In the spring of 1946, the day after Dad came back from one of his trips to Washington D C, he and Mom announced that he had a new job in the government, and our family would be moving to the suburbs of Washington D C He and Mom had already discussed the move. He had been inquiring among his new office colleagues and scouting out school systems, and that the best schools were in Arlington County.
"But I like it here," I protested. "I'm making friends."
My new friends included the Cooksies, an immensely fat elderly couple who lived across the street and sat outside by their front walk on a bench with their hands cupped over their upright canes and looked themselves like big cookies. By the sidewalk to the right of their bench was a big tree with a cavity that somebody had filled with cement in which a couple of horizontal grooves were inscribed, so it looked for the world like a vertical sidewalk rising under the bark, and I was pretty sure it was a magical sidewalk that might lead eventually up to the beanstalk castle of a giant.
I spent a lot of time puzzling over whether the giant ducked under the bark or walked over it. Either method was intriguing. Either possibility made sense in my child logic. If I shared my quandary with Mister and Missus Cooksie (and I think I did), I'm sure they were amused, so it's no wonder they befriended me. The Cooksies talked funny. They were from a faraway place called Maine, and their accent was as exotic to my ears as that vertical sidewalk was to my reasoning powers.
Next door to the Cooksies a new family had moved in with a little girl named Mimi, a year or so younger than me, but a promising playmate. I think I had a crush on her.
"You'll find new friends," Mom and Dad assured me. As a further inducement, Dad presented me with the Sunday comics section of The Washington Post. Unlike our newspaper, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, these funnies were in color!
I couldn't read the text inside the balloons, but I pored over Hal Clements' Prince Valiant for its elaborate detail. Someone must have helped me with the words. The fierce, blue-painted Picts were swarming over Hadrian's Wall, while Prince Valiant fought them off with his famous singing sword. That particular scene may have come until later, but it's the one I will never forget. Prince Valiant's epic battles spread across a main panel captured my imagination. And Princess Aleta's beauty was not lost on five-year-old me – with her tumbling blond locks and delicate features. I was ready to defend her myself.
Alley Oop, Popeye, and Li'l Abner – all with their girlfriends – were among my other favorites. And Krazy Kat loved Ignatz the mouse, who was always throwing bricks at his head. How those cartoonists loved to draw! Even Orphan Annie, with her dog Sandy, drawn so carefully with those weird blank eyes. I could see their love of drawing in those strips.
"You'll get to read them every Sunday," Dad told me, "after we move."
"You can bring your favorite toys," Mom added. And you'll get to fly in an airplane, way up above the clouds!"
I think one of them added, "You'll get to have a dog."
Yay!
We moved out on a June morning in 1946. Mom had finished packing the last boxes. We ate breakfast, and the movers arrived to trundle our sofa and other furniture into a big van.
Dad had driven ahead in the Chevy a couple of days earlier packed with things we would need before the moving van got to our new house in Arlington.
We were going to fly!
Dad had prepped us what to expect. How our ears might pop, and we might feel weightless at moments "like riding in an elevator." The flight might be a little bumpy, he cautioned, "but you'll be safe."
I said goodbye to the Cooksies, took a last look at the giant's beanstalk sidewalk. I said goodbye to Mimi. I picture myself kissing her, but that's probably an added-on fantasy. Suspect, like the organ grinder's white cane. I do know we hugged.
The three of us rode by taxi to the St. Louis airport, the driver slouched down in his creaking leather seat, smoking cigarettes, his ashtray overflowing with stubs. The cab reeked. Mom cranked our windows open.
At the airport, we walked up to the big airplane, Susan and I holding Mom's hands on either side; Mom tightening her grip on mine as we passed the propellers, which were starting to rotate as the four engines coughed to life separately. At the top of the moveable stairway-on-wheels, smiling stewardesses ushered us inside. The plane was made of aluminum, the word a little difficult for me to pronounce. Dad has told me how aluminum was a new metal, lighter than steel. It seemed like the metal of the future.
The cheerful stewardesses, who wore uniforms and little hats, and all had the same smile, escorted us to our seats. As we passed the open door to the cockpit, we could see the pilot and copilot sitting at their complicated bank of controls. I was invited to step inside, I guess because I was a boy. Susan peeked in over my shoulder. The pilot swiveled in his seat and introduced himself as Captain so-and-so. He showed me the altimeter and a couple of controls along with a small half steering wheel; and how the co-pilot had a similar wheel. Then he presented me with a little metal pin that was a pair of wings for me to pin to my shirt, so I might someday be a pilot.
Once everyone was buckled in and the No Smoking sign came on, and the stewardesses made another round, checking our seatbelts, the Captain's voice came on, telling us we were waiting for a runway to be clear. A few minutes later he announced our takeoff.
The plane taxied for a long time while they tested the ailerons and rudder, as the Captain had explained to me. Then he made a U-turn to taxi into the wind, this time with the engines roaring really loud and shaking, until finally the wheels left the ground – I could feel it happening! – feel the clunk below as the landing gear folded into the underbelly. The plane ascended at a gradual slant through clouds, which were b,uffeting the plane a little as we labored through them, followed by "air pockets," which did make our stomachs queasy and our ears pop. Mom gave us chewing gum. Once we got above those big fluffy clouds, they looked as though you could jump on them and bounce.
"Fairy castles," Mom exclaimed. I think this was her first time flying too.
For dinner, the stewardesses brought us our choice of two hot entrees from the galley at the rear of the plane. I don't remember what I chose, but galley made it sound like a ship.
When we landed finally, the propellors went into reverse to bring us to a whooshing stop.
Dad met us at the gate. He loaded our suitcase into the car, and drove us past Arlington Cemetery and the Pentagon, which he said was the biggest office building in the world, and then on to Dominion Hills, our new neighborhood – so new that the road in front of our house hadn't been surfaced yet. Dad drove over round river-rocks laid between the new curbing. Our house was two-story brick, with a red front door and green shutters. Dad pulled into the driveway.
He was like a magician, turning the key in the lock, and opening the door wide and ushering us in.
Everything smelled new. We went from one room to another. Upstairs was my bedroom – the smallest of the three, with a window above the front door, which made it special, they explained. I agreed. We were going to do our own painting. Mom told me I could pick the color for my room.
After the movers arrived with our stuff, Mom set up her old treadle Singer sewing machine in Susan's room to make curtains. I chose blue for my bedroom. It was really Mom's choice. Blue was good for a boy's room. She did the real painting, using the new 'rubber-based' paint that could be cleaned up with water, and applied it with a roller instead of a brush – her first time using either. I painted some of the trim on my window.
I could decorate my room however I liked. But Mom and Dad supplied the furnishings, which were reminders of our Oklahoma and Indian heritage: a bronzed figurine of Will Rogers, about a foot tall, that I could put on the little table next to my bed. Will Rogers was a 'favorite son' of Oklahoma, they told me; part Cherokee like Dad, a cowboy movie star who did rope-tricks. The figurine showed him with a wry smile, one hand in his pocket, a coiled lasso hanging from the other. Across the bottom were the words "I never met a man I didn't like." For years it seemed an admirable sentiment.
Hanging on the wall over my bed was an old cap-and-ball Colt revolver with a rosewood handle that Dad claimed had belonged to his father, my grandfather Scott Morse. "He swapped it for a heavier .45."
