Tag Archives: Black History month

99. We Hold These Truths (post 1)

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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Thomas Jefferson said it, but he didn’t believe it. Ask Sally Hemmings, if you think he did.

Jefferson was ahead of his time, but not far enough ahead to resist the pressures to retain his slaves. The French Revolution was so far ahead of history that it ended in dictatorship under Bonaparte. Lincoln was certainly ahead of his time; he freed the slaves, but he could not give them lasting equality.

Throughout human history, human culture has been a repudiation of the idea of equality.

*****

If I were black, my whole approach to life would be different. As a sympathetic white guy, I am angry at the stupidities of race in America. If I were a young black man, I would be pissed. My viewpoint and priorities would different. After all, its hard to remember that you’re trying to drain the swamp when you’re up to your ass in alligators.

As a white guy, the alligators aren’t trying to eat me, so I can see beyond them. But all I see is swamp.

*****

Hierarchy. It was invented by winners to keep the losers losing. It means “I’m better than you are.” No one ever said, “You’re better than I am”, and meant it.

Race is a handy way of keeping track of who’s supposed to be better than whom. It’s helpful it there is a strong physical dissimilarity between the winners and those who are forced to lose, but it isn’t necessary. In America, a white-looking black is still a black. In Japan, the situation is even worse.

There is a “race” of people in Japan which used to be called the Eta. Now that word has fallen into disrepute and they are called Burakumin. They are utterly indistinguishable from “normal” Japanese, yet they were, and often still are, considered untouchables and subject to powerful discrimination.

Of course things are better among native peoples who have not been damaged by civilization, right? Try reading The Tiwi of North Australia if you think that, or let me tell you about them. Women are controlled by men through arranged marriages. The old men have power, which translates as first choice. Young women are married to old men. Young men are pretty well restricted to marrying old women who have become widows. They will get young women later, when they have grown old and powerful. Does that sound like a fun way to live, for men or women?

In many traditional Muslim countries, the rights of men are many and the rights of women are few. For late breaking examples, see any television, any day.

Nothing is further from equality than a caste system.

If you seek the origin of the word caste, you will find that it is Portuguese, not Sanskrit. Roughly, it means color; the Portuguese who founded a colony at Goa on India’s west coast used their word to apply to the Indian notion of varna, and gave us all a word with new connotations.

In the 60s and 70s, some academics were calling black-white relations here at home an American caste system. There are similarities, but the Indian situation is far more complex.          We’ll look more closely at that idea tomorrow.

98. Black, White, Aryan, Jew

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Race. In America, it means black and white. I have spent the last few weeks arguing that race in America is a construct. We all partake of the same gene pool, varying only in the amount of various genes we possess. Take the whitest non-albino; put him on one end of the line. Take the blackest black and put him on the other. Assemble the millions of us who are not recent immigrants from elsewhere and put us in between. There would be no break in the gradation.

Nevertheless, race is still here, so embedded in our national consciousness that the truth of our unity is swamped by the voice in our heads screaming, “I don’t care. Blacks are still blacks, and whites are still whites!”

This kind of confusion about basic reality leads to tragedy, and not only in America. Try this sentence:

In the days of the Third Reich, Germans persecuted Jews.

If this sentence sounds accurate, you are missing a few points. The Jews who were sent to the death camps were largely Germans. I am sure that was no comfort to them, and it isn’t the most salient fact about the situation. But it is important. If we put a wrong label on something, it makes it hard to think clearly about that thing. This process is still going on, as today’s politicians turn complexities into sound bites.

Hitler offered simplified and false solutions to real problems, based on the idea that there was a German race and a Jewish race. Jewish is not a race. It is a religion, and sometimes an ethnic group.

German is not a race. It is a language, and it is shared by several countries other than Germany. Germanism is also an attempt by the late-formed country of Germany to find national unity in a semi-mythical past.

Aryan is not a race. If you say Aryan in today’s world, it will evoke Hitler’s movement to elevate his blonde, blue-eyed “super race” to world supremacy. That super race is a myth made up of equal parts hatred and scientific misunderstanding.

The term Aryan originates in northern India, 3500 years ago. It refers to the “light skinned” conquerors who drove out or enslaved the dark skinned native population. The word Iranian is a modern variant of the word Aryan. As for the “light skinned” conquerors, think Koothrappali from the Big Bang Theory. They were light skinned only compared to the people they conquered.

