Swimming to America: What this White Boy has Seen of "the Souls of Black Folk"

I was born and raised in a Southern society highly charged with racism. A sublime gift my parents never knew they gave me was a sense of the burden of injustice under which black folks must live their entire lives. They were born and lived in Chicago before World War II, my father was of third or fourth American generation German-Irish immigrant stock and my mother was a first American generation Sicilian. I emerged from the frothy crest of the baby boom in Houston, Texas, and lived in the South until I was thirty.

My first specific recollection of racial difference is an incident one night on a Houston bus when I was about six years old. I was not conscious of it at the time (about 1956), but of course black folks were expected to sit at the back of the bus. At my father’s prompt, I shared my Hershey Bar with a black girl my own age. She was delighted. We parted in mutual chocolate bliss. That small sharing planted in my mind forever the fact that black folks were people, individual human beings, like me.

Later my family moved to Memphis. Never in Houston, as I think of it now, was I concretely aware of segregation. In the Houston of my early childhood, there were just no black people around, except maids and janitors on buses; it meant no more to me than that. The racial situation in Memphis around 1960 and the Civil War Centennial was vastly different. There was no question where blacks sat on buses. There was no question what water fountain or restroom a black person used: the facilities everywhere were clearly labeled "white" and "colored." My mother introduced a peculiar thing into my racial awareness, something that would never have occurred to me on my own. She drew my attention to our maid Minnie (I genuinely believe my mother employed a maid as a small personal gesture of economic empowerment), whose arms were discolored by longitudinal half-dollar size dark marks: profound evidence of mistreatment, probably by her man. I began to notice cruelty between people.

Before it fell apart in 1962, my family lived in Birmingham. These were the days of Police Chief Bull Connor, turning the water hoses on black demonstrators, and the murder of the three civil rights workers. My personal unhappiness distracted me from much of the worst of these local events, but my mother told an anecdote of a dinner party. Somehow, as it always did in the South, the subject of race had come up. My mother apparently defended the position of the civil rights demonstrators. The hostess challenged my mother’s obvious yankee nigger-loving attitude and demanded to know would my mother "eat off their floors?" My mother replied, "No, and I would not eat off your floor, either." Poorly educated, under terrible emotional stress, my mother intuitively grasped Martin Luther King’s Christian message of equality and liberation with as much compassion as any white person I have ever met. Maybe a bit of that rubbed off on me.

Shortly before I left Birmingham forever, one Sunday morning I was awakened by a troubled voice instead of pop music on my clock radio. Something big and horrible had happened. A bomb had been thrown at a Negro church and four little girls had been killed. I recall that moment as clearly as the day Kennedy was assassinated, or waking to the first radio report that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Now I knew what hate could do.

I graduated high school and spent my twenties in Houston. It was a dynamic city with racial harmony: the races were segregated into white neighborhoods and black "wards." My high school crowd often went dancing at black night clubs like the Cinder and the Latin World. My blues band played a gig at the Mark V on Dowling in the Third Ward, opening the show for the nearly forgotten old jazz-blues great, Eddie "Cleanhead" Vincent. There were a few black patrons, and our young white friends. On Christmas Eve 1967, our small pack of white blues aficionados went to the Palladium Ballroom in the Third Ward to see B.B. King. We were the only white people there. Everyone—I mean every man, woman, and child in that hall—had a ball.

When I bicycled to the University of Houston from my house in the Rice University-Medical Center area, I always passed through the Third Ward and the campus of Texas Southern University. One day I read a short newspaper story about a black man named Shall Ratcliff. Working as a construction laborer digging a deep hole for God knows what purpose, he was killed when the walls of the excavation collapsed in on him. For some reason, probably his unique first name, but possibly because of the pathos of the event, the sad account stuck in my head. Amazingly, I found myself the foreman of the jury in the civil case of Shall Ratcliff, charged with the duty to settle the dispute over the disposition of his meager estate, mainly a pitiful insurance benefit, between his common-law wife and his late-adolescent son by another woman. To be brief, it was clear from the testimony and evidence that Shall had loved his common-law wife and that he surely intended that she should be cared for after his death. So the jury found. This poor, nearly illiterate black woman had no other resources. Her man was dead. His child and the insurance company sought to deprive her of any material connection to Shall. Only the justice delivered in that courtroom saved her from abject total loss. To this day, it is a profound source of spiritual gratification to me to know that I did the right thing in this tragic case. This case must be why I have a special admiration for the work of Morris Dees.

