A
few friends were discussing the N
word with me a day or so ago. It was an awful, disjointed and unproductive
conversation, but it left me thinking and trying to put something constructive
together about the subject.
by Charlie
Leck
The conversation
started this way. I was sitting around with a few guys I consider
sensitive, thoughtful and kind. We had been chatting about the movie 42.
I told them the little narrative that a white lady-friend of mine from Georgia
– a high school classmate -- had told me only a few days before.
“Charlie,” she
said, “it was so embarrassing. I went to the theater in Cairo with a black
neighbor-friend of mine. We both wanted to see 42, the story about
Jackie Robinson. Well, we lived so near it, why not go to a theater in the town
where he was born to see it. Oh, my, it was so embarrassing.”
My friend
actually turned bright red as she told me the story. She shook her head and
laughed nervously about it. I sat patiently, not wanting to break her train of
thought, and waited for her to continue.
“Well, that
Philadelphia manager,” she said, “was so terrible and he stood outside the
dugout there and kept shouting out that word. I felt so awful about that and I
was so embarrassed that I wanted to disappear down through the floor. Well, my
friend sat with me, you know, and there were other black people throughout the
theater. In fact, most of the people were black and I felt so terrible that I
just wanted to get out of there.”
I’d seen the
movie – a couple of times. I knew what she was talking about, but I wanted to
broaden our discussion and wanted to hear her say it. Don’t ask me why! I just
thought it would be important – you know, cleansing and more honest.
“You know what
I’m talking about,” she said. “You know! The N word. He just kept shouting it and it was so embarrassing.”
I remember
hearing the word as a child. There were times that my old man used it. He
didn’t seem mean-spirited about it. It was just a common vocabulary word that
he, from time to time, used – and that was almost always when a black man
wasn’t present to hear the word spoken.
“A nigger
stopped in yesterday afternoon,” my old man would say (or something like it),
“and wanted to buy a copy of the New York Times. They were all gone by that
time of the day – like they always are – and he looked so damned disappointed.
Imagine! The New York Times.”
My old man had
words for all kinds of people – wops,
kikes and spics. He never seemed to use the word pejoratively, you know. It
was just the way he was brought up talking. I remember occasionally seeing a
bit of a flinch in the eyes of some of the people to whom he was speaking when
he used this terminology.
Yet, even then –
at ten or eleven years old – I knew there was something wrong with the words
and that it just wasn’t right or proper to use them. I wished quietly that my
old man wouldn’t let them slip off his tongue so easily. I remember my brother
angrily chasing a guy down who had called his friend, Oliver Brown, a nigger – and with a really bad
intonation on the word. My brother caught the guy and gave him a number of
painful raps and smacks.
When I’d grown a
bit, at the age of 23, I was sitting in a colored
waiting-room at a railroad station in Mississippi. A white sheriff’s deputy
came into the room and looked at me and the three other white gentlemen with
whom I traveled.
“You don’t
belong in here,” the deputy said and I could hear the exclamation point in his
voice! “This here room is for our niggers.”
Now, there is
was and it was used differently than I’d ever heard it – with that possessive
article attached to it – our niggers.
Frankly, that made it sound far meaner and uglier than I’d ever heard the word.
It shook me to my core that day and I remember trembling as I looked over at
the angry and red-faced deputy. He grew angrier when the kind and brilliant older
man with whom I was traveling told him that we had no intentions or desire to
leave the waiting room – that “we prefer it here to the waiting room for white
folks.”
It was as if one
of us had spat upon him. He was shocked at our lack of decorum and manners – at
our total disrespect for the customs of his community. He told us we were
entering upon dangerous territory and we were doing so with a terrible attitude. Why, I
got the idea that he was regarding us as the least mannerly people he had ever
met. Yankees!
He threw a
warning out to us – one to which we should give serious consideration.
It was then – at
that moment – that I first heard of the disappearance of James Chaney and
Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.
“You don’t want
to end up like those boys, you know – those civil rights workers what
apparently disappeared in the dark of the night last evening. Why, they’ve sent
us alerts about them bein’ gone – missin’ – and it don’t sound right good about
them. If I was you fellas, I’d not only get out of this waitin’ room but I’d go
in there to the station master and buy yourselves tickets for the next train
travelin’ north through here. Our niggers
don’t need your help. They’re doin’ just fine here on their very ownselves.”
It was nearly
fifty years ago that I stood there, in that waiting-room, trembling, so I don’t
know the exact way he warned us – word for word; but I do remember it was a
very close to the way I’ve described it above.
It was the Philadelphia Phillies (baseball)
manager, Ben Chapman (played quite well by Alan Tudyk) who delivers the
shocking and hateful attack on Jackie Robinson that was depicted in the
marvelous movie we’re talking about here.
Freedom of
speech? Well yes and no! The Supreme Court explained that we really couldn’t
yell “fire” in a crowded theater when there was no fire.
