Julian Riggs Smith
Durham, NH
Growing up in a little town in Louisiana during the Second Word War, I found nothing strange about the fact that my white grandparents often ate breakfast and lunch at the kitchen table kitchen with ‘Stell, their black cook, and John, her husband–and that John and ‘Stell never ate with us in the dining room.
Nor did I find it strange that I was expected to address respectable older blacks like John and ‘Stell as “Uncle” and “Aunt”.
Uncle John had a mule and a wagon and a regular trash-collection route and sometimes let me ride with along him when he had a full load to haul to dumping ground in a swamp several miles from the center of our little town. I liked going to the dump because Uncle John let me shoot rats with his old .22 rifle.
One day in early 1945, when I was seven, I was sitting on the buckboard beside Uncle John when a dog began snapping at the legs of the mule.
“I wish I had my n*****-shooter”, I said, using the local slang term for a sling shot.
“What’d you say, boy?” asked Uncle John, stopping the wagon.
I repeated my words and pantomimed using a sling shot.
To make a long story short, Uncle John told me to get down, walk home, and tell Miss Rachel, my grandmother, to wash my mouth out with soap.
My grandmother didn’t wash my mouth out with soap, but she did tell me why I must never use that terrible word again–and that Uncle John was my uncle, was my grandfather’s older half-brother, begotten on his cook several years before their father, a Confederate veteran, could afford to marry. And how her father-in-law, my great grandfather, sailed to Baltimore to woo and marry a cousin and brought her back to Louisiana to his fine new house where the kitchen was run by a former slave with a little boy who resembled her new husband and the two boys she eventually bore, a little boy who looked after his too younger half-brothers, took them hunting and fishing.
Although I was seven, had attained the age of reason and made my first communion, I did not know what that terrible word meant. But using it that day on my uncle’s wagon unlocked the door to many mysteries and set me on a path that would one day result in my own mother calling me a n*****-lover.
