Today’s Short Story

Point of Reference

Doc and Mayme used to visit every September. They would fly in to Albuquerque from St. Albans in Queens, NY on their way to Dick and Mattie Gibson’s annual Jazz party in Colorado Springs. This was a big deal, with huge stars like Dizzy Gillespie, Clark Terry, Ray Brown and other Jazz legends attending. You couldn't just show up, you had to be invited. Doc and Mayme would stop over to visit their grandchildren, my stepsons, Hashim and Waleed. For Mayme, a proper woman for whom and proper decorum was everything, visiting one’s progeny was just good manners. I had proposed to Waleed and Hashim’s mother at the age of twenty-five and both Mayme and Doc took me for a walk the day before we got married to let me know what the skinny was.

“You know, we won't be sending our daughter any more money after you’re married,” Mayme said on our walk. This was a surprise to me. I didn't know Cynthia was getting money from her parents. There were a lot of things I didn't know about Cynthia.

“That’s OK,” I said, “I'm marrying her for her looks.” Mayme raised a well coiffed eyebrow. She never did have a sense of humor.

Doc was more direct. They had lost his luggage somewhere between La Guardia and the Albuquerque Sunport and the only thing he had to wear was a white, Panama suit. We went walking through my less than middle class neighborhood, this tall lean, black man who looked like a billboard for Cuban cigars and his portly, Mexican soon-to-be-son-in-law. When we got to the end of the block, he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “If you ever raise a hand to my daughter, I'll kill you.” And then he grinned maliciously. I thought it best not to joke with him and just nodded. “OK then. Let’s go eat!” he said with new enthusiasm.

Doc and Mayme loved their family from a distance. The day to day responsibility of raising kids had long ago been left to Cynthia. Their other daughter, Alethea, had no kids and didn't care to have any. After so many years of working and raising two daughters, Doc and Mayme moved on to live their golden years. They were on top of the world. He was a well-respected physician in New York and she the wife of a well-respected physician. Because they were Black, they had overcome many obstacles to get to where they were. Both tried to instill in my boys the need for a good education and in me the best way to bring up their grandsons. I remember Mayme taking me to task for having the kids chop wood for the fireplace. I thought it to be character building, but she reminded me that she and the doctor had worked very hard to make sure that their grandchildren would not have to perform the menial tasks that they had once had to perform themselves. Mind you, when the kids used to visit her in New York she would rub them down with bleaching cream in order to help them blend in more effectively.

Doc and Mayme would talk to the boys about the sacrifices that others had made for them so that they, as young black men, would have opportunities not afforded to people of their generation. The boys had no point of reference, and so, did not understand the point of the story. They took for granted, as all young kids do, the value of all the rights that have been earned for them. It didn't help that Cynthia saw her parents as elitist, bourgeois, snobs. (They were, kind of.) My sons had grown up largely in New Mexico where many people were more fascinated by black skin than fearful of it. Racism would catch up to the boys, eventually, in adolescence.

Doc and Mayme celebrated their prosperity. They lived in a large house in St. Albans, an exclusive Black neighborhood in the borough of Queens. Every year, Doc bought his wife a new Cadillac. When they came to visit, he would hand her four or five thousand dollars in cash and say “Knock yourself out, baby,” and send her off shopping in Old Town where she would haggle with the merchants over an irregular stone or tarnish on a silver bracelet. The merchants still speak in reverent tones about her. They traveled anywhere she wanted to go, partied with the rich and famous and never looked back on their lives as a young, Black couple living in 1950’s America.

Doc had grown up in Mississippi, the son of a contractor who made a reasonable living but also knew that despite his skill and hard work, he would never be allowed the affluence accorded to others in his profession. Doc was tall and thin and a child prodigy. He could read before anyone in his age group and breezed through the only public school available for Black children in his county. His father had told him that he would not be able to put him through college, but Doc was able to work his way through a four year University by the age of nineteen. There were no scholarships for Black students, no matter how intelligent, back then.

He moved to Chicago to go to medical school, working as a chemist for some unsavory underworld characters. He swore that they liked him and offered him lifetime employment, be he knew that he could never become a full member of the familia because of the color of his skin.

His first choice was to enter the Air Force as a fighter pilot, but because he was six-foot four, he was too large for the cockpit. After graduating med school, he entered the Army as a doctor at the rank of Captain. He served the required six-year stint and moved to Queens to work in a hospital. That’s where he met Mayme. She was an emergency room nurse half his size, widowed with a daughter, Alethea. It was rumored that she was working as a nurse until she could find herself another doctor. Doc and Mayme married in 1950. She quit her job the next day.

Over time, Doc established a private practice comprised mainly of Black patients who would not be seen by or who did not trust White doctors. His reputation as a competent physician grew and over time, he began to attract a more affluent clientele, Black professionals including musicians, artists, actors and the occasional heavyweight champion or two.

