I was around seven or eight years old when I got word of a kid whose father had a garage full of brand new GI Joe’s, that you could buy at wholesale prices. It seems really odd in retrospect but at the time I had no interest in the particulars of how they had come to be in his possession. Maybe the guy worked for Hasbro and had access to damaged or overstock product. Maybe he was a Mob hijacker who nicked the wrong truck. Or maybe he was just a weirdo who stocked up on action figures to lure young boys to his garage. This was the early 1970’s so none of those scenarios strike me as too far fetched. Life was stranger and freer in those days. So free in fact, that at that tender boyhood age we were pretty much roaming the entirety of the little hamlet of Glasgow Village with frequency and familiarity. But this particular kid must not have gone to Saint Catherine of Alexandria because his name was new to me and he lived on the far side of the unspoken border of our wanderings, which was Lilac Avenue. We rarely crossed Lilac at the time other than to cautiously explore the expansive grounds of Riverview Gardens High School, sometimes on a holy day while that school was still in session. Once you made the mistake of flaunting the liberation that the martyrdom of the saints provided in front of the public school kids, you thought twice before doing it again. They didn’t appreciate it, not at all. Better to huddle in your Catholic enclave and keep a low profile until their school day had ended, no reason to gloat. There was a walkway with a low chain-link fence that bisected the row of homes that bordered the high school allowing the village teens easy access to the campus. Walking that path as a pre-teen, was to walk the gauntlet of pimply faced, leering, jeering, smoking, Room 222 rejects that populated the era. That path was sort of a demilitarized no man’s land where the lunch break ritual crimes of lighting up a joint or heavy petting could be carried out in relative safety and anonymity. God, how those poor homeowners on either side of that walkway must have loathed its purpose.

At this point in his chronology GI Joe had evolved enough to have the fuzzy, flocked lifelike hair rather than the painted on pompadour. Kung-Fu grip may have been on the scene but I wasn’t interested. I believe now that it was just a clever pioneering PC ruse to eliminate his trigger finger. Anyway, the Kung-Fu fingers always split at the top of the palm leaving Joe looking liker an inept butcher. I saw that gimmick as the first chink in Joe’s armor and the beginning of his full decline that would culminate some few years on in the depressing duo of Mike Powers, Atomic Man and Bullet Man, The Human Bullet. The Joe I loved was a soldier, a man of action; bionics or similar silly superpowers never belonged in his world. If it couldn’t be done with muscle, ingenuity and the contents of his footlocker, than it just didn’t need doing. Stripping away the multitude of available Christmas catalogue accessories, Joe at his basest level came in five flavors. There was your basic Man of Action; still clinging to the past, clean-shaven and dressed in olive drab. A generic foot soldier in your backyard army, a nobody, a green second lieutenant who talked tough but had no game and no experience; in a word, expendable. This beardless Joe also came in a black version simply labeled Adventurer and decked out in full khaki. The picture on his box shows him cruising through the desert in of all available places, Africa. The remaining three Joe’s were all appropriately seventies looking white dudes with their groovy new facial hair. There was the brown haired Land Adventurer in jungle camouflage, red headed Sea Adventurer sporting an all denim ensemble and lastly the blonde Air Adventurer wearing what I thought was the coolest togs of them all, an orange zip up jumpsuit. Each came with the standard issue gear of dog tags, Adventure Team patch, black boots, shoulder holster and pistol.

I must have had a name for this lucky kid with the twelve-inch treasure trove and I suppose I had an address because I remember my mom driving me over and watching my back as the deal went down. Plastic for cash, cash for plastic, not a lot of chitchat, just hand over the dough and pick the man you want. “Be quick about it and move on, we’ve got nosy neighbors over here. The jig is up if Sears or K-Mart find out we’re dealing in black market Joes.” I made my selection with little hesitation; though with each Joe spread before me the multitude of service branch specific play scenarios were peppering my imagination rapid fire. I must have spent what little money I had saved from birthday or allowance. My family was certainly not wealthy and we were not quite poor, we were middleclass back when the term accurately defined generations of people who worked hard, lived within theirs means and paid their bills on time. A new toy for me came on birthday or Christmas only, so this was a big deal. Not that I was deprived, I had more than enough army men, cowboys and Indians, Hot Wheels and toy guns to sufficiently arm and populate the backyard landscape that was my playground. I even had a hand me down Joe and some gear that came to me from a cousin who had outgrown them but I had never experienced a brand new Joe fresh out of the box.

I stood looking at that box in my hand, bright burnt orange and electric with the promise of adventure to come. I cracked it open after slowly tugging at the new cardboard that hugged and gripped and created a vacuum in that way fresh boxes will do. He stood there at attention, rigid and perfect. No dangling silver snaps on his uniform from constant wardrobe changes, no loose joints that made standing upright independently or holding a rifle with accuracy a difficulty. No bald spots where his lifelike hair had rubbed off from helmets and hard play and no split up the back of the boot which was the most common and inevitable flaw in Joe’s gear. He was immaculate. He was also black.

