Face It, You're Black!: Growing Up Colored in an All-White Indiana Town

By Mike Enrico

Long before buzzwords such as multicultural and biracial arrived on the scene, the Jim Crow era "One-Drop Rule" determined who was colored in America. Mike Enrico spent the first 23 years of his life in Hobart, Indiana, as its only black resident. While most of his peers took their ethnicity for granted, Mike had to come up with explanations for his appearance, for being adopted, as well as answers to the often asked question: "What are you?" Face It, You're Black! will appeal to anyone struggling to blend into a color-obsessed society and to baby boomers fed up with out of control political correctness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543986341

Book preview

Copyright © 2018 by Mike Enrico

ISBN: 9781543986341

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

Mike Enrico

New York, NY

www.twodroprule.com

Author Note: I have tried to recreate events, locales and conversations based on my memories of them. In order to maintain their anonymity, in some instances, I have changed the names of individuals and places. I may have changed some identifying characteristics and details such as physical properties, occupations and places of residence.

Book Layout © 2017 BookDesignTemplates.com

Face It, You’re Black/ Mike Enrico. — 1st ed.

Dedicated to my beautiful wife Pamela

CONTENTS

RACIAL AWAKENING

WHAT ARE YOU?

FRIKK’S FOLLIES

ST. BRIDGET

THE SULLIVANS

ROLAND DOWN THE RIVER

LAKE GEORGE

RECREATION ROOM

FRIENDS AND FOES

THE FASTEST GUY IN HOBART

JUNIOR HIGH

TROUBLEMAKERS

CAMPING OUT

HIGH SCHOOL

NO SEX, DRUGS, AND ROCK & ROLL

THE ARMY

CHAPTER ONE

RACIAL AWAKENING

Hobart, Indiana - The Friendly City.

1960 White population: 18,600. Black population: One. Me.

In 21st century America, mixed marriages and bi-racial children are commonplace, especially in the cities. I was born to an unwed interracial couple in 1958 Indiana, at a time when such relationships were rare, and, in many states, including Indiana, against the law. The One Drop Rule, which originated in the Jim Crow South, classified me as a Negro.

All my life the same question has perplexed me: How did I end up in a town called Hobart, the only black kid, possibly in its entire history, adopted by white parents?

Growing up, without any guidance, I was unprepared to face the realities of my racial predicament. As a teenager, I ran around with a dried out, tangled afro because I didn’t know how to take care of my hair, and the local barbers knew even less. I didn’t know whether to wear braids, dreadlocks, or keep it short. White people could just pull out their combs or brushes and face the world. What was I supposed to use? No stores sold afro picks. Why would they? After all, no niggers lived in Hobart. So, they believed.

A few years ago I went on a mission to locate my biological parents. I didn’t want to leave the planet without discovering their identities. Along the way, I submitted my DNA for analysis and learned some surprising details about my racial background, including dominant genetic matches in Southern Tunisia, and mixed Native American (not Cherokee) ancestry around Minnesota.

During this quest, with documentation obtained from the Indiana Board of Health, I found out that my biological mother, Anita (who died in 2011) was white and had given birth at nineteen. And through some online detective work, I was able to track down and talk to her brother, Sam, who, ironically, lived in Hobart. Sadly, he passed away in 2016, but not before confessing that while Anita was pregnant with me, his parents lied to the rest of the family and told them she was in the hospital suffering from appendicitis. Sam sent me a B&W photo of Anita as a teenager, as well as a color snapshot of her from the 1980s. Although the identity of my biological father and his descendants remain unknown to me, their DNA populates Northern and Eastern Africa, in addition to Honduras and Brazil.

I came into the world on December 16, 1958, in Gary, Indiana. Gary is famous for three things: Steel mills, The Jackson Five, and murder. The official slogan for Gary used to be City on the Move. It’s true. When blacks moved in, the whites moved out.

