Black Man, White Woman: A Midnight Encounter at Lowell and Stanford
I don’t really spend too much time being fearful of crime. Sure, you have to expect bike thieves to be no more than 10 feet away at all times, armed with liquid nitrogen and a safecracker’s skill set, and lock up accordingly. Occasionally, you will lose a bike anyway, because the lions win some, and the hyenas win some too. It’s the way of things.
It is life on the food-and-bicycle-chain.
But aside from that, I am just not inclined to be too paranoid about going out at night, or about sketchy parts of town or whatever. No matter what they tell you on the news, if I’ve learned anything at all from the stuff I’ve been through ( – much, much stuff..much.) – it’s that most people aren’t out to get you. Most people are not thinking about robbing you, raping you, or even taking your parking place. So if I have to go somewhere at midnight or something, I just go. I don’t trip on footsteps behind me or someone walking on the other side of the street unless they give me a reason – there’s things that people who mean you harm will do that give themselves away. Everyone else is cool with me.
So I wasn’t really thinking about it when I was riding my bike someplace around midnight awhile ago, and a youngish black man hailed me from behind. “I just want to ask you one thing.”, he said.
Now, I have to admit I’m a sucker for that one. See, I’m kind of a know-it-all, and when people say that, I’m always thinking maybe they’ll ask me about my theory of sexual resonance, or if I think that a capitalist economy is inherently unfair. So I stopped, and turned around.
“Hi”, I said, “What’s up?”
As my cynical self had already surmised, he had indeed been about to try to chat me up in that way that is kinda predictable in these situations. However, something about my reaction had tripped him up, and he was plainly derailed. He looked at me funny for a minute while his conscious mind, formerly on autopilot, caught up. After a long moment, he said to me, “Wait a minute. You’re not afraid of me…”
“No, it didn’t seem like I should be.”, I replied. Hmmm, the back of my brain ventured. Some guys will see this as moderately insulting. Are you saying I’m not man enough to be scary?
“No offense or anything..”, I added hastily, in case he was like that. “Not that you aren’t, you know, tough or anything…you just didn’t feel like a bad person. You know?”
“You’re not afraid of me.”, he said again, to himself. He looked into my face, directly. “You’re different….you’re not like I thought you would be.”
I felt almost guilty for muffing the proscribed scenario, and throwing him into such an obvious state of nonplused.
“Yeah, I know.”, I said. “I can’t seem to help it. In fact, it causes me a lot of trouble.”
And we got to talking. I introduced myself, he introduced himself. We stood at that corner talking for a long time. (right next to the corner that my old friend D. always used to stand on when she was “working”, many years ago. I miss her.)
It turned out that we were roughly the same age. We both came up in the late 70’s; with bands like War and Tower of Power as killer examples of people just getting along together, like it was easy, like it was natural. Natural. Now that’s something else I miss – naturals! And dashikis, and stuff. People being as delighted with being African, and with things that made them feel African, as I am with being Italian, and feeling Italian. There’s a certain joy that comes when you really feel the sense of continuity with your forebears, going way back in time, that we are all entitled to, and you embrace that lineage, and your place in it. That joy was the thing that finally gave me a glimpse of what it is to belong, somewhere, undeniably.
But I digress. (you are not surprised.) My new friend spoke to me about himself, then. He told me he worked at a large attorney’s office in San Francisco. He said he felt weird, because he was one person when at work in the plush office, with his upwardly-mobile and genteel colleagues, and the rent-a-plants and progressive conversation; and then he would come home, to the hood, to Oakland, and he was a whole different guy. Had to be. At the office it was, like, all GQ and Tiger Woods: a black man accepted into the old boy network, as long as he didn’t, you know, make waves. Back at the pad, in the neighborhood where he grew up and where everyone knew him from way back, his pals were chilling with a blunt and a really, really loud stereo. And both of them were him, but not really, and there was just no way he could mix them at all, no way to reconcile the two of him. His friends just wouldn’t understand, neither set of them. It wasn’t his nature to be a gangsta rapper; and while he was quite at home in the boardrooms and highrises, that whole scene is pretty phony and elitist, and that didn’t feel right, either. And he didn’t understand why it had to be that way. He said whichever place he was in, “I can’t just be me, who I am.”
