July 3, 2020

Dear Interested Readers,

 

A Different Kind of Fourth

 

One of my most cherished possessions is about fifty feet of 8mm film shot by my father between 1948 and 1950. I found several canisters of developed and undeveloped movie film in a desk drawer at my parents’ home about fifty years ago. To my regret, the undeveloped film was beyond processing. The earliest film is grainy black and white, and the remnants from 1950 are in color. At the time of my discovery, I was a new father myself and had started to document my own son’s development in 1966. 

 

I think my exciting discovery was set up by my father. He had seen my cinematic efforts, and revealed that he had tried documenting the growth of his children. I went looking for the remnants of his attempt to capture our family’s memories. He led me to believe that the task had been an idea that exceeded his technical skills. Throughout his life my dad was always focused on finance, so I guessed that not only did he find it hard to make home movies, but it was also an expensive activity. Another point in his defense was that he was also very busy with his responsibilities as a minister.

 

From about five rolls of variable quality film I was able to splice together a short collage of family scenes. Over the years I have transferred the precious footage first to VHS video and finally to a CD. Most of the footage is of my sibs and me, but some of it is curious footage of buildings and monuments that are interesting only because they must have been interesting to my father. The final shot is of my brother and me with some neighborhood playmates looking at my baby sister blinking in bright sunlight in my mother’s arms. My sister was born in February of 1950 which dates the scene to sometime in the spring of that year. There are peonies in full bloom all around the yard. 

 

Some of the earliest footage is from the summer of 1948, and it was taken in the side yard of my maternal grandparents’ home in Lincolnton, North Carolina. I lifted today’s header from that scene. I assume it was taken on the Fourth of July because my mother, my grandmother, and my mother’s brother and his wife are standing around a table that was taken out into the back yard. My grandfather is just cutting the watermelon. “Papa Childs” is wearing a long sleeved starched white shirt and a nicely tied bow tie. In deference to either the heat or the watermelon, he has removed his coat and dressed down for the activity.  I cannot remember him ever wearing a short sleeved shirt or being without his tie until I saw him sitting by his bed in his pajamas in the summer of 1953 a week or so before he died at the age of 64 of his congestive heart failure that followed a massive myocardial infarction a few weeks earlier. 

 

The action in the film is not limited to the cutting of the watermelon. My dad, the fledgling cameraman, also captured my brother in his diaper as he wobbled around the table swinging his arms for balance. He was pretty mobile for a child of ten months. The film reveals that my cousin and I were wearing nothing but our underpants. We were having a big time running wild and jumping in and out of a water sprinkler, oblivious to everyone but the cameraman, as all the other adults were standing around the table chatting and eating their watermelon as the children ran wild in the background. 

 

We had driven to North Carolina from our home in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. My uncle was a civil engineer and a Citadel grad who had served during World War II in Italy and Germany building bridges that enabled our troops to advance. The Hill Burton act was passed in 1946, and for many years he would go on to supervise the building of hospitals that were funded by Hill-Burton for small towns and cities in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Louisiana. 

 

The family film from which the picture is lifted came to mind this week for two reasons. First, it’s the Fourth of July weekend and families all over America will be gathering in backyards trying to figure out how to blend the traditional activities of the holiday with the wearing of face masks and attention to the dimensions of social distancing. The second reason is that the events of the past several months have caused me to review what I owe to my “white privilege.” 

 

My grandfather’s family had come to North Carolina in a series of moves during the 1840s from Massachusetts by way of the Finger Lake region of New York. Some of the family had also ventured further west to Rochester and on to Ohio and Minnesota, but family records show that  they stayed in touch, and some went back and forth from North to South both before and after the Civil War although some fought for the Confederacy. I have no evidence that my grandfather’s branch of the family owned slaves, but they did marry into families that did have a  history of being slave owners.

 

I learned about a year ago when I had my genetic profile done by “23 and Me” that most of my DNA comes from the British Isles and Western Europe, but there is a small amount that comes from West Africa. In the profiles of my “cousins” that “23 and Me” has identified there are many pictures of Black Americans. “23 and Me” suggests that my black ancestor is probably a great, great, great grandparent who lived in the late seventeen hundreds or early eighteen hundreds. It was startling for me to learn that my own DNA makes suggestions about our nation’s dark past history that were never considered during the Fourth of July celebrations of my youth. 

