I'm In' on my
Sesame Street record and all was right with the world. And then
Miss Piggy had to go and offer that foam rubber apple to Kermit.
Here's the story my
mother told me: A teenage black boy, the son of neighbors my parents
were friendly with, was standing on a street corner minding his
own business, when some other black teenage boys ran past him,
seemingly in retreat from some kind of pursuit. One of them stopped
and asked the neighbor boy to hold his radio, to which the neighbor
boy consented. The police, whom one could only assume were white,
then arrived on the scene. The neighbor boy, due to his proximity,
both spatially and racially, to the fleeing wrongdoers was mistakenly
presumed by the police to be involved in whatever wrongdoing had
been done, and was, despite his protests of innocence, arrested.
My mother went to court as a character witness and the boy was
freed, largely due to the testimony of my mother and other neighbors
who came forward in his defense. Hearing this story was quite
jarring to my tender young mind, like being awakened suddenly
from a pleasant dream by a scream and a gunshot and finding yourself
in a pitch dark room, unable to remember just exactly where the
hell you were. The wind had shifted and I was looking into the
ugly maw of a newer, more troubling, more uncertain, and more
unjust world. And as much as I wanted to, I could no longer look
at my wonderful black friends as total equals, because this new
world was teaching me that regardless of one's character, conduct
or accomplishments, some people were more equal than others.
I was largely unaware
of the turmoil and violence happening in the larger world at the
time, the race riots and the assassination of Martin Luther King,
but nonetheless, this turbulence, a seismic shockwave carried
along the currents of the collective unconscious, found it's way
into my neighborhood in the form of a dog; a german shepherd that
was rumored to have attacked several people in the alley behind
our rowhouses, including an elderly white woman who was mauled
as she emerged from her back door to put out the trash. My friends
knew where the dog was kept and we all went to gawk at this creature
which had assumed a kind of celebrity status in our small two-block-wide
world. We were all morbidly curious in the way that people are
fascinated by serial killers or the Loch Ness monster. My friends,
however, had some disturbing inside information.
"This dog doesn't
like white people," they said. "The guy who owns it
trained it to hate white people." They told me this in all
innocence, as a plain statement of fact, as if they were telling
me that the dog had been trained to catch a frisbee or to sit
up and offer it's paw.
"Look--we'll show
you," they said. And each one of my friends, in turn, held
their hands up to the dog's muzzle. The dog, which was sequestered
behind a tall chain-link fence enclosing the small, square patch
of cement that served as each row-home's backyard, sniffed at
their hands disinterestedly.
"Now hold up your
hand," they said. Sure enough, at the sight of my caucasian
hand, the dog leapt into action, growling and snarling and barking
on cue in true Pavlovian fashion. I jumped back, shocked, as if
I had touched an electrified fence. I hadn't really believed my
friends; I thought they were putting me on.
"See?" they
said. "He doesn't like white people." The fact of the
dog's behavior did not change my friends' fondness for me. They
did not understand, or else chose not to acknowledge, the larger
implications. They were simply pointing out a neighborhood curiosity,
with no more significance than a dead squirrel or a lost hubcap
in the street. But for me, it was another brick, and a quite large
one at that, in the wall being slowly and silently erected between
my black friends and me.
The next brick was hurled
on the day that the dog came strutting through the back alley
where my friends and I were playing baseball with my father. The
dog was on a leash attached to it's owner, a big, burly black
man with a bald head and bulging biceps and an angry scowl on
his face, like Mr. T without his mohawk. I didn't see what led
up to it, but suddenly my father was yelling at the man to "keep
that god damned dog tied up, or I'm going to kill it!"
"You touch my dog
and I'll fucking kill YOU!" bellowed the man. Now, I knew
my father was all talk, and would never follow through with his
threat. Still, I was impressed with him for standing up to someone
who could probably flatten him with one punch, driving him into
the ground tent-peg style like in a cartoon. It was a tense moment.
All the kids in the alley stopped and stared and held their breath
as the two men glared at each other.
"That dog is a
menace!" said my father, still angry, but less confrontational,
as if trying to prove the dog's hazardousness by logical argument.
The burly man jabbed his finger at my father's face.
