I’m going to my Aunt Margie’s 90th birthday party Saturday in Wyoming and I hope to honor a woman who 60 years ago taught me an important lesson I eventually and grudgingly learned as a I grew up.
Aunt Margie was the older sister of my mother, and she outlived “Poor Little Doris” by five years. Both of the sisters had to grow up tough in rural Michigan during the Great Depression without a father, Elgie, a street car conductor who died of appendicitis in 1928 while my grandmother was pregnant for my mother. So essentially neither knew their biological father.
While Aunt Margie was going through a divorce in the mid-1950s, she agreed to take care of me and my sisters, Leslie and Mary, and her own two children in Croton while Mom and husband Wayne Goodwin lived in a mobile home to travel through Northern Michigan to go where there was work for a lineman.
Aunt Margie did her heroic care taking between December 1956 and May 1957 and Mom and Dad and children Gibby and Donita came home to Croton on weekends.
Like most youngsters, I stumbled onto naughty aspects of growing up as a boy in rural backwoods territory, where racism raged even though there were virtually no people of color in our midst.
One boy, slightly older than me, used to taunt me by singing the Mitch Miller popular song “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” substituting the “N” word for “Rose.”
“Oh the yellow N—— of Texas, his name is David Young.”
There was plenty of use of the “N” word in many conversations among rebellious youth in Croton, and many jokes about black people, particularly black men.
As an 8- and 9-year-old boy, I didn’t have very many smarts about the situation, but today this drives home the point activist Jane Elliott has driven so often that we are not born racists, we have to learn the process, and we do, most often at a young age. Some actually grow up and get over it. Some don’t and continue to practice denial to keep the sham going.
Aunt Margie overheard me use the “N” word around the house while at play with others, and immediately pulled me into a bedroom and closed the door. She sternly told me to stop using such language for two huge reasons. One was that it’s unfair to say awful things about people who look differently than we do. The second was that in the wrong place, such word usage could get me into a lot of trouble.
I took her statements under advisement, but privately continued to use the word and tell racist jokes, in the same way I used vulgar language and told dirty jokes.
Interestingly, I received another dose of sage advice from older sister, Leslie, not long afterward. Leslie, who today lives in Wayland with her husband, Merle Thompson, spent a brief period attending school in the White Cloud system. There she met and befriended a black family that originally came from Chicago but moved to White Cloud to get away from the rat race.
It seemed two of her best friends were Olivia and Glenn Rose Dukes, two really nice young ladies with intelligence and impeccable manners. Being a backwoods ignorant child, I used to try to make fun of her black friends privately, but she would have none of it. Though I didn’t pay attention to the wisdom of my older sister at the time, I’d l
ike to think I later grew up and got over the surprisingly widespread disease of racism and prejudice.
The first step for me was to recognize that I am indeed privileged because of the color of my skin. Since then, my mission has been to try to be as fair as possible, knowing it’s impossible to really understand “them” because I don’t walk in their shoes.
Jane Elliott once asked an all-while college audience if anyone in the room would like to be treated like black people are treated would they please stand up. Not one did.
“So you all know what’s going on around you, yet you don’t do anything about it?” she asked.
To this day, I still get into trouble when I imitate white people too polite to use the “N” word but uncomfortable enough to use words such as “Negroes” or “Colored.” So sometimes my efforts at being anti-racist are misunderstood.
I can’t get away with making offensive comments about people of color. A doctor who was a native of Nigeria saved my life 35 years ago by curing me of Hodgkins Disease, a cancer of the lymph system.
When I see Leslie Thompson Saturday, I plan to ask her if she’s ever heard since from Glenn Rose and Olivia. I thank her and I thank Aunt Margie for trying to open the eyes of a young bigot who took his time in seeing the error of his ways and in breaking free from his ignorance.
You were fortunate to have had the influence of good people.