Tag: Black boys

Soft Serve Summer

One teenage summer I was hired to sell soft-serve ice cream on the corner of Eighteenth and Main in South Belmar, New Jersey. I opened the stand in mid-morning and closed my shift at four. I had just enough time to get home, shower off the sugary goo and get to my other job counting out cash drawers at a popular saloon on the beach. The legal age for working at the bar was twenty-one. I was eighteen.

On the east coast the common name for soft serve was carvel after the brand that invented it. Learning to dish it up was the easiest gig to master. I started the day pouring gallons of ice cream mixture into the top of a big aluminum tank, replenished the cones, cups and toppings and waited to pull the lever of creamy goodness for the crowd.

Most summer businesses wisely set up on the boardwalk or Ocean Avenue where the action is. The carvel stand opened a mile and a half from the beachfront as a gamble, a beacon of delight beckoning vacationing families. George the owner gambled himself a bit at Monmouth Park Racetrack during the day and at all-night card games. In the 1960s the Jersey Shore had its share of mobsters conducting illegal poker games in summer cottages up and down the Atlantic coast.

I spent a lot of time perched on a stool reading books and magazines that summer. Very few customers came for carvel during the day. The crowds were seaside, swimming, surfing and sunning. A little boy popped up and down at the window one day. I heard him giggling under the ledge where I couldn’t see him.

“I think I hear someone,” I said out loud, “I wonder if I should make a chocolate or vanilla cone.”

“Chocolate!” Came the response loud and clear.

I held the cone out the window without saying a word. A head full of tight black curls slowy pulled up the thin shirtless brown body of Perry. He reached his hand out for the cone.

“Twenty-five cents please.” I said.

“Don’t have no money,” said Perry. “It’s already made so jus’ gimme it.”

I tried to tell him I couldn’t do that but his persuasive smile matched his logical entreaty. I cautioned him not to tell anyone. He did tell someone, of course—all his friends. One by one they appeared below the window in the same way Perry did, as if bobbing up and Unknown 2down was the normal way to get a free cone.

At one point George told me the reason we didn’t have customers was because too many Black kids were hanging around. We both knew that wasn’t true. He loved those funny bobbers as much as I did but that’s what he told his white friends and family to justify his failure.

Between George’s lifting cash from the till and my give-aways to Perry and his friends the post Labor Day accounting showed two thousand dollars in the red.

George, curiously unconcerned, laid plans for his next scheme. 

Unearned Chicago Whiteness

I want to be a woman who is not afraid of young Black men. I want to enter the subway platform like an alley cat flic-flac’ing her cold feet into lackadaisical safety. I’m an old woman who wants to love non-Anglo words bouncing off the curve of the tunnel—ping! pow! hitting the pulse of the collective-waiting-for-the-train with differing beats-per-minute.

Imagine if I accepted Black culture the way some accept Chinese culture. I’d stop trying to colonize Black names—it’s Na’Dia, not Nadia! I’d quit harping at the Walgreen’s cashier for her gold-plated elongated fingernails—how can you hit the keys with those? I’d accept rap and hip-hop, stop changing the words or the beat whitening it all up just to enfranchise my fragile birthright. 

I’d walk down Lawndale streets, how-you-doin’, and ‘wassupin’, a welcome visitor looking for friends and food and local art. Next day I’d take you with me sayin’, meet Taneesha from poetry class and oh there’s Damari from tutoring. Hi Fam. Here’s my friends. I’d hear new language poppin’ outta my own mouth. Like they were my own words. Like they have to do when they walk white and talk white on Michigan Avenue, or else. Or else, the judge says, I can’t understand you. Speak proper English. 

We’d gather all together and go to the movies, sit side-by-side transforming ourselves into subcutaneous doppelgängers. We’d be like, oh that’s funny or Girrrlll I feel ya’. All hands would open and close on popcorn from the same bucket. Afterwards we’d crowd the sidewalk two-steppin’ to No Diggity on our way to brunch. Everyone would get served and be safe.

My unearned whiteness is a blessing: I get to go out the door without rehearsing how to react when Macy’s security guards ask to see my receipt. And a curse: A white woman cried to the police there musta been 40 Black boys down there crowded in the red line and I’m helplessly guilt-ridden when the fact gets reported as 50 later that night. And 60 the next morning.

I’m an old white woman who wants to cuddle and cry with Black children maligned in that subway—not white women’s cries regurgitating Black boy history of false accusations and lynchings. No. No. God-the-Mother cries with tears that seep under my babies’ skin cleansing them of my control, my denial of their equality, my remarks about their hair.

I thought I was once a curious woman simply eavesdropping on human nature’s racial conversations. The constant banged-out message that my beloved Chicago is the most segregated city in the country woke me to know I’ve been a gagged participant all along.

My vow is to be the old white woman waiting in that subway, with you, emancipated from the fear of young Black men.

michael-sardin
CHICAGO (CBS)–An 18-year-old is among four people now charged in a mob attack on the CTA Red Line.