I don’t honestly remember my dad’s reaction as I proudly showed him my purchase. He was a tough Irish, Korean War Veteran born almost a year to the date before the beginning of The Great Depression. He worked in the city in a manufacturing job at a time when the civil rights movement was still fresh, Nixon was up to his old tricks and The Vietnam War was dragging on. I was growing up in a far north county berg where if we had any black neighbors, I was unaware of them. That was the time and the place of my youth. Chances are as good as not that Dad didn’t say a word but just looked at me sideways, maybe raising an eyebrow. That would have been in character and even at that young age, I would have gotten the message. I would not have read it as disapproval but instead as if to say, “Kid, are you ever going to do things the easy way?” Which in its audible incarnation usually came as, “I think you have a screw loose.” I always took that as a compliment. I still do.

I was not a wise child, I was barely smart but I was curious, observant and self-entertaining. I was certainly no child crusader for civil rights because the very concept of civil rights and that necessity for others would have never occurred to me. I was not noble nor was I trying to make a point, I was simply indifferent and ignorant to any notion of my toy choice presenting a problem. It never occurred to me that I might catch backlash from another kid while I carried out my adventures in the yard with my new and only black friend. For the record, I don’t recall that I ever did. Kids are not their parents and if racism was rampant on an adult level in my all white neighborhood and all white school, I again was either too dumb to notice or too self-involved to care. I was busy being a kid and wallowing in all the selfishness that goes with the job.

From Glasgow Village, a short journey down Riverview Drive takes you round The Halls Ferry Circle onto Goodfellow and into the city of St. Louis. We went into the city often enough for me to know that the world was not exclusively white, I don’t ever recall having to be informed of this. If I had some vague sense of the tensions that existed between races it likely came from watching television. My dad loved old movies and with one black and white television in the house I suppose I was bound to inherit his passion. One movie in particular that I recall seeing at an early age was The Defiant Ones. The film features Tony Curtis and Sydney Poitier as shackled at the wrists escapees from a chain gang. Curtis as John ‘Joker’ Jackson is a small-time, nobody southern bigot and Poitier is Noah Cullen, who is not having any of it and is determined to escape north even if that means dragging his invective spewing companion with him. They are diametrically opposed in every way but are forced to work together toward a common goal of freedom, all the while trying to understand what it is that drives the other. At one point Noah presses Joker on his habitual use of the word; that word for which he has promised to kill Joker if uttered again, while Joker on the defensive heatedly tries to rationalize its use.

Joker: “Now don’t crowd me, ‘cause I didn’t make up no names”!

Noah: “No, you breathe it in when you’re born and you spit it out from then on.”

There is a lot of truth in this exchange. No one is born seething with hatred for his fellow man but we breath it in if it permeates the air around us and we sure learn how to use to our advantage what sets us apart, in one hell of a hurry. Life not treating you fair? Things not going as planned? Well it can’t have anything to do with your own shortcomings so there must be someone else to blame. This way of thinking usually manifests in the soothing rationale of, “Sure I’m a miserable asshole but at least I’m not a ___________! Fill in the blank anyway you see fit.

I loved The Defiant Ones as a kid and still to this day, not for the ugly truths it exposes but for the message of hope it provides. By the end of the movie the shackles are off but a stronger bond has been forged. The two men have struggled for their very survival, most often grudgingly and when finally free of one another they come to the startling realization that they were stronger together. After one last failed bid for freedom, Joker lies broken and shot, cradled in the arms of Noah as the law grows ever nearer. Defiant to the end, Noah sings the Sheriff in with a spiritual that starts low and slow and becomes joyful if not outright rapturous by the finish, “Bowlin’ Green, Sewin’ Machine!”

Life is not fair. It is hard and dirty and cruel enough without piling hatred upon hatred for hatred’s sake. Acknowledging this is liberation. Race relations seem to be driven by our disruptive and fallacious presumption that individuals are inherently racist based on surface reactions to deeply rooted, intricately nuanced social problems. It is after all behaviors and attitudes, independent of a particular skin color, that we usually disdain. Skin color might help us feel assumptive of ill intent (and it is in these glancing observations where racism is born) but in the final analysis it is actions and habits that make us hate, not the color of one’s skin. Hate is colorblind, my eyes however are not. The suggestion that we should view humanity as if colorblind is inane and self-deluding. That is like saying we should view the sky and the trees as the same color because we don’t want green to be offended by blue. The world is vast and many hued and I savor the abundance of color and shade.

