COPS

Hurtling down a country road at midnight, approximately three feet from the bumper of a Virginia Highway Patrol car, didn't strike me as much in the way of a honeymoon. Of course, by then, the honeymoon had long been over. I'd already spent six weeks in Washington, D.C., by myself, fending off the creepy insinuations of a regular patron at the only diner within my budget and walking distance of my five-buck-a-night hotel room. It was January and a thick crust of white muffled everything but the crunching of my footsteps.

Those were gloomy days in more ways than one. I was supposed to earn enough money to stake us when my husband finished out the semester, but I had lost my job. Phone calls between my groom and me were sparse, given our correspondingly sparse funds.

In 1963 Virginia was bleating along with the rest of the Confederacy about the Federal government messing with states' rights, which was code for keeping the "niggruhs" in their place. While I am white, my then husband was one of those who was supposed to know his place but didn't. He had driven up to Washington, D.C. from North Carolina together with his sixteen year old brother. They carted my meager belongings to the car and we headed right back down the highway, some time around eight that night.

Unfortunately, my husband didn't observe the advice Bob Dylan eventually set to music: "Watch your parking meters." DWB (driving while black) would've been sufficient to get us stopped. SWB (speeding while black) was a cinch. Walter was instructed to get out of the car. This business of "get out of the car" terrified me. I had been stopped once and the cop had seemed satisfied to issue a ticket while my fanny remained planted in the driver's seat.

In Virginia interracial marriage was at that time a felony. I knew that because we'd had to go up to D.C. to get married, the only place south of New Jersey where we could do it legally. So I twisted around, keeping an eye on the back of the car where Walter and the cop were talking. My brother-in-law whispered fiercely, "Look out," just as I grew aware of a light shining through my passenger window. I turned as a second cop rapped on the glass with his flashlight.

"Let me see your driver's license," he said when I rolled down the window.

"What?"

"Your license. Hand it over."

"What for? I wasn't driving."

It didn't seem possible that his eyes, hunkered down in foxholes of fat, could narrow, but they did. "Hand it over."

My license had been issued by the State of North Carolina. In that era, North Carolina, as did the rest of the South, prominently displayed race on each driver's license. He directed his flashlight onto the license, gave me a disgusted look, and walked to the back of the car. I watched him show it to the other cop. It was a cool night but my hairline began to ooze sweat.

Without a word to me, they put Walter, handcuffed, into the back of the patrol car. I scooted across the seat and jammed our car into gear as they zipped past. Within a few minutes, the patrol car turned down a dark country road that coiled left and right. My driving performance, in retrospect, reminds me a bit of the mother who lifts the car off her child. My vision was keener, my reflexes rubber-hammer quick. I stayed on that car's tail, certain that if I lost it, my husband would be lynched.

What did I think I could do to stop them from doing whatever they were intent on doing? I didn't think. I wasn't thinking at all. When someone you love may die if you don't do something fast, cognition is the first thing to go. The body, as in the case of the super-human mother, focuses all its molecules, sparing nothing for extraneous activity. If my brother-in-law spoke from the backseat, I didn't hear him, didn't answer him. But I suspect, like me, he saw only the need not to lose sight of those cops.

Trailing them might've taken ten minutes or half an hour. I really don't know and I don't think if you had asked me then I could've told you. But I can recall the relief that flooded me as we dipped down at last into a clearing, a parking lot, a building, a sign: Virginia State Highway Patrol.

A few years later, driving a junk car, Walter and I were again stopped by the highway patrol, this time in San Francisco. One taillight was busted. The cop came to the car with a shotgun pointed at Walter's head. I thought of how one reasonable Virginia cop—as my husband told me later—had refused to participate in a lynching. I thought too of a man named Ernest Detweiler, who a few weeks before our encounter with the California Highway Patrol had been speeding his wife to the hospital. She was in labor. The cop pulled them over and shot Ernest in the face. He died as his wife clutched her heaving belly beside him.

The cop reported that the trigger accidentally discharged as Detweiler's car lurched forward. Whatever Mrs. Detweiler said, no one chose to record.

It still punches me in the gut to know that Walter could've been legally executed for a broken taillight.