On the opposite wall was a pair of rawhide-bound Indian stickball sticks made from hickory, hung crossed over a deer skin. Dad explained how the hickory was steamed and bent into a loop, and webbed with strips of rawhide. He didn't know whether these sticks were Cherokee or Choctaw. He called them 'Indian golf clubs'; I don't know why. They were basically lacrosse sticks with small heads. The competitions were fierce, according to Dad, the sticks used to deftly capture and hurl a small leather ball, which in the old days would have been a human skull, and the competitions were often between villages located miles apart; sometimes they served instead of war to settle disputes.
I admired the beauty of those sticks, the toughness of the bent hickory. I took them down sometimes to feel them, how the tight-grained wood was polished to glassy smoothness from all that rough play, the original rawhide bindings overwrapped with black tire-tape of the old canvas sort – that suggested to me someone had played with them pretty seriously, and not just in the way-distant past.
Dad seemed not to have played with them. But somebody sure had!
As I got just a little older, it seemed clear that since I was a boy I was expected to carry the Oklahoma stuff forward, while Susan could do the girly things.
I was the one Dad told stories about his old Indian grandmother, whom he idolized. She was his mother's mother, so my maternal great grandmother. But Dad always referred to her as 'my old Indian grandmother" with a special possessiveness, never as "your great-grandmother." That possessiveness strikes me as peculiar – the way he adored her and was almost elbowing me out of the way. I've come to understand it in various lights, as I learn more about Oklahoma – the real Oklahoma, and not the Broadway Oklahoma! that we must have seen three times as a family. I got a few glimpses of their own hard-scrabble early lives, but nothing of what was happening to the Indian tribes struggling to keep their identities within the tribal lands assigned to them that were being taken away, along with their language and tribal culture.
"Some people will rob you with guns," Woodie Guthrie says in one of his songs. "Others will rob you with fountain pens."
Young Indians attending the government boarding schools who were caught speaking their own language were punished, made to hold their palms up for the teacher to whack hard with a sharp ruler.
If my parents were conscious of the genocide taking place, they said nothing about it to me. I think they did not want to know. I think Dad's way of honoring his old Indian grandmother and his own Indianness was to keep her locked in the past, in his boyhood, where she was safe – safe from whatever he did know, and did not know, was happening to the Indians.
Her name was Julia Edwards. She was known to be part Cherokee and probably some Creek. She'd grown up in a Creek household, rode horses with the men. In the two old photographs she stood tall, rooted to the earth in the Indian way: dark, with high cheekbones and dark eyebrows, eyes 'black as two holes burned in an Army blanket', as family lore had it.
Julia Edwards refused to sign the Dawes Register, so she never received the 160-acre allotment of land that would have been hers for signing. Dad always blamed her stubbornness and ignorance. She was perhaps one-quarter Cherokee, which would make him one-eighth. Her quotient was uncertain, as with so many Indians, because of the Creek and other tangled lineage. But she was easily eligible. People with quotients as miniscule as point 035 could sign. Now that I've learned a little more about the Dawes register, I understand why.
Some signed with an X. She was illiterate but could have signed her name. Dad as a ten-year-old, had taught her how to write her name, so he was doubly announced that she never signed.
His blaming her always puzzled me. I can't do that puzzling without experiencing a heaviness in my heart. This has become truer than ever for me. I feel some anger and loss, myself, for the Indianness Dad was forced to leave behind.
From those two surviving photographs of Julie Edwards, and also from family lore, it's clear she was darker than her daughter – Dad's mother, my grandma Morse – who had blue eyes and curly hair and was ashamed of having a mother who was so dark and visibly Indian.
Dad took after his old Indian grandmother. He was darker than his mother, and had his grandmother's black hair, although not her intense black eyes. He must have identified with her more than with his mother, and bridled at his mother's shame.
I can't help but wonder whether, if I had looked more Indian, he would have called her 'your great-grandmother' instead of always 'my old Indian grandmother' and felt safer passing her on to me. But he could not. It was as though – I'm going out on a limb here, with a thought I've never had before writing those last words – it was as though, in holding onto her legacy for himself, he was raising a hand of goodbye to his Indian lineage.
My father, as articulate as he was in matters of law, would not have been able to voice such feelings, if he did hold them somewhere in the private space within. This is my belief, now that I am older than he was then, at an age when I can separate myself from him, and can look at him as a younger man, with the foibles that attend one stage of life or another.
During my own middle adulthood, I thought of my father as a Deist, in the eighteenth-century mode. He placed a high value on rationality; believed in a God of nature, in human progress and the perfectibility of man. But now I also see how he felt obliged to frame everything in the white man's way, and if he did have such feelings as I imagine now, they were not white man's feeling – or in any case, not the sort of knowledge that could be boxed up in the methodical way he'd learned to construct a legal brief, and the way he'd learned to parse everything in his mind, the way we're all taught to do in mainstream industrial society.
I think I've learned to do it too well, myself. I escape at times – when I'm immersed in my art or taken up in love or awe or intimacy. Now, at this moment of my life, when suddenly I'm unpacking such a multitude of discoveries, so many bound up ineluctably with others, I let it all tumble forth as it will. Truth comes in breathtaking simultaneity.
My father would not have found the words because it was not about words. Important as words are in my own life, and however they help me ladder my way through my thinking, words also get in the way of what's swimming around behind my brow and in my belly, and in the muscles that propel me, that exist outside the cerebral layer. Some awarenesses are best allowed to exist beyond words. Dad I think found this true for himself, in the last twenty years of his life, when he gave himself over to sculpting in marble and wood, even if he felt a need to explain it afterwards in a didactic or joking way. Toward the end, there was less to explain, less that could be explained, in the play of light and shadow over life and death.
But what I remember as a child, seeing that toy train under the Christmas tree, and afterwards studying its intricacies, the hinged door to the firebox snipped from a Naphtha gas can; the knowledge beyond words that he'd followed his tin-snips and soldering iron into a world of make-believe we shared.
That was my first experience of art, I think, looking back on it, my first inkling of how art worked.
My second experience of art that I remember came later, after we moved to Arlington. It was more external, but felt also in my body, looking up at the statue of Abraham Lincoln inside the fluted columns of his memorial.
I know from Dad's stories that Julia Edwards always lived with the family, at least from the time they lived above the general store that Granddad Morse ran in Muskogee, and after Granddad moved the family out to the farm in Okmulgee, at the edge of the Cherokee Nation, when the threat of war loomed on the horizon of Europe in 1916.
Granddad Morse, being a Socialist and a pacifist, avoided conscription by turning to farming. They crowded into a small house, onto which Granddad built a lean-to addition – a family of seven: Granddad and Grandma Morse, their four children crowded into two bedrooms; old Julia Edwards, who had a bed in the living room; and Dad's Uncle John, who whenever he showed up after a few nights of drinking, slept on a couch in the unheated porch.
Photographs of my father as a boy show little Wilbur barefoot in overalls, with dark bangs cut in the mixing-bowl style of farm kids, a hint of mischief playing at the corners of his mouth. Wilbur used to bring his schoolbooks home, and his father would follow along with him. His father had no formal education, but he'd learned how to read and write, after taking out for the Territory as a twelve-year-old on the stolen horse and finding refuge with educated Indian families who had books. But his father had only rudimentary math skills, adding and subtracting. Studying along with Dad, he learned long division and decimal-fractions – skills he would use later to bid on construction projects.