 

I hope someday to learn more about the distant secrets that my DNA reveals, but it will take some work. “23 and Me” informs you of the names, and sometimes the pictures of “relatives,” people with whom you share some DNA, if they have agreed to share their data. Some of the names are associated with pictures. As I scanned the names and “pictures” of the relatives that “23 and Me” has identified for me I recognize some familiar names, but I also see names I have never heard and the faces of Black men and women that I have never met. 

 

I have written to two of my Black “cousins” who have answered my inquiries, but so far there is little progress except for the discovery that I share the name Durham with one, a young Black woman who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina. There are Durhams in my maternal grandmother’s branch of the family tree. They lived in Southwestern Virginia and Western North Carolina, but without more information there is no way to be sure that our relationship is through those Durhams because “Durham” is a relatively common name in the South. The most well known story told to me by my grandmother was about my great great grandfather Durham.  Her mother, my great grandmother Wiseman born in 1863, remembered her maternal grandfather as a passionate man who in his youth rode horseback to New York City just to hear the great opera singer of the era, Jenny Lind. I come from a long line of woman who have passed on their knowledge of the world through stories told to their children and grandchildren.

 

Four blocks north of the site of my grandparents’ home in Lincolnton, North Carolina where my father was taking movies of everyone eating watermelon, is one of the town’s Black neighborhoods. As one travels north down McBee Street, the neighborhood abruptly changes, first to some comfortable, but obviously inexpensive homes, but there is also a public housing project, soon it is obvious that you are in another community. There are three Black churches, one with a small associated graveyard, and further along a large gleaming white establishment that is a Black owned mortuary aptly named Ebony and White’s Funeral Service.

 

The city cemetery, where my parents and several generations of ancestors are buried, is stangely located near the Back churches and can also be accessed via a road that runs from Main Street three blocks away through this community. At one corner, a block from the town cemetery, there are two Black churches of different protestant denominations that sit facing each other diagonally across the intersection. On either side of the road from Main Street to the cemetery there are small “shotgun” houses. People are usually sitting on the porches of these dwellings in the evening. There are small gardens scattered here and there. As a child I was totally unaware of this community. As an adult I often walk through it on my way to visit my parents’ and grandparents’ graves. As I walk, I realize that my roots and the roots of the people who still live here in relative poverty have intersected and co existed since the late seventeen hundreds when some of my German Swiss ancestors first settled in the area. Two and a half centuries later, my family is comfortable and their Black neighbors across the country are differentially challenged, but have begun to assert that their lives matter as much as mine, and that they and their ancestors have created much of the wealth that is held by the white community. In the Black Lives Matter movement they are demanding respect and some form of equity and restitution for crimes to which my DNA and personal experience gives some evidence.

 

Lincolnton had a population in 2010 of about 10,000 that was 65% white, 25% Black, and about 15% Hispanic. In 1950 the population was about 5,000, and I remember seeing no one of Hispanic heritage during our long annual summer visits. Over the last sixty years there has been substantial growth of the Latinex community in North Carolina mostly through the need for labor in construction and agriculture. During the same time Lincolnton has become a “bedroom” community of Charlotte which lies 35 miles to the east. During my childhood there was no mention of apartheid, but I doubt that a visitor from another planet would have been able to see the difference in the late forties, the fifties, or early sixties between the Jim Crow South or the apartheid South Africa of Nelson Mandela. In the South of America and in South Africa the races lived in parallel communities, and though the rules of division and separation were rarely discussed everyone knew their place. As I child I knew that there were Black people in my community, but I never saw them in church, rarely in stores, never in restaurants, not at school, and never at the “white” water fountain at the filling station down at the corner of Main and Oak Street where the bathrooms were labeled MEN, WOMEN, and COLORED. 

 

Over 25% of the population was virtually invisible to me, and I never thought about them unless they were cleaning, cooking, or watching over me and my sibs in our home. If I saw Black people in any of the places that I lived in Oklahoma, Texas, or South Carolina, or in North Carolina at my grandmother’s home, it was usually as they worked at a construction job, or were doing lawn work, or working inside in a janitorial or domestic position. We knew where our side of town met their side of town, and we rarely ventured to the other side of that line. By the time I was a teenager in Columbia, South Carolina, I noticed that there was a separate entrance labeled “COLORED” at the back of my doctor’s office. That door led to a separate waiting room with hard benches in what was once the kitchen in the house that my doctor had converted into an office. My waiting room was accessed through the front door, and there were comfortable chairs and recent magazines for me to read as I waited in the room that was once the living room. 

