Graves White Boy

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-942531-32-6
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

White Boy is one man's unvarnished story of love, loss, race, Memphis, and a dark past. Everything is laid bare when Memphis author, journalist, and university professor Tom Graves takes a vivid and deeply introspective account of his life. Certainly no one can accuse Graves of looking back through rose-colored glasses as chapter after riveting chapter he confronts his family's racist past, shares his eye-witness memories of the integration of Memphis public schools, details his dating escapades with women from another race, and brings you to tears with his powerful account of the roller-coaster relationship with a Sierra Leone native whom he met on Match.com and brought to the U.S. to become his bride. This courageous and unforgettable memoir is sure to stir-and perhaps even prompt you to reconsider-your own feelings about love and race.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Graves, Tom

Leseproben

Drinking Out of the Colored Fountain
  I AM FROM A racist family. I was educated in a racist school. I was a parishioner in a racist church. I live in a racist city. This being Memphis, however, the racism is complex, ironic, and like Einstein’s concept of time seems to fold in on itself. In my childhood the world seemed to be divided two ways: by gender and by race. There were men and there were women, and there were white people and there were black people. And that was all there was to it. I was only vaguely aware that there were others who fell outside those parameters. This state of affairs seemed logical to me. God created man and woman and he intended for them to have children, to be fruitful and multiply as the book said. People grew up, got old, died, and went to heaven, or if they were bad to that other place. And for reasons we didn’t really understand, he created white people to show black people how they should properly live. That white people were superior to black people didn’t even need suggestion. That fact—along with the word “nigger”—was in the very air we breathed in Memphis in the ’50s and ’60s. There were restrooms for girls and restrooms for boys. There were restrooms clearly marked for whites and those clearly marked for “coloreds,” which was the polite way in that time to refer to niggers. I knew those signs and obeyed them long before I hit first grade in 1960 and learned to read. There were also water fountains with the delineations “white” and “colored” and we were told not to drink out of their water fountains. Somewhere in the celluloid haze of films I have watched over the years, I remember a scene of a black boy drinking out of the colored fountain and he glances around to see if anyone is looking and steals a sip from the white fountain. I’m here to tell you that white children, myself most certainly included, did the same thing in reverse, drinking out of the colored fountain when no one, especially our parents, was looking. To my surprise, the water did not taste different. I was born in 1954, and because I’m either blessed or cursed with a very vivid and accurate memory of my childhood can remember the racial divisions in the South with crystal clarity. I remember how, as my family traveled to their birthplace in Pine Bluff, Arkansas to visit their kinfolk every few months, we would beg to stop at an ice cream stand in Clarendon, Arkansas on every trip. Whites ordered from one side of the building and blacks ordered from the other side. I do not remember that any signs were posted. That was just the way things were and everybody in the small town knew the drill. I also remember that the Memphis Zoo, one of my favorite places, had one day per week, Thursday it has been confirmed, reserved exclusively for blacks. Nigger Day as we called it in those unenlightened times. The late Ernest Withers, the great African-American photographer from Memphis who was a friend of mine, has a justifiably famous photo of a sign posted outside the zoo that says “No White People Allowed In Zoo Today” with a background of black Memphians blithely walking beyond the gates, no whites in sight, and a black woman sitting on the sign. There was also a Nigger Day at the Fairgrounds Amusement Park.     One of my first inklings that something wasn’t right with the black and white equation was when our family was picnicking with some old family friends who were visiting from Florida. There was discussion of everyone meeting again at the zoo in a few days. I tugged at my Dad’s sleeve and whispered, “Dad, we can’t go on that day. That’s Nigger Day.” My Dad was a fair man despite his racist leanings. Without fail he rooted for the underdog in almost any given situation and even though he had what the Graves family referred to as the Graves temper, I never heard him say a cross thing to anyone in day-to-day life, whether white or black. Now, if someone was giving him some grief or a hard time, like the comic book hero the Human Torch he could turn his flame on. He brooked no nonsense. Yet I cannot imagine him giving away candy treats to a group of children—he loved kids—and not making sure the black kids got an equal number