The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  It is the speech of a beleaguered people, or those who see themselves as such. A tribe, besieged, has always been possessed of a laager mind-set. Every Afrikaner schoolchild has been taught the history of the Great Trek and the covered wagons drawn into a circle, holding off the half-naked Zulus. On late TV, we still see John Wayne and his gallant frontier-comrades holding off the half-naked Sioux. In neither of these instances was the language veiled. A savage was a savage was a savage. Yet, contemporary white America is somewhat diffident in language, if not in behavior. Therein is the exquisite irony.

  Before Emancipation, black slaves, dreaming of escape and freedom, were forever talking and singing in code. Regard the spirituals. Jordan River, though heavenly in Biblical lore, was, in earthly truth, the swampland separating slave from free state. Pharaoh’s army was not Egyptian: it was, in flesh and blood, the slaveowner. Daniel’s deliverance was not from the lion’s den but from pursuing bloodhounds. The Sweet Chariot was not driven by a Roman paladin but by underground-railway captains. There is no need to explain the veiled language in these instances. It was a matter of survival: life and death.

  What is it, though, that impelled the waitress, the Boston woman, and the Chicago candidate to desist from direct reference to African-Americans? It certainly was not a matter of survival, though the laager fright was indubitably there. Had they been less euphemistic, they’d have suffered no public scorn. (Al Campanis and Jimmy the Greek faced the red eye of the TV camera; here, pretense must be maintained. Their punishment was manifestly unfair. After all, George Bush, in effect, employed Willie Horton as his campaign manager and was rewarded with the presidency.) It had to be something else that restrained the others; something that, perverse though it seems, offers a slender reed of hope.

  Diane Romano, a mother of five, reflected on black depredations and her low opinion of most. “Maybe it’s not really me saying this. I don’t want to be that type of person. It makes me less a good human being. A good human being is rational, sensible, and kind. Maybe layers and layers of prejudice has finally got to me.” She sighs. “I have such a mixed bag of feelings. I’m always fighting myself. One part of my brain sees all these things and is fighting the other part, which is my real deep, deep-down feeling.”

  A young schoolteacher, who had encounters with black schoolmates at college and black parents at her job, says, “Though I was brought up not to be prejudiced, I hate to admit that I am. I don’t like my thoughts and feelings. It is not a Christian feeling.”

  A case in extremis: A small-time collector for the syndicate casually refers to “shines,” “spades,” “jigs,” “loads of coal.” When asked whether he considers himself a racist, he is indignant: “Hell, no! Did you hear me say ‘nigger’? Never!”

  The young construction worker, after offering a litany of grievances, especially in the matter of affirmative action, assures me that the stereotypes of African-Americans are true. “I seen ’em. They live like low-lifes. Don’t like to work. Let their homes run down.” He quickly adds, “Oh, the black guys I work with are okay.” He speaks of his black friend whom he’d defend against all comers. “Racism” is a word that disturbs him. Like Oscar Wilde’s forbidden love, it dare not speak its name.

  (A caveat: Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, racial pejoratives have been more openly, more unashamedly expressed. His hostility toward civil rights legislation was interpreted as something of a friendly wink toward those whose language may be more gamey than civil. John Hope Franklin, the American historian, is “astounded at the amount of rancor in some quarters. The feelings that once were covert because people were ashamed of them are now expressed overtly. This crude and barbaric outburst of racism that we’ve seen in the last several years has been encouraged somewhere.” It has, in fact, become à la mode not only among tavern troopers, but in the most respected quarters.

  (A visiting Afrikaner journalist was astonished. “Being from South Africa, I am obsessed with race. Any chance remark registers with me. Click. I just sense the whole zeitgeist has changed ever since Ronald Reagan was elected. In 1979, I ran into very few who expressed antagonism to black claims for restitution. Now you hear it at dinner parties, without any embarrassment. I met country-club patricians who were as outspoken in their racism as their blue-collar counterparts. You hear the litany, wholly uninvited.”

