It's 1970. I'm eight. It was me, Lemmy and Telford Mindingall; Rickie, Bun, and G’eg Jefferson, and Kevin and Barry Stephens out on Mrs. Stephens’ porch in Pontiac. We’d do this thing every day in the summertime, sometimes until the street lights came on.
Lemmy go, “You so black fireflies follow you around in the day time.”
Then Telford go, “You so black, you walk outside, the sun go back down.”
“Motherfucker, you so black you piss ink,” Ricky say.
Then me, the white kid, go:
“You got so many people sleepin’ in the same bed at your house, when you get up at night, you gots to put in a bookmark to keep your place.” That was my best.
Telford come back: “Ya head is nappy and ya bref stank.”
I go, “I went to Telford’s house and axed what’s for dinner. His mama say, see that roach on the wall? When he fall, we eat.”
They laugh. “Nigger, you crazy!” I get called nigger all the time. I never think about it. I just took it like I was one of them.
It wasn’t strange to me that all my friends—well, everybody in the neighborhood—was black and that we were the only white family. And we were crazy white: Scottish white. Practically all our teachers were black except my 3rd grade teacher, Mrs. Essig. But the Essigs didn’t live in Pontiac so I figured she and her family really didn’t count as being the other white people here.
We ate almost the same like the Mindingalls did: livers, hearts, brains, hocks, oatmeal. Mrs. Mindingall made chitlins and I guess my mom would have too if she learned how, but I was glad she didn’t.
The Mindingalls didn’t say grace the way we did, but that wasn’t especially weird either. They'd sit and bow their heads. We all had to stand for grace, men to the right of the head of the table and women to the left. My dad said that’s how it would be in the kingdom of heaven. He would know. He was an Episcopal priest. This was a great deal for us men because we could make faces at each other in the mirror. All mom and my sister got to look at was the yard. Then we sang the doxology: Praise God from whom all blessings flow, all six parts of the harmony with the amens and everything. Then we sang it again to the tune of Yankee Doodle. Then again to the tune of Hernando’s Hideaway. Then we sat and ate, all of us, even our pet squirrel Desireé who was named after a song by Frank Zappa and ate off of doll dishes.
The standing, singing grace; the division of sexes, the squirrel at the table: these things were strange to my friends, though, and they told me so: A squirrel? Damn.
What was really weird to me was when the whole family was at church where everybody was white and there was one old lady who always asked me, “Do y’all still live over on Franklin Boulevard?” I'd go yes. Then she always smiled real big and leaned down so close that I could smell her sour old lady breath, and she’d say, “Are you still the only drop of buttermilk in all those flies?”
When my friends weren't calling me nigger, they called me brother. What they meant was “Osmond brother”. Ricky came up with it during a bout of the dozens. “You about a Donny-Osmond-looking motherfucker.” Later that got shortened to, “You about a Osmond.”
Mrs. Stephens, Kevin and Barry's mom, looked out for me back then. She made sure I knew what fried green tomatoes were. She took me to the carnival with her family, bought me tickets to the rides when I was broke. She taught me shuffleboard in the park, and that putting onions on a burger helps when you have an anxious stomach. She took us all to see James Brown at Wisner Stadium. It didn't matter if I was too young to understand why the man on stage kept falling on his knees, or why that other man kept bringing him a blanket. She thought it would be good for me to be there.
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Now I’m in a tiki bar down at the ferry dock getting drunk with some racists. It’s forty years and two thousand miles away from Mrs. Stephens’ porch. Everyone in the tiki bar is waiting for their beloved Seattle Seahawks to get their asses kicked on Thursday night football. This is back before the Seahawks were good, back before we had a too-short black kid as quarterback who brought the Lombardi home.
The racists are all drinking the same kind of beer. They're having a private conversation about chinks and gooks and zipperheads. I’m drinking tequila and texting my wife. She’s a Filipina. “Goddammit I hate white people,” I say. “Have you walked past a mirror lately?” she texts back. “Caucasian please.”
Funny thing is on the way here I shared a ferry across from downtown with a different bunch of racists. Some white women were pushing the mileage on a racial joke: that there’s nothing white in White Center. It's a Laotian neighborhood to the south of us.