Hitler should be rolling over in his grave at the thought, but he got his information third hand.

It started with Max Muller, a German born-scholar who spent his career at Oxford. Linguists of his day discovered the link between the languages of Europe and South Asia, and developed the notion of an Indo-European language family. They believed this family of languages originated in the southwestern steppes of Russia, and was introduced into South Asia through the Aryan invaders. Muller was a strong proponent of Aryan culture, considering it one of the greatest developments of mankind. By Aryan, he meant the culture of India. After others had misrepresented his ideas, he clarified that Aryan culture did not imply an Aryan race.

As time passed, proponents of European superiority such as Arthur de Gobineau moved the origin place of the Indo-European language family to northern Europe, confused current notions of race (such as Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean) with the linguistic and cultural classification Aryan. They “invented” the Aryan race, which they considered to be light skinned in the European sense, the originators of civilization, and superior to all others. The caramel skinned invaders of India had been thoroughly whitewashed.

The last member of this trio is Huston Stewart Chamberlain, born in England, raised in France, and ending his life in Germany, converted to German superiority by Wagner’s music. He wrote the Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, in which he saw the history of the world entirely in terms of conflict between the Aryan and Jewish races. It became a bible of Nazism, and Chamberlain became a mentor to Hitler.

Labels like Jew and Aryan matter, just as labels like black and white matter in America. A “Jew” in Nazi Germany might be a Zionist extremist who believed that God chose his people and would smite all his enemies, or a modernistic atheist who had repudiated his Jewish ancestors, or some poor schmuck who just got misidentified. It would all be the same in Auschwitz.

And the Aryans that Hitler believed in, didn’t exist at all.

Voices in the Walls 16

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Chapter two, continued

She squeezed my shoulder and laughed. It was a sound full of compassion and understanding, and there was surprising strength in her hand. In that moment, she won my heart.

Aunt Rachel put Sarah to work frying bacon. When Sarah wanted to know why the servants didn’t cook, Rachel told her that there were no servants in her house. Sarah was working up to pout again, but we didn’t stay to see it.

Aunt Rachel had a two wheeled handcart that she used to move heavy things around the yard. She showed it to me, then walked out to the crossroads and helped me load Sarah’s trunks on board, shaking her head in amazement. I explained how Sarah had lived in one boarding school after another, with no real place to call home. These trunks were her home and her security.

Aunt Rachel listened. She said, “I understand. I don’t like to criticize Thomas because I know he’s your father, but he should have done better by her.”

“He did the best he could!” I replied heatedly.

She said, “Perhaps,” but she wasn’t convinced.

When we got back to the house it was filled with the smell of burned bacon. Rachel said, “Go pick one trunk to take up to your room. Then Matthew will put the rest in the barn until later.”

“I don’t want my trunks in some old barn,” Sarah snapped.

Rachel did not respond to Sarah’s tone of voice. She just said, “Fine. They can stay on the cart, but if it rains this afternoon . . .”

“I want them in my room!”

“All right. When you finish eating, you can carry them up.”

I thought poor Sarah was going to explode. She crossed her arms with offended dignity and said, “You can’t possibly think that I am going to carry my own trunks.”

Rachel lifted the overcooked bacon onto a plate and began breaking eggs into the grease. Over her shoulder, she said, “Who is going to carry them up, then?”

Aunt Rachel busied herself around the kitchen while Sarah thought about it. By the time she had heated a half loaf of bread and put it on the table along with eggs, bacon, jam, and butter, Sarah was ready to say, “I’m sorry, Aunt Rachel.”

Rachel said, “No one expects you to carry your own trunks, because you aren’t big enough. Matthew and I will carry your things up, but not now. Matthew is as tired as you are. I can see it in his eyes. So as soon as you eat, go choose one trunk, like I said, and we will put the cart with the rest of the out of the rain. This evening, after your brother has rested, he and I will take your trunks up.”

“Thank you, Aunt Rachel,” Sarah said, but I wasn’t sure if she was really thankful or not.

Rachel was not through. She sat down and faced Sarah directly. “Sarah,” she said, “I don’t expect you to carry your trunks up because you are too little, but I will expect you to work as long as you stay in my house. I don’t have any servants here. I live alone, cook my own meals, wash my own clothes, and raise my own food. You are welcome to stay here, but it is going to take more work to keep a house going with three people in it than it does for one. You two are going to have to do the extra work. There just isn’t anyone else here to do it.”

