海角大神

鈥淚 was in seventh grade when my parents took me to St. Augustine, Florida,鈥� recounts my 87-year-old neighbor, Ann. 鈥淲e stopped at a park, and I went to a fountain to get a drink of water. My dad said, 鈥榊ou can鈥檛 drink out of that one,鈥� and I said, 鈥榃hat?鈥� He said, 鈥楽ee the sign. ... It says Blacks only.鈥� I asked why. He said, 鈥楾hat鈥檚 just how it is.鈥� All of a sudden, I became aware that Black and white people weren鈥檛 equal 鈥� at least not in St. Augustine.鈥�

Listening to Ann鈥檚 story caused me to pause. I needed to process what I had just heard, even though I had asked to hear it. As a 66-year-old Black woman, I had always heard the segregated water fountain story from the opposite direction. It had never occurred to me that a white girl could be denied a drink of water because she was white and the fountain was for 鈥渃olored people.鈥� What else had we both been denied because of our race?

Race, racism, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, and a lot of other race-related terms lead our nation鈥檚 news cycles these days. And yet, to talk about race at the street level still makes us uncomfortable. Does it have to?

A few weeks back, I stopped by Ann鈥檚 so we could catch up on each other鈥檚 lives. We share a common wall in our condo complex, and it had been a while since we鈥檇 talked about our kids 鈥� or in her case, grandkids, and great-grandkids 鈥� COVID-19, and where to shop. Over the past year, we had discussed the George Floyd murder and the election results, and on Jan. 6, we were texting back and forth as we watched an insurrection unfold.

On this day, our conversation took a turn that would prove revelatory. Ann asked if I鈥檇 ever heard about 鈥渢hat thing that happened to Black people in Tulsa 100 years ago.鈥�

Yes, I had heard of the Tulsa race massacre. Ann replied that in all her years, even now that she鈥檚 become a news junkie, she had never heard about it. She told me she had called another neighbor, Petrea, and asked her if she had known about the Tulsa event before all the recent media attention. Petrea, age 75, had never heard about it either.

A lot of African American history goes untold, I said to Ann. African American history is an elective, not a requirement in most of the nation鈥檚 high schools. Many people, Black or white, who choose to study African American literature, history, or music get to make a deep dive into African American history only in college. And even then, the courses will need to be augmented with personal reading and research if you want to drill down and get to an event like the Tulsa travesty that was hidden from our national narrative for most of the past century.

More caught than taught

Our conversation turned to other subjects that day, but Ann鈥檚 curiosity about Tulsa gave rise to some questions of my own. I鈥檓 no scholar of Black history, but I wanted to know how much Black history my neighbors knew. I wondered what some of their earliest memories about race were. I wanted to know if they went to grade school and high school with Black children, whether their churches were integrated, and what was said around their dinner table about Black people.

I took a risk and asked Ann and Petrea if we could have a conversation about some of our childhood racial experiences. A few weeks ago, we sat down for what we had agreed would be an hourlong conversation 鈥� that lasted almost four.

I learned that our racial understanding of life was more caught than taught 鈥� like Ann鈥檚 St. Augustine experience. Ann and Petrea couldn鈥檛 recall a conversation with their parents about racial issues. I couldn鈥檛 remember my immigrant parents talking about race at the dinner table either. As a child, I thought about people鈥檚 differences not in terms of race, but money. I knew the white family my mother worked for as a maid had more money than we did. Ann knew the Black kids at her grade school lived on the other side of a busy street and were poor.

Petrea had gone to a country school in Nebraska, one of those one-room schoolhouses where children from kindergarten to eighth grade learn together. There were no Black people in her town, church, or school all the way through high school. In my 99% Black grade school, we called the white students who lived in the trailer park 鈥渨hite trash.鈥� Not my proudest memory.

Petrea grew up near an American Indian reservation and remembers her mother calling a man from there a 鈥渂lack buck.鈥� That was confusing to me at first, but I figured out that back then, being called Black was an insult, no matter the person鈥檚 racial background. I thought that, but I didn鈥檛 say it. On this day, we were listeners, not judges.

Ann told us that she didn鈥檛 know any professional Black people when she was growing up. I knew plenty of them 鈥� nurses, schoolteachers, business owners 鈥撀爓ho attended my childhood church. Petrea grew up reading Cosmopolitan; I read Ebony. Ann鈥檚 mother crocheted and so did mine.

From the personal to the political聽

As the hours flew by, our conversation moved away from our own lives to the broader issues of educational inequities, parenting, reparations, mass incarceration, housing discrimination, and whether I could have purchased a home in our community back in the 1980s. They believed I could; I wasn鈥檛 as sure. I had recently heard another neighbor describe restrictive covenants as if they were a good thing.聽

In all my years on the planet, I can鈥檛 say that I鈥檝e ever had a conversation like this. I can say it was not the big deal, off-limits, threatening conversation I had thought it would be. It was insightful, shamefully honest, and at times funny. We were never mean-spirited, malicious, or confrontational. We were just three people sharing some of our most enduring memories about our racial experiences.

Hearing their stories and sharing my own removed some of the fear that comes from a lack of knowledge and empathy. We had sought not to be understood, but to understand. And I, for one, could benefit from doing more of that.