My grandfather and my granduncle are both dead now, and have been for many years. I loved 'em both dearly and I remember 'em fondly… but today, I remember a thing that makes me remember this: The past is a foreign country. Things were not then as they are now.
Grandfather and Granduncle were brothers, and they grew up in the same little town in Texas. Granduncle was a baker, and owned his own bakery. Grandfather was a surveyor at the time; this would have been in the late 1920s, if I am right. Maybe the thirties. Like I said, I wasn’t there.
Anyway, Granduncle owned a bakery, and one day, he had a box of day old doughnuts he was about to toss out. Grandfather was around at the time, for some reason. And a black fellow that they knew asked – since the doughnuts were going to be trash anyway – would it be all right if he, um, sort of *liberated *them from the trash?
Well, Granduncle was a sporting sort, and so he handed the guy the box, and made a crack about “They’re all yours, bud, just make sure to bring back the holes so I can wrap tomorrow’s doughnuts around them!”
And nothing more was said. Until the next day, the black fellow brought back the box of doughnuts. Carefully eaten in such a way as to preserve a bare edge of doughnut hole, a tightly nibbled ring of sugary confection around each hole.
Well, this is where Grandfather and Granduncle parted ways. Granduncle was horrified. He’d been kidding… never expected anything like this… and abruptly, it got pounded in on him rather hard that he lived in a world where a black chap could not ignore a white man’s joke in safety. Sure, White Man was PROBABLY kidding… and Granduncle had a very easygoing reputation… but… what if the White Man wants to make an issue of it? What if he wants to raise a stink the next day? “Hey, boy,” he might say, “I told you to bring back my doughnut holes. WHERE ARE MY HOLES, BOY?”
Granduncle was rocked pretty hard by this. He had grown up in an era of easy racism, sure, but it’s one thing to hear about it from one’s white friends and relatives, and another to be confronted with the stark patheticness of its results.
Grandfather, on the other hand, thought it was hilarious. HA, ha, ha! That silly negro! That simpleton! He did not understand the joke! HE took it SERIOUSLY! Ha, ha! He really thought Brother needed the holes to wrap new doughnuts around for tomorrow’s batch! Oh, my lord, the hilarity of simple, silly negroes! And he told that story for years afterwards.
It did not get the laughs in the seventies that it apparently had in the thirties and forties, for some reason.
And the one time I heard it from my granduncle… well, Granduncle didn’t seem to think the story was very funny at all.
I’m glad they both told me the story, though. I was born in the early sixties, when the Civil Rights movement was picking up steam, and by the time I was old enough to tell the difference between my classmates’ skin tones, the N-word was being discouraged, and race baiting was SEVERELY frowned upon, even in deep south Texas. I didn’t understand any of this, of course. “Selma” to me, was a woman’s name, and Martin Luther King Jr. was some guy who made big speeches in public places. And then, he kind of disappeared. All I was told was that I shouldn’t give black kids a hard time for being black, which considering I was a child, never really occurred to me in the first place.
Mine was the first generation, perhaps, in Texas, to have their racism training kind of short circuited at an early point. Years later, when I heard of cross burnings and lynchings, I was stunned. Things like this HAPPENED? And people I actually know PARTICIPATED IN THIS insanity?
Well, yeah. And while my grandfather never wore a sheet or burned any crosses, he did have a firmly established set of beliefs… beliefs shaped by the time in which HE grew up. And by my standards, those beliefs were… and are… pretty harsh things. We need to make a point of not forgetting these stories, though. No matter WHAT color any of us happens to be. Forgetting this stuff makes us ALL the more ignorant… and more prone to it happening again, in some form or fashion.
I guess that says something about the atmosphere of race relations I was raised in, but I’m not sure what. An assumption that white and black men can joke together? Yes, I suppose I do carry that assumption.