When Dad was nine, he wanted a pinto pony for Christmas. Wanted it in the worst way. He prayed that he'd find the pony on Christmas morning waiting outside the kitchen door.
Christmas arrived. No pony.
"I went to my old Indian grandmother. I asked 'Why didn't God hear me? Why did He let me down?'"
"She explained 'That's not the way prayer works. You don't pray to get things like ponies, Wilbur. You pray for things like patience and forgiveness, not for things, like a pony'."
He portrayed her as a sort of medicine-woman. Ladies from all around came to Julia Edwards for healing; they also came around with willow baskets filled with remnants of cloth, to quilt, sitting around the big square quilting-frame that that got hauled up afterwards with ropes and pulleys to store up against the lean-to ceiling.
Every spring she stitched up a medicine-bag filled with smelly ingredients like camphor and lard and kerosene that she made Dad wear around his neck during flu season. In the one-room schoolhouse he attended, where kids sat in benches around a woodstove, no one got too close to Wilbur Morse.
When Dad and his older brother Alva heard the drumbeat and chanting down at the Old Indian Stomp Grounds at the back of the farm next to the river, they would venture down to watch the Indians perform their seasonal dances – the green corn dance and the yellow ribbon dance, and others. When I picture myself joining those two boys, we are semi-hidden behind a fringe of bushes. That's my fantasy. But for all I know, they sat in plain sight on bench-logs around the perimeter of the circle.
All those stories helped anchor my own more tenuous Indian heritage. The old six-shooter represented the European side, the invaders. I took it down to feel the rosewood handle and see how the levered tamping-rod would have tamped the charge of powder and wad into each of the six chambers in turn. At some point in my early teens, I identified it as a .32 Navy Colt. But I already had serious doubts as to whether my Granddad ever would have carried such an antique. The only gun I ever saw him carry was a shotgun, whose power he demonstrated once when we visited his farm – the old 'home place; in Okmulgee – by blasting a little green snake that crossed our path. There wasn't much left of the snake.
I somehow understood the symbolism intended in those three objects: the old six-gun, the hickory ball-sticks, and the statuette (even if I knew it was plaster under the bronze paint, revealed by a chip at the bottom, and even as the words "I never met a man I didn't like," began to sound saccharine). I understood the symbolism, but not the conundrum they have come to represent for me now – the irreconcilable cost of taming the West.
The old Colt shooting-iron was safely never going to shoot. I realize now the stickball sticks must have been carefully restored, so as to bring the polished hickory to that glassy smoothness, the tire-tape kept intact probably as part of the restoration, the heads restrung with soft deerskin too delicate for actual use. They too were sentimental, intended to feed my imagination for an idealized Oklahoma, the Oh What a Beautiful Morning! Oklahoma where the cattle all stood like statues. Mom kind of believed in fairies, and Dad was always a bit of a trickster behind that Indian persona.
I can't put it off any longer.
This is the time, now that I've taken you through my very early childhood to when we arrived in Arlington.
Now, finally, with some dread I have to jump ahead three-quarters of a century into the future, to the murder of George by police on a Minneapolis sidewalk, the afternoon of May 23, 2020.
The cell phone video, taken by Darnella Frazier, the teenager who posted it on social media, appeared on the world's television screen again and again. It showed the white police officer, Derek Chauvin, assisted by three other officers, pressing his knee against the back of George Floyd's neck to keep him from breathing, while the big man lay face-down in the gutter, handcuffed, pleading for his life, saying "I can't breathe."
The process seemed interminable. The slow extinguishing of George Floyd's life continued even after an ambulance arrived with paramedics who attempted to intervene and were waved away by the cops intent on finishing their business.
To see any actual murder recorded live would have been horrifying. But to see this one carried out in broad daylight at a busy intersection, with such casual determination, struck me as an assault on humanity. This was underscored all the more by the additional videos shown later at the trial.
Chauvin kept his left hand in his pocket – lackadaisically it seemed, at first viewing. Later I realized the leverage he was using, by doubling that left hand into a fist and leaning into it, so as to bring his upper body weight to bear more fully on his victim, while all the time Chauvin's blue eyes glared defiantly into the lens of Darnella Frazier's cell phone camera.
The video struck deep. Struck me; struck others. I can only try to imagine the feelings of African American who witnessed it in person or who saw the video later in their own homes. It would be different. I hardly knew what to do with the outrage that flooded through me and fixed at first on Chauvin. But I realized that without the video, this police killing, like others, might be denied or hushed up with testimony by their fellow officers and be forgotten, and I would go on with my life.
Without the proof of the video, it could be swept under the rug.
Worse, came a more pointed realization:
It wasn't just humanity that was under attack. It was my own. And it was not just the general rug. If not for Darnella Frazier's video, I knew with dizzying certainty I would have swept it under my own personal rug. The filaments of my old cocoon had returned, soft as cobwebs, but cloying and strong, unrealized by me, clinging to me for what I knew just as suddenly had been years. I had to ask myself:
Where was I, for those earlier murders?
Later I would go on-line and verify some particulars I'd let slip into the day-to-day of news. Where was I when Eric Garner was murdered in New York City six years earlier? I'd swept that one under the rug, maybe because of all the hoopla. Garner's murder too was captured on a cell phone video. I'd forgotten. Garner was arrested ostensibly for selling loose cigarettes outside a convenience store. I watched on YouTube, how cops used a chokehold to flip him onto the sidewalk, held him face-down while he repeated those same desperate words – "I can't breathe" – eleven times before he died.
That earlier murder had propelled Black Lives Matter into high gear. Garner's death inspired community efforts to reform police departments, to acknowledge the challenges faced by urban police officers, but to dial back violence. Reforms would include identifying racist cops, outlawing chokeholds, requiring body cameras, and creating citizen review boards – all aimed at stopping abuses and restoring local policing that respected the community it was serving.
Where was I, in the effort to address police violence in the inner cities?
I asked that question later, realizing I had let a lot slide past me.
But something more immediate was happening for me as I saw George Floyd being murdered – because of a single word I heard a witness use in a sidewalk interview immediately afterward. A young black man called what had happened a lynching.
I should not have needed the word.
But I did. I, who rely so much on words – perhaps too much on words – did not make the connection on my own.
Up till that moment, my idea of lynching was defined by Hollywood; all those old westerns where vigilantes are often just misinformed good guys – about to string up some innocent guy – all of them white, when some hero arrives in the nick of time, like the Lone Ranger firing a silver bullet to sever the rope and riding off with a hearty High Ho Silver!
I must surely have heard the word 'lynching', even in polite Arlington County. If I did, it was only a word. It had no roundness. It was part of the flattened-out 'elsewhere' in the South that I was encouraged to ignore, like Halls Hill.
My resistance came from somewhere deeper than those old Hollywood distractions from reality, I'm sure. But hearing that word from a black onlooker took hold of me, jerked me back long ago to that terrible moment I had managed to forget, and I'm back there.
I'm that young teacher standing outside my classroom, with the heavy oak door propped open. My eleventh graders are brushing past. The boy appears with his black-and-white photographic postcard and asks, "Have you ever seen anything like this, Mister Morse?"