 

Things are different now in some ways. Pre COVID I was amazed that the restaurants in North Carolina had many black patrons. There are Black doctors and nurses at the local hospitals in Georgia and North Carolina that provided care for my parents. There is some integration of the neighborhoods and occasionally a Black person will be seen at a church service, but much of the distancing that I saw as a child still persists. 

 

When I moved to Boston to go to medical school in 1967, I was surprised to see much of the same separation of the races that I was accustomed to seeing in the South. I had expected something different. In the South we had Black neighborhoods. In the urban North we had Black ghettos. In many ways there was not much difference between Roxbury in Boston and the end of McBee Street in Lincolnton where the Black church and neighborhood with the “shotgun houses” were located. There were 120 members of my class. One Black student, ten women, and a couple of Asian students represented the diversity in my class. I occasionally joked that my presence in the class could be explained by the fact that I was accepted to provide diversity as one of the few representatives from a southern public university. There was one classmate from the University of Virginia, a couple from the University of North Carolina, me from South Carolina, and one from Ole Miss who was probably a legacy admit because his Dad was the author of Guyton’s Textbook of Physiology. Yes, the world has changed, but has it really changed enough?

 

The summer between high school and college I got a job in construction. My idea was that the hard work would help me get stronger for the upcoming football season. I was the only caucasian on the crew of masons. I worked with a young black man named Horace who was my age and showed me how to mix mortar and efficiently keep the masons supplied with mortar, bricks, and concrete blocks. Horace and I developed a relationship and through his stories I got some appreciation for how differently we experienced the world. I imagine that Horace expected that he would be doing the same work for the rest of his life. It was obvious to him and to me that our futures were headed in different directions although Horace had a wealth of humor that carried him through long hot weeks of work.

 

Horace lived for Friday when the boss would pay us in cash. On several Mondays of that summer Horace would not be present until the crew chief went by the county jail to pick him up. I doubt that Horace’s weekend celebrations were much different than those of my white friends, but in our unequal society his fun came at a higher price. One Monday morning after our boss had picked him up at the county jail, he greeted me with a big smile and said, “I had a good time Gene. If you could be me for one Saturday night, you would never want to be you again!” I admired his spunk, his strength, and his attitude. I hope those qualities in his character helped him carry a heavier burden than I ever had. The opportunities were fewer and the prices were higher in Horace’s world than in mine. I don’t know what happened to Horace. Did he go to Vietnam while I went to college and med school? I hope that wherever he is, he has found a way to translate his youthful love of life into a happy and prosperous adulthood. The odds are heavily weighted against that unlikely outcome.

 

The Black Lives Matter movement has finally gotten us to begin to examine closely the concept of white privilege. It is a good thing to give some thought to white privilege as we celebrate this Fourth of July. COVID-19 has underlined the fact that not only is your life expectancy a function of your ZIP code, but your likelihood of being employed as an essential worker, or your likelihood of living in an a crowded environment where the virus is prevalent and defense by social distancing is more difficult, is also a function of socioeconomic status which in turn is often a function of race. This last week there was evidence published that if you lived in Manhattan you had better access to sophisticated ICU care than if you lived in Queens, the Bronx, or Brooklyn. Living in Manhattan is a healthcare benefit. Living in a less wealthy neighborhood is in itself a health care disparity in the age of COVID-19.

 

Over the last decade there has been a plethora of literature about the economic inequities associated with race. We have noticed that in the 30s Social Security was denied to many Black Americans because it did not cover agricultural workers. Black veterans returning from World War II did not enjoy the educational and home loan benefits that my two uncles who were veterans put to good use. If you have never read it, I would suggest that you read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 Atlantic article, “The Case for Reparations: Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.” It’s a long article but it explains much of the difference in the life I have enjoyed and the one I fear that Horace has experienced.

 

Coates puts the burden that Horace carried into a stark and undeniable perspective that takes a little bit of the celebratory punch out of the Fourth of July. Coates will augment whatever you know about “redlining,” common discriminatory real estate practices to keep neighborhoods segregated, and the unfair municipal codes and banking practices that prevented easy access to home ownership and the associated wealth accumulation that has benefited many families like mine. The economic and medical advantages of whiteness are well documented. If you doubt the facts there is a huge literature that corroborates Coates’ assertions and builds an undeniable case. I would recommend Thomas Shapiro’s excellent 2017 book, Toxic Inequality: How America’s Wealth Gap Destroys Mobility, Deepens the Racial Divide, and Threatens Our Future. Another source of information delivered through stories as well as data is Matthew Desmond’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize winning book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Both books describe the burden of all people in poverty, but underline the fact that it is harder to be Black and poor in America than it is to be white and poor in America. I would also refer you to a previous post, “Thinking About the Experiences of Poverty” that I wrote about a year ago that discusses these books and other sources. Finally, in the context of the broad scope of American history and over four hundred years of institutional racism, I would recommend Jill Lapore’s wonderful book, These Truths. In her book, she demonstrates through letters and papers of the day that our honored founding fathers, including Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, knew full well that what they tolerated and practiced themselves was a crime committed against humanity for their own personal economic benefit. The benefits of someone else’s labor was just too good to pass up, even if it was immoral. As they conspired to gain their own freedom from the King of England, the Founding Fathers rationalized why it was acceptable to enslave others for their own benefit. It was wrong and they knew it.

