The Joker: A Memoir (17 page)

After the quilter sent word that she was done, Mom asked Grandmomma how much she owed. “Five dollars a quilt,” Gradmomma said.

“That’s not enough,” Mom said. “That’s too much work for five dollars.” I didn’t know much about quilting, but I knew that if my mother wanted to pay more, something vastly unfair was happening. She was proud to call herself “tight as a tick.”

“That nigger agreed to five dollars and I’m going to pay her five dollars.”

“I’m going to pay her ten. Just tell me where she lives, and I’ll get the quilts myself.”

“Roberta, I am not going to do it. We gave her the cloth to do the
work with. All she had to do was stitch it down. And I’m not going to have you spoil that nigger. She’s perfectly happy to get five.”

“Just tell me where she lives and I’ll go get them.”

“No you won’t, because I’m the one who knows and I’m not going to tell you.”

The fight sputtered on for a few days and ended only when Mom found someone who knew where the woman lived. She drove deep out into the country, got lost, finally found the woman’s house down an unmarked dirt road, picked up the quilts, and paid ten dollars apiece for them.

Because of incidents like this, I assumed that when my mother told racist jokes she was making fun of my grandmother and racists like her. Only slowly did I come to understand that though that was true, or partly true, my mother was not immune to racism; hers was simply a more evolved species. I never saw her do a deliberately mean thing to anyone, black or white, but from time to time she surprised me with what she said. Once when I came home from high school right after it had been integrated, I mentioned to my mother that I had found myself in one of the crowded stairwells before class jammed against a girl who reeked of perfume and I had smelled it on myself the rest of the day. I mentioned this only because I had never been close enough to a girl my own age to smell her perfume and, though I didn’t say so, I was disturbed to smell her musky scent later in the day on my own skin, as my own scent.

“Was she black?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then be thankful she smelled like perfume,” Mom said and laughed. At sixteen, and sheltered from a great deal of racism by the very woman who had just made that remark, I didn’t know what to think. This racial stereotype was a new one to me. I hadn’t yet heard the joke that asks, “Why do black people stink?” “So blind people can hate them too.”

My mother occasionally went out of her way to speak to blacks and working-class whites with a naturalness and ease that were beyond me, distressed as I was by my developing sense of historical guilt. Original sin had merged seamlessly with the inherited sin I learned about from reading
Manchild in the Promised Land
,
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
, and
Black Like Me
. At fourteen, I couldn’t walk past black people on the street without assuming they automatically disliked me because I was a member of the race that had imposed slavery on their ancestors and Jim Crow laws on them. By sixteen, I was even more self-conscious and mortified to realize that my way of thinking reduced every African-American to an undifferentiated representative of the race—and that made me a racist too, if a polite and abjectly deferential one.

Several times Mom told me she wouldn’t mind in the least if I brought home a black woman and announced I wanted to marry her, as long as I “really, truly loved her.” She was working hard not to be overtly prejudiced, so I’ve wondered if the qualification hinged on believing true love conquered all or that white men were incapable of truly loving black women. Twice, though, she added that she would have a problem if I brought home a Filipina. They started out young and attractive, sure, but they turned hard in just a couple of years, she said. They saw white men as a way out of the Philippines and into the land of the big PX. (The PX, the Post Exchange, was the army’s retail store for soldiers and their families; the air force called it the BX, or Base Exchange.) This prejudice was the eccentric and unabashed distaste of a service wife who had seen a couple of friends marry Filipinas only to be dumped as soon as the wives’ U.S. citizenship came through. Since I first received this warning when I was fourteen, and had only seen Filipino women at the PX or base commissary with their husbands, the proscription always tickled me. I couldn’t take Mom seriously because I’ve never heard anyone else say anything derogatory about Filipinos, before or since.

“What about an Indian, Mom? Can I marry an Indian?”

“I don’t care. Just no Filipinos.”

“What about Japanese?”

“Japanese, Negroes, I told you I don’t care.”

“What about Mexicans? They’re brown—do they get hard-looking as they get older, just like Filipinos?”

“This isn’t funny anymore. I told you what I think and I mean it. Don’t you bring home a Filipino girl.”

“There goes my Saturday night.”

“That’s enough, young man.”

