The I’m all right Jacks

August 5th, 2007 | Letters From America | E-Mail Article | Print Article

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Dearest Jimmy,

It is 1.25 am. I have started this but I don’t know if I’ll finish it. I have left my glasses downstairs. I am not sure that I am writing on the line, but even before I ask, how you are, and tell you how miserable I am; I must tell you about yesterday.

Sweetheart, I promise not to write any more heavy letters after 31st August. But I have to get everything off my chest by then. By the way, I am now wearing my glasses. Can you tell the first word I wrote with them on?

Freedom Is Only A Word

Yes, yesterday, my Toady. I kept going on but I was annoyed simply by watching the news and seeing the few blacks who turned up at the Martin Luther King Anniversary March. When asked the difference between this march and the one in 1963, many explanations were given. To me, it just seems as if it was about the “I am all right Jack Syndrome” all over again.

It is as a result of the 1963 march - and let’s face it - King’s death, that many blacks can be seen on TV anchoring programmes, advertising products, and athletes can seemingly become millionaires overnight pulling their families from sheer poverty and into middle-class neighbourhoods. Their children can now go to school with the best of white America and, so it seems, there is no need to bother any more.

The privileged few can walk into any restaurant and be given the best tables. Politicians point to them and say just how much things have improved for blacks in America in the past thirty years but that of course is a fallacy. Things have not changed much at all. Ordinary stupid people with pale faces still keep others down, the poor in general, but blacks in particular. In America, as in England, money talks and certain people make it virtually impossible for the poor to become rich no matter how hard they may work.

We were talking, Sally and I, about certain neighbourhoods and their suitability as places of residence. She reckons that it is now very difficult for her to find a neighbourhood with people in the same category as herself, and I suppose, she means people of her ilk. I tried to explain to her that part of the reason why Western style democracies like England and America have ghetto problems is because as soon as some white families see a black family move into an area, they sell their homes and move out. More often than not the black family is just as cultured (yes cultured) as anybody else in the neighbourhood and want only the best for their offsprings too. They have moved to a quieter neighbourhood not because they want to identify with white people but because they want better quality services and infrastructures.

I have lived in many areas in England. Most of my neighbours have been white but I did not particularly like living next to them because I am house-proud, very fastidious, and quite often they were not. In fact, the best property my husband and I bought was from a white family where the mother was an ex-hospital matron. Her son was a doctor. Her daughter taught at a school where Princess Margaret’s friends were her pupils, she said. The house was so filthy that when they offered me a seat on which their mangy dog had pride of place, I was too shocked to ask them to ask the dog to move. Of course, I was allergic to dog hairs at the time, but the house was a great buy.

We were the only black family on the road. The house was a beauty but it had not been painted since the turn of the century. It was then July 1963. We got it dirt-cheap. The owners were immigrating to Australia and we were able to get a loan from Barclays Bank to make a cash purchase. Before we moved in (and we were in no hurry to do so because we already had a house in St Stephens Road, Bow), my husband started clearing the grounds while the builders started renovating the house itself. It had to be ready for the birth of our first child. Bow was not the kind of district that I wanted my baby to grow up in. Our son was due on 27th September, but it was a good enough starting point for our new family.

For once, our neighbours did not begin to leave when we moved in. Most of them had lived in the area for thirty-odd years or more and almost without exception each one of them came up to my husband and told him that in all the years they had lived in the neighbourhood they had never seen anyone painting the house or the garden being cleared. When all the painting work had been done, and I arrived to put my curtains up, the only reaction we got was people taking down their net curtains overnight and washing them to put back the following morning. Me? I did not have that problem. I always had two sets of the best French Voile or Tergal curtains and my windows always looked the best on our road, wherever we lived.

We had had no problem with the purchase. We answered an ad in a local newspaper and the deal was a private one with no Estate Agents involved. No other property on that road or in the immediate vicinity was sold to another black family. We remained the only ones there until 1966 when my husband went back to Jamaica and we sold to an Asian businessman. We made no bosom friends. We did not want any friends but we were respected by everyone. It is a long way to go to get to the point I want to make, but the fact that people have the same colour does not mean that they share the same character, values, expectations, or are even at the same stages of development.

Estate agents and property developers have a lot to answer for. They are the ones often directly responsible for creating ghettoes and for making the lives of working class people miserable. Some upstanding black couple used to a high standard of living, or brought up to expect the best that life has to offer, buy a property and move in with their children. Some tear-away family move in next door. They play their music as if they are having a party every day. More often than not this new family do not work but the hard-working family cannot sleep at nights for the noise. They along with the other neighbours are now under siege. Their lives have become a living nightmare.

