Usually, if the kids were included in an excursion to town, it was to visit relatives, or get haircuts for one of us boys. I don’t remember ever visiting a doctor or dentist before, perhaps the eighth grade. Church and school were both attended at two of the scant public facilities in our small community. Besides the church and school, there was a small grocery with a gas pump, and we did eventually get a one-stall garage, so the volunteer fire department would have a place to park their fire truck, and gather to train, visit, and drink beer on Saturday nights.
Grant it, growing up in a rural community near a small California farm town, my view of the world at age six was a narrow one. In those days, even though it was a mere five mile drive to town, we only went there as a family on rare occasions. We approached town from the East, meaning we had to drive through “nigger-town” and over the tracks to get to “town.” There really were not two towns, but one single small town divided by railroad tracks, and a cultural divide just as interminable as the steel rails that ran infinitely from view in either direction.
Crossing the tracks into the main part of town, you still saw Blacks, along with Whites, and Hispanics, and Asians, and a few Jews. The local shoe store was called the Jew Store, perhaps in ignorance, but without malice, and the Rio Grande market was owned by a very well respected Hispanic family. There were no Whites to be found on the East side, nor Hispanics, or Asians, or anyone who was not black, AND bearing a certain look about them. The people in nigger-town were a frightful oddity to my six-year-old mind, and never to the best of my recollection, were ever referred to as anything but “niggers.”
Two things about Black people stand out in my childhood memories of that era. Their teeth, and their cars. I somehow made a connection between gold teeth, and the men from nigger-town. It seemed, in my child’s mind, they all sported huge and evil grins, exaggerated to display the shiny gold crowns on one or more of their front teeth. I thought I could always spot blacks from nigger-town in this way, and I was scared to death of them. Those without the garish gold teeth seemed to me, to be just people. We worked with them in the cotton, went to school with them, and they were among the butchers and junk collectors who frequented our family farm in the course of business.
I can still close my eyes and conjure the vision of nigger-town folks congregated, not inside the buildings, but outside, around automobiles that lined the South side of Whitley Avenue. I remember my folks repeatedly talking about the predominance of Cadillacs always present in the lineup. There were, new Cadillacs, old beat up Cadillacs, and Cadillacs at seemingly every stage of decomposition between showroom and junkyard.
The occasional detour to exit town on the North side, took us through the black residential area, which I did not consider a part of nigger-town. However, I was always amused at the number of elaborate cars on blocks in the front yards, where they were apparently erected on cinder blocks as some sort of monument to the fact their owners had, at least for a fleeting moment, risen to Cadillac status.
The East side of that small town is long gone, replaced by vacant lots, industrial buildings, a small park, and a few very tidy little houses. Nevertheless, every time I see a black pimp on television, or a rapper of any color, clad in garish gold jewelry or fur, or sporting outlandish tattoos, with or without a wide brimmed Panama, or anyone displaying outlandish hubris, I am taken back to the piquant view of nigger-town from the side-rear window of our family car.
I am glad such language, in American society, has mostly gone the way of the dinosaur, but I have a great fear. Barack Hussein Obama is nothing more than a nobody, who is without benefit of experience or merit. He has been vaulted far above his earned status by a naïve and idealistic class of socialist leaning liberals, aided and abetted by an opportunistic MSM. Hopeful blacks have been coddled and lied to for so long, that they believe something is owed to them whether they earn it or not, and have become useful idiots and the final straw that has broken the back of our system of Republican self-governance.
The final insult to all of America, including the blacks who voted for him, is that Obama, with his garish display of hubris and unconscionable waste of money to honor himself in inauguration regalia for achieving Cadillac status, has set all of America back fifty years. I am so dismayed that I can’t help but wonder if we will soon see a couple of Cadillacs on blocks in front of the Whitehouse, and the glimmer of sparkling gold when he smiles for the press. While there is some hyperbole in all of this, I will never see an image, or hear the voice of Obama without thinking of the niggers of nigger-town who frightened me so as a child. That was an era of history I had hoped to never see again. I guess it does qualify as change though, doesn’t it? ~Neo