racial segregation

TWELVE-YEAR-OLD IN ALABAMA

It was dreamtime:
Twelve years growing on the earth,
Limbs reaching, mind agape,
Vibrancy washing
My tablet in an alien terrain.

Hot confederate hues
Lifted the moss in its doldrums
Drooping from the oaks.
Days hung heavy as the air
While the bogmen wrote their lives
According to the rustic scriptures of history.

In this misty residue of time,
A black phantom scraped and bowed—
A deference I could not fathom.
Why did this ancient scribbler
Genuflect to me, the novice?

Out of history’s tomes
He shied and flitted,
Haunting my dreams.
His wrinkles wore the lines
Of many stained pages.

My skin was barely scratched,
Smooth parchment. Yet
His book bowed to mine.
The thesis: his vintage was naught
To my bare text.

Here’s a wonder in a world of dreams:
A wizened man bent to my skinny knees.

September 1983—revised June 2010


This poem was written shortly before I moved to the apartment on the bay.  It was published first in City Magic, 1987.

Even though I had been born in Alabama, I had been raised in the integrated USAF, so all my life I had had friends from a variety of ethnic groups.  Besides the two years in Japan, I had lived mostly in Western states like Arizona, California, Washington and Wyoming.  I had had Asian, African-American, and Latino friends.  Furthermore, my father, a born-again Christian, had told me all my life that every human being should be treated with kindness and affection because all were the children of God.  He backed up his words with his actions because he treated everyone the same despite being a conservative Republican.

When I was twelve, Dad retired from the military and went to college in Alabama.  My first encounter with a Southern black person occured when I went to the town square looking for the town library.  A black man of around fifty years was standing nearby, so I walked over to ask him where the library was.  He astonished me by bowing, calling me "Sir" and deferring to me as if I had some power over him.  Shocked, I told my parents what had happened when I returned home.  Mother said,  "Things are different in the South," and explained to me the situation in our town.

In my segregated classroom, the students were riled up that they would be forced to attend school with blacks.  The teacher, in her innocence, asked me, since I had lived in the North, to explain how it was there.  My first words were, "I didn't know there was a problem.  One of my best friends is black."  For the next few weeks, I got into plenty of fights, usually preceded by "Hey, nigger lover!"  Once the bigoted students had enough knocks from fighting me, they left me alone.  As an Air Force brat, I had learned that I had to prove myself in whatever new town I arrived, so I was used to a couple fights in September, but this was an extreme situation.

Any of you who don't understand that period of racial segregation could read any of these books: