Color Me Human

Color Me Human

"Flo, can you believe this trash!" Herman Robbins was glaring at the headlines of the Lauderdale Sun, April 7, 1970 and there it was in big bold print -- SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS BROWN VS. THE BOARD OF EDUCATION : Broward County Schools Will Integrate Next Year.

Herman continued to spew his disapproval. "Brown versus the Board of Education. Hmph! They ought to call that damn fiasco Clown vs. the Board of Miscegenation is more like it!"

Reared back in his personal recliner that nobody could sit in but him, Herman slammed the newspaper down on the floor besides the chair huffing, "Whole damn country's going to hell in a hand basket!"

Mrs. Florence Robbins gave no indication she had heard her husband's outburst at all. She kept her eyes cast downward, fixed on the ironing board and her work at hand. A younger, more inquisitive set of eyes, however, was fixed on Herman. Trudy was lying on her belly at her father's feet watching her favorite show and drinking an orange Nehi soda. Her father's sudden eruption had caused her to look back over her shoulder at the comical spectacle he had made of himself. He looked to her like a blowfish with a sunburn, the way he was all puffed up and red in the face.

Removing her stare from her father’s face and looking towards her mother, Trudy asked, "Mama, what's 'misgenation'?"

"The word, Honey Bunch, is mis-ce-ge-nation and it's when a white person dates or even marries someone who's of a different race".

Having no need for further explanation Trudy said, “Oh,” then turned back to her father and said, "Daddy, you look funny," giggling.

"Sweetheart, let me tell you somethin'," he said with a stern look on his red face. "There ain't nothin' funny about white children going to school with watermelon stealin', chicken eatin', lyin', cheatin', good for nothin' niggers!"

That's when Florence's head snapped up as if she were a puppet and somebody had yanked her string. She plunked the iron down hard on the board and stared at her husband with a look that meant strictly business.

"Alright Herman. That's enough!"

Herman pulled the lever on the side of his Lazy Boy chair and bolted to an upright position.

"Oh, that's enough, is it? I'll tell you what's enough, Flo. Enough is when your daughter comes home pregnant with a little monkey baby. Whadda ya think about that, Flo? Huh? How 'bout that?

"The only place she's gonna get a monkey baby from, Herman, is the Broward County Zoo! People don't make monkey babies, and if you hadn't noticed, black people are called black people because, guess what, Herman? They're people! They got arms and legs like you and they walk upright -- AND, I think I've seen you enjoy a nice whoppin' slice of melon and a chicken wing or two myself. I may even have pictures to prove it!"

Herman struggled to wiggle his overweight carcass out of the chair and stomped out of the room, muttering something about how he should have known better than to marry a Jew.

******************

Herman Robbins was born right outside of Doltham, Alabama in 1937. His parents raised him on a farm owned by his grandfather who was a sharecropper. Every Saturday, from the time he was old enough to drive the '52 Chevy pickup, Herman made a trip into town to sell surplus vegetables from the farm at Goldstein's Country Market. Most mornings Herman didn't want to ride the sixty-five miles into town when he could be playing baseball or horseshoes.

Teddy, an elderly black man, had helped run the place since Herman’s own father was a boy. Every Saturday Herman would protest, "Why can't you send Teddy to Goldstein's? He practically runs this place and he counts money good.” Herman would get the same pat response he got the week before from his grandfather:

A colored man
and my hard earned money,
the two shall never twine;
long as I can catch a breath
and tell piss from apple wine.

In 1955, when Herman was eighteen, and she was only fifteen, Florence Goldstein started working the store for her father on Saturdays. Herman was smitten by this slender-waisted sack of firecrackers. She had big brown eyes with a thick dark set of lashes, and lips as red and shiny as a candy apple, without lipstick. Herman tried hard to get those big eyes trained in his direction-- maybe a little too hard.

He began showing up at Goldstein's eagerly with his hair so oiled up and slicked back it looked like he had poured motor oil on it instead of pomade. The pungent smell of the hair tonic put up a fierce battle with the musky odor of the Old Spice cologne he was steeped in. Florence's best friend Sandra, who was black, or colored at the time, lived on the main road into town. She swore she could smell Herman passing by her house.

After three years of courting Florence with flowers on her birthday, chocolate on Valentine's (nothing for Christmas of course), and a few scattered dates to the movies or the fair, on his twenty-first birthday, Herman got the gumption to propose. She said on one condition would she marry him. He would have to get her away from these " backwards, backwoods damn hicks."

Herman was too glazed over to know he was exactly what she wanted to get away from and she, being in such a hurry to hitch a ride on the first thing smoking, didn't seem to notice either. On August 28, 1958, they married and headed for south Florida. Twelve years later they were about as well suited as pomade and Old Spice, but nonetheless, together.