Recently, when I complained about the caricatures that pass for human beings in the novel and the movie, "The Help," an acquaintance suggested I was hypersensitive on the subject of race. I've often thought that if more white people experienced some of what I've seen, we'd all be hypersensitive and the statistical discrepancies between people of color and whites in this country would shrink. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

. . . a new study from the Pew Research Center has found . . . that median wealth declined by 66 percent among Hispanic households between 2005 and 2009. For black households during the same time period, median wealth fell by 53 percent, while white households experienced a decline of only 16 percent.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/26/hispanics-recession-blacks-wealth_n_909609.html

COPS

Hurtling down a country road at midnight, approximately three feet from the bumper of a Virginia Highway Patrol car, didn't strike me as much in the way of a honeymoon. Of course, by then, the honeymoon had long been over. I'd already spent six weeks in Washington, D.C., by myself, fending off the creepy insinuations of a regular patron at the only diner within my budget and walking distance of my five-buck-a-night hotel room. It was January and a thick crust of white muffled everything but the crunching of my footsteps.

Those were gloomy days in more ways than one. I was supposed to earn enough money to stake us when my husband finished out the semester, but I had lost my job. Phone calls between my groom and me were sparse, given our correspondingly sparse funds.

In 1963 Virginia was bleating along with the rest of the Confederacy about the Federal government messing with states' rights, which was code for keeping the "niggruhs" in their place. While I am white, my then husband was one of those who was supposed to know his place but didn't. He had driven up to Washington, D.C. from North Carolina together with his sixteen year old brother. They carted my meager belongings to the car and we headed right back down the highway, some time around eight that night.

Unfortunately, my husband didn't observe the advice Bob Dylan eventually set to music: "Watch your parking meters." DWB (driving while black) would've been sufficient to get us stopped. SWB (speeding while black) was a cinch. Walter was instructed to get out of the car. This business of "get out of the car" terrified me. I had been stopped once and the cop had seemed satisfied to issue a ticket while my fanny remained planted in the driver's seat.

In Virginia interracial marriage was at that time a felony. I knew that because we'd had to go up to D.C. to get married, the only place south of New Jersey where we could do it legally. So I twisted around, keeping an eye on the back of the car where Walter and the cop were talking. My brother-in-law whispered fiercely, "Look out," just as I grew aware of a light shining through my passenger window. I turned as a second cop rapped on the glass with his flashlight.

"Let me see your driver's license," he said when I rolled down the window.

"What?"

"Your license. Hand it over."

"What for? I wasn't driving."

It didn't seem possible that his eyes, hunkered down in foxholes of fat, could narrow, but they did. "Hand it over."

My license had been issued by the State of North Carolina. In that era, North Carolina, as did the rest of the South, prominently displayed race on each driver's license. He directed his flashlight onto the license, gave me a disgusted look, and walked to the back of the car. I watched him show it to the other cop. It was a cool night but my hairline began to ooze sweat.

Without a word to me, they put Walter, handcuffed, into the back of the patrol car. I scooted across the seat and jammed our car into gear as they zipped past. Within a few minutes, the patrol car turned down a dark country road that coiled left and right. My driving performance, in retrospect, reminds me a bit of the mother who lifts the car off her child. My vision was keener, my reflexes rubber-hammer quick. I stayed on that car's tail, certain that if I lost it, my husband would be lynched.

What did I think I could do to stop them from doing whatever they were intent on doing? I didn't think. I wasn't thinking at all. When someone you love may die if you don't do something fast, cognition is the first thing to go. The body, as in the case of the super-human mother, focuses all its molecules, sparing nothing for extraneous activity. If my brother-in-law spoke from the backseat, I didn't hear him, didn't answer him. But I suspect, like me, he saw only the need not to lose sight of those cops.

Trailing them might've taken ten minutes or half an hour. I really don't know and I don't think if you had asked me then I could've told you. But I can recall the relief that flooded me as we dipped down at last into a clearing, a parking lot, a building, a sign: Virginia State Highway Patrol.

A few years later, driving a junk car, Walter and I were again stopped by the highway patrol, this time in San Francisco. One taillight was busted. The cop came to the car with a shotgun pointed at Walter's head. I thought of how one reasonable Virginia cop—as my husband told me later—had refused to participate in a lynching. I thought too of a man named Ernest Detweiler, who a few weeks before our encounter with the California Highway Patrol had been speeding his wife to the hospital. She was in labor. The cop pulled them over and shot Ernest in the face. He died as his wife clutched her heaving belly beside him.

The cop reported that the trigger accidentally discharged as Detweiler's car lurched forward. Whatever Mrs. Detweiler said, no one chose to record.

It still punches me in the gut to know that Walter could've been legally executed for a broken taillight.

