Stephen Kearney tells his various tales of multi-ethnic lunacy from multi-ethnic south London.
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Art imitating life must be one of the hoariest old clichés around but even clichés must have to emerge from somewhere. There must have been a semblance of truth in the idea somewhere, sometime. What happens when the cliché is out-clichéd?
“Fawlty Towers” remarked one American wag with some experience of British hotels “is not a comedy but a documentary”. London is the big melt but just how much melting can go on in real life? When does the melt leave the area of balance, suitable for sitcom or even cliché, and move into over-the-top unusable farce? When does it boil over?
Friends, Neighbours, Foreigners ……..
“Let’s talk to these two foreigners over here” suggested my neighbour, indicating two squatting bodies, as we exited at midnight our south London local, once a dive and now made over into ‘cool’. Two young guys sat on the pavement edge opposite in the quiet cul-de-sac, enjoying one of the all-night heatwaves from the early naughties. “How do you know they’re foreign?” I asked, curious at his instant diagnosis, wondering is he was differentiating them from me, an Irish immigrant. “Oh I can tell” came the breezy reply. We crossed the road to open negotiations.
Well, my neighbour must have had a sixth sense. We engaged the two kerb squatters in conversation and it quickly emerged that they were from Croatia. The exchange was light, pleasant, good humoured and inconsequential – conversation for the simple pleasure of human communication, in other words. Alas, as so often happens, our simple pleasure was soon interrupted. Another foreign voice called out from the darkness, threatening that if we didn’t shut up, the voice would call the police. We might have come from the pub but we weren’t being loud or shouty and neither were the two Croatians, though I had no idea where they had come from on that particular evening. We ignored the interruption and continued with our pleasure.
About two minutes later, emerging from a darkened alleyway came the voice. The voice came in the form of two men who looked like they had just dragged on their clothes in a hurry. They complained about our noise which was keeping them awake. We weren’t actually making much but, I admit, even a conversational level voice can carry in the still of humid darkness – in the heat of the night. It turned out that the two threat issuers were both Russian, possibly explaining their instinct to reach for the threat of ultimate force, rather than bother with any of that cissy negotiation stuff. Putin would have been proud of them.
For all that, negotiation won the day – or the night – and we all parted on friendly terms.
Walking back home with my neighbour, I was reflecting on what had happened. “Isn’t it amazing”, I began “an impromptu meeting of six guys on a London street and only one of them is British”. “Yeah” came the immediate reply “and he’s black!”
Taking Sides
It was a few years before that, in the same area and with the same neighbour, that I walked into another one of the local bars – a once typical south London dive bar of lager, crisps and tattoos – the sort of bar that used to exist before being squeezed out by the onward march of marketing driven, consumerism where people, I mean customers, ‘cool’ of course, now have ‘lifestyles’ instead of raucous enjoyment. And in the best dive bar tradition, the big screen was showing the inevitable football match and Chelsea were playing.
Now, just to explain a bit of background to those of the non footballing persuasion, people like me, it goes like this. Football clubs, just like pretty well all other aspects of voluntary human activity, each have their own fans with their own tastes, each club attracting particular biases, just as certain brands of car or motorcycle attract a particular type of person, like Ferrari is rumoured to attract particularly silly people and Volvo particularly stupid ones (it used to be said among bikers that Volvo drivers had one brain and took turns at it). I can’t speak for now, but certainly in the past, like the 1990s or before, the London club with the biggest reputation for hooliganism and racism was Millwall. Not far behind them in the same field of reputation was Chelsea – and maybe that wasn’t too far in the past either. It was as recently as 2015 that a group of Chelsea supporters repeatedly bundled a black man off an underground train carriage to the chorused chants of “We’re racist, we’re racist and that’s the way we like it” – and that was in Paris!
We had just entered by the main door to be confronted by the giant screen high on the wall, the game now in full swing. Just at that very moment, a TV camera panned to the fans in the stands, momentarily lingering on two young black guys dressed from head to foot in Chelsea blue. My neighbour’s progress, half way across the threshold, was brought to an abrupt halt, the sight too much to bear. He stood in the doorway, utterly transfixed, his eyes riveted to that screen high up on the wall. His dismay was total, his body locked in the frozen moment of realisation. Barely moving a muscle, addressing no-one but the giant screen, he pleaded “Forgive them Lord, for they know not what they do”.
