July 18, 2021
I first heard the phrase Black Lives Matter identified as a movement in 2017 although, apparently, the phrase had already been around several years. I knew the organizers were on to something when I heard it.
For too long the anti police-violence movement tried to appeal to people with just a list of names and faces that were often times difficult to make a case for. A lot of supposedly upstanding white citizens, deep down, just didn’t have a problem with instant justice meted out by the police. When it came down to it, black lives just didn’t matter enough to dicker over whether accosting a store clerk and stealing a pack of cigarillos deserved an old west death sentence.
It’s why justice was denied for the murder of a teenage boy from up north who, way back in 1955, had the audacity to whistle at a white woman. The thought of him doing such a thing scraped a sulfur-tipped match across sandpaper and lit a bright flame of hatred in the heart of many white southerners. That hatred was stoked and encouraged to burn bright and long and remained undamped by the image of Emmet Till’s bloated body dragged like hanging meat from the Tallahatchie River. Provocation was provocation. After all if such behavior was allowed, where would it end?
Barack Obama picked a good title for his book when he chose The Audacity of Hope. Black folk, black men especially, were not allowed to have audacity. It was a rare thing and it was mostly only associated with bad things.
When I first moved to Mississippi my first friends were black boys my age—Emmet Till’s age. I was 13. My parent’s had bought that big house on Main Street which represented the dividing line between the races. Almost without exception everything on the south side of Main Street was white. Everything on the other side, on the north side of Main, across the railroad tracks, were black homes. This was the quarters–or Goula as Elijah called his old neighborhood.
I did not know until recently, talking to Elijah, that Hawkins Junior High had started out as a white school. The year he went there, 1967, was just the second year of integration in Hattiesburg. Elijah could have stayed at an all black school in the quarter but he believed he’d be better off at Hawkins. Already on the chunky side, he thought life would be easier there than at the all black middle school where he’d be mercilessly teased.
Ten years later, when I went to Hawkins, most of the white families had fled to the majority white junior high across town. Elijah had helped bring in the black kids that the whites ran from. Two long blocks from my house, Hawkins was now an 80% black majority and 20% white even though the neighborhood itself was still white.
There were no other races at Hawkins—no Asians (generically known as Chinese) or Latinos. If anyone had a race that was not black or white they hid it well.
Wait, I’m forgetting Regina! She arrived in the ninth grade from Venezuela. Tall, well-built and beautiful, she immediately had every teen age boy forgetting whatever derogatory name they’d ever heard concerning people south of the border. I have no idea what brought such an exotic teenager to Hattiesburg in 1978. But she was an exception.
Hawkins retained the mascot of the “Fighting Irish” though the football team was 90% black. The cheerleading team was opposite. There was one black girl on a squad of eight. Beauty, a requirement for cheerleaders, was still firmly entrenched as the domain of the white race.
Children can usually get away with being audacious—at least with each other. If they are confronted by it they can sometimes claim ignorance. Emmitt Till’s crime, committed among adults, was apparently too big for this.
One of the ways we black and white boys pushed the socially constructed, racial envelope, two decades after Till’s murder, was to play, what I’ve since heard called, the dozens.
Mostly it involved insulting someone else’s momma—as in “your mama is so ugly….” I was never very good at it and only made it through a round or two. I usually had to stop after my go-to insult which was, “That’s not what your mamma said last night when she came scratchin’ on my window.”
I came to Hattiesburg, friendless, the summer before eighth grade. I found a couple of boys to play basketball with soon after arriving in my neighborhood. After the first or second game one of the kids brazenly said the basketball was his and took it home. The next day I went to his house and he gave it back smiling, pleased, I think, that he had created this worry in a white boy.
One of my draws to entice kids to my house was telling them I had a pool table. I mentioned in an earlier write that I’d bought a regulation size, Sears Brunswick, table our last year in Texas. I saved up paper route money to get it. My generous parents shared space with it in the living room, with their bed, at the Londonderry Lane apartments. Now, in the big, old southern bungalow house on Main Street, it fit in my house-wide room at the back with enough space around it to make a short stick obsolete.
James was one of the kids I attracted with the lure of the pool table. He had an open, mischievous look in his eyes and a diagonal scar line that went across his thick, upper lip and pointed to a front tooth with a large chip. He usually held his mouth slightly open revealing the tooth. The corners of his mouth always looked ready to smile. I’d say he had a good dose of what my grandmother called “The Devil” in him. The Devil got in me fairly often too, so I knew the telltale signs.
James always came to our back door which I thought was strange, but my parents told me a lot of black folks had been taught that this is the way you came to a white person’s house.
It didn’t seem like a good way to go under the radar to me. James had to go through a gate in the back to get there. Coming to the front door would be far less suspicious.
I went to James’ house once. It wasn’t behind the railroad tracks but on a far side of town I’d never seen. We walked there in the heat of the day, the world quiet and different in the way it is when you are with a new friend.
His house was a small 12 by 18 foot box sitting on brick piers with a triangular roof. Steep wooden steps led to the door. It was the kind of house kids draw to represent “house” in Kindergarten. He lived with an aunt. It was dark inside and piled with furnishings and clothes. Nobody was home and we didn’t stay long. Mostly James came to me.
One day after some pool games James went over to my mirrored bureau. I followed him there and watched him look around then pick up my wallet.
“Give it back,” I said.
