Don't Mention It

I read out loud two paragraphs from my family memoir, to a group of smart and friendly people.

One paragraph was tough. It was an old family story. One of my grandfather's tenants ambushed him and shot him in the chest, one day in 1909.  My grandfather survived. The shooter was acquitted for lack of a third-person eyewitness. Soon afterwards, grandfather's friends and neighbors made certain that this man would never try to assassinate anyone again. It was a violent story, with racial threads. The tenant was a black man, and his boss was white.

The other paragraph was more lighthearted, for relief.  As boys in the 1910s, my South Carolina uncles rode their cows to school and back. The girls at recess were curious about those cows. My young uncles-to-be told them, "Lean close to the cow," and then squirted milk into the girls' hair.

I read these paragraphs at a "Book Party" given by a colleague, for me and two other new authors. They read excerpts from their books, as well. The food was scrumptious, the wine flowed, and everyone was in a good mood.

After the readings, several people came up to talk. No one mentioned my story of violence. Nor did they mention sharecropping, segregation, or race. Nor did they refer to the fact mentioned in my reading, that killing a black man was not deemed murder in the South of 1909.

Instead, they wanted to discuss the allure of the South, with its exotic accents. One person said, "No one can tell a story like a Southerner."

Had I mentioned a topic that no one wanted to acknowledge?

There were no African-Americans in my audience. Why not? I wondered. Chance?A white friend chatted happily with me about having both black and white pals at a Southern college. They were all great friends, he said.

I absorbed the following message from the group:  Racism was bad, but it is now cured. We don't want to talk about race. Hmm. This was like the message I grew up with, as a Southerner.

In an episode of "Fawlty Towers" with Monty Python's John Cleese, the high-strung hotel owner Basil Fawlty is serving dinner to German guests. Someone warns him, "Now, Basil, don't mention the War," meaning World War II. Of course, Basil freaks out and mentions the War in every sentence. And then the Jews, and the Holocaust. He goes haywire with a Hitler imitation. The German guests begin to weep.

So we don't mention racism these days. We're past all that.

Not.