by Tales of Two Americas- Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (retail) (epub)
She accepted the firing. Or maybe she quit after being accused. I don’t remember. But I do remember how ashamed I felt at being, even inadvertently, the cause of yet one more humiliation, an outrage, really, toward this woman, who I must say I felt great affection for, even if it was pretty much impossible for me to get to know her, to really get to know her. We lived in different worlds, in those days. Especially the very poor black and the middle- (even lower-middle-) class white. Any black and white, really.
I remember thinking, If her children don’t have underwear, she can have my underwear. I don’t care if she steals my underwear. It’s not right to fire a woman because she can’t afford to buy her children underwear, and that she can’t afford to do that because she has to work for wages about five times less than what an adolescent white boy could make for less skilled labor than she was doing.
There was nothing I could do to rectify the situation. My mother hired a new maid, not nearly so nice or efficient as the one who quit or got fired.
Years later, I saw the first maid, the good maid, at a bus stop. She was wearing a hospital worker uniform. She had a pretty good job. But I can practically guarantee it was one of the lowest-paying, if not the lowest-paying, job in that place.
She was happy to see me. She sure seemed so, anyway. And there was no real reason anymore for her to pretend that she was.
A GOOD NEIGHBOR IS HARD TO FIND
Whitney Terrell
I USED TO worry about a boy. He lived next door to me in a small airplane bungalow on the east side of Kansas City. My writing room was at the back of my house and in the afternoons, when I was working late, I would hear him playing trumpet in his own room, which was at the back of his house. It was a mournful and, to be honest, very imperfect sound—a teenager fumbling through scales on snow-bitten afternoons when the light was flat, in a depressed African American neighborhood, where playing the trumpet no longer seemed like a realistic method of escape. No Miles Davis over there. Just a kid who was about to get beat.
■ ■
My neighbor, Jackie Eason, rented the house. She was black; I was white. The boy with the trumpet had suddenly appeared at her place, a sweet, quiet, almost furtively gentle kid who one day hopped down off a school bus and loped up her cracked concrete steps, instrument case in hand. It was 1998. No announcement, no explanation.
Our houses were maybe twenty yards apart, separated by a waist-high fence, along which the prior owner had planted orange day lilies.
“What’s up?” I said one day. “My name is Whitney. I live next door.”
The kid nodded politely. He was bright eyed and long limbed, wearing a collared shirt and khakis, and he tucked his chin and bit his lower lip as if he’d just witnessed something amusing—for instance, my announcement that I lived next door, made while standing in the yard next door—and he was debating whether or not he should share this with anybody. “What’s your name?” I continued, circling the fence.
“Terry.”
“So you’re staying with Jackie for a bit?”
I was fishing for information, of course. Terry who? Terry Eason? Were he and Jackie related? Not related? Where were his folks?
Then Jackie’s wry, smoky voice issued out through her darkened screen door. “Watch out, Terry. You talk to him too much, he’ll put you to work.”
She pushed out the door in her slippers and a pair of jeans. Jackie was in her fifties, on disability, and rarely left the house—and yet, despite these difficulties, she always seemed formidably collected, hair done in a perm, nails painted, clothes pressed. I myself tended toward cotton work shirts with holes in the elbows and filthy khakis.
“Is he busy?” I asked.
This got a shy laugh from Terry, which pleased me.
“No, he ain’t,” Jackie said, observing Terry with her arms folded across her chest. “But he should be because he’s got a pile of homework he needs to do in here.”
“Come on, Granny,” Terry said, tilting back his head.
“It’s better than anything he’s got to offer,” Jackie replied.
This was said in a friendly tone, like a joke, so I took it that way. But it was also a warning, which I spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether I should ignore or heed.
■ ■
I found out that Terry Hemmitt (that was his full name) had no father. That’s what people said. That’s what he said. Of course this wasn’t true. He had a father out there somewhere. He just wasn’t around. Ever. And his name was never mentioned in my hearing, either by Jackie or by Terry. There was a zone around that name, a force field, that he and Jackie had deliberately erected, which told you: Do not ask about this man.
That was what I felt when Jackie said: “It’s better than anything he’s got to offer.”
She didn’t just mean that I didn’t have anything better to offer than homework. She meant that I should not under any circumstances present myself as a substitute, a mentor, a big brother, a “male presence.” The warning also involved the admission that Terry would be vulnerable to wanting that.
■ ■
A journal entry dated Thursday, February 15, 2001. I’d just finished teaching Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find to the white kids at the nearby Catholic college, where I taught comp for ninety-two hundred dollars a year. I heard a high-pitched squabbling outside my house and found about twenty African American schoolchildren in a pushing, screaming mass across the street. Their bus was inching forward, as if the driver wanted to leave. When I walked down the steps from my house, he did, and I was alone with the fighting kids. “Hey, nigger, why don’t you stay out of this?” said a boy in a Packers parka, whose head came up to my elbow. “Just let them fight. Let them be.”