If I didn’t grow up in a place that offered a diversity of skin color on the street or in the classroom, I certainly came to appreciate that diversity while watching our black and white TV. The 1960’s and 70’s were dynamic in their portrayal of black men in movies and television and I took notice. What I noticed was that often the more heroic characters, the ones who fought the hardest for justice and right, were the black men. I noticed too that they did so against great and overwhelming opposition, which would naturally make them the underdog. When you’re an eight-year-old kid playing alone in a ditch with dolls (okay, action figures) while your friends mostly were off playing sports, you might tend to view yourself as an outsider, an underdog. I identified with and admired these men as I tried to reconcile their strength with the conflicting input I was receiving from earlier movies. Saturday afternoon television at the time usually served up a trio of old movies from the 1930’s and 40’s featuring some combination of Abbott & Costello, Charlie Chan, The Bowery Boys, Ma & Pa Kettle and Francis The Talking Mule. It was through these movies that I was introduced to classic vaudevillian shtick that I still find amusing to this day. They also introduced me to some really awful portrayals of black men almost exclusively relegated to the role of butler, bellhop, porter or janitor and most consistently reacting ludicrously to some impending danger; say, a ghost. You could find similar portrayals in the cartoons from those years, another prevalent source of entertainment on television as I was growing up. Faced with these two opposing characterizations of the same men, you could hardly blame a white boy for being confused.

I was too young to grasp the concept of pandering and it was not at the expense of white actors and their portrayals that I was drawn to these black characters. Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Cagney and Bogart, Billy Jack, Fireman John Gage and Astronaut Steve Austin were always going to be figures that I admired and emulated. But alongside them there was ample room for men like Jim Brown as Robert Jefferson in The Dirty Dozen, whose heroics saved the day or Roscoe Lee Brown as Jebediah Nightlinger whose calm, collected cool in the face of villainy was every bit the match of John Wayne’s grit in The Cowboys. Watch Hari Rhodes as MacDonald in Conquest Of the Planet Of the Apes for another example of the type of character I’m extolling. These men of dignity and resourcefulness who stood tall and took no shit were not just presented in the movies but on the television as well. Clarence Williams III as Linc Hayes on Mod Squad, George Stanford Brown as Officer Terry Webster on The Rookies and even the great Ron Glass as Detective Ron Harris on Barney Miller come to mind.

Still I’m not arrogant enough to believe that appreciating some great acting performances and owning a black GI Joe in 1973 made me somehow above or immune to the pitfalls of racism. One of the most shameful moments and lowest humiliations in my life came in Junior High, when sitting in class there came a knock at the door and the teacher asked me to answer it. By the time I got to the door and opened it, no one was there. Just as naturally as Joker Jackson, the words, “It was only a n****r knocker” rolled off my tongue and I immediately froze to the spot where I stood and felt the blood rush to and then drain from my face. I was standing in the classroom of the first black teacher I had ever had, Mrs. Henry, a woman who I truly admired and respected as much as I did any teacher in those days. I can’t recall her response, if any, other than to tell me to go sit down. It was certainly more measured and restrained than I deserved. I slunk back to my desk and learned a lesson that day that still resonates. At the end of the semester, Mrs. Henry presented me with sets of oil and chalk pastels because she knew I was a budding artist. I still have them.

Could be I’m just wishing to remember that better version of myself before the world did it’s best to taint and warp. I’m hardly less isolated now than I was then and have not gone out of my way to wrap myself in relationships that might broaden my experience. I finally found some diversity in High School but even that setting was still predominantly white. I thought myself engaged but unless I was missing something, I don’t recall there being any strain based on racial divisions. Though I’m not stupid enough to believe that my black schoolmates would necessarily remember things the same way. If I didn’t have much contact with them it was only because I went to an exceptionally large school where I never shared classes with a great many people, likely because they were taking tougher courses with more serious goals in mind. I was then and am still, living alone in my metaphorical ditch where plastic cowboys and Indians come in yellow, green, blue and red and black GI Joe’s work hand in hand with white to combat real threats like Nazis and dinosaurs. A place where color doesn’t matter, only the cause and where everyone is a friend until they prove themself an enemy.

Black lives matter, blue lives matter, all lives matter; is it now coming across as hollow chatter? Hands up, don’t shoot, make America great again; shall we ever overcome? We have been to the mountaintop and there we listened to a sermon that went in one ear and out the other and thus sanctified we came down fighting. Over the din of senseless babble I recall one lone voice, clear and concise and exasperated, pleading for human dignity, for human decency, “Can we all get along? Can we get along?”

And the only answer my head can manage comes in the voice of Sydney Poitier singing that song,

Long gone

Ain’t he lucky

Long gone

To Kentucky

I left my home in Nashville

Look a-here what I got

Twenty long years on a chain gang

Sweatin’ and bustin’ rock

Judge he come from Memphis

Put me in the pen

If I ever do see his face once more

He never get home again

That judge be long gone

To Kentucky

Long gone

Don’t mean maybe

Long gone

What I mean

Long gone judge on a bowlin’ green

Bowlin’ green

Sewin’ machine

A little kitten sittin’

On a sewin’ machine

Sewin’ machine

Sew so fast

Sew eleven stitches

In a little cat’s tail

Bowlin’ green

Sewin’ machine!