And there I am, holding that damned postcard in both hands. Shaking my head, shaken in my being. The three black men are hanging from the big tree branch, the one young man with his neck horribly distended can't be more than twenty. And the white people with their picnic blankets and woven-wood hampers are eating food and laughing. I see the young blond woman with her head tipped back, showing her teeth, her eyes bright with that God-awful laughter. My own heart pounding, my own naked innocence exposed.
Now, though the postcard is long gone, I turn it over in my mind and realize I didn't think to check for a date. I picture the photographer's name appearing at the bottom in white script. From what the picnickers were wearing, it might be the 1940s.
I liked Norwich; was well on my way to adopting New England as home. New England greeted newcomers like me coolly, in comparison to the famous southern hospitality. Smiles were not automatic in New England. I'd come to value that reserve. Old-timers told me you could live in Norwich for ten years and still be considered a newcomer. But I liked the bedrock feel of that terrain, the narrow streets, the affection for old houses, an attachment to the Puritan past, starkly rendered by carved slate headstones – compared to the South's attachment to a softly sentimentalized past, rendered with Gone With the Wind nostalgia.
In choosing New England as my new home, I thought what I was rejecting was southern surface charm, the superficiality of my high school years. But the postcard made me realize the rejection was itself superficial. I had no idea a rosayof what lay behind the surface I experienced in Arlington. I was rejecting. The questions raised by that picnic were immense:
Again, if realities like that lynching were missing from my education, then what else was missing?
And more.
Recently, reading a biography of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, I found a description of Marshall's response to such a photograph. Early in his career, working as a civil rights lawyer for the NAACP, Marshall traveled through the South by train, often at night and alone, at some personal risk, sleeping fitfully in the black-only coach.
One image especially haunted Marshall's sleep while traveling to save four black men falsely accused of rape, in Groveland, Florida. The Sunshine State Florida was the scene of some of the most virulent racism in the South. The photograph troubling his sleep was that of Rubin Stacy, a black man tortured by the KKK and strung up on a Florida pine. Author Gilbert King, in his biographic Devil in the Grove, recounts Marshall's torment:
"It wasn't the indentation of the rope that had cut into the flesh below the dead man's chin, or even the bullet holes riddling his body... It was the virtually angelic faces of the white children, all of them dressed in their Sunday clothes, as they posed, grinning and smiling, in a semicircle around Rubin Stacy's dangling corpse... 'I could see my dead body lying in some place where they let white kids out of Sunday School to come and look at me, and rejoice'."
Reading of Marshall's torment, I initially felt a sameness in my response to the laughter in that postcard. But the difference sank in immediately. I was not black. My own life was not a risk.
Now I recall my shame as a new teacher. I never talked again with that boy. I don't remember his name. Can't summon up his face. Have no idea how he came by the postcard. Maybe didn't want to know.
But that's who I was, at that point in my life. Maybe I was too busy shutting everything out that I couldn't cram into my crowded priorities.
George Floyd's death brought back that forgotten postcard.
The video and the forgotten postcard set me on this course, of trying to finally understand my whiteness. So now I ask, because it is part of my humanness as well –
How did I make that postcard disappear from my consciousness?
Do outrages simply dissipate like that, into our busy lives?
I'm sure some do. I think in my case, as a young husband and father new to adult responsibilities, I must have just prioritized it away. I must have told myself, consciously or not, 'I don't have time for this'.
Today I have to confess, I do exactly that – say almost those same words, internally, or before I've even shaped the thought with words – do it far more often than I've realized. The decision happens, I'm guessing, often in milliseconds, before it ever fully enters my consciousness – especially if the cause for such feelings is infuriatingly familiar, like the endless suffering of war, in Ukraine and Gaza, the latest mass shooting, the dilemma of a Congress paralyzed by Republicans in the thrall of a racist and ex-President's endless attacks on our democracy; the latest assault on our collective sanity – so that, like a bicycle wheel slipping into an old groove left in hardened mud, my mind slips into that default avoidance. If I'm honest with myself, I'd hazard a guess that those mini decisions could account for a substantial percent of my so-called thinking.
George Floyd's murder exposed a piled-up backlog of such mini decisions.
I hate acknowledging what I'm about to say – because after a career as an investigative journalist and decades of activism, it means surrendering some pride. But it also means shedding some arrogance. And that arrogance is tied up with my whiteness, so it has to be part of the process I'm trying to describe here in these pages.
George Floyd's lynching by police – and lynching, I realize now, refers to any extralegal execution, whether by noose or by gunshot or drowning; whatever the mode – presented me the simple and inescapable truth – that once again I was encapsulated in the obliviousness that minimizes black suffering.
Thank you, George Floyd.
Thank you Darnella Frazier, for your witness. Girl with a cell phone. I know you wish you could have done more than hold that phone so determinedly steady. But you rose to the occasion, and what you captured of George Floyd's death, forced this old white man to examine his own life. Watching that cop pressing the life out of a handcuffed man calling out for his mother as he died, seeing the killer's gaze of impunity into the eye of your witnessing camera, I had to ask myself –
What do I share in common with those racist cops?
In the hours that followed, I realized if I was not careful, I could allow my anguish to distract me from what I needed to do.
I needed to change.
I needed to change the way I meet the world. I need to understand my own whiteness more clearly – how I learned it, how privilege has filtered through my life, and how at its extremes the impunity of whiteness gives some people license to commit murder.
Not all of this could I sort out in those hours. I did know this, for the first time:
I needed to be worthy of my outrage, to get past it and be truer to it now, in a way that my present age allows, and not allow what's just happened, this time on a street in Minneapolis, to dissipate into the dailiness of life, as my younger self had done.
I had learned something else, too, from the Quakers, and from what Martin Luther King Jr. had brought to the Civil Rights struggle – that my loathing toward those cops could impair my understanding of them. Nothing is gained by dehumanizing the enemy, by refusing to see ourselves in the despised other. So, over time, the question of what I shared in common with racist killers has taken me deeper in this process than I could have guessed; deeper into my own whiteness and a self I'd never really explored.
For more than two years after George Floyd's death brought back the memory of the postcard, whenever I walked past a pawnshop or saw postcards displayed at a local flea market in Connecticut or while traveling elsewhere, I had the impulse to stop and ask discreetly if the seller had such a postcard – hidden away, perhaps, in a drawer, waiting for the right someone to ask. But I couldn't bring myself to do it, out of what I thought was embarrassment.
Finally, not long ago, driving past a local antique place called Trailside Treasures, on my way to a hiking trail, I pulled over. I sat for a moment in my car, before I took a deep breath, and went inside.
"This is a strange question," I began, and managed to get the question out without sounding ghoulish. I tried to sound academic.
To my relief, the answer was no.
This was New England.
Walking out of the shop, I realized it wasn't petty embarrassment that had stopped me on those other occasions. It was something larger. I could feel it somehow in my body as I climbed back behind the wheel – what I had learned from overcoming my inhibition and asking the question I was afraid to ask.
Yes, afraid.
It was fear, not just embarrassment. Fear at the proximity of such deep shame in my own whiteness, for a racism that commodified black suffering. By this time, I had learned it was common practice in some parts of the South for professional photographers to station themselves at lynching picnics with their cameras and sometimes their darkroom tents, for the purpose of selling those souvenir postcards. Some surviving postcards bear light-hearted inscriptions. 'Wish you could have been here!'
