A bit of background about who I am and where I came from. I am 68, and grew up in a small city in North Central Texas. My parents were both born Texans and all four grandparents were from the South. Three of them from the post Confederate South. All four were the children or grand children of people who fled The Clearances in Scotland and Wales.
To a considerable extent I was raised in a fairly racist segregated atmosphere (“fairly” being relative to many areas of the Deep South and South West, and not forgetting that the Chicago and Watts Riots and other smiler incidences occur in places like Chicago and Watts,). In other words I was imprinted as a child with racist attitudes and (in)appropriate vocabulary.
Just a bit more context. My mother’s father, put his Black yard man’s two children through college, at a time when he was going through bankruptcy himself. My parents, both teachers (my mother in junior and high school and my dad in college), helped many of my mother’s needier students to attend the local college using their connections to find jobs and scholarships, and personally funded an anonymous scholarship to put one young Black student through all four years of college.
By most of the standards I read from liberals and progressives, which I agree with, my parents would be considered racist, if the previous paragraph were not known about them.
So to my story.
A bit of background about who I am and where I came from. I am 68, and grew up in a small city in North Central Texas. My parents were both born Texans and all four grandparents were from the South. Three of them from the post Confederate South. All four were the children or grand children of people who fled The Clearances in Scotland and Wales.
To a considerable extent I was raised in a fairly racist segregated atmosphere (“fairly” being relative to many areas of the Deep South and South West, and not forgetting that the Chicago and Watts Riots and other smiler incidences occur in places like Chicago and Watts,). In other words I was imprinted as a child with racist attitudes and (in)appropriate vocabulary.
Just a bit more context. My mother’s father, put his Black yard man’s two children through college, at a time when he was going through bankruptcy himself. My parents, both teachers (my mother in junior and high school and my dad in college), helped many of my mother’s needier students to attend the local college using their connections to find jobs and scholarships, and personally funded an anonymous scholarship to put one young Black student through all four years of college.
By most of the standards I read from liberals and progressives, which I agree with, my parents would be considered racist, if the previous paragraph were not known about them.
So to my story.
My mother’s mother’s family was from a very small Louisiana town in the piney woods of Tangipahoa Parish. We visited her family every summer until I was 18.
One summer in the mid to late 50’s we were driving back into town using the highway that passed through the Negro side of town. A Black man about 30ish was coming down the side walk in the opposite direction to our driving. He had urinated on himself, wet his pants. He was walking briskly, with his chest out, chin held very high, and tears flowing down his cheeks.
The disparaging comments from the adults, my mother and her two sisters, were less race targeted, though there was that, than just that he looked dumb, stupid, as in mentally retarded. The harshness of their words and the anger behind them was puzzling to me. Why were they angry at that man?
I had trouble going to sleep that night thinking about what I had seen and heard. The N word was so common then that it didn’t enter my mind to question its usage. What I couldn’t get was why the anger from my mother and her sisters and that the man didn’t look mentally retarded like they said. And why if he were a normal adult had he wet his pants. And why was he so openly walking on a public road looking and acting like that?
He looked like a healthy man, who was probably walking home from a job in town (tiny towns don’t have busses, and few Blacks would have been able to afford a car). He was wearing the type of slacks and shirt that some one who drove a delivery truck might wear. That didn’t fit with the mental retarded description. But he had wet his pants and he was weeping openly and he was walking with his chin up and his chest out in a very exaggerated manner.
Something was wrong with that picture. Why did he wet himself if he was normal and why the anger from the adults? (That last bit I have never figured out.)
That image bothered me a lot that summer. There was something about that picture that wasn’t right, was out of synch.
The ghost of the image has haunted me over and over. The ghost will vanish for years, decades and then there he will be again. A man publicly humiliated like a little child with his chest out, his chin held high and tears streaming down his face. Why?
The most obvious explanation was that he was walking home to the Negro side of town from his job in the White side of town and there were no bathrooms that he could use. No way could a Black man in the South go behind a bush to relieve himself and risk a white person seeing him with his penis exposed. There was no place to get a drink. It was very hot so he probably took a big drink before he started home. And home was miles away.
But I was young and it took me years of his ghost rising and subsiding and rising again, to figure the pieces of that puzzle.
As a quick aside, bathrooms are an issue with ADA and handicapped accessibility even today. Most of us don't think about it but we are leashed to the nearest bathroom.
Over the years and decades his ghost has come to me out of that long ago image, just a few seconds long, and each time I realize that he has brought me a new insight about racism, the insidiousness of denying equal access, the strength needed to not be oppressed and shamed, to be strong in the face of societies' degradation.
He is very patient, he comes and hangs around for days or weeks. Uusually I wonder why he has come back into my conscious memory until I realize that things and been bumping around in my brain for some time. He stays until the pieces have been put together and I have learned something, gained and insight, and then he leaves me.
Incidents like the one involving Deen, though it is her own fault, also remind me how harmful to her that she has not been able to reject a racism that she was taught from birth.
My Ghost Black Man with the urine soaked pants and tears has made me, from childhood fight against a racism, both the words and the anger that I was raised with.
He may be one of the best friends that I will ever have.
He has taught me so much about the insidiousness and destructiveness of prejudice.
Sadly I cannot tell him Thank You.