Growing Up in A War Zone
By Robert Drake

 

Note:  This story describes growing up in the midst of racial conflict in the industrial Midwest.  It was not a “war zone” in the truest sense.  I mean no disrespect to those survivors of conflict such as happens between national armies at war with each other. 

 

Between the ages of 13 and 18 I was at war.  From 4th grade through my senior year of high school I endured and participated in racial conflict without surcease, but for some few weeks each summer. 

 

I was raised in Northern Indiana between the industrial cities of Chicago, Indianapolis and Detroit in a smaller industrial town known for its recreational vehicles trailer factories, musical instruments and Miles Laboratories (Speedy AlkaSeltzer).  I say I was at war because that is what it felt like and that is what it looks like from the vantage point of 30 years gone, as I recall the years of 1965 into the summer of 72.  It was hell.

 

Pierre Moran Jr. High on the south side of Elkhart, “south of the tracks” was fed by several elementary schools below the town’s Mason-Dixon line - the rail-road tracks.  The demarcation was dramatic. Everyone in the town of 42,000 souls knew what it meant to say that you lived “on the south side.  A passage from the north meant going over or under the tracks and down a perceived, and sometimes actual, gauntlet through “black” neighborhoods.  Once you got far enough south you came to safe ground (unless you were on the battleground of an elementary or middle school). The most southern area was peopled by lower-middle-class whites in tract houses bordered by open fields.  The streets like the one I grew up on, Markle Street, were often unpaved dirt or gravel. The residents were just above poor and were working class proud.  The blacks were poorer. 
We did not think they were proud.  You might say that that is the subject of and force behind this monograph.  The blacks (we frequently called them niggers – and many there still do), were proud, of course.  As a dominant local population, we, the whites, couldn’t and wouldn’t recognize that pride.  We saw slums wherever we saw blacks.  The entire town lived in fear of “blacks moving into the neighborhood.”  Why?  Because “Blacks have no self-respect.”  It was irrelevant that most “Black” houses were neat in appearance from the street.  This is not what we saw.  If a home had blacks in it, it was, by definition, slum. 

 

The enrollment of Pierre Moran Jr. High, grades 7, 8 and 9 must have been about 5000.  My dominant memory of school time there, outside English class, was of conflict.  The black and white races collided there every day for 7 1/2 hours.  It was unrelenting.  One learned NEVER to enter a bathroom alone anywhere in the school.  The number of times I was accosted, slugged or smacked having made this mistake to handle nature’s call is simply too great to count. Sometimes, you just had to go, and damn the consequences.  It was easier, of course, to go in force to the John between classes.  You expected problems and you went in with no fewer than two friends to watch your back – literally.  If you had to go during class you were probably going to get the s--t kicked out of you.  I guess it is no wonder I bit my fingernails.

 

There were some rules about going to the bathroom.  First, of course, never go alone.  Never go during class-time – it was too quiet and for some reason, some people didn’t need to go to class.  Sometimes you just had to go. Never wear a new hat, gloves or sweater in.  They would be taken from you by too many guys to fight and also hold onto your merchandise.  It is humiliating to lose your new Christmas gloves to just one or two too many guys to fight.  Humiliating. Shaming. And that was, of course, the point.

 

A population embittered and shamed at every level of its public existence will not suffer a member of the dominating race or group to go without a taste of its own medicine when it can get away with it.  Remember, this was the 60s. “Black Power!” was a real battle cry.  Some say that it is untrue that “hurt people hurt people.”  They, I say, delude themselves.  They are blind.  The victim will eventually find a way to victimize or retaliate.  It is in the nature of the human animal to “make him pay” if possible, and to lash out at the “other” that is created in the process of domination, subjugation, impoverishment and hegemonic structural violence.  That is not to say this urge is always overpowering.  Gandhi and King overcame it as did so many of their followers.  Neither do I claim that one gains less by fighting back than by overcoming the demons of fear and shame and revenge and nurturing an inner garden of dignity and self-restraint.  Let’s face it - often we don’t and sometimes we can’t, as individuals, always rise above the anger generated by suffering chronic disrespect.

