Race and place developed slowly for me as themes. I grew up in spaces or towns that
were white, not sundown towns but white, by which I mean the visible or total absence
of black bodies. A sundown town would attempt to reschedule a high school football
game, make the Friday night tradition a Saturday noon event, if it meant black folks
would be on the field or in the stands. My high school didn’t do that. Of
course, our daily lives are filled with things, large and small, we don’t
see and, if we do, don’t remember. The things we do remember get distorted
as they move into story. That said, here’s a story that may tell you something
of worth about me, race, and place.
It’s Friday, April 5, 1968. I’m fourteen years old, twenty-two days
past my birthday. I don’t remember many of my birthdays, but I remember that
one. That evening, March 14, I watched the last episode of my favorite TV show,
Batman, out back of our corner store (family house attached) in the privacy of Grandma
Lucy’s tiny house. Batman, Robin, Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, Joker, Catwoman.
Pow! Boff! Thwack! I don’t remember dreaming at all of moving to Gotham City
from Bethalto, Illinois, the small town we moved to, just up and off the Bottom,
when I was a toddler, though years later if I was home from University of Illinois,
where I was working on a PhD, and my dad was watching a movie and there happened
to be a scene in a deli, he would yell, “Charlie, come here. Look. I can see
you there. In a place like that. In New York.” Why he called me Charlie is
another story, which is what stories do: they advertise the form like we’re
all Scheherazade, abandoning one story for another to maintain interest, when we
should get back to the point of the one we’re telling and finish it with no
fear of death at the Sultan’s hands.
It’s Friday, April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. is shot dead
in Memphis. It’s the last day of the week, and my little white town, just
a few miles down Route 140 from Alton (birth place and home town of James Earl Ray,
captured two months later in London at Heathrow Airport), is bursting at its pale
seams with fear. I wouldn’t know a thing about it except parents are showing
up at Wilbur Trimpe, my junior high, to remove their kids from school. Word eventually
circulates among desks and in the halls that our classmates are being taken home
because blacks from Alton are marching, or are assembling to march, in our direction,
down Route 140 to make a violent statement in Bethalto. Never mind that they could
more easily find all the white folks they want right there in Alton or march down
Broadway to East Alton and Wood River and maybe hook a right to Hartford and right
to my old neighborhood, the northeast quadrant (AKA Gasoline Lake in my writing).
No one knows at this point that James Earl Ray is from Alton, but we’re white
and some of us are gripped by race hysteria, collective Negrophobia, call it what
you will. I call it some dumb-ass shit.
So does my mother, though she wouldn’t use that language. It’s Friday,
April 5, 1968, and my mother’s working in our family grocery store, which
tells me that Grandma Lucy—my father’s mother, transplanted from southeast
Missouri to spend most of her adult life working at the International Shoe Tannery
situated between my birth home (Hartford) and the refineries that polluted my old
neighborhood (personally mythologized as Gasoline Lake) before joining us at the
store when the tannery shut down—must have had the day off, which is good
considering the racism she would most likely have brought to any conversation in
the store that morning. Grandma Lucy doesn’t like dagos either, as she calls
them one day within my hearing, which means by now my memory, because she doesn’t
like the smell of their food at lunch. Garlic offends. Dagos, she says. (I loved
my grandma, but this is the woman I watched pick up the store phone and call the
mother of a woman her youngest son was about to marry and say before, as was her
custom, hanging up, “Hi, this is Lucy Wintjen. I hear my boy is marrying your
daughter. We’ve never had a Catholic in the family before, but I guess it’s
okay this time.” Click. Not good-bye. Click. Memory. Story.)
It’s April 5, the morning after Martin Luther King Jr. has been reported shot
and declared dead. The occasional customer comes into our little grocery store,
known as The Little Store, with talk of angry blacks coming our way, marching with
ill and violent intent. My mother’s response, probably kept to herself? Nonsense.
Absolute nonsense. But all alone, with my father working down on the Bottom a mile
east of our old Hartford neighborhood at Shell Oil, with Grandma Lucy gone, my mother
finds herself caught up in the race hysteria. From mid-morning to early afternoon
she declares nonsense, absolute nonsense, then closes the blinds, turns off the
lights, locks the front door, retreats into the house, redeclares nonsense, absolute
nonsense, comes back out to the store, turns the lights on, opens the blinds, unlocks
the door, waits on a customer, repeats.