  (During a visit to South Africa in 1963, I was stunned by the preponderance of racial news in the Rand Daily Mail. In reading our local papers twenty-eight years later, I have come to accept the obsession here as a matter of course. Have I become an easy-going Afrikaner?)

  “Our worst selves are being appealed to,” says a black dowager in North Carolina. “The signals flashed by Mr. Bush are the same as those of Mr. Reagan.”

  A weary cabdriver at the end of a twelve-hour day squints as he sips his coffee: “When traffic’s beginning to close in on me and I’m behind in my money, I’m really uptight. There’s a black driver in front of me, the word “nigger” will come into my head. No matter how much education you may have had, the prejudices you were taught come out. These sinister forces are buried deep inside you.”

  Much more may be buried deep, interred within the bones of all of us. Including myself.

  As I stepped onto the bus one early morning, the driver, a young black man, said I was a dime short. I was positive I had deposited the proper fare. I did a slight burn, though concealed. To avoid an unpleasant exchange, I fished out another dime and dropped it into the box. My annoyance, trivial though the matter was, stayed with me for the rest of the trip. Oh, I understood the man. Of course, I know the history of his people’s bondage. It was his turn—a show of power, if only in a small way. If that’s how it is, that’s how it is. Oh, well.

  As I was about to disembark, I saw a dime on the floor. My dime. I held it up to him. “You were right.” He was too busy driving to respond. In alighting, I waved: “Take it easy.” “You, too,” he replied. I’ve a hunch he’d been through something like this before.

  In this one man, I had seen the whole race. In his behavior (especially before my discovery of the dime), I saw all African-Americans. During the trips I had conducted a silent seminar on ontogeny recapitulating philogeny.

  A favorite modern-day parable of Martin Luther King concerned ten drunks. One was black, the other nine, white. “Look at that black drunk,” says the indignant observer.

  Several years ago, an old friend and I were in a car. He was regarded with great affection by his black colleagues. They knew his track record. He had been in the middle of civil rights battles in the early days when very few whites participated. Anti-Jim Crow, that was the phrase. A black teen-ager rode by on a bike. “I wonder if he stole that,” murmured my friend. To my stunned silence, he responded, “He’s poorly dressed. I’d have said the same thing about a poorly dressed white kid.” I wonder. About myself as well. As the cabbie said, it’s deep, these sinister forces.

  The paramedic, who has worked in the black ghetto, who understands cause and effect, was driving along with his nine-year-old son. “There’s a black guy crossing the street. He breaks into a fast run to make the traffic. My kid says, ‘Looks like he’s running from the police.’ I hit the ceiling. ‘Where the hell did you get a racist comment like that?’ ”

  Where? Everywhere, it seems. Consider our media.

  A TV station chartered a plane to fly a black journalist and a crew to cover a routine speech by Louis Farrakhan. “We had to put it on the air that night. It was the usual stuff, nothing extraordinary. I know why they sent me down there. They were hoping he’d say something outrageous.”

  During the Continental Airlines strike several years ago, an unusual picket line had formed in Chicago’s Loop. It was led by a handsome pilot and an attractive flight attendant. A sort of Mr. and Miss America. TV crews had assembled from all three major channels. I assumed this would be the lead story on the six-o’clock news. It was a natural. Seldom before had flight attendants
hit the bricks. Suddenly all the crews took off. They had not yet begun shooting. They had received word from their respective news directors that a shooting (of another kind) had occurred at a black high school. One student had wounded another. That evening, all three channels featured the black high-school incident. The picket line didn’t make it.

  The petite, gentle mother of two, an accountant, softly offers her opinion of television and the press. “We usually see the young black men in a gang. They can’t talk. They have leather coats and are trying to conquer the world by being bad. What do you see first? A black person killed another black person or killed a policeman or stabbed someone. Of course, you’re going to be scared of black people. You can’t help but think they’re all that way. That’s not really what black people are about.”