Doc’s affinity for music (he had once sung in a radio broadcast to Admiral Byrd at the north pole) brought him more and more Jazz musicians as patients. He was discreet about their unique treatment requirements like addiction. He would often treat their wives and girlfriends for social diseases without revealing the nature of the illness, telling them they were deficient in some substance or disguising their treatment as something peculiar to their gender. For this, he won the loyalty of the elite in the profession.

He and Mayme moved into a large house in St. Albans. Their neighbors included singers Brooke Benton and James Brown, actor Paul Robeson and other Black entrepreneurs. Mayme bought a gray parrot and taught it to curse at people she didn't like. Life was good.

During one of his conversations with the grandchildren, when he was trying to give them some sort of motivation to achieve something beyond their grasp, I asked him what inspired him to be a doctor. He sat back in the big chair in our living room and told them about the incident that changed his life.

When Doc was twelve years old and living in Mississippi, he was like any other boy his age, not interested in much more than having fun. He had chores at home and his studies to attend to, but all that was simply a means to an end. Once those things were out of the way, he could play.

On one occasion, he noticed a large tent going up in a field on the White side of town. It was being placed there to shelter a free barbeque and political rally for Theodore G. Bilbo, campaigning for his second run for governor in eight years. Bilbo was a proud racist, a member in good standing of the KKK and believed in the “natural inferiority of the Negro”.

With little to do, Joseph (That was Doc’s given name. I was the only one who ever called him Doc.) asked his mother if he could go and see what the fuss was about. As long as his chores were done, she replied, he could go, but added the proviso “Don’t go messing with those White folks. You know they don’t want you there and you come home at the first sign of trouble.”

And so off to the rally he went. As he described it, it was a mess of noise. A great big barbeque with music and White people coming from all over town to see and hear this man who had been governor of Mississippi eight years previous and wanted to be governor again. There were a number of Black people there as well, just outside the perimeter so as not to be run off by the authorities for “mixing” as they called it. After a time some of the Blacks drifted away, but Joe stayed, finding a soft spot to lie on a mound of hay where he could listen to the music and take in the sounds and smell of this growing crowd.

After more than an hour, a commotion rose from the crowd. The great man was coming. They could see the dust trail from his and several other automobiles off in the distance. Theodore Bilbo stormed the crowd, leaping onto the stage as they cheered and cheered. He was a small man, neatly dressed and he removed his jacket and tie and rolled up his sleeves with a flair that said “I am one of you.” He spoke to them through a sound amplification system that gave his voice a harsh, fuzzy tone that made him hard to understand whenever he shouted. Once the crowd was whipped into a frenzy, he waved his hands above his head pleading for quiet.

“Now I'm gonna tell you why you need to once again elect me a governor of this great state of Mississippi. There are some things that I have left un-finished, and what I have to tell you is vital to the very survival of you, your children and your grandchildren.” The crowd remained hushed, waiting to hear the wisdom this man possessed. “Now you see them niggers out there sleeping in the sun?” He gestured toward Joe and some of the men lying in the hay. “Well you just let them sleep. We don’t want to wake them, no. If we do that, they’re going to start asking for things, expecting the same things that you and I have worked so hard to earn. The very things that have been granted to us by the creator. They’re going to demand education. They’re going to demand opportunities that rightfully belong to you good, strong, White, Christian people. They’re going to want to take money out of your pocket and food out of your children’s mouth. They’re going to try to make themselves better than you. But they can never be better than you. It isn’t in their nature. They don’t possess the intelligence to better themselves, but it won’t keep them from trying.”

He continued. “But if we let them sleep. If we give them just enough so that they don’t want to have more, if we give them a little education, a little work and keep them out of our churches and out of our homes, they’ll learn where their place is. They’ll learn that their place is at our feet.” With that the crowd mumbled in agreement. Several of the men in the crowd cast accusing glances toward Joe and his compatriots and almost all of the Black men knew that it was time to leave.

Theodore Bilbo went on to win the governorship once again and later became a U.S. Senator.

“After that day,” Doc explained, “I stopped playing. I studied and studied and studied some more. I worked to get out of school and out of Mississippi as fast as I could and I never went back. My mother never understood what got into me and I never told her about that day. Every decision I made from that day moved me toward my goal of proving that man wrong. I did whatever I had to do to become a professional. That’s why I play now. Because I earned it.” The boys stared at their grandfather, unsure of what to say.

Years later, after Mayme died, Doc took me to Dick and Mattie’s Jazz party. His health had declined and he needed help getting around, but I think he actually liked having me there. I sat at lunch, surrounded by the very elite of the Jazz community. I was in heaven. At the same table were Zoot Simms, Ralph Sutton, Ray Brown, Oscar Peterson, Butch Miles, Milt Hinton, Barney Kessel and a young Howard Alden and Terrence Blanchard. All of these guys were Doc’s personal friends and they respected him as much as he did them. After finishing a plate of prime rib (Doc loved to eat), he pushed the plate back and looked around the table, enjoying the elite company he was in. He grinned that evil grin he had given me just before my wedding day and said to no one in particular “Fuck you, Theodore Bilbo.”

Home

All content on this website unless otherwise indicated copyright 2010 by Jose Antonio Ponce