The dreaded N-word has resurfaced lately as we discuss what has happened down on Rick Perry's hunting ranch some twenty years ago. For those who don’t already know, Rick Perry’s family leased a hunting ranch back in the 1980’s where the word nigger-there, I’ve said it--was painted on a rock at the entrance to the camp. It is not the first time that I or my family have had an encounter with that term in a very serious way.
I lived my adolescent life in the town of Vienna, Illinois. Back in the 1950’s, we had a small black population that lived south of the town in a small segregated community known in Vienna as Nigger Hill. I have no idea how long that they had lived down there but, even though Vienna was in a northern industrialized state, it was very southern in its attitudes toward blacks. My father had taken some blacks out of the state penitentiary through the years and employed them in his business as parolees. One of them even occasionally worked at our home on the side doing yard work and the like. I remember one day when this man was there and my mother asked him to come inside and eat at our table. We were white and he was black and he instinctively “knew his place” and sat on the back step outside in the summer heat to take his meal. The blacks in the community had a connection of sorts with white Vienna because they had a small white painted church on the south side of town that the members of Nigger Hill would walk across a bridge that helped to divide them from the town to attend church services there. They could not live in Vienna but they had a church there which was probably, in their minds anyway, a small way to be a part of the community on its own terms and to have a small slice of heaven for a few hours a week right here on earth. Religion and spirituality have always been a dynamic part of the black experience and, just perhaps, as they held their unique services, they thought that they might be helping some of their white friends on to eternity! I also remember visiting the county fair which was held at the fairgrounds in Vienna and being out at the racetrack barns one summer day while the fair was on. A large, gross, fat white man called a young black over to give him some money to get him some lemonade from one of the stands.
‘Boy! Come here and go get me something to drink! Yes sir! Right away sir! Came the reply!
In the summer of 1954, in the heat of the moment, the black man who had taken his supper on our black step, joined with another black man on a drunken spree which ended up with the rape of one white woman and the killing of her grandmother. Vienna was in an uproar about the whole thing as it probably should have been. After the two men were captured, some the members of what would later be called the greatest generation, some freshly back from the Korean war and all veterans of either that war or World War Two, and all white, gathered down at the local Veteran’s of Foreign Wars chapter on the south side of Vienna where they also got liquored up. They went across the bridge after passing the little white church and proceeded to burn down Nigger Hill and drive its long established inhabitants away from the town and the county at large. There were black children who experienced this event and, to this day, when I think of homelessness, helplessness and terror, I cannot help but think of all of them.
Some might read this piece and say that I am wrong to use the “N-word” in its total form but, when you have seen what I have seen at such an early age, you come away from that vision with a vision all your own of what is right and wrong that needs to be passed on in its total and unabridged form. We do not need to ever forget that blacks, despite what we might think of them today as welfare recipients and other forms of mainly right wing generated vitriol, are people who have had a very rough time of it in this nation that their distant ancestors never asked to be brought to, to start with. Still yet, they are among our oldest Americans and their roots go back far into American history. The “N-word” and “boy” and things such as “coon” are a part of both theirs and our heritage because we are the ones who have called them that. I use the collective “we” here because that it just what it really is. And, to think that these terms and the things, such as lynching’s, will not come back to this nation in the future is not to think at all. There is a segment of America, and it is apparently not so small, the does not like immigrants, Moslems, Mexicans and others who are not like themselves. To think that they really like black people is not to think at all. We remember the recent Glenn Beck gathering on the mall in Washington, D.C. when he had every black that agreed with him placed on supposed seats of honor right up front of a crown that was 99% white. If that is not segregation in its most blatant form we don’t know what is! These people thought that they had been placed in seats of honor, however, in reality, they had been singled out!
We write this piece because there are those in both the white and the black community who would like to shrug off the Rick Perry controversy and to place it in some sort of perspective in the distant past. To those who would like to do that we would ask them to remember the Huffington Post piece that states that Republican governors and their legislatures in a dozen states or so are, right now, passing laws and regulations that will disenfranchise an approximately five millions mainly minority voters in the face of the 2012 presidential elections. If they can do that, burnouts murders and lynching’s cannot be all that far off in our future as we retreat from an equality that may never have been that equal at all from the start. I am sixty two years old, and, I can remember. And, we all need to remember that these governors and these legislatures do this in their single minded attempt to defeat the first black person to sit in the seat of the presidency of the United States. Those, as the saying goes, who cannot remember and benefit from the past are destined to repeat it! As a friend told me a short while ago in reference to his uncle, a doctor who was one of the first into Auschwitz after its liberation, who, on his deathbed simply said that he had seen too much, I too may have, at a very early age, seen far, far, too much!
I write this lest we forget.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
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