Sarah didn’t answer. She turned back to her food with a look that would have curdled milk. Aunt Rachel didn’t seem to mind. I decided then and there that I wouldn’t worry about Sarah as long as our aunt was there to keep her in line.

97. Truman, Eisenhower, and one other

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Once again it is Presidents Day. We used to celebrate Washington’s birthday and Lincoln’s birthday, but now we lump them together and throw the other forty-two Presidents in for good measure.

Not all of them deserve to be remembered, but Truman and Eisenhower do, especially during Black History Month.

No, I didn’t forget President O’bama, but he’ll get his share of acknowledgment. So will President Kennedy. Maybe even President Johnson; Lyndon Johnson, that is. Andrew Johnson is all but forgotten, despite the fact that he was impeached for trying to continue Lincoln’s policies.

Not many people remember what Truman and Eisenhower did for African-Americans. Mind you, we are talking about the fifties. Neither president was particularly pro-Black, and neither would have marched in Selma, but their actions, whatever their motivation, moved the cause of Civil Rights forward.

In July of 1948, Truman issued Executive Order 9981 which abolished racial discrimination in the United States Armed Forces. Like Lincoln before him he was able to do things as Commander in Chief that would never have passed in Congress.

Need I add that practical necessity was a driving force in the action, along with pressure from civil rights leaders who did care about the plight of blacks? And need I add that the white military was not thrilled? Kenneth Claiborne Royall was forced to retire as Secretary of the Army after he spent a year trying to block execution of Truman’s order.

Most of the desegregation of the Army took place on President Eisenhower’s watch. So did the early Civil Rights movement. Eisenhower was in favor of equality under the law, but sympathetic to the feelings of the white South. That made him a centrist in the 50s, but leaves him completely out of the conversation today. That’s unfortunate.

After Brown v. Board of Education, Arkansas’ Governor Faubus deployed National guard troops to keep black students out of LIttle Rock’s Central High School. Eisenhower convinced him to stand down. Then Faubus withdrew the National Guard and left the black students at the mercy of the mob. Eisenhower sent in federal troops to protect them and forcibly integrate the school. It made him no friends, but it was his duty to enforce the rulings of the Supreme Court. He did his duty, and set the stage for the integrations of schools across the South.

*****

As a student of history and a citizen sympathetic to the civil rights movement, I knew all this before I started to write. As an honest scholar, I did the research necessary to freshen my memory and get the names, dates, and places right.

Everywhere I turned in my research, another name kept coming up – Philip Randolph. There is a story behind the story, and one I’m not ready to tell. After all, I just discovered Randolph, and my knowledge of him is sketchy. Nevertheless, here are the bare bones.

In 1917 Randolph founded the black rights magazine Messenger. Through the 30s and 40s he organized black workers in labor unions. In 1941, he planned a massive march on Washington for access to defense employment, pressuring President Roosevelt into Executive Order 8802, the Fair Employment Act. Through the rest of the 40s he brought increasing pressure on the Federal government for desegregation, resulting in Truman’s Executive Order 9981. He formed an alliance with Dr. King in 1957, and was instrumental in bringing about the March on Washington in 1963, where Dr. King gave his I have a dream speech.

Here is a man who has just jumped to the top of my list of people I need to know more about.

Voices in the Walls 15

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Chapter two, continued

The door opened on my second knock. I had forgotten how tall she was. She was nearly as tall as Father with a raw-boned pioneer look about her. She looked as if she should have been loading her husband’s flintlock during an Indian attack in Kentucky a hundred years ago.

I had also forgotten how young she was. Her face was clear and unlined and the brown hair tied gracelessly on top of her head was without gray. I did a quick calculation. Aunt Rachel was three years younger than Mother, so she would be thirty-three this year. In my mind, I had made her short, old, and gray, but she was none of those things.

There was a moment of confusion on her face, too, then she smiled and said, “Matthew and Sarah?” I nodded.

She reached out immediately for Sarah’s hand and Sarah curtseyed. Rachel laughed and said, “None of that! Come in; come in.” She ushered us into a hallway that ran the length of the house, saying, “I got a telegram from your father, but it was very short. He said a letter would follow to explain everything, but you seem to have beaten it here, so you will have to tell me what is going on.”