Delivering the Mail
Like many local authority blocks of a certain vintage, mine has a communal, open air deck access, giving every resident, in effect, a second balcony or communal landing. It forms an effective half way house (no pun intended) between a private space and a public one: it’s sort of yours and sort of every other resident’s too. It’s where you can meet your neighbours, talk trash, hang out and generally enjoy the simple pleasure of human communication in a controlled space with no strings attached – like a gated community on the (very) cheap. You can come and go (home) as you please without any caveats. And it’s good for DIY too, especially when you’re cutting up larger or longer pieces that your flat can’t accommodate.
I was doing just that, out there with my folding workbench, my long and wide pieces, a saw, a measuring tape and of course, a pencil. With me were my neighbour, yeah, that guy, and another neighbour from upstairs, a young fellow of Congolese parentage. We talked and yapped for the simple pleasure of human communication as I measured, drew and cut on that sunny day in 2018.
And then the postman, a pleasant guy of Caribbean descent, arrived. Weaving his way past the others, he handed me a cluster of letters. “How do you know they’re for me”, I asked. “I know you” came the reply as he turned to leave. “Oh yeah” came the loud sneer from my neighbour “give everything to the white man”.
Youlotery
“Youlotery” is the cousin of “whataboutery”, the practice of trying to change the subject to get the practitioner off the hook, what you reach for in desperation when you’re caught bang to rights – like the prominent motorcycle journalist I asked to justify the atrocious (and unscrutinised) fuel consumption of a bike he had tested. “What about Ferrari” he demanded “they’re worse.”
Youlotery is the practice of dumping every ill, every wrong and every injustice on “you lot”. “You lot” are the enemy and enemies can be selected according to need. “You lot “ can be just about any group that isn’t you: it can be based on race, ethnicity, football teams, choice of food, drug, clothing or just about anywhere else you might perceive a difference, even in your car – or motorcycle. In my young days, way back in history, as a hard-core motorcyclist of the British bike persuasion, “you lot” meant anyone who rode a Japanese bike and of course, had to be appropriately despised.
I used to have a neighbour who lived a few floors above me who was a serious practitioner. Born to Jamaican parents, he had decided somewhere along the line that this was to be his one and only identity. Being black was his job, nay, his career. He was a professional and being black was his profession. During the time I knew him, his career was going through a developmental phase. Positions were being worked out and ideas were being clarified while unnecessary complications were cut away like so much dead wood. It all crystallised into a wonderful message of beautiful, Trumpian simplicity, the zenith of his career development. Almost like a chant from ‘Animal Farm’, it came down to “Black good, white bad” (and say 100 times).
For all that, I liked the guy, even fixing his car once – for free and lent him a bit of money too (never repaid). So long as the conversation was light and inconsequential and, to be honest, I don’t think he was interested in a lot more, exchanges along the landing could be a bit of fun. But there was always a screen, an invisible barrier that kept out any unwelcome thought or reflection. Then he left the area of his upbringing and sightings became rare and accidental. I think he wanted it that way because he was a man reaching the pinnacle of his career development. “Hiya Floyd” I once called out to him across the street, during an accidental encounter in these later times. He turned angrily. “Oh thank you” he sneered loudly “for calling me by my slave name” before walking on, fixed in his righteousness. Some time after that I encountered him again as I got on a bus, greeting him as I walked by, as ex neighbours might. He stayed silent but looked downright annoyed. Hadn’t I read the script? While people just aren’t supposed to recognise black people. What did I mean by humanising him?
It was some years earlier that I encountered him at my door, probably when trying to borrow some money. “There should be separate facilities for black people” he began, “there should be separate schools, separate cinemas, separate hospitals …….. “. “They used to have that” I answered, “it’s called apartheid”. He looked stunned. The idea had never occurred to him.
Not long after that he complained to me about a Jamaican neighbour. “He’s beaten up every guy in this block”, he assured me. “Well”, I answered, “he’s never beaten me up.” His lip curled in contempt. “Yeah” he sneered, “that’s because you lot go to the police.”
It was on another expedition to my front door that he exercised his full “you lot” repertoire, giving it a total workout. It seemed that “you lot”, (you know, the people you borrow money from), were responsible for all the ills of the planet, black people in his view, being the recipient of every injustice since the dawn of time and all at the hands of the white man. “You lot did this”, “you lot did that” and “you lot” it seemed, existed purely to do down the black man. Accompanied by a jabbing finger I was hit by salvo after salvo of accusations done by “you lot”.
