Not very smart
By Brandon Astor Jones
"Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)
I have just watched a film clip of the Jerry Springer Show. I am grateful to have the opportunity to see what that show offered today.
What I saw was a young mother sitting with her two sons on a sofa. The boys appeared to be about three and four years old.
The mother's manner with her sons was deliberate, careful and painstaking. She was encouraging them to grow up to "be klansmen". She was teaching them to be "white supremacists". She was teaching them to embrace hate — and they were learning very well.
People in the US need to see and fear the hate some parents are teaching their children. I have nothing but praise for the courage that it takes to air such a film clip.
Later that evening I was reading and came across the words of Saint-Exupéry. I was struck by the fact that his book was published the same year that I was born. Thirty-five years later I read it.
This evening I find myself hoping that the two little boys who sat on the sofa with their misguided mother will reject her hateful teachings. Some children are strong enough to do that; some are not. Let me share a bit of my past with you:
When I was somewhere around seven years old, I used to play with a golf ball while walking home from a school in Harvey, Illinois, at which I was the only child of colour. My five-mile trek each way required me to walk through what an upper middle class — exclusively white — neighbourhood.
While walking, in the street, I would bend down low and sling my golf ball with an underhand toss along the kerb and see how far I could keep it rolling in the trough where the street and kerb met.
On the afternoon in question the ball struck a protrusion which caused it to bounce out of the trough. It veered upward to the left and flew across the sidewalk, then sped over and beyond an expansive and well-manicured lawn. I watched it roll on to a gravelled section of ground, and into the largest dog house that I had ever seen (it must have been at least five feet [1.5 m] high, and perhaps six feet square!)
I stopped to look around, and I could see that there was no-one else on the street. I walked across that yard with the single purpose of retrieving my ball.
With appropriate caution, I approached the doghouse. In my child's mind I reasoned that any dog that resided therein could not be mean because the yard had no fence. I got down on my hands and knees and began to cautiously crawl in, but I did not see my ball until it was suddenly handed to my by a girl who appeared, in the dim light, to be about my age. She startled me.
"Is this your ball?"
"Yeah. Thanks", I said, as she dropped the ball into my upturned hand; then, like a crayfish, I began to back out of the doghouse.
"Wait. What's your name?"
"Jimmy", I replied as I crawled back into the structure and sat across from her. It was clear that she did not want me to go. We sat face to face and our shoes were touching sole to sole.
"My name is Barbara. I'm mad at my mother."
"Why?", I asked.
"Because she won't let me go over to my friend's house to play!"
At that instant we heard the slam of a screen door, followed by feet moving over gravel.
"Barbara", the woman yelled, "where are you?"
The little girl quickly stood all the way up (I still remember being amazed that her head was nowhere near the roof of that doghouse). She bent slightly at the waist, then stuck her head out of the vaulted opening.
"I'm in the dog house."
"Okay. I just wanted to be sure because I saw a nigger boy walking by a few minutes ago. Did you see him?"
"No. I have been in here all the time", she replied.
"Well, don't stay out too long. Come on in the house. Okay?" The screen door slammed again.
"I will", Barbara yelled, after her mother left their back yard.
She turned around to face me, then sat down again and said, "My mother thinks coloured people are 'dirty niggers', but sometimes grown-ups are just mean and not very smart.
[The writer is a prisoner on death row in the United States. He welcomes letters commenting on his columns (include your name and full return address on the envelope, or prison authorities may refuse to deliver it). He can be written to at: Brandon Astor Jones, EF-122216, G3-77, Georgia Diagnostic & Classification Prison, PO Box 3877, Jackson, GA 30233, USA.]