Me, I’m at Wilbur Trimpe, watching other kids leave, sitting at my desk near
Floyd, a greaser who declares more than once with a show of brass knuckles he pulls
from his black leather jacket, which he may or not be wearing, which I may be including
because they fit the story, that he has something for those “n—s” if
they’re stupid enough to mess with him, at which point his mother knocks on
the classroom door, asks for her little Floyd, he hops up, hustles to the door,
and they leave together. Me, I’m at my desk until the end of the school day,
at which point I walk home. My mom does not come get me early. My mom is too busy
being ashamed of herself for locking/unlocking/locking/ unlocking the
door and giving in to group-think, to race-think, to something nearing communal
hysteria, which involves a neighbor woman bringing my three younger sisters home
early from grade school without asking my mother, without the school asking for
a parent’s signature.
Fourteen-year-old me, I walk home. It’s not far, and my all-white town is
remarkably free of angry, marching Negroes. I use “Negro” because that’s
the nicest, best word they received in those days in my town. More typical was Floyd’s
descriptor, which Grandma Lucy used one night during the evening news when she was
watching Blacks riot in some city somewhere. I used to think it was Watts, but she
probably wasn’t in the little house behind The Little Store by then. Although
I’d heard her complain about the “dagos” that one time (the time
I remember), I’d never heard her cuss (that I remembered). So when I heard
her say with considerable heat as she moved from her chair and TV to her kitchen,
a distance of maybe nine feet, “goddamn n—s,” I was shocked. The N
word was shocking, but it was the cuss word and the heat she lit it with that mostly
got me. I was used to sporadic, usually casual or dismissive declarations of that
word around town.
I have in fact a very specific memory of using it myself around that time. It would
be a tidy, sense-making story if the three events happened in the order I used to
remember them: MLK assassination, Grandma Lucy’s “goddamn,” and
then my use of the N word (influenced specifically by her use). I loved my grandma.
I spent many a week and weekend with her in Hartford before she moved to Bethalto.
She was a tough woman, who might have, like your grandma, vacuumed her floor in
a bathing suit and high heels if she owned them and her man wanted the show. In
fact, while doing a little post-research for Murder on Gasoline Lake I
was told on the phone by someone I’d never met, someone older than me, that
Grandma Lucy was, in his words, “a whore.” That, of course, is another
story that had to do with a man leaving his wife and children to marry her. (Scheherazade!
Pow! Swack!) This story, the one I’m finishing now (finally!), ends in southern
California. I’m in the back of a camper with a couple of cousins I haven’t
seen since we were toddlers, brothers, one a year older, one a year younger. My
uncle and Grandma Lucy have left the truck to go into a store, and I see through
a window slit that an elderly black man is getting out of a car behind us. I suppose
to impress my cousins, I yell the N word out the window. The man looks around. We
duck down, even though he couldn’t have seen inside the camper. My older cousin
is horrified or maybe just angry because we might get in trouble, and I immediately
know I’ve done a thing so bad I’ll never do again.
I’m pretty sure this trip happened the summer before the spring in which Martin
Luther King Jr. was assassinated and no African Americans marched to Bethalto to
make a point about racism in America. I have for the last ten years or more been
making a point about that point, racism in America, losing some friends along the
way, folks who don’t like what I have to say. I have transformed that moment
in that camper and put it in my Black Guy Bald Guy series, in the same story
in fact (“Where the Water Runs Uphill”) that features an unsanitized,
relocated version of the creek we now call Lick. A tidy telling of these events
from the latter half of the Sixties would have me yelling the N word a couple of
months after hearing my grandma yell it, but I doubt that’s the order of things.
Even if it were, the word was part of the way we talked and thought back then about
people we had never met. Race in an all-white town, especially in an all-white town,
is part of growing up, and I’d be a less honest writer if I didn’t address
it.
—A version of this essay was previously published within “Talk from
the Middle East to the Middle West: A Conversation on Place, Race, Gender and Poetry
with Steve Davenport,” by Lea Graham in Atticus Review (January 20th,
2015); republished here by author’s permission.
Author of the poetry collections,
Overpass and
Uncontainable Noise; and two chapbooks,
Murder on Gasoline Lake (originally published in
Black Warrior Review and listed as Notable in Best American Essays
2007), and Nine Poems and Three Fictions (available in The Literary
Review’s Summer 2008 chapbook issue).
A story in The Southern Review earned him a Special Mention in
Pushcart Prizes 2011. In June 2012, Massachusetts Review
published three installments from his “Black Guy Bald Guy”
series of fictions.
www.gasolinelake.com