Second Grade. Pedley, California. 1970s. Unincorporated part of Riverside County straddling the Santa Ana Riverbed. No Black kids in my school. Not until the fifth grade when Ryan Knight showed up and my friend Curt called him the N-bomb and Ryan posted up and beat the living shit out of him. Years later, Ryan was senior class president of my high school, shattered every CIF record for a running back and got a full ride at USC (he never cracked the pros but his younger brother Sammy certainly did). Don’t know what happened to Curt.
But I had one Black teacher: Mrs. White. Even in second grade, I noticed the irony. Anyway, one day I got in trouble for something or other (probably smoking a joint; no second grade, must have been blow) and had to stand in the back of the class, eyes facing the wall.
There were a couple of books on a shelf and one, in particular, caught my eye: Famous Negroes in American History, or something like that. After class, I asked Mrs. White if I could borrow it. Inside there were small chapters on famous Black Americans. Not exactly the edgiest; there was Booker T. Washington, but no W.E.B. Dubois; George Washington Carver but no Marcus Garvey. Harriet Tubman (basically a Black Clara Barton not a bad-ass liberator) but no Ida Wells. Frederick Douglass and MLK (both Bad Asses) but no Paul Robeson, Bayard Rustin, Ali or Stokely Carmichael. But they were not names I had heard of and, yes, I was only in second grade but I was already reading anything I could get my hands on and history was my favorite subject. But while I knew all the brave white heroes like John Smith, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, these were people who were part of a story that I had no clue existed.
It was the first time that I sensed there were things that were not in my school books.
A couple of years later, my mom is driving and we’re on our way to Long Beach to visit my grandma. Grandma Elma Bailey was part of the large Midwestern contingent lured from the frostbitten breadbasket of America by the nascent oil industry, sun and lack of tornadoes, irony being that the year my mother, Donna, was born in Lakewood, a 6.4 earthquake flattened 70 out of 120 school buildings and killed 120 people.
Though informally known as Iowa-by-the-Sea in those days, Grandma was actually from Maumee, Ohio, a small town outside Toledo (I know it’s not exactly the Midwest, but who’s got time to type East North Central region of the Midwest?). It was farm country but other than fixing up some killer chicken and dumplings, grandma never felt country to me. She rolled her own cigarettes, liked her booze, and never said the N-bomb– unless there was a goddamn in front of it, and that was often usually something like:
“Goddamn n—–s always breaking in my goddamn house.”
This was a constant refrain, and Grandma lived on Easy Street in Long Beach, just west of the Los Angeles River in the late 1970s, and from near as I could tell, she was the only white person in that zip code. So hearing that her neighbors were always breaking into her house and stealing stuff–even though I was always struck by how her refrigerator and TV always looked the same and her home never seemed to be ravaged or pillaged–I was terrified. Would not step out of that house even though, looking back, if it was always being broken into you’d think it’d be the last place I wanted to be. But I guess i wasn’t too logical back then.
Anyway, on that fateful Sunday, while maneuvering whatever piece of shit car we had at the time from the 91 west to the 605 south, my mom started freaking out. The accelerator had broken and was flat against the floorboard. She’s yelling and screaming and pointing and I don’t know what the fuck is going on but finally I realize she wants me to pry it up with my fingers but anyone who knows me as a somewhat grown man knows that I am the last person you ever want in a situation like that, and I was probably worse as an 8-year-old. But somehow, through constant trial and error, I managed to finesse it just enough that we herked and jerked off the freeway and made it to grandma’s house.
Now, you can’t fix a car from inside a house and apparently Triple A didn t exist at the time so there the three of us stood by a car with an open hood, me and two old ladies (my mom was only about 40 at the time; ancient to an 8-year-old), with no clue how to fix a motor vehicle, and all I’m hoping is that whoever robs my grandma’s house is taking advantage of us being outside so they won’t be in there when we finally go back in.
And then a black man, kind of small, kind of old, walks up. I don’t remember him saying anything, nor my mom or grandma, but my silent screams of panic may have washed out any external stimuli. But he poked around a little bit under the hood and then left. He wasn’t carrying a carburetor or anything (not that I would have recognized a carburetor from a spare tire) so I figured that it wasn’t all so bad. But then he was right back. Holding a rubber band. He then poked around some more under the hood, stuck his head out and must have said something like, “that ought to get back you home at any rate,” but seriously I was so fascinated by what the fuck he did with that the rubber band he could have whistled Beethoven’s Fifth and I wouldn’t have heard it
And that was that. I think my mom thanked him and he walked away. Not much more was said about it the rest of the day, at least not that I remember. And we did get home and the car was eventually fixed. But I do know that on that particular Sunday on Easy Street,I didn’t hear my grandma say goddamn nothing once.
That was the first time I realized that maybe grown-ups didn’t always know what was up.
Neither of those two isolated incidents made me any more tolerant, empathetic or above laughing at or telling more than my fair share of racial jokes. And I would never claim that they gave me any wisdom or insight into what it is like to be Black in America; hell, if anything they taught me more about white people, especially the second.
But I do think the first put me a little bit ahead of the curve from some white people, not in terms of understanding the Black experience in this country but at least understanding there is, and has been, an experience different from that of white America in so many ways. And it’s mostly lip service on my part, as any perspective of that experience has not come from my living it, nor from any long conversations on the topic with any Black people, or other people of color. Like most everything in my life it’s come through reading. Because that little whitewashed sanitized book in Mrs. White’s second-grade classroom was the first chapter in a multi-volume set that would eventually include James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates and other writers of color, predominately Black, who communicate their stories and share their lived experiences in ways that, for me at any rate, are more powerful and impactful than any videos, rallies and protests–not that any of those lack power.
But that’s just me. And maybe that’s taking the easy route; unless you publicly announce you stand in solidarity with something, you are just all talk. But I honestly think that my words, like all of our words, are infused and shaped by those words and ideas and cries and curses that have sought us out and stick to our souls and lodge in our heart and serve as some kind of moral foundation during times when every house seems built on sand.
Reading hasn’t made me any more black, rainbow or any other color; but I’m proud to say it’s made me a little less white.
But I still wish I knew what the fuck that Black dude did with that rubber band.
Posted inrants and ravingsTags:black lives protest, frederick douglas, james baldwin, Pedley, Ta-Mehisi Coates, toni morrisonEditMrs. White, Easy Street and One Magical Rubber Band
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