Them & Us

I don't remember why the so called welfare mothers chose Sears & Roebuck for their protest but on a pleasant Saturday afternoon in September, just after school started, they gathered with signs and loud speakers and not a few rocks and stormed the unsuspecting Porter Square store. They were mostly young, black and with children in their arms or their bellies and made such a scene that the police - all white - were called to break them up but not before several windows had been broken and traffic hopelessly snarled. I watched from a hemmed in bus as the uniformed officers waded in and began dispersing them and when one very young and very pregnant girl refused to budge, she was given a sharp crack with a nightstick and forcibly dragged away, handcuffed, and put into one of the squad cars. A second was arrested when she threw a rock and struck an officer on the shoulder, a third carried off after she had passively laid down on the pavement and refused to move. It all happened so quickly that by the time the local news arrived, there was little left to film except the display windows being boarded up and the traffic being sorted out. Sears cried vandalism, the police cried public nuisance and resisting arrest, the women just cried. Until that day, civil disobedience had been little more to me than an overused phrase in a civics book - seeing it in action was something altogether different, horrifyingly real and frightening.

Rocks aside, I imagined my daddy would side with the women and was caught sadly off guard when he backed the police, telling me in no uncertain terms that welfare parasites deserved what they got, that they were too lazy to work and preferred to have babies in order to get more public assistance. Besides, my mother added with a nasty sneer, They're nothing but dope fiends and drunks and colored trash. God help us if this busing thing catches on, you'll have to be in school with them. The thought made her shudder and reach for another drink.

This introduction to my parents' theory of "them and us" came as a mild shock. My daddy had told me for as long as I could remember that there was no shame in poverty, he was proud of his background, deprived as it might have been, and grateful for the chance to rise above it. He had never taught me any outright or recognizable racism that I could recall and I had always assumed that unlike my mother - who had no earthly use for anyone who wasn't white and Protestant, conveniently forgetting that the entire country had immigrant roots, even on her own precious family tree - he didn't give much thought to skin color or country or origin. I hadn't reckoned with his business being in the heart of what had once been an upper class Cambridge neighborhood but which had fallen on hard times and was struggling to survive a fundamental change in character. Someone had to be held accountable and the easiest scapegoats were poor and black.

The next school day, I took a serious look at the only black student in my school, a young, withdrawn and frail looking boy the same age as I was who I'd known since the first grade. I'd never considered how much time he spent alone or that he wasn't involved in sports or music or any after school projects. Truth was, I'd never considered him at all and now was feeling a little ashamed of myself. I wish that I could say I spoke to him, he spoke back and we became friends, but I had no idea how to begin the conversation - I knew absolutely nothing about him except his name and that he had no friends at school. It must have been difficult being the only dark face in a sea of white and to this day I wish I'd approached him, talked to him, given him a chance. I believed my parents were wrong but wasn't prepared to put it to the test.