Nobody Thinking 'bout You, Miss Ann

INT. LAIR - FULL SHOT - NIGHT:
Kong, in side angle, begins to pick her clothes off, as a monkey might pick a
rag doll to pieces.

-from the screenplay, "Kong", 1933,
by James Ashmore Creelman and Ruth Rose


Yep. It happened to me in St. Clair Shores. I know a lot of stories about Black men round these parts begin with those very same words, but for some reason I didn't think that day that one of those stories would be one of mine.

I didn't think I would be frightening the shite out of some white woman in the streets of St. Clair Shores. I didn't think I would be subjected to the full metal hysteria of the frightened white woman of southern lore, of Emmett Till fame, and of the quaint Dixie remedy of lynching. A wild eyes, shrieking, mouth wide open milk white woman, hands pressed to her breasts as if to protect her scrawny mammary glands, bringing everyone around her to a halt to stare at she and me in shock, followed quickly by anger and fear, and only far too much later, shame.

In the moment after shock, but before shame, when I knew the white people all around me and this shrieking woman would soon be sending a flood of anger and fear cascading over me, I snapped at her:

"For God's sake, shut up and behave like you have good sense!"

I guess I must have just felt the utter absurdity of it so keenly, that my usual compassion for an Anglo unwittingly caught up in the sheer, awkward awkward, inappropriateness of foolish Anglo obssession with race desserted me.3828509682?profile=original

I, like you, like the Iraqis, the Vietnamese, the Puerto Ricans, the Iranians, the Koreans, the Mexicans, the Aboriginal peoples, the Cubans, the Vietnamese, and just about every other group on earth who've been subjected to Anglo hysteria, violence, intrusion, abuse, alacrity, colonialism, lynching, castration, contumely, presumption, obnoxiousness, unfair taxation, and invasion followed by enslavement followed by conversion to the false version of the African Christ they claim to worship, to emancipation only to be condemned to neo colonialism and wage slavery, madness, and poverty and suffering in the shadow of their continued imposition, I like you, usually feel and offer up in public as a mostly undeserved gift (wasn't it the great American writer, James Baldwin, who said that either you learn to feel tolerance and compassion for the Anglo people's obsessions or you'll find you shall literally be moved by their causal abuse to murder them in the streets?); a gift to the very white people who afflict us...tolerance in the face of their predictable hysterics.
But I must have felt the utter absurdity of this white woman standing in the middle of the sidewalk on Mack/Little Mack, near the corner of 9 Mile near the "Roy O'Brien" car dealership, first major car dealer in the Detroit area, my grandfather had always said, to break the unwritten rule of segregation and sell brand new cars to Black citizens at the height of Jim Crow; there, in this part of St. Clair Shores where my grandfather had said Black men could find if not a friend in Roy O'Brien, at least a merchant willing to allow a Black customer to walk in and look at the merchandise and fork over greenbacks to pay for something without shrieking in fear!

Stay on the right track
To 9 mile and Mack...to get the best deal in town
'Cause Roy O'Brien, has the best deal around!

"Act like a grown woman!"
I snapped at her, and she clapped her mouth shut (a mouth which been well on its way to becoming a gaping maw, a black hole of hysteria and fear), and she stared at me silently.
  
"Are you okay?" an old man in a blindingly yellow sweater hissed at her, his eyes narrowing as glared at me. "He just frightened me, that's all" ("He" being "Me" in this locution, of course).
 
The old man gave one firm nod of his head, grunted, as if the whole thing made perfect semse ti him at least, and then moved on past us., taking most of the crowd of stunned white citizens with him, although two or three made a point of standing around continuing to watch us--just in case.

"You came from around that corner awful fast,"
she chided me. "Like...Like..."

"Like a Black man?"
I asked.

"Why say that? I didn't SAY that. Why do you people always have to play the race card?"

"Why do you people keep talking about freaking CARDS and DICE and such foolishness whenever we make you confront your psychosis about race, as if the historical experience of being kidnapped and murdered by you, and forced to do slave labor and then to live under a hundred years of violence and oppression is a game of bid whist, or of Yahtzee??"

She opened her mouth again, as if to say something, but just let it shut, with a click of teeth, and a put upon sort of sigh.

She stuck out her hand.

"I'm Miss Lisa."