Some people have even had nervous breakdowns because of it. Then to make matters worse, they discover that they cannot sell their property because it’s now worth less than they paid for it. They had paid over the top just to get on the property ladder in the first place. Now only other ethnic minority families will buy and the proceeds will not purchase a house in a better neighbourhood. So, they have to stay put. They then watch their children grow up alongside people they would not have lived amongst in their own country. Their children grow up to be no better than the others because everything is stacked up against them all in the postcode lottery of where they live. I tried to explain the situation to Sally. I suppose she got my drift. At least, I hope she did.

Now my other source of anger was a debate between Jessie Jackson, some man called David Horowitz, and a few others. They were talking about the progress made since 1963. Among other things, this Horowitz’s attitude infuriated me. He began to moralise about unmarried black women having babies without fathers and how kids of fifteen are committing murders and not getting long enough sentences. The striking thing was he kept saying that African-Americans committed 50% of murders. African-Americans did this or African-Americans caused that.

If I was on that panel, the first question I would ask without shouting at him is what nationality he is - and he would have to state that quite clearly! As far as the American people are concerned, anyone born in the United States of parents born in or becoming a naturalised citizen of these ‘ere United States is an American citizen. It is not possible to be an African and an American, nor indeed a Korean and an American, or an Arab and an American. Once an American by birth or by choice always an American.

It is obvious that this Horowitz fellow does not originate from these ‘ere shores but he and people like him refer to themselves as All-American. Some blacks can trace their fore-parents back hundreds of years in America. They did not choose to come to these shores, they were brought here and America was built on their blood, sweat and tears. Some forty million (40,000,000) of our people were sacrificed in the making of America.

Most black Americans cannot identify with Africa. They have never been there and do not want to go. Africans would not want them there anyway because their children still behave like children but the West creates monsters of the people for whom they no longer have any use. Kids are fed all sorts of drugs by all sorts of people who should know better and then when these kids turn to violence and crime without any consciousness at all about what they’re doing silly politicians ring their hands in anguish and blame everyone but themselves.

Until the powers that be wake up to the fact that blacks are still disadvantaged by the experience and burden of slavery then things will never really get any better. Slave women were only there for breeding to add to the inventory (a new word for me). The more kids she had the richer the slave-master. Who the hell has ever heard of slaves getting married?

We have indeed come a long way in a short time and given the chance we could even catch up. In Africa, although men have many wives, they do get married. Children are brought up in a loving family, they look out for one another, and the wives are usually quite friendly with each other too. In their new world, the children of slaves knew a different reality. They could not adopt to polygamy and of course things being what they are men found it easy to believe that their sole purpose in life was to multiply and replenish the earth. That they could only be REAL men by the fathering of children.

So, you see, blacks are still reeling from the impact and setbacks caused to them by slavery but most whites do not make it any easier. Politicians should create a climate where all Americans can realise their full potential and be allowed to improve their stake in life. Start programmes of rejuvenation in the so-called ghetto areas. Involve the young in decisions that affect their lives. Start renovating undesirable buildings and clean up the main streets. Open the churches and bring back the old hymn books and the old communal-style teachings. Grand-mamma and grand-daddy can join in the singing with the grand and great grand children and church can once again be fun.

Changes are good but some things should never change. Most Americans speak only English but in the hymns dating back hundreds of years there is a language that is indisputably one that binds; a language that kept our forefathers alive in adversity; a language that helped them to survive against all odds. One cannot build a future if one destroys the past. If all that has kept us together is wiped out then we will never know who we really are let alone who we were. The church is important, religion is important; it is the only thing that seems to keep people together.

Jimmy, I am preaching again, but do you remember when nosey Parkers were listening to us chatting in those far off days and how they followed everything when I sang love songs but once I started singing hymns only us could converse? That is what I am trying to point out. People have deliberately gone through and destroyed the things that are important to creating a stable society in certain communities and because of that we have the mess our children and adults are in today.

We need to take matters into our own hands, chuck out the guns, and the drugs and drug dealers and take charge of our own children by whatever means necessary. Education, education, education is the key, and I am in no way a believer in sparing the rod and spoiling the child. A good spanking now and then from my mother when I needed it never did me no harm.

Sorry, Jimmy, you must be tired. I am going to give you a break because it is now four-0-eight (and don’t you dare say it does not rhyme). Someone should give me a little Oxford Dictionary. Should be a new paragraph, but what the hell? You know, a ninety-four year old woman retained so much information about the passage of her life that after she had said it all she promptly fell asleep sitting in her chair. It took several people to wake her and we could only keep her awake a few seconds at a time before she finally passed away, and this is no “Fairy Tale.”

Bye, my best buddy, I will see you in my dreams.
Bursting with gratitude and all the love in the world.
Here, the shape of it.

My Heart