How do you put the changes that have torn your life apart into a few words for a stranger? Rachel saw my distress, and said, “Well, never mind. You can tell me later. How long do you plan to stay?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe a long time.”

Her face suddenly became serious. She nodded and said, “Lincoln’s election, of course. Thomas would see it as a danger. But if he acted this quickly, things must be even worse than I thought.”

“He sees it as a great danger, Ma’m.”

For a moment she had a far-away look in her eye. Then she was all practicality again, asking us how we had come so quickly and where we had slept last night. When she found out that we had slept on the train and had had no breakfast, she started to herd us into the kitchen for some food. I interrupted to say, “I need to get Sarah’s luggage in first.”

“I wondered if you were traveling with just one carpetbag,” she said. “Why don’t you fetch her things in while we start something to eat.”

I hesitated, embarrassed, and then said, “Do you have a wheelbarrow or a cart?”

“Yes. Why?”

I pointed out the front door. She leaned past me and saw the pile of trunks making a small, tumbled mountain at the crossroads. I was cringing inwardly, waiting for her scorn, for I knew that she was a plain woman. 

Instead of making a comment about the pile of trunks, she put her hand on my shoulder and said, “How much of that is yours?”

“It is all hers.”

“You are traveling with one valise and she has all that. You have not been raised together, have you?”

“No, Ma’m.”

She squeezed my shoulder and laughed. It was a sound full of compassion and understanding, and there was surprising strength in her hand. In that moment, she won my heart.

96. Ancestors?

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I have a grandfather Logsdon, a grandfather Harvey, a grandmother Patterson, and another grandmother who was a bit of a black sheep. Her name was “Per-vet”; that is how I’ve heard it pronounced, but I never met her and I’ve never seen it written down.

According to a document sent to me as junk mail by a company which wanted to sell me a plaque, Logsdon is an English name, derived from Longsdown, meaning a long hill. Harvey is pretty certain to be English. Patterson is supposed to be Irish, by one authority, and Scotch-Irish according to another. History will tell you that the Scotch-Irish were just Scots who went to colonize Ireland. I strongly suspect that “Per-vet”, if seen written down, would be spelled funny and would be French.

So we see that a cursory glance says I am one-half English, one fourth French, and one fourth either Scots or Irish or both. But how reliable is that?

Not very. Let’s take the name of one of my grandparents and play with the possibilities it offers. A hypothetical fellow named Patterson, from Patterson Holler, deep in Appalachia, where there are a hundred families all inter-related back nine generations, is probably safe in concluding that he is Scotch-Irish.

However, another man named Paterson(1) comes straight to America from Belfast and marries a woman named Smith. His son, Patterson(2) marries a woman named Jones, his son Patterson(3) marries a woman named Wilson, his son Patterson(4) marries a woman named Harlan. Their son, Patterson(5), will have one-sixteenth of his genetic heritage from Patterson(1). His name will be Patterson, but should we call him Scotch-Irish?

Should we call him he Scotch-Irish if the young women named Smith, Jones, Wilson, and Harlan were all visibly black women?

*****

Like everyone else, I’ve seen the PBS program Finding Your Roots. The team behind the scenes is impressive, but no matter how good you are in genealogy, history, or biography, there is always a limit to certainty. Documentary evidence is always suspect. People lie, clerks transpose names, and harried bureaucrats write down what they think to be true because they have to write down something. Those in charge of data are people in power, and axes get ground. The stories unearthed are sometimes fascinating, but let’s remember to take them with at least a grain of salt.

*****

Then we have Ancestry.com. I have no intention of criticizing their work, but their advertisements deserve a kick in the ribs.

We’ve all seen the one about the black woman with ancestry from Ghana. Lets assume that she did have an ancestor from Ghana (an assumption we make without accepting the very shaky hypothesis that genealogists can determine such a thing from a DNA sample) and that her ancestor arrived in America about 1800. That is nine generations ago. Our subject would have 256 great great great great great great great grand parents in that generation. That one of them was from Ghana tells us next to nothing. The other 255 ancestors were probably from all over Africa and Europe – just like my ancestors and yours.

There is the another ad where a white American who has believed that he is Scottish discovers after a DNA test that he is actually German. He has to trade his kilt for lederhosen.