That degree of commodification has clear roots in slavery and the perverse belief that human beings could own other human beings, that went back to Jamestown.
The commodification based on color continued brutally under Jim Crow, and beyond, into today's unhealed America, where a lynching can take place on a public sidewalk outside a convenience store in New York or Minneapolis.
George Floyd's lynching in 2020 set me on this journey.
Now I look back, through a more critical lens, at my family's journeys: the grandparents' trek from Kansas into what would become Oklahoma, arriving by covered wagons on my mother's side, by stolen horse on my father's side; the Trail of Tears that may have included the great-greats in my Cherokee ancestry.
Every family has those mythic journeys, some desperate, some remembered, some forgotten or denied. "Some things ain't meant to be remembered," Kiese Lamon's old grandmama told him, when he asked about slavery.
As I take a harder look at my family's journeys within my own lifetime – hold it up like a patchwork quilt – I notice patches I hadn't seen before that that figure in my whiteness, and how race and gender shaped my father's career.
Dad had opened his private law practice in Vinita, in 1933 – in the depths of the Great Depression. Bank failures and mortgage foreclosures were up to a thousand per week. Clients had little or no money to pay legal fees. A man Dad saved from the electric chair built him a walnut desk in the prison workshop – the desk in the den where Mom used to sit and write letters and type out the text for Pogo's Notebook and where I learned to type.
That private law practice failed. Dad never used that word, but that was the reality. Fortunately, his law degree qualified him for temporary work overseeing a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program in Oklahoma, under Roosevelt's New Deal program to get people back to work. Dad's law degree I'm sure helped get him elected to the Oklahoma state legislature. During his two terms, he wrote the legislation that authorized construction of a big hydroelectric dam on the Grand River, and he was able to parlay that experience into a job with the Rural Electrification Agency (REA), another New Deal program aimed at extending the electric grid across the rural heartland. Thus began my father's lifelong career in the federal Civil Service that would take our family from St. Louis to Washington D C, where, as General Counsel for M S T S, he would end up practicing admiralty law – the law of the high seas – quite a long jump for a farm boy from Oklahoma.
Now that I look more closely, I realize his race and gender gave him a boost at every juncture:
Negro lawyers were few, female lawyers almost nonexistent. The Oklahoma state legislature was solely the province of white males. The REA would never have sent anybody but a white male around to talk farmers into forming electric co-ops.
Now I realize the federal Civil Service was not an option for an ambitious Negro, since within the federal bureaucracy the most talented and highly educated Negro could not rise above the level of clerk typist. How could I have remained ignorant of this, living in a suburb where nearly everybody worked for the government?
One answer of course was that we were all white. Our whiteness was written all around us. Segregation fostered the ignorance that was part of our whiteness.
In fairness to Dad, he practiced inclusiveness in whatever hiring he directed within his office staff at M S T S. He added a Jewish lawyer to his legal team, and promoted a Negro secretary to executive secretarial level when that became an option in the 1950s. He enjoyed the interactions with both and learned from them. He was fond of bringing home gefilte fish and kippered herring, or lychee nuts from a Chinese restaurant, as he and the lawyer became friends as well as colleagues.
When the Negro secretary came back to work after a week of vacationing on the Maryland Eastern Shore, she showed everyone where she had applied a Band-Aid on her shoulder to show how much she'd tanned.
Exotic news for Dad to bring home. "Negro people tan!"
My parents pushed tolerance. Negro dolls were not available in stores, but Mom sewed quite a lovable Negro doll with straight-out pigtails from a pattern she found somewhere. It had a cheerful pancake sort of face, only semi-round, like Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. Susan and I shared it, relishing its uniqueness and maybe the good intentions contained in it.
I'm sure tolerance guided Mom's choice of a children's book she used to read to me, when I was quite young, sitting on her lap. The book was Little Brown Koko. Its author, Blanche Seale Hunt, was clearly white, her text weirdly adoring in a way that makes me cringe now. Little Brown Koko was 'the shortest, fattest little Negro you could ever imagine. He had the blackest little wooly head and great big, round eyes, and he was the prettiest brown color, just like a bar of chocolate candy."
Mom opened the book at intervals to show me a little boy my age, but dark with big round lips. He wears red rompers. (The book, like many children's books published during the war years, was printed in only black and red.) Little Brown Koko was rendered in half-tone gray except for those big round lips and his red rompers.
Little Brown Koko was always getting into trouble, because he was so greedy and lazy. When his "nice, good, ole, big fat black Mammy" makes a tasty seven-layer chocolate cake for his supper, and puts it aside in the pantry, telling him he must wait, Little Brown Koko can't resist dipping his finger in the icing, and soon the cake is gone, his tummy "pooching way out." His Mama gives hm a switching on the seat of his little red rompers but bakes him another chocolate cake for his supper. He wants another one for his breakfast. You could see how Little Brown Koko was getting spoiled rotten.
Mom was trying to plant the germ of tolerance at a time when books that included Negros scarcely existed. Unitarian Sunday School taught tolerance as well. Tolerance was a marker of educational class, part of our family's journey. But as I approached Middle School I would realize tolerance was not enough.
I see my family's physical journey with a wider-angle lens now. Our move from Vinita to the University Heights suburb of St. Louis, and my parents' first purchase of a home, were orchestrated by federal government policies that funneled white people into suburbs everywhere around the country.
Bank failures and foreclosures during the Depression had reduced homeownership so sharply by 1939 as to threaten the stability of the middle class. In response, the Roosevelt administration enacted policies with the dual purpose of promoting home ownership and shielding banks from risk. These included the underwriting of FHA loans, and a mapping of neighborhoods according to risk – effectively echoing the redlining by banks to favor single-race neighborhoods over multi-racial neighborhoods, on the assumption that that single-race neighborhoods were more stable.
As a consequence, middle class home-ownership skyrocketed, with the massive white migration into the suburbs that began in the 1940s and consigned Negros to the inner cities.
All this figured in my own cocooning and how that cocooning continues to operate today. Now I can better understand tensions that arise between the residents of ghettoized black neighborhoods and a culture of white supremacy among the ranks of police, and the depressive conditions of the inner cities that are partly the consequences of public policy.
The Interstate highway system, established under President Eisenhower in the 1950s similarly reiterated the color-line. The new highways were supposed to connect cities with each other, but the effect was to connect the suburbs with each other, and suburbanites with urban centers. (General Motors in the meantime was buying up thousands of miles of inter-city trolley lines and destroying them so as to increase the demand for cars and new roads. I happen to own an old map of Connecticut that shows the state laced throughout with inter-urban trolley lines.) This would wed American society forever with the autonomy of private cars and truck transport of goods.
The Interstate highways were also used as a tool for further ghettoizing cities like Atlanta and Detroit, where local urban planners used them as cleavers to divide and isolate black neighborhoods.
The cumulative impediments to black homeownership created by government policies enacted during my lifetime alone is almost incalculable. This is not ancient history, too late to redress. This is today. The surface impediments continue, while the deeper monetary cost – the loss of wealth in the form of homeownership to be passed from one generation to the next – remains substantial for most black families today.
