I grew up in 1950s Evanston, just north of Chicago, in a suburb even more rigorously segregated than the big town to the south. Evanston’s only high school stood at one end of the black “ghetto” (hardly an accurate monicker, since Evanston’s black population was mainly middle class). Until I went to high school, I rarely saw a black face. Both sides of my family, like most respectable families of the time, were openly, unashamedly racist and jingoist. My dad described Jewish people he liked, or at least tolerated, as “white Jews.”
Yet his three best friends, guys who were around the house all the time, were a black janitor from the Public Service Company auto shop, an illiterate Italian immigrant and a workingman dad affectionately referred to as “the Polack.” They all felt comfortable at our house, and the only complaint from any of them came from “the Polack” one day when I heard him bitching under his breath about “Walt and his goddam rubber nails.” Dad never threw away a nail, or much of anything else. If he pulled nails out of something, he’d hammer them out straight again on an anvil on his garage workbench and stash them in jelly jars for future use.
Dad had grown up in Crystal Lake, Illinois in the kind of grinding, degrading rural poverty endemic to rural America at the end of the Gilded Age, the kind of poverty depicted in Michael Lesey’s Wisconsin Death Trip. His father got too sick to work, and dad had to quit school in the 7th grade to support the family. By the time he was 14, he was shoveling 10 tons of coal a day. Drafted into the Army, he drove trucks all over the country during WWI. When he returned from service, he got a job with the Public Service Company as a lineman, stringing and maintaining electrical cable all over northern Illinois. Then, during the depths of the Depression, someone in the company recognized his good sense and care for others and offered him a promotion into management.
While he was a working man to his depths, no way could he turn down such a promotion in those economic times, and he worked in personnel for the rest of his career, well into the ’60s. He had lived the American Dream, rising from poverty to upper middle class affluence by his own unrelenting efforts. With a 7th grade education, he could write clearly and eloquently in a beautiful hand (men didn’t learn to type in those days, unless they were reporters), he had taught himself to make shrewd investments and to analyze the runic financial pages, and he went off without complaint many a night to counsel some employee in his sorrow or drunkenness or other extremis.
My mother’s side of the family had a very different background. Her grandfather had been a field-promoted Union general in the Civil War and a prominent attorney and friend of the famous and powerful in later years. Her father had become so successful in the Crane Plumbing Company that he was able to retire at 50 and devote the rest of his life to golf, while raising two sons and four daughters in relative luxury. My mother never had to work a day in her life – in fact, wasn’t allowed to.
And yet both families openly talked of jigaboos and spics and dagos and kikes, complete with the standard stereotypical characterizations of these and other subhuman categories. All the best people talked and “thought” this way in those years, as they had throughout post-Civil War history, except for reds and bleeding hearts, who didn’t count. As a kid in the ’50s, such talk puzzled me, since the only niggers and dagos I’d ever encountered were family friends.
But dad didn’t appear to experience any cognitive dissonance over the disparity between his friends and his racist beliefs. I think now that he did not because he simply viewed his three friends as “exceptions that proved the rule.” That was an oft-heard cliché in those days, “proved” widely misunderstood to mean “supported” rather than “tested.” Brad, the janitor, and Art, the Polack, both had ready senses of humor congruent with Dad’s, and Jasper, the immigrant, spoke rarely and haltingly but worked tirelessly and intelligently, as did the other two. Since work was dad’s ultimate test of worth, those three passed with high grades, and their race or ethnicity were erased in dad’s mind. In my experience, most people, myself included, seem able to live with those sorts of contradictions between belief and behavior quite comfortably. Hey – got a light? I never disbelieved the surgeon general’s report, but for most of my life I never paid it the slightest attention, either.
Not until after my sophomore year in high school did I make a black friend. That summer I worked on the grounds crew, doing various maintenance and landscaping jobs around the high school grounds under the direction of my first high school English teacher, Mr. Henn. While he never spoke of it, I think he must have been one of those bleeding hearts; our crew was made up of four blacks and four whites, and when we were divided up to carry out various missions, the pairs were always of mixed race.