Cute, but this holds about as much water as cheesecloth. What is it to be a German? Germany only became a country about a hundred-fifty years ago, and its borders have fluctuated widely since then.

Hitler notwithstanding, there are no genetic Germans, just folks who happen to live in a particular part of Europe, during a narrow range of years, speaking a particular language. These things leave no trace in the DNA.

Searching for ancestors can be an exercise lubricated by snake oil. While there’s nothing wrong with a little fantasy, it can lead to blindness. When I was young, everybody bragged about their lost Cherokee ancestors. Nobody bragged about their lost Black ones.

Voices in the Walls 14

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Chapter two, continued

Southern Pennsylvania is a area of rolling hills. The pioneers had cleared much of the forest for fields, but plenty of timber remained. It must have been lovely a month earlier when the hillsides were ablaze with fall colors, but now only a few stubborn brown leaves clung to the oaks, and all the rest of the woods were gray.

The Emmitsburg Road passed southward paralleling Cemetery Ridge and a mile to the south I could see a pair of hills Dreyfus called Round Top and Little Round Top. Once he had warmed up to me, the teamster gave me a running commentary on the local sights, gossip, and politics. By the time we pulled up, I had a beginner’s understanding of the region.

(One of the benefits of historical fiction, particularly of well known times, is the amount of research material available, along with instant recognition by your readers. The flip side of this benefit is the likelihood of getting caught out if you screw up.

Years ago I came across a library book full of photographs taken days after the Gettysburg battle. It was also full of detailed maps, with notations on the maps of where each picture had been taken. I didn’t need the pictures of bodies, but the maps gave me every road, hill, orchard and farmhouse, down to the names of who lived in some of the farmhouses. Rachel Pike’s farmhouse was one of them; its actual occupants were conveniently not named.)

We stacked Sarah’s trunks at the roadside (I was getting mighty tired of those trunks!) and I waved good-bye to Mr. Dreyfus. Sarah was through pouting, but she didn’t wave. I suppose she thought a lady should be above waving to servants, but I had liked the man.

We stood at a crossroad. Behind us, both corners were in grain fields, one plowed and fallow, the other still in ragged stubble. On the corner to our left was an orchard; peaches I thought, from the shape of the naked trunks. Aunt Rachel’s house sat back from the road on the last corner. It was a substantial two story house with a widow’s walk and a wide verandah, flanked by two magnificent oak trees. There was a cluster of outbuildings behind it.

The house had a look of age, and though it had been reasonably well kept up there was just a hint of decay about it. A cracked window pane here, a few boards leaning against the side of the house where some repair had been begun and never finished, and paint that should have been renewed a few years ago – the sum of these little things gave the house a forlorn and haunted look.

Father had written to Aunt Rachel with the details of why he was sending us to her, and had sent a brief telegram in case we arrived before the letter, but of course there had been no time for a reply. It was just possible that Aunt Rachel was not here. I took my carpetbag in one hand and took Sarah’s hand in my other, and we walked up to the house.

I knocked on the door and waited. Sarah had become very quiet. She had never met our aunt. Aunt Rachel and Father had never gotten along, and it had been ten years since I had seen her.

The door opened on my second knock. I had forgotten how tall she was. She was nearly as tall as Father with a raw-boned pioneer look about her. She looked as if she should have been loading her husband’s flintlock during an Indian attack in Kentucky a hundred years ago.

95. Literature of Passing

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When I was very young, I learned a lot from things that weren’t openly said. Not that anyone was shy about their opinions on race, but they didn’t talk much about sex, and the two subjects seemed joined at the hip.

I someone was having a baby, and there was some doubt about who the father was, someone would mention that there was a nigger in the woodpile. Even if the father was white and known, there was a racial subtext.

I rarely saw any black people, but there was one woman we saw occasionally in Claremore whose arms were mottled brown and pale. I heard my parents say, “That’s what happens when you mix the races,” with the silent implication of God’s disapproval.

At the drive-in one evening, we saw the theatrical trailer for Imitation of Life while waiting for another movie to begin. I was only seven or eight and it didn’t make any sense to me, but my parents looked knowingly at each other and I knew that there was something sexual and forbidden in the dark skinned girl’s passing – whatever that was.