Recently, when I complained about the caricatures that pass for human beings in the novel and the movie, "The Help," an acquaintance suggested I was hypersensitive on the subject of race. I've often thought that if more white people experienced some of what I've seen, we'd all be hypersensitive and the statistical discrepancies between people of color and whites in this country would shrink. Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

. . . a new study from the Pew Research Center has found . . . that median wealth declined by 66 percent among Hispanic households between 2005 and 2009. For black households during the same time period, median wealth fell by 53 percent, while white households experienced a decline of only 16 percent.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/26/hispanics-recession-blacks-wealth_n_909609.html

The Race Card

If you're white, is it okay to notice that Clarence Thomas is stupid?

Navigating around your own racism can prove sufficiently frustrating to tempt you (along with the aunt of the white boy who seems to have murdered a black man for fun) to whine that you're sick and tired of "the race card." http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2011/08/09/alleged-killer-in-mississippi-hate-crime-was-good-boy-says-uncle/

Oh, I know. You're a nice white liberal and there isn't a racist bone in your body. Me too.

African Americans have known for a long time that they have to be twice as good to go half as far. Or, like everybody else in our pay-as-you-go world, they have to ingratiate themselves with the power brokers, a la Clarence Thomas, who ascended to the hallowed halls of injustice through affirmative action--Republican style. Which is to say, the way Republicans and racists (often one and the same) understand affirmative action to work: Hire someone for the color of their skin in spite of their overall incompetence.

It's a tricky thing to reflect on Thomas' blatant lack of integrity and smarts. His written opinions (no questions verbalized, presumably because he has none) range from skimpy to ludicrous. In one complex case, heard several years ago, in which a suspect had been interrogated prior to receiving medical attention for a bullet wound, I recall several opinions from the other justices on the civil rights issues at stake. Justice Thomas wrote that the police officer "didn't intend" to hurt the suspect.

The current Court, heavy on ideology and light on respect for the Constitution, features a Chief Justice, John Roberts, who doesn't exactly appear to be the brightest bulb on the planet either. So is it fair to zero in on Thomas's shortcomings, numerous though they are? The problem is that attacks on Thomas may embed an expectation that the dark-skinned fellow ought to be twice as good as that light skinned idiot.

In other words, it's easy to slide from progressive to bigot. Those, for example, who empathize with the Palestinians occasionally do indulge anti-Semitic leanings (and let's not muddy the issue with a detour into "the Palestinians are Semites too.") This doesn't invalidate their argument; it merely corrupts it. I am hostile to Israel's government and military for their numerous crimes against the Palestinians, in part because I've never had a lot of respect for someone who burns down your house and murders your family because you threw a rock.

Accusations of "anti-Semite" shout down every negative observation concerning Israel. Even so, just as criticisms of Israel cannot be rendered invalid by the prejudices of those who utter them, accusations of anti-Semitism are not invalidated by the spurious motives of the accusers.

The inadequacies of a member of a targeted group can give nonmembers of that group permission to unleash socially unacceptable sentiments normally repressed. We see this most clearly in right-wing attacks on the President. Fox News's Web site managed to suggest both that the President was a gangsta from the 'hood and that he was Marie Antoinette, feasting from the public trough while shrugging off the agonies of the marginalized: "Obama's Hip-hop Barbecue Didn't Create Jobs." (Oh, Rupert, have you at long last no shame?)

The President's indifference to poverty (a word he avoids) and his prioritizing of the debt and the deficit over the welfare of most Americans are sending the nation down a rocky path previously traveled in 1937, a year in which the same tactics plunged the US back into economic misery. Some naive Americans may infer that three wars financed by slashing taxes as well as milk-toast controls on Wall Street's shenanigans equal economic free-fall. They might also believe that Social Security, the only government program enjoying a surplus, is not the place to fund tax breaks for the wealthy and bailouts for high-flying con men. But the President and those in Congress who are putatively his enemies disagree. The recovery, such as it will be, will be bled out of the weakest Americans, and when they fall, the middle class will be next in line. The infrastructure, long neglected, has not for a very long time had budgets to slash.

It is tempting to rage at a black President who exposes callous disregard for the most vulnerable, many of whom are themselves black. But George W. Bush displayed the same let-them-eat-cake hubris. The point is not that Obama should be forgiven for being a bad President, but that he should not be chastised for being a bad black President. Clarence Thomas is a rotten, unethical Supreme Court justice, but it is irrelevant that he is a rotten, unethical black Supreme Court justice.

In other words, we so-called progressives frequently feed our rage and frustration over the failures of people of color because deep down we don't think black people have the right to be the kind of lousy human beings plenty of white people are.

