Well Bottom Blues

“I’m a comin’ I’m a comin ‘though my head is hanging low.” These lyrics were sung in some forgotten cartoon of my youth by a stereotypical bipedal hound dog. Only recently when they popped into my head a couple of times that I discover they were taken from the lyrics of “Old Black Joe” by Stephen C. Foster, the maestro of the minstral and the bard of blackface.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44257/old-black-joe

Enter Mr Bones, stage left, into the drama of an often troubled mind.

I was born on the south side of Robert E. Lee Boulevard and raised not half a block from that. There are other bits of doggerol I can’t seem to expunge from my mind. One is the old Hershey’s chocolate jingle where they spelled out the name, except the version I learned when very young substituted Dillard for Hershey.

I remember the way my grandfather would refer to his workers as ‘his niggers,”and the genteel way my grandmother would say “nigra” as she told me too dark a cafe au lait would turn me brown as one.

I startled some people one night, especially the black people at the table, when in a pertinent conversation I borrowed the line from 12 step and said, “Hello my name is Mark and I’m a racist.”

That is what we were taught by adults and peers in the early 1960s on the lakefront just off Robert E. Lee Boulevard where the only black faces were the maids and gardeners, and my father’s favorite handyman Jojo.  He towered over my toddler self in overalls and boots without a shirt, black as a Hindu demon. I wasn’t frightened of him given how young I was, not yet fully indoctrinated. My other early direct memory of black people was the maid we shared with my mother’s sister and my grandmother, Sylvia. Some of my earliest childhood memories are not of my mother or older sisters but of sitting on the floor next to the ironing board while she shook water from a salt shaker onto my father’s shirts while watching The Guiding Light.

I think seeing JoJo was my first experience of transcendentalist Awe. And Sylvia was invited to my older sisters weddings but of course not the receptions.

It’s a long slog to crawl out of the ancient hatreds. It’s not a magic moment when you proclaim yourself free. Freedom doesn’t work that way. It’s a daily struggle. “Living one day at a time,/ Enjoying one moment at a time,/ Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace…” *

I do not accept the prayer’ s Christian Inshalla.I do not accept the things They say cannot be changed , “taking…this sinful world As it is…”

The world is what we make of it, taking strength and wisdom from those ancestors who did not settle and did not bow.

* From theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, from which the 12 Step serenity prayer is derived.