I knew exactly what he was talking about, and in his voice I heard a kind of painful confusion that I recognized instantly from having encountered it inside my own head about a million times. People in this world will put so much pressure on you to be how they think is right, and they will give you so much stress and shame for being some kind of way that you honestly can’t help. I mean, say you have never really had a solid connection with linear time as a primary motivating factor in the universe. Consequentially, you might once in a while miss the 8 am bus, and have to catch the 8:15. If you are the kind of person who just can’t experience that fifteen minutes as a great big deal, fraught with value judgements and political consequences, well… you are a bad person. That sort of thing reflects your lack of respect for our way of doing things. Blah blah blah. You can be their best employee, honest and hardworking, and people will fire your ass over fifteen minutes.
Or dishes. Some folks like to have them washed as soon as you put your fork down. (Didn’t their mother ever tell them to wait half an hour after they eat?) Others are a little more relaxed about the whole thing, and maybe do the dishes their next day. Hey, no harm done. It really doesn’t matter if they’re in the sink overnight. And it is not a moral issue! People who are standing on the front steps of their church will turn their noses up at you, and not get it at all.
So I said, “Damn, dude, that’s exactly where my head is at. I feel the same way, all the time. When we were coming up, everybody told us to just be ourselves, to keep it real, to try and be fair and treat each other kind, and we’d get a better world, and it would all be good. And now, you got to be all on your guard all the time, you’re supposed to not trust each other and it’s everybody for himself and shit. It’s hecka confusing. And sad.”
He seemed so relieved, so – well, vulnerable – in those long minutes that we stood talking together; like he’d been saving it up a long time, because these days there’s hardly anybody you can just rap to that really understands, and won’t take the opportunity to make fun of you or something if you open up even a little to them. He, like me, wondered what happened to the pretty cool world that it looked like it was shaping up to be when we came out of high school. It really did seem like bigotry was fading away, like everybody was really trying to participate in reshaping our world into something happier, and more fair, and more loving. More like you would want it to be. Why not? Who doesn’t want things a little better, for everyone?
And where did it go wrong? When did those lurkers in the shadows creep up, and take over, in a MUCH bigger way than ever? And fuck everything up beyond recognition? Somebody snatched it and switched it from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, to Animal Farm, or The Wall, or like that – where did our righteous little world go? We’ve been cheated, man. All of us.
I guess what he wanted to know was: What the hell is the point anymore? The youngsters coming up now dismiss us as obsolete, for being good-hearted and straightforward. Our parents’ generation still looks down on us because we’re not all uptight and straight like them. It looks like our nice smooth not-too-greedy, live-and-let-live, Cheech and Chong reality got detoured somewhere around Ronald Reagan and is still lost somewhere in the hinterlands of hate and greed and compulsive puritanical judgement.
About the only thing I know that means anything is something I read not too long ago. It was something like this: It may not be our destiny to ever see the fruits of our labors, or the end of the struggle. It may be that our part is only to hang on, and hold tight, and not let the dream die. We may be carrying the torch only so that we may pass it to our children, still burning with the fierce and beautiful flame in our hearts. And we may never see that sweet day, you know, the one you dream about at night sometimes, and you wake up smiling. But if we don’t forget it, and don’t let it go, then it won’t die. Then that sweet day will come. Whenever.
If that isn’t soon enough – well, there’s always…ummm…revolution?
There’s not much more to tell. My friend and I, we shook hands solemnly; he admonished me to “be careful out here” – and then we parted ways, and walked off into the night, bloody but unbowed.
“I know a place, I’ll take you there, ain’t nobody worried, ain’t nobody cryin’, ain’t no smiling faces.”
– -The Staple Singers
