My father’s best friend, Jesse Raybon, bore a striking resemblance to Chicago blues harmonica player Jerry Portnoy. “Uncle Jess” had bone-straight hair and blue eyes. His family owned a tavern back in the day.
He spent hours at our kitchen table. After completing his mail route in Webster Groves, he came by to swap lies with my mother. By the time my father arrived from his Kirkwood route, Uncle Jess had smoked several Pall Malls, downed multiple bourbon shots, and I was bored.
Uncle Jess was older than my dad, but they had compatible sensibilities. They bonded over Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington, Count Basie, Erroll Garner, BB King, Esther Phillips, Etta James, confusion over Smokey Robinson, playing “More Love” over and over, on whether Lena Horne or Nancy Wilson was prettier, Lincoln University, Dr. King, the Cold War and literary classics. They never mentioned their jobs.
One afternoon, I remained seated at the table longer than usual, riveted by Uncle Jess’s recounting of what happened earlier that day at the post office. A white mailman had come into work, very intoxicated and shouting over and over: “Hoosiers and failures! That’s who you are, or you wouldn’t be working at the post office!”
Uncle Jess emphasized that the African-American postmen were not insulted or embarrassed, since delivering mail was one of the few decent-paying career options available to black men in America, even college-educated ones. He also emphasized the white employees’ embarrassment and distress.
I have reflected frequently on this tale told by a family friend, and particularly now that, after Mike Brown, the veil has lifted on the continual assault on black men in America. There is a black President currently, and many black men have defined and achieved varying definitions of success, which may or may not prevent their arrest or murder.
As for the intractability of both race and caste, an incubator for rage in poor and working-class white men and police, surely the country can construct a different paradigm for measuring human worth. Black men and black people should not, rationally speaking, be the target of displaced venom.
Undergirding unfair treatment of the less powerful in any society is the assumption of innate superiority by the wealthy and powerful. Think Nazi Germany; no hyperbole intended.
In this season of death, many African Americans have read the memo. My suggestion is for all to remain seated at the table until the tale completely unfolds.
Ruth-Miriam Garnett’s debut novel “Laelia” was published in 2004 by Simon & Schuster/Atria (New York). She is author of a poetry collection, “A Move Further South” (Third World Press, Chicago) and “Concerning Violence, New & Selected Poems” (Onegin). A new novel, “Chloe’s Grief” (Onegin) will be published in fall 2015. She is a 1992 recipient of the National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and was a Cave Canem Fellow in 2002.