I lean in with a smile and say, “Pardon me ladies, do you know what’s white and ten inches long?”
They say, “I don’t know, what’s white and ten inches long?”
I say, “Nothing.”
They look at me like they got a whiff of spoiled meat. I don’t care. I want them to know they’ve been exposed. I want them to know that the white paint job is just camouflage.
This tiki bar can hold only about me and three racists and not much more. I’d be a bookmark if I wasn’t saving a seat for my wife.
All the TV announcers say the game is going to the Eagles. They say this while they show reruns of Marshawn Lynch making the longest touchdown run in post-season history. It’s their way of giving us hope.
The third guy down the bar looks like what an angry Santa would look like hungover while sitting on a boil. I ask him what he means by zipperhead.
“You know, gook – Asian,” he says.
“Oh Asian. Like my wife,” I say.
Things get real quiet.
The Seahawks blow their first series.
Angry Santa mutters: fuuuuuuck yooouuu.
“Hey man, just checking,” I say. “She’ll be here in a minute. Just wanted to know the lay of the land.”
Angry Santa says, “Why’n’t you check up on my ass?”
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My wife shows up at the racist bar just in time for the Seahawks to make a game-changing interception.
We all explode with joy. I put out a conciliatory hand to the racist sitting closest to me. He tells me his name is Jakob Singer. He looks at my wife. He is smitten by her and throws on his best manners. He tells me he’s a tank sergeant who finds bombs in Afghanistan for a living.
“Well,” I say, “welcome home.”
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Jakob’s telling me stories about bomb hunting while the Seahawks rack up touchdowns. He says they form two columns and head out into the desert, infantry with metal detectors in the front, tanks in the rear. Tanks drive over the bombs and the tracks get blown off. Then they spend the rest of the day sweating like hell while they put a new set on. It’s worse, he says, when you hear a whoomp at the head of the column. Then you have to walk up to the front with a bag and spend the rest of the day looking for body parts to put in it. I ask him how he got put on that shit detail. He says he volunteered. In May, he’s rotating back.
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The first time I came in contact with the military was in elementary school. Kevin and I got chased by a National Guardsman. This was at a time when somebody important was getting killed every couple of years: JFK in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965, King in April and RFK in June of the same year: 1968. Now they were shooting white kids at Kent State. It seemed like everybody was fair game. If the whole world was watching, the whole world didn’t give a shit.
There was a riot at Pontiac Central high school, two blocks from our house, in October 1970. My older brothers went there. I got bussed to Saint Fred’s. The riot started on a Monday. The Friday night previous, five kids got shot to death in the parking lot outside a football game. By each other? Maybe. By the cops? Also likely. No syndicated news service was reporting on it. But by Monday it was black kids versus the cops; black kids versus white kids; black kids versus the National Guard, black kids versus every goddamn body on Earth.
In their unimpeachable wisdom, the city imposed a daylight curfew. The school board obeyed without question and turned all us elementary and middle school kids loose at one o’clock in the afternoon. If we didn't go straight home, we’d be fugitives and felons in the eyes of the National Guard. We lost the Guardsman by hiding out in a dumpster until it got dark. Mom was hysterical when I finally got home. My older brothers didn’t get off so easy. My brother Greg hid out in the school basement until the tear gas got too thick. Then he climbed up to the roof and watched the riot from there. My brother Tom got his nose broken and came home with blood crusted on his face. When I asked him why anybody would want to break his nose, he said he didn’t fucking ask. Their friend Jimmy, a white kid, got it the worst of all of them. He got thrown out of a window by a whole bunch of kids who caught him hiding in a bathroom stall. They didn’t even open it first; just crashed him straight through the pane. He fell three stories and broke his pelvis when he landed on a dumpster. The damage was never undone. Jimmy walked like a pimp for the rest of his life.
For the next two days, my whole family watched out the living room window as armored personnel carriers rumbled up the street. Phalanxes of National Guardsmen followed them. Not one of the Guardsmen was black.
I knew the curfew was off when I saw Ricky, Lemmie, Bun, G’eg and Kevin walking down the street past my house. They were all looking at their shoes, heads bowed in that way men do when they share a common burden. I ran after them.