of candies as the white kids. That just wasn’t in his nature. But just let him read the headlines in the local paper about integration or civil rights or a protest downtown and black thunderclouds would form over his head and his ire and dismay would find form in long monologues at the dinner table, monologues at least until I was old enough to start questioning some of his ideas and then dinnertime became a verbal sparring match. When I told Dad we couldn’t visit the zoo on that particular day he replied, “Son, they can’t go on our days, but we can go on theirs.” Even at five or six years old, this struck me as a queer deal indeed. “They can’t go on our days but we can go on theirs.” This wasn’t the first clue that something was wrong. The first would have to be singing that Sunday School mainstay, “Jesus Loves the Little Children.” The song specified that Jesus loved them one and all equally, “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight.” The illustrations that accompanied the song sheet in our Sunday School books showed a very Caucasian Jesus surrounded by children of all races. The message of equality was quite clear, even in a church that was lily-white. So, if Jesus, who I had been taught from birth was my Lord and Savior, the one I said my prayers to every night when I went to bed, saw no difference between black children and white children, then why did they live over in Niggertown, which was demonstrably poorer and shabbier than the white parts of Memphis, and why did they have their own churches and their own histrionic manner of worship and we couldn’t be friends with them? Why were there separate restrooms, water fountains, places to sit in the movie theater, seats on the bus, kitchen entrances at restaurants, separate waiting rooms at the doctor’s office? I didn’t understand these things. To further confuse matters, black and white children played in harmony on The Little Rascals film shorts shown weekdays on local television. Renamed from the 1930s Hal Roach Our Gang two-reelers, these films were not only hilarious but showed that some of the black kids, Stymie in particular, were more clever than most of their white counterparts. One scene I recall was when an evil white step-mother gave her spoiled son bacon and eggs for breakfast and made her step-children eat mush, which sounded dreadful. Stymie tricked the spoiled son into fixing all of them a king-sized bacon and eggs breakfast. Amos ‘n’ Andy played on Memphis television every afternoon for years. The show is vilified today by many African-Americans for racial stereotyping and is further tarred by the now long-ago memory of the hit radio show that spawned the television series that was done in blackface and “Negro” dialect by two white comedians. While I do understand those misgivings, there is still some complexity there for me. My father was a fleet mechanic for the Bell Telephone Company, a good-paying union job that fed and clothed a family of four and provided a tidy little thousand square-foot home with a tidy little mortgage. Unlike Amos and the Kingfish, my folks never went to fancy restaurants. Until I turned 18, the fanciest restaurant I had ever been in was Britling Cafeteria in Memphis, which was dazzling enough to me. I couldn’t imagine my parents in a place as opulent as those where Andy and the Kingfish would routinely create mayhem, or my father being outfitted at a tailor’s for a suit, or being a member of a lodge. Those things were for rich people, and the TV show of Amos’n’ Andy showed a lot of what, to me, was rich black folks. My parents were very strict about my brother and me saying “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am,” “yes sir” and “no sir” to anyone of adult age. It was unthinkable for us to call any grown-up by his or her first name. Except in the case of blacks. The church janitor and his wife, who I write about in this book, were known to us as Ed and Ophelia. The white custodian of my elementary school, Bethel Grove, was Mr. Fox. His helper, the janitor, was known simply as Charlie and I said hello to him every school day. One day I asked my father if I was supposed to say “yes sir” and “no sir” to blacks (that’s not the word I used, I’m afraid). This question caught Dad by surprise. He thought about it for a good minute then said, “Well, I don’t guess it would hurt anything.” Then a heartbeat later he added, “But they don’t have to force you to.” My Dad, who was nice to pretty much everyone, hated black people. No question or guessing about it. When I was older and things in our culture began to gradually change, my Dad would still drop the N-word around new company just to gauge the reaction. Generally, there was no reaction, especially if the company in question shared the rural Southern roots of my parents or were from the blue collar class. I began to get more and more uneasy about this habit of his, especially when the company was more mixed and we were around a politer set. From a very early age I understood class differences; that the wealthier you were then the better you spoke, the more refinement you displayed, the better you dressed, the bigger your house was. And you didn’t say that word. This was completely reinforced on...