 

Let me make one thing perfectly clear – If I had been a black teenage young man in Elkhart, Indiana, USA, in the latter 1960s and early 1970s I would have been militant.  How much abuse can one take?  How many years can you be told everywhere and by everyone that you and your kind are little better than dirt, not as valuable as a white man’s navel lint and barely removed from apes, and not fight back – rail against the machine?  The alternative is, for most not as enlightened as MLK, to self-devalue, to internalize the white man’s valuing of one’s self.  This is how the Native Americans were (and to a significant degree, remain) colonized.  They internalized the messages and carried on the colonization by the white race of their inner landscape.

 

Yes – if it had been me in that car of blacks down by the railroad depot on that misty May Monday night in 1968 in Elkhart, when the downtown erupted, I damned well would have found a way to fight back and stake a claim to my dignity. “Who we gonna kill?  Niggers!”  That’s what I and a crowd of a hundred ignorant white youth screamed and chanted that night.  We made our way up one side and down the other side of Main Street between the mile between the tracks and the Elkhart River.  We ripped out parking meters, smashed store windows and threw fist-sized rocks at the police, who, as I recollect, arrested no-one.  Do you know what tipped us over the edge?  It was five black men (one as big as a refrigerator) who had the unmitigated audacity to take a stand for their own dignity.  I will never forget the courage and force of spirit those men showed when they got out of their car on “our side” of the tracks (I was on the white and right side at the moment) and said to the foaming crowd: “Start with me!”  Courage.  Strength.  The reaction of the crowd to this imposing stand was fear and violence turned anywhere but towards this dangerous dignity.

 

The cowardly crowd knew that unless we attacked in unison, with overwhelming numbers and tire irons - not just brandished, but striking, some of us would be badly hurt.  As we were mostly cowards and young and had no trust in each other, we retreated and took our shame and outrage out on Main Street.  We made sure our message had the volume and intensity to reach into the nether-land just past the tracks.  It did.

 

Yes, I would have been a militant black. Whether or not I would have had that strength I shall never know.  I would like to think I would have.

 

School was a war zone.  There was no real demilitarized zone.  The enemy was always armed and always ready to fight.  An Afro comb with a quarter inch steel spine and a dozen sharp four inch tines can do a lot of damage to a face.  The tines will pierce a thick winter coat when sharpened.  Box cutting knives are sharp, flat, and easily hidden.  They use replaceable razor blades.  Carpet knives were common kit.  Guns were not generally carried in those days, except in car trunks. Handguns were very unusual.  It was mostly whites who carried switch-blades for some reason. They were more expensive weapons.

 

The Refrigerator standing that night boldly outside the old Cadillac almost took a round from a 22 rifle.  Every white boy on the south side had a 22.  I remember the guy who got his rifle out of his 64 Chevy trunk and cocked it, but…he wasn’t a killer.  He was just a stupid kid victimized by his own dominant culture and absolutely bereft of understanding of his place in the machinery of ignorance.  He didn’t have the courage; or he had too much heart, to pull the trigger.  We all lucked out.  The rifle went into the back seat.  The cars were parked and the Outrage got under way more safely.

 

I know what it is like to be slapped in the face and taunted – dared to strike back.  It is humiliating beyond explication.  “Am I not a man?  Am I not a warrior?  Am I a sissy? My father would be ashamed of me!  I should strike back!”  But I am stunned and shattered.  I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to hurt this boy.  I am shocked at his cruelty and audacity.  In his eyes, defying me to prove that I am the better man, I see a lake of shame behind an opalescent lens of defiance.  “He can’t help doing this!  He hates me for being part of the race that taught him to hate himself.”  In a flashing moment I see this, but it doesn’t diminish my shame.  It makes it worse.  This man-boy, in the very doorway to the classroom - English – where I had, ironically, always felt safest, tries to prove to himself that the biggest of the white boys is less a man than he; less than he.  What ever happened to him?

 

A slap in the face – such a simple maneuver – different from a punch, you know; less physically damaging, is a message:  “You are weak.  I defy you.  You are nothing. I exist.”  There are so many ways to slap a person or a group.  Deny access to University – that will do it.  Sell your home and move to another part of town when an untouchable moves in down the street.  Hire them only for service positions. Belong to a club where they are disbarred.  Put a uranium mine in and dump the tailings on their reservation.  Pay them big money to beat each others’ brains out on the football field, basketball court or boxing ring but don’t let one date your daughter.  Dis-respect.  A slap in the face.

