When I Grow Up

When I was a little girl, I used to lie in bed at night and wonder about a lot of things. I was one of those kids who daydreamed a lot. I thought a lot. I was trying to figure a lot of things out and one of those things was about race. So much didn’t make sense to me. 

I was a child during the Civil Rights struggles. I remember seeing those “White Only” and “Colored” signs. My grandparents lived in the South so I often had to travel down there to visit family. I loved it. The South, that is. I loved the weather and it was so beautiful down there. My family lived in Florida so I got the best of it, I thought.

I’ve lived in the South for a lot of my adult life and I still love it.

We took the bus sometimes, which was a lot of fun for a child.  It was a great trip from Illinois to Florida. There were a couple of times that weren’t fun though.

Once a racist bus driver made my Mom get off a bus in Ohio because she only had a bus ticket for herself, me and one of my brothers.

My other brother was only about 3 and he sat in our laps or in a seat if one was empty. They had told her in Chicago that she didn’t need one for him so she hadn’t bought one. He not only put us off the bus but he told the other driver for the bus we were going to transfer to that he shouldn’t let us on the bus.  She was trying to cheat Greyhound and it was up to him to make it right.

Actually, it was something meaner and nastier, but you get the drift.

So my poor Mom had to call someone back home and get them to wire her money for a ticket and we had to sit in Ohio for hours waiting for it to happen.

And then there was the time in Daytona Beach that my Mom and Aunt Bootsie got off the bus to get us some food.  They had to go to the “Colored” window to order it and could not sit in the restaurant like the white folks. They didn’t want us kids to have to deal with it so they left us on the bus and subjected themselves to the hatefulness they had left the South trying to avoid.

While they were getting the food, a white couple came and sat in our seats. When they asked them to move, they declared they didn’t have to. They were white and they could sit where they wanted. 

Wrong answer.

Mom and Bootsie were not the ones.

And, in fact, neither were the other white riders on the bus who all went after the two old rednecks.  When the bus driver came back, there was all kinds of yelling and cursing going on and when he realized what was what, he told the couple they had to get off the bus.  My family had been in those seats since Chicago and they couldn’t just sit where they wanted.

They called him a nigger lover among other things and wouldn’t get off the bus even though they had moved, so he called the police who came and told the couple they had to go. I recall that they didn’t threaten to arrest them, just told them to get off the bus, which they did.

I later wondered if it had been a black couple sitting where a white couple had been, if they would have been so nice about it. 

Other trips were on the train and in the car. I loved the car trips. I vaguely remember the ones when we couldn’t use the restrooms in the gas stations in the South where we bought gas.  Or we couldn’t eat in the restaurant we had seen billboards for because they didn’t serve black folks. On those trips, Mom cooked lots of food and we had coolers with stuff to drink and that big potty in the trunk so we could squat on the side of the road if we had to. Yeah. Fun, right?

But most trips we were able to go to restaurants and use bathrooms even if we got dirty looks.

But I remember seeing people getting hosed and beaten by cops and seeing them sic dogs on kids like me. I remember hearing that Dr. King had been assaulted in Chicago for protesting. I saw all this on television as I watched with my parents. I can’t even imagine how they must have felt.

I still think about the hate I saw on the faces of the people in Little Rock and Boston who didn’t want their children to go to school with children like me.

And I remember Selma and the March on Washington.

I cried a lot when I saw things like that. I didn’t understand.

Why did people hate people like me because of our skin? Why was that such a lightning rod? Why was it so bad?

It didn’t make any sense to me. It wasn’t like we were given a choice. We just grew up and one day somebody called us a nigger and we didn’t really know what that meant so we asked our parents.

They got that look, that crestfallen, pained look that meant they were going to have to explain all this to us so that we would be prepared to deal with it the rest of our lives.

They had to tell us that we couldn’t expect to do a lot of things or go to a lot of places and that many people just hated us. That word was something bad that they used for us and we would hear it all of our lives.

So we had to grow up knowing we could never trust everyone.  Some people just wanted to hurt us and we had to learn to avoid them. And I have to say that the police were some of those that we could not trust. I know that’s tough for white folks to understand but it’s true.

Ask any black man about his interactions with the police even if he is a fine upstanding citizen. He’s still suffered at the hands of an overzealous and often racist cop. They are NOT always the good guys.

My parents didn’t want us to grow up in a segregated area like they did.  They didn’t want us to be humiliated and despised like they had been so they moved up North so we wouldn’t have to face it. They thought we would have a better life living up North.

When it happened up North you could see how hurt they were. They didn’t want us to grow up in that kind of hate. They had wanted us to live in a better world.

They didn’t know that place only existed in Star Trek. I didn’t either till later on.

But when I lay in bed pondering all these things, I consoled myself by thinking things would get better with the passage of time. People would see that we weren’t bad or deserving of the hate and that we would all kind of get together and fight the hate and have a good life.

I had white friends and black friends and I thought we would all just have fun together. But some of my white friends said they had friends who didn’t like black people. Not many, but a few. And I had black friends who asked me why I had white friends. How could I hang out with crackers. Didn’t I know they hated us?

Wow.

I knew some of my white friends’ parents didn’t like them being friends with black kids. You know when you can’t go to their house but they came to yours. Or when their parents look at you like you grew a third eye when they saw you.

There were lots of little things and I still wondered about them as I grew up. It still didn’t make any sense to me. I knew we were all more like than a lot of people even thought about. I knew I wanted the same things they did. Why did they dislike me for that?

It just seemed so crazy to me. I wanted people to get along and learn to love each other. I knew that if we spent time together we learned that we were pretty much the same and that things could just be cool. I tried hard most of my life to get people to see that. But I had faith in the future and I really believed it would be better.

Now that I am older and wiser, I still lie in bed and wonder the same damn things. Instead of getting better, t seems to have gotten worse. Every day I go online to read numerous stories about people who confront people and call them names because they are different from them. They don’t want to live with them, go to school with them, go to church with them, party with them, date or marry them.

They hate people for being black.

For being Hispanic.

For being Asian.

For being gay.

For being bisexual.

For being transsexual.

For being a Muslim.

For not being Christian.

For being open minded.

For not being open minded.

For being Jewish.

You get the drift.

WHY???   WHY???  Why people???

Why are we still nursing all these hate?

Maybe we haven’t grown up yet. Maybe we never will. I don’t know.  I just know we only have 200 or so more years till Star Trek so we have work to do if we are going to have that brave and beautiful future like Gene Roddenberry saw for us all. We’ve fallen behind.

Way behind.

I don’t have the answers. I wish I did.

I just know I almost get sick these days reading all those articles about so much hate. I read what people post online and I want to weep. I don’t do it much anymore because it is just too painful for me.

I still want to hope. It’s getting harder but I want to believe that things will get better.

Somehow.

Somewhere.

Someday.