She had bought a new attachment for the bicycle, which I would put Mary-Emma in instead of the wagon, and we rode around the park that way, while Mary-Emma sang and hummed herself to sleep, her voice wobbly on the bumps. I would pass the town’s few black and Latino kids fishing in the pond for dinner, and I would think of the absurd disparities of everyone, how Mary-Emma was now a little African-American princess while these poor kids at the pond were the casualties of a new pull-away-and-don’t-look society. Here is where churchlessness had gotten us. Not that far. And so I often admired Reynaldo’s piety. Still, the kids were having fun fishing. But I could see they hadn’t yet caught a thing. Nonetheless, it was spring, and they were young, and even hedge fund managers couldn’t take that away from them.
On Wednesday days when I was with Mary-Emma, the noon whistle would blare and the dogs next door would go barking mad in choral reply, as if saluting some larger king dog. On Wednesday nights, as if echoing this, the house once more filled up with visitors and their remarks. Contentious shards of discussion floated upward like dust shaken from a rug.
“Postracial is a white idea.” This again. It had all begun to sound to me like a spiritually gated community of liberal chat.
“A lot of ideas are white ideas.”
“It’s like postfeminist or postmodern. The word post is put forward by people who have grown bored of the conversation.”
“And the conversation remains unresolved because it’s not resolvable. It’s not that kind of conversation. It’s merely living talk. Whereas you put post in front of it — what is that? It’s saying ‘Shut the hell up. We’re tired and we’re going to sleep now.’ ”
“If you reject religion, you reject blackness.”
“Black culture here is just southern culture moved north, that’s all.”
“Well, that’s not all.”
“Blacks have preserved the South up here — the cooking, the expressions, the accents — better than the southern whites who’ve moved here have.”
“Why is that?”
“Uh — isn’t that obvious?”
“Southern whites who’ve moved north live among the northern whites? And blacks live collected together in segregated neighborhoods?”
“I’m here representing the Pottawatomie, the Oneida, the Chippewa, the Winnebago, and the Ho-Chunk. I am here to tell you we weren’t successfully integrated because we weren’t given real jobs, let alone intimate jobs in your homes and on your property. Only on high bridges and tall office buildings. Your relationship to us from the beginning wasn’t even exploitive. It was homicidal.”
“Dave, sit down. You’re mostly white.”
“Is this the pot calling the kettle black?”
“I think when the pot calls the kettle black the pot is merely expressing its desire for community. It’s also expressing the pot’s habit of calling bullshit on the kettle.”
“We can’t solve history. We have to work with what’s now.”
“What’s now is my son’s white grandparents who only just now got around to putting him in the will with the other grandchildren. They want to be congratulated left and right. Good God — he’s ten years old. It took them ten years!”
“What’s now is these self-admiring people who say, ‘I don’t care whether a person’s black or green or purple.’ As if black were a nonsense color like green or purple.”
“What’s now is I walk in behind Kwame when we go out to eat and I can see that the hostess is afraid of him — a thirteen-year-old black guy coming into a restaurant. I’m white so they don’t know I’m his mother and am right behind him. They don’t know I’m seeing them. But what I’m seeing is what Kwame experiences all the time. She sees that hooded sweatshirt, she grabs the pager, and then says stiffly, ‘Can I help you?’ Not ‘Here for dinner?’ or ‘Good evening.’ ”
“I’ve got a time machine in the trunk of my car.”
“Oh, I know. And the relatives all love them when they’re little but then when they’re older and don’t look cute to them anymore, look out: they see they have a young black man as a grandson, or an African-American girl full of vim and sass. The sexualized black teenager just so doesn’t work for them.”
“Let me tell you: even the white ones are a shock.”
Laughter.
“Is it racism or racial inexperience?”
“Oh, we’re back to that.”
“Girls have it bad, too.”
“I said girls.”
“Of all colors.”
“And don’t get me started on Islam!”
“And why are we so hateful about black Muslims, for decades these Chicago neighborhoods have been tense about every goddamn mosque and yet we went way out of our way for those honky Bosnian Muslims?”
“Honky Bosnian Muslims?”
“Honey, be quiet and just drink.”
“A suffering sweepstakes — now there’s a fool’s game. Who invented the term suffering sweepstakes anyway?”
“People who aren’t suffering. People who find it a spectator sport. Can’t one say ‘Ouch’ without being told to shut up? What ‘suffering sweepstakes’? A sweepstakes involves a prize! Besides, everyone who really is suffering knows someone who is suffering worse. Suffering is relative. Or at least it is with my relatives!”
“Who invented the term suffering succotash?”
“Here’s a suffering sweepstakes: War was devised to offset the number of women who died in childbirth. The young men killed actually equaled the young women who died. But now it’s all out of whack … so it looks like the old men are plotting to kill the young in order to get all the hot chicks.”
“So that’s why war was invented. To get rid of the competition. Mother Nature had put too much competition in play.”
“And who is doing all this engineering again?”
“Father Nature.”
“Ah.”
“Nate — as he’s known to his friends.”
“Nate.”
“Yup.”
“Here’s a suffering sweepstakes: Both Black Hawk and Otis Redding died in this county. But Black Hawk gets a bar and a golf course.”
“He was pursued like a rat. He should get a statue.”
“Is there a statue?”
“Is there a statue for Otis?”
“I think there’s a granite bench.”
“A granite bench? He would have preferred a golf course and a bar.”
“A fool’s game.”
“And this pertains to our discussion how?”
“Since when did pertaining pertain?”
“Oh, yes, military recruitment of minorities.”
“The schools are off to begin with. Busing and integration are never done right, and so it’s a fool’s game.”
The fool’s-game person again. Or the fool’s-game person’s brother.
“Look at the schools in this town. The only one that’s not failing black kids is the magnet one where whites are only twenty percent of the school. Now, that’s empowering! Put them in a white school, they are all relegated to the tech courses. They get put in the basement with the vocational teachers. Then they have dropped out by junior year, while the white parents continue to hoard the resources for their gifted and privileged. They want money for stringed instruments! They demand it! They get violins, we get violence. Man, you’d better get some money for some black teachers, I say.”