In the 1950’s when I was a youngster in NYC….

In the 1950s when I was a youngster in NYC, I looked forward to the summers on my grandmother’s farm in very rural South Carolina. Before leaving the City, my mother would remind me to remember my place down there. Don’t upset the white folk she would tell me.
I remember one summer when my teenage cousin Verlean learned that the local white elementary school was finally enrolling colored. So I joined her, my aunt, and my little cousin Queenie as we drove to take advantage of such a golden opportunity. All were dressed to the T, like we were all going to church! I did not go into the building, but little Queenie and one or two of the elders came back to the car with long-drawn faces. The school told them to take Queenie to the local colored school for nothing had changed. The white school was not accepting applications from coloreds.

And then there was that South Carolina summer when the white Russell family boy (about my age) was at my grandmother’s farm. That was the closest I’d ever been to a Southern white. He invited me and an older black teenage friend of my grandmother’s sons to join him for lunch  up at his place. I jumped at the invitation! Up at the Russell place Jackie and I joined our teenage host in the large chicken pen outside the family’s home. Eventually he quietly went into the house came back with the lunch that Jackie and I were to consume in the midst of chicken poop, flies, and stench. Young Russell went into the house to lunch with his family. Surprised, I asked Jackie why Russell did that. Had he (Jackie) ever been inside the house? Jackie thought that that was an inappropriate question, telling me coloreds never entered the main house of whites like the Russell family. No, he never had any such expectations during the years that he worked for the family.

And I could go on with more such stories but will only tell you that even in NYC, I was reminded of my place and quietly accepted the fact that I would never be able to live in the nice neighborhoods my father and our family would drive through on Sunday afternoons like Riverside Drive or upstate New York or even Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey, where we were denied entry on one of those Sunday afternoons — my mother was livid as she and my father returned to the car after trying to purchase entry tickets.

Compared to today, American society back then was an harmonious society. Most colored who were in my life knew better than to rock the boat.

Even when my 9th grade junior high math teacher Mr. Cozza told my mother on parent-teacher night that we would be lucky if I graduated from high school and I should not expect to ever enter college because I did not respond well to his lessons on beginning algebra, even then we took Mr. Cozza’s advice as one more lesson in America’s inequality amidst the nation’s harmonious society. And we considered ourselves lucky for the harmony that rang in America’ North, compared to the tune that my southern cousins marched to.

“And were you among the marchers?” my dentist asked me last week. Without waiting for an answer, he asked: “What do they want?” Dr. Chen had been my dentist for at least a decade. I always enjoyed talking to him about jazz, a music we both love. He even told me a few minutes before asking me that question: “Miles Davis is the best musician this country has ever produced!” I did not see his question coming. “What do they want?” Isn’t it obvious that all we want is equality? Like bebop jazz, such a society can hardly expect to enjoy any conventional harmony. All I want is to enjoy the improvised, creative sounds. The beautiful music.

~Bill H