A brief lull in his barrage gave me an opening. “What do you mean “you lot””, I asked, “you’re British; I’m not”. The flow just stopped. He stopped too, his face frozen in amazement at the idea there might be more than two human identities on the planet. His whole body language changed. His voice changed too. “Steve” he said, in tones of realisation, “you’re a brother”.
Years later again, he actually visited his old block and there I met him on the deck with another neighbour. It seems he had, in the meantime, at last done a little bit of thinking and reflection, something we could all do with from time to time.
A Question of Immigration
Trevor, the British Jamaican manager of the industrial unit next to ours in Primrose Hill, was getting a bit heated. He was in his stride, holding forth on an issue I cannot even remember. It was Summertime sometime in the early 1990s and maybe the heat was getting to him.
“The trouble with you English” he stated, jabbing a furious finger at me ……. . “I’m not English” I said. Hastily correcting his plan of attack, Trevor continued, “Oh well, Irish, British anyway”, as he lined up again. “I’m not British”, I countered. The man just stopped. His attack plan was abandoned. Astonishment now replaced indignation. His jaw sagged. He was a man confounded. “Not British?” he ejaculated “are you an illegal?”
Off The Record
What do people say behind closed doors? When do you hear what people really think? What do people say when they drop their guard. What do people say about what they really feel, when they know that someone is on their wavelength.
I actually had what felt like a ringside seat at one such exchange and it took place where I worked in exotic Primrose Hill back in the mid 90’s. My boss, a man from Trinidad, in the UK since ‘62, and I were in the workshop chatting idly – the best type of chat. In walked Trevor, the man with issues about my immigration status. I don’t quite know how it began, but basically the conversation was between the two of them, and I merged into the background, gradually assuming the role of a spectator. What started as a light, friendly chat, something I’d seen a few times before, started taking on another dimension. They both talked about aspects of racial discrimination and the feeling of never being truly accepted in Britain, no matter how successful you were.
Now, the boss was always an easy-going guy and rarely got angry. I’d known him for about ten years at this stage, and I’d never heard him talk much about race or discrimination. He had friends from every race, colour, creed and country and usually seemed quite at peace with himself. But this time there was something new, at least for me. A slightly different narrative began emerging. He started talking about the compromises he had to make on a daily basis in order to fit in, which involved having to bury part of his personality. Every day, he said, he had to put on “the mask”. He went on to explain that this was one of the reasons he liked visiting his native Trinidad because he didn’t have to “put on the mask”; he could be himself. I don’t think I’d ever heard him more upset.
Trevor was the other half of this conversation. Now I’d always seen Trevor as a slightly superficial, bling liking guy, quick on wit, charm and repartee, but not someone that you could have a real exchange with. This man did not do serious. But on this occasion something began to shift. Although born in the UK, his tale was not dissimilar to the boss’s, a tale of compromises, the perpetual state of subtle exclusion, and the certainty that no matter what you achieved you would never be truly accepted. You would be forever an outsider. As he spoke, another man, another Trevor emerged, one I hadn’t seen before. Gone was the cheerful, smiling, somewhat shallow, flash car driving guy; in his place was was someone very different. He now had a body language that spoke of betrayal, frustration and disappointment. And on his face I saw something I thought I’d never see. Hurt!
The nest morning, as I locked up my motorcycle, Trevor walked by, sporting a sheepish grin. “An interesting conversation, yesterday” was his only comment,. The mask was firmly back in place.
A Mask Shared
A few years later I was working for another boss, a total control freak. You could have no views, no opinions, no inputs – and no personality. You plain didn’t matter. Your job was simply to be subordinate to him. You developed a coping strategy by being largely invisible, saying as little as possible and, like a good U boat captain, staying submerged and adopting silent running procedure. It was horrible. Every morning I would switch into robot mode as a being with no feelings, opinions, views, personality or friendship; anything at all that might detract form the boss’ boss-role was verboten! Praise was simply unknown – unless it was for the boss. Criticism, however unjustified was there in abundance. That daily morning mode switch, I felt, was just like putting on a mask. As that realisation hit me one morning I suddenly found myself wondering, utterly aghast, if this this what black people have to go through with every day.