“No, this wallet is mine,” he said smiling.
“No, it’s not. Give it back!”
“What? This is mine,” he insisted playfully.
My mother passing through the hall must have heard the commotion.
“What’s going on?” she asked appearing in the doorway.
James stuck the wallet behind him. We both said nutin’ at the same time. When she left he handed it over and said he was just kidding. The next few times James came to my house I made some excuse not to play with him.
Another black kid came over enticed with the pool table. He even had dinner with my family one night. He had not bathed in a while and the smell elicited raised eyebrows among my family. Mom tried to make him feel comfortable as he drew into himself to eat. This kid was less openly devilish than James, but in private, he too seemed to play on some insecurity of mine which led to a less than satisfactory friendship.
This type of joking wasn’t something I could get used to. These kids were picking up on some inherent distrust on my part or playing on a stereotype they’d been labeled with. Either way, it was too much for me to deal with.
At some point while I was in junior high I made friends with a light-skinned, mixed race boy named Marcus who lived a few blocks away. He would joke with me but not in a way to make me feel uncomfortable. There was something more sophisticated in his humor—irony or sarcasm. I met his mother who was raising him by herself. He’d had a step-father that he told me a horrible, sad story about involving a kitten. I won’t share it because it still disturbs me.
Marcus was a Jehovah’s Witness. It was my first taste of this religion—or at least, he was the first representative of it that I met. Perhaps because I liked him, I have always had a willingness to engage with Witnesses. Eventually I came to believe that many of their ideas are ludicrous, but I always maintained a respect for the followers and knew they were on to something by the fact that, of all religions, they seemed to have the most mixed race congregation I knew of.
There was a time in San Francisco when I was a regular reader of their magazine, Awake. I’d get it from an African American woman who stood at my morning bus stop on the corner of Market and 8th where I’d wait in the dark to ride out to Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard. I drove a truck delivering sandwiches from a company based out of a cooperative kitchen there. The woman’s greeting was always welcoming and we had many pleasant chats. I only took Awake from her which had practical articles and advice. Watchtower, the other JW magazine was evangelical and uninteresting to me.
While Marcus and I were friends—I’d even say confidants—we never had sleepovers or spent time going places together. We mostly hung out at school. Occasionally I’d drop by his house. I don’t think he ever came to mine.
Between fifth and tenth grade I had pretty much failed to grow. I was the shortest boy in 10th grade. That year I met the person that would become my best friend for the remainder of high school and my first year of college. Chris was gay but not out of the closet then. He was pasty white with red hair and not athletic at all. Despite being short I retained some pride in my own, largely unrecognized, athleticism.
Somehow Chris and I became good friends. He would call me “little boy” in a very disdainful way but it always ended with a twinkle in his eye that I picked up on and by eleventh grade I was regularly going to his upscale, middle class brick house where his sophisticated, older parents greeted me from the living room where they usually sat quietly reading.
His father who was then in his sixties had remarried late in life and had Chris and his younger brother. Chris’ mom, thin and a head taller than his father, had a stern look but a friendly enough smile. She wore women’s business suits and had her black hair in a tight bun that seemed to pull back her face and further accentuate her high cheek bones and thin cheeks.
The family drank out of short but wide glass tumblers instead of the tall, more narrow kitchen glasses typical at my house. I had often felt my family more sophisticated than other families I’d meet—if not in home decor, at least on an intellectual level. However, Chris’ family seemed to have us beat all around.
The “little boy” disdain he had for me must not have been all an act.
At around this time Chris introduced me to a friend who lived around the corner from him. Sande was the only African American kid I knew in Hattiesburg who lived in one of the modern, suburban neighborhoods beyond the center of town. His mother was a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi like my dad and also the dean of her department.
Sande was something of a boy wonder. He placed in the National Science fair for several years in a row. When I knew him he was building robots. He had a Hewlett Packard computer he’d won in his first national fair which he programmed to control a robotic arm he built. I’d watch the indecipherable green letters of code scroll upward on his HP as he did test runs on new commands.
He had milk-chocolate skin with tight, kinky hair. He wore glasses, had a high vocabulary and had earned his nerd card a thousand times over. But he was unique in that he was also socially adept. He didn’t act like or present as a nerd—just a put-together kid. As I got to know him more I learned he even had girlfriends!
The first time I hung out with Sande alone he asked if I’d like to spend the night. We were having a good time.
“Really?” I said with a level of enthusiasm that must have revealed my surprise and excitement.
“Why not?” Sande said. “I enjoy your company.”
I had never had someone be so frank with me and reveal that they liked me. It was an eye opening experience. In retrospect, maybe it was the way his scientific brain worked. Cause and effect; like and hang out. It struck me as rather revolutionary that a person could actually have enough confidence in himself to say what he felt! My normal experience with testosterone driven boys my age was to keep all feelings hidden and only share tough thoughts. Sande and Chris were a shift for me toward a kinder, more thoughtful world. Not surprisingly I suddenly started caring more about school and my grades started a sudden steep incline.
Sande quickly became my other best friend. Sometimes the three of us hung out together although mostly we were one on one. One of my favorite pictures is the three of us hanging out on my big front porch in Hattiesburg. We all are laughing and at ease and I must be in my senior year of high school or just beginning University for I am as tall as Chris and Sande and there is no way Chris could call me little boy anymore.
Spotty West Goes East 