May 01, 2005

Happy Black History Month

One of the things that I should say first is where I am coming from. I am almost 26 and live in a "white" suburb in northern Atlanta. Well, maybe I shouldn't say "white" suburb because my neighbors on either side are black. Well, the family on the right is West Indian, well one of them is, the other from New York. The woman across the street is also black, but the rest of my street is white I think although nobody really talks to anybody else. The two Hispanic guys across the street may or may not be gay, but I don't know because I haven't really gone over and introduced myself really. Of course right when we moved in we were shaking hands and meeting everybody in the neighborhood like Anthony (who is from New York and black and lives way up the street) but the people across the street weren't there then - the land was just a lot back then. The family on our left is black and she is divorced with a son. We don't know anything about anyone else in the neighborhood. We are all middle class and our parents are proud.

Also let it be said that I am from Macon which is a medium-sized city in Georgia that is about 50-60% black or at least that was my impression because that is how all the schools I went to laid out. Well, once I got up to high school. Elementary was more like 20% then Middle was like 70% then High School 50% then college 2%. Funny how that works sometimes. I understand the drop off from Elementary to Middle because the Elementary school that you go to is in your neighborhood and everybody seems to live with people who look like them. I remember when I got to Middle and High I met people from parts of town that I had never even driven past.

Our neighborhood had one black family and we only knew this because the son, who was about 9, was always in the front yard looking like he was going to run in front of a car at any moment - drawing attention just sitting on his steps staring at you. My parents live there still and there are a few more now, but it is still mostly 90-year old white women watching Oprah (now Ellen DeGeneres - funny how that works).

As additional background please note the following. When I got to high school I was in an "advanced" program that brought students from the whole country to one high school apart from normal jurisdictional rules. A lot of these kids were black but by the end of the four years only three were left and they were all women. I was friends with a couple of them early on and we used to play basketball together. We used an old neighbor's court up the street and the ball was always rolling down the hill into the Brannon's or else going over the fence on the other side into the McClure's yard. Neither of them seemed to mind at all except when I brought David and Greg over, and then Mrs. Brannon (who had one eye and went to our church by listening to it on the radio) complained to my Mom about the niggers killing her flowers with the basketball.

Everybody in the neighborhood was very nice to us since we were the only kids in the neighborhood other than that kid down the street trying to get himself killed by running into traffic. Halloween was the only time I realized that there weren't any other kids around - nobody was ready for us so we got apples and not-so-shiny nickels. The Glenns, our next-door neighbors on the right, were an old sweet couple. Mr. Glenn used to play minor league ball for years and like always we never knew what he did for a living before he retired. He seemed really happy and used to watch us from inside when we would play wiffle ball in the front yard. We never actually saw him but he just came right out and told me one day that he came from a big family and that he loved to watch us play and laugh outside his window. He must have been in a giving mood that day because he also told me that day about how much fun he had on his honeymoon trip driving down to Florida. He had never really driven that far before and his new bride and him had the windows down while they flew down the southern part of the state where there just isn't much of anything to see. As they were driving along they saw a young black man walking alone along the road and swerved to hit him just to see what he would do. They were coming up from behind him and aimed to narrowly miss him which they did, sending him jumping in the air. Mr. Glenn's eyes lit up at this part and told it over and over: "That nigger liked to have jumped out of his coon skin".

Happy Black History Month

May 1, 2005 03:32 AM