At what point do we face up to the moral imperative? Reparations going back to slavery and Reconstruction are daunting. But at what point do we Americans accept responsibility for our government's missteps during our own lifetimes and insist on righting the wrong?
My family's journey east from Oklahoma as dwarfed, I realize now, by a vast movement of people – unsubsidized by government, unremarked in the white press, and unnoticed, as far as I know, by my parents.
This was the massive movement of black people escaping the Jim Crow South.
I learned about the Great Migration from reading Isabel Wilkerson's account in her 2011 book The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson calls the migration of some six million black people from the South "one of the most underreported major events of the twentieth century," one destined to "transform urban America and recast the social and political order of every city it touched."
The exodus went unreported partly because it was spread across six decades, starting after World War One, and continuing into the 1970s, and also because of the secrecy surrounding the individual escapes – secrecy necessary because of the debt-bondage that held sharecroppers captive to merchants and landlords, and because of the ubiquitous threat of vigilante violence.
A Mississippi plantation-owner boasted to Look Magazine in 1964, that if any of his black tenant farmers tried to register to vote, he would "shoot them down like rabbits." Similar attitudes prevailed toward those who prepared to flee their debt captivity. They planned their departures secretively. Items of furniture or cookware too heavy to carry were quietly sold in advance or given to neighbors, or simply abandoned. Departures were often in the dead of night, by cars or trucks, or, if by train, then from stations in other towns.
Testimony to the transformational impact of the Great Migration is the roster of southern-born African Americans who rose to the top in various fields following their escape from the South. I learned only recently of Althea Gibson – one of the greatest tennis players of all time – born in 1927 to sharecropper parents on a South Carolina cottonfield, who fled to Harlem in 1930 – and who rose through the hitherto segregated ranks of tennis, and amazingly won the Grand Slam in 1956.
Oher luminaries include Leadbelly, Josh White, Miles Davis, Toni Morrison, and dozens of top athletes, as well as millions of more ordinary African Americans who could flourish as factory workers, skilled tradesmen, physicians and healthcare aides, classroom teachers, and political activists.
Wilkerson took her title from Richard Wright's autobiographic Black Boy, which depicts Wright's own journey north while in his teens, from Natchez, Mississippi to Chicago, in 1927 – out of a desperate need to feel "the warmth of other suns." Wilkerson's epic account of the Great Migration helped me understand the powerful motives that drove it: the new form of enslavement under Jim Crow, whose cruelty I don't think many white people fully understood then or understand now.
Reading Black Boy, I learned of physical and emotional torments of Jim Crow that were more demeaning and controlling than anything I'd imagined, from within my white isolation.
As a precocious youngster in Mississippi, Wright taught himself to read, while literally starving – so thin he couldn't make the minimum weight requirement to apply for a post office job. After escaping as far as Memphis in his teens, Wright discovered The American Mercury magazine, and the social criticism of H L Mencken. To gain access to a Memphis library, a privilege denied to Negroes, he borrowed the library card of a white acquaintance and forged a note as follows:
Would you please let this nigger boy – I used the word nigger to make the librarian feel that I could not possibly be the author of the note – have some books by H L Mencken?
Turning pages back in his rented room, Wright was astonished by Mencken's slashing attacks on God and authority, on human weakness in general, and American idiocy in particular. The teenage Wright realized that words could be a weapon, wielded like a club. Books could be his salvation.
Black Boy took my breath away. For me, reading Wright's words three-quarters of a century later, as an old man, they offered a model for me in taking control of my own education – at an age when most people are inclined to coast on what they already know. I am blessed in countess ways, but one of them is this belated encounter with Richard Wright. Just as Mencken's writing led Wright to other writers – Joseph Conrad, Sinclair Lewis, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, Balzac, Nietzsche – Wright's book propelled me to other writers, black writers I'd put off reading, like Maya Angelou, or ones I'd never heard of, like David Walker, and a host of talented young writers who continue to open my eyes to an America I would not otherwise know.
Maya Angelou's account of her growing up was particularly compelling. She worked in her grandmother's store in Arkansas, in the heart of the Negro area, where her grandmother sold meat pies to the sawmen in the lumberyard and the seedmen from the cotton gin. The store was stocked with spools of colored thread, mash for hogs, coal oil for lamps, flour, and other staples – the kind of stuff my grandfather Scott Morse sold at his store in Muskogee, Oklahoma, wrapping his customers' produce in his Socialist newspaper.
As a girl, sweeping, Maya witnessed the morning bravado of pickers setting out with laughter and predictions of conditions in the field, and boasts of how much they'd pick. Then they would return, dirt-disappointed in the dying sunlight, fatigue weighing down their arms and legs, "fingers cut by the mean little cotton bolls," the sound of the empty cotton sacks dragging across the rough lye-washed floorboards. Some pickers would leave their sacks at the store. Others had to take their sack home for mending. She "winced to picture them sewing the coarse material under a coal-oil lamp with fingers stiffening from the day's work."
An old slave lament comes to mind, handed down by W E B Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk: "When I Lay This Body Down."
I'll go to judgment in the evening of the day,
And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,
When I lay this body down.
What Maya Angelou remembers learning, as she swept and washed the floor with lye, was that whatever cotton they picked into those long canvas sacks was never ever enough to escape their bondage. "Their wages wouldn't get them out of debt to my grandmother, not to mention the staggering bill that waited on them at the white commissary downtown."
Angelou's description helped anchor what I learned from The 1619 Project, when it appeared in 2021, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times Magazine – the fact that the peonage of tenant farming, enforced by Jim Crow, was in some respects more brutal than chattel slavery. Slave-owners at least had an investment in their human property. Having paid good money for the enslaved, a planter had a stake in their health and continuing ability to work. But under the debt-based servitude of tenant farming, the landlord planters had no such investment. Tenant farmers could be run into the ground and sometimes killed with impunity.
I'd never realized this.
Every bale of cotton produced by tenant farmers passed through the hands of the planter, who had the exclusive right to sell it. A black tenant farmer could be whipped or killed for trying to sell crops on his own without the planter's permission. And black people had no legal rights under Jim Crow law. A black man who questioned the planter's accounting or asked for appropriate receipts could be beaten or lynched, and a black person's word could not stand against a white person's word in court; nor could black people serve on juries.
The lower tiers of white oppressors, who saw themselves as its enforcers, could indulge their cruelty more viciously. Among Isabel Wilkerson's subjects was Bill Russell, in Monroe, Louisiana, whose father was the man threatened with a shotgun at the gas pumps. Russell's mother suffered humiliation on the street in Monroe when she was grabbed by a policeman who threatened to arrest her if she "ever dressed like a white woman again."
The intensity of racism in Monroe launched another family north as part of the exodus from the South: Huey Newton as a toddler was spirited away with his family to Oakland, California. Later, as a young man, he helped found Oakland's radical Black Panther Party, appearing on posters wearing a black beret and carrying a shotgun.
Our house at 6031 N Ninth Street, was surrounded by other similar three-bedroom single-bathroom brick homes – small by today's perceived need for one bathroom per person in professional-class homes, but suitable in the 1940s and fifties for upper-level bureaucrats and senior military officers.
Construction was going on all around us, with the growl of bulldozers and backhoes scooping for foundations and laying new streets with sewer-lines and sidewalks. We watched our street get finished, with pea stone laid over the river-rock and rolled flat by several passes of a steamroller, then the asphalt, and it was rolled too.