 

Disrespect.  Don’t respect.  Deny respect. Deny that this human being has dignity.  Get righteous about it. You with the lion’s share of the plunder, you, born on first, second, or third-base in life, complain that “they” are the cause of your suffering.  Call them names.  They deserve it!  Niggers.  Filthy Indians.  Lazy f...king Mexicans.  Dirty Jews.  Wops, Slants, Nips, Kikes, Faggots, Pigs, Muslims, Rag-Heads, Liberals.  It is all the same mechanism. It is all the same sickness.

 

We hide in our fear behind epithets of disrespect and hatred.  We propagate it with every sexist, racist, stupid joke we listen to passively, as we support the framework of official disrespect and institutionalized violence it thrives in.

 

Gym class was a nightmare.  Actually, anything taking place in the gym, including assemblies and school games was nightmarish.  The moment I exited the previous class doorway and headed toward the gym my stomach went into knots, my blood pressure skyrocketed and I prepared for a fight, at best; at worst, abject humiliation.  The races congregated and massed for strength and safety.  The blacks knew what they could get away with – how much violence.  In the 60s in school, they were the identified aggressors.  Outside school they were the victims.  Inside, it seemed to most whites, they could get away with almost anything.  It took almost a court order to get someone expelled.  They knew it.  We all “knew” it.

 

I was fortunate.  I took full advantage of the open fields around my home.  I spent hours, when I wasn’t at the Y, roaming the high grasses and sprinkled copses of trees with my BB Gun or bow and arrow. I shot birds off the wire, dug underground forts, built tree-houses, rambled, and mused alone until light abandoned my evening adventures and I was forced inside.  Every day at school was the same.  One approached with care, planned the safest path to first period, and then moved through the day with stealth and affected strength.  A lapse of either meant trouble.  Conflict was inevitable – blows were to be avoided if possible.  In elementary school scuffles inevitably ruined clothes through blood, dirt or tear.  The damage escalated with each year’s school progression.

 

There were exceptional champions on both sides.  Our side had Larry B.  Larry was a champion gymnast, strong boxer, smooth of tongue, smart and fearless.  Larry never, to my knowledge, started a fight.  He was targeted because he was good hearted and a strong foe – the kind one wants to best and then crow about. No-one ever got to crow over beating Larry.  It happens that Larry’s Dad was a great mentor of mine.  He proved, as did his son, that it was possible to be tough, kind and possessed of integrity.  Chuck, who ran the physical department at the Y, taught me to stay in shape, work hard, act young, and keep my stomach taught. Larry is a prominent local physician now.  Chuck – wherever you are, thank you.

 

The YMCA, for all the activity and camaraderie it afforded, was also rife with racial conflict. I remember being slugged in the solar plexus and dared to fight.  There was one guy who hung out begging quarters – Glenn:  “Hi, I’m Glenn, I’m your fren, you gotta quarter to len?”  Then he would drop the quarter on the floor and try to coerce you into picking it up for him.  If you didn’t:  a punch in the stomach.  He was big compared to me in those days.  Disrespect.  Respect.  Heads one, tails the other.  He desperately trying to get respect through the white boys’ genuflection – I desperately trying to save face by not succumbing to his coercion. 

 

My problem was that I generally could not bring myself to fight, and risk hurting another to save my own skin.  Put someone else at risk – “dis” a friend, gang up on a single guy, that provoked my ire and violent reaction every time.  Here I lost control a bit too easily.

 

Cartier J. was mixed blood.  That young man was caught right in the f---king middle.  One friend of mine (we became close friends after a good fight) used to call Cartier “Mellow Yellow.”  This deserves a digression:  Bob and I became friends after coming to blows in Mr. Stuckey’s 9th grade science class. Mr. Stuckey, who was himself 6’4” at least, actually took a swing at me when Bob and I began fighting in class.  I don’t know why he chose to swing at me. I ducked and he hit Bob.  The fight stopped but we took it up again, naturally, in the gym after lunch.  We gained respect for each other and became good friends. 

 

My God, what Cartier endured.  Yet he was condemned by us for having an “attitude.”  I should think so.  Cartier was outside both camps though he tried hard to identify, through his militancy, with his black blood.  What did this do to his inner ecology?  I can only imagine what it must have been like to try to expunge his white half; neither half of himself being accepted by his black friends.  Cartier lost his eyesight later in life.  I spoke with him at our 30th high school reunion.  He grew into a kind and good man.

