SOME BLACK LIVES THAT MATTERED TO ME Over
the course of my eighty odd years, I have learned that people of every
race have equal access to God's gift of creative genius. And that all
are equally capable of great accomplishments, as well as great failings.
And I see no race that is intrinsically superior despite orations s
to the contrary made by various fuhrers pharaohs and fog merchants might
have proclaimed. The Bible says--”God is no respecter of persons.”
He sees all of us as equals just like Abe Lincoln says. All human blood
is red and all human hearts are capable of either good or evil. Skin
color is just a matter of pigmentation. But “us vs. them”
problem seems to be as old as Cane and Abel. After
I shipped out to New Mexico, I soon found myself back in San Antonio's
Randolph AFB hospital for an eye infection. About the second week I
was there they brought in a black airman named Will Wiggins on whom
they had operated for a detached retina. He had to lie stark still on
that bed for over a week to keep the retina from re-detaching. When
He finally was able to move around we got to be good friends and would
go down to the kitchen every evening to get free coke floats. He told
me about growing up on Chicago's south side and I taught him to spot
some of the constellations we could see from the court-yard of the hospital
at night. The Northern Cross was one. We went to a movie one night at
a theater he knew about. While we were sitting there, I began to feel
a strange sense of uneasiness, and looking around I realized that I
was the only white guy there. That was my first chilling dose of what
it feels like to be an outsider. David's 137th Psalm is worth
Googling. “How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?”The
KJV version is still the best. It
was the same feeling, I think, that Huck Finn had to deal with in Mark
Twain's great novel. in which Huck, teamed with the runaway slave, Jim,
on a raft for several days, realizes that Jim just might be just as
human and real as any normal white folks-- a man who loved his wife
and kids and was going to save up money to buy them back as soon a he
reached freedom. That was against everything Huck, whose dad,”Pap”
was as hate-filled a racist as a drunken white trash alcoholic could
become. Langston
Hughes wrote a short story about a homeless black man who knocked on
the door of a southern church parsonage hoping for some food and shelter
from the rain. He was soundly rejected by the pastor, and found himself
walking in the rain with Jesus at his side. He turns to Jesus and says,
“They won't let me in there.” “I know, my son,”
says Jesus. “They won't let me in there either.” My
daughter's in laws came from Jamaica. They are as cultured and well
educated as any family I've ever met. But when they make the trip from
Maryland down to their time share in Orlando Florida, they always take
the freeway strait through all those southern states on the way down.
They still considered it unsafe to stop or shop in any town along the
way. Jim
Crow is still alive and ill in parts of Dixie land, as the massacre
of Rev. Clement Pinckney's Bible study group so hideously attests. That
shooting was performed by a poor misguided kid who spent way too much
time listening to his bigoted elders. W.
H. Auden puts it graphically in his poem “Sept. 1st
1939,” on the eve of WWII. All
of us need love, acceptance, and forgiveness. Lacking these, very little
good will follow. Your
assignment? Read and if possible memorize William Blake's poem “Little
Black Boy.” Also read I Corinthians Chapter 13. Yup, that's the
one about Love. I regret now that I didn't make both of those required
reading in every class I ever taught.
Gene Pinkney For the
Daily News 7/7/
20 html
edit 8-12-2021
So where does all this racial bias come from? The little song from “South
Pacific” says it very well, “You've got to be taught to
be afraid? Of people whose skin is a different shade/. . . Before you
are six or seven of eight/ To Hate all the people you relatives hate/
You've got to be carefully taught.”
I started out pretty innocent personally, being raised in lily white
North Dakota, I never saw a black person until a group of gospel singers
from Russ College visited the Fairmount Methodist Church and put on
an absolutely soul-stirring concert, so good that, as a little kid,
I thought black people were somewhat super human. And I had heroes among
them too: Jackie Robinson, Archie Moore, Floyd Patterson, Bill Russel
all seemed well worthy of emulation, and in music I still believe nobody
could sing jazz ballads better than Nat King Cole. Frank Sinatra felt
that way too.
It was in the air force that I got my first bitter taste of the racial
bile. I became friends with some really likeable black airmen, Leon
Goolsby and Willy Perrier with whom I used to do some combo singing
of the great do wop hits they brought with them from the big cities:
Tunes like “Ruby Ruby-- “I got a gal and Ruby is her name/
She don't love me but I love her just the same” and “In
the still of the night” and “Two Silhouettes On the Shade”.
I thought we sounded pretty good; but not to the two southern boys on
the other side of the barracks aisle. They gave me stares of pure hatred.
And I heard the “n--- lover” epithet for the first time.
It began to dawn on me that some of the guys in our flight were still
smarting from the Civil War.. That was chilling. No doubt they'd never
read Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural Address which speaks of binding
up the nation's wounds “With malice toward none and charity for
all.” Charity is “King James English for love. Lincoln wrote
everything in that beautiful style because he grew up with only that
Bible to read.
Reading the great black writers like Alice Walker, Langston Hughes,
Ralph Ellison, or Maya Angelou, to name but a few, one finally begins
to get some idea of what a hell it must be to be “a stranger in
a strange land.” But I doubt most of us lucky enough to be “accepted
in the beloved.” will ever fully understand.
So what is the answer? The same
old answer that has been there since Calvary.
“We must love one another or die.”