Failing the Audition
A shoplifter had just been caught. It was in my local supermarket probably about the turn of the century – the 21st century, that is. I was standing in the paying queue when the incident happened somewhere behind. A white guy of indeterminate nationality had been caught by the Nigerian security guy, not tall but very powerfully built. As far as he was concerned the only law was his fist which he used liberally on the shop lifting man’s body. After he’d done enough punching, he frogmarched the miscreant past the paying queues and ejected him into the street.
On returning, he was congratulated by one of the queuers, an elderly west African gentleman in conservative attire – conservative English, that is.
“You did a good job there” he called out.
Then, switching his attention away from the supermarket’s Mr. Punch, to the obedient lines of paying queuers, he bean casting for supporters of his moral indignation.
“These people come over here” he announced loudly in a suitably pompous tone “and don’t want to do any work.”
The response was one of stony silence. We’d failed his audition.
Death of the High Street?
“Great party, isn’t it?” said the young, fat white guy, desperate to start a conversation. The year was 1983 and I was at a party in Poplar, east London. It was hardly a wild affair, just a bunch of young(ish) people, mainly guys, just sort of milling around can in one hand and something to smoke in the other, vaguely wondering where the action was, but realising that this run-down council flat was not “where it’s at.”
The fat guy clearly wanted someone, anyone to talk to and I was in his line of fire. I was simply a target of opportunity. As a vague wonderer, smoke free, mind you, I just sort of stood there and let him continue. He soon moved from the “great party” as a subject matter, to what really was bothering him, his shops, or rather the loss of them.
It seems he had owned two shops in the area, shops that had served the local community for generations, but he had been forced to sell them. He mourned their loss because, as he explained, they were not just shops but community centres, where people would stop in for a chat, talk to each other and generally exchange views, in addition to exchanging money for goods, like they did since before Abraham or something. His party refrain seemed to be that the loss of his two community hubs was tragic, sad and painful.
And what had brought about this, well, tragic, state of affairs? The supermarkets! Yep, a supermarket had opened nearby and he just couldn’t compete. It seemed like the old story, the old flotsam and jetsam of once thriving business failing to move with the times. Frankly I wasn’t interested, but I hadn’t exactly a lot else on. I mean no attractive young woman wanted to tell me her tale of woe.
Yielding to social pressure to say something – anything, I asked fat boy what had happened to the shops, the actual buildings.
“Oh, an Indian family bought them” said he, in a tone of weary resignation as though he were accepting the inevitable.
“Are they still shops?” I asked
“Yes” came the reply. I was beginning to get a little bit interested now.
“Do they make a profit?” I asked
“Yes” This was getting me more interested.
“How come they can make a profit and you couldn’t?”
“They open in the evening”
“Why didn’t you do that?”
“I wasn’t prepared to work those long hours.”
“Wait a minute, a few minutes ago you told me how concerned you were for the community but now you’re telling me you wouldn’t open your shops at the time community wanted them.”
“I just wasn’t prepared to work those long hours.”
“OK, so why didn’t you close your shops when the supermarket was open, and open your shops when the supermarket was closed and that way you’d work even fewer hours?”
“Well, I wasn’t prepared to do that.”
As the conversation, if you can call it that, went on, it emerged that fat boy had no interest in shops at all, had inherited them from his father and had spent the previous five years pissing the profits up against a wall. He was glad to be rid of them.
And I’ve no doubt the next person he encountered, the next target of opportunity, the next person in his line of fire, the next lamb who wandered from the protection of the flock, at a party, in the job centre, in a pub, or, dare I say it, in a shop, would be treated to an action replay of the tragedy of his lost shops. He’s probably doing it still!
Negotiating a Discount
As the traditional small shops gradually disappeared along the high street, new businesses would move in to the now vacant or just about to die premises, sometimes hoping to revive the going concerns with a new approach, as so many Asians successfully demonstrated in reviving old newsagents. Others would try a new kind of business altogether, perhaps one more in keeping with a changed world. A shop premises down my way moved from God-knows-what (it’s amazing how quickly you forget what was there) to an IT store in keeping with the 1990s. Yep, he had all the usual stuff – the cables, the adaptors, the DIN plugs, the RAM expansion cards, the floppy discs, – the IT equivalent of the car accessory shop offering the sort of service that plugs the gaps in an emerging market, the all too frequent gaps that the major manufacturers overlook, leaving opportunities behind, until they wise up.
