Bastards and addicts matter
My father was a rambunctious little boy. One time, when he was maybe seven years old, he was riding in the car with his father. They were sitting at a red light and Granddad was cursing out Dad, trying to get him to behave. Granddad didn’t notice that the light had changed. The man in the car behind them did notice. He honked his horn and yelled out, “Move your ass, you black bastard!”
This happened in Tucson, Arizona, in the early 1950s, and the man who was yelling was white. My black grandfather got out of his car and walked over to the yelling man’s car. He reached in through the window and removed the yelling man from his vehicle. Then granddad pulled out his pocket knife, put the blade against the yelling man’s throat and told him, “If I ever see you again, I will be the last thing you see.”
My grandfather then folded his knife, put it back in his pocket and walked back to his car, where my father was sitting obediently, in complete silence. My father still remembers looking over the back seat and seeing the man on his knees in the street, his mouth wide open but no longer yelling, as they drove away.
When my father told me this story, my mouth must have been just as wide open. I said to him, “I didn’t know your dad was such an aggressively proud black man!”
“He wasn’t!” my father replied, then laughed for a very long time. “My father was scared to death of white men! He wouldn’t even look one in the eye. He didn’t threaten him because he called him a black bastard! He did it because he called him a bastard.”
In other words, Granddad’s reaction wasn’t about race. It was about class.
My grandfather was born in 1890, the tenth child of a slave. He had a sixth-grade education, which, for a black man back then, was as rare as two Ivy League PhDs today. That education allowed my grandfather to leave the cotton fields of East Texas and get a well-paying job in Tucson. That job afforded him the opportunity to buy a car, a house for himself and his wife, and to raise a child. Through luck, perseverance, cleverness and sheer force of will, he managed to jump not only economic classes, but social classes. That’s no small feat today, but back then it was even harder. My grandfather was from an era when the situation of your birth genuinely mattered. If your parentage was called into question by, say, someone calling you a bastard in public, you could lose everything. No more job, no more house and car, no more wife and child. You went back to the cotton fields.
My grandfather knew that if you weren’t born into a socially favorable situation, society behaved as though it was your fault, as though you could choose the circumstances of your birth. And he knew that the lower class in America had been abandoned and was being punished by those in the higher classes. He was willing to literally face down deep-seated fears to rise above that abandonment and escape punishment. Somehow, he pulled it off. Like I said, he got lucky.
But class damnation doesn’t only affect the black sons of slaves. It’s not even necessarily deliberate. It knows no geographic boundaries and has not lessened with time. It exists right now, right here in Portland, Maine.
The most recent example is the proposal, in the budget of City Manager Jon Jennings, to close the city-run India Street Public Health Center. The center serves over 1,100 impoverished patients, including hundreds with HIV and drug addictions, and there’s no clear plan for how to transfer them to other clinics and service providers. This is supposedly being proposed as a cost-saving measure, but what it will likely cost are human lives.
At least four multi-million-dollar condo developments have either recently been built or are currently under construction within a few blocks of the India Street clinic. This makes the motivation to close it suspicious. I’m not saying anyone is trying to kill the poor. Not at all. It just doesn’t look like human lives are the priority. They need to be.
There are still many unanswered questions about the consequences of closing the clinic. Those questions need to be asked, and clearly answered, as the City Council debates and votes on the budget this month. I hope they keep all of us in mind when they do.
Samuel James is an internationally renowned bluesman and storyteller, as well as a locally known filmmaker. He lives in Portland and can be reached at racismsportland@gmail.com.
