by Helen Doss
Even college graduates with a supposed cultural breadth have made boners, each of which would have been hilariously funny if it were not such a pathetic exposé of the boner-maker, and, indirectly, the boner-maker’s society. Otherwise well-educated persons are always asking if it was hard to teach our children to speak English, and I have lost track of the number who have asked, even when Alex was still on Pablum and a nursing bottle, if we had to feed him chop suey!
One day a woman teacher sat in our dining room, watching our children eat. The younger ones, on nursery chairs and homemade stools made of orange crates, sat around a large table cut down to their size. All the children were shoveling in their food with the usual gusto, except Rita, who is so full of bounce and mischief she cannot sit still even at mealtimes. She kept cavorting about, doing everything except turn cartwheels on her wooden box, shiny black hair swinging, obsidian eyes dancing.
“Sit up and eat, Rita,” I said.
Rita turned right-side-up, pulling a mournful cloak over her brown Mexican face. Rita clouds up like a quick summer rain when she is reprimanded.
“How can you expect her to be interested in something so foreign to her nature as lamb stew?” the teacher asked. “Don’t you realize she craves chili beans and hot tamales?”
I didn’t hurt the good lady’s feelings by pointing out that when I did cook beans, Rita was the only one who didn’t want chili in them. An American baby raised in a Mexican peon’s hut would talk and act in a typically south-of-the-border way, while a baby of any nationality or race growing up in an American-culture home would be as completely American as hot dogs and ice cream.
Some of the skeptical find it hard to believe that people of all races are born with the same kind of vocal chords for speech, the same kind of taste buds in the tongue, the same type of digestive apparatus capable of assimilating a wide variety of foods. Differences between national or racial groups are mostly just differences in culture. It is not heredity but a cultural pattern that makes the British love their royalty, the Chinese reverence their scholars, and the Eskimos relish partially decomposed and frozen raw fish. Cultural mores, not genes, determine the language we speak, our notions as to the wearing of a sarong, a kilt, or a stuffy business suit, and whether or not we think it polite to belch after a meal.
We try to explain these things, whenever we think the backs of the misinformed are strong enough to bear the truth; but the boners go marching on. One afternoon a businessman was talking to Carl at our front door. Rita whizzed down the driveway sloping from the church to the road, made too sharp a turn and flew off her trike, landing square on her nose.
“Wow,” Carl said, poised to take off at the first wail from down below. “My daughter took quite a spill.”
But there was no wail. Teddy was beside her in an instant, helping Rita brush herself off. They giggled as both hopped back on their tricycles and sped off around the circle drive again.
Carl relaxed and smiled. “I thought she was going to yell her head off from that bump. She’s a tough little kid, though, and a good sport.”
The man shrugged. “Actually, coming from such primitive stock, she couldn’t possibly have felt it the way a Caucasian would have. I doubt if her nerve ends are very highly developed.”
Primitive nerve ends! Our children don’t need the studious anthropologists and ethnologists to tell them that such fantastic notions are hogwash, because they already know that people are more alike than different; nor do they need the proof of microscopes and IQ tests and statistics covering years of careful research, to believe that modern science finds no race superior to any other.
These scientific ideas are not new. Nearly two thousand years ago, the same thing was said in a different language, “God hath made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on the face of the earth.” East may be East and West may be West, but the twain can meet and get along with each other, when each looks the other in the face and admits the truth we find in the Bible: God is the Father of all mankind; we are all God’s children, and all men are brothers.
Why do people refuse to believe this, singling out certain portions of their fellow men to hate, to discriminate against, even to persecute?
First, prejudice is a contagious disease, as easily caught as measles, the babe from his parents, the school child from his playmates, the adult from his fellow workers and neighbors. To compound the social tragedy, prejudice once caught is hard to cure, since it unwittingly serves a number of morbid purposes. When a man is picked on by his boss, he can slam home and take it out on his family, and frequently does; however, a more socially approved outlet is to turn around and release the feelings of hate and anger on those of a minority racial group. If denied certain yearned-for opportunities and privileges, there is a devilish quirk within man which gives him perverse satisfaction in seeing that at least one segment of the population enjoys even less opportunities and privileges than he.
If a person feels socially or mentally inferior, has a persecuted feeling that society is crushing down on him, it is easy to bolster waning self-confidence by convincing himself, “At least there are whole groups of people socially, mentally, economically inferior to me.” Worse yet, he will try to keep minority groups in a deprived and subjugated position, to prove what his ego wants to believe.
Psychologists and psychiatrists have long told us that bottled-up feelings of aggression and anger can be dynamite to the happiness and well-being of the individual who refuses to recognize real causes behind his maladjustments. Multiply these fearful and emotionally tense individuals by thousands, by even millions, and you have social dynamite. If people can’t fight their personal frustrations directly, let out their angers in socially healthy ways, they will fight something else. Hostility will be exploded in any area where society permits it; there is no choice. If these virulent emotions were not released, they would destroy the individual from inside.
