Thursday, January 24, 2008

Color Comes To Michigan Avenue

Nigger.

There.....got that over with!

I am a white person, and I hate that word. I rarely use it, and the only times I do use it are times when I am writing it. I never speak it out loud. That word is mean and hateful and is one of the lowest words in the English language. Yet it is a word, and its inherent power alone is no reason not to use it........it's just that the deep, modern controversy about its use is a sad symptom of our failure as a society and as a culture to face down some deeply buried issues. And the longer we run from these issues, the more they fester and infect our collective sense of ourselves.

But you know what's truly obscene here? Not the word itself, but rather that euphemism for it: "The N-Word." God, we are pathetic. I notice that every now and then some genius will revisit this notion that we ought to ban the works of Mark Twain - especially Huckleberry Finn - cause it contains the word nigger. I have lately been reading the works of James Baldwin, which are rife with the word. I have never heard of anyone seeking to ban his work, at least not on those grounds. Is it because Baldwin was black?

That word was one of the very first words I remember hearing, and I heard it a lot in the company of my paternal grandparents, Douglas and Annie Pearl. (Douglas was the subject of an earlier eponymous post.) My earliest memories involve them, because in my infancy both my parents worked full-time, and they were my "daycare." Especially Annie Pearl, because Douglas had his own job down there at the Union Pacific Railroad. Which was fine with me, because I hated every minute of being "home."

Annie Pearl hailed from Texas, and she was an out-and-out racist, bred so. I don't know what Douglas' problem was around the race issue, whether he, too, was infected at birth or learned the sorry art from Annie Pearl and just fell in with her program to get along with her. Funny thing was, in the few situations I recall being with either or both of them during encounters with black people, they were always respectful and cordial. Maybe it was that class beat out race as they faced each other: the blacks in question were waitpeople, custodians, fellow busriders or customers, etc. Maybe out there in the world, my grandparents felt and showed a kinship with members of their lower-middle-class, regardless of race. I don't know, but we all seemed to get along in public.

Which rendered their private racial utterances incomprehensible to the little me. What was going on here?

Comes a blistering, withering hot summer day on Michigan Avenue.......6927 N. Michigan to be exact, in the Piedmont District of North Portland, sometime in the mid-1950's. Before the I-5 freeway sliced the neighborhood in half, Eisenhower's dream dressed up as our nightmare. (I recall Annie Pearl praying out loud that "they" would run the freeway right down Michigan Avenue, and cash them out for their one-bedroom bungalow and tiny lot. Alas, "they" did much worse - ran the damn thing two blocks west, which not only did not afford them a chance to start over somewheres else, but infested the rest of their days with construction racket, endless dust, and the perpetual drone of freeway noise. Decades after Douglas and Annie Pearl were dead, "they" made things "right" by erecting gray concrete noise barriers, which resemble nothing so much as the apartheid wall in modern Israel.)

Annie Pearl and I were passing the sweltering afternoon somehow in the triple-digit heat. Douglas was downtown, passing his afternoon at Manning's Restaurant, as was his wont. There were lots of Manning's in Portland then, friendly cafeteria-food-and-coffee-purveyors offering quivering jello squares, casseroles, and endless weak cups of their own brand of java to families and retirees hungry to be around their own kind. Cheap, decent, and clean were Manning's. On joint visits, as we slid our trays - a key rite of passage being when I got my OWN tray, as opposed to them loading my requests onto THEIR tray - down the shining stainless steel runners, I always ordered the mashed potatoes and gravy side, because I LOVED to watch the line server hollow out a pocket in the potato mound with the gravy ladle, then deftly tip the ladle and pour the gravy into the cavity. Now THAT was performance art!

(I will never forget one bright Saturday downtown Manning's visit involving the three of us. We had had our lunch, and had retired to Douglas' car - a 1952 green Ford, parked on this occasion at a meter right outside the restaurant door. We were just sitting there, all the car windows open, with Douglas Henry and Annie Pearl perusing separate sections of The Oregonian newspaper and me no doubt being bored, not being able to read yet.

I asked Annie Pearl why we, since we had left the Manning's, continued to sit in the car rather than go home or to a park or a movie, as we usually did of a lazy Saturday. "Your grampa paid for time on the parking meter, and we don't want anyone else to use it for free" was her answer. I still marvel at this logic, even as I am convinced it continues to affect me deeply on some level. In that moment, was I incoculated with a poverty mentality? Is this why I am not rich?)

But on this particular day, Douglas Henry was a solo Manning's habitue.

A knock at the front door. Annie Pearl answers. I can't see who is there. Some adult talk. Seconds pass, and Annie Pearl and I rush to the back door, where I see an elderly black man half-carrying, half-walking my beloved Douglas Henry across the shadowy threshold and up the few back stairs into the house.

"I was walking down the street and I saw him passed out in his car," I remember the old black man saying. Douglas Henry had always been a frail, thin man who suffered from asthma and various other sinus ailments from time to time. To my young eyes, the summer heat often seemed to go right THROUGH the man. But I had never seen him like this, his head lolling on this man's shoulder, obviously dependent upon him for his salvation.

A nigger.

I was frightened, astonished at what I was seeing. Was Grampa dead? Who was this man? I stopped feeling hot and started shivering.

They laid him down on the couch in the living room, and the black man left with our thanks in his wake. Annie Pearl placed a wet rag on his forehead and he started to come around. I stopped shaking. He was going to be OK. This black man found him almost dead and drove him home, way over to the other side of town. This black man, who in the abstract would have been called a nigger by both my grandparents, was a savior. What is going on here?

And the funny, ironic thing was..........both this savior and my Grampa were dressed EXACTLY ALIKE! Both had on dark blue suits of summery light material, jackets open at the collar, revealing white seersucker shirts, and both sported airy straw hats with blue hatbands. Both were downtown on their own that hot day. Were both escaping their wives for the coffee and crony-chatter oasis, maybe? (Many years later, I saw the bluesman Muddy Waters perform at a club in Seattle. He had on the same outfit.)

I remember thinking as my Grampa came around, "Don't you see? This nigger thing has got to stop. A nice man dressed just like you whose skin is black saved your life, for me. This hateful nigger word has got to stop. Otherwise, nothing makes any sense at all."

It didn't stop, and it still doesn't. Make any sense. At all.