From everywhere came the sounds of hammers and saws – mostly handsaws – and the fragrances of new lumber and fresh asphalt, and concrete curing. You'd see flatbed trucks arrive with lawns in the form of oversized rolls of sod six or eight feet in diameter, which men pushed down a ramp and unrolled across the red Virginia clay.
Dad's new job was across the Potomac as a civilian lawyer within the Navy bureaucracy in the Navy 'temporaries' located on Wisconsin Avenue near Ward Circle. His title was General Counsel for Military Sea Transportation Service. M S T S managed the chartering of oil tankers and other noncombat vessels for the Navy. He commuted across Key Bridge or, if traffic was bad, then further up the Potomac across Chain Bridge.
I didn't know at the time that Civil Service level jobs above GS-4 were not available to Negros. What l did know was that our new neighborhood was a kid paradise for my sister and me. Kids our age zoomed around on fat-tired bicycles and roller skates. Susan played sidewalk games with the other girls – hopscotch and jacks and double-Dutch jump-rope – made tea parties for dolls and exchanged trading cards – while I played nearby with my, and sat on the curb with my pals shaping pieces of slate into arrowheads, and smacking pieces of flint together to get the smell. I'd given up my wooden scooter for a refurbished American Flyer wagon, and was soon learning to roller-skate on the new sidewalk. Even now I can feel the buzz of those clamp-on skates vibrating up my calves.
My friends and I made small parachutes from old handkerchiefs weighted with rocks tied to the corners that we could throw into the air and watch float to earth. We got help constructing kites from crossed balsawood sticks and tissue paper, to which we tied rag tails, and ran up the street to launch them or took them to one of the nearby open fields. My pals and I played on the dirt piles and road-cuts left by the steam-shovels and bulldozers. We had mudball fights and tunneled into embankments. I have fragrant memories of pressing my cheeks against the cool clay. We played cowboys and Indians, king of the mountain, and explored the woods and unbroken pastures of the old Saegmuller estate at the edge of Dominion Hills.
Sometimes I ventured onto the Saegmuller property by myself, playing Indian. I was Gray Wolf. I'd hide inside the clumps of tall grass in the pasture, pick wild strawberries, explore a little meander of creek where an old rusty car, probably a Model T, had been abandoned and was causing the water downstream to seep the color of rust. That was a special place for me, hidden behind a sprawl of sumac and inkberry wildness. I'd check the mud for the tracks of raccoons, whose footprints look so much like little human hands, and the funny little mud-scratchings of crawdads. Or I'd visit another favorite place – a honeysuckle tangle that fringed the pine woods – and crawl on my belly through the vine-tunnels made by rabbits and other creatures, or just hang out sucking drops of nectar from the blossoms. Sometimes, picking blackberries or strawberries, I'd encounter a red-eyed terrapin, with ruby-bright eyes, and play with it; watch it close up tight in its shell. I'd turn it on its back, then observe its struggle to right itself and take off with surprisingly strong strides. The shell was a masterpiece of design, the work of the great unseen artist I still believe is God.
Kids today I'm sure find beauty in their electronics, and freedom exploring the Internet and social media. But these were beauties beheld in the body.
What strikes me now about my own childhood is the freedom we had to explore – build tree houses, bicycle everywhere. Dogs ran free too, as long as they had their tags.
Some of the freedom had to do with the times, a country that was not armed to the teeth with assault weapons. Hallowe'en trick-or-treaters could traipse around the neighborhood in costumes we made ourselves – with burnt cork and rags and cardboard and mother's lipstick homemade costumes – traipsing in little groups without adults having to hover over us for fear of some actual monster.
Much of our freedom had to do with being white. My pals and I were free to build our treehouses in a big oak by the creek behind someone's yard, nailing together oddments of lumber scrounged from construction-sites after the workers had gone home, or pilfered from the long gray wooden construction sheds that were guarded by an old man named Pop O'Day who was a watchman and carried a shotgun. If Pop O'Day was nowhere in sight and we spotted a shed door ajar, we'd sneak in, look around for an open keg of nails, fill our pockets, and sneak back out, usually with a few asphalt shingles tucked under our arms.
We knew. We knew. We knew we were stealing. And my father, the lawyer and former carpenter, surely knew. Those shingles and nails had to be coming from somewhere. My friends' fathers knew too. Everyone figured boys would be boys.
White boys, that is.
Living in Arlington was special. We felt famous. We were always showing off the sights to family visiting from Oklahoma. We picked them up at Union Station, and in later years National Airport. On the way to our house, Dad would drive past the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery. The first or second night Mom would demonstrate her new sophistication by serving baked Alaska.
The tour of Washington started often at the columned porch of the Supreme Court, and next to it, the National Archives, to view the original Declaration of Independence enshrined behind special glass and inert gas to protect it forever, so you could see with your own eyes the signatures of Thomas Jefferson and the other founding fathers, and how John Hancock's signature stood out so clearly.
If we were doing the complete tour, we'd go inside the Capitol, beyond the rotunda, where a young blue-uniformed Congressional page could usher us up to the visitors gallery, to observe Congress at work. Mom always warned everybody it would look like nothing was happening: a lot of empty seats; a few Congressmen or their aides shuffling papers, and the teenage pages delivering telephones and packets of paper. If we had time, we'd go down to the basement to ride the little train that connected the buildings.
Next usually came the walk down the National Mall alongside the Reflection Pool, that ended at the Washington Monument, and my cousins and I would climb all those steps inside or take the elevator up as far as it went, and then take the steps up to the very top, where it smelled funky and we could look out the little windows, the big kids lifting the little ones to see.
After that came the Lincoln Memorial. I loved the statue of the seated Lincoln. Sometimes we'd include the bland Jefferson Memorial. Finally, Dad drove us across Memorial Bridge to visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Mom, who had an infallible internal clock, tried to make sure we arrived at the Tomb of the Unknown in time for the hourly changing of the guard.
Driving to the Tomb, Dad would play his special joke on first-time Oklahomans. Having made sure that somebody vulnerable was sitting in the passenger seat – like my nineteen-year-old cousin Don, who was studying to be a minister – Dad would speed up as if to crash straight into the white marble wall at the foot of the tomb, only to swerve away at the last minute. Country-boy humor. Don was terrified.
The ritual changing of the guard always held me rapt. The symbolism was simple enough for a kid my age to understand. I enjoyed the windup-doll precision of the soldiers, the whap! of white gloved hands smacking rifle-stocks smartly as they presented arms and spun the rifles around in deft half-circles. What else I was learning, God only knows. Patriotism. Awe. Heroism bestowed on the war dead. Mostly I savored the ritual precision, feeling excitement somewhere above my belly button.
I looked forward also to the trips across the Potomac into Washington D C with just our family. That first spring, and for many springs after, we drove across Memorial Bridge to join the tourists ooohing and ahhing at the pink cherry blossoms bursting forth all around the Tidal Basin. Mom loved it. A few of those visitors were people of color, Washington being home to embassies and a tourist Mecca. Mom liked to remind us that the cherry trees were a gift from the Japanese.
Mom was always speculating as to when the cherry blossoms would peak or had already peaked. One spring – maybe three years after our arrival – Mom she broke off a small bough of blossoms and smuggled it home under her Easter coat.
