 |
 |
The word Nigger
I have been trying and trying to find a way to read from Faraway Places and not say the word “nigger.” I guess I could skip around and leave out sentences here and there, but that would be hedging, and if there’s one thing that Dangerous Writing is about, it is trying to get to the truth. The sad, sore, secret, hard truths that make us human beings.
I’m right now writing a book on Dangerous Writing and one of the things I’ve come up with is the fact that we are, all of us, in some way or another haunted. These days, we use psychological terms to express our hauntings. But when we come right down to it, isn’t an Oedipal complex, a very specific haunting by a mother and a father? Aren’t our phobias in a way ghosts that come to visit us when we’re too closed in, when we’re too high up, when we’re among too many people? When we deal with strong women in powerful positions? When we see two men kissing? Think about it. If we go to our deepest fear, isn’t the fear itself the effect of some trauma? Aren’t our learned behaviors in a sense old ghosts that won’t release their hold upon our psyches?
And our obsessions, our addictions and our compulsions? Can’t they be explained in terms of hauntings as well? The sex-obsessed are stuck in some dust devil that won’t set them free.
And addictions. My father’s father was Blackfoot, Idaho’s town drunk. My father never drank a drop of liquor in his life. But he was a dry drunk. And a mean one. And look at me, with a tab of MDA up my ass, my own bottle of Ethyl Chloride, my uppers and my downers—we simply called them disco drugs—wasn’t I cute stoned out of my mind walking into the hallowed hall of Studio 54.
And the compulsion to clean my house before I can write a single word onto a page or onto my computer, isn’t that some old distant call to establish order before I jump into the chaos of my uncharted pages?
Ancient ghosts constantly haunt us and our so called rational minds.
We, as a country, are also haunted. No doubt about it, ladies and gentlemen, The Homeland is Haunted. Our roots as a nation are bound up in slavery and the genocide of Native peoples, so much so that these are the very issues that still haunt us to this day.
I wrote Faraway Places twenty years ago. In 1988, I’m not sure I could have told you what my intention for writing this book was. I knew I wanted to address the racism of our country, but not in a broad abstract way; rather through my own story.
Several weeks ago, when Barack Obama gave his ground breaking speech about race relations in this country, his words to me were Balm in Gilead. Finally, one of our political leaders was actually talking about race. But the real beauty of Mr.Obama’s speech wasn’t only that he was talking about race, he was also showing us how to talk about race.
Mr. Obama talked about his mother, his preacher, his grandmother. He told the story of race in America by telling us his own personal story of the complex people in his life who had influenced him.
By talking about his experience as a man with a white mother and an African father, Barack Obama gave us all permission to talk about race and our experience of race. Permission to tell our stories.
Perhaps it is only mixed race people in our society who will be able to get away with this. I certainly hope not. The ghost of racism haunts every one of us. I don’t think you can grow up in America and not have racism touch you in some important way. It was only a few decades ago that the largest assembly of the Ku Klux Klan outside of the South was right here in Portland, Oregon.
Let me tell you how racism has haunted me. I was born in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1946. The only Black man I ever saw in my first twelve years was the guy in an old beat up International pickup who came to collect the baling wire that my father had discarded. This guy did not have a name. This guy was The Nigger.
In my first twelve years, I didn’t know any other name for African Americans. We had no television, and the only thing on the radio I’d heard referring to African Americans was “Negro” and then it was only linked with another word, so it was Negro Spiritual. Still I had no sense at all of the difference between the word “nigger” and the word “negro.” It wasn’t until I started as a Sophomore at Pocatello High School that I actually was in the same room with other black people. I think there were a total of five or six in a student body of four hundred.
In 1958, my family got a television set. I remember Mahalia Jackson singing The Star Spangled Banner for some event. It was about at that time, at the age of fourteen, that I started to get a sense of the cruel and hateful connotations to that word “nigger,” but I still used it, much the same way young men these day use the word “faggot.”
It wasn’t until I went to college and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy that I began to have any kind of real awareness.
There was one particular incident. While I was in attending Idaho State College, the college had invited a young black man named LeRoi Jones to be a guest lecturer. His name is now Amiri Baraka. That day sitting in the audience, experiencing LeRoi Jones’ bitter anger for America and the white establishment, did I first really internalize and become aware of my own racism. I was overwhelmed with shame.
White Man’s Guilt. I had it. Still have it. If we are to tell our own story honestly and with a clear voice, I have to say that I am still ashamed of the misery and pain that we as a nation have caused our black brothers and sisters.
But not only as we as a nation.
How about we as a family.
My family.
Let me tell you about my mother, my preacher, my grandmother.
Once when my mother and father came to visit I took them to the Grotto, a huge Catholic installation in honor of the Virgin on the way to the airport. I spent the day walking through the beautiful gardens with mom and dad, and kneeling and genuflecting and praying with them in the chapel. When we got in the car and were on our way home, I asked my mom what she had thought of the Grotto.
All she said was. “Where did all the Japs come from?”
My father often bragged of the night in his youth when he and his friend Urban abducted a Black man from one of the bars in Blackfoot, threw a gunny sack over his head, hog tied him, threw the man in the back of a pickup, and told the man that they were going to lynch him. They took him up in to the hills and beat him. My father always ended his story by laughing and telling us “how scared that nigger was.” Then he’d say, “Of course we let him go. But you should have seen him running around with that gunny sack still on him, running into trees. We laughed our asses off.”
Now you all might think this is a novelist’s desire to spin a good yarn, but I promise you that every part of the stories I just told you is true.
Yet, when I told my father I was gay and that I had AIDS, I don’t think it ever crossed his mind to disown me.
Yet it was only just before my father died that my sister told me my father didn’t believe I got AIDS from having sex with men. I got AIDS, my father believed, because in 1969, at my first chance to leave my hometown, I went three thousand miles away to Kenya. That’s where Tom got AIDS. When Tom was in the Peace Corps in Africa.
Black Africa—the place that embodied my father’s deepest fear.
I am haunted by my father’s racism. And my mother’s.
As they were haunted.
That’s the reason why I wrote Faraway Places. To expel some of these ghosts from my psyche.
And in order to tell the story of my family, the voice from out of that racist past, told from within that darkness, there was no other way but to use the very language of that darkness.
Purchase Faraway Places by Tom Spanbauer