Thirty years later I read what Mark Twain said about how his book Huckleberry Finn was doing. He said, “I feel like the lady felt when the child came out white.”(see post 90.) How interesting that the lady was worried. To put it bluntly, had she been fooling around with someone black, or was she worried that some ancestor had, and that the genes would show themselves?

Everybody knows that most American blacks are partly white, even though it is no longer politically correct to say so. Everybody should know that most American “whites” are at least slightly black, because of blacks who have passed into the “white” gene pool throughout our country’s history. Mark Twain apparently knew it, but the “white” half of our common race has been trying for four hundred years to convince themselves it just isn’t so.

Or at least that it shouldn’t be so.

I have to admit that I hadn’t thought of Imitation of Life since childhood, and had to look it up on the internet. I must have seen the trailer for the 1959 remake, but in both movies the light skinned black girl who passed for white came to a bad end, drove her saintly black mother to an early death, and repented in tears at her mother’s funeral that she had been passing.

Yeah. Right. Sure. Doesn’t that sound a lot like a movie made by white folks to show to other white folks?

Passing is a novel by Nella Larsen, published in 1929. It treats the subject of passing seriously and has been accepted as a classic by literary scholars. I have to admit that it has been sitting on my to-read shelf for about a year and I am reporting on it from research. If it seems racist that I have not gotten to it yet, you need to know that my to-read shelf is groaning under the weight of books by authors of all creeds and colors. Blogging is incredibly time consuming, so the shelf keeps growing.

I have read Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894, Mark Twain’s last novel.  In it a black slave woman is given a white infant to nurture. She has only recently had a child of her own, who is seven-eights white. By coincidence (shades of Prince and the Pauper) she looks at the two of them side by side and they are identical. Thinking of the beautiful life that lies in store for the “white” baby and the horrors that lie in store for her “black” child, she switches them.

Need I say that things go badly after that? At the end of a long and angry life, Twain wrote Pudd’nhead with vicious dark humor. Raised to the privileged life of a slave owner, the passing “black” grows up to be an unmitigated villain, and the unwillingly and unknowingly passing “white” grows up as a battered and passive embodiment of slave mentality.

Critics call Pudd’nhead Wilson unreadable. I did not find it so, but then critics need something to complain about. I did find it tangled and unpleasant. I don’t recommend that you read it for pleasure, but I suggest you take this away from it—

In 1894, Mark Twain knew that there were a lot of blacks who looked white. He knew that passing would be easy to accomplish. Twenty years later there was a massive migration of blacks to the cities in the north where, unlike the small towns and villages from which they came, they would be anonymous. In America, in the early twentieth century, it was easier to live white than to live black.

You do the math.

Voices in the Walls 13

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Chapter two, continued

It was a long, uncomfortable night. Every time I fell asleep the swaying coach threatened to throw me to the floor. Fortunately the seat opposite us was empty, so I got Sarah stretched out there and held her in place by sitting with my heels braced against the edge of her seat, with her shoulder wedged against the sole of my boots. I doubt that Mrs. Davison would have approved.

We arrived at Gettysburg late the following morning. Sarah was awake, but irritable. I left her standing on the platform while I watched the porters take her trunks out of the baggage car.

The arrival of the train is a major event in any small town. The brightly colored engine and tender, the noise of the whistle and the rolling steam from the pistons, make a sight that few can resist. Children and dogs rushed wildly about. A teamster stood by the heads of his horses to keep them from panicking when the train pulled out again. I asked him about Aunt Rachel’s house and found out that it was on a farm two miles south of Gettysburg on the Emmitsburg Road.

The teamster’s name was Dreyfus. He looked me over with distaste, and allowed that he was heading down the Emmitsburg Road himself after he had loaded up. I was wearing a dark suit and riding boots, and looked like a Southern gentleman’s son. He was dressed in ragged shirt and trousers, with shoes that might have belonged to someone else before him. He didn’t like me, but he was willing to take my money to let us ride along with him.

When the train had pulled out and he had maneuvered his wagon up to the platform, I hung my coat on the brake lever alongside his battered hat and lent a hand with the loading. There were heavy crates of shovels and hoes, and bags of grain and seed potatoes. I think he was surprised that I chose to help him, and even more surprised that I stood up to the work. At least, when we threw Sarah’s many trunks up on top of his load, he did not make the cutting remarks I had expected.