*******************
Every night right before bed Trudy's mother brushed her hair. Her mother's delicate touch and easy rhythm always charmed the thoughts right out of her head. This night was no different.

"Mama, why was my daddy so mad when he was reading the paper today?"

"Well, some people don't think white children going to school with black children is a good idea. Your daddy's one of 'em."

Trudy was silent for a moment as she let this new information wash down from her follicles to the tips of her long brown hair with her mother's soft strokes.

"What do you think, Mama?"

"I think you can become friends with or marry whoever you want, and a friend is a friend no matter what they look like. Next year you'll have a chance to make all kinds of new friends when you start fifth grade at South Bend Elementary.

"Mama, is it true that if you play with somebody black that the black will rub off them and onto you then you'll be black too?"

"No, Sweetheart. That's not true. Did you know that when I was growing up in Alabama my best friend Sandra was black? Who told you that foolishness about black rubbing off anyway?

"My daddy did when you left to go to the grocery store. So, I asked him what color the black person would be after all the black came off of them and on to me.”

Florence chuckled at her daughter's innocent, but perfectly rational question.

"What did your daddy say then?"

"He said all of it doesn't come off. So I said, 'Well there won't be enough to make me black all over so then how come I haven't ever seen anybody who was black and white?' Then he just said, 'Trudy Jane, watch TV.'"

***************
It was October already. South Bend was in a bustle as teachers and students prepared for the Fall Carnival and Halloween celebration. Akillah Muhammad was at Mr. Buttersmith's desk with a note that Trudy figured was probably from her mother. Mr. Buttersmith held the note out from his face like he always did to read something through the skinny lenses he wore low on the ridge of his nose. He glared at Akillah, his big vein-streaked bloodshot eyes protruding, and balled the note up then chunked it into the wastebasket beside his desk. Akillah lingered as if she was waiting to be dismissed.

Mr. Buttersmith sneered, "What are you waiting for, a silver submarine to show up and whisk you to your seat? Go sit down!" Then he added, "You people make me sick.” Trudy cringed. That was a lot of S's to have Mr. Buttersmith spitting at you through those big yellow crooked teeth of his. Everybody called him Mr. Butterspray behind his back and tried to avoid the dank mist at all cost.

Akillah did an about face, wiping the sleeve of her blouse across her face, sauntered to her desk directly in front of Trudy's and slid in. She pulled the knot loose on the scarf she wore tied under her chin the way old ladies do, and stuck the brown bag containing her lunch into her desk. Her shin length skirt draped around her legs and practically touched the floor. Trudy wondered what in the world was in that note Akillah handed Ole’ Buttersrpay that got him spraying all over her like that.

Just then Mr. Buttersmith scooted the heavy wooden chair back away from his teacher’s desk, scraping the terrazzo floor. He stood up, jerking his head to sling his jet-black greasy bangs out of his eyes. In his hands was a stack of graded papers.

"If you are going to be attending the Fall Festival for Halloween and haven't brought a note from your mommy requesting that you be excused for religious or any other reason, raise your hand." Hands flew up all around the room in response-- except one. Akillah sat with her forearms resting on her desk, hands clasped.

"Thank you. Give yourself an extra credit of ten points on the quiz I’m returning to you as a reward for your display of school spirit and pride."

He strolled down the aisles handing out a paper at each desk as he went. Mr. Buttersmith practically threw Akillah’s paper to her. Trudy peeped over Akillah's shoulder and saw the red one hundred written sloppily across the top, as if Mr. Buttersmith had caught a cramp when he was writing it.

*****************

At recess, Trudy got with Marjorie and Janet as usual to hang out near the basketball court. They sat in a circle on the grass with their legs tucked Indian style and talked about boys -- who was cute and who was not. The other kids were grouped off and engaging in various activities and games like tag football, hopscotch, and jump rope. While the groups included a mixture of girls and boys, they were yet homogeneous in one sense; everybody in each group was black or white. With this being the first year white children were being bussed into South Bend Elementary, everybody was still unsure how it was all suppose to fit.

Trudy had lost interest in the pow-wow going on between Janet, Marjorie and herself and was watching four black girls playing a game of patty cake. They were doing maneuvers along with the songs, which was a lot livelier than any patty cake she had ever played. It looked like a lot of fun. Then she noticed Akillah sitting on a bench near the swings reading a book the way she did everyday. Trudy was feeling sorry for her. The other black girls wouldn't play with her because she was different and Mr. Buttersmith always treated her so mean.

"What are you lookin' at her for?"

Trudy jumped as if she had been caught doing something shameful or bad. Marjorie Thistle, the leader of their gang was talking to her. Marjorie pushed on.

