[I had written offlist a short description of going to the movies in Lubock,TX with two California friends, one big Native American guy, the other a nice looking Lesbian woman. Somebody behind us was whispering stuff in the dark like `Is that a boy?'.. loud enough to be heard. Me and big L had to turn fully around and stare down whoever it was like we used to do in highschool. Everybody pretended not to look at us.]
Dennis Claxton wrote:
``I don't know if I told you before, but I grew up in Oklahoma. My mother still lives there. Last Thanksgiving my brother and his family and my daughter and I drove to my mother's from my brother's house in Albuquerque...
...My brother lives with a woman who has a daughter who's ten, same age as my daughter, from a previous relationship. The kid's father is black and her mother is white. My brother and this woman also have a baby together who was probably 18 months old at the time. So we're three adults, two kids, and a toddler.
We stopped in Amarillo to get something to eat. We' sit down and before long my brother changes seats and moves to the other end of the table. I didn't make anything of it at the time.
Turns out the table next to us was occupied by this cracker family who were shooting glances from the time we sat down. I didn't notice any of this but my brother's wife saw it from the get-go. Our neighbors didn't like the looks of this mixed-race kid.
This was right after the election and one of them said "They're getting awful bold before he even takes office.''
---------
Geeze Dennis,
This brings back memories. My father was born in Hobart, OK and my grandmother lived there after their homestead farm failed. Grandpa Grimes went to town and opened a barber shop. they had a tiny clapboard house on the outskirts. Across the dirt road was a field. My cousins were Billy Bob, Gerald Ray, and Martha Anna. My real name is Charlie Alfred. At dinner time, my old grandma used to stand on the porch and yell our names like that and say You'all come in now. God it was so sweet to hear that, and yet what a terrible place. It didn't matter we were from California. We were kin and that was enough.
And it was real food, hand made, from scratch. Pork maybe, over cooked, and sliced up, mash potatoes, thick gravy, over-cooked greens, a full plate. Biscuits and butter. It needed a lot of salt and peper and I liked my ice tea with heaps of sugar. Then outside to walk around or talk at dusk, the hot, dusty, orange-gray glow over the flat land. And then nightfall with the fire flys, the huge green insects buzzing at the porch light, and the sound of crickets, drumming in the dark. Playing cards on the porch. Then the cousins went home, cause my uncle showed up from his job at the flour factory, loaded us into a pick-up bed to stay over with Gerald Ray, who was my age. It was a double bed mattress and springs, linoleum floor and a sheet. Strip to our underwear and lay there talking with the window open. listening to the crickets.
This was real white trash, and it was beautiful...well to visit. I had just got back from living in Guadalajara. I felt the same wonderful warmth of family on Calle de Rayon, as I did in Hobart. If you added some cayanne, jalapenos, beans and rice instead of mash potatoes, tortillas and butter, for biscuits, and lemon aid or mixed fruit punch for ice tea, it might even be the same cuisine. Heavy, working family food, to last long hard days.
So back in the 1950s we took Route 66 from LA, just like the jazz song, and Grapes of Wrath. After about New Mexico, I ordered chicken fried steak dinner and poured A-1 or Henz-57 on everything. We went to all the weird roadside places along the way. Some of the bigger fruit stands. Filling stations with odd-ball collections, side trips to all sorts of strange places. But now I see we never went to any of the Indian (NA) stuff. That's because, I now realize my father was a deep bigot and Native Americans were worse than Negros, Mexicans or Chinese.
What a terrible sadness I feel for him. He was just a few years younger than Leo Strauss, and imagining Leo was my father, made all the difference in understanding Leo the man, rather Leo the philosopher.
Back in LA, my first little buddy friend was a Chinese kid who lived with his dad in a laundry across the street (So. Hoover and Figaroa). Danny was over at my place, we were playing something. Me and Danny were not allowed to cross Hover by ourselves, so when my Dad arrived that Saturday to pick me up, I asked him to take Danny across the street, explaining the rules. My father looked angry. Then we got in the car, and the son of a bitch pulled a full huey across Hoover against on coming traffic and slammed on the brakes in front of Henry's laundry. Danny jumped out, and I got in the front passenger side. My father didn't say a word, as we drove up to Hollywood where he lived, but I knew he was angry. I had no idea why.
It took me years to figure that scene out. I finally put it together, when my baby sister who was about nine started playing with a little girl on the corner. The family was Jewish. I used to play with her older brother, Mark. Mark's father came into Mark's room one day where we were building a model, and started talking about the Anti-semitism here and pointed out the back window. There was a Nazis flag in the next door neighbor's garage. I knew this guy next door. He was a great model builder. I had spent hours watching him work on his projects and all the while the swaskia was hanging over his work bench. I didn't know what it meant. I just thought is was some cool German stuff. Mark's father explained it. I never went to my favorite next door neighbor's work shop again.
All this stuff forms deep emotional themes in my life. [Added just now. I don't think most of the bigots of the world understand when they pass this bad stuff to their children, they are hurting their children and making it harder to get along...]
The US is a beautiful place. The US is a terrible place.
CG