by Mac Pope
Jack Amos and the others were scorching mad at Slime, cursing and punching at him. When I came in, Jack actually included me: “You’re gonna want to put some bumps on this bag of dirt too, roomie!” he said.
He threw Slime onto the floor, in front of M’dad and kicked him. “You listen to me!” he shouted, “you say to Mr. Leroy’s face the lying crap you said about him or you’ll never leave this room walking.”
Slime seemed irritated but not afraid as he faced M’dad. M’dad looked curious and a little amused.
“I said what I saw because I know what I see, I have agent instincts that I use to listen and watch.”
Jack Amos kicked him again. “Do what I told you!” he said.
“What I said was this,” Slime said, staring at M’dad, “there was this big fight in the gym over some downtown girl. It started in the shower room, the two muscular guys had about equal power and after a while, they were sliding naked on the tile floor tied up in a beefy knot with each other’s head in an armpit, arms, legs, and bodies wrenched; looked like a pile of oily meat. Lot of men got disgusted and left but I had professional interest in the ones who stayed. One guy I always suspected was there staring and I made note to call him in. But then I was surprised, shocked to see Mr. Leroy still there, not only watching, but his face had turned beet red and he was breathing heavy—sure signs.”
“Sure signs that you are a liar and a fag!” Jack said. He hauled Slime up by his collar so M’dad could hit him. “Crack his face, boss!”
“Screw that,” he said, “listen, to me, everybody looks good,” he shrugged, “I am wot I am,” he said that in Popeye’s voice, so, as shocked as they were, people chuckled.
The room went dead silent; nobody could even look at each other.
“Boss!” Jack Amos finally yelled out in frustration. He suddenly threw Slime to the floor face down, jumped his bones and started humping him like crazy, yelling, “This is what we think of your kind!”
After three minutes, Mackie, who knew Jack cheated on him at poker but never confronted the big guy saw his chance and dived onto Jack, humping him angrily, two others thought the pile looked hilarious and dived on. M’dad glanced at me, shrugged and went on the pile.I had never thought I’d ever touch M’dad; he’d been a ‘buddy,’ but his ‘confession’ pissed me off and I saw payback there in front of me. I topped the pile and instantly discovered M’dad’s body temperature was at least twenty degrees higher than most humans, felt like the hot blankets medics put on patients before surgery.
After a while, the men let go of each other and rolled around on the floor laughing, calling each other ‘fags,’ nobody got aroused so everything was OK… even Slime seemed content to be part of a group for the first time. Like me.
Jack warned Slime that he was not to call in dirt on Leroy or somebody in the room would call in anonymous leads on Slime—at a gay orgy. He heard.
Afterwards left alone in our room, I had to ask, “Well, how come you never said?”
“You’re from New York, you’d cut me off,” he said. “Besides it’s like a purple splotch on your back—you keep it covered and get on with your life…”
Then I asked: “Did your dad ever know?”
He drew his lips into a straight line and looked past me.
“M’dad was drinking corn liquor with some buddies out back of the house, I was around the corner when I heard him say: ’I know my Lord, friends; and if ever a son of mine showed the signs of Sodom, I would take my boy and my rifle into the woods and come home with my rifle and a broken heart, it is the Lord’s holy will…”
I thought for a few minutes, then I said, “Screw your dad!”
He went stiff with anger-shock, then slowly let it go, said, “Yeah, guess nobody’s perfect.”
We talked awhile, later he went to take a shower and to go get his pillows.
Blacks Upon Our Village Green
1970
My wife and our young son came with me when I reported in at the US Air Force unit on the RAF airbase at Upper Heyford, England. We were warned: base housing had a long waiting list and local housing had few rentals available. “Best to leave family at home,” we were told.
However, my wife had a history; she was from Liberia, West Africa, and the daughter of a patrician family there who’d sent her to Farrington’s, an elite English boarding school. She was also niece of the Liberian ambassador to Britain. Some of her friends arranged for us to lease their deceased parents’ house in Freeland, a country village outside Oxford.