War has always been a socially glorified outlet for pent-up angers and frustrations of whole peoples. In America, our Negroes have provided another scapegoat, and so we have had race riots, Jim Crowism, and the Ku Klux Klan. On the West Coast first the Chinese, then the Japanese, provided another handy outlet for our inner tensions, and we have had discrimination in jobs and housing, an Orientals Exclusion Act, and the “relocation centers” of World War II.
What can we do about it? There is no easy answer, no quick solution. Civil-rights legislation, while no cure, can alleviate some situations, like the clean slash of a surgeon’s knife to cut away festering flesh. Education, through books, magazines, newspapers, and the public schools will help. But, in the long run, we can never eliminate race discrimination, as we can never eliminate war, until a controlling number of the world population is composed of more emotionally healthy and mature individuals.
If we can help our children to become emotionally mature, they as adults can add to the happiness of the world—rather than subtracting from it because of inner compulsions to hurt others.
Also, in the meantime, Carl and I must prepare our children to stand up in the face of prejudice. We know they will someday share the fate of many Americans who, like Taro’s father, are sometimes forced to live on the edge of danger because their skins are dark or their eyes “slant.” Even harder to bear will be the daily hurts and petty discriminations, the snubs and innuendoes, the caustic remarks of the cruel or unthinking. Although our friends and neighbors and church congregations have leaned over backward to show affection to our dark-skinned youngsters, these halcyon days cannot last when adulthood approaches. The more secure and happy their childhood can be, the more they will be willing to try to understand, even pity, those who would hurt them. Above all, we will encourage them to develop one of the best defenses they can have—a sense of humor.
Teddy was the first of our children to be wounded by the barbs of prejudice. The incident caught us by surprise, because Carl and I did not foresee such a thing happening to any of our children until the
y were at least ready for high school. No occasion had ever suggested that a specific inoculation would be needed, at so tender an age, against the infection from such wounds; perhaps the complete acceptance of our children had lulled us into thinking the halcyon days might last longer than we first thought. Certainly, up until the day Teddy started first grade in Boonville, his playmates had been quite unconscious of color differences. Just a few weeks before school started, a little neighbor his age came running into our yard.
“Teddy,” she gasped, “you know that house in back of us?”
Teddy nodded.
“Guess what! There’s a Filipino moved in there, a real, brown Filipino. My mother told me. Her name is Tomasita, and I saw her. Do you wanna see a real Filipino?”
“Sure,” Teddy hollered, his brown Filipino face popping with curiosity, and they ran off hand in hand to get a peek.
Since Boonville is a logging boom town, a large number of migrant families have crowded into the tiny shacks around the sawmills. Many have come from parts of the country where considerable resentment exists against Negroes; because of educational and cultural limitations, and the insecurity of their lives, some of these migrants were outspoken in their prejudice. It wasn’t that the loggers and millhands didn’t make substantial wages in season—they usually drove good cars or squandered unbelievable sums at the noisy bars—but they were restless and rootless in their work, and mere spurts of money cannot bring peace of mind.
Many of the local schoolchildren were from these lumbering shacks, and they mirrored, without thought, the prejudices expressed in their homes. We found this out when Teddy, Elaine, Laura, and Susan started to school. On that important first day, the four six-year-olds joined Donny at the bus stop in front of the church. They danced off to their new venture as eager as their fourth-grade brother; but it was different when they came home.
“How was school?” I asked. “And where’s Teddy?”
“He’s crying by the church,” Laura said, tears of indignation in her eyes. “Those were real mean girls, and they shouldn’t have said that to Teddy.”
“Some girls we don’t know called him names,” Susie added. “They did it and did it.”
“Out on the playground they kept yelling, ‘Little nigger-boy, little nigger-boy,’ till the teacher came out and made them stop,” Elaine said.
I found Teddy under a bush at the far side of the church, sobbing his heart out. I sat down, took him into my lap, and dried the tears from his brown face. Running my fingers through his silky-straight dark hair I told him, “There’s nothing wrong with being a Negro, and only very rude people call them ‘nigger.’ The trouble is, there are so many people think they hate Negroes, and usually it’s because they are all mixed up inside and hurt about something. So it makes them feel like being mean. And then, because they are so mixed up, they think they hate anybody who has brown skin or different eyes, like you. When children shout names at other children, they just repeat things they heard rude and mixed-up grownups say.”
“Oh,” Teddy said.
“What these people don’t know,” I went on, “is that God made more dark-skinned people than any other kind! He made Filipinos—like you. And Negroes. And Hawaiians like Diane, and Orientals like little Alex.” I hugged Teddy. “So I think God must especially love little brown children.”
Teddy looked up, relieved. “I think I’ll go play, now.”
I took his hand. “Come in the house a minute, first. Mama wants to show you something.”
We didn’t have a globe, but I found a National Geographic map which showed the Philippines, far away in the blue Pacific Ocean. “Here is where some of your ancestors came from,” I said, “and someday we hope our whole family can get on a big boat and sail all the way across this ocean, so we can visit there.” Then we took out a picture book, telling about different peoples around the world, and found some familiar pictures of Filipino children. “Remember when we talked about these before?”
Teddy nodded, with a shy smile. “You said they looked like me. I guess I forgot.”
