Pickaninnies and More

According to my Mother, she spent her childhood on a plantation in Tennessee run by a “King David” in the 1920s and early 1930s. Mom never knew her father. Shortly before her birth, sheriffs in El Paso Texas killed him when he resisted arrest for drug possession.

Mom said her mother rode horses bareback and her dad worked as a roustabout and cowboy with Ringling Brothers Circus. Apparently, he’d been trying to score some drugs for friends in the early movie industry. Instead of his actual name, Jesse Woodall, El Paso County used his stage name, Billy West, on his death certificate. After his death, my grandmother went to live with Jesse’s relatives and raise her child.

Mom, the N — word and pickaninnies.

I rarely heard the N-word used at home as a direct slur. Things were a bit more subtle. Not a lot, but a bit. Instead, my parents almost always colored or coloreds when referring to African-Americans. More on that in a moment.

But pickaninnies? Pickaninnies I heard a lot from Mom starting around the age of four or five. She’d talk about the “Mammies,” who cooked and cleaned for everyone — meaning the white folk — on the plantation, and how she played with the pickaninnies.

When I finally asked what it meant she said “it’s little colored girls, black as tar, with their hair sticking out all over.” She used the word with affection for the children, yet somehow I picked up that it was also with a sense of superiority, that she thought African-Americans were less than she.

The subliminal message strengthened

A few years later, I saw the Our Gang comedies on television. Buckwheat, a caricature of a black child, matched Mom’s descriptions of pickaninny perfectly. It reinforced the notion that “coloreds” were less than. I don’t recall hearing the word Negro around home.

In her early teens, my grandmother sent Mom out west to Ventura, California, to live with other relatives. From hints Mom dropped, I suspect it was because grandmother feared “someone” on the plantation might rape her.

Dad was born and raised in Joplin, Missouri. Another border state. He taught me to pronounce it “Missoura,” not “Missouree.” He too grew up fatherless, perhaps in a sharecropper’s cabin on some farm like his grandfather pictured below. Dad’s father lit out for California to find work. No one in Dad’s family ever saw him again.

When I look at the photograph above, I can only imagine the stories he heard about African-Americans by the time he graduated from high school and joined the Marines in the early 30s.

Like I said earlier, I rarely heard the other N-word used at home. At different times, however, Mother would describe in rather haughty terms that she and other girls were to be wary of “the n — — in the woodpile.” It wasn’t until my mid-teens that I understood what she meant — and how that or other men on the plantation prompted her to move to California.

First recognized effect of racism in my family

For part of my early teens, we lived in Winslow, Arizona, one of the 18 towns I called “home” before I dropped out of high school and joined the Navy.

I had an African-American friend in Winslow named Charles Lott. He and his mother cleaned the town’s walk-in and drive-in movie theaters. They let me help them so I could earn a bit of money or get free tickets to the movies. Occasionally, I stayed overnight at their home. It was my first experience eating pickled pigs' feet. Stereotypically, it was on the “wrong” side of the railroad tracks and called “N — Town,” by many white kids.

I don’t recall Dad ever using the N-word. While living in Winslow, I once asked him about his views on Negroes. He described them as good people, but he wouldn’t invite them home for dinner. That stopped me from inviting Charles to our trailer. Actually, I don’t recall anyone being invited to dinner.

Dad struggled hard enough just to provide for a wife and five kids as a body and fender repairman.

The family’s racism impact on me

So how did their racism impact me? Despite our poverty — or “lack of resources” in today’s sanitized parlance — we and I were superior to someone else simply because of our skin color. Expressions like “we’re not colored,” “we’re not Mexicans,” we’re not Chinese or Japanese”, popped up from time to time to reinforce our status.

Our poverty made me feel powerless. However, I knew I had one power, no matter what. I was white. Whether I expressed it outwardly, my youthful self could hang on to that sliver of status. I wasn’t on the bottom rung. At least in my mind.

Those experiences happened over 65 years ago, and I’ve “evolved” since then. Still, I can’t help but wonder when something racially biased that I don’t recognize might pop up. Might it influence my view of current events despite decades of working to eliminate them? Can I be open to exploring it if someone else points it out?

And I wonder about those who are younger than me and may have experienced the same or even more subtle forms of family racial prejudice and biases. How have they responded to those views? Have they adopted them as their own or acknowledged and struggled with them?

How has the heightened awareness of inequality based on color and class impacted you?

I’m curious about how other old white folks evolved over the last six or seven decades.

When you look back on your childhood, did you develop subconscious prejudicial attitudes that you uncovered later in life? How long did it take you to recognize them? How long did it take before you accepted their origins and worked toward eradicating them? Have you ever said or did something that someone pointed out as racist or prejudicial? If so, how did you respond?

Honest responses to hidden color-based bias

How we respond is the hardest part of being in a racist environment. Most of us whites don’t want to be seen as racist. Yet, most of us are. Not all the time, or even a big part of the time, but sometimes a racist notion pops up — seemingly out of nowhere.

We never get rid of all the racist impressions from our past. I don’t think it helps to attack one other for non-physical racist transgressions. And I understand that, far too often, we whites feel “attacked” and get defensive when someone is merely pointing out our making a racist comment or perception. But that’s a subject for another article.

The best we can do is to avoid becoming defensive; to be open to exposing the source of the bias; to examine the effects covert and overt racist perceptions have in our interactions with BIPOC.

And, most important, eradicate both the perception and the behavior each time it rears its ugly head.

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