Sarah, on the other hand, had had enough. She stood with her hands on her hips looking at the teamster’s wagon and refused to go.

“I’ve been on that old train for a whole day and a night, and I’m tired. I hurt all over and I don’t intend to go anywhere in a wagon that smells like – like what cows do! I’m going to stay right here until Aunt Rachel comes to pick us up.”

Dreyfus rolled his eyes and spat tobacco juice. I was tired myself, and in no mood for spoiled brat behavior, so I told her sharply, “Aunt Rachel doesn’t know we are here. I see no reason for Mr. Dreyfus to take your trunks out to the farm and have Aunt Rachel quit whatever she is doing, hitch up a team, and drive out here because you don’t like what his wagon smells like.”

She sat down on the edge of the platform with a theatrical flounce and pouted. All I could think of was Mrs. Davison, and I really hadn’t liked the woman all that much.

I went to the wagon, made a nest for Sarah out of empty feed sacks, and then hoisted her aboard. She squealed in protest, but I paid her no mind, except to say, “If this wagon is good enough for Mr. Dreyfus and for me, it’s good enough for you.”

Half a mile out of town, the teamster spat over the side and laughed. “Mr. Dreyfus! Man, that’s prime.”

94. We Are All Passing

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Is anyone so comfortable in his own skin that he never fears exposure?

How many preachers shout hallelujah at the top of their lungs to cover their own nagging doubts? How many ministers comfort the bereaved while their hearts are burned out from sharing too much grief?

How many businessmen brag about their accomplishments to silence the small voice whispering in their ear that it will all come crashing down?

How many part-Asians or part-Hispanics write white on the census, then feel guilty for betraying a part of their heritage?

How many husbands and wives say “I love you,” while a voice inside adds, “I did, and I should, but I’m just not sure any more.”

Passing isn’t just about race, but if it were, it would not be just about white and black. In Japan, Burakumin hide their origins. In India they say, “Beware the black Brahmin and the pale Chamar,” for people have been fighting to escape caste identity ever since caste was invented.

Gays know a lot about passing, too, although their phrase for it is “in the closet”.

I was once “in the closet”, a very peculiar closet, and I passed for two and a half years. Not a gay closet, but a religious one. That experience is another reason a white science fiction writer has such an interest in race. I know first hand the fear of exposure that passing brings on.

Until I was just shy of sixteen, I was a straight-laced, Bible toting, young Baptist. I believed what I had been taught, despite normal adolescent doubts, and I was reasonably sure of a trip to Heaven when I died. Then, in a flash of insight, all those doubts came together and in one instant, all belief fled. One moment I was a Christian; the next moment I was an atheist. I never asked for it; I never wanted it; but there it was. Like Saul on his way to Damascus, struck down by a total change of life – only in the other direction.

I was afraid of what had happened to me, but I was even more afraid to tell anyone about it. My father was a deacon and lay minister, good natured and fun loving except where religion was concerned. In that regard, he was God-struck into inflexibility.

I feared him, with a fear that made me mute when confronted by his disapproval.

The fear was unjustified. Years later I came to realize that he hid behind certainty to disguise his own fears.

Unjustified or not, the fears were real, so for two and a half years I lived inside myself and confided in no one. I went to church three times a week, I sang hymns, I read my bible, I prayed aloud when called on. I fully lived the lie, and no one doubted me. I passed, successfully, but at an emotional cost that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

In 1967, on the way to Michigan and college, I vowed to never lie again. No doubt, that is why I’m a writer; I’m still trying to tell the stories I couldn’t tell before. It’s also why my long suffering friends probably know more about me than they ever really wanted to know.

In these last weeks I have spoken often about black people passing for white and turning us all into one race. These have been logical arguments intended to clarify the American situation. I have tried for a neutral tone, although, in fact, I approve of miscegenation and passing and any other thing that people do to make their lives work under harsh circumstances.

I always realize my privileged position. Yes, I’ve worked since I was eleven, I came up from a harsh and rustic environment, and I went to college on a scholarship that I earned by hard work. But if I had done all that, and had been born black, I would never have made it.

I don’t feel white guilt, but I feel an endless obligation to the men and women of all races who fought for civil rights, particularly to the black men and women who fought hardest and against the steepest odds; and an endless obligation to tell the truth through what I write.