“£13.50”, said the owner, a huge black guy, as he handed me the modem (remember them?)
“How about a discount for a starving white man?” I asked hopefully.
He fixed me with a baleful eye, answering in that flat, slow tone of total conviction, like one certain of a scientific fact.
“The white man”, he announced “will never starve.”
Making over the Ironmonger
The traditional London high street used to boast a whole patchwork of trades, specialists, suppliers and services, each in its own little niche. It seems weird to us today, that a small shop could stay in business selling, for instance, only wool and other trinkets of the haberdashery world to a local clientele – and yet they did – for years. This was the world of the corner shop, which also included modest terraces of them as well. And they were all over London in addition to every urbanised area of the land. They were simply the local distribution system.
It wasn’t just wool. Pretty well every local need could be locally supplied, from groceries to coal, from meat to timber and just about everything else, including car accessories, for which my high street used to boast two outlets. These shops were often curiously specialised, very much sticking to their own stock in trade, as though fearful of crossing some special line of demarcation. They sold their stock and that was it. The notion of the bicycle shop selling milk or the newsagent selling batteries just wasn’t on. I mean that sort of think leads to anarchy.
But they were different times – and they were a-changing. There’s probably a PhD thesis lurking in there, which analyses the historical failure rate of shops by trade. And yet, there was one shop trade that hung on in its traditional, non-revitalised form longer than most, and that was the ironmonger.
Ironmongers were once one of the staples of the high street, selling everything from pots and pans to nuts and bolts to buckets and spades and pretty well anything made out of metal – yep, they were mongering iron, any old, in many cases. Due to apparent strict observance of demarcation agreements, some quite small and marginal shops stayed in business a lot longer than they should have but if you have the local monopoly on nails and buckets and buckets of nails, your future was assured so long as people wanted these items. But as times changed and plastic started replacing metal, the old order both in stock and staff, started changing or disappearing. Some ironmongers of insufficient plastic faded -or should that be rusted – away. Others, though, managed to adapt, transforming themselves into general hardware stores.
My local ironmonger, located in a long line of terraced shops, typical of a Victorian south London high street, was founded in 1949 replacing God knows what from an even earlier time. Yes, it was founded in 1949 and that’s where it stayed. It stayed there in ‘59, ‘69, ‘79 and ‘89 but somewhere around there the old man, the founder and sole operative, died. But the shop did not die with him. His son took it over and continued exactly as before, though sticker celebrating the half century in ‘99, with the same piles of everything from bins to baskets sitting on randomly assigned areas of shelving, cupboards and floor space, devoid of any apparent pattern or logic in their siting – but the proprietor knew damn well where everything was – and knew his trade too – serving all his customers through a hatch. This guy wasn’t going for any of that trendy, modern, open plan stuff. Ironmongers simply didn’t do that sort of thing! This customer review from 2008 – yes from this century – gets the place and the man:
One of that rare breed, an old fashioned ironmongers where you go up to a counter and ask the proprietor for what you want. He then disappears & rummages about in an alladins cave of musty old wooden drawers, or maybe up a ladder, or even into the deepest bowels of the shop, to return triumphantly with said article.
Old soldiers never die, they only fade away. Somewhere around 2012 the son of the father, finally faded out, complaining about the lack of footfall, and the shop closed down, seemingly forever, another episode of history apparently consigned to the history books.
But wait! Soon after, the shop opened up again and under the same, very English, name too. But no longer was an Englishman running it. This time it was two men, one from Pakistan and one from Eritrea. The place changed. It changed from a relic of Victorian times to something vaguely modern. All the boarded up old places disappeared, all the partitions came down along with the serving hatch that had been there since before Abraham, and probably biblically ordained, and the darkness was driven out. And then the place was painted! Is nothing sacred?
Where the English guy could no longer make it, like the fat “two shops” guy from ‘83, the Pakistani and the Eritrean did! The shop, now bright, open and welcoming, moved from selling the remaining bits of old stock that had probably been there since ‘49 or even before, to a gradually improving and useful range of new stock, while still retaining the old spirit. It was still a local hardware store and still effective and very useful, but, in stark contrast to the morose and taciturn founder, the new guys were open, chatty and engaging – good company in other words. A chatty ironmonger? Is nothing sacred? I suppose not, for I became a frequent customer.