Yet, my friend
had to sit there, next to her African-American companion, and hear it shouted
at her (as well as at Jackie Robinson) over and over and over again.
For you baseball
buffs, remember that it would be ten more years after that day playing the
Phillies before the team that played in the City
of Brotherly Love would put a black man on its roster – 1957. And, by that
time, Jackie Robinson would already have retired from the game.
Ben Chapman wore
on Jackie Robinson that day in Brooklyn; and the pain he inflicted by shouting
the word out, over and over again, was worse than a physical beating. He wasn’t
screaming out the N word. My lordsy,
no! He was shouting out nigger, nigger, nigger!
Of course, the
word ought to disappear from our vocabulary, but we must never let it disappear
from history; for it is a reminder of the fear, the hatred and the meanness
that can lurk in each one of us.
It is a word
that negates personhood and personalness. It objectifies and depersonalizes! It
defines one as an object that can be possessed, abused and misused at one’s
pleasure. It is one of the cruelest, vilest words ever spoken in America and it
shall forever be a part of our history.
I remember
sitting in the theater that afternoon, watching the extraordinary film, when
Tudyk began shouting the word out. Again and again he intoned it with such vile
hatred and dislike. It made me so edgy that I wanted to mute the theater’s
sound system.
As a boy, I
regarded Jackie Robinson as one of my heroes. My dad and my grandpa took me to
the remarkable old ball park in Brooklyn to see him play. He’d been playing a
few years when I first saw him and, by that time, he’d become a hero in the
eyes of all kids in general (white or black) and he was regarded as a man of
extreme stature and talent. And, he was his own man. He belonged to no one. He
had bright sparkling eyes and a chin that he proudly held high.
And you could
call him anything you wanted cause it wouldn’t matter; for whatever you called
him, he and we kids who loved him knew he was just good-old Jackie. He had done
something no other ballplayer in history had. He faced down hatred, bigotry and
racism and kicked them in the ass.
My favorite
scene in the movie (and I don’t have any idea if it is fact or fiction) took
place in Cincinnati and shows Pee Wee Reese, the Dodger shortstop and local
hero, walking all the way over to first base to stand with Jackie when the
Cincinnati fans had begun to boo and scream at Major League Baseball’s first
black player. Peewee put his arm around Robinson and just stood there until the
fans began to quiet down. Before going back to his position, he turned to
Jackie and said: “I think all of us on the team ought to wear number 42 and
then they wouldn’t know which one of us was you.” It was an extraordinary comment and it left me thinking.
Now, on one day
each year, every Major League player in baseball wears number 42 in honor of
the game’s first black big league player. There were so many black men before
Jackie who should have been allowed to play because they were clearly good
enough. It will forever be one of the great, shameful facts that the sport must
carry upon its shoulder.
When you hear
someone talking about the N word, let
the real word reverberate inside you, so you can feel and sense and taste its
awfulness – so that you can fully understand how awful and negative and hurtful
the word was and is.
The news in the
last few days about Riley Cooper’s drunken expressions at a Kenny Chesney
concert is a good example of how the world is changing and how the N word has become one of the most
embarrassing and shocking expletives that can come out of the human mouth when
used as a pejorative. Cooper, himself a modest celebrity as a wide receiver for
the Philadelphia Eagles football team, got far too intoxicated at the concert
and began a boastful rag that was caught by someone’s ever present cell phone
video recorder. Cooper embarrassed himself and his employer and now must suffer
the consequences as he tries to rebuild his relationship with his football
team, which includes many black players.
Yet,
I’m pleased when I hear black folks use the word among themselves. It’s a grand
and pleasing term when used properly and positively by them. Few whites have
earned the right to use the word in such a way, but African Americans can use
it in a distinctly different and friendly manner among themselves. Their usage
of the word actually mocks the term’s terrible history, by rendering it
incredibly endearing and flattering.
It was good
thing that four white guys sat around trying to understand the power of the N word and its history. The movie about
Jackie Robinson was a perfect sub-topic for the conversation.
I told my
friends how shocked I was to be sitting at a dinner-dance at my high school
reunion, only a few days before, when from across the table I heard one of my
classmates use this awful word in reference to our President. Using the word in
such a way went beyond political disagreement or difference. It showed
incredibly bad taste and it smacked of hatred of more than just the President,
but of a race of a people who are good and loyal Americans. I felt more than
embarrassment. A momentary sickness swept over me and I suggested to my wife
that I had to leave. She calmed me and I remained, but I withdrew as a
conversationalist for the rest of the evening – far too shaken to make any
contributions.
Barack Obama’s
presidency shows we’ve come a long, long way in dealing with racism in this
nation; however, incidents like the one involving the Philadelphia Eagle’s
football player and the comment at my evening dinner party show that that we
have a long, long way yet to go.
_________________________
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