Two girls circled each other on the sidewalk. It was cold. The aggressor wore a white cotton T-shirt and was bare armed. The other girl wore a red coat with a floral pattern stitched onto it. My lecture on O’Connor’s story had focused on the white family’s lack of curiosity and empathy. I had no real curiosity or empathy for these kids; I just wanted them to go away. But during my lecture, I’d angrily recalled Jackie’s claim that I had nothing to offer. As I approached, the girl in the white shirt pushed me away and then looked me up and down in a slow, deliberate manner as if she didn’t understand what species of being could be stupid enough to be standing in her path.
“All right, let’s go,” I said. “Get out of here. Break it up. No fighting on this street.” Even to my own ears, I sounded unconvincing.
“Hey,” the Packers kid said, plucking my sleeve. “Would you please step out of the way? Would you please step out of the way? Now I asked you three times nicely, would you please step out of the way.” There was the grave suggestion in his eyes that something horrible would happen to me if this incantation were disobeyed.
The aggressor in the white shirt taunted; the girl in red stood her ground with a blank stare. The mob egged them on: “What you waitin’ on? Hit that bitch!”
A fusillade of “motherfucker!” and “shit!”
Jackie Eason came out on her porch and said she was going to call the cops.
“Fuck the cops!” one kid said.
The cops came. Both girls were cuffed and arrested. I stepped away.
■ ■
Terry Hemmitt hadn’t been on that particular bus. But the fight—unreasoning, brutal, pointless—reminded me of the world he lived in when he wasn’t at Jackie’s place. Like those kids, he was in the Kansas City, Missouri, public school system. The KCMO public schools were a horrific wasteland because the white residents of our city had fled across the state line to Kansas during the battles over school desegregration in the 1960s and 1970s. In Kansas, which housed our newest suburbs, built expressly for these fleeing whites, there were no black residents. Thus nobody to bus. Thus higher property values.
Thus lower property values in the ne
ighborhoods they’d left behind, like the one where Terry and I lived. Lower tax revenues. Worse teachers. Failing schools.
■ ■
After that incident on the street, I started spending a bit more time with Terry. Part of this was vanity. A silent assertion that I wasn’t a total misfit. We went out to dinner occasionally. Royals games. I watched him play football. In his presence, I often felt like a much younger and smaller version of Terry was very cautiously protecting himself inside a fortress of good manners that he wasn’t sure was going to hold up. The kid who played those mournful scales on the trumpet was inside the fortress. He was appreciative that I’d come up to the ramparts for a visit, but he wasn’t coming out.
Fair enough. I still wasn’t going to play his friend or father. But I also wasn’t sure what I could offer, other than a lot of unsolicited advice. For instance, about girls.
“You dating anybody?” I asked one day.
“Not seriously. There’s one girl I’m kinda seeing. Doing stuff,” Terry said. He had a very pleased look in his eye when he said the words “doing stuff.”
“No,” I said.
“Whaddya mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean, I don’t care. You want to have sex with her, have sex with her. But you have to be very, very careful not to get stuck in anything.”
This was one of the times when Terry deployed his shy laugh, as if to remind me that he was now old enough to make a joke out of that last phrase.
“I know what I’m doing.”
“I do not doubt that,” I said. “Just so long as you are doing it with a condom. Right?”
Silence. The ramparts of the fortress whistled in the wind.
“You don’t think this matters? What about your future? And hers?” I was sputtering here, offering an incompetent version of a talk that my father had once incompetently given to me. “What about college? You ever think about that? Your grades are good. Football. Music. Extracurriculars—”
Terry also found this phrase, “extracurriculars,” to be funny. But I could also see that he was curious about college. A bright brown eye peeked at me through the ramparts.
“I am serious about this, man,” I insisted.
“Maybe you are.”
“This college thing is no joke. You could totally go if you wanted to. The only thing that would prevent you would be getting in some kind of trouble between now and when you graduate. Some kind of responsibility that you might not be ready for yet.—”
“You mean like getting my girlfriend pregnant?”
Terry’s chipper, innocent expression was slightly exaggerated, as if to remind me that he had experience with the consequences of somebody getting pregnant when they weren’t prepared to take care of a child.
Like his mom, for instance. I always felt better when I saw this glint in his eyes.
“Okay,” I said. “So we’re on the same page?”
“Yeah. I heard about that page.”
■ ■
College. That was it. I wasn’t fit to be a father—I didn’t want to be a father—but I could be a college counselor. That was something I knew about. I gave Jackie my entire spiel. Terry was an A student. He’d recently gotten into Lincoln Academy, the best high school in the otherwise disastrous KCMO school system. He played football. He played trumpet. And he was a young African American male from the urban core. Sure, he’d been marked for a different destiny by his neighborhood, school district, and city. But the people who’d done the marking felt a very vague and distant sense of guilt about this. They were willing to do certain things to assuage this guilt, and one of those things was to allow pointy-headed academics at their universities to favor students like Terry.
“So he gets in, what then?” Jackie asked me. “I can’t pay for this.”
Which was true. “He can get a scholarship.”
I almost lost her here. Jackie’s face broke into a scowl. She handed back my sheaf of application requests. “He is not good enough at football for that.”