I shouted, “Yo niggers, wait up!”
They stopped, turned as one, and looked at me like I was about a dumb bastard; like I was about a Osmond.
After what seemed like half an hour, Kevin broke away from the rest of them, walked up to me, and play-punched me in the chest.
“Say, man,” he goes, “Why’n’t you kiss my black ass?”
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On the last evening in August, 1971, the cicadas were roaring. My friends and I were hanging out on my front lawn, looking for satellites in the night sky, talking about girls, doing nothing, sweating.
In the distance, we heard a whoomp. Then another whoomp and then more. The sky glowed red-yellow. G’eg, Ricky and Bun sat up, whispered something to each other, then ran off. Kevin said, “I’m going home.”
“Okay,” I go. “I’ll see you soon.”
Twelve days later, Robert E. Miles was arrested for destroying ten of our school buses with dynamite. He was the former Grand Dragon of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan and the leading Secretary of State candidate. Six other Klansmen got arrested along with him.
When I heard the news, I went over to Kevin’s house. Mrs. Stephens met me on the porch. Her whole demeanor had changed. She was the cold Mrs. Stephens, the stern Mrs. Stephens, the “you boys better stop messing around in there” Mrs. Stephens. She told me that he wasn't coming out, that I needed to go home, and that I need not come around anymore.
I don’t know why she didn’t want me coming around anymore, but I wasn’t about to ask. I figured that it was something I did. Or something I was. I never got to speak to her again.
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They opened the Pontiac High School swimming pool to the public in the summer of 1972. I guess it was PR. They wanted to make people feel like their property tax dollars were paying for something other than riots.
I was changing in the locker room when a kid came up to me and went, “What’s nineteen times nineteen?” I go, “I’m sorry?” He goes, “Nigger, I said what’s nineteen times nineteen?” I go, “I don’t know, damn.” He goes, “Kevin said you was real smart. You ain’t real smart.”
I hadn’t seen Kevin for over a year.
I hadn’t been called nigger in forever.
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The Seahawks win. Jakob and I are drunk. We’ve been telling hiking stories. We have bonded over our love of humping across the landscape with a ponderous burden. We both want to attempt Abraham’s Path, also known as the Masir Ibrahim. It's a four thousand year old trail that runs through Turkey, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel. It is recognized by three different faiths as sacred, and is the only width of ground in the whole war-torn region that anyone of any faith is allowed peaceful passage on at any time. I dismount my barstool after Jakob and I shake on a promise to walk the length of it when he comes back to the world.
Before I leave, Angry Santa pulls me aside. He gushes about how beautiful my wife is and heaps apologies on me. He tells me he’s not a real racist.
"You're not?” I say. “I am.”
“You are?” he says, and starts to laugh.
“Yeah,” I say, laughing with him. “I hate white people. Can’t you tell?”
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I shave at night after my wife has gone to bed. I tell her that I have to do this so I can colonize the sink. She says it figures: it’s in my blood.
I think about the racists at the tiki bar, curse myself for getting so friendly with them. I don't know why I piped up in the first place. What do I think I am, some kind of merit-badge minority because I grew up with black people and married a Filipina? What do I think I’m going to do, change something that hasn’t changed in forty years just by calling out some drunks? Nobody is going to follow me around a 7-11, wondering what I put in my pockets. No government is going to redline me and my family. No federally-insured bank is going to pull a fuckaround with my mortgage.
No one is going to shoot me in the head during a routine traffic stop when I reach for my seatbelt buckle.
I am about a goddamn Osmond.
I tried to find Kevin online. Turns out there are a lot of Kevin Stephens’ our age from Pontiac. I wonder whether he’s the Kevin Stephens who died in a hospital in Detroit at age 25. Or if he’s the Kevin Stephens whose last known whereabouts are Royal Oak and whose last known number looks like it was five years and ten burner phones ago. Or if he’s the Kevin Stephens who was, according to the police report, “jostled, slapped, shot in the leg, then shot through the head execution-style” at a house a few blocks from where we shot the dozens.
I’m shaving drunk. I nick my lip. For a minute I think, what if I just kept cutting? What would it change? Could I just keep cutting until all the white came off?