A Casualty of White Rage
The defenders of Western hegemony sense the encroachment and have already defined the possibility of imagining race without dominance" without hierarchy" as 'barbarism.'
Toni Morrison, "Home"
My father died from cancer in 1999. He picked cotton before he left Foreman, Arkansas, along with 1.4 million blacks who left the South during the 1940s. I don't know if he left by bus, train, or car, but he would have been in his twenties then. I used to have a photo of him in a sharp suit and tie, with a hat that made him look classy. He could have shared the screen with Bogart.
My father heads for Cleveland but ultimately arrives in Chicago where he met my mother. The two married. And divorced, months before I was born. When I'm eleven, he's back, already working as a beef boner at a meat factory on the southside.
Some years before, in his senior years, he was trying to learn Russian. I don't know why. It was something to do, something to learn, to exercise the mind. My father never struck me as an uneducated man, although I heard that he was good at sports. He loved sports, particularly baseball and football. He might have had ambitions to play as professional. I'll never know. But he certainly had dreams.
I remember a man who read the papers everyday. The Chicago Sun-Times, in particular. The Defender and Ebony. My generation would have called him politically conscious. For my father, you had to be conscious: there were white folks out there. White folks. Always white folks. Particularly on weekends when Johnny Walker Red encouraged him to speak his mind.
Had he not had strabismus, he would have fought in the war to defeat fascism in Europe. But my father, whether he knew it or not, was already familiar with fascism in the US, already its opponent, struggling to be free of it.
While reading White Rage, The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide, historian Carol Anderson's well-researched account of foundation rage in the US, I was thinking about my father. I was thinking about his anger, followed by hours of sitting in silence. I was terrified by it, too young to understand that, for the most part, he wanted to vent, and he couldn't do so with the white man who crushed his dreams.
He went to work, nevertheless, rarely missing a day. In the "freezer," moving his arms in that repetitive motion necessary to stab at the carcasses of beef, my father would have stood beside co-workers, friends, on the assembly line. His boss sat in the comfort of either a warm or an air conditioned office, ordering the black men in the freezer to pick up the pace. He needed the black men to keep his company viable and his family upward bound. He would never have asked these black men what they wanted. What were their aspirations.
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