Dave, one of my black fellow crew members, lived a few blocks from the high school. We soon discovered a mutual love of jazz, and I took to going over to Dave’s house for lunch nearly every day, where he turned me on to Miles Davis. I’d been listening mainly to the first generation guys – Louis, Fats Waller, Duke. Dave was a truly kind, pleasant guy, and our race difference didn’t, as I recall, receive any notice from us. It was irrelevant. Porgy and Bess, Miles Ahead, Miles’ sound, Gil Evans’ arrangements – those mattered. That experience of race as irrelevant has held true throughout my life in acquaintances and friendships with other musicians. Music can trump just about any stupidity. Describing the early days of jazz, Richard Sudhalter writes, “For the musicians themselves, questions of jazz ‘legitimacy’ seldom, if ever, had racial implications: some played well, others did not. Skin color was not an adequate explanation for either” (Lost Chords, Oxford UP, 1999).
From my mother, I learned early to love reading, and by the time I was ten or eleven I’d burned through all the kid and young adult books in our local library. My mother took me to church rummage sales and garage sales, and she’d buy me any book I thought looked interesting, so I began reading adult books and in a few years ran into Richard Wright, and then Ralph Ellison, and then James Baldwin. I don’t know how much of their truth I was equipped to understand at that age, but I know I recognized what they were saying as truth and their ways of saying it as the kind of writing I wanted to read more of. Since I was already well on my way to becoming, in Scott Momaday’s phrase, a man made of words, books like Native Son, Invisible Man, Another Country and Going to Meet the Man left the race of their authors stupendously irrelevant. Yes, they were writing primarily about and from the black experience, but that experience, they made me see, was the human experience, and we didn’t need any Spanish philosopher to instruct us in “the tragic sense of life.” We had plenty to work with right here in the USA.
Though the Red Scare of the ’50s had taught my generation that paying attention to politics was un-cool, we couldn’t completely ignore the challenges being put to the institutions of segregation and the accepted truths that underlay them. Jackie Robinson, and the players who followed in his great wake, made prohibiting black men from playing in the Major Leagues seem not just wrong, but absurd. Thurgood Marshall’s presentation of the Clarkes’ simple experiments (presenting white and black dolls to children of both races are tabulating their reactions) presented an inescapable metaphor showing that segregation not only could never lead to equality but was in itself a cause and perpetuator of inequality. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King gave equally inescapable demonstrations that human dignity must be asserted until it is recognized. People of my generation, even if they’d been raised as I had in the miasma of prejudice and jingoism, were swept along with these events and others that led many to reject legalized bigotry and its bogus justifications. (Many of us; not all of us, by any means. The psychological rewards of prejudice, racial scapegoating and grievance will probably never lose their appeal for some people. And so there’ll always be evil sociopaths who encourage those evils and use them to leverage themselves into greater power.)
After I got out of Northwestern in 1964, my situation was perfectly described by Calvin Trillin in one of his memoirs, Remembering Denny: “I was carrying the rallying cry of people our age – ‘I’m not sure what I want to do’ – to its logical extreme. I didn’t exactly want to do anything.” So I hung around working as a painter until I was drafted the following winter. The Army provided my next experience living with people of other races and cultures.
My permanent duty station in Hoechst, Germany was Peacetime Army all the way, despite the escalating war in Vietnam. My signal battalion supplied radio and cable communications to V Corps, which formed a long-standing supposed deterrent to the feared Soviet invasion of Western Europe. Since the Russkies had held off for the past 20 years, our battalion had fallen into sloppy habits indeed. It had become SOP to meet all Corps level inspections by hauling any non-working equipment and vehicles down to the Mainz River, where they joined an ever-growing pile sleeping with the fishes. My particular job as a clerk was to collect status reports on what vehicles, radios and cables remained. These reports always listed the river-dwelling stuff as having been sent off somewhere for repair, and all the remaining stuff, most of it obsolete and barely functioning, as combat-ready. I quickly learned to forge my staff sergeant’s signature on this piece of fiction, a service he appreciated. My literary BA from Northwestern had prepared me well for my service, for which you may thank me any time you’d like.
We all loved our staff sergeant, a big Hawaiian, because his loyalty ran one way – to us, not to the officers whose orders he carried out. He took care of his men. If one of them took exception to his orders, he let it be known, that man could always meet him out back of the motor pool after the work day ended. No one ever took him up on that always-open offer. If he’s still around, he’d be long-retired now, so it won’t hurt to say his name – Homer K. Hatori. In the moronic fashion of Army nicknames, his was of course “Hat.” Anything I ever learned about leadership, I learned from him.