I sometimes yearn to teach in a secondary school where I can try to make a positive difference in the black and white community, but I do not know today whether that makes any sense at all. As an individual white adult male, far into my life of many other interests, directions and commitments, I believe—I do not know whether I am correct—that I have nearly zero credibility with that sub-culture. Like most rational white Americans (not to say white "liberals"—I am more libertarian than liberal), I am fuzzily concerned for the black community as a whole, particularly because of what I see to be its remarkably self-destructive and esteem-annihilating popular culture and colloquial language. At the philosophical level, I conjecture the challenge, whatever it is, needs to be addressed from within the community, by its own individuals and leaders. I do not feel this as my racism, I see it as an urgent question of social and personal human resources. Who is better suited to do the work? There seems to be the black identity the white culture sees, and the black identity that lives and dies in black society. This notion is affirmed, for me, in W.E.B. Du Bois’ essay, "The Souls of Black Folk." Only recently have I become aware of the source of whatever enduring compassion I feel, such as it is, for members of the African-American community. It is because of Burt. My confused mess of hope and doubt about black people in America is jumbled in the friend I had in Burt Curtly. When I think of him, I hear the Arthur Symons refrain that Du Bois calls to mind.

There were not many black folks at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas in the spring of 1969. Too Catholic, too expensive, too white. I was the craziest revolutionary on the campus, too crazy to be truly effective, crazy enough to publish "Confessions of a Nigger Lover" in the school’s student magazine Southern Tissue, a journal of opinion and creative writing I helped to found and spend into oblivion. But a black or two there was at that distinguished institution of the Basilian Fathers. The finest young man among those few was Burt. I do not recall exactly how we met, but we hit it right off and saw much of each other that Soul on Ice spring. This was a time when black activist Lee Otis Johnson was in a Texas prison for possession of one joint, and Muhammed Ali was stripped of his title because "no Vietnamese ever called me nigger." One year on from the Tet Offensive, a time when a certain stripe of all-too-serious young men in America spent their evenings smoking dope and talking revolution. Unlike Du Bois’ picture of his own day, Burt and I did not race one another, nor did we ever compare grades. It never occurred to us that we did not share the "worlds [we] longed for" or the "dazzling opportunities." If we knew it - that we did not share - we did not know that we knew it, or rather, I did not know that we knew it. Burt and I were "co-workers in the kingdom of culture." Then, as in Du Bois’ day, and as now, "the Nation has not yet found peace from its sins." Burt was certainly one of those who "up the new path the advance guard toiled," and he stood at that horizon of "youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect." "Roman and Negro," Burt and I were friends in 1969. We lived in some kind of world Du Bois may have foreseen. I shared with Burt "the longing to attain self-conscious manhood."

One night Burt and I and another young black man who had a car scored some grass in the Third Ward, a place white boys did not go by themselves. In the drive over and back, I sensed tension between the two black brothers. You saw that tension in their manner of dress and speaking, to me and to one another. Thinking back on it now, it seemed to be the tension of city and country, one the slick urban style, quick to act, the other slower, more thoughtful, closer to truth. Back at the flat, we rolled numbers and rapped revolution. Some passing remark by Slick came between them, drawing a sharp reply from Burt. I do not recall the gist of their heated rise, but in that moment of unshielded exchange between two young black men, I saw for myself the duality of which Du Bois speaks—and realized at the time that I had glimpsed their "two-ness"—"two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body." I understood then, and I saw then, that night, that there was more to Burt’s "history of strife" than to mine. In that moment when I witnessed those two bared souls, I perceived that they were "darkened by the shadow of a vast despair."

Burt and I lost touch after I spent the summer in Mexico and the fall in love. A year or two later I heard that Burt had gone missing at a university outing at the Galveston beach. A few days later his body washed ashore. Burt was a strong young man, like me, and when you lived in Houston you knew how to swim in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the years since, no other black man has been my true friend. I often recall my friend Burt and muse over his loss. Remarkably, the "unasked question," the "real question," comes to me across the twentieth century from W.E.B. Du Bois. Sixty years before Martin Luther King stood at the Lincoln Memorial to give the crowning address of the Civil Rights Movement, Du Bois wrote, "the spiritual striving of the freedman’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength."

For my black friend Burt, the spiritual striving of that freedman’s son was the travail of his soul whose burden was beyond the measure of his strength.

How and why did Burt leave his burden to me?