"My mom saw her when she was dropping me off to school and she said the reason she wears those ridiculous long skirts and that rag on her head is because she's one of those black Muslims. They don't celebrate any holidays, not even Christmas, and they hate white people you know," she said, nodding her head and surveying Trudy and Janet with her eyebrows raised for emphasis.

Janet Morgan who was lieutenant, a.k.a. flunky, in the chain of command, stamped Marjorie's statement with her own seal of consensus.

"Yeah, she's weird. I overheard some of the black girls saying she brings bread in her lunch that has little bugs in it with some type of stinky smelling bologna. At the pizza party somebody asked her why she wasn’t eating any pizza and she said she doesn’t eat pork. For someone who makes good grades she sure is dumb. What part of a pig is the pepperoni part?”

The whistle announcing the end of recess rang out above the noise and chatter of the children playing. Mr. Buttersmith was across the field beckoning with his arm waving that it was time to come in and get ready for lunch. In the classroom, those who brought their lunches retrieved them from the slot in their desks and joined the others in line waiting to walk to the cafeteria. Trudy, Marjorie, and Janet were hanging back at the rear of the line, walking in a cluster rather than single file. Marjorie, known for being quite devilish, delegated an assignment to her subjects.

"In the cafeteria, we'll sit at the table right next to Aunt Jemima today."

"Who's Aunt Jemima?” Trudy asked.

"She's some old black auntie that makes pancakes and wears a rag tied on her head, duh."

"There's no old black la--oh. You mean Akillah?"

"Do you have keys in your back pocket or is that your brain rattling?” Marjorie snarled sarcastically. “O.K., so we'll sit next to A-ki-llah so we can see what's in her lunch.
****************
Akillah was already seated when the three sleuths sat at the table adjacent and parallel to hers. They sat facing Akillah with Marjorie in the middle. Akillah pulled an apple from her lunch sack and opened a composition pad she had brought with her and started to write in it, stopping intermittently to take a bite of her apple. Trudy felt embarrassed spying on Akillah, but she didn't want to upset Marjorie. The last time Marjorie got mad at her, because she wouldn't give her the definitions to the vocabulary words, Marjorie told everybody not to speak to her and they did exactly what she said. Marjorie was a rich, snooty brat who had a way of making everybody think they had to meet her approval.

Akillah was savoring her apple and writing leisurely. Marjorie whispered to them after awhile, "What do you think she's writing? --probably a plan to blow up the school. My mom said those black Muslims are crazy and they don't even believe in Jesus."

Janet added, "Pastor Riggles at my church said anybody who don't believe in Jesus can't be trusted and they're going to hell quicker than you can swat a mosquito."
Trudy was about to tell them that her mom was Jewish and didn't believe in Jesus either, but instead she held her tongue. If Marjorie knew that she would have her blacklisted for the rest of the year.

They were already finished with their lunch but were sequestered there by Judge Marjorie until the assignment was completed. Finally Akillah stuck the apple core inside the bag and pulled out something wrapped in aluminum foil. Janet and Marjorie sat up real straight and rigid, staring straight ahead. Trudy slouched with her elbows on the table and her hands under her chin. She would much rather have been out in the courtyard enjoying the outdoors until it was time to go back for art class.

Akillah opened the aluminum wrapping and picked up a sandwich. The bread was yellowish with tiny little black speckles in it.

"Oh, My God! It does have bugs in it. Gross!" Janet whispered.

Marjorie whispered back, "Well, they're not moving so at least they're dead, but what's that smell."

They sat frozen, staring "bug-eyed" at Akillah while she took bites of her sandwich in between writing in her tablet. A big grin gradually spread across Trudy's face that turned into a chuckle and then into a full-blown fit of guffawing.

"It's kosher bologna on rye bread you nattering nincompoops!"

They looked at her like she had gone mad. Marjorie thought she looked just like her crazy grand-aunt Eunice who always burst into fits of cackling at funerals. Plus, Trudy had just called them something that neither of them knew the meaning of, but didn't like the sound of, either." Trudy herself was only repeating something she heard her mom say to her dad one day when he was on one of his rants about how in twelve years he couldn't get his own wife to cook him a ham.

Marjorie looked down her nose at Trudy with a scowl. "Well, excuse me, Ms. Brainiac. At my house we don't eat that crap."

Janet chimed in, "Yeah, what's wrong with eating Wonder Bread and Oscar Meyer like other normal people?"
********************
In art class Marjorie and Janet intentionally chose a small table with only room enough for two. While everybody else was drawing and painting pictures of pumpkins, black cats, and witches on broom sticks, Akillah sat alone painting a picture with an array of muted colors except for the red she used to color the bricks of a large house. From where Trudy sat it looked like a beautiful picture of a winter scene. There was a smoking chimney and snow on the ground with a large leaf bare tree in the foreground. She thought about going to sit with Akillah, but felt like her feet were encased in cement blocks when she gestured to move. Marjorie and Janet kept whispering back and forth and giving her darting, malicious looks. She was blacklisted. For some reason, she didn't care.