I’ve imagined that my biological parents met secretly in dark Chicago nightclubs and enjoyed a brief but intimate affair. When she got pregnant, he panicked, hopped a train in the middle of the night, and disappeared out of our lives forever. What other choice did he have? After all, he was a black man who had impregnated a nineteen-year-old white woman in 1950’s Indiana. It would have been impossible for the two of them to marry. Still, I wonder if he even said goodbye? Thank God my mother decided to carry me to term. That’s how I ended up in the same adoption agency as my brother, Joey. My sister, Catherine, was rescued from an orphanage in East Chicago, Indiana. None of us are blood-related. Joey’s nationality could be Italian. Catherine’s heritage is unknown, but she might be a mix of European and Native-American. Since I was light-skinned, my negroid features were not yet prominent. Perhaps this explains how I slipped under the radar with a white family.

My adoptive parents were both of European stock. Franklin (an Italian who failed miserably to live up to the responsibilities of fatherhood, shall, for the remainder of this book be called Frikk.) Cecilia (Balchik) Enrico, was Czechoslovakian. Her closest friends called her Tilly, although I never asked why, but should have. I found out that Enrico as a surname is unique; it’s primarily a first name, such as Enrico Caruso. Our new family moved to a nearby town called Hobart, known back then as The Friendly City, in 1959. We settled at 221 South Connecticut Street in the smallest house on the block. Frikk’s mother, Dolores, lived in a much smaller house right behind ours in the backyard. Her address was 221½.

I don’t remember too much of those first few years, but from 1963 through 1969, I can recall, through flashbacks, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, his brother, Bobby, along with civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. I can’t forget the nightly news flashes on our black and white television of FBI agents battling Ku Klux Klansmen in the South, and the police murders in Chicago of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, along with reports of increasing U.S. military fatalities in Vietnam. In Hobart, STOP THE WAR graffiti popped up on billboards and traffic signs all over town, and the cops hung placards in store windows reading, IF YOU DON’T TRUST THE POLICE, THE NEXT TIME YOU’RE IN TROUBLE CALL A HIPPIE. While Chicago burned in the aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination, and demonstrators rioted during the 1968 Democratic Convention, Hobart residents, a mere 32 miles away, slept well in their cushy suburban beds.

I experienced my first racial encounters from our neighbors, the Brandenburgs. They enjoyed pestering my mom with questions such as, What nationality is Michael? And mom’s usual reply was, Oh, he’s Puerto Rican, or He’s special, but she would never say I was Negro or black. After the Brandenburgs departed Connecticut Street, a new family, the Pohls, moved in. The Pohls hailed from Kentucky, and from the beginning, we didn’t get along. After a game of badminton in our backyard, Cindy Pohl ran home crying and said that Joey called her a bad name. Mrs. Pohl immediately stormed over to our house, and instead of confronting Joey, she said, If you all are gonna be calling us names, we’re gonna start calling Michael little black Sambo. I never met Mr. Pohl; I believe he was a traveling salesman. Around mid-July 1968, Joey and I went next door and saw blood all over their porch. Three or four men, including our neighbor, Ron Gallagher, were busy cleaning up the mess with buckets of soapy water and large industrial brushes. An ambulance sat idling across the street. Evidently, Mr. Pohl blew his brains out in the middle of the night, but we never found out why. Strange, we didn’t even hear the shot. I can still see the blood: syrupy thick, and dripping down the stairs. Cindy moved back to Hobart as a teenager and Joey bragged that he finger fucked her in Fifield’s garage.

Beginning in junior high, Joey had a major problem with niggers. They disgusted him, and I could never figure out why. Perhaps self-hate, since he was unaware of his own racial heritage. Being a Caucasian with the last name Enrico, he always told people, I’m Italian, and nobody ever questioned him about it. When he got angry at me, while playing sports, or if I walked past the couch and farted in his face, he’d call me some slang name for nigger: nig, jig, buck, coon, whatever popped into his head. If he saw any racial confrontations