The
Monkey-Rope
By Barney Morgan
IPS Features

Return to Current IPS Features

Return to Catalogue

IPS Features Staff

International Press Service

Write:
Barney@ipsfeatures.com

A strong racial slur

Before this opinionated essay ends, I'm going to use a term that almost all black people and many white people consider a strong racial slur. You can guess what it is. As it is most often used, I, too, consider it a strong racial slur.

I grew up in a rural community near the small southeast Tennessee town of Dayton. Yes, that Dayton. Home of the ridiculous Monkey Trial that pitted the brilliant legal mind of Clarence Darrow against the political populist and religious fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan. The area was not as backward as portrayed in the news stories H.L. Mencken sent back to his employer, the Baltimore Sun, but it was backward enough. I was born eight years after the trial and grew up about a generation after it.

There was a fairly large creek that tumbled out of the mountains and through the community where I lived and then passed through Dayton before losing its identity in the Tennessee River. There were many good swimming holes on the creek. My friends and I most often used one in the heart of our community, but also often used several scattered along the three or four miles the creek flowed before reaching the community. There was one decent swimming hole, Rock Wall, between our community and Dayton. We sometimes swam there, but not often, because we were skinny-dippers, and the town people who swam there usually wore swim trunks.

Once when I was about 13, word got around that a group of balck people were swimming in Rock Wall. Usage of any spot in the creek by blacks was not viewed kindly by whites. A group of eight or 10 righteously indignant white vigilantes quickly sprang up, ready do their duty and put those presumptuous blacks in their proper place. Somehow, I found myself among them.

I can't remember how that happened. All the people in the group except me were from Dayton. None of my community friends were there. All I can figure is that I played with a town baseball team, and I must have been with some of them when the fracas started. Anyway, we set out to rock the blacks away from the creek and back to their section of town. It was easy. We startled and scared them with a surprise attack, shielded by trees, and they high-tailed it out of there, carrying their clothes. We chased them.

One guy in our group was a good bit older than the rest of us. He must have been about 20. Apparently he had been working that day as a carpenter's helper because he was wearing a pair of carpenter overalls.

He had a ball-peen hammer in his back pocket. I was running a few steps behind him. Someone closer to him yelled at him and asked what he was going to do with the hammer. He said, "I'm going to pick my teeth after I eat niggers."

That brought a burst of raucous laughter from the group, except me. It froze me. I stopped, and as the group quickly sped away from me, I said to myself, "What the hell am I doing here? What am I doing involved in this at all? Those people have as much right to that creek as I do. As much right as anyone."

I greatly regret my role in that ugly incident. I give myself credit for stopping, and for condemning it, but I had thrown some rocks.

At the same time I have always been glad and thankful that something I had been taught, no doubt by my family, had made the incident hateful to me. I have never been able to determine who or what it was in my family that instilled in me that concern for fairness and justice. But looking back, I know that fairness and justice were honored in our house. I hope I have passed some of it on to my current family.

At the beginning of this article, I hinted that I think there are times, however rare, when the racial slur used here is not as racist or as vile as it is generally perceived. One day soon I will write about that.