“That’s right. And now I’ll tell you a secret my mother once told me, when I was little. If somebody calls you a name, and you cry, they have power over you. All they have to do is call you that name, and presto! They can see you cry! I’ll tell you how to fool them.”
His chocolate eyes were round. “How?”
“Laugh,” I said. “Laugh right along with them, and make a big joke out of it. Then they’ll either leave you alone, or else they’ll make friends with you.”
“What’ll I say if they call me little nigger-boy again?”
“Just laugh, and say you guess they don’t know very much. Tell them you’re an honest-to-goodness, real American Filipino boy.” Teddy knew a nursery song about a little brown Teddy bear. We sang it together. “Teach the other children that song, if you want. Tell them if they want to call you something, to call you brown Teddy bear.”
When Donny arrived home later, on the next school bus, he was disturbed by the stories the first-grade girls babbled to him. To make sure that Teddy’s ego was completely solaced, he gathered the children together in the yard, Teddy in the place of honor beside him. I could hear Don’s high, earnest young voice through the open dining-room window.
“Would you kids like to hear a story a man told me when I was the size of Teddy?” he asked. “It’s about how God made Filipino people, and all the rest of the people in the world.”
There was a chorus of assent.
“Well,” Donny began, “God was out in his kitchen making gingerbread men. He made their little eyes, put on a nose and a mouth, and stuck them in the oven. When he took his first batch out he looked at them and said, ‘My golly, these got burnt!’ So that’s exactly how he happened to make Negroes.”
“Didn’t it hurt them to get burnt?” Timmy asked.
“Naw,” Donny said. “Not the way God did it. He blew his breath on them, and they turned into real, live people, and he loved them anyhow. So then he decided he wouldn’t make the same mistake. So he pulled his kitchen stool up and sat right by the oven door, and just baked the next ones a little bit.” Donny paused and looked around solemnly. “That batch was half-baked, and that was me.”
“Gosh,” Diane said.
Donny put his arm around Teddy. “But now God caught on about how to do it, so he made Teddy and all the Filipino people last, and they were nice and brown, and just right!”
Teddy came home from school happy the next day.
“Everybody likes Teddy,” Elaine reported.
“Yep,” Laura nodded. “Teddy’s the favorite.”
“All the girls fight for turns to teeter-totter with him,” Susie said.
The next week I saw the first-grade teacher at P.T.A. meeting.
“Your little Teddy is a charming boy,” she said. “In spite of getting off to a hard start, he already has become one of the most popular boys in the room. And do you know what? I don’t know how it started, but they all refer to him affectionately as Teddy bear!”
CHAPTER 13
Little Beaver and the War Orphan
THERE were two other children we almost adopted. One was an Indian boy named Little Beaver; the other was a European war orphan.
After Diane and Elaine joined our family, some of my query letters were still being passed from one orphanage director to another. One June morning the following year, the letter arrived about Little Beaver. That wasn’t his real name; he had been the youngest in an Indian mission school, and the nickname given by the older boys had stuck.
“In most of his eleven years,” the letter informed us, “this boy has not been able to make a good adjustment, due to unfortunate situations in his life. He has retreated within himself, become morose and a problem child. We have heard that you were looking for a boy of minority race to adopt. At present he is not free, although we hope to complete legal action sometime in the future which will put him in the adoptable category. In the mea
ntime, we wondered if you would like to have him at your house for a summer-vacation visit? Even a short time spent away from the scene of his latest problems might give him a new start toward facing them.”
When I hurled myself up the picturesque and rickety outside stairway to Carl’s office above the little church kitchen, and waved the letter breathlessly under his nose, he just laughed.
“Silly girl,” he said, reading it and pushing it aside for the plans he was drawing up for an Every-member Canvass. “You get the funniest ideas.”
“Well, can we?” There was no answer, so I pleaded, “Well, can’t we?”
Carl looked up as if he were surprised to see me still standing there. He made a vague motion, as if he were brushing away a disturbing fly. “Of course not.” He frowned. “Didn’t we agree to stop at nine?”
“But this is just for a short visit,” I said. “If he becomes adoptable later, we can cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime, he’s just a poor kid who needs a summer vacation.”
“If I were sure it would end there,” Carl sighed, looking around at the work he had stacked up to do, “I’d be out with a brass band to welcome the little fellow.”
We met Little Beaver at the Ukiah airport; we didn’t have a brass band, but our nine children made a noisy-enough substitute. He didn’t look very little, either, although he did look uncertain and lonely as he stood beside the plane, clutching two cardboard suitcases.
Donny bounced up, full of welcome.
“I’m Donny,” he said. “Gosh, you’re a lot bigger than me, aren’t you? You get to sleep in my room, because I got two bunks. Do you hope someday you’ll come back to stay, and be my brother? I sure do, boy, I sure do!”
Little Beaver only scowled.
On his first day with us, which happened to be Sunday, he announced that he had ten dollars in his wallet and was going downtown to buy a knife.
“I’ve been promising Donny a jackknife,” Carl said. “Tell you what. You can save your money, and I’ll buy you both one.