What was I supposed to do? I shook her hand. That chased away the rest of the curious, suspicious, and paranoid white crowd, anyway.

"I'm Professor Waller."

"You're a Professor?"

"Amazing, huh?"

"See, there you go!"

"Yahtzee."

"You are obnoxious, Professor."

"That's what my students tell me."

"They are right."

"And you, Miss Ann, are loud."

"My name is Miss Lisa."

"Sorry."

"You see, you startled me."

"I must have REALLY startled you."

"Well, not that much."

"You were about to burst into greasy flame."

She laughed at this. No lie.

"Well, you are a big man."

"Yahdda, yahdda."

"See? Obnoxious."

"Loud."

"Well, have a good day."

And she was off on her way, her hair still just a bit straight up atop her head do to the static electricity she'd generated with her shrieking scream.

How had I gotten so taken off guard by this most common of American encounters: fear of rape by a big, Black man?

Let's just say a fellow gets lulled by having been treated well. He gets to thinking maybe he's got it coming, even--being treated well, I mean. Or maybe I just was too focused on my own thoughts that day, a few days back.


I had driven by the St. Clair Shores, home of my ex girlfriend's mother. Her mother had died a couple of months ago--an unexpected sickness, and I had missed the funeral. I didn't think it would hurt so much to have missed Mother Giovannucci's funeral, but later on it did--it hurt like a hot coal in my stomach. It made me feel as if something between her mother and me were unresolved. I don't think i was even fully aware of just how much I was hurt by her passing and by my missing the chance to grieve with the family, until that day I drove by the house, to take a look.

There were a lot of memories for me in that house. The Giovannuccis are an Italian American family, and a family that had accepted me because of my relationship with their younger child. Mother Giovannucci was like my mother in many ways, and I loved her. I had spend some time with her in Miami, when her daughter had been undergoing surgery and felt keenly the sameness of my relationship with her to my relationship with my own mother. Both mothers had been very elegant women in their youths, both had been treated like queens by their deceased husbands (I often tell my own mother that I sometimes wish I could dig up my father and slap him for having spoiled her to the point where she doesn't even know how to change a vacuum cleaner bag), and both women were in their late sixties/early seventies at the time, with apparently an utter faith in the idea that they could trust and depend on ME.

I 'hung out' with Mrs. Giovannucci, in Miami, doing some shopping, eating , and driving around. I remember I took her by a "K Mart" and while she discussed purchasing something or other with a pimply faced, white sales 'consultant' I dribbled a basketball in the aisle--hanging out with Mother Giovannucci would now and then bring out the little boy in me, for some reason. The sales 'consultant' stared at me--a big Black man with a petit, patrician looking Italian American matron, dribbling a basketball behind her as she questioned him sharply about the quality of his merchandise.

At one point she reached out and snatched the basketbell from me and held onto it so she could hear him. He answered her question, then she handed it back to me, and I continued dribbling. This drove him to such distraction that he stared at me. Is something wrong, she demanded. No, no, he said, looking vaguely resentful.

Later, at my and her daughter's apartment in Coral Gables, Mrs. Giovannucci was settling down to sleep, and she tested an inflatable bed that had been stored at the apartment for guests. She lay down on it, in her pajamas, rolling on her back with her knees drawn up to her chest like a cat, testing it. I suddenly felt a flood of tenderness for her, for the sheer vulnerability of the whole thing--that I was responsible for this short time, for taking care of her, and she trusted me utterly to do so.

Never, not once, did I ever feel anything but love and caring from the Giovannucci family, so much so that I came to take that love for granted, came to see St. Clair Shores as my own city, in many ways.

But sitting in the car looking at the now empty house it hit me that I had lost a mother.

The shrieking woman made me realize I had also, in some small way, lost a city.

"Can I say again that I'm sorry?"

The shrieking woman had come back, because I was still standing there, lost in thought, unable to move on from that spot, that moment.

"Miss Ann, ain't nobody thinking about you."

She pursed her lips. "That's not my name."

"Miss Lisa, ain't nobody concerned with with you."

"I just apologized to you again. Is there anything else you want to say?"

I thought about it.

"Yeah. Yahtzee."

She walked on, around the corner, and was gone.

I miss Mother Giovannucci so much I could cry.

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