My journey begins in the dentist's chair. The nurse is pressing dental dough into my lower incisors, and she and the doctor are playing dueling banjos with funny stories about their kids. They've paused for me to nod or grunt as if I, too, were part of their conversation when in walks a man, another dentist, dropping by to say hello. "I've got a good one," he says cheerfully, and goes on to tell a racist joke. I can't recall the joke, only that it ends with a black man who is stupid. Dead silence. It's just us white folks here in the room, but my dentist and his nurse know my wife, who is black, and they know my son and my daughter, who are, as they describe themselves, tan and bright tan.
How many racist jokes have I heard in my life? Five thousand, maybe ten thousand, at least. But today, for the first time - who knows exactly why? - I am struck with a deep, sharp pain. I look at this man, with his pasty face, pale hair, and weak lips, and I think: This idiot's talking about my children!
I want to shake him, shove him against the wall. But I say nothing. Hastily, my dentist grabs a tool, the nurse extracts the dough, and the idiot leaves. But I remain in suspended animation. It isn't just the joke. It isn't the tension in the air. It isn't even the idiot. It's my recognition that I've crossed a line, and that for an instant I've traveled to a place where white Americans rarely go. I feel revulsion and anger at this man. I feel fear and anguish for my children. I feel helpless. Am I, I wonder, feeling like a black man?
I have a memory of a long time ago, when I was eight, maybe nine, when I sat with my grandmother onthe steps of her house in the country, thirty miles outside Chicago, snapping fresh beans. My grandmother was a large, stern woman with a baritone voice, round wire-rimmed glasses, and ashen hair swept up from her forehead, temples, and neck in that old Gibson Girl fashion. I called her Big Grandma with fear and respect. That day she told me she'd been to "the city" - Chicago Heights, which in the 1950s was an industrial town of about thirty-five thousand people. Big Grandma said she'd seen "coloreds" everywhere. She said that while standing in line at the Walgreen's she'd heard one colored lady tell another colored lady, "I always carries a razor in my purse." Big Grandma said this with dramatic inflection, a shiver, and a kind of rage, but I missed her complex meanings. Coloreds, I thought. What in the world are coloreds? I had no idea. But from her tone, I knew enough not to ask. I decided that coloreds were people whose skin, for mysterious reasons, resembled a concoction of melted crayons stirred into a weird, beautiful swirl. When I eventually went to Chicago Heights with Big Grandma and she pointed out a colored, I was amazed. I was disappointed. They weren't colored after all.
Three decades later, sitting in the dentist's chair, I'm struck by how much I am still like that little boy who believed he understood what he absolutely did not. I have been married to a black woman for ten years, and we have two children. I've had years of visiting my wife's family in rural Kentucky, years of births and deaths and holiday meals, of hunting with my father-in-law and his friends, of shared shots of Old Forester, shared jokes, lies, and hunting knives--years of what I believed was a life lived across the color line. Yet only today, at age thirty-nine, have I really felt the intimate intrigues and confusions of race in America.
Only today, for the first time, have I crossed the line.
When does a journey begin? Is it the day or the hour or the minute you finally stash your bags, wave good-bye, and set out?
Or does a journey begin way back before you ever knew you'd set out, when the idea was still locked in some undiscovered place in your mind or your heart, surfacing in only fleeting, misunderstood images and half-noted thoughts for years or even decades? So that when the idea occurs to you - say, in the dentist's chair - it seems you've always had it? That's how it was for me, anyway. From the moment I realized that I needed to do this - go out and travel America's parallel black world - it seemed as if I had always needed to do it. Thank the idiot in the dentist's office. His callousness had pierced my lifetime of distant intellectualizing about race and struck at the place where my hopes for my children reside, struck at my heart and not my head. In that instant, I was touched and humbled, converted. In that instant, I knew in my heart that I didn't know anything about race, that I never had. That I had to start again.
For as long as I can remember, the coloreds, then Negroes, then blacks, and now African Americans, have been somewhere on my mind. I suspect this is true for most white people. In our heads, race is always back there somewhere, on a back burner, bewildering us, making us shake our heads and wonder at "those people," alternately blaming ourselves and them for the conundrum that is race in America. But that's where most of us white folks stop. We've got lives to lead, mortgages to pay, birthdays to celebrate. But for me, from that moment in the dentist's chair, the matters of black and white in America were no longer curiosities. I no longer had the luxury of keeping "those people" on my mind's back burner.
Those people were my kids!
The more I thought about this and listened to my white friends, family, and neighbors, the more I realized how little any of us knew. How few of us had even one close black friend, how few of us had ever had an honest conversation with a black person, how many of us were still hiding behind the same frightened rage I'd seen in Big Grandma on the porch thirty years ago. Looking back, I know now that race has baffled and fascinated me all my life, that I've always yearned to understand "those people," to feel something of what it is they feel. I suspect that this is true for most white people. Because in some way, blacks are our other half. In some way, we can't understand ourselves if we don't understand them. It is racism's oldest dynamic.
So with a lifetime of curiosity to satisfy, and a father's need to protect and guide his children, I am heading out into black America to learn something - not from the statistics and politics of race, but from the lives and voices of real people, black people from every imaginable age, income, occupation, and locale. I've tacked a map of the United States to my wall, and I begin a list of places and people, one filtered through the suggestions of friends and colleagues, black and white, and my own curiosities. I have these goals: When I'm done with my travels, I want to have experienced the breadth of black America. I want to be the blind man who touches the whole elephant. I want the story of my journey to be less like a social scientist's analysis and more like an artist's collage. I want my children, when they are old enough, to be able to pick up this single volume and see, hear, feel, taste, and understand the sweeping arch of people, places, and opinions that make up half of their heritage. Some of my destinations are obvious: Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus in 1955. Some are deeply personal: I hope to find the first black man I ever knew in my life, someone I met when we were both teenagers. In between are dozens of other people I plan to visit: a city police chief, a jazz trumpeter, a convicted murderer, a farmer, an architect, a welfare mother, a corporate mogul, a rap star, moviemakers, Hollywood stars, novelists, poets. All across the country, black people have agreed to show me around, introduce me to their families and friends, tell me the stories of their lives.
That's the plan, anyway. But as I pack clothes, books, notebooks, pens, tapes, and tape recorders, I think of Mark Twain's words, "Circumstances do the planning for us all," and I decide to go where the circumstances take me.
My kids say their quick good-byes and run off to play, not really comprehending that I will be gone more than a little while. My wife walks with me out to my tan Isuzu Trooper with too many miles on it already, kisses me good-bye, and stands with her hands on her cheeks, crying. I think about how much I love her. And I think how strange it is that I'm about to leave this black woman behind so that I might learn more about black America. But this much I take for granted: no one person is black America, not even if she is my wife.
As I wave good-bye and coast down the gentle hill of my driveway, I suddenly think, I'm crazy! Why am I doing this? But I keep going, because I do know why. I'm doing this for myself, my children, and the dentist with his racist jokes. What do I hope to discover? Who knows? As John Steinbeck wrote, "You don't take the trip. The trip takes you."
