A Nigger. Six Times.

In over half a century on this planet. Just six. To my face.

“So me, my uncle, my father and my brother would put on our orange suits and climb in the Cadillac.” The speaker was a roommate of mine, and eventual Best Man, Duane. The audience was a roomful of rapt listeners, listening to him describe just any ol’ Tuesday in Portland, Oregon where he hailed from.

“We drive around for a bit with the lights off. Then my uncle, and we let him do it because he was the best at it, would slow down with the lights off and I don’t know how he did it…he must have just sensed it…he’d SUDDENLY flip on the bright lights, stun the raccoon, and knock it unconscious with the car.”

He paused. For. Dramatic. Effect.

“Then we’d run out, throw them into our burlap sacks, toss them in the trunk and take them home to roast over the fireplace. Good meat! Good eats!”

There were tears in my eyes. Mostly because when I looked out at the sea of upturned faces I could see they bought it. Mostly everyone not from Portland bought it. And everyone who bought it was white.

So when people ask me why I don’t talk or write more about race I think about this story and wonder: how would it serve my purposes to try to explain to people, white people specifically, that you don’t need orange suits and a Cadillac to catch, cook and consume raccoons?

I get it. I’m a smart guy. Race seems to be a nettlesome problem. Maybe I might have a perspective that others might find useful.

I left and when questioned about my day I told my father what had happened with my new playmate. “Well, that’s probably because David’s father is in the Ku Klux Klan.”

Maybe I’d start off with the fact that I think race, as understood in America, is not about the state of, but more the process of…race. But after that all bets are off because America’s obsession with race is not about solutions. It’s about reifying a standard that no one has any real interest in changing.

So I don’t focus on the macro. I focus on the micro. Or QTAT. Stuff that, specifically, keeps me from making Quick Time Across Town. And interestingly enough Obama told Bruce Springsteen about being called a nigger on their new podcast. But you know, something about those two feels slightly out of time to me. Like they were on vacation and are just now coming back to the scene of some unspecified disaster and sort of forgetting that the rest of us were still here.

Anyway, the first time someone called me a nigger I laughed in her face. She was Black as well, which I said. To her face. She didn’t drop the “r” either. This was 1972. She was Panamanian and she put some spin on it: “You Black Niggers!” We were kids and she was an adult taking umbrage at us doing kid stuff. But we were like the Bowery Boys, just all Black, and we laughed at her. Until she went back in the house and let us be.

The fifth time? It was shouted from a person speeding by. I was in my 20s and laughed at him as well. The strength of his conviction was written all over him driving 55 miles per hour in a 25 mile an hour zone and spotting me over 100 yards away and feeling a need to offer commentary on the process of race in America.

Time number three was most notably when I was almost murdered by a mob enforcer, also a cugine, in a basement in Ridgewood, Queens…I needed to make it out of that basement alive.

Time number four was out in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn where a scant few years later Yusef Hawkins was shot under very similar circumstances. But it was a teenaged me against three cugines. Them with broken bottles, a crescent wrench, and a German Shepherd. The details of the night in question can be read HERE. Or in my book, Fight, Or Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Ass Kicking But Were Afraid You’d Get Your Ass Kicked for Asking. But there was very little laughter that night. Either when I was stomping one of the attackers into unconsciousness or later in the hospital when I was getting stitched up.

Time number three was most notably when I was almost murdered by a mob enforcer, also a cugine, in a basement in Ridgewood, Queens. The word itself and everything heaped in, on and around it was really much less of an issue then that I needed to make it out of that basement alive.

But I used to spend the summers with my father in Maryland when I was a kid. The first kid I made friends with there was named David. He picked me and we did some version of Tom Sawyer type stuff since to me Maryland was the country. I’d see other kids in the neighborhood but they stayed away from David, and me when I was with David.

One day at his house his mother was in a panic. “Your father’s home!”

We were playing down in his backyard and his mother’s panic was shared by David. I made nothing of it until his father’s angry face appeared in the upper window screaming something. I couldn’t hear what it was but David said, “I gotta go in now.”

I left and when questioned about my day I told my father what had happened with my new playmate. “Well, that’s probably because David’s father is in the Ku Klux Klan.”

So while I never played with David again, no one in that house ever called me a nigger.

The rest of my summers there were fairly uneventful. I was a welcome wrinkle to folks who spent all school year together and were generally happy/amused to have the kid with the heavy Brooklyn accent around again.

“Yo, Nigger.” Or maybe he said “Nigga”, I don’t distinguish and I also, as you may have noticed, don’t use “the n-word”…

“Let’s go play some ball.” Tommy Smallwood stood up on a slight incline with a basketball under his arm. I stood down below. I think I was having some nature moment like city kids have. Watching lizards or something. He was insistent. He pushed and I pulled back. Tommy had a great sense of humor and I’ve cut someone with a sense of humor some slack, but our relationship was also fraught.

“Nigger!” And he threw the ball at my head activating a series of events that started with me scrambling up the muddy hill after him, catching him, and then almost killing him. No basketball was played that day.

Later that day when I ran to greet my father as he got home from work, Tommy’s father, who had also been waiting, marched down the street and as I stood there next to my father he said, “I think we need to talk…”

“About…”

“Well, Tommy and Gene seem to be having a lot of problems and so I wonder if there’s something we might do about…”

“So, how is it my fault that your son’s a sissy?”

I was too shocked to laugh but years later, now the father of four myself, this has emerged as one of the most amazing things I’ve ever heard a father say to another father, and miles beyond “boys will be boys”.

Tommy’s father turned on his heels and made his way back up the street. Tommy and I played together nicely after that. Our fathers never spoke again.

And the last time someone called me a nigger was in San Francisco. The San Francisco Giants were playing a game. People were flooding in, I was walking away through the crowds. I saw him, this white cat, across the street as the light changed.

He was in full-on Eminem mode. Pants sagging, baseball cap at a rakish angle, he bopped across the street, all 5’9”, 165 pounds of him, oversized down jacket swirling around his waist. I watched him as we walked toward each other. I smirked while I watched him and when he was about eight feet away…“Yo, Nigger.”

Or maybe he said “Nigga”, I don’t distinguish and I also, as you may have noticed, don’t use “the n-word”, though I’m ok with everyone else doing it.

“Yo, Nigger.”

I didn’t stop smirking. I didn’t stop walking. I stared at him, silent, and in three feet he was nothing but a memory to me until now. See, I was making quick time across town. I had some place to be.