I journeyed out, following a map to see the place, passing storybook cottages neat with bright front gardens and cobblestone walkways; there were medieval churches wreathed in ivy and Inns and taverns out of old movie sets. I saw soccer and cricket fields, part of the lush greenery of the land. There was a manor house with a maze made of manicured high hedges and a fountain in its front.
I found the houses: 2 Church View, Freeland, Oxon, it was in a recent development of fine single story homes fronted with rich beige Cotswold stone under slate roofs. Wide windows overlooked sculpted hedges and bursts of hollyhocks, daisies, and flowered bushes.
I went past the waist-high garden gate and approached the open front door of that well-furnished house that I viewed from the windows. It was supposed to be unoccupied, but I could hear a teapot whistling from within. I felt nervous, like an intruder; still I entered, passing through the living room and the dining room to the kitchen, calling out, “Hello,” and glad I wasn’t in Mississippi. Through the back window I saw an old man entering the back door from a glass and wood greenhouse. Me, being black and in the house didn’t seem to surprise him; in a gruff accent he said that he was John, the gardener, that he’d stayed on to keep up the gardens until the new folk take over. He showed me the greenhouse stocked with orchid plants and the acre long back garden that looked like a painting; a winding path lined with bright ground plantings and white rocks leading to an arbor in a flowered circle. Deeply green grass everywhere had been cut and pressed with a hand pushed roller weight until hazy horizontal lines pleased the eye like the courtyard of an iron gated Oxford College.
We took the place, of course.
The British seemed goodly folk, but they didn’t know what to make of us blacks; we raised eyebrows and questions. In a land of class systems, my wife’s elite school accent made her welcome among the ladies of the ‘Young Wives Club’ (whose members’ average age was forty, since no one could ever ask anyone to leave), while my enlisted military status got cool reception on the elite left side of a public house where professionals and upper middle class couples met over fine wines, but I was at ease on the sawdust floored right side of the Pub where clerks, farm workers, and laborers, especially veteran members of the British Legion, enjoyed good English brown ales with me.
After seeing us in the street about three times, neighbors would lift their chins, nod their heads, pin on a smile, and say ‘good morning’ or ‘good day’ in passing. The English are reserved. Still, there were some who were naturally warm-hearted and made us welcome and a few who saw us as a conduit to the legendary low prices of the BX. There were two neighbors though, who glared at us like we were bugs in a clean kitchen.
The house consumed us. After I mastered the charcoal fireplace, we surrounded the fire-like primitives, especially when it was down to glowing embers at night. It was the main source of heat, but it also gave the room a moody beauty; the furnishings were Victorian reproductions, dark mahogany with silver handles, Turkish carpets covered the oak floors. The gardener stayed on; we were to touch nothing, mower, rake—nothing. I had tried to trim the only ragged-looking hedge in the yard and he stopped me dramatically, “That’s not hedge!” he said, “It’s Lavender—just before it blooms!” He went on to slowly explain what lavender is, “People use it for scent,” he said, “folk stuff it between pages of Bibles and books…”
I pretended not to know, like I had no idea.
In the month we moved in, I was
involved in an accident. I needed to buy English stamps, so I drove to the post office which stood on a steep rise above the Oxford road. I parked my car on the down side of the parking spaces and was waiting in line inside when we all heard the crunch of metals outside. I knew it was me. Things had been going too well, I’d parked poorly, I thought, and caused a crash and they’d all turn on me as I went with the crowd outside to look. It was me; an ancient lorry; a truck was lodged back to back with my car. But the crowd made it clear that I was the victim. “Oh, it’s old Arthur again!” one man shouted. “Didn’t put the brake on? Both he and his damned Lorry’s too old and broken to be on the roads.”
A woman comforted me: “Don’t worry, he’s got the money to put your damage right,” she said, smiling.
