White

If you are from the South, this entry may make sense to you.  If you are from the North or West or Midwest, you may wind up scratching your head.  Nonetheless:

I was born in 1952 in New Orleans, Louisiana.  I don’t remember playing with any black kids.  In 1957 we moved to Metaire, a suburb of New Orleans.  Sociologists would say we were part of “white flight”, white families moving out of the city to live in all-white neighborhoods (and to be away from Negroes). 

I am 67 now, so none of my early memories seem crystal clear.

My exposure to black people, for many years, was limited to our maids, a succession of black ladies who came once a week.  We were strictly middle class, but most families on our block had a maid.  They were usually paid $5 a day, plus car fare (they took the bus that dropped them off at Veterans Highway and the entrance to our subdivision, called Bissonet Plaza).  They worked from about 8 to 5.  I remember the maids did the ironing.  I think they might have also cleaned the house, but I’m not sure.  One thing I remember clearly is that my mom told us not to go in the kitchen when the maid was eating lunch.  I thought, why not, but never asked.  It still doesn’t make sense to me.

We had several maids over the years.  I can remember some of their names:  Beulah, Lavinia and Dorothy (i think she was Lavinia’s daughter), and then a white lady named Mrs. LeJuene.  She came from a lower-class (economically) background.

One thing I remember I thought for a long time was that, if I was white and defecated black, that means blacks defecated white.  Such was my ignorance.

I also remember clearly that at Schwegmann’s, our grocery store, there were separate bathrooms for white men, white ladies, black men and black ladies.  This seemed very odd to me, but once again I never asked.

Once in a great while, my mom and dad would donate our old furniture to whoever was our maid at the time.  This meant driving to her house.  I was taken along on a Saturday morning.  (We wouldn’t drive into a black neighborhood at night.)  We had a station wagon, and the furniture was put in the back.  I can remember almost pressing against the windows once we arrived in the black neighborhood, I was that curious about everything.  The houses were old, but not rundown.  I saw black kids.  They seemed to peer back at me with as much interest as I looked at them.

I didn’t know much about current affairs as a child.  I did know that John Kennedy was the first Catholic President (because we were Catholic and this was regarded as a great victory).  A few years later I knew some vague facts about Cuba because, during the Cuban missile crisis, we were taught to go out into the hall and squat down and cover our heads with a textbook or notebook.  Those were the 2 most significant things I knew about what was going on in the wider world.

Nothing changed in my experience with black people until I went to high school at East Jefferson High.  I entered as a high school sophmore, 15 years old, into an all white, all boys public school.  Meanwhile, Orleans Parish (the city of New Orleans) had begun integrating their schools in 1960, under duress; controversy and race fights breaking out between blacks and whites, after many delays in enforcing Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka from 1954.

How I remember integration into East Jefferson was first, rumors.  Of course when people referred to black people then, they used the n-word frequently.  And then came the actual integration, probably no more than 10 black kids sent to EJ.  I don’t remember exactly, but sometime thereafter the “race riots” started.  This was our teenage phrase used to elicit excitement.  In fact, what they were, were fights, usually between one black boy and one white boy, with maybe some on each side joining in.  The guys (black and white) who fought usually were kids with a chip on their shoulder.  The fights were wild, with the guys barrelling down the halls as they fought.  I can remember running into a empty classroom to hide.  Eventually, maybe 2 months later, the fights became less frequent, though you never knew when they might start again.

Fast forward to the late 1980’s.  I had lived in Houston by then, and moved to San Francisco as a gay man looking for a comfortable and maybe exciting place to live.  And wound up at one time with a black boyfriend named Tyrone.  He was from East St. Louis, Missouri, an all-black town near St. Louis (a mostly white city).  From him, I learned a few important things.  One was that most people (blacks, whites, whatever) have a color line; that is, a shade of skin darkness that feels comfortable to them.  Another was that black men were frequently stopped for “Driving While Black”; police sometimes pulled over black male drivers just because they felt like harassing someone. 

So now, 30 years later, here we are in the era of Black Lives Matter.  I think I understand part of the struggle, but i need to educate myself a lot more.  I’ll be looking to get a copy of some more James Baldwin, and friend recommended a talk by the ACLU entitled “The Truth of the Confederacy in the United States”.

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