Mom may not have cared for Filipinos, but the word
Filipino
itself had no sting to it. Grandmomma used the word
nigger
like a lash on herself as well as others. My mother softened it: “Look at this house! Clothes scattered everywhere! It looks like a bunch of Okies live here.” Or “Get your bikes and toys out of the driveway. The neighbors will think we’re a bunch of hillbillies.” There was real despair in her voice, and something that I couldn’t place. Later I came to understand it was fear. As soon as she had proclaimed us Okies or hillbillies, she pitched herself into cleaning the house, tidying the yard, polishing the silver, and I was soon on my knees washing the baseboard with a stiff-bristled brush and then scrubbing around the bathroom faucets with an old toothbrush. Only much later did I come to see that Okies and hillbillies were socially acceptable substitutions for the unacceptable word she’d grown up with. But she still needed the concept. Long before I knew what one was, I knew I didn’t want to be a nigger, Okie, hillbilly, or white trash. When I was a young man, poor, angry, and depressed, I too used these words to sting myself into action. The taboo power of the words hurt and, when I used them on myself, I wanted it to.

Maybe the rage behind Grandmomma’s words came from poverty, a hard life laboring at the looms of the Dundee Mills, and a fear that African-Americans, whom she had always assumed were below
her, might grab the next rung of the ladder and vault past. Maybe it came from raising three children and losing a fourth during the Great Depression in rural Georgia while married to an ineffectual and self-effacing husband who drank his way through the first years of their marriage. Maybe. Even my teetotaler father once allowed that he considered drinking to be a reasonable response to being married to Daisy Mae Rodgers. Many people in her time and place suffered as much as she had, or more without becoming as fierce. Mom told me later that when she was a girl, Grandmomma would, for little or no reason, grab a razor strop or churn handle—whatever came to hand—and beat her and her brother and sister to the floor.

Grandmomma used words as she used the churn handle. For the last several years of her life, my Aunt Joyce moved into Grandmomma’s house to care for her. When I visited, Grandmomma, sitting at her kitchen table and talking affectionately to me, her elbows propped on red-and-white-checked oil cloth, would suddenly turn to Joyce and snarl, “How long you gonna let that dirty skillet sit on the stove? Heavens to Betsy, Joyce, it’s two o’clock and you’re still slopping around in your housecoat like a nigger.”
Nigger
cracked like a whip. And Joyce grumbled back, “Now, Momma, don’t start on me.” Or worse: “Don’t start on me,
old woman
.”

A dirty house and dirty clothes were the first step toward the abyss, toward slovenliness, laziness, and despair, which would lead to being fired and to drunkenness and to living hand-to-mouth, like “white trash.” Grandmomma knew full well that some people would call her that—white trash—though she wasn’t. She was a worker, a church woman, a woman who kept a clean house, never took a nickel of welfare, and raised three children, all of whom had jobs or husbands and not one of whom had spent so much as one night in jail. “No matter how poor you are, you can always be clean,” both she and my mother said, with more intensity and certitude than any religious sentiment I heard them utter. So Grandmomma,
too disabled to clean her house, bullied Joyce into doing it: “Joyce, sweep this floor! I hate the feel of grit under my feet, I just purely hate it. There’s niggers live better than we do.”

There was little Grandmomma could do except ride Joyce—ride Joyce and wash the dishes. She clumped across the kitchen on her walker, jerked a cane-bottom chair up to the sink and angled it so she could wash the dishes and still be part of the conversation that was going on at the table. Sitting, she slowly washed a sinkful of dishes, a two-hour job, and she wouldn’t accept help. She scraped a dirty plate, dipped it in hot soapy water, and scrubbed it over a worn bath towel folded double on her lap. She dipped the plate again, scrubbed it once more, inspected it, perhaps washed it a third time, then dried it before moving on to the next one. She was a harsh, determined, wrathful woman, whom I loved because, like God, she loved me first.

I have never heard my father say
nigger
or tolerate the word in his presence, a rare attainment for a white man born in rural Georgia in 1922. As an officer in the United States Air Force and a Christian, he despised the word and everything associated with it. Though he is not much given to talk and even less to praise, he went out of his way, especially when I was young, to compliment black officers he’d worked with. Out of the blue, he found ways to indicate that so-and-so was black, and a fine man and a fine officer, and he—my father—was proud to have served under him. He made a point to say “under.” Every situation was a teaching situation, and no opportunity for a sermon on race ever went unfulfilled.