Doing The Nasty

I was standing in a long hallway, ironing. There wasn't any air conditioning so my clothes stuck to my body and sweat trickled down behind my ears. When I came on a stubborn wrinkle, I simply placed my moist hand on it for a second or two and it ironed right out. I really didn't need the sprinkler bottle.

Out of the glare pouring from the doorway end of the hallway, a tall figure materialized. In a starched uniform, he swaggered toward me, a crew-cut blond, blue-eyed, long-faced, Southern white boy. Somewhere in Alabama or Mississippi, some poor black person, compelled by economic necessity, yanked yet another of these models off an assembly line. How else could the South have populated itself with so many Billy Bobs?

He stood two or three feet from my ironing board, his hand relaxed against the holster where his gun nestled. I pretended not to see him so he spoke. Walt Disney might've scripted what he said. Its clichéd banality startled me. "What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?"

It took a moment to regain my aplomb. I wondered how many times that line had been spoken by some Hollywood heartthrob on screen, and whether it had ever, before this moment, been spoken without irony by one actual human being to another.

I made a face and went back to ironing, muttering, "Same thing everybody else wearing this uniform is doing. Time."

"You one of them outside agitators, are you?"

"Yeah. I am."

He tutted and shook his head. My "nice girl" status had just hit the deck. One of my old ladies peeped out of her room.

"Candi," she said in a quaking voice. "It's time for my bath, isn't it?"

"No, Mrs. Hennessy. Your bath's at five o'clock. That's three hours from now."

"Oh." Her thin hand trembled against her cheek in an unconscious parody of a lady appalled to have committed such a gaffe.

Mrs. Hennessy was not the most interesting of the women who occupied the wing it was my job to serve during my incarceration at the workhouse in Durham, North Carolina. The most interesting inmate wasn't elderly. Georgia must've been about forty or forty-five, although because she was emaciated, she looked older. The emaciation was supposedly the result of syphilis, festering in her bloodstream while she expended her youth. Like all "my ladies," she was very nice. And like all "my ladies," she was white. The elderly black women were on a different wing, their attendants, of course, all black as well.

The ladies and I sat on the porch in the late afternoon, rocking and shelling peas or snapping string beans into pots. We had a close-up view of the exercise yard at the insane asylum, as it was then called. Most of the patients looked the part, as if chosen by the same Hollywood director who instructed the guard to ask me about my reasons for doing time. They wandered, their eyes unfocused, their hands moving randomly. Or they sat, semi-catatonic, oblivious to the wails, perhaps, of a nearby colleague. But one individual stood out.

The girl was perhaps seventeen. She had long flowing hair, dark eyes, and a brooding expression. There was nothing crazy about her, but as I studied her day by day, it seemed the fight was draining away and she was becoming resigned. I asked Georgia about her. Georgia knew everything.

"Her parents put her in," she said, breaking a bean in half with vigor. "Sorry," she said, tossing it into the grass.

"Why? She doesn't look like she has any psychiatric problems."

"Not unless you call nymphomania a psychiatric problem," Georgia said, snapping more carefully this time.

"What are you talking about?"

Georgia shrugged. "I expect her parents came on her doing the nasty with her beau. They call that nymphomania down here. And it gets a nice little white girl locked away for the rest of her life."

I gaped. Just then the door to the insane asylum opened and a white uniform emerged. The nurse, if she was a nurse, clapped her hands, and beckoned to her charges. "Time to come on in," she called in a thick North Carolina drawl that made it sound as if she'd said "Tom ta cum on ian."

I watched the young girl's back and shuddered as the door shut behind her, one word whirling through my 18 year old brain: Forever.

Deceptions and Delusions

My novel, Bridge of the Single Hair, is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble as well as some bookstores.

This blog describes an incident that occurred in 1962, a year after the Freedom Rides. As you read, keep in mind that very few African Americans are not to some degree white. Biracial is a clumsy attempt to reinforce color prejudice within the black community as well as to reinforce the notion of race as an absolute.

"Are you sure you're not a Georgia peach?" the tall soldier asked me. He was a George peach himself, actually.

He terrified me. Nevertheless, I smiled. "What makes you think so?"

The chunky soldier said, "You got a drawl going there, girl."

"Well, it's a San Francisco drawl, I guess. Unless I got it from my grandfather. He was born and raised in Kentucky."