  “My father is the kindest, sweetest man you ever wanted to know,” says another young black woman. She writes for a trade journal. “He’s very dark-skinned. It infuriates me to think that some little white woman would get on the elevator with my father and assume, just by the color of his skin, that he’s going to harm her, and clutch her purse tighter. To think that my father, who’s worked hard all his life, put us through school, loves us, took care of us—to think that she would clutch her purse because he’s there. The thought of it makes me so angry.”

  Visibility is high these days for African-Americans, especially in matters of street crime.

  Mayor Daley, surrounded by bodyguards, aldermen, photographers, video cameramen, and print, radio, and television reporters, toured the gang-plagued Englewood neighborhood, site of the summer’s worst violence.

  The purpose of the visit: to motivate the community to help police fight gangbangers.... Residents peered through windows and watched from porch steps and viewed the mayor’s visit with cynical eyes.

  One thirty-nine-year-old man shared a cigarette with some streetcorner buddies. “His face ain’t good enough. You got to have some action behind it. If they give us some jobs cleaning up and taking care of the neighborhood, maybe there wouldn’t be so much crime. We’re tired of being out here broke: we got family to take care of. We get up and have to look at each other every day. We got nowhere to go.”77

  Yet in our daily run of the course, the black is still the invisible man. Consider the case of the senior editor of Ebony. He, elegant in dress, manner, and speech, lives in an expensive high-rise. As he waited at the curb, a matronly white handed him her car keys. I would not trade places with him on a rainy night were we hailing the same cab. Nor would a shabbily dressed white.

  When Mayor Richard J. Daley died, many Chicagoans were in a state of trauma: What will happen to our city? When the news of Mayor Harold Washington’s death broke, the first question asked by a prominent elder citizen seated next to me was: “What will Eddie do?” He was referring to an alderman who was unremitting in his hostility to Washington’s programs. In the minds of our makers and shakers, the five historic years of a black mayor’s administration never happened. He was the invisible man. Or, at most, an aberration.

  Is it any wonder that I came so close to being run down by a crazy black driver?

  I am a professional pedestrian. I am also nearsighted. I have never driven a car. Often, as I cross the street, I hold up my hand in the manner of a traffic cop. One day, as the light was changing, a cab did not stop and came within inches of knocking me down. I shouted. The cab screeched to a stop. The driver, a black man, leaped out. His words sprang forth, feverishly, uncontrollably. “You did it because I was black.” Though I was equally furious, my attempt to explain my raised arm was in vain.

  Was my arm, raised in the manner of a policeman, the fuse that set off the explosive? In his stream of consciousness, was I, a white, giving him the official finger? Was he, once again, as I’ve a hunch he had so often been, ’buked and scorned?

  The eleven-year-old black kid, with his comrade-in-mischief, a twelve-year-old white boy, cracked the window of an elderly neighbor. It was a small stone, sprung from a slingshot. When the woman confronted them, he was an indignant counsel for the defense. “You’re accusing me just because I’m black.” Why do I think he had heard this somewhere before?

  “When I was young, I used to get a lot of grief from the cops.” The musician remembers a bike ride through the park, somewhat roughly interrupted. “They thought I stole it. Cops still hassle me sometimes. I don’t know one black person who has never had an encounter with cops.”

  The elderly ex-social-worker recalls a ride to Wisconsin with her black colleagues. “I was the only white in the car. Just as we were leaving the city, we were stopped by a cop. I don’t know why. Our driver, the husband of my friend, was himself a cop. He got out, came back quickly, and said it was all right. I felt very uncomfortable. I remember saying, ‘This is ridiculous.’ Why were we stopped? I doubt this would have happened to white people. Nobody in the car said anything about it. We talked about something else. On reflection, I think this has happened to black people so often, they didn’t think it was worth discussing.”

  Langston Hughes’s dangling question is more pertinent today than ever: “Does it sag like a heavy load? Or does it explode?”

