Soloman

By Steve Wilent

“What do you think when you see a cop? A white cop? As a white man, how do you feel?” Big John Soloman asks his friend and fellow firefighter, known as John Two. “You know what a black man feels when he sees a cop? Scared, man. Fear. Scared of what that white cop might just do because he’s black. Questions like, what are you doing in this neighborhood? Do you live around here, boy? Is this your car, boy? Man, I been put in jail for nothing, ’cept driving while black. That’s something you will never understand, man, never.”

But John Two wants to understand what his friend, and other black men and women, have experienced in a world where racism sometimes seems to have been overcome, yet still haunts our society.

Big John and John Two are like brothers, people say, identical but for the color of their skin, one black, the other white. The bonds of friendship are strong between “The Twins,” as they are called by their fellow firefighters, and these ties become stronger still when tested by “the depth of the hatred some whites feel for blacks — of hatred and guilt held in dark fathoms, a murky, engulfing pain and misery and the bitterness and fear it breeds in equal measures.” Racism surfaces as the two men fight forest and brush fires in the Western US and even as they seek solace deep in a remote desert canyon in the mountains of central Nevada. A chance encounter with a man consumed with a “twisted loathing for people with black skin” leads to a violent confrontation and, ultimately, death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Wilent
• Release date: Feb 25, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301797233

Steve Wilent

Steven J. Wilent is a freelance writer who lives in Rhododendron, Oregon, near Mt. Hood. When he isn’t writing, he’s probably cooking or chopping firewood. (Please don’t confuse me with the Steve Wilent who lives in the Portland Metro area and is an actor/writer/director.)

Book preview

Soloman

A Novella

By Steve Wilent

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Steve Wilent

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Chapter 1. Questions

The first time I called a man a nigger was in 1965. I was six years old.

The scene stands out in sharp contrast against the hazy uncounted days of my childhood, and the details my father has supplied as he has told the story make it seem closer. Dad had taken me with him on a business trip to Travis Air Force Base, near Sacramento, California. He was an engineer for Philco then and had been called to repair the base’s radar equipment. I have vague recollections of scenes from that day: the big orange antenna turning on its concrete tower, the long streaks of rubber on the runway, green-brown camouflage-painted jets landing and screaming in takeoff. I asked a man in uniform if the planes were coming back from bombing Vietnam. The man said no, they weren’t bombing anyone. I was always full of questions.

Dad and I had left the house early and arrived at the base in time for breakfast. We walked into a large cafeteria filled with men in uniforms, cigarette smoke, the clatter of heavy white china, and many masculine voices. We had ham and buttery grits and eggs and orange juice, and after we had eaten, we walked down a long hallway to the men’s room to wash up.

The restroom was crowded with more men in uniforms, many of them talking and laughing, a couple of them smoking. Dad waited silently with me in a line for a urinal. The man in front of us was very tall and had lots of stripes on his arm and rows of ribbons on his chest. And he had dark black skin. As the story goes, I tapped on Dad’s arm, pointed to the sergeant, looked up at my father, and said in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, Daddy, is that a nigger?

Every man in the room, both black and white, fell silent and turned to look at me, a pale, skinny, blonde white kid, now bewildered, looking up at a semicircle of adult faces. I swear to god I can’t imagine myself saying the word, even at that age, but it must have been so. Although my father is sometimes given to exaggeration, he couldn’t have made that up, and when he says he was struck momentarily speechless by my little outburst of curiosity, I believe him. The sergeant looked at us, so dad says, with no expression on his face. He looked down first at me, and then back up at Dad, who shrugged and tried to look as sheepish as he felt as he apologized several times. Dad says he has never been quite as embarrassed as he was right at that particular moment. I am, too, whenever he tells the tale, and even when I think of it.

Back then I didn’t know what it meant to use the word nigger. I was just a kid, of course, and I didn’t understand that it was a hurtful thing to say. I don’t remember my parents ever using the word, nor do I remember anybody using that word with any intention of malice — at least not until I was much older. Maybe that’s because I grew up with people of so many different colors. My neighborhood and schools were mostly white, but always had at least a generous sprinkling of blacks, Asians, and Hispanics, and I made friends with whoever I pleased; my best friend was Eugene, a happy-go-lucky half-Chinese, half Filipino kid who could out-play most anyone on any driveway basketball court in the world. I never thought much about the color of a person’s skin. It was just that: skin.

Another memory from childhood: I am waiting in the heavy heat of a long midsummer morning in Sacramento for the garbage man to come. He was a large black man with the darkest skin I had ever seen, who always dressed in grimy gray overalls and an olive-green knit cap with a short bill, always, no matter the weather. And he always carried a large, dented steel can over his shoulder. From a knothole in the sideyard gate I would watch him walk from the truck and across the strip of lawn along the driveway to the gate and pull on the latch string. Those were the days when garbage men would actually come into your yard for the trash and haul it to the truck and return the can and close the gate behind them, and people would leave them ten dollars in an envelope at Thanksgiving, and maybe a bottle of Jim Beam every Christmas. One time a lady down the street left a pair of fluffy pink slippers on top of her can, and I saw the man pick them up, look inside them and then at the soles, and then walk to the truck to put them in the cab. As the man approached my house I would run and hide behind the house and watch with half of one eye bent around the corner of the garage. The pinkish-beige stucco, so bright in the sun, burned my hands and the skin on one side of my face. The man would pretend not to notice me, then put down his can and, with his hands on his hips and a wide smile on his broad sweaty face and the stump of a black cigar unlit in the corner of his mouth, tell me that if I didn’t come out and say hey he would come find me and put me in the can, growling Now come on out here, sonny! I know you’re there someplace. He would laugh a hearty, booming laugh and say I ain’t gonna hurt you. You don’t think I’d REALLY put you in this here can, do you? You don’t think I’d REALLY put you in that ol’ truck, now do you? You git on out here. Come on now. This or something like it was our routine every week, and every week I ran out to him so he could laugh more of his wide, rolling, infectious laugh and rough up my sun-bleached hair with his strong callused hand before he lifted our can and emptied our trash into his can. My mind retains the scents of garbage and sweat and cigar smoke, the roughness of the stained, brown skin of his hands, sunlight glinting on beads of sweat on his forehead. Sometimes he would tell me to carry the can and then tease me when I couldn’t budge it or when I could do nothing but tip it over. He was grandly mysterious in my eyes, a great jovial man-god, all-powerful, all-knowing. I had no notion of any racial difference between us. I told my parents that I wanted to be a garbage man when I grew up.

It has taken me most of thirty years to learn the depth of the hatred some whites feel for blacks — of hatred and guilt held in dark fathoms, a murky, engulfing pain and misery and the bitterness and fear it breeds in equal measures. I had begun to sense this, of course, not long after I grew out of my weekly games of hide and seek with the garbage man, and in the two-dozen years since then I have seen far too much hatred between black and white and all colors in-between. Far too much. Yet even after all that has passed, I do not understand race hatred. Why is the color of a person’s skin worthy of anything but a passing acknowledgment? You might as well condemn the sky because it is blue.

Hate multiplies hate, that much I do know. Even within me. I once nearly killed a man — a white man — because of his twisted loathing for people with black skin.

Chapter 2. The Circus

I didn’t grow up to be a garbage man. After high school, which passed in a blur of beer and boredom and working almost full-time driving a forklift on the swing shift at a mill dedicated to turning heavy, dusty red sugar beets into sweet white granules — who needs to do homework, right? — I took my 1964 Pontiac