Just as in my high school grounds crew, my room in the barracks was perfectly integrated, three black grunts, three white grunts – William Lloyd Garrison III, Henry Jackson, Roy Brown, me, Don Knudson, and Dan Durkowski. Roy tended to get exercised about racial discrimination sometimes, and Don was pretty outspokenly bigoted, but we all got along with minimum friction, united by our status as grunts, piddling E-3s and E-4s, members of the working class. Cannon fodder, whose only possible protector was Hat, our boss but still one of us. United also in our contempt for the officers we rarely encountered except when they were running their mouths during tedious ceremonies or giving asinine orders in the field.
William Lloyd Garrison, III – known of course as “Willie” to one and all – despite his august name showed no interest in politics, history, society. Willie was a dedicated romantic. Soon as it was allowed, he was off every night to the bars in town, looking for love in all the wrong places. He never learned anything from his regularly recurring coronary shipwrecks, though one night, returning from a particularly painful one, he lay prone, wrong-end-to on his bunk for an hour, wordless, before I encouraged him to sum up his situation. After a long further silence, Willie did so, in words I’ve treasured ever since: “Life!” he said. “Life!…Life, Mac! Life!…is a motherfucker.” A good thing to bear in mind.
Our company supply sergeant, Ernesto Gonzalez, gave me an even better thing to bear in mind. Sgt. Gonzales, inevitably known as “Speedy,” presented the perfect caricature of the “shiftless Mesican” of racist folklore. He very closely resembled Fat Stuff, the ostensibly Hawaiian character in Zack Mosley’s long-running comic strip Smilin’ Jack. Fat Stuff was a fixture in the background of many panels, always accompanied by a chicken, whose function was to snatch up the buttons that Fat Stuff’s bulging belly ejected from his shirt front. Speed was about that fat, though he didn’t keep a chicken, and he’d long mastered the arts of doing his job with minimum effort, arts which most people mistook for sloth, failing to notice that the job always got done.
My pay as an E-4 was $234 a month, but somehow I was able to keep most of that out on loan to my buddies at no interest. My debtors included Speed, a notorious welsher according to scuttlebutt. In fact, he was one of my principal debtors. He was into me for around an even grand, which, everyone assured me, I’d never see again.
One night I was walking through the streets of Hoechst, possibly on my way to the little park, more likely headed for a bar. I heard footsteps coming up behind me pretty rapidly, and was considering if I should break my cool by looking over my shoulder when I felt a seriously sharp pressure on my ribs. I’d heard the blade snick open just before I felt it, but hadn’t reacted in a timely fashion. A voice very close to my ear said quietly, “Don’t ever let anyone come up behind you like that, Mac.” I heard the blade snick shut, Speedy moved up beside me, winked, and veered off down a side street. Though he paid me back my thousand before I left Germany, that little street lesson has compounded far more valuable interest throughout my life.
I’ll leave it there. What I learned from my dad’s example, from the brotherhood of musicians, from the brotherhood of GI’s, from the brotherhood of writers, has been that race, national background, religion don’t count for much. Everybody talkin bout heaven ain’t goin there. And over my lifetime, I’ve certainly seen people’s views of what’s acceptable speech change, which in turn has probably changed acceptable thoughts and beliefs some. Despite the excesses and silliness of some of its advocates, “political correctness” has at least led to general discomfort about voicing racial slurs. Unless you’re the President or something.
Yet so much has failed to change much, or at all. Dearth of whiteness is still a perilous offense almost anywhere in this country. One administration after another, Republican and Democratic, has passed laws and instituted policies designed to keep the lower classes – the vast majority people of color – subjugated, imprisoned, uneducated. Ralph Ellison described the process eloquently in Shadow and Act:
“To put it drastically, if war, as Clausewitz insisted, is the continuation of politics by other means, it requires little imagination to see American life since the abandonment of the Reconstruction as an abrupt reversal of that formula: the continuation of the Civil War by means other than arms. In this sense the conflicting has not only gone unresolved but the line between civil war and civil peace has become so blurred as to require of the sensitive man a questioning attitude toward every aspect of the nation’s self-image….The America into which [Stephen] Crane was born was one of mirrorlike reversals in which the victors were the defeated and the defeated the victors; with the South, its memory frozen at the fixed moment of its surrender, carrying its aggression to the North in the form of guerrilla politics, and with the North, compromising as it went, retreating swiftly into the vast expanse of its new industrial development, eager to lose any memory traces of those values for which it had gone to war.”
In that same fine book, Ellison warned of the danger that such moments of recognition of the need for change as we have been seeing may fail to bring about any real change: “Even in swiftly changing America there are few such moments, [when ‘revolutions in culture’ are fomented] and at best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.” May we not waste this moment.
