There are blacks, and there are, um…blacks

When I was in my early 20s, I made a black friend. I worked for a large company and Eddie was in my unit. He was a professional man, and one of very few blacks in the company. In fact, off the top of my head, I can’t think of any others who were there when I first met Eddie. Eddie was a thin, dark-skinned black man, and he had a southern black man’s accent that made him sound like he wasn’t very smart. But he was extremely smart and he knew it. He was very opinionated, to the point of being arrogant, as was I, and he had a good sense of humor. He and I had what my grandmother used to call a ‘mutual admiration society’. We were on the same team in the company bowling league and we played golf together from time to time. Eddie never talked about being black.

I never met Eddie’s wife or daughter and I never went to his house. He lived on the south side of town, where the black people lived, but he was obviously middle-class. I wasn’t real familiar with the south side of town because I almost never had reason to go there. But I couldn’t picture Eddie living in colored town.

When I asked him where he lived he told me the name of a well-known neighborhood. It was a large middle-class neighborhood south of colored town. It seemed like the kind of place where Eddie would live, except that I had known it to be a white neighborhood. I didn’t think there were any middle-class black neighborhoods, which is why I was so interested in finding out where Eddie lived.

I tried to choose my words in such a way as not to offend him, but there was really no way to dance around the question I wanted to ask. “Is that area mostly white, or black, or what?”

He told me, “It’s integrated.”

“Is it more white or black?” I asked.

“Oh, it is about half and half actually,” he said. “It’s integrated.” There was a pause while I tried to wrap my mind around that, and then he said, “I like it. It’s nice.”

“It used to be all white I think,” I said in a tone of voice that strongly (too strongly) implied,”‘My, isn’t that interesting!” because I didn’t want him to think that I was stating disapproval of integration. I may have even stroked down on my chin with my thumb and forefinger, squinted my eyes, and furrowed my brow professorially.

“People seem real happy with it now,” he said, smiling. I moved on to a different subject.

By the time I had known Eddie for about ten years, I had worked my up to a cubicle near his. One day, Eddie came in to my cubicle to show me his vacation photos. They had been to Jamaica. I looked through the photos of Jamaica, throwing in a few Oooos and aaaaaas at the appropriate places. Then I came to a photo of some black children in front of a house that looked like it could be in colored town, or in any poor black neighborhood in the country. They were smiling at the camera.

“Is this Jamaica?” I asked, confused, but pretty sure it was not.

“What?” Eddie said.

“This isn’t Jamaica is it?”

“No,” he said, offering no more.

Now Eddie owned some rental property. He owned a rental house and a duplex and he spent a lot of his off time maintaining them. He had shown me a picture of the duplex once and it was nice. I liked to tease him by calling him a slum lord. He didn’t seem to think it was funny, but I figured it was OK since he was NOT a slum lord. I figured that it was the same kind of teasing that I would give a white friend, and that any discomfort he or I had with the joke was because of his race. I was determined to treat him the same way I would a white friend, and I decided if he didn’t like the joke, that was too bad.

I have no idea what possessed me to ask him the next question about the photo of the little poor black kids. “Is it your tenants?”

“No.”

“It isn’t St.Pete?” That is where he and I both lived.

“No.”

“Where…”

“Alabama.”

Uh-oh. “Ala…”

“We visited my sister…”

Think of something normal to say. “Oh, after Jamaica…”

“Yes. Those are my nieces and nephews.”

I said, “Ohhh”, with as much “happy to see your adorable family members” inflection as I could muster. “Nice looking kids.”

I was embarrassed and worried that I had insulted my friend. I was confused and surprised that Eddie’s relatives would be ‘that kind’ of black people. Eddie and I lived in the same world- the white world. We never discussed that other kind of black people, and it never occurred to me that Eddie had anything to do with that world. The ghetto world. I wondered why Eddie didn’t rescue his sister’s family. But I didn’t dare ask.

Our friendship survived this awkwardness, ignorance, and lack of tact on my part- to the extent that we had an actual friendship. I realized then, sadly, that our racial difference was a chasm in our friendship that could not be overcome. Today I know that the chasm was me- my lack of understanding and my attitudes about black people- attitudes that were, and are, so deeply ingrained that they cannot be turned off like a switch. Eddie had to understand the white world if he wanted to work in his chosen career. He had to endure insult and a lack of understanding. He had to make friends. I saw him as one of us, only black. I saw him as one of the ‘good’ kind of black people who are successful and who never complain about what it’s like to be black. I would not have admitted this of course- not even to myself. I have always hated to hear someone say, “so-and-so is black, but he’s a good one,” or “there are Blacks and there are N—–s.” I found those statements offensive. Well, I might not have been so harsh in judgment, but I definitely divided blacks into two groups- those who have acclimated into white society and those who have not. I still do today, even though I know better, and I still experience the confusion that I experienced over the picture of Eddie’s nieces and nephews.