“An academic scholarship,” I said.
“For what?”
“For grades. For being a good student. And for being a good student while he was living here.” We were sitting on her porch and I nodded out at our neighborhood.
Jackie took a deep sigh and pulled the paperwork back, pursed her lips, and gave it another look. “You better be right,” she said.
■ ■
I’m not going to portray myself as being omnipresent in Terry’s life during these last few years of high school. I wasn’t. I had my own life. I published a book in the summer of 2001. I got fired from my adjunct teaching job. I got married in 2003. I was working hard to finish my second book. The book was late and I was terrified it wouldn’t be any good. But somehow during this time, his college application to the University of Kansas got turned in. Financial aid forms were filed. Personal essays written—that part I remember helping with, editing, though I have no actual memory of what they said.
And then, as I’d hoped, he got in. The University of Kansas offered him an academic scholarship and financial aid.
■ ■
I drove him up to Lawrence for a campus visit in late May.
“It’ll be great,” I said. “It’s really beautiful. The whole university is set up on a hill. Big limestone buildings. There’s a river. Allen Fieldhouse. You’re going to be a Jayhawk, man. You’re going to love it. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen.”
Terry was nervous. The bright, shy smile didn’t show up during these conversations. I chucked him on the shoulder. Maybe he felt bad about leaving Jackie.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You do not have to feel guilty about success.”
■ ■
The term “white privilege” wasn’t common yet in those days. Neither were the terms “institutional racism” or “structural racism.” I’m happy that these terms are in current use now. But as shorthand, they fail to convey the human feelings that Terry and I experienced when we drove forty minutes west of Kansas City to Lawrence, Kansas, for his campus visit to KU. As the son of a KU graduate, I’d always felt very comfortable in Lawrence. My father told stories about being in a fraternity there. We’d gone to basketball games together. My mother had a college friend who lived in Lawrence and I’d grown up visiting and playing at her house. As an adult, I’d taught at KU for a semester, and as a writer, I’d read at The Raven, the local bookshop.
That was what I brought with me as Terry and I exited I-70 and pulled into Lawrence. He’d been quiet on the ride out, so I thought I’d take him on a cruise down the main drag, Massachusetts Avenue. That street is like a postcard for the “college experience.” Filled with the kinds of things you’d imagine that college kids would like: hip record stores, coffee shops, pizza restaurants, artsy movie theaters, and bars, bars, and more bars. Crowded, too, with kids. I’d driven down it a hundred times and always loved it, always felt at home, but then, for the first time in my life, cruising down that block with Terry, it made me queasy and frightened. Nervous. Anxious. A sheen of sweat glossed my forehead, and I began to curse myself for my vast stupidity and blindness because, for the first time, with Terry riding beside me, I was looking at that street through his eyes. I was searching the sidewalks, and the bars, and the packs of laughing coeds, for somebody, anybody, who looked like him.
Maybe there were a few African American faces there. Surely there must have been. But my memory of driving down that street, and then up the hill onto campus, was of a vast, impenetrable sea of whiteness. Happy. Self-assured. But to me, right then, wanting to reassure Terry, terrifying and inane.
■ ■
Terry bravely went in for the campus interview that I’d set up for him, dressed in a pair of khakis and a collared shirt that he’d carefully picked out. I waited in the car, rehearsing things that I could say. It was a big school. Lots of stud
ents. There were African American student groups. African American frats. You didn’t have to get involved in, or even pay attention to, the white fraternities and sororities whose mansions we’d cruised past on our way in. Once he got assigned a dorm, he’d meet people on his hallway. He’d find his way into making friends. It would be scary, I understood it would be scary, but it was scary for everybody when they first went away to school.
He could always come back home and visit. It was a short drive away.
All of these things were true, in the narrow sense of the word. But none of them, on that particular day, felt true because they were in the shadow of a greater truth. There are a ton of KU graduates in Kansas City. They live in Johnson County, Kansas. This is a huge swath of Kansas City, just across the state line. A vast white republic that extends south from 55th Street clear to 160th Street and beyond. They are people who left the neighborhood where Terry and I lived. Their descendants are the kids whom we drove past that day as we silently left Lawrence and headed back to our part of the city.
■ ■
The process of reinscribing oneself, of covering over the destiny that our economic system has written on all of us, isn’t easy. Thomas Wolfe is credited with coining the phrase “You can’t go home again.” My version of that line would be “You can’t leave home if you try.” During the years I lived next to Terry, I always expected to be the one who left Kansas City. My writing was useful only if it served to get me out.
I’ve tried several times to leave, believe me. But I’m still here. Sometimes, I think, it’s because, no matter how openly I rebel against my past, the fact is that there are still benefits to being tattooed with the marks of a white son of privilege in Kansas City. These are diminishing and dying out. They aren’t the future. But they exist and are applied indiscriminately, even to the rebels, no matter how loudly they complain.
Terry, however, got out. It was painful, merciless, and hard, as all such operations have to be. But most important, it was his plan, his decision, his escape route—which is, of course, the only true path anyone can take. After his first semester at the University of Kansas, he gave me a call.