Someone else said, “Aye, old bugger’s got a packet put by.”
Then I made a mistake: “I’ll have to call the police down to make a report,” I said.
The crowd froze. The smiling lady’s face went strange, and she said in a voice from a Hitchcock movie: “We don’t call up Old Nick round here, we never do…” Nodding heads backed her up, stared me down.
“But I’m US military,” I said, “and I need a report for my insurance to make repairs!”
“Old Arthur will get it done good as new, lad.” That was Old Arthur himself talking to me as he looked at my car’s scratches, the smell of ale about him was almost pleasing.
He kept his promise. I broke a military rule, but the incident became a little local legend and Old Arthur became for me a wise, funny friend afterwards. On our first Sunday after settling in Freeland, Oxon, we went across the main road to Mass at St. Mary the Virgin Anglican church. I went through a history fit entering the grounds under an ancient stone arch that read:
“IN MEMORY OF THE YOUNG MEN OF THIS VILLAGE CRUELLY TRANSPORTED FOR THEIR METHODIST FAITH, 1630.”
‘Transported’ had to have meant that they were bound and sent on ships to the American colonies to work as indentured servants, alongside slaves, until earning freedom after several decades. Of course, it also meant that many of their descendants went on to control corporations, manage banks, airlines, and inherit fortunes.
“So, all’s well that ends well?”
Inside the church, we were greeted by two parish ladies who said they were delighted to receive us products of missionary work among the masses in Africa. We let it go. Then one lady told us that Anglican services there would be far more complex and formal than the low masses we knew back home. She kindly sat with us to guide us through the High Mass. “There will be Latin,” she whispered. We awaited the procession, and we waited for about a half hour before a church warden bustled down the aisle advising that the pastor had overslept and was dressing quickly to come down. She was devastated.
“It wasn’t the first time,” she said, and to have happened with us there; “Rector must go before the board,” she said.
We tried to calm her; “This sometimes happens in the bush, as well,” I said.
My wife’s new friends who had sponsored her membership in the Young Wives club, honored her by bringing her along on a traditional walk. Like the others, she dressed in a cloth coat and tied a kerchief over her hair and carrying straw baskets on their arms, they trekked out to the low gate of the local manor house shrouded in acres of beautiful greenery with horse paddocks and landscaped fields. At an appointed hour, a servant of the Lord of the house came down to the gate bearing dozens of pheasant carcasses. The gentlemen looked on from above as the women were given pheasants they had killed in exchange for one penny. I was told that since medieval times, men who poached on the Noble’s lands were punished, but over the centuries, Squires who walked out shooting the birds on their lands rewarded honest commoners by handing out birds they didn’t need at the manor house for a penny apiece.
We were advised to hang the birds at our back door; that would slacken the bird’s muscles after several days in preparation for the roasting. The meal was kingly, it shamed turkey and chicken and duck; I understood and pittied the poachers. We dined by candlelight that night, on pheasant with a fine claret in our ‘bourgeois’ abode.
Two years later, when we had to move to housing on base, my wife visited Freeland and brought back two birds and hung them at our back door. Soon rumors of ‘witchcraft’ chilled the neighborhood, reaching all the way to the chaplain’s offices.
We took a trip to see Blenheim Palace, Churchill’s family home; I got lost driving to the estate and we saw a handwritten sign saying ‘Winston Churchill Monument’ pointing into what looked like a wide alley off the street. I thought it was a sham, but I drove in to see. We were amazed to see it was Churchill’s resting place, along with Lady Churchill, born, like me, in Brooklyn, New York.
While we walked in wonder, being told by the guide that Churchill rejected burial in the great palace for that common space, we heard the crowd take a dramatic intake of breath. We looked and saw that our little son David had crossed the velvet cord and was sitting on Churchill’s marble tomb. His expression said “What?” it said. “I was tired, and you didn’t care!”