 

The Sophomore Division was a school devoted to 10th graders.  The Senior High School in town – EHS, held 11th and 12the grades.  Five Jr. High Schools fed the sophomore school.  It was downtown across the street from the old Y.  Marble floors and stairs, cavernous rooms, creaky wood floors. I remember the day Danny W. lost it on these wide cold stairs.  Danny had had polio.  He walked hitching and halting, arms crooked and curled at his chest – hands hooked.  Danny did the weather every morning on the PA system.  Danny was a raving racist in those days.  He hated blacks.  I suspect he needed to feel better than someone – God knows he got more than his own share of cruel abuse.  One day Danny was making his way painfully down the broad main marble stairs when he lost his balance, tumbled down a full flight with books and papers scattered.  He didn’t have to fall.  When he started to fall one of the archons of Black Strength and militancy, Dennis S. kindly stooped and made an effort to keep Danny from falling.  Danny would have nothing of it.  “Get your hands off me you black bastard!”  Dennis simply let go – Danny tumbled down the stairs.  Respect.  Disrespect.  Slap in the face.  Reprisal.

 

It was in my sophomore year when Miss Pitfido, my beautiful English teacher, gave me The Confessions of Nat Turner to read.  What was it she saw in me?  This was a watershed in my interior development of conscious consideration of the Black American reality.  I still had two more years of participation in racial conflict.

 

Desperation.  Exasperation, grief.  My sister two years younger had been surrounded and beaten after school by 12 black girls - all her seniors.  She was just too proud. She had to be knocked down. Respect.  Disrespect.  You flip the coin.  My parents were beside themselves.  To their way of thinking the school would do nothing.  Who would?

 

By my junior year I had studied Judo, Jui Jitsu, a little boxing and a karate style called Okinawan Shoryn Riu. I had a bit of a reputation for knowing how to handle myself and for having a temper.  I was in fair shape – a swimmer, rider, and a mediocre gymnast.  One home football Friday brought out my crazy, uncontrolled anger. This was the night I really got my reputation.  It was half-time against Mishawaka – the bigger “city” west of Elkhart but not as big as South Bend.  These “blacks” came over to our side “looking” for trouble.  Maybe they were just stretching their legs.  One of my friends among the “Bleacher Creatures” called them the “N” word.  They turned and came back angry.  I knew the little guy who said it had no way of defending himself, so when they demanded to know who had yelled the expletive, I said, without hesitation, “I did.”  I would never by that time have said such a thing in reality, but they didn’t know that.  That wasn’t the point.  I remember what followed with crystal clarity.  The guy in the center reached into his pocket for his knife.  I told him calmly that if he produced a knife I would bury it in him.  I was high on adrenaline and egoic fatuation. I had been working out regularly at the dojo.  I can still see the moving image in my minds eye as I imagined the sequence of movements to follow:   I would break this guy’s back over the steel railing to my right.  My Sensei would have been thoroughly disgusted and ashamed of me just for putting myself into that situation.

 

I wonder if my friends saw the damage I was about to wreak?  They tackled me – cops were probably coming.  Six of them managed to push me down to my seat.  I rose again with them hanging of me like loose luggage.  They told me after that it took 12 guys to bring me down. The Mishawaka guys skated.  After that night I became one of the EHS Great White Hopes.  I hated this role.  I was ashamed of myself but also felt a new “respect” awe, fear from others.  After this I was always in front when the big school riots erupted.

 

Eleventh grade, 1970-1971 was probably the worst of all high school.  Fights broke out regularly.  I tried to stay as stoned as possible though I succeeded better at this in my Senior year.  Our Junior year, though, the conflict was so chronic and dangerous that police were posted throughout the school. I mean, a lot of police!  Every intersecting hallway in this school of nearly 3000 students sported a blue uniform, badge and gun.  People were dying by the score every day in Vietnam this year.  In Elkhart, we “students” were fighting each other.

