Readers and writers blog

What a week — the bailout passes, Sarah Palin debates, Wall Street loses more money, the baseball playoffs begin, O.J. is convicted — and yet. . .

What I’ll remember long after this week is a kid coming out of a diner.

You know, I got called a ‘nigger-lover’ once. It was nearly a half century ago, and it certainly wasn’t a badge of honor then. And even if it had been, I couldn’t have worn it in good conscience.

I was a young soldier at the Army Language School, sharing a cubicle in the barracks with a guy named Bill Thomas, a nice guy from the Chicago area who happened to be African-American, and we were studying on our cots one Friday night when a bunch of our classmates came back drunk from a local bar. One of them spotted me but not Bill and started haranguing me, and then out came the epithet. I was stunned, not just for me but for Bill. But he wasn’t. Years later, I described in my book, Adrift in America, how he reacted.

I wrote in other places in that book about my racial attitudes at the time. I’d have to sum them up as naive. I grew up in lily-white New Hampshire. In the 1950s, when the Supreme Court declared separate-but-equal schools illegal, our school had a debate and I took the segregation side, which I did without a stroke of conscience. It was just an exercise in forensics.

Bill was the first African-American I’d ever known, and we just fell in together. Never a second thought for me. It seemed absolutely natural, and I assumed it was the same for him. I was to learn it was not. Through his eyes, I saw how America really was. And as distressed as I was to see all this, I was even more crestfallen when I failed him.

I should have gone to see him in Germany when I was getting out of the Army, but I didn’t. Because when I talked to him on the phone beforehand, I learned that although he hated the Army as much as I did, he had decided to re-enlist for assignment in Europe because he could live there peaceably with the white woman who became his wife.

Whether I was dismayed or just plain angry that he was surrendering to racism, I just couldn’t face him, and I’ve always felt I abandoned him when he needed me. Since then, I’ve never been able to examine my own racial attitudes without a twinge of embarrassment.

This is where we come to the kid at the diner. My wife, Bonnie, and I were leaving from the lunch we usually have there with her parents after playing our Sunday music program at a local senior residence. Bonnie was just getting in the car when I saw the boy, barely a toddler, an African-American toddler, coming down the steps in front of his mother.

I’m supporting Barack Obama, not because he’s African-American but because he’s a Democrat whose views I share.

“Look at that kid,” I told Bonnie. “I wonder how many white people after this election is over, no matter what the outcome, will look at a kid like that and not see a future gangsta thug but. . .”

She finished the sentence: “. . .a president of the United States.”

This week’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapters 14 and 15 of Ann M. Pino’s novel Steal Tomorrow:

Chapter 14: Cassie is visited by two shadowy figures from a post-apocalyptic world in which only teenagers and children have survived a global virus. Her visitors, known generally as Thing One and Thing Two, have brought her the body of her friend Leila, killed by a gang of fundamentalist zealots called the Christian Soldiers.

Chapter 15: Cassie’s gang, the Regents, mount a counter strike that wipes out the Christian Soldiers. Filled with grief for Leila, Cassie also has to endure fears as the Regents return from battle that the boy she loves, Galahad, also has been a victim. When he finally turns up, he takes Cassie to his private lair and pledges himself to her. She moves in with him.

• Chapters 38 and 39 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring:

Chapter 38: After her sexual encounter with a stranger in a neighboring town, Tess finally tells someone — her gay friend Zeke — about dark secrets from her teenage years: She’d given up her virginity to her mother’s boss and continued to have sex with him, even though her mother knew — and used the knowledge to improve her benefits at work.

Chapter 39: Longing for Brian after their separation, Tess confronts more of her inner demons, slashing a painting that reminds her of her surrender to fear and crying tears for everyone she feels she has failed. But in the end, she feels ‘a something that (is) green and new inside me . . . just like spring.’

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top was taken by a photographer named Jeremy and shown on the web album site Picasa.