I was going to hitch these thoughts on the end of my racism post, but then started thinking about it some more and thought there was more going on. More going on than just an unpleasant memory. My Dad could be a son-of-a-bitch, but I suppose he had some good qualities. When not drinking and expounding like some hot-air-bag buffoon, he could say some things that were reasonably intelligent. The man used his brain, and his generation, with his level of education, were not expected to do that. What I liked most about my Dad was the way he hated Americans. Well, not hated exactly. He could not fathom why they acted the way they did. He had been born in England, grew up in a little fishing village called Leigh-on-Sea, and never quite lost that scruffy English street urchin thing, having to go out and make a living at age thirteen. Like the Dad in Angela's Ashes, which rattled a few memories for me, his father appeared only sporadically, joined the army, was booted out, worked a bit, mostly haunted the pubs, and was sometimes violent.
But back to the American bit. I don't know if this was originated by him or by Mark Twain or somebody else, but sometimes he would expound on some particularly idiotic turn of American political events, roll his eyes heavenwards and exclaim, "The land of the free, and the home of the slave." His version of the Star-Spangled Banner (which he sometimes sang at the dinner table) was, "O say can you see/Any bedbugs on me?" Irreverant was no word for it. But I will never forget the most terrifying, and perhaps the most profound thing he ever said, when he was fairly drunk but in a reasonably benevolent mood, not in one of his fist-thudding rages. He was rambling on about something, then fixed me with his glittering eye and said, "Do you know what the worst word in the world is?" I thought he meant cursing, and kept thinking, shit, fuck, goddamn, but I couldn't say those words out loud. "The worst. The very worst word you can say or write or think of." Bitch. Asshole. Christ?
He sort of crooked his finger and made me get in really close so he could say it low. But he said it. "Nigger." I flinched. I knew that word was terrible, that I never said it and was not supposed to say it. My mother had told me rather casually that they used the word all the time when she was growing up and didn't see anything wrong with it. But my mother was born in 1915. I didn't ask why it was the worst word in the world, but I didn't have to because he was about to expound on it. "Nigger. Nigger is the worst word in the world, and I'll tell you why. It means one person owns another person."
It took me a minute to realize he was referring to slavery. And it was appropriate, because nigger is a slave word, a plantation word, a word to describe a thing that can be owned, bought and sold. Placed on the auction block. And when those ran out, there were lots of others to be captured and shipped over, an industry in itself, the importing of essential goods. This was difficult for a ten-year-old kid to contemplate, the concept of one person owning another person. It was horrible, demeaning, dehumanizing. Little middle-class white girls growing up in 1960s suburbia didn't use language like that because it might evoke something demonic. Nigger meant you were farm machinery, replaceable and even renewable through breeding, and that your purpose was to make agriculture possible, thus founding a country which insisted it was the greatest nation on earth. Then not being able to use the white drinking fountain. It was crazymaking, a blank wall of contradiction. That communities grew up, vibrant communities, out of the ashes of slavery makes my scalp prickle with awe. That those communities grew up right outside my door makes my head spin. But when I realize that Chatham's significant part in the Underground Railroad was never even mentioned in all my years in school, it fills me with a sickness, and casts a pall over the brightest sunshine of my life.
I can't begin to tell you how much it sickens me to see what strikes me as a great resurgence of racism - and not just in our neighbors to the south. How we love to say things like, "Oh, that's just in the States," or "our history was so peaceful," conveniently forgetting the apartheid of residential schools which literally stole children from their parents and held them hostage. We never heard about these things at all, of course, and I think if we had, we would have thought in terms of what an advantage it was for these poor underprivileged "Indian" children to get a good solid Catholic education. Blindness. I don't want to start. Chatham, where I grew up, seemed for some reason to have a disproportionate number of black people. Disproportionate? That means five per cent rather than none! But black culture was a presence, if not from the citizens of Chatham we lived and worked with, then from Detroit, that source of vibrant new musical culture along with alarming rumbles of unrest.
But there was something else about Chatham. I think my schooling was lily-white until I got into Grade 9 or so (not that it had anything to do with the parallel social movement of integration, no sir!). Then suddenly there were black kids, maybe two or three in a class of thirty. Compared to the zero of before, with all those classes of kids at the Dutch reform school who seemed to be universally blonde and blue-eyed, it was a lot.
It was a confusing time. Black culture was cool, we thought, but we wanted the "good part", Diana Ross and the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Afros and "black is beautiful", and wanted to leave out the ugly part, the violence, the riots. Of course I knew about Martin Luther King - he was my hero - but I was beginning to have just sprinklings of awareness of other leaders with names like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Malcolm X. Meantime, something seismic happened on a more intimate level that rocked our school, and everyone's school. It was a song by a folk singer named Janis Ian, and it was about a white girl dating a black boy. It was called Society's Child, and the refrain was, "I can't see you any more. . . " The girl's mother would not even let the boyfriend in the house. To me, the most chilling line of all is the very last one: "I don't want to see you any more." Her mother's ugly mentality has won a mean little victory.
This song caused a furiosa of response, but it was all underground. Girls huddled around their lockers whispering to each other about it. "Did you hear it? That song? . . .I heard it. . .yeah, it's true, isn't it." Not one person thought the song was inaccurate. I don't know why were such idiots about it, why we didn't discuss it openly in school, but then we never discussed anything important in school. This was never more apparent than when my mother started talking to me one day about her favorite history book, Romantic Kent by Victor Lauriston. "There's a chapter in it about the Underground Railroad. Chatham is one of the termination points, you know." About the what? Once my mother had explained to me, more or less, what the Underground Railroad was, and that Chatham was instrumental in helping escaped and fugitive slaves to settle and build new homes and create communities, a question screamed in my head: why didn't we learn about this in school?
We learned nothing of the Underground Railroad. Either it didn't occur to the school board to put it on the curriculum, or they were embarrassed by it. Chatham had a famous son, Fergie Jenkins, a nationally-known champion ball player, and he was a real nice colored man. Wasn't that enough? We had Mahalia Jackson who came all the way to Chatham to sing for us, but, oops, Mahalia wasn't allowed to stay at the William Pitt Hotel because the management was sure she would be "much more comfortable" in another hotel across town. I see racism minimized now, I see people writing in comments sections (and why do I still read them?) about how it has all been blown out of proportion, how black people should just forget the past and suck it up and be glad they live in the greatest country in the world (and you know the country I mean, and it isn't Canada). Unfortunately they omit one little fact: that greatest country in the world was founded on the backs of slaves. The United States would not, could not exist without slavery. Slaves were the engine that made the entire machine run. If by force, if by theft of liberty, then what was the damage? They could always go over there and get some more, because slaves were a renewable resource.
But why do those black folks still insist on making such a fuss? I have seen diatribes about indentured workers, Irish mostly, and about how they were treated "just as badly as the blacks". It's the same mentality that whittles down the Holocaust: "but lots of other groups were just as persecuted", "other atrocities took place in history and nobody notices", and maybe just maybe they got that infamous six million count wrong. I try not to write these days, I really do, because when I do this is what comes out. Truly, I'd like to only post silly videos and animations and things I enjoy doing, because none of it makes one jot of difference anyway. I have almost no readers, and I keep this going only for something to do. I have had weird surges in readership that then died, and I don't understand the surges and I don't understand the dying. I guess I will keep on as long as it amuses me, but there are certain things that will never amuse me, and atrocity against humanity is definitely at the top of the list.
