Double Play

Bobby

When I was a small boy and we still lived in Springfield my mother would disapprove of my behavior by saying it was as if I lived on Columbus Avenue, which was, in those days, a Negro neighborhood.

I knew that a white fighter named Billy Conn almost beat Joe Louis at the Polo Grounds until he got careless in the thirteenth round. All of us rooted along with the rest of America, or almost the rest, that a white fighter would beat Louis (as long as it wasn’t Schmeling). Conn was the closest we got. Lou Nova failed, and Buddy Baer, and Two Ton Tony Galento. I knew that there was a race riot in Detroit in 1943 and President Roosevelt had to send in army troops. I was never clear how it worked in the war, but I was pretty sure Negroes and whites didn’t serve in the same units.

I knew that my father would give me a nickel, every Saturday, and I would go up to Wolfe’s drugstore on the corner of my street and buy five licorice candies called nigger babies. I knew that the Brazil nuts in the nut mix my mother put out at Christmas were called nigger toes. I knew that there was a high lawn weed, which when it went to seed was called a nigger head. If something was brightly shined my mother would describe it as “shining like a nigger’s heel.” People who spent money foolishly on ostentation were nigger rich.

In my childhood that was what I knew of black people. I had no personal contact. There were none at school. Until we moved to New Bedford, I don’t think I ever met a black person. I don’t remember my father ever working with a black person. To my knowledge my mother never knew one. Black racism was, thus, a kind of abstraction. One knew it was coarse to call someone a nigger. Impolite. But one didn’t worry that they’d move into the neighborhood. It was unthinkable. And no one, in my memory, ever thought about it.

The more immediate threat was Jewish. They could often pass, if one wasn’t alert. In 1944 when my father was transferred to New Bedford they sold their Springfield home to a gentile for $500 less than they had been offered by a Jew. My father had no comment on that. My mother explained that selling to a Jew would betray our neighbors. On the other hand, our family doctor was my father’s friend Sam Feldman. I found this unsettling.

In fact, long before I should have, long before I had any information to the contrary, I was suspicious of judgments based on race. I do not know why this was. When we were just barely postpubescent my friends and I, who had never had sex with anyone, and were years away from doing so, would discuss very seriously whether one of us would have sex with a good-looking Negress. Lena Horne was our most frequent example. I always insisted I would. Some of that insistence was merely an honest appraisal of my feverish hormonality. But there was also a sense that to do otherwise, for racial reasons, would be wrong. Embarrassingly that is, to my memory, my first public position on racial equality. The question of whether Lena Horne would have wanted sex with any of us was never considered.

Later I would read Kingsblood Royal, and watch Home of the Brave and find my suspicions about racial attitudes confirmed. But the suspicions existed prior. Perhaps I simply exemplified a happy quirk of nobility. It would be pretty to think so. On the other hand, years past childhood, as an adult, in psychotherapy, I discovered that I was able to keep my most aggressive impulses in check because I identified with the object of my own aggression. I identified with the victim. Maybe that had something to do with it, too.