Journal: Donald A. Johnson
We are supposed to write about the fears or prejudices of our childhood. My essay, I’m sure, will be different from the others in the class, because they are white. They are going to write about how they encountered a member of a despised group, perhaps how they came to the understanding that the people they were taught to hate were not so bad after all. But I am not a member of the dominant group, so I have a somewhat skewed take on the issue. Those white kids will never imagine a world that floats in space above them, one which they will never be privileged to enter, and one which must be so wonderful that it makes your own life seem tawdry and dull beside it. I expect they cannot imagine such a thing. But I can. Oh, yes, I can.
The red convertible is seared into my brain cells, its color as fiery and tantalizing as the day I first saw it. It was old and dented, and the muffler must have been peppered with holes, because the roar sounded like an airplane engine. But it was as red as fire engines, as blood, and it was going sixty or better.
“Damned fools,” my father muttered, as the convertible sailed by us. Inside were six Negro men — I saw them as men, but I guess they were barely out of their teens — wearing bright-colored Hawaiian shirts and men’s hats scrunched far down on their heads so as not to be ripped away by the wind. A car radio blared a raucous rhythm-and-blues song, and beer cans were held aloft like banners.
My father frowned, but I — oh, I was enchanted. That was freedom — a red convertible going sixty, beer, music, wild shirts and men’s hats. Oh, how I wanted to grow up!
My father’s frown was echoed, I knew, in the other cars on the one-lane highway that wound through the Maryland countryside, loaded with kids and inner tubes and picnic baskets. White fathers would certainly mutter, “Damned crazy niggers!” and their offspring would peer through the open windows of backseats at the disappearing convertible as they might at the elephants at the National Zoo, to see exotic and mysterious creatures pass by.
I, meanwhile, was gripped by a mysterious schizophrenia. While I desperately wanted to be in that red convertible, I was also seized, even at my young age, with a responsibility for my race. I instinctively knew that such behavior, exhilarating though it might be for the individual, was bad for us as a whole. What one Negro did reflected on all of us. White kids could skylark around in convertibles and there would be no consequences to Caucasianhood proper. But in my family, at least, we knew the rules. One must be A Credit to Our Race. I always thought of it that way; and I was sure red convertibles were not a part of it. We could be A Credit to Our Race by knocking out hulking German fighters or sliding hard into second base, but those were about the only fun ways to do it, and how many of us could be Joe Louis or Jackie Robinson? Mainly, we had to be boring and polite and get good grades.
But such thoughts did not occupy me for long. We were on our way to Sparrows Beach, and soon I would be floating in my inner tube in the warm, brackish water, keeping a wary eye out for any U-boats that might venture past, happy with the world and my place in it.
Sparrows was our beach. The other cars, with the whites in them, would turn off on the roads to Scientists Cliffs or Mayo Beach or Beverly Beach. They were for whites only. Sparrows Beach was for Negroes, and every Saturday on hot summer days we were on the road before eight for the thirty-mile ride to Chesapeake Bay, a trek we shared with at least a third of the residents of Washington, D.C., or so it seemed on the jammed and winding road.
My mother packed the lunch — ham-and-cheese sandwiches on white bread lathered with mayonnaise or chicken salad creamy with mayo that crunched with little bits of celery. My parents were second-generation Washingtonians and proud of it, and we ate what most middle-class Americans ate. (I mean, it was really very strange; we were exactly like the white people in the cars that were all around us, but they didn’t know that.)
My mother, of course, was in charge of making sure we didn’t starve on the trek to the beach. She knew that spoilt mayonnaise could kill; but without it the sandwiches tasted like cardboard, so it was a necessary evil. My mother kept a sharp eye on the hamper, putting it in the shade and checking it every so often as anxiously as she would a sick child. She watched me and Darlene as we ate our sandwiches, a flicker of fear in her dark brown eyes. Despite the ice, and the wax paper, had lethal bacteria stolen between the two pieces of Wonder bread?
The result of this was that I was probably the only kid in America who had mayonnaise nightmares. It was mortifying. What a stupid thing to be afraid of. Snakes or demons or witches were respectable terrors, but how could I tell my parents I had mayonnaise nightmares? In them, I inadvertently ingested rancid Hellmann’s, and I fell to the ground, mortally wounded by mayonnaise. My eyes bulged from my sockets, my tongue grew black and swelled to fill my throat, my stomach burst like a balloon at a birthday party. My mother sobbed, and the other adults stood sadly by and watched my death throes.
