My Racist Roots (written after the death of George Floyd)

I was six when I was shopping in Woolworth’s with my mom and saw something unusual.  A tall black woman in a simple pants suit pushing her toddler in a shopping cart.  Yes, in this Long Island neighborhood that was an unusual sight.  The wiry little girl with her hair in two tight braids with pink bows and a flowery pink dress to match was fidgeting and whining like any toddler in a shopping cart and her mother was shushing her, but differently than my mom shushed me.  More urgent, like their lives depended on it.  I watched the little girl with fascination as children watch each other in stores. And there was an awareness I had.

I went home with a thought in my mind that I pondered for hours, days, hell, perhaps a lifetime.  Here is what I, alone in my room playing with my white dolls, ruminated on.  Why had that child been born black?  Why not I?  But something more.  I felt lucky, and I pitied her.  I understood, not that I was better, but that IT was better to be white than black.  Where the fuck does a six-year-old get the audacity to pity another human being?

Where indeed?  My mother told me stories of being raised in a Pennsylvania state home and being teased by other children and reprimanded by the adults for playing with a younger black child.  I suppose she was trying to teach me compassion.  But she inadvertently taught me racism.

My father taught it to me, too, when PLUNK he locked the car doors because a black man stood on a street corner in Central Islip where we stopped for a light.  My older sister called him racist, and he became incensed and indignant.  “I am not.  I just smiled and held the door for one of them at the store.  But this is a bad neighborhood.  See how smart you are when he rips you out of the car and does God knows what to you.”

 My cousins who lived in Ozone Park overtly taught me racism when they proudly told stories of confrontations they had with black students at “their” school, calling them names that sounded like venom spewing from their mouths.  “Why do you hate them?” I asked.

“Because they’re black,” they said, as if I was the idiot.

All this before that day in Woolworth’s when I was six years old, and I knew it was all wrong.

But fast forward ten years to a perfect May evening when Charles Robbins, one of only eight black kids in my high school and drop dead gorgeous with dimples that surfaced often with his easy smile, and warm brown eyes that a sixteen- year-old girl could live inside of, at least for one summer, rode his bike to my house and knocked on my door.  My father answered.  It was not unusual for me to have boys knocking on my door, not because I was cute, but because I was a tomboy who could play an assortment of pick-up games in the dead-end across the street.  No big deal for my father to watch me go off, basketball or baseball glove in hand, with a boy known or unknown to him. 

That night, looking out the front door at the boy who asked if I was home, my father pivoted sharply to where I stood in the hallway behind him and glared at me.  He clenched his teeth and spit that familiar venom, “Get rid of him.”

As I sat on the porch with Charles, I felt my father’s presence everywhere, especially in the open window behind us.  I did not know why Charles was there.  I suppose he saw something in me that he liked when we were in math class together and I didn’t even know he was watching.  Charles liked me enough to look me up in the phone book and pedal his way from one end of the school district to the other and knock, unannounced, uninvited, but hopeful. 

And I know I could have liked him.  He could solve for x, make other kids laugh, do brave things, and most important, he looked at me like I was something other than a first baseman.  But whatever he saw in me in school disappeared that night when I went mute on my family’s porch on that warm spring evening with my handsome gentleman caller. 

Not because I was shy.

I wrote in my diary about it May 19, 1981.  “My father was really mad.  I hope Charles never comes back.”  He didn’t.