My very late TTE.(m)
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| Wed, 01-16-2002 - 7:07pm |
My very late TTE.(m)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR MARGARET
Today is Martin Luther King's birthday and I'm watching the reporter for the evening news interview some eighteen year old black girl from the local college. And I know what she's going to say before she says it. She's going to whine that racism still exists -- not because someone like that poor man in Texas still gets dragged to death behind some redneck bastard's pickup, but because someone who was having a bad day snapped at her on campus or in the local diner or when she shopped in Walmart last week.
I want to tell her to quit her whining, because they did the same thing to my sorry ass the other day -- and I'm white. And because at 62, I can remember when the bus we took from our house in Kansas to my grandma's house in Oklahoma stopped at the state line so all the "coloreds" could move to the back of the bus. I remember when a ratty little shack across the tracks, in the town where Grandma lived, was burned to the ground because the black man who lived there with his wife and kids had pissed off some white guy. Even at four, I knew he was lucky that all he lost was the shack.
I remember, at five, when my brothers and sister and I, were put in a Children's Home, going to public school and having to line up with the other students -- two by two -- to march to weekly Bible school at a church two blocks away. No one wanted to walk with me because I lived at the Home. I stood there feeling like shit while the teacher said, "Someone needs to walk with Linda. Come on, now. Someone walk with her so we can get started."
Margaret, the only black child in the whole school, stepped up beside me, smiled shyly, and said, "I'll walk with you." And she did. Every week. I can only imagine what it cost her.
I remember, as a teenager, watching on television as black people were swept along the street -- like so much gutter trash -- in some southern town by a cataract from the firehoses, and ripped and gnashed at by German Shepherds as the police tried to run them off because they wanted to be treated like human beings. It horrified me and made me physically ill.
I was fourteen when the Supreme Court ruled that separate was not equal, in Brown vs. the Board of Education. Sixteen when Martin Luther King led a boycott of the buses in Montgomery. Around that time they integrated Central High in Little Rock -- those brave, terrified children marching the gauntlet of taunts, screams, and obsenities from angry whites who didn't want them there -- and Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to some white guy, just because she was black. And "suddenly", there was a civil rights movement.
I was seventeen when I started to college and had my first class with black kids in it. It was an art class. Five of us became good friends and, about that time, some in the white communities began to realize that the black's fight for dignity and freedom should be our fight too. I joined the NAACP and, when the sit-ins began at the Woolworth in Alabama, joined my friends in a sympathy march outside our local Woolworth. A crowd gathered to watch, some of them curious and some angry. And for one heartstopping moment, when a large white guy with cigar breath and a face twisted in red rage leaned toward me -- his fist an inch from my nose, his face next to mine -- and screamed, in a hoarse whisper, "You nigger-lovin' white trash cunt ..." I felt what millions of blacks had felt through 170 years of slavery and oppression. But it was my turn to step up, and say, "I'll walk with you".
That was probably the bravest thing I ever did. A year later, I dropped out of school and moved away. But I kept up with what was going on in the fight for civil rights. I remember Rev. King's "I Have A Dream" speech. Lyndon Johnson's irracible courage in pushing the Civil Rights bill through Congress. I was twenty-eight when Mr. King was shot down in Memphis. I cried off and on for days. But the dream didn't die. In the years since, civil rights have taken hold, racism of the type I witnessed as a child is a rarity -- so much so that the murder of that black man in Texas is now an abberation, abhored by decent human beings everywhere.
Back on my television set, the young black girl has finished a litany of slights she has suffered, and the newscast has moved on to other things. I want to smack the girl's face, shake her by the shoulders, and tell her she doesn't know shit, that all those people back in the fifties and sixties could tell her stories that would make her hair curl, that Rev. King and James Chaney and all those who went before them didn't die so that she could whine about her bad day as though it were some racial armaggedon. But, even if she were here in front of me, I wouldn't. I never quite feel like I have the right. Because I was only on the fringe of what they fought for. Because for all I know, the right to whine about a bad day like the rest of us is part of what they fought for. But most of all -- and this frightens me sometimes -- because after all those years, and all we worked together for back there, I am still white and she is still black and she would resent me telling her as much as I would resent having to tell her.

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Good Story, Ozarker...(m)
...as usual. If I were to suggest anything at all, it would be to 'show' us this story more than just 'telling' us. As a memoir, I think this piece works. (No, I'm not an expert, just going with the gut. LOL.) You captured the anger very well, and the frustration. Thanks for sharing this, Sammi
It is clear from the response that this is very powerful...
and I can't say a single thing against it. I love it when the ideas come like this - bright, clear, and marvelously well shaped. You developed an excellent character sketch in just a few paragraphs here.
This really is an excellent piece, and I like it even more because it flys in the face of this whole PC movement without doing it politically. You made an excellent statement and painted some poignant, crystal images for me. The last sentences are among the best crafted I have seen here - and I mean that!
Thanks so much for sharing this with me, and everyone else!
Wendy
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