June 1952, Jackson, Mississippi, a humid 95 degrees. Roland decides to cool off at a “picture show,” a few blocks from his house. Maybe the man didn’t like where Roland was sitting or just that he had noticed him. He draws his knife. He orders the boy to run home like a good nigger.
June 1955, Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. Barbara, a girl of Yankee stock, meets Jesse Owens Perry at a Christian summer camp. He resembles his namesake, the African-American Olympian cheered for shaming Hitler in 1936. A summer romance begins.
That same summer, Emmett Till goes down to Mississippi from Chicago. In August, he has a flirtatious encounter with a white shop clerk. The following week, photos of his funeral are published nationwide. The images of his grizzled corpse galvanize the Civil Rights movement, four months before the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Emmett Till, my mother, Barbara, and my father, Roland, were all 14 year-olds.
—
September 1976, Irvine, California. I’ve just turned eleven years old and been bumped to seventh grade a year early. My psychologist father sees clients from home, though he’s not always there when I get back from school. I spend my afternoons practicing my guitar or listening to the radio sitting by our pool. I like the solitude. But it’s not like I’m alone all the time. If I want company, all I have to do is plug in my electric guitar, open the garage door, and I’ll soon have a gang of kids skating in the driveway. Dennis will play the drum kit he’s left over at my house, and we’ll have an instant band, an instant party. I like that power.
Lately, a ten-year-old girl has been making sexually provocative comments towards me as we ride home on the bus. I’m repelled by her plump sexuality, yet drawn. I’ve kissed, and touched the breasts of my babysitter over the summer. In two years I will lose my virginity to a nineteen-year-old KISS fan, who resembles Mindy from “Mork and Mindy.” In eight months I’ll learn of my dad’s affair with a redheaded Scot that will lead to my parents’ divorce. But in this moment, I’m still in the name calling/fighting stage of childhood flirtation. I want to fuck her and I tell her. Our conversation is not anonymous.
The day following the “’I want to fuck you’/’fuck you’ bus conversation,” I’m ambushed. Greg, a tall blonde, with icy blue eyes and permanently flush cheeks jumps off the bus first. He drops his backpack next to a wall I’ll pass to walk home. As I pass, he pulls me down and begins to pummel me.
“Why did you say you wanted to hurt that girl? She’s just a girl! A girl!” Punch. “A girl!” Punch!
“Now run home like a nigger. That’s right! Run home like a nigger.”
It’s funny how a sentence with the word “nigger” doesn’t need an exclamation point. I don’t hear it in my memory. A “nigger” without an exclamation point is so much more structurally powerful. It holds the calm weight of centuries of privilege.
When, at five years old, I got beaten up for calling a kid a nigger my parents explained the history of the word. Now the term is turned, and I’m beaten again. My father is not home. Though I’d like to ask him why this is happening in the safe suburbs to which we’ve fled from Los Angeles, this is probably a blessing. My father’s Mississippi summers were his justification for a large arsenal. He made it known the guns were not for show.
—
The weight of centuries does not dissipate in the shared imagination of two teenagers. Barbara and Roland imagined a world where race held little significance for choices of love or movement. They met doing an internship, at a mental institution.
—
I’m the biracial son, grabbing the peaceful idealism of Mother, rocked by the violent insecurity, inherited from Father.
I try to live in a world where race does not affect my movements. But my father’s fears ambush me when I don’t expect it.
We know the cliché: black man walks into an elevator; white woman clutches her purse. But the truth is I walk in and wonder if she’s the threat; if this situation is a threat.
Emmett Till haunted my father. Roland put on a suit, got degrees from three universities, and moved himself as far away from a place where the phrase, “Now you saw how they did that boy,” was shared as a ritual warning. But he could never relax. He could never believe that he was truly free from the threat that black life was somehow expendable.
—
I don’t know what it’s like to grow up in a family that prepares you for the reality of racism. When I learned the history of the word nigger, it was an abstraction. I knew it was a word I would never again use to hurt a person, but when it was used on me, I lacked tools to combat it.
My father’s flight of imagination led to the freedom I felt as a young boy, the freedom to live large, to feel the power of my intellect and talent. Yet he lacked the confidence I felt.
My echo encounter with the Emmett Till legacy squashed my confidence in my eleventh year.
—
Before they married, my mother went to Detroit. She studied interracial families as a part of a home economics course. She came back with evidence of no difficulties that couldn’t be counteracted with love, and good parenting. But she never felt a corporal threat. And my dad could never truly believe the rhetoric of his freedom. So they weren’t on the same playing field. All the while I was playing on a third without the united cheering section my parents imagined they’d be when they married in ‘64.
Father’s suits and hidden guns were the manifestation of his constricted freedom. He could never whistle at a white woman without fear of reprisal.
Sadly that fear has passed to me.
August 24, 1955, ten years before I was born, Emmett Till either whistled, propositioned, or simply said “bye, baby” to a twenty one year old woman. I long to feel that free.
