In Their Place

The time was not long ago. Even if you were born after it curled into a ball in a corner of history, it still reaches for you. If it cannot touch you directly, it reaches you by touching those you know, or depend on or love.

With skinned knees and messy braids, I escaped this ugly time. But I sometimes hear it breathing behind me, insinuating that I belong to it. I do not. But I will never put it to rest. Only my children, and their children, can break free from it completely. Look at my white skin. It burns when I remember.

*****

As the civil rights movement heats up, Life magazine educates American readers on the torturous passage from slavery to the ghetto. I turn the pages of the article and the backs of my retinas recoil from the photographic images… are they real? White men have lined up to pose for the camera, holding shotguns on their shoulders. Proudly they display a black man on his knees, trussed to a yoke. He is dead. His skin is crackled, hanging in shreds. He has been burned alive. Like big game hunters with a kill, the men stare into the camera and smile proudly. This can’t be possible, I think. This lynching happened after the camera had been invented, not hundreds of years ago. I feel sick. The horrific image follows me into my nightmares.

*****

“How can you be in favor of integration?” the boyfriend of my best friend in high school demands to know. “They’re human beings,” I tell him. “They have a right to the same freedoms as every other American.” He shakes his head and stares at me with pitying eyes. “You are so ignorant,” he says. “Don’t you know that colored people aren’t human?”

*****

Now I am carpooling to work for my first job. We are discussing the number one topic of the day, school bussing as an antidote to de facto segregation. The driver this week is a man in his late thirties, the father of three small children. “I am not a bigot,” he insists. “I like colored people just fine, as long as they stay in their place.” I tell him that’s what everyone says who wants to cling to their prejudices without feeling guilty. “You might as well say that if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile,” I tell him. He is silent for a moment. “They will,” he says.

*****

My family sits transfixed in front of the television. Detroit is in flames. In a banner headline, today’s newspaper says simply, “Burn, Baby, Burn!”

“First Watts and now this,” my father says. “Where is this going to end?”

“But Dad,” I say, “maybe the only way they can get their rights is to demand them. Wouldn’t you feel like burning down the ghetto if you had to live in it because you’re white? Haven’t you always taught us that all people are the same beneath the color of their skin?”

My father looks worried. “Well, sure, we’re all equal,” he says. “But I don’t want them moving into our neighborhood.”

“What? Daddy, don’t you believe in brotherhood, like you always taught us?”

My father doesn’t meet my eyes as he says, “Yes, but I don’t want our property values to drop.”

*****

These ugly times, along with other events like witch-burnings and public hangings, seem far in the past, relics of eras we have since transcended. But I remember the ironic twist that propelled us into a more righteous future. After the fires burned out in Detroit and the embers stopped smoking and the politicians climbed down from their soapboxes, no one, ever again, said they liked colored people as long as they stayed in their place. But that doesn’t mean it’s safe to say, “Hallelujah!” The hate and fear and guilt of yesterday’s racism simmer in the dark corners of our collective subconscious.

Somebody turn on the lights.