"Don't you fuckin'
be worryin' about my dog, motherfucker!" And at that, the
man stalked off. It took several minutes for noise and activity
to resume in the alley. My friends and I looked at each other
uneasily. Not a word was spoken about what had just happened,
but I could see a question in their eyes. They were wondering,
whose side are we on? Whose side are you on? And are we going
to have to choose sides?
The 60s were drawing
to a close and there was more and more talk in the neighborhood
of "gang violence." Anger seemed to be seeping through
the cracks. A few years earlier, on a trip down south, my parents
had come upon a civil rights protest, a march around a restaurant
that refused to serve blacks, and they were proud of the fact
that they had placed me on one of the protester's shoulders, allowing
me to participate, at the age of two or three, in the fight for
justice and equality that had galvanized and charged the early
to mid 60s with such righteous fervor. Now the summer of love
was over, King had been murdered, Bobby Kennedy had been murdered,
the Vietnam war was escalating with no end in sight, and the black
panthers were on trial. My father had a dream: He's alone on a
dark city street at night. Suddenly, there's a huge mob of angry,
rioting blacks, rumbling and barreling towards him like a herd
of stampeding buffalo. He turns and faces them.
"Wait... stop...
I'm on your side," he pleads, but they don't care; they're
not listening, and they plow him under.
A day of reckoning seemed
to be waiting in the wings, and for the first time in my short
life, my black neighbors were eyeing me with suspicion.
A group of older boys
took to questioning me whenever they saw me on the street.
"Do you like Nixon?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"He's a bad president."
"Why's he a bad
president?"
"Because he won't
end the war in Vietnam."
"See... the kid's
alright," the questioner said to his friends, who were looking
at me with skepticism bordering on disdain. And even though I
had gotten an official okay, it wasn't a friendly, big-brotherly
sort of exchange; it was more like an interrogation. Whose side
are you on?
A black girl called
me "white boy." She snarled it; it was definitely an
insult. I was playing in the back alley. There were lots of kids
around and I accidentally bumped into her. She was maybe two years
older than me, and she glowered at me and hissed "white boy!"
with withering contempt. I was confused; it seemed to be a mixed
message. I understood her tone of voice and facial expression,
but the words "white boy" didn't make sense as a slur.
I didn't get it.
"Yes," I thought
to myself, "I'm a boy... and I'm white... so what?"
In 1971, my parents
moved us out of the city and into an all-white suburb. There were
a handful of blacks in the landscape, but they were inconsequential,
neutered, as if they had been hand-picked by the whites as harmless
tokens and sources of comic relief. The single black family in
my new neighborhood, who rarely showed their faces, had a son
who was an idiot savant, a black Rain Man. His area of genius
was the ability to memorize baseball statistics. He could give
you the stats for any player in the major leagues for any year
going back to the turn of the century. He was too unusual and
exotic to be threatening, like a duck-billed platypus plopped
down in the middle of the manicured suburban lawns, so he was
tolerated by the white kids as a kind of curiosity, a circus act
from which they occasionally demanded a performance.
A single pair of siblings,
a brother and sister, constituted the entire black population
of my new elementary school, and like the savant, they were strange
creatures to be ogled and laughed at. They were both obese and
dressed in clothes that looked like hand-me-downs from distant
cousins. The girl had a large, fully-formed pair of breasts, the
only set of hooters in the fourth grade, and the boys were constantly
trying to touch them and squeeze them, which made her kind of
withdrawn and bitchy. She was like an enormous big-game animal
on the African plains surrounded by white hunters. The boy was
like some kind of Uncle Tom slapstick actor from the Amos and
Andy era. He rolled his googly eyes and did over-the-top schtick
for the amusement of his white classmates. The only thing he didn't
do was say "Sho 'nuff, boss." It was never openly stated,
but it was clear that the brother and sister were objects of derision,
and they were so far removed and alien from the people I had known
in my old neighborhood, so clownish and embarrassing, that I could
not relate to them at all; there was no point of contact, no common
ground.
Several years later,
at the onset of adolescence, having discovered the pleasures of
marijuana, a friend and I were on the train coming home from a
trip to a downtown head shop where I had purchased a new pipe.
