Trying to talk to Kay last night about the race thing and realizing how much it is on my mind. I mean, I feel so odd to be behaving so naïvely about it after all these years. It’s like I have never really considered race before and now it all seems so bogus and unnecessary. I feel like if people would just stop and look at the race thing, they would say, “How weird! Let’s quit this!” Yes, I know all the economic arguments and all the racism-is-in-the-bone arguments and the rest of it, but Kay’s mother hated colored folks and voted for Goldwater, but she still hugged me when I got to be Kay’s friend. And Kay herself admits that she thinks we are so close so fast because looking at me she didn’t have to deal with the race thing because I don’t look black and what does that mean?
I told her last night I was going to rent a sandwich sign and go around the country talking to white people who didn’t know any black folks to convince them it was okay. Nothing political. Just sit down and talk to them like a friend a while. They would not be intimidated because I look like them and talk like them and they would see how ludicrous all the race stuff is. “Meet the Mulatto,” I would call the thing. It’d be great. They would be able to let me know beforehand what they wanted to talk about so I could read up on it if I needed to and be well versed in all subjects. I could solve the whole race thing singlehandedly. It would be a trip. Novel material, at least.
I told Kay how betrayed I felt for liking Pat Conroy and being at his house drinking his peppermint tea and talking to him and liking it all so much and then reading in an article about him that he used to throw rotten watermelons at black folks as a fucking game when he was growing up. Of course, he’s different now, but I felt violated because I had trusted him and he could do that to black people just because they were black. Amazing to me. I don’t understand it. I swear I don’t.
“Meet the mulatto and let your mind be at rest.”