I turned to look through the window, a false move since all I could see was an oily blackness. We were in the Mississippi Delta, crawling toward the moon. That afternoon, somewhere in the South, the bus had stopped for an elderly black woman with a sack of groceries. She stood there swaying, her arm pinioning the groceries at what looked like a waist. On a cross-country bus, I wondered, was it expected to give up your seat to someone shopping for milk? If I did, would these two down-home boys turn on me? Before I could resolve this crisis of conscience, an elderly black man at the back stood and motioned her into his seat.

"So tell us where you're going, Georgia Peach."

I decided on coyness: "A lady has to have some secrets."

They smiled knowingly. Probably they thought I was running away from my parents to elope with my boyfriend, waiting for me somewhere on the bus route. At 19, I was (to them) in need of a chaperone. In this case, two chaperones. They weren't exactly welcome but I couldn't think of a nonviolent way to be rid of two Southern white boys who might've lynched me had they known I was headed to North Carolina to protest segregation. In South Carolina they had to join their regiment, or whatever it is soldiers have to join. My tight smile probably didn't entirely conceal my relief to say goodbye to them.

My bus got into Durham around midnight. The station was deserted except for one lone taxicab. When I gave the driver the address, he shook his head.

"You don't want to go there, miss."

"But I do."

He shook his head again. "That's not—not a proper—well, naw, it just ain't right."

Below his cap, a chalky border, like the trail of a wet finger, severed his chopped hair from his tanned neck. His collar had wilted. He tugged at it and said, "I don't think you know where that is."

He put his cab in gear and inched out of the parking lot, his head rotating from side to side for the next two blocks. When we pulled up in front of the house, I begin to feel some of his misgivings. I was looking out at three stories of darkness. The driver didn't get out. Shoving my bills into his shirt pocket, he issued a sort of nicker, like a horse might make, and cruised away.

At the top of the steps, I banged on the door. There was no bell and no porch light. Were they expecting me or not? I pulled my blouse away from my body.

"Hello," a dark-skinned woman in a bathrobe said in a barely audible voice. That was the only word she spoke to me. She opened the screen and motioned for me to come in. I followed her upstairs where she indicated the door to a large room, furnished with a bed, a dresser, a couple of chairs, and a window overlooking the garden. In spite of the heat, I felt a chill. She hadn't said one word of welcome.

Early the next morning, I descended the steps and prowled through the house, looking for the CORE people I'd come to work with. They were already gathered around the dining room table: two black men, a black woman, three white men, and two white women plus, now, me. The taller black man rose and introduced himself as Sam. He was attractive and had a magnetic smile. I saw my own appreciation of that smile reflected in the eyes of the single black woman. "Welcome. Sit down."

Dazed from my cross-country trip and lack of sleep, I don't recall what was said at that table. Eventually we adjourned to the living room to plan our day. Some were going to picket downtown. I was included in a group that would conduct a "hit and run" at a Howard Johnson restaurant enjoying Uncle Sam's lease on the interstate while refusing service to African Americans whose taxes kept the customers flowing. For the time being, we were short our black contingent, most of whom had gone on to Statesville to organize a voter registration drive. Barry Goldwater was running for President against Lyndon Johnson, who characterized the far right Senator as a warmonger. I can close my eyes and see the little girl in a field of daisies, plucking and chanting, and then suddenly in a blinding white light—gone. The Republican slogan was "In your heart, you know he's right." Pretty funny. Our slogan was, "In your guts, you know he's nuts."

Our group was to enter the restaurant, wait for the cops to arrive, and, when ordered out by them, leave, the "run" part of the "hit and run." Trouble was our group was all white. Sam and the single black woman were committed to teach a course in nonviolent resistance at a local church that day. The other black man had been assigned to a picket line, but Sam turned to him and said, "So, Jon, you need to go with the Howard Johnson's group to integrate it."

Jon's eyes darted around the room while his mouth worked without making a sound.

"I'm not—" he began. Sam cocked his head.

My god, I thought. He's not black. He had a deep tan and very short dark hair. His brown eyes kept seeking a place to rest, without notable success. They settled on the windows.

"You're not what?" Sam asked in a soft voice, although I saw he too had figured it out.

"I'm not Negro."

There it was, like a dead rat in the center of the room. We all fixed our eyes on the carpet.

A Southerner and probably used to whites carrying concealed weapons, Sam just shrugged. "Okay," he said, "I guess I'll have to go."

"What should I do?" Jon asked.

"Oh, you," murmured Sam as we all stood up. "Why don't you just stay here and practice being white. You're not doing that good a job at it."