 

I’m not certain what precipitated the “Big Riot.”  As I recall, it was alleged a white girl was accosted at “The Dunes,” a park on the beach at Lake Michigan.  The s--t hit the fan the next morning.  People came to school loaded for bear.  They carried their motorcycle helmets into school to be worn in the fighting, along with knives, tire irons, pipes – anything that could be brought in under a coat.  By 10 AM the school exploded.  It started near the huge dining hall.  I remember being shoved to the front of the white mob.  “Get up there, Drake!”  Again, Dennis S. and me facing off.  I hit him once as the two armies collided.  I don’t remember being hit at all.  The crowd surged forward into the open space in front of the cafeteria.  There it somehow shifted when dozens of whites took up 8 foot dining tables and rushed the blacks.  With these running battering shields we ran every black but one through the school, out the front doors, and another 500 yards until they were over the bridge.  What a “victory”!

 

Billie B. was the one black who was not run out of the school.  Billie was a delightful human being who seemed to be able to straddle the two cultures by virtue of her love for all, her genuine respect for the attributes of both worlds, and her intelligence.  Billie was involved in school plays, war politics, art, music, and was an excellent student.  When the alarm first sounded, I saw Billie. Rather, I heard her, first.  As I ran down the hallway in the English Department I heard her sobbing. I slowed briefly in front of the classroom that was empty but for her.  She sat alone with her head down weeping. She was caught squarely between two worlds in one reality of hatred, fear and prejudice.  I ran on to join my brothers in arms against my black brothers in arms.  I would give anything to talk to Billie now about that day.  31 years later, with a microphone at a class reunion, I publicly apologized to others for my part in that day’s infamy, and for too many other infamous school days.  Billie – I am SO sorry.

 

Reggie U., Mike H., Leibo, Dennis S., so many other good black young men turned militant warriors to hold their own respect.  Reggie U. was known to be one of the “worst.”  I use the parlance that was current at the time.  Reggie fought regularly, though I remember getting physical with him only once.  Most of our fights were with words and eyes, the body language of defiance, hatred and fear.  I also sat next to him in physics class.  I couldn’t hold a candle to his understanding of the subject.  I still remember feeling dense and inadequate next to him and ashamed that a black guy was smarter than me.  “They” weren’t supposed to be smart – especially not the militant ones.  I mean, what genes gave them intelligence?  This is precisely the way we thought then and the way so many there still think.  Respect?  Forget it.  The funny thing was, I did respect Reggie.  I did respect Mike H.

 

Mike H. and I got into it too many times to chronicle.  Thirty years after high school I apologized directly to Mike – now The Reverend Mike H.  He had a thriving congregation when he died just a few months ago, now.  Mike was a man of peace.  He worked hard through his adult life to propagate love and understanding.  This is the guy who hated all whites so!  The guy who wanted destruction and violence!  Obviously something was off about my, our, understanding of him.  We were wrong about Mike as we were wrong about the race of black, struggling to gain purchase on the lower-most steps of the American Dream.  They just wanted their share of respect.  As I look back over the 60s and 70s I am astonished that there was as little national violence as there was.  I don’t believe I would have been so pacific had I been on the other side of the fence.  And if I had been born black, and had fought and railed against the oppressor, would I have been shown to be the lesser kind of man for it?  I fear that I would have.

 

Respect: the singular quality missing in any escalating conflict.  Something happens within the psyche of a human being when he feels disrespected that reverberates to his soul.  The moment a man senses disrespect a powerful chain reaction ensues. First, outrage.  The outrage masks fear and shame.  The personality interprets disrespect, personal or official, as a red flag of danger.  The danger is that I might not be a viable, valuable entity.  By extension, I could lose support of my tribe – that means a real risk to my physical survival.  Disrespect is translated to mean danger to survival.  Shame is a motivating engine that engages anger, a mask, which causes action and forces from the other the concession, at swords point or barrel of a gun, that I am respected.  I am worthy of respect.  I deserve to live.  I matter.

 

In conflict, until respect is shown by the opposing side, no de-escalation can be made without force.  Without respect there can be no trust.  How myriad are the ways that we fail to show respect throughout each day, and in the subtlest of ways, create disharmony, fear, unease?

 

The human being is the strangest of animals.  It takes insult more deeply and frequently than any other.  Don’t you think?  Another animal will fight when assaulted, or at a threat to survival, i.e., territory, food source, family, a body.  People will kill or fight if they feel slighted or momentarily disrespected.  Why?  The most reasonable explanation is they feel threatened.  Lack of respect is somehow intrinsically related to survival.  If disrespect is so causal to violence and conflict in the moment, it must be immeasurably more so when protracted through generations, and institutionalized as structural violence.