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I was born in the South on what used to be a plantation. My grandmother, a sort of village doctor who never accepted payment for her services, was the midwife at my birth. She was a religious woman who lived by the Bible, so she named me Elijah. My mother, who had an eleventh-grade education, was twenty years old when I was born and already had three children.
Her family members were sharecroppers, so she went to the field each day to pick cotton, as did my grandmother and my father. In those days, when crops needed to be planted or harvested, school would let out because that work took priority. My father attended school only to the fourth grade, but in World War II he drove a supply truck in the US Army in England and then in France. After returning from the war, he felt he could no longer live as a second-class citizen in the South. He believed he would encounter trouble there, and a better life in the North beckoned.
The factory jobs of the North were a magnet for rural southerners, both Black and White. My uncles had already migrated to South Bend, Indiana, and my family followed them there. Once in South Bend, my mother worked as a domestic, working “days” in the homes of well-to-do Whites, and my father, like my uncles, found a job at the (now-defunct) Studebaker automobile factory. For many years he worked in the foundry there. And at age seventy-one, after breathing soot and metallic dust over decades, my father died of lung cancer, though he’d never smoked...
Eventually my family moved into an apartment in a segregated part of the city. When I started public school at age five, I was one of only a handful of Black students at the excellent Oliver School, the result of a racially gerrymandered school district. By contrast, later, when we moved into our own home in an “integrated” neighborhood that was in effect transitioning from White to Black, I entered a segregated Black school. By the time I graduated from high school, the neighborhood was totally Black...
On Monday evenings in South Bend, the downtown businesses remained open until 8:30 rather than closing at 5:30. As I canvassed the downtown, I spotted Mr. Forbes, a heavyset middle-aged White man, alone inside his typewriter store. I went in and asked him for a job. “You need some help?” I asked. “What can you do?” “I can do whatever these other boys do,” I said.
I’d passed the store many times and noticed a few older boys, both White and Black, working around the shop. After seeing them, I thought I might have a chance...
After a few minutes of this back-and-forth, Mr. Forbes agreed to hire me. “Well, I can start you off at fifty cents an hour.” “Can you make that seventy-five?”
“Naw, you’ll need to work your way up.” “Okay,” I said, “when can I start?” “You can start tomorrow,” he said. I shook his hand...
Over the next weeks, Mr. and Mrs. Forbes would come to know and trust me, and I would come to know them. I would run errands for them like shopping for Mrs. Forbes’s groceries, picking up chop suey from the local Chinese restaurant or fetching sandwiches at lunchtime, and on occasion depositing checks and cash in the local bank. Much later, after I’d gotten my driver’s license, I even delivered typewriters in Mr. Forbes’s new Ford...
A sensitive man from a small town in Illinois, Mr. Forbes treated me well; he genuinely liked me and became almost like a father to me. He and his wife even included me on family trips to their cottage by a beautiful Michigan lake. I’d do chores around the cottage, swim in the lake, and eat dinner at their picnic table like a member of their family. As the only Black person at that lake community, I was fascinated by this White world, and I noticed what Mrs. Forbes cooked and how their family ate.
Since I worked in Mr. Forbes’s shop from age twelve until I graduated from high school, I had several years to observe that privileged world. Of course the customers who visited the store were usually White, as were Mr. Forbes’s friends, who would sometimes stop by to talk and socialize. I’d watch the constant traffic in and out of the store and eavesdrop on the conversations. Mrs. Forbes would sit at her desk and do the bookkeeping while the other boys and I would take typewriters apart, soak them in a cleaning solution, wash them down, and reassemble or repair them.
This was in the late 1950s and 1960s; the civil rights movement was going on, and by the time I was fifteen or sixteen, it was in full swing...
This was how I became aware of what race meant to him. This is the context in which I began to learn how he felt about Black people and their struggles for racial equality: that they were a funny, lowly, and distant people who had strange diseases and were different from Whites. Yet at the same time he was friendly to me...
On occasion Mr. Forbes sent me to other office buildings around the downtown to change typewriter ribbons, giving me an entrée to a host of entirely White establishments. But my real initiation into this White world began in Mr. Forbes’s store and through the experiences that job afforded me.
Then one day my coworker Jim said to me, “Eli, guess what Forbes told me.” I was curious.
“He told me I shouldn’t hang out with the colored boy so much.”
“No, he didn’t say that.”
“Yes, I swear he did!”
I was incredulous and continued to argue with Jim about whether Mr. Forbes actually told him, a White boy, not to hang out with me so much.
Mr. Forbes had been my mentor since he hired me at age twelve. Not only had he taught me how to take apart any typewriter, fix it, and put it back together, he also had absorbed me into the life of the store and his downtown office building where he worked and lived. I ran errands for him and Mrs. Forbes, and I knew not only Richard but his wife, Irene, and their young daughter, Beth...
After my conversation with Jim, however, I started to watch Mr. Forbes more closely and noticed racial issues I’d previously ignored. I began to see that while Mr. Forbes trusted me, even loved me, and would do almost anything for me, he placed limits on our relationship. In the caste-like system of South Bend, in which Black people were considered the lowliest, he wanted to protect Jim from my status. In effect, he taught me what it means to be Black in the White world.
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