The Black Folk of Buckingham

I recently read Kathryn Stockett’s extraordinary book, The Help, set in Jackson, Mississippi, in the early days of the civil rights upheavals. The primary protagonists are some black domestics and their white employers. As the story unfolded I kept flashing back to the distant untroubled years of my childhood in Buckingham, Pennsylvania, just 50 easy miles from the Mason-Dixon Line. Any resemblance to Jackson was thin at best. We did not have lynchings and everybody used the same toilets and buses as far as I know. However, there was a black community, although I don’t recall seeing many of them except for a very small number, some of whom played starring roles in my early maintenance and instruction.

Howard Blackstone, for example, who worked across the road for my grandfather on a small, diverse farm. His primary skill was blacksmithing and he made a wide variety of things like horse shoes and hinges and cart wheels and such. But it was a small farm with limited needs for blacksmith products, so Howard did other things as well.

One late fall day in, perhaps, 1938 or so my father, a young man at the time, and Howard were sent to Brown Brothers auction to look for something or other for the farm. It was the sort of auction where just about anything might turn up – shovels and tractors and poultry and tedders and yokes and plows and watering troughs, a wide variety of stuff that some farmer somewhere in the county discovered that they didn’t need anymore. They wandered back and forth along row after row of rusty implements and anxious goats until they got right to the back where the small items were displayed, or dumped, depending on your aesthetic sense, and there they found a great chain, a large, robust chain suitable for pulling stumps and freeing mired tractors. Their bid was successful and so by and by they returned to the distant reaches of the auction yard to collect their prize. My father took one end of it and Howard took the other and they started winding their way back to the parking lot. It was not long before my father noticed that their little parade was attracting attention. Gaping stares, in fact. When he turned around to look he discovered that Howard had wrapped his end of the chain around his neck and was staggering tragically along, arms raised to heaven.

Some years later when I was very small we had a sleigh, and a horse to go with it and enough snow in the winter that Howard could take us kiddies out for a toot around the neighborhood. There were bells attached to some part of the harness and we jangled along just like something out of a Bing Crosby movie. I don't remember where we went but photographic evidence still exists that we went somewhere. Mostly I remember just starting out from the barn leaving brown streaks in the snow until the rust was cleaned off the runners.

It was about this time that Nancy came to us. She lived in the room over the kitchen, a large spacious affair that she referred to as her house, as in “Don't you come into my house before you wash your hands!” She previously worked for the neighbors across the street who always resentfully accused us of poaching her away from them, but I once got a look at the broomcloset she lived in there and can't imagine that it was a difficult negociation.

She was a Jehovah's Witness, a strike against her which I think caused some parental discomfort, but she was made to understand that the children were to be washed and fed, not converted. And so it was that our religious instruction or lack of it was left up to my parents and the Buckingham Friends School. However, she did take us with her when she went around peddling Watchtowers and I have always wondered what her customers thought when this young black woman turned up at their doors with two little white tykes in tow.

I think she was secretly appalled by the bad habits my parents lavishly indulged in like drinking and smoking, but she had the good sense never to say anything about them. The only hint came one morning after the annual traditional cocktail party the parents always held for the neighborhood during which all their respectable friends, doctors and bankers and stockbrokers and such came and drank themselves blind and then wobbled and swerved on home in the great swaying behemoths issued by Detroit in those days. The residue after these extravaganzas was an unimaginable number of bottles. My father was struggling out to the end of the driveway with great clattering sacks of these one day when Nancy appeared on some errand.

My father boyishly observed “If anybody were to look into our trash, they'd think we were a bunch of lushes.”

“They got no business looking in your trash!” replied Nancy indignantly.

At one point she fell afoul of the IRS. It couldn't have been a catastrophe on an absolute scale since she didn't have the assets for it. But it was a catastrophe in her eyes and she was nearly undone when she finally asked my father to help with it. It took a while for him to understand what the problem was partly because of her non-linear and barely comprehensible account of the matter and partly because all IRS personnel involved were referred to as “the man at the post office,” which apparently stood in for any functionary she had been in touch with. The matter, whatever it was, was finally resolved after a few more conversations with the Man at the Post Office, and ever after that I think she considered my father to fall somewhere between saint and genius and slayer of dragons.

Nancy was a city girl. She lived in Philadelphia when she wasn't with us. She also had a son. That was a long story I didn't hear until half a century had passed. She had relatives in Philadelphia who looked after this child while Nancy was with us, during the week. Then she would return to the city on the weekends. In the summer she would take along armloads of vegetables which my father grew in abundance, including a row of okra grown especially for her since none of the rest of us would touch it. In fact the only cruel thing she did to us during our long association was to make us eat that stuff, and, to her credit, she only did it once.

We also had animals, some sheep, a couple of steers, a couple of horses. These were, for the most part well-behaved creatures. They stayed within the boundaries alloted to them except on those rare occasions when a fencepost fell down or a gate was left open on which occasions they would taste the heady brew of liberty and other peoples flower beds and steps would have to be taken to get them back. In a clear demonstration of the existence of cosmic pranks, these daring escapes most often took place 2 or 3 days after my parents left on a 3 week trip to the back side of the moon, leaving Nancy in charge of our small world with the promise of help from my grandfather, if necessary and available. It was a monument to her courage that she was prepared to face down these large creatures that terrified her with the implacable dignity of a Masai queen, armed only with her faithful broom, her weapon of choice in the face of all perils.