The word 'sheepish' was not yet in my vocabulary, but I could tell how Mom felt, sneaking those blossoms home. She put the bough in a vase on the piano, an old upright at one end of the living room, where it would not be seen from the front door.
Winters were cold enough to freeze the Reflection Pool for ice skaters. And if we were lucky, the snow would sometimes be deep enough at home for sledding and making snowmen. My toys included a wooden Flexible Flyer sled with steel runners for when we got snow. A couple of years after our arrival in Arlington, we got nearly a foot of snow. Dad used a snow shovel to cut blocks of snow and build us an igloo for Susan and me. We could climb inside. I don't think Arlington ever had a snow like that again.
I liked the daytime excursions across the river with just one parent too. Sometimes Mom took me with her on shopping trips into downtown Washington. We drove across Key Bridge into funky old Georgetown, with its cobblestone streets and trolley cars on M Street, past the old yellow house where, according to local gossip, George Washington had quartered his mistress, and on into Northwest Washington D C, the city's commercial hub. Unlike the Federal Triangle that began at Lafayette Park and included those landmark emblems of democracy, downtown D C had the grainy feel of a regular city, with brick and brownstone and painted row-houses with front steps and railings, stop-and-go automobile traffic and busses.
I especially relished the cavernous old brick market on K Street, when I accompanied Mom past the outdoor wooden counters laden with produce, and into the tall-ceilinged interior, past myriad aromas, all the way to the big green roasting-drum where Mom asked the man for two pounds of coffee beans and then took the beans to a red grinding-machine that loomed twice the size of our refrigerator, presided over by another man, who wore a white apron and a faded billed cap, and who from his special perch adjusted a big fat round dial for the grinding, and, when the grinding was finished, tipped open a little nickel-plated gate to release the redolent cascade into a waiting paper bag.
Too young to drink coffee, I was hooked nevertheless on that fragrant ritual.
Downtown D C held another wonder for me as a six-year-old.
Negros.
I stared, I'm sure.
Negro people were walking around like anybody else, crossing streets, catching buses, loading boxes onto delivery trucks, or otherwise going about their business.
'Negro' was the more respectful word my parents used, to be preferred over 'colored', which most of my friends used. Later, once I got to middle school, I heard a few kids say 'nigger', but I knew that was a bad name, like 'Jap'. Nobody said it in my circle of friends.
The first time we drove to Union Station to pick up Aunt Odie or someone else arriving from Oklahoma, the afternoon was sweltering hot. Dad drove around the little traffic circle in front of the train station, around a big stone fountain with a broad stone basin, where a bunch of glistening black kids were splashing around and scrambling all over the wet granite and bronze statuary, the youngest of them naked, whooping and laughing, black as licorice it seemed to me, and obviously having the time of their lives. I craned my neck out the open car window and wanted to laugh with them. They were having such a good time! I longed to join them. But I knew without being told, this was impossible.
"How come they get to do that?" I asked.
I don't remember the answer. Maybe it was inexact, or got blurred in memory. I understood by then, if only barely, that my parents didn't know everything. But I gathered this was a special privilege those kids had – maybe even deserved, what with all that heat. Their joy was tolerated. That's the word I would learn later in Unitarian Sunday School. We learned tolerance. That's the word that occurs to me now in hindsight, that even today describes a lot of white people's attitude toward any display of African American exuberance. It is tolerated. That's probably generational, truer for us old fogies.
The wistfulness I felt then as a six-year-old watching those shiny black kids splashing and whooping at the feet of the stone angels contained some inkling, I think, of my own as-yet unrecognized white privilege, or at least a divide between us that was invisible, but which I could feel somewhere inside me – almost like the decisive dull clank of an iron garden gate latching shut.
None of this could I put into words. One thing was clear: kids like that were nowhere to be seen in Arlington.
After that first visit to Union Station, on any occasion when we drove to meet a visiting relative or drop someone off, I hoped to see those kids playing in the fountain. I was always disappointed when they were not there, when Dad drove around that little circle and the fountain was empty. And finally came a time, after a couple of years, when those kids seemed to be gone forever. I don't know why they disappeared. Something had changed. Laws or enforcement. Maybe the fountain was even drained. Whatever the reason, those kids disappeared. And I missed them. Eventually that big fountain was taken away too.
When I was ten or eleven and old enough to ride the bus into Washington D C by myself, I learned from my mother – not in words I remember, but somehow – that it was not safe for us to venture past Union Station into Southeast Washington or into Anacostia, beyond the web of train tracks that spread behind the station.
Northwest Washington was safe. You could tell by the fancy lampposts and brass fire hydrants outside big department stores like Macys and Woodward & Lothrop, with fancy show-windows of svelte mannikins displaying the latest fashions, the same windows that got decorated before Christmas with mechanical elves stitching and hammering in Santa's workshop, or wrapping presents – while inside the store, a man wearing a padded red suit and a white beard took children onto his lap, and we told him what we wanted for Christmas and put letters in his North Pole mailbox. I went along with this for a couple of years.
The store windows and polished brass were all cues that a neighborhood was safe. And if you got close to the edges, you looked around to make sure most people were white.
Now I picture Union Station through strata of time, including glimpses out the car window as we drove beyond the station through Southeast Washington toward Baltimore and the beaches at Ocean City or Rehoboth, which had waves as tall as a house sometimes. Today I realize all those public beaches on the Atlantic shore were whites-only. Black people could swim and picnic only at Sparrow's Beach, at the estuary near Annapolis, or other weedy stretches of sand, with no big breakers for bodysurfing; no saltwater taffy or penny arcades with bumper-cars; no strolling with cotton candy past the mechanical fortune teller cackling behind glass.
Now, too, my composite picture of Union Station includes the riots that broke out in 1967 and 1968 in Southeast Washington, as well as in Detroit and Newark and other majority-black cities and neighborhoods around the country. I see the station through those layers now. Some black people were already calling it Chocolate City. What I felt at the time was a glimmering sense of Union Station as an outpost at the edge of an impoverished and restless black presence. The kids splashing around in the fountain fit somewhere into that puzzle.
The interior of the station was immense, its overwhelming cacophony of sounds rising like a flood, bouncing from one hard surface to another. Holding some adult hand, I halted just long enough to take in the immensity, the lobby echoing with train announcements on loudspeakers and with men at the various gates barking out names and numbers and holding up placards for people trying to make connections. High above, where the carved stone bas-relief was darkened with decades of soot, big clocks presided over the row of brass-and-marble ticket-windows below, the bustle of passengers and baggage-carts attended by Negro porters wearing red caps, trundling suitcases and trunks to yellow taxis lined up outside.
Venturing out on the platform with Mom or Dad to meet our visitors, I peered through billows of steam, through the pungent scalded exhalations of locomotives hissing and sighing like powerful beasts, back to where the red-capped porters were loading suitcases and helping passengers into the seats of carts towed in a string behind the little rubber-tired puffer-billies weaving their way back and forth along the platform, between one end of the train and the other – and high above, the pigeon-swooped sunlight filtering through overhangs of grimy glass and open sky and piercing the steam with shafts of Sunday School light.
I felt small, awed and elated with the too-muchness of it, standing at the edge of such a very big world.