In the car on the way home from school, Trudy told her mother about what had happened at school, then asked her, "Mama, do we have any more rye bread at home?

"Yeah. Why do you ask?"

"I wanna take my lunch to school tomorrow. Can we stop by the store to get something to make a sandwich?

Her mother was flummoxed and asked, "I thought you said you didn't want Marjorie and Janet to think you were too poor to afford hot lunch."

"Yeah, I know. But bringing your lunch doesn’t have to mean you’re poor. Like, Akillah. She doesn't eat pork. Or maybe you just don't like the food in the cafeteria. Besides, there's nothing wrong with being different and marching to your own drum, you know?"

"Well, I wonder where you've heard that before," her mother laughed.

Florence Robbins was stopped at a red light. She took a long hard stare at her little girl, her face beaming with pride.

******************
The next day at school, it was clear that Marjorie and Janet had closed ranks and Trudy was the enemy. They shunned her all day, and at recess they played a game of four-square with Sandy, Maggie, and Brenda. When she went over to get in the game, they all sallied off towards the track where they strolled several laps talking, probably about her, until it was time to go in. She walked over to the swing set and plopped down on one of the narrow rubber seats. Akillah wasn't twenty feet away engrossed in her book as usual. The cement blocks proved heavier than Trudy had thought.

In the cafeteria at lunch time, Trudy felt dizzy. The noise of everybody talking at once and the clatter of lunch trays being shoved haphazardly on the belt by the class leaving seemed louder than usual. Marjorie and Janet sat together with their hot lunches, eyeballing her and the brown sack she was carrying as if she had suddenly broken out in chicken pox.

She went through the line to get something to drink. She was allergic to milk and didn't really like apple juice, but since it wouldn't require a trip to the emergency room, she chose a carton of juice. Really she was only stalling, hoping that the cement blocks would get light enough that she could walk over to where Akillah was sitting. This was big business, breaking ranks with the South Bend Elementary Internal Segregation Club.

There was no such organization of course, at least not officially. But the way everybody kept to their own color, following some unwritten code, you might have thought so. As if there was some type of silent initiation that involves the transfer of data through osmosis called "the rules". Trudy wanted to revoke her membership and become friends with Akillah who was both smarter and nicer than Janet and Marjorie. But if it turned out that Akillah was a paying member of "the club" herself, Trudy could wind up in a no-man's land exiled on both sides of the border.

Trudy exited the line corridor and walked out into the crowded, noisy cafeteria. She lifted those blocks a step at a time, and they really did seem to get lighter, until she felt as if she was gliding on a sheet of air. It was something that happened in her heart; something she knew her mother would be proud of that made those blocks start to crumble.

She had to pass the table where Marjorie and Janet, sat with Sandy, Maggie, and Brenda. Apparently Marjorie had some new recruits for her dirty work. They all saw Trudy coming and looked away quickly thinking she was coming to sit with them, and wanting her to know she no longer had the privilege to breathe their air. As she kept going to the next table, she suddenly became an object of intense interest.

They all stared at her like they were watching a climax to a horror movie, and Marjorie was elbowing Janet hard in the ribs. Trudy ignored them and slid on to the bench beside Akillah, close enough for her to know she had company and make her glance up from her scribbling. Trudy laid her lunch bag on the table and started removing the contents. Akillah seemed surprised though not overly bothered by Trudy's bold entrance into her space.

"Wat’cha writin'?"

"I was...just writing, uhm, a letter to my uhm, grandma. I write her all the time. She moved to New York and I miss her a lot."

"That was a pretty picture you drew in art class."

"Yeah, that was my grandma's house the way it looked the last time we visited. It was the first time I saw snow."

"I miss my grandma too. I don't get to see her much. She lives in Alabama. Last time we went my mom took me to Tuskegee Institute and I learned about George Washington Carver and where peanut butter comes from. That was real cool. Hey, I got tuna on rye. I'll trade you half for half of your bologna." They swapped halves and Trudy offered Akillah the apple juice she wasn’t going to drink. Akillah took it and thanked her.

Talking with her mouth full, like her mother always told her not too, Trudy said, "I noticed you got a hundred on your math quiz. I guess you didn't need Ole’ Butterspray's ten lousy points of extra credit anyway." They both giggled.

Trudy and Akillah ate their sandwiches and talked liked they had been friends since at least the third grade. As the year wore on it seemed as if there had been a rewrite of the silent rules. With each passing day, the playground began to melt into a muted and blended array of blacks, whites, browns and pinks, on a beautiful canvas speckled with "hue-man" beings.

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