 

The question now is what will we do since once again through the horrible death of George Floyd and the growing awareness of our founding flaw we can no longer use our ignorance of events and history to excuse our complacency. We should have done something much sooner. Martin Luther King, Jr. demanded out attention to these matters more than a half century ago, and predicted that we could ill afford denying justice any longer. Our plate has been full with other more pressing problems and we have had a world class ability to drag our feet in our response to Dr. King’s warnings. Now, we have a pandemic. We have a threatened environment. We have growing inequality. We have a healthcare system that does not protect the health of the nation. We have a damaged economy.  We have no effectively coordinated leadership. It will be easy to prioritize the Black Lives Matter “problem” far down the urgency list.

 

Our first priorities should be to address the issues of race and the challenges to the environment. If we take those two challenges as our highest priority then it is possible that our other concerns, like the economy and healthcare, will improve in their wake. Any approach that delays addressing the issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement would be wrong. I hope by the Fourth of July 2021 we will have made some progress against all of these enormous challenges, but most of all I hope that by this time next year we will have begun to effectively and meaningfully address what even Mitch McConnell describes as our “original sin.”

 

After I finished this piece, I happened to note that David Brooks shared many of the same feelings in his column this week. It’s entitled “The National Humiliation We Need: July 4 and America’s crisis of the spirit.” I will leave you with the words with which he finishes his piece:

 

I had hopes that the crisis would bring us together, but it’s made everything harder and worse. And now I worry less about populism or radical wokeness than about a pervasive loss of national faith.

What’s lurking, I hope, somewhere deep down inside is our shared ferocious love for our common country and a vision for the role America could play as the great pluralist beacon of the 21st century.

July 4 would be a good day to find that faith.

 

To that I will add, “Amen, brother.” I too hope that this 4th will be a moment of greater awareness and commitment on the way to a better America. Our challenge is to find the way for everyone to enjoy the possibilities that we have avoided by collectively taking many wrong turns on the road to a more inclusive understanding of the demand for universal equity in the phrase  “these truths.”

 

A Quiet Summer Interrupted By Bad News

 

It’s been a quiet, albeit wet, week in my world. The summer is in full swing. We enjoy having a separate guest house that allows us to have family visits while simultaneously practicing social distancing. I thought that the most exciting thing I would have to report to you was that I caught a picture of the bear who regularly visits us on the new motion detection camera that was my Father’s Day present. We are learning how to coexist with nature including the copperhead snake that my wife encountered and photographed in her garden. She is not as interested in the kale and the tomatoes as she was before that happened. 

 

 

New Hampshire is the only state in the union that has had the number of new COVID-19 cases fall for two consecutive weeks, so that has been good. The District of Columbia, which should also be a state, has also achieved the same success, but with COVID-19 things can change fast as the experience in the South and Southwest is teaching us. The experience in the states that threw caution and data out the window underlines the truth that Tom Friedman espouses, that you can’t mess with Mother Nature and expect to get away with it. Ideas like that are abstract until you learn that someone close to you has tested positive. This week I learned that two members of my family have tested positive in Georgia. My niece is a nurse practitioner in the suburbs of Atlanta. She is positive and symptomatic and my sister and the rest of her family are awaiting test results. Across the state of Georgia on St. Simons Island, my great nephew, a teenager, contracted the virus at a Y camp. These days one is apprehensive with the receipt of every email and text message.  

 

Be well! Still stay home if you can. Wear your mask and practice social distancing as best you can if you must go out, even if the numbers are getting better for the moment where you live. Think about the America you want for yourself and others. Demand leadership that is empathetic, thoughtful, truthful, capable, and inclusive. Look for opportunities to be a good neighbor. Let me hear from you. I would love to know how you are experiencing these very unusual times!

 

Gene