I Am My Own Cousin.

Chapter 21: CrazyWhiteSingles.com

Warning: This contains offensive language and may not be suitable to read at work.

In my neck of the woods bigotry was a virtue. When I was nine I overheard my Granny Carico talking to the family at Thanksgiving.  "Only dykes wear baseball hats to Thanksgiving dinner. I'm telling you that girl is a lesbian."  This happened while I was standing in the kitchen with her, wearing the baseball hat I wore every second of every day to hide my eyes.  All the adults laughed like it was the funniest thing they had ever heard.  I went and hid in the backyard and cried for the rest of the evening.  When I told Mom later what Granny Carico had said, she was pissed off.  "You are just a tomboy Jacqui; you will grow out of it. I used to be a tomboy too and I grew out of it."   "But you told me you wore dresses everyday and played with dolls." "Well yeah that's true. I did.  But I liked to climb trees and play games with boys too."I knew she was just trying to help me feel better, but it worked and I did feel a little better.

In one of his profound conversations in the last year of his life Papaw told me that he would still love me if I married a black man, a big step in tolerance for him, but if I was a lesbian he would have to disown me. His logic was that black people couldn't choose the color of their skin but homosexuality was a choice.

Our Granny, Judy, and Mom taught us that racism was wrong.  They told us that everyone was equal regardless of the color of their skin. That didn't stop all the men in the family from mocking their tolerance.  They made it a point to say outrageously discriminatory comments just to rile us up.  During the last Christmas Papaw was alive, his chemotherapy treatment had failed and he knew this would be his last holiday with his family,  Granny had bought all of her granddaughters a baby doll and the grandsons got pocket knives.  Despite not really liking dolls much and sort of wishing I'd got the pocket knife, I loved my present and carried it around like it was real.  Papaw was the first person to notice that a few of the dolls were darker than the others.  Despite being eaten up with cancer he roared, "JUDY!  DID YOU GET THEM NIGGER BABIES?!"  Everyone froze.

 "No Bobby, they're not black babies, some are just a little bit darker than the other ones."   "I know a nigger baby when I see it Judy. You're going to have to take them back and exchange them."   I interrupted "It's okay, I like my doll. I don't mind if it's darker."  My Uncle joked, "They can name them tar baby!"   Papaw ignored us and ranted on, "I will not have my grandbabies playing with a coon doll."   "Fine.  I'll take them back tomorrow if it makes you happy Bobby."   That quieted him down.  She never took them back.

 Bigotry wasn't something to be ashamed of in their minds.  It was equivalent to being patriotic.  When we had lived in the trailer park in Knoxville the movie "The Bodyguard" came out.  It caused a huge scandal in the trailer park; it was all people were talking about while exchanging drugs.  A neighborhood teenager who lived two trailers down from us snuck to the movie with her friends. When her Dad found out that she had watched something about an interracial couple he beat her into a bloody pulp while screaming "nigger lover" at her.  No one stopped him.  Mom was the only adult in the neighborhood who openly condemned the attack.  She played the movie soundtrack on repeat, full blast, for weeks.

A large outspoken portion of the men we interacted with were legitimately scared of anyone who wasn't white. They emblazoned everything they owned with rebel flags, from their hats, shirts, and trucks, to the tattoos on their bodies. They didn't bother to pretend it was "heritage not hate." "The South will rise again!" They were proud of being good ole boys. They longed for the days when the blacks were segregated. The N-word being bandied about made me feel uncomfortable. Despite being constantly exposed to prejudices, the women and next generation of children less accepting of the discrimination.

I stood up once to an uncle after his tirade about "Niggers taking over the country."  "The n-word is a bad word, please stop saying it or I'm going to tell Granny on you."   He just laughed and said, "I'm not racist, didn't you know that my best friend in high school was black?  I called him nigger all the time and he called me cracker.  He wasn't offended at all by it."   "Oh really? I didn't know you had any black friends."  He looked wistful for a moment; I started to feel like a jerk for assuming he was being racist. You couldn't be racist if your best friend was black.  "Yeah, we quit being friends after Daddy sold him to another family."  I gasped, appalled at his "joke," and my uncle laughed at his own joke for several minutes.  He repeated the punch line every time he saw me for days.

 It wasn't risky to be openly racist in the area because it was isolated with very little diversity.  Anyone who treated blacks as equals was viewed as a traitor to their own kind.  Everyone who was a good old boy or girl, we didn't personally know any blacks. Anything and anyone that was foreign to their way of life was seen as a threat.  The extent of our high school's diversity was there were two black students, a half Latino, and one teacher of Asian descent. They were all made fun of constantly; even their friends would call them slurs to avoid looking weak.  Outside, in different areas of J.J. Kelly, people had carved "KKK was here" into the picnic tables.

While I was playing basketball with some neighborhood kids at the court in the projects one day my friend Brittany pulled me aside.  "I just want to let you know that you don't want to play with Danny."  Danny was the darker of the two black kids that attended St. Paul High. "Why not?  He's teaching me how to trash talk."   "Jacqui, didn't you hear that he has AIDS?"   "What?! No! How do you know that?"   "He slept with Amber and didn't use a condom.  You know how black people don't use condoms."   "That can't be a thing. You're making that up." I said.

 "I swear, it's true, my Mom told me.  She said that AIDS is God's punishment for blacks and homos.  Anyways, the week after he screwed her Danny told Amber that he has AIDS.  She wants everyone in the neighborhood to know so they don't catch it." "Ummm... I don't think you can catch AIDS by playing basketball with someone Brittany, it's passed through bodily fluids."   "Sure you can. If he's sweating and touches the basketball, then you touch the basketball, his sweat can get in your skin pores and you can catch it." I began avoiding Brittany after that conversation. I also avoided playing basketball with Danny, just in case there was the slightest possibility she could be right.

Living in the apartments I was exposed to rap music for the first time. Tonya gave me a bootlegged copy of Eminem, he was the only rap artist I knew, and I became obsessed. I was hoping Granny could appreciate Eminem's lyrics the same way I did. I warned her that he cussed a lot, then let her listen to my favorite song, "97 Bonnie And Clyde". The song was a fantasy about him killing his ex wife and hauling her body around in trunk of his car, all while talking to his small daughter. "Ohh listen to this line, it's hilarious!" I told Granny, turning up the stereo a little bit so she could clearly hear it. 

"And don't worry about that little boo-boo on her throat. It's just a little scratch - it don't hurt, her was eatin dinner while you were sleepin and spilled ketchup on her shirt."

 When the song ended Granny said, "I didn't understand a word of that shit.  Does your Mom know you're listening to music with cuss words in it?  I don't think she would like that very much." "Yes, she knows Granny.  She said it was okay if I listen to it because Tonya gave it to me as a present." I was crestfallen that Eminem didn't speak to her the same way it did me. I guess it was a lot to ask her to move directly from the rock of Elvis Presley to the rap of Slim Shady.

Since I now considered myself somewhat of an expert on rap, knowing every song on the Eminem album, I drastically changed my appearance. I alternated between two pairs of baggy parachute pants every day, one pair was bright red and the other was dark green. I wore several necklaces at a time, always with a big cross for bling. I chopped all my hair off; with my huge forehead I closely resembled Tweety Bird. My hair was a frizzy mess of curls and I was clueless on how to maintain it.  I would often use "hair glue" to try to spike it out but it just ended up as a greasy clump. So I began wearing winter toboggans (or as I liked to refer to them, "beanies") year round, even indoors. I had a beanie in every drab shade of black, white, and gray; the black one was reserved for when I wanted to dress fancy.

 Every ugly girl in a teen movie has five things in common: brains, frumpy fashion sense, frizzy hair, glasses, and braces. It is the penta-fecta of undesirability. So inevitably I had to wear braces, it was predestined by the fashion police and Hollywood.  When we had our first appointment with the orthodontist he remarked while patting my shoulder, "You two girls have an extreme emergency case here. Don't worry; we will get you fixed up with braces to get your overbite corrected right away."  I was deeply offended, sure I had bucked teeth and couldn't completely close my mouth, but I had never thought of it as being so deformed as to be called an extreme emergency. To rub salt in the wound Jessica didn't have to wear braces. Her teeth had always been straighter than mine and Jenny's. We were worried that Jessica would snag all single boys with her normal teeth, while our braces snagged everything we ate......  To be continued on Wednesday.