Bigots
by John Sheirer"What's brown and yellow and screams?" This was a joke, I assumed.
I was twelve years old at the time, a farm kid who worked hard, respected my elders, and tried to stay out of trouble. I loved seeing the seasons change in the hills beside our house and hearing the quiet in the county night as deer drifted into our fields each evening -- but I suspected there was more to the world beyond our little farm.
"What's brown and yellow and screams?" my cousin Gene asked again, not hiding the leering grin that periodically overflowed into a frightening cackle. My father stared at the floor, as did Gloria, joke-teller Gene"s wife. I had just picked a bushel of sweet corn from our garden in the dwindling summer dusk. We always gave relatives food from our garden, even though most of them had even larger gardens of their own. We may have been poor in money, but we were rich in vegetables.
"I give up," my mother said politely, breaking the silence. She and I looked expectantly at Gene because we were the only ones in the kitchen that evening who had not heard this joke before. My father and Gloria both made a somber study of the pattern in the linoleum.
"A school bus load of nigger kids going over a cliff!" Gene hollered before breaking into a spitting fit of laughter.
My mother, ever polite, shook her head. "Good one," she said softly before turning her attention to something in the vicinity of the stove. I think her sarcasm was lost on Gene.
Out of a general subservience I felt when around adults, I coughed out a half-laugh, then quickly cut it off as I made a mental image of the joke: screaming schoolchildren plunging to their deaths ... horrifying.
Gene slapped both his knees with both his hands, then clapped me across a shoulder blade, clearly mistaking my subservience for appreciation, perhaps even approval.
There were no black people in Hyndman where I went to school. In fact, only a few dozen black people lived in all of our county. I didn’t actually see a black person up close until I was in junior high and went on a class trip to Washington, D.C. At the Smithsonian, a black tour guide smiled at me and asked a group of my friends what we thought of the Apollo space craft exhibit. We stared at him like he was from the moon. He just chucked a bit and nodded, probably thinking to himself, "Okay, another busload of hillbilly white kids from the sticks." He would have been mostly right.
One summer, I rode my bike to town to play basketball at the high school courts. An older guy who was maybe twenty told us between games that he had played basketball with some "darkies" in the big city where he had found a factory job.
"Some of them are kind of okay," he said. "But most of them smell funny and will cut you up for the five dollars in your pocket."
"How many did you meet," I asked.
"Three or four," he said. "That's enough to know."
Most white people I knew growing up had what I later called "TV Negro Disorder." The only black people they had ever seen were on television, so their idea was that the whole race consisted of drug dealers, athletes, and Huxtables. Some of these white people would say things like, "They're just too lazy and dumb to get jobs or make something of themselves." Then these white people would cash their welfare checks and use their foodstamps to buy cigarettes.
Even at the mostly white college I attended after leaving the farm, I met dark-skinned people from Africa, Jamaica, South America, Australia -- even exotic places such as Ohio and New Jersey. I discovered that I needed to meet a lot more than three or four to be "enough to know" about them. My ex-wife is African-American, and I loved getting to know her wonderful family. Racial differences had no effect on our marriage or divorce. I've now had the pleasure of meeting thousands of black people as my life has opened up, and I know that they are as diverse as I am different from my cousin Gene.
The other day I saw a television show about racist jokes. One of the ones examined went like this: "Question: What's worse than a bus load of niggers going over a cliff? Answer: One seat being empty."
As evil as this joke is, there's an ugly, mean intelligence behind it. You have to think for a fraction of a second to get it. The sense of negation and lost opportunity to do away with one more hated black person who could have been in that empty seat shows a mind at work -- twisted and sick, but intelligent. Such an intelligence is rare among bigots. Cousin Gene's black and yellow and screams joke -- that's just dumb.
I was an ignorant country kid. I grew up not knowing anything about people of different races because of geographical and cultural isolation. But my brain worked well enough to understand that people have differences -- but people are people. Most bigots are a lot like my cousin Gene was that day in my kitchen all those years ago -- not only ignorant, but too stupid even to tell their racist jokes correctly.
"Bigots" is an excerpt from Mr. Sheirer's Growing Up Mostly Normal in the Middle of Nowhere. Other excerpts have appeared in Mocha Memoirs, Pindeldyboz, The Stump, and Word Riot, among others.