I went to visit her once in South Carolina where she was living in retirement near her brother. Her house was small, cluttered and cleaned to within an inch of its life. There were framed photographs here and there of various events and family members, and I was surprised to discover that during the time she spent with us she was drop dead gorgeous. Why hadn't I noticed this at the time?

It was during that visit that she told me about her failed marriage. She was married at the age of 19 or 20 soon after completing her nursing training. Her husband was in some sort of business that took him and his new bride to Toronto. They got a small house in the sort of place where the back fence is about 10 feet from the kitchen window and she was left in it to wash the dishes and dust the furniture while he went off into the Great World to ply his trade. She hated it. It was cold, grey, and she didn't know anybody. Soon she was pregnant. Then one gloomy day she was standing at the sink looking out the window at the neighbor's trash cans over the back fence and realized that now she was Absolutely Stuck. She would be bound to this dreadful place by her husband and soon her child and then no doubt other children and she would never see her childhood friends again, never feel the intense summer sun of South Carolina on the back of her neck, never experience the joy of her church back in Philadelphia. And so it was that one day she packed up her clothes and returned to Philadelphia where she was taken in by her many friends and relatives. How she came to work out Beyond the 'Burbs I never did learn.

In any case, Nancy and Howard and a small number of others, casually met, represented all black people to me. So when the race riots and civil rights upheavals hit the headlines I was mystified. I could not imagine why anybody would want to exclude these people from the country's mainstream. At the same time, I have come to understand that I actually know nothing about the reality of these people I thought I was so close to – where did they go to school, what were their prospects, how did they come to live the lives they did. Were they happy?

Privacy

We start life wet, noisy, and completely free of any claim or expectation of privacy. No part of our bodies or lives is excluded from invasion by friends and strangers alike, and at first we don't much mind. It's not long, however, before we object to being groped by strangers and are more selective about who gets to see us with our pants down. Before long, perhaps about the time we first learn the potential of speech, we start having secrets. It is not a big step between secrets and privacy, the only difference being one of degree. A secret is just a single thing you don't want to reveal. Privacy is a great tangled complex of secrets that are of great importance to their owner. In fact it could be argued that those things we choose to keep private more accurately reflect our character than those we choose to reveal.

We each of us develop our own private kingdoms in a series of concentric barriers around parts of us that we do not want scrutinized. The outermost barriers are easily crossed by friends and spouses and even trusted acquaintances, allowing access to non-critical areas that we might not want published in the daily paper, but no great harm done if the postman discovers, say, that we vacuum less than we should. The closer to the core we get, the more closely guarded we become, and in many cases the protected areas depend on who we are talking to.

We would have little hesitation discussing our stock portfolios and the appraised value of Grandma’s diamond brooch with the family lawyer, but we might not want to enlarge upon such topics with our daughter’s boyfriend with the nose ring.

We freely describe our rashes and boils and disgusting discharges with the family physician, but might hold back in this area with the telephone repairman.

We may luridly detail the latest developments of our torrid dalliances to our best friend, but wish to maintain a discreet silence with the vicar.

In addition to these specific revelations that we control on a person to person basis we are constantly patrolling our perimeters to protect ourselves from unauthorized invasion by strangers. Common courtesy is our main fence. In a uniform society in which all members understand the signals, saying “Butt out!” with a look, a tone of voice, a bland comment inoffensive to all is a common practice. We back off, change course, no one is offended or invaded. Apart from a few people who want to offend us or don't care if they do, the system works quite well.

Where the problem arises is when we are confronted by somebody who is using another set of rules. Either they do not understand our signals, or they actively seek to breach our defenses for some purpose. We often react strongly to these attempted invasions. First we try formality. Next comes frigid silence. And finally, when all else fails, we fall back on rudeness. In some cases, such as persistent telephone solicitors, rudeness is the only defense possible. In others, such as foreigners using different signals, we would like to be kind, but we feel under attack, and may overreact to perceived aggression.

One of the worst mistakes we make in our relationships with others is believing that people we are close to should have no secrets from us, that we should be open books to our parents and spouses and friends. Or in other words we should not mind a bit upon finding Mom going through our drawers and throwing stuff out or demanding an explanation for THIS! The fact that we have been out on our own for several decades and have the white hair to prove it, have been leading independent lives and are doing fine doesn't neutralize the trespass, or detoxify the resentment. We need some space that is ours alone or we risk losing ourselves.

In addition, our own notion of what areas must be maintained inviolable may differ greatly from that of others. Is religious belief an acceptable area to open to the public? Or money? Or our psychotic relatives? In some cases yes, in others no.

So much of our behavior is governed by our need to maintain our privacy, it is small wonder that so much heat is generated over political movements whose aim is to invade areas cherished by some as intensely private; by others as matters to be dragged into public view in front of a studio audience.

If media reports are to be believed, upcoming generations will entertain no expectations of privacy. They will accept as normal the impertinent questions put by online merchants and special interest websites and will obediently supply their preferences in reading, viewing and listening, clothing, medications, sports teams, and holiday destinations. They will cheerfully welcome, rather than resentfully tolerate, the inescapable intrusion of advertising in all aspects of their lives. They will not mind that Apple Inc., the FBI, or Big Brother listens to their phone calls or traces their movements. Perhaps it is the vanguard of this new demographic that appears on Dr. Phil.

In any case it seems ironic that a people that has always prided itself on its rock-ribbed individualism would so easily abandon this myth in favor of bobble-head compliance with the demands of private industry and shadowy government interests.