Luckily, out of the silent crowd, a man said, “It’s good to see the old man get to serve some good purpose.”
People chuckled.
Someone else said, “At least he didn’t wet ’im down, eh?” Everyone guffawed. We left for the palace quickly with smiles behind us.
A few months later, our US Air Force base lost an aircraft, an F-16 jet crashed onto a pig farmer’s field. No one was injured—magically, the pilots ejected safely, the cockpit separated and landed in the space between two village houses; the aircraft body skidded across an open field just short of a great pig pen. I was selected to supervise the security detail to protect the site from news media, kids, and possibly, spies.After organizing postings and setting up a camp I went late at night with our lieutenant to the local pub to buy water, coffee, and staples.
No black man, no person with a deep tan even, had probably ever entered that remote pub. It looked as old as the Tower of London.
It was located near a luxury car plant’s headquarters and there were staff and executives in the house as well as news reporters from all over. No one seemed curious, everyone ignored me and the lieutenant with me, despite the uniforms, but the bartender whispered that he was running out of glasses because of the great number of people there because of us and the news we might have. The English are reserved but nosey; two reporters cornered me, they seemed cross that no high ranking US diplomat had come to apologize to the locals for the mishap. One burly columnist told me he had great sympathy for all that ‘my people’ suffered for generations at the hands of the white population of the US. “Trouble was,” he said, “England didn’t fill America from the top of the barrel.” I didn’t really want to hear all that, but he kept on.
“Were it not for your people’s survival, grit, and triumphs, US history would be about as interesting as the settling of Western Australia…”
The other man added, “You won’t see in your history books that before that Revolution we used to send Britain’s crooks, thieves, and harlots over to your side; after the war we had to ship them all the way to Australia.” I didn’t want to get in a confrontation about the country’s forebears, since I knew Britain also had filled the West Indies with slaves, nor did I want to stand there listening to bad-tempered talk from reporters who’d missed a big story.
Still, I remembered that Britain was the first nation to outlaw the slave trade worldwide and that they captured slavers boats on the high seas, including US ships, and repatriated the frightened captives.
But, only Americans should criticize America; we do it best. I figured it was time to leave.
I turned down their offer of a mug of beer, collected supplies, and hurried back to the pig farmer’s barn where our troops were camped out.
Back at home, I began to worry about our young son’s upbringing; by day he was attending grade school at the Oxford House
School in the city wearing his wooly-billed cap and crested jacket. His neighborhood playmates took up most of his time at home. One day, he came in from soccer play and shouted:
“Mummy, may I have a biscuit, please?”
It was my sad father duty to warn him that when we return to the US, he MUST say, “Mom, I wanna cookie!”
And, I caught myself using the subjunctive, for god’s sake, I once told my wife, “Had I known you were wearing a long dress to the restaurant I should have worn a jacket.”
Instead of “If I’d a known… I woulda’…” We were ‘Innocents Abroad…’
Racism was subtle sometimes: A neighbor had me over for tea and said he’d tell me a joke going around.
"Seems a prosperous Indian man buys a house next to an Englishman’s and tells him:
‘I’m better off than you!’
‘How so,’ says the Brit.
‘I have a fine house and a luxury car.’
‘But I have the similar house and an equally expensive car!’
‘Still, I am better off; I have thousands in the bank!’
‘There again, I have many thousands in the bank, why do you say you’re better off?’
“And the Indian man says, ‘I have no Indian next door lowering my home equity values!’”
Some say that before there were blacks, browns, and Asians in the mix, the Irish were a problem for urban England. They were reputed to be hot-tempered, sly, and zealots, even immoral at times. But with the coming of ‘others,’ they became home and family.
Most of the English, though, seemed to have no real patience for racism, or Empire memories.
Day by day, all races lived England’s way; speaking the British accents of their social class and working such jobs as bus drivers, policemen, lawyers, clerks, and Parliament members.