“Should have been more careful with the mayonnaise,” said our neighbor, Mr. Williams, as I groaned and thrashed and croaked; with my tongue the size of a sneaker, that was the only sound I could make. It was at that point that I would wake, soaked with sweat.
Occasionally the nightmares would have an added feature, jellyfish. At Sparrows Beach, there were nets to keep out the millions of jellyfish that spawned and bloomed in the bay, especially in August. Sometimes I would float right up to the edge of the nets in my inner tube, to mock them, packed in quivering masses on the other side.
“Die, you suckers,” I would snarl at them. In their fury, they would hurl themselves at the nets, which always held, as a shiver of danger curled up my spine. But they could not get to the tender brown flesh that swam in the safety of the enclosed areas. Now and then, one or two would sneak by, and they could give a nasty sting with their tentacles. Then a parent would fish the offending creature out of the water with a stick, leaving it gasping on the beach.
But some nights the jellyfish would take their revenge on the child who taunted them. They would surge past the nets in a great, gooey mass to the shore, to rise up on millions of little gelatinous legs they had miraculously sprouted, and come marching straight towards me. They would hurl their yucky, slimy bodies on top of me and begin to ingest my flesh. They would eat it, inch by inch, smacking their gooey lips with each tender brown morsel as I shrieked and shrieked.
Mr. Williams would look on sadly and say, “You just got to be careful around jellyfish.”
But nightmares aside, there were no happier times of my childhood than those I spent at Sparrows Beach. Sometimes I would paddle my inner tube out as far as I could and peer curiously at the shoreline on a far curve of the bay where Beverly Beach was. I strained my eyes, but all I ever saw was the line of trees near the edge of the shore. So I imagined the details: sand as white as a swan’s throat, azure water like the pools Esther Williams swam through at Saturday matinees. Heaven, I used to imagine, was acres and acres of those pools — whose waters could instantly turn to violet or green or red and sprout mermaids in gold lame — filled with colored people, backstroking. Never mind that, as far as I could tell, no black bodies were ever allowed to frolic with Esther. But they did let Ricardo Montalban in the water, and at last he was swarthy, which was close.
There had to be something wonderful about those white beaches, since white people were so careful to guard them from us. Why would they bother to put up signs and posts with chains across them simply to protect the same brown sand and brackish water and jellyfish that we had? How they kept the jellyfish away I was not certain. Maybe it was a death ray, or mind control, or something mysterious. White people could probably do death rays, if they put their minds to it. Ah, what places they must be! Beverly Beach was more exotic to me than Xanadu could have been.
But then I grew up, and mostly forgot about all that. When I learned to drive, my friends in high school — and later in college — and I would head for the ocean beaches on the Eastern Shore. There were some cottages glad to have us, and there was too much ocean to be fenced off, and the water was blue and bracing, not tepid and greenish brown.
So I was surprised, one day during my junior year in college, when I found myself driving that winding road that led to the Chesapeake shore. It was a bleak November day, I’d had it with studying, and I just got in my car and headed off down the road, aimlessly, I thought. I kept going down that familiar road, passing landmarks long forgotten, and then, suddenly, I saw it. At first I thought there must be some mistake. When I was a kid, the ride had seemed to take forever. How could I be here so soon? But there it was, the sign I had passed so many times: Beverly Beach.
I turned down the road, feeling a strange throbbing in a corner of my neck and a dryness in my throat. There was no one around, but the feel of danger once again curled up my spine. I soon reached the parking lot. There was no one in the wooden ticket booth, and no chain barred the way. I parked the car and walked the few yards to the place where the straggly grass disappeared and the sand began. Then I walked across that sandy strip and looked at the water. It was brown.
I squatted down by the edge of the water and stuck my hand in it. It was greenish brown and cool — but not yet chill — to the touch. A dead beetle floated by, and I looked out at the water. The posts that held the jellyfish nets stood faithfully on guard, awaiting another August.
To my amazement, all I felt was sad. And more than a bit cheated. All that fantasy. All that white energy spent on keeping us out, and this was it? Just another brown spit of sand on the bay, no different than Sparrows Beach? Esther Williams wouldn’t have stuck a pink toe in this water. No white sand. No death rays.
It should have been better. It should have been wonderful. All that time I’d wasted, imagining.
I drove back to school, knowing that a piece of my childhood had vanished as surely as the jellyfish from the bay in October. I had the sense that I should have been constructing great notions in my head, about the banality of prejudice and the illusion of power, but I just felt — sad. I wanted my money back. I wanted the magic, even though it wasn’t time.
At long last, I had come to face to face with my Xanadu: Beverly Beach. And it was not at all what I had imagined.