How Are We Doing?

  When I was still in school, Port Arthur, Texas was still a segregated community. I had the occasion to see and interact with different groups of people through my father’s work as a police officer. He often brought me with him to work when he was a desk sergeant in the Port Arthur PD. On a Friday or Saturday night, what I saw and learned there left a lasting impression. I saw the public face of the police department, but I knew the private one. And the two were nowhere near the same. My own father was a very bigoted person. And at the time, I didn’t even know what that word meant. Please, don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t the only adult I knew of that was like that. And I just knew that the way he acted towards other racial groups publicly was nowhere even close to what he expressed to me in private.

  I must admit here, that as a youngster, I was very naïve about the world and how it works. I read all the time. And for me, the world should be like those fantasy worlds I read about. To discover that it wasn’t like that, was a shocker and an eye-opener to me. I was one of those kids that was always asking, “Why? or Why not?” In the science fiction books that I read, people came in all colors, shapes, and personalities. Science fiction asked you not to judge who were “people” and who wasn’t based on their looks at all. Instead, you were expected to judge them solely on their personalities and actions alone. They could be blue aliens or little green men, or even giant preying mantis type beings and still be “people” as long as they behaved in an acceptable manner.

  But Friday and Saturday nights at the police station, I saw that this wasn’t the case in the real world. For the life of me, I didn’t understand why not. The first opportunity I had to actually talk to and interact with a person with very much darker skin than my own, was when I was about ten-years-old. A black man, whom my father dealt with, owed him some money. To help pay off his debt, my father allowed the man’s wife to come and help with chores, including doing windows, around our house because my mom was pregnant yet again. I don’t remember the lady’s name now. But she was outside on a ladder washing the windows one day, and I was standing there watching her. My curious mind wanted to get to the bottom of why I wasn’t supposed to like her based on her skin color and nothing else.

  I was born with a fairly dark complexion. And during the long, hot Southeast Texas summers, I got very dark. The black lady on the ladder, finally noticed me standing there watching her. She smiled and said, “Boy, you better get out this hot sun before you get as black as me.” And then she laughed with a very genuine and friendly laugh that put me very much at ease.

  As I was very shy when I was young, I had problems talking to anyone. But for some reason, her laughter made my shyness go away. I told her that I didn’t care how dark I got and that it was like that every summer. I asked how come she was working on our house. And she explained to me what the situation was. I think I sat there talking to her for about thirty minutes before my dad came out and told me to go play and quit bothering her, so she could get her work done. Even though he never said it to me, I got the distinct impression that he didn’t approve of me talking to the woman at all. And again, I couldn’t understand why not. I thought the lady was nice and funny. I liked her. At that time in my life, I couldn’t say that about too many adults at all.

  From that day until my senior year in high school, I had no other interaction with anyone of color other than one of my best friends who was Hispanic. Back in those days, the Hispanic invasion of our southern border hadn’t happened yet. And the few Hispanics here, could probably trace their heritage back to before the Alamo. Even so, I saw first hand how some folks viewed even him when I heard them calling him “Spic” behind his back. Then in my Senior year, it happened. They mandatorily enforced “racial integration” of our schools. I remember, just before that school year started, everyone was bracing themselves for the violence that such a move might ignite. It had in many other parts of the country. I heard my friends and family members speak in hushed tones about how awful it was going to be, and how we all had to watch each other’s backs.

  Then the big day came when they bussed over approximately one hundred students from the black community into ours. It was obvious that everyone on both sides was uncomfortable with the situation at first. But nothing really happened because of it. No riots broke out. No fights. After a couple of weeks, it was just a bunch of kids trying to make it through the rigors of high school in one piece. My own experience during my senior year was that I made several new friends from the wrong side of the railroad tracks, and I got labeled a “n….r lover” by many of my white classmates. But in my case, I was always on the outside looking in. Hey, I was already the guy who hung around with the Hispanic guy, so I didn’t have much to lose. And my social standing could not have fallen any further down than it already was. So, it hardly phased me at all. But other than a few racial slurs, I have to say that our community handled the situation much better than some others elsewhere in the country were doing at the time.

  After graduation, I worked for a year at a job on Houston Avenue in downtown Port Arthur. I was the only white boy in a completely black neighborhood. And I have to say that I never felt threatened or discomforted because of my skin color in that part of town back then. I even walked several blocks through town every day to go to lunch at one of the neighborhood cafes (this old white boy loved him some soul food). No one ever bothered me.