A group of five or six black boys, some of them our age, some
younger, surrounded us, squeezing themselves into the seats next
to us and behind us. They were seemingly friendly, asking us who
we were, where were we going, did we have any pot? Did we want
to buy any pot? My friend was wary and tight-lipped, but I was
still trusting and expected people to be color-blind and friendly
without a hidden agenda. I showed them my cool new pipe and told
them no thank you, we didn't want to buy any pot, and thought
that would be the end of it, but they persisted with their shucking
and jiving; it was good pot, were we sure? Did we want to smoke
some out of that new pipe? Where were we getting off the train?
Now my bullshit detector was sounding the alarm. No, we're cool,
we're getting off at the next stop, thanks anyway. Seeing that
I was no longer being chatty and affable, they undraped themselves
from our seats and quickly moved out of the train car. Some time
passed and I reached into my pocket for my new pipe and... sonofabitch!
It was gone! They fucking stole my pipe! I couldn't believe it.
I felt so stung, so violated! And not just because the black boys
took my pipe, but because the whole thing had been an act, a put-on
to fuck with these two crackers and rip them off. I wasn't a person
to them; I was whitey, I was the enemy. Things had come full circle
and I was standing on the outside of the racial divide, helplessly
manipulated by forces larger than myself, and put in an adversarial
position with no idea how I got there or why.
Throughout my adult
life, I've tried to breach this barrier whenever the opportunity
arose, but the opportunities have been few and far between. I
do meet black people who can see me and relate to me as an individual
beyond the color of my skin, but more often than not, if they're
over the age of ten, they automatically have their defenses up
to one degree or another. I think to myself, "If you only
knew..." I'm like my father in his dream. "Don't you
know that I'm on your side?"
At the age of thirty,
I decided to take a trip back to my old Philadelphia neighborhood,
and I persuaded a friend of mine who was fond of road trips and
exploring to drive us there. It took a while to find my old street--I
was only four feet tall the last time I was there--but eventually
the familiar rowhouses with their terraced steps and triangular
panels above the front doors, so typically Philadelphian, came
into view. We parked the car and stepped out into a world that
seemed miniscule when compared to my memories. I was Gulliver
in Lilliput. And as I was marveling at the weirdness of it, the
juxtaposition of then and now, I became cognizant of a group of
hostile young black men looking daggers at us from down the street.
One of them detached from the group and approached us, swaggering
and sliding down the sidewalk, eyes narrowed and fixed on us like
a tiger stalking it's prey. He was obviously the leader of the
pack, maybe a couple of years younger than me.
"Hey, man... whatchoo
want?" he said in a threatening tone. It was clearly a challenge.
My friend looked alarmed, but I was unimpressed. This was my neighborhood,
god damn it! I belonged here.
"I used to live
on this street," I said.
"Oh yeah?"
he said, his tone and expression softening. "When?"
"About twenty years
ago," I said.
"Who you know?"
he said. I started naming names, listing friends and neighbors
from when I was a kid. "Oh yeah--I know them..." he
said. "Okay, it's cool. Me and my boys--we kind of watch
out for the neighborhood--know what I mean?"
"Yeah, sure--no
problem," I said. He held out his hand and I shook it. He
was relaxed now, not quite smiling, but probably as close as he
could come to it while still maintaining his role as defender
of the neighborhood.
"Where you live
now?" he said, "In Philly?"
"No... I live in
the suburbs," I said with some reservation. I was almost
hesitant to admit it. The suburbs were where white people with
money lived.
"Oh," he said,
and he looked at me as if I had just slapped him in the face.
And his eyes narrowed and his body language hardened and the whole
fucking gangsta act snapped back into place, and suddenly, I was
an outsider again.
He warned us about hanging
out too long in the hood, making it clear that his people wouldn't
fuck with us, but he couldn't guarantee our safety either. The
sentiment was generous on the surface, but his voice was cold
and he walked away with a string of sour notes trailing behind
him. And the sour taste stayed in my mouth as we got in the car
and drove off, wishing I could have left my old neighborhood with
the feeling I had when I shook the guy's hand, a feeling of no
barriers, the feeling I had as a kid when all of us, black and
white, like it or not, were stuck together like tar babies in
the briar patch.
David Aronson
November 2006