Town

Ok, a little clarification about the last post. My parents weren't really racist. Not by the standards of the time. They didn't hate anyone because of their ethnic background. It was pure ignorance and lack of deep thought or exposure, very common at that time, in that place. If anything, they were fairly mild in their prejudices. They would never have said anything hostile to anyone in person. It was all jokey assumptions, of the same kind they made about their own groups. It was, at most, mildly disparaging. Their language if overheard from forty years on would sound awful, but at the time, it really didn't mean that much.

My father worked in a copper tubing factory, alongside every flavor of immigrant imaginable in Detroit in the 50s & 60s, which is considerable. He was Frenchy, Hungarians were Hunkies, Italians were wops, and I don't think the black men he worked with, and liked, would have been called the N-word to their face - at least not by my father*.

Both my parents were polite to anyone black that they met out shopping, for instance. There was simply an immense sense of them being "other." My father talked like Archie Bunker at home, but had enough sense of social norms not to throw it in the face of anyone concerned. As the neighborhood became predominantly Mexican†, they may have grumbled a bit in private, but treated them all as good neighbors. And even that faded over the years, as they became more familiar.

It seems like a fine line, but I think it's an important one. I never felt I was reacting against my parents' bigotry, only going a step further toward compassionate understanding.

Those attitudes, though, are part of why one can't go home again. Because home is not just a place, it's a time, a very particular set of events. Hard to explain. That's why nostalgia is going home, not going back to the house you grew up in. Home is a state of mind, a phase of our lives, even more than where it happened.

Perhaps I so reject nostalgia because I am home, here, now. Or maybe because so often, I think nostalgia is about trying to go back and get the love that was needed as a child, and not given. So, the desire to return and try again is strong. Or some other loss ungrieved, or joy taken away too soon. A distaste for seeing the black and white and all the greys, preferring to imagine only the good, to fill in the gap.

Or I've seen Our Town a few too many times. After a while, one begins to see the satire.


*I have fairly little good to say about my father. And I'm sure he made any dark skinned person uncomfortable with his own odd mannerisms. But I can't imagine him shouting angry slurs at another man in public.

†Many of whose families had been in the states longer than my parents, who immigrated from Canada.


Oh, and this interview with Shelby Foote, come across lately, is a balm.