“What’s a nigger?” Johnny asked. “What’s a nigger?”
I had never heard the word either. I lived in a world where blackness poured over us like warm molasses and filled our ears with affection, where black love didn’t have to be spoken to be felt. But I knew when the spell was broken and we were hurled into a parallel universe of quiet hate.
“What’s a nigger?” Johnny asked a third time.
In that instant I knew exactly what it meant. It was a tidal wave of foul water crashing down on me, staining me, choking me, and pulling me out to the point of no return. I knew it was a condemnation, not just of me and Johnny and his mama, but of every black person I loved, the ones I didn’t like, the ones I didn’t know, the ones I would never know. In that moment my mouth filled with the taste of hate beyond anything my parents or any adult in my life could fix.
Surely you won’t judge me, beloved. And please don’t make a silly false equivalence between us. Some of you claim that black folk are racists too when they use epithets like honky, redneck, cracker, ofay, gray boy, and the like. But you know that’s a lie, and I’ll tell you why a little later.
Don’t be taken aback by the wash of hatred over my preadolescent mind. Can you blame me? I was a seven-year-old child feeling the weight of the white world’s hate crushing my precious soul. There was no Benjamin Spock to explain the trauma I endured as a grade school victim of hate. There was no Jean Piaget to explain the impact of utter revulsion on my cognitive development. I would quickly learn how others of my race fended off your grave assault. A famous black leader told me how he and his young adult peers would rifle through the obituary section in the white papers and gleefully proclaim “another cracker gone.” I heard churchgoing folk who love the Lord sanctify their rage with holy profanity at your barbarous mistreatment or murder of us. “Goddamned crackas. Motherfucking honkeyass ofays. Fuck all of them redneck peckerwoods.”
“What’s a nigger, Mommy?” Johnny asked for the last time in utter exasperation.
His mama knelt down between us, her eyes level with ours, still holding our hands.
“Don’t tell your Daddy,” she said to Johnny. She turned to me.
“Promise you won’t tell, Michael. And promise you won’t tell your Daddy when we get back. Both of you, promise.” We promised. We stood there and swore the oath of secrecy that too many mothers and children of my era were compelled to swear. I knew from her worried eyes, her tight lips, her urgent tone, and her painful grip on my hand that this moment, this word, in this context, could never pass from my mouth to my father’s ears, even as it echoed in mine. When my father died in 1981 at the age of 66, I had not broken my promise.
Nigger.
I don’t remember what lie Johnny’s mother told her husband about why we didn’t bring back any food. I do remember that she didn’t want me to tell my father what happened because that knowledge—the knowledge that his son, his family, was in danger—was a black man’s kryptonite. Men like Johnny’s father and mine were still young enough and full enough of dreams inspired by the north’s meager but real freedoms that the treatment of black people in the south could lead them to act, as southerners would say, foolishly. The danger was always there. Even small gestures like being dismissed, or disrespected, or scorned made a black man taste his bitter limits. Forced to be less than they were, to be less than men, to witness the white man’s silly insistence that they eat from a different lunch counter. It all might suddenly be too much to bear. A man might snap at the awareness that he couldn’t protect his family, not really, not like white men. For a black man, the knowledge that his son and his loved ones had just been called nigger could turn, swiftly, to calamity.
I entered a dark room of knowing when Johnny’s mama swore me to silence. I began to realize that a word alone could sap my father of his powers. It could rip the cape off his manhood and he could no longer be his family’s superman like all good daddies deserved to be. It was not because he couldn’t leap tall buildings in a single bound. That was easy. I’d seen him jump the tall homemade doghouse in our backyard in pursuit of a huge rat that threatened to bite us as we played. It was not because he was not more powerful than a locomotive. My father’s nickname was “Muscles.”
It was because there was one thing that Superman did that my father couldn’t do, and while I didn’t know it, I sensed it even then, when I still believed in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy: my father wasn’t faster than a speeding bullet, or more powerful than a noose. In that moment I inherited black intuition, a sense about the world that outpaced my knowledge of it. It was black intuition that, in retrospect, was inevitable because all black people get it at one time or another. It is passed down from generation to generation in the cellular memory of our vulnerable black bodies. I got my innocence snatched from me, with one word, more abruptly and years earlier than white children lose theirs. And for all that my own story is specific, it is the opposite of unique.
*
Nigger.
That one word. I know you recoil at its use. I know you have never used the word yourself, or at least almost never. You may admit, however, that, unfortunately, some of your kin have used it, especially the unlettered ones, or the previous ignorant generation. You know the ones. It’s mortifying, isn’t it? I know you hate its use in polite white company. You may even have called out a friend who used it. You think nigger is a linguistic fossil. It belongs in the museum next to the Confederate flag.