  When I heard Big Bill Broonzy, the nonpareil of country-blues singers, moan the lyric, “Laughin’ to keep from cryin’,” I had to remember he died in 1958. He didn’t live to experience the sixties, the civil rights movement, and the Second Betrayal. Bill knew all about the First Betrayal in the 1870s. His mother, born a slave, had told him about the promise to every freed man: forty acres and a mule. It was in the nature of a check that bounced. A hundred and twenty years later, with a couple of winking presidents canceling one check after another, Bill’s sons and daughters are “laughin’ to keep from ragin’.” The laughter is no longer that frequent.

  “Is race always on a black person’s mind from the time he wakes up to the time he goes asleep? Wouldn’t that drive a person crazy?” The middle-aged insurance man is repeating the question I had asked on a black call-in radio program. “Remember my answer? We are already crazy.

  “Being black in America is like being forced to wear ill-fitting shoes. Some people adjust to it. It’s always uncomfortable on your feet, but you’ve got to wear it because it’s the only shoe you’ve got. Some people can bear the uncomfort more than others. Some people can block it from their minds, some can’t. When you see some acting docile and some acting militant, they have one thing in common: the shoe is uncomfortable.

  “Unless you go back to the roots and begin to tell the truth about the past, we’ll get nowhere. If someone would rape my daughter in front of my eyes and sold my daughter and I’d never see her again, sure I’d go crazy. And if I didn’t get any help to raise another child, with my insanity, I’d pass that along. The brutality that the next generations went through, it was enough to drive them mad. So our foreparents have been driven mad. It reflects itself in black hatred, too.”

  (In the late forties, Destination Freedom was a Peabody Award-winning radio series on NBC. Satchel Paige, the hero of one episode, asked Richard Durham, the writer, “Is colored folks in charge of this?” “Yes.” “Ain’t gonna be no good.”

  (Vernon Jarrett, a black Chicago columnist, says, “If I’m feeling good and want to have my morale lowered, all I have to do is drive out Madison Street and look at the throngs of unemployed youngsters in their weird dress, trying to hang on to some individuality. Can’t read or write, looking mean at each other. You see kids hanging around, hating themselves as much as they hate others. This is one thing that contributes to the ease with which gangs kill each other. Another nigger ain’t nothin’.”)

  The insurance man concludes: “I don’t know where the story will end, but we are all kind of messed up.”

  It may be true, muses Lerone Bennett, Jr., a black historian. “But I still have hope. Know why? Given the way we were forced to live in this society, the miracle is not that so many families are broken, but that so many are still together. That
so many black fathers are still at home. That so many black women are still raising good children. It is the incredible toughness and resilience in people that gives me hope.”

  “We live with hope. Otherwise we couldn’t go on,” says Professor Franklin. “But blind hope is not realistic. A strong sense of self had developed during the sixties, during the civil rights movement. When there is no longer that kind of hope, the response is frustration, anger.”

  When I was seventy-five, I was mugged by a skinny young black man. Was his name Willie? My loss: a Timex watch, net worth $19.95. When I was twenty-three, I was jackrolled by a burly young white man. Was his name Bruno? My loss: $1.25. It was during the Great Depression.

  It was Bruno whom Nelson Algren celebrated in his novel Never Come Morning. “This was the sleepless city where a street-corner nineteen-year-old replied to a judge, who sentenced him to the electric chair, ‘I knew I’d never get to be twenty-one anyhow’—and snapped his bubble gum.”

  Was it Willie’s little sister I ran into a few years ago, as she was skipping rope outside the Robert Taylor Homes? In response to my banal question, she sounded eminently sensible, considering the circumstances: “I might not live to be grown up. My life wasn’t promised to me.” She was ten.

  The difference between Bruno and Willie lay in their legacies. Their forbears were horses of a different color and their arrivals in the New World were of a different nature.

  Maggie Holmes, a retired domestic, had little patience with the centennial celebration of the Statue of Liberty in 1984. She had followed its extensive TV coverage. “When you had your hundred years of that Statue of Liberty, I got damned mad. It was sickening to me. That wasn’t made for me. We didn’t come through Ellis Island. Do you understand what I’m sayin’? You came here in chains, in the bottom of ships and half-dead and beaten. What are you doin’ to help them celebrate. A hundred years of what?”