White Privilege Redux

 

It’s not her. But it could have been her. 

Maybe I said at FB above, or not, but I’ll say it here anyway. The first book I wrote on this subject, called White Privilege, was about black and white, Moor, Puerto-Rican, Native American, and us just plain white folks. We got along. Only I forgot something incredibly important. My bad.

Truthfully, I have no excuse. So how did this happen?

I knew him this way.

Mercersburg, Princeton, Hine parties. I stood closer to him than I ever did to Hiney himself, and I have never seen a better dressed man, including my father, which is saying something. He had no reason to, but he knew my name. “Robert,” he said. “You went to Mercersburg too.”

And I never made the connection. 

I was spending a summer of legal internship, courtesy of Harvard lawyer Santo Salvo, researching property prices in 1913, the year the income tax was passed. He was part of the family conspiracy to send me to law school, and he had the way greased to a school I would never have attended. But there I was in the basement of the Cumberland County courthouse, making $100 a week, and there was this kind Japanese woman looking out for me and trying to relieve my boredom.

Cumberland County Courthouse in Bridgeton.

We wound up talking. Why it all went over my head I can’t explain. She had been interned in Cumberland County as a child. Four years of her life stolen. Well, I went to prep school. Same thing? No. Not at all. She was angry, deep down, and I could see it had changed her life in pivotal ways. They didn’t beat her, or starve her, or sexually abuse her. They just deprived her of her native-born American freedom.

I had all the pieces laid out before me. I just didn’t put them together. She was interned in a property owned by Seabrook Farms. Jack Seabrook’s dad. She didn’t know that was where it was. I should have.

I thought of hers as a personal tragedy. But I did know better. Year after year, the valedictorian of the Bridgeton High School was Japanese. They were proving a point I, who had always gone to private schools, never got.

Where was I? Right next to the guy who graduated shoulder-to-shoulder with Jimmy Stewart at Mercersburg and Princeton. I was starstruck.

The awfullest thing. I can’t remember her name. I wrote all about all my babysitters, and I cannot remember the name of the kindly Japanese lady who told me about the worst thing that ever happened in my home county.

You knew I had to do this. Sorry.