  My next stop was Uncle Sam’s Army. There they pounded it into our heads that Uncle Sam’s Army only recognized one color and that was OD Green. I had a friend in basic training who was black and had a PHD in mathematics who worked for NASA in Houston. He had been drafted and could have gotten a deferment avoiding service altogether, but he chose not to. Once in, they were always bugging him to go to Officer’s school or take a direct commission to the officer ranks. He turned them down every time. He told us he just wanted to serve his country for the two years he was in for and then get out and go back to NASA. We didn’t know whether we should admire him or call him completely insane. But that was the first time I ever interacted with someone who was demonstrably way smarter than me. Another eye opener!

  After the army, I began working at Texaco Refinery in Port Arthur. My first year there, I met a black man whose last name was Johnson. I don’t know if I ever knew his first name. I always just called him Mr. Johnson. He was in his sixties and I was just a punk kid in my early twenties, but we became very good friends. I was working full time and going to college full time as well. Mr. Johnson didn’t have much of an education at all. He could not read and write. He had started working at Texaco when he was ten-years-old as a water boy carrying water to the work crews out in the field. He was fascinated by my studies in college. Every day he would ask me what I learned in school that day. I would tell him everything my professors had gone over in class and he would listen intently. Sometimes, he would smile or laugh and say, “Well, that might be what they say in your school books, but it was my experience…” And that was always the way of it. He would never outright disagree with anything I told him. The first words out of his mouth every time was, “In my experience…” It wasn’t long before I realized that this was one of the wisest men I had ever met. Uneducated, yes. But smarter than most of the people I knew. Thinking of him always kept me humble when I finally did earn that college degree. Because of him, I never felt like I was any smarter or wiser than anyone else I might run into.

  Port Arthur also had an influx of Vietnamese after the unfortunate war ended there. They were met with a little animosity, at first, from both the white and black communities. There was some friction between the different groups for a while. But it settled down. Now the third and fourth generations of Vietnamese kids are just as Texan as any of the rest of us.

  So, how are we doing as a community? I say I must be proud of our community overall. At least of the ones who remain in it. Many left, of course, due to what’s been referred to as “White Flight”. There has also been some “Black Flight” from the influx of Hispanics pouring into our area as well. My mother never left her general neighborhood in Port Arthur. And she saw her area go from all white to all black (except for her), then to Vietnamese, and finally to just about all Hispanic. So, there have been some major influxes. Right along with all that, there have been many different peoples coming to our area from all over the world. Just go into any convenience store in our area, and you will see what I mean. Are we killing each other or rioting in the streets? No. Are there still some who sling about racial slurs and wish to separate themselves from anyone who is not like them? Sadly, yes.

  But overall, I think we’re doing well. I was sitting in a coffee shop in Groves, Texas, where I live now, which is a small community that is basically a suburb of Port Arthur. Traditionally, Groves has always been a white-only community. But that is changing. As I sipped my Sugar-free, Vanilla, Latte, and read my latest science fiction selection, I saw a couple of black people come in to get coffee. They were pleasant and were greeted pleasantly by the owner. No one else in the place even glanced up or paid them any never mind (as my momma used to say). And it got me to thinking about how far we’ve come. At least in my part of the world. And it made me proud to be from a town that has seen good times and gone through bad times but has come to understand that we are all in this together. None of us can afford to go it alone anymore. We all need each other to survive. One thing I’ve learned in all my travels and in my job I have now, where I meet people from all over the world, is that people are just people no matter what their skin color is. We all want the same things. It is high time we stop thinking of race as something that separates us. There is only one race on this planet. And it is the human race. For the human race to survive and make it much farther down the road, we are all going to have to work together for that to happen.

  I am nearly seventy years old now. Over the last fifty years, I’ve seen attitudes change – sometimes more slowly than we’d like. But they have changed, and it’s mostly for the better. However, today there is a new divide happening right in front of our eyes, and it’s a very sad thing to have to witness after we were making so much progress. Now it’s Conservative vs. Liberals. And there are different sexes, races (so-called), ethnicities, and religions in both camps. And they are both ratcheting up the rhetoric and hate speech against the opposing side to the point of almost coming to blows. There’s even been talk of a Civil War brewing. Come on people. Don’t let politics tear us apart again. It’s just insane.

  We are all Americans, and we need to get our act together before it does come to blows. And to me, it’s more than that. We are all children of God. It definitely would displease Him to see his children behaving so badly towards one another. I can’t say that I will always agree with you. But I can say that I will always love you as a fellow human being no matter what you believe or how misguided I might think you are. Going forward, lets put our heads together and work out the problems we can. And for those problems that seem insurmountable right now, let’s just put them aside and maybe the solution will come to us down the road with God’s help. Let’s keep the progress we’ve made so far and not throw it all away just because someone has drawn a line in the sand or down an aisle.