I wandered in one day in 2019 – on one of my many visits that year and I believe in shopping local anyway – and engaged in the usual chat and banter, in between buying a few bits for another DIY project.. The odd customer entered and left and then one odder than most arrived, although he looked more respectable than average, assisted by his late middle aged appearance in manner and attire. Well, he looked respectable but that was as far as he got. He didn’t sound it. The English language was not the man’s forte. He seemed to have only one word of it, which he repeated to both proprietors, as I waited respectfully in the background – I mean I had to allow these guys to make their living. But neither the Pakistani nor the Eritrean could figure out what he wanted to his increasing irritation. Trying to help, I listened to the one word and repeated it back. “Courtland?”, I said slowly. The man looked relieved that at last someone understood him. The trouble was, I didn’t. When I shrug indicated that this was the case, his disgust was palpable. He strode out of the shop, reeking of contempt.
No sooner had he gone, than both the Pakistani and the Eritrean turned to me, forming a sort of angry chorus, saying, in far from perfect English themselves, that they couldn’t stand people who had been in England for maybe 20 years and had learned not a word of the language.
I asked where the man was from.
“I don’t know” replied the Pakistani, “I think he might be Sikh”
“Do you speak Punjabi” I asked
“Yes” came the reply
“Well, why didn’t you speak to him in Punjabi?”
“Why should I speak to him in Punjabi” came the angry demand “why can’t he speak English?”.
My First Experience of a Boiling Melting Pot
1973 saw my move to London. To say that I was adrift was to put it mildly. Everything was new but one thing was certain: I needed a job. Through a contact, I was able to get one, in the best Irish tradition, of digging the roads. I dug London roads with the “Grey Murphy”, long since defunct but the “Green Murphy” is still with us in 2020, just as it was in 1973. Road digging was hard but it paid. I could accept the hard work part of the job but not the rest. What got me most was my fellow diggers. They might have been fellow Irish, but apart from formalities, that’s where our common ground began and ended. Victims of a system called old rural Ireland, most of them had arrived in London hopelessly uneducated and unskilled – and stayed there – in London, uneducated and unskilled. They simply stayed where they arrived, drinking, fighting and sweating their guts out with no horizons beyond the next pay packet or drink. It was impossible to have a conversation with them.
There were a few – very few- exceptions. There was one guy from Cork, about 40 years old, who held the high status position of truck driver, a rare distinction in an exclusively Irish firm where most could not drive. He actually knew something about machines too. Surprised at a knowledge level above that of knowing the location of the nearest bar, I asked him where he’d learnt his stuff. “In the Irish army” came the reply. He was one of the very few I could actually have a chat with.
Perhaps it was through this experience that I could immediately sympathise with the Chinese woman, wife of a fallen high official who had been posted to a very remote part of north west China. Driven out of her head by lack of stimulating company – stranded with the Chinese Murphy – she would cycle once a week 30 miles to the nearest railway station on the off chance of encountering someone with whom she could have a stimulating conversation – in fluent English.
One day I was Corkman’s assistant which meant sitting in a truck full of gravel, which he drove over to Camberwell from Camden. It was a pleasant drive and we chatted about all the usual stuff. I liked this guy. Having dumped the gravel in Camberwell we were just about to drive off when a bus pulled up at a stop, temporarily blocking our exit. We sat there quietly, utterly unconcerned. And then it changed. Suddenly my driver caught sight of the bus conductor, an Asian guy. The easygoing, peaceful man from Cork suddenly turned into a raging bull. “Look at that black bastard” he roared, “see how he deliberately blocked us in”. Seemingly from nowhere, veins stood out in his face like they were about to burst, his face contorted in crimson hatred and fury. The tirade of venom against the “black bastard” continued at maximum volume, so much so I was wondering if the bus conductor was going to be physically attacked for “deliberately blocking” him in. I was stunned. One of the few men in the Grey Murphy with whom I could have a conversation was now exhibiting a level of insane racist stupidity that was scarcely credible.
After less than a minute, the bus moved off, steered by an unseen driver, leaving our path clear once again. My driver’s veins sank back into their previous state of invisibility in his rapidly whitening skin. His voice returned to normal, all mention of “Black Bastards” disappeared and peace reigned again. We drove on like nothing had happened. But I still remember those veins, those veins of rage, hatred and fury almost 50 years later, when that man’s personal melting pot boiled right over.
The Melting Pot Boils Over (r2) © Stephen Kearney September 2020