The Great Race War Part 2 – N-Word, or Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear

By Barbara Groark

This is the story of Gladly, the Cross-Eyed Bear.

That’s the extent of the joke, one of those mild-mannered puns that used to be allowed. It was handed down by my grandfather Andy, who would quietly put it in conversations at the Sunday dinner table occasionally, if things were getting too serious or ponderous or a change of subject was needed. He didn’t hand down much money, but he did pass on an affinity for wordplay and a skewed view of the world.

Once in a while I find myself using phrases that were popular around 1910, or 1930 if my mother is in the house, words like “copasetic.” If everything is copasetic, or even “jake” – it’s all good. My mother likes to shake up her grandchildren by using phrases like “the part that went over the fence last” or some phrase from old vaudeville routines, which she would have got from her father.

As for other less amusing uses of language, Inauguration Day 2009 has at last occurred. My grandfather might turn over in his grave.

My grandfather came from a time and neighborhood in which there were several colorful names for the Negro race, other than the usual N-word. Of course, other groups, including his own (Irish), had these unofficial names as well. And in fact, the nicknames of individuals who were his friends included Poopy Eddy and Whiskey Clark, not necessarily terms of admiration or endearment. We grandkids always wanted to know what Andy’s own nickname was, but when we asked him, my grandfather would get quiet and dignified and say he didn’t have one.
These are not excuses. He was a racist, no doubt. But he was also a humorist, a lifelong teetotaler after a promise to his mother at age 21, and a sharp dresser, at least on Sunday (the style, with hat, a combination of Fred Astaire and Clint Eastwood). That oath at 21 also included a promise to stop boxing, so as not to turn “punchy,” as some other guys in the neighborhood had done after a few years in the Golden Gloves rings in Philadelphia.

His parents had come down to Philadelphia before their marriage from the Pennsylvania coal country, precisely Mahanoy City. There his father had developed both the black lung and alcoholism, apparently of the knock-down, drag-out variety, and the father occasionally would disappear for days and weeks at a time. The father also spent a long time in New Mexico at a sort of asylum for lung patients in the dry air of that state. His wife and five children, including Andy, in that era had many addresses in Philadelphia and among relatives back in coal country until the children began to earn real money in their late teens and twenties, and they could all buy a house in West Philadelphia.

Andy left school in the sixth grade and drove a doctor’s horse and buggy on the doctor’s daily visits to patients. This way he helped pay off the cost of the doctor’s visits to his own family, including the fee for attending the birth of the last child, John (the one who later boxed Gene Tunney in a U.S. Army exhibition fight), at home. Becoming familiar with the stables from his daily routes, Andy then learned blacksmithing, probably figuring everyone would always need their horses taken care of, and continued in that craft after his marriage at age 28 and through the Depression.

In other words, somebody had to be lower than he. And that included the black trainers and other stable hands he saw every day in his early days. He didn’t know any college professors or small business people or political leaders, or even cops, whom he had quiet disdain for anyway, who were African-American. Throughout his life Andy read the daily newspaper cover to cover, and he followed the Philadelphia sports teams and the boxing profession throughout his life, and liked to watch horse races – though not as a gambler – or dressage exhibitions. He played pinochle with his friends and also in partnership with his wife and other married couples, neighbors and in-laws. He smoked cigars and pipes. His hair turned white by age 30, but he kept his full head of hair till he died in his eighties.

Once at my mother’s dining room table when I was 12 or 14, after a family Sunday dinner with my grandparents visiting, and after everyone else had left the table, I asked my grandfather why he had all these names for blacks, and why he hated them in general anyway. He was thoughtful for a few seconds when he saw I was serious, and then said, “It’s the way they treat their women.”

I asked for details, but he was vague. He did recall one man he used to work with, when he became a siderographer (something to do with engraving) later in the forties and fifties, whom he did respect, but otherwise he had no time for the race in general.

We could note that his own father was a knock-down, drag-out drunk who left his family without resources, having been given none himself. And later as an adult I could see that, by the definition given, there are plenty of white niggers in this world.

His wife, my grandmother, did not share his views, though she did not speak her mind often. We however knew her views were not in the same as his. She never swore or used ethnic slurs of any kind, and would not allow certain talk in the house. She taught her own children to respect the Jewish store-owners in their neighborhood in West Philadelphia (across Conestoga Street from her mother-in-law) whenever she sent my mother or one of the other kids to get something she needed. However the kids had nicknames anyway. One deli owner they called “Mr. Vadelse” because he would have almost no conversation with them except to ask “What else?” in his Yiddish accent after each item in the order from their mother. But they used the respectful “Mr.”

Caroline (my grandmother’s name) herself was an immigrant from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, near Vienna among the Alps. She came to this country at 13 and was placed in the second grade in order to learn English, but dropped out because of the sing-song taunts of the small children (“Dutchy, Dutchy, Sauerkraut, does your mother know you’re out?”), and learned English on her own, and well. (I find that most people who learn English as a second language use it more correctly than natives; maybe they’re just not as lazy about it.)

My grandfather was hesitant at first to marry a German-speaking woman (they were both 28) in that era following World War I, as his older brother Steve had died in France in 1918, and resentful feelings still ran high. They did marry, but my grandfather would not allow her to teach German to the children.

When my grandfather would begin the yarns from his childhood at our Sunday dinner table (drove a horse and buggy????), or begin telling a story containing ethnic slurs, Caroline would interject an exasperated but quiet “Oh, Andrew!” into the conversation, and sometimes “You’re telling lies to these children.” This would amuse my grandfather, who would feign surprise and puzzlement.

She also would sip wine with dinner or a have a cocktail before dinner at our house, while my grandfather would always have ginger ale or 7-Up. In other words, he did not require his wife or his family to be in lockstep with him in all areas. And he wasn’t kidding about his vow to his mother.

This was the era when Mohammed Ali became the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. I remember being in our rec room at the house with some sisters and my grandfather and watching Ali’s win at the Olympics, when he was still Cassius Clay. Watching his pre- and post-fight antics (“I am the Greatest!) my grandfather in his chair waved him away in disgust (he also waved away in disgust the June Taylor Dancers on the Jackie Gleason Show), but over the next few years I heard him say quietly after watching some tape of a fight, “He’s a pretty good little fighter.”

So maybe he wouldn’t really turn over in his grave over Inauguration Day 2009, once he had a chance to study the situation.

I heard a talk radio guy saying recently that Barack Obama should emulate John F. Kennedy and call for a landing on the planet Mars, just as Kennedy called for a moon landing in the 10 years following his inauguration. Whereas the moon is rather romantic, why would anyone want to land on Mars, a smoky, gassy, dark place named after the old god of war. Now Saturn and its rings would be cool, the name Saturn as a god is no more appealing than Mars.

But really, Obama’s election and inauguration constitute a landing on the moon or an outer planet. It feels as if something killed off in the sixties or the nineties (optimism, graciousness, humor, regard for fellow citizens even of the opposing party) is being restored, among other amazements.

So God bless the United States of America. I think we have a good little fighter.

And maybe Andy would have to laugh at himself and be saying by now, “Gladly the cross I’d bear.”