When a particularly perfervid black leader in Montgomery ranted about police violence or discrimination, most of the white folks I knew got riled up, angry, and defensive. But my father often simply said, “I’d like to think that if I were him, I’d do just what he’s doing,” a statement that I could only take as pedagogical since I’ve known few people who abhor extravagant rhetoric as much as he
does. Another sermon, I thought at the time, but now I wonder if Dad was weighing himself in the balances—“I’d
like
to think”—and finding himself wanting.

In Sunday school in Montgomery, Dad took pointed enjoyment in telling the other men in his class that my high school football team, the Sidney Lanier Poets, couldn’t reasonably be considered the best team in the state, despite their undefeated record, because they hadn’t played a single black team.

“What’d they say?” I asked.

“They explained that the blacks had their own league and Lanier couldn’t be expected to play teams outside their league.” He grinned and snorted, to let me know what he thought of that excuse.

In 1970, my first year in college, Daniel “Chappie” James was promoted to major general, an air force “first” for an African-American and one that received a lot of press. “Did you ever meet him, Dad?” I asked as we watched the news after supper, and my father waxed unusually enthusiastic. He had in fact met General James, he said, and he considered him to be a superb general and everyone who had worked with him thought the same thing. Keeping a straight face, I closed my eyelids and rolled my eyes as far back in my head as I could. Even honorable sermons remain sermons.

To Dad, sermons were the entire point of life. My mother and father had grown up only a few miles apart in rural Georgia, in red-clay poverty, and my father’s family was if anything poorer than my mother’s. My father, his two brothers, and one sister were raised by a widow whose husband died as a delayed result of mustard gas he’d inhaled in Europe during the First World War. Still, despite the hardship, my father and his brothers went to college, and their sister, my Aunt Margie, married a man who began as a lineman for Southern Bell and worked his way into management. Both of my father’s brothers became ministers, while my father was for a number of years a deacon in his Southern Baptist church. Their education
and thoughtful commitment to their faiths made racist joking repulsive to them—but not to everyone on their side of the family. When my father’s uncle died, a man I knew only distantly as Uncle Cisco, his children found a Ku Klux Klan robe they’d never seen before hidden in the back of his closet.

I admired the humane morality of my father’s family. It made me feel safe, if bored and occasionally bullied. But
humane
is a bit abstract, more affectionate than passionate—and I was claimed by the hot-blooded love of my mother’s family, a love that I was all the more aware of because it could so quickly turn to anger. The same ferocity that drove their racism and raucous squabbling with one another also seemed to drive their love, including their love for me. Their laughter was volatile with fear and love, rage and attachment, and I treasured the warmth of it while dreading the flames that often flared. I was drawn to the laughter even if it was bad laughter.

I felt I could separate the ugly, racist laughter from the misplaced rage that fueled it. But it troubled me as I sat at my grandmother’s table, morally conflicted because I knew my uncle took my fitful laughter at his hair-raisingly racist jokes as complicity. When one of his jokes surprised me and I laughed before I could stop myself—“What’s the difference between a snow tire and a black man?” “A tire doesn’t sing when you put on the chains”—Buddy must have thought,
Andrew agrees with me because he’s laughing.
But in the harmony of our voices blended in laughter, wherever that harmony came from and whatever it meant, I felt the anger ease, though not disappear. We were family. We had to find ways of living with each other.

One day Uncle Buddy set a bowl of water on my grandmother’s table and pronounced, “That’s the city swimming pool.”

He jibbled up pieces of white notebook paper, scattered them on the water in the bowl, and said, “Those are the white kids playing in the pool, having fun.” Oh God, I could almost see what was
coming. Griffin had a large municipal pool built by the Works Project Administration, and a couple of times every summer Buddy took my brothers, cousins, and me for an afternoon of splashing, hot dogs, ice cream, and sunburn. When the federal court ordered the swimming pool integrated, the city discovered problems with the pool, problems so extensive that the pool had to be closed. Permanently.
It’s really irreparable. I mean, we’re a small town and we just don’t have the money to waste on frills like swimming pools
.