Please note, the use of the word Coloreds is used in this story without
any disparity or disrespect intended. If I have offended anyone I am
sorry. Now, since I am in an apologizing
mood, let me apologize for the use of words such as Mr. Charlie, Mr. Jim Crow,
Uncle Tom, Red-bones, high yellows ninny coloreds and the darkies, I may as
well apologize for the cripple who rolled around downtown Starkville and spit
on the sidewalks. I must not forget to
apologize for graduating from high school ahead of my older brother. One day I am going to make a list of all of
the things I must apologize for. Ooh to heck with this, these are nothing but
labels and others conception of me.
Labels have no power of their own.
We give labels, powered by what we perceive them to mean, If I said your
mother wore cowboy boots, and you drew your gun and shot me. The legal establishment would want to know
why. You will say I insulted your
mother. I will say I don’t know your
mother; I never met your mother. You are
left to explain how can my word mean anything, how can they be insulting when
they are based upon my lies and conjectures.
If I call you stupid, does that make you stupid? You are stupid if you think you are stupid
because I called you stupid.
Back in the old days when our ancestors worked outside, the sun toughens
their skin and they weren’t offended by the use of mere words and they weren’t
offended by bad hair. Now that we have been elevated to Afro-Americans by the
NAACP and we have become civilized, our skin has grown thinner, and we get
offended by mere words. We spend millions of dollars trying to teach our hair
lessons and buying other folks hair, and still end up with bad hair. Another group spends millions of dollars
trying to darken their skin and still end up being white. We want laws enacted to make people love us so
that we could marry anybody we want to and the right to sit at anybody’s
table. Well, there are still people I
wouldn’t want my daughter to marry and definitely would not want a bugger
popper sitting at my table.
When it comes to names, we are a strange
breed. We just can’t make up our mind to
what we want to be called. When I was in
grade school, I was a Nigger by the time I got to high school I was colored.
When I joined the Air Force I was Black. By the time my tour of duty had ended,
I was described as an Afro-American.
Then I began to fade in and out, one minute I was Black and the next I
was Afro-American. One day it was OK to be Mr. Gillespie, the next I was
suppose sign my name as “Mr. X”. How can
a person be an African and an American at the same time? Here is a dichotomy that is being overlooked
and need to be evaluated. I have chosen not to be a hyphenated one. I am not an African, never been there and I
wouldn’t want to live there. I am an American, I was born here, I fought for
this country and I am a part of this country. You can call me bugger or you can
call me dog, just don’t mess with my family and I don’t try to hang your
stinking monkey on my back.
There are three major groups that make up my bloodline. My Great Grandmother was an African, and I
am proud of her. My Great Grandmother
was a Choctaw Indian, and I am proud of her. My Great-Great Grandfather was
Irish; he was a land owner, a slaveholder and a medical doctor. I am proud of him and his
accomplishment. I challenge the great
minds to define me. I will not allow
myself to be defined by the outcome of any one of these struggles. I am the product of many different struggles.
Visualize this if you can, a 16 ounce jar is placed on a table and filled with
8 ounces of water. You are asked to
describe the jar and its content. A
small and limited mind would say, “There is a jar that is half full of water
sitting on a table.” One who struggles
to be profound and follows a different path would say, “There is a half empty
jar of water being supported by a table.”
To the elevated mine, one who needs no labels to define its contents
would simply say, “There is a jar with water in it.” Why must I be defined by a color content or
quantity? Why must I be Black? Why do you define your sister of father to me
as a step when I don’t know them? Have
you ever seen a half-sister?
After the Civil War, Mr. Charlie was in for a rude awaking. He was about
to meet the product of his own creation and he didn’t have the foggiest idea as
to how to deal with it. The colored and
the Indians were a group of people that consisted of many shades of skin
pigmentation. There were the high
yellows which had good hair and were trying to pass. On the bottom rung of the
ladder, there were the darkies that had bad hair. Nobody wanted to be a darkie with bad hair,
but Jessie Jackson made people ashamed to admit it. Jessie Jackson made us
stand in the rain while our hair went from straight to kinky; to up the clench
fist and shout, “I am somebody.” Did we
need Jessie Jackson to tell us that?
Then there was the Mullato’s who own the ladders of upward
mobility. They were the uppity colored,
(for the sake of calcification and readability I wish I could drop the “N-Bomb”
here but my proofers would delete it. So
every time I use the word “colored’ think of the N-Bomb.) The Mullato’s were
considered high bred colored, who had good hair and they looked down on the
poor darkies that had bad hair. By now
you are probably wondering what hair got to do with anything. The answer is nothing, it’s a label. Most of
the Mullato’s passed for white. Some of the Mullato’s are still trying to prove
they don't have white folk’s blood in them. Now if you wanted to bring a Mulato
down a notch just tell them they were Mr. Charlie's Chillums. The coloreds wanted Mr. Charlie’s hair, they
wanted his color, they wanted his money, but nobody wanted to be poor Mr.
Charlie's Chillums. The middle position was held by those whom Grandmother
described to her color struck grandchildren as being just plain ninny
color. Usually the ninny color children were
a Red-bone with bad hair.
Humanity, not just the coloreds is screwed
up. Think of the money made on tanning
products and bleaching cream. Do you
want to say, huh.
Remember those times when nobody wanted to call a dog, then Randy
Jackson went on national television and told everybody that it was alright.
People then started calling the peoples' dogs.
A famous tennis shoe company paid a colored man a huge sum of money to
convince every working colored, poor welfare mothers included, that love for
your child was spending two hundred dollars for a four dollar pair of tennis
shoes. These two unrelated acts taught Mr. Charlie one of his greatest lessons
about the colored.
Being colored allowed us to make all sorts of wild claims, such as a
young boy in grade school not wanting to be called colored, told the Teacher
that he had an Indian in him. Then there
is the story of two little boys running down the road, one black and one white,
shouting run, run the (for this to sound right you have to drop the N-bomb here)
colored are coming. Now it becomes easy to see how the thin skinned
Afro-American’s and the NAACP has messed up my life. I cannot write this parody
without trying to explain myself. There
were the high yellows and the just plain ninny colors that learned to
mispronounce certain word when they talked.
‘Hey Mon’ became a transitional phrase, if you said it right, you could
be a visitor from some exotic island. I
tried it when I was in the Air Force and immediately I was somebody. I was a
Jamaican with a stinking monkey on my back.
I guess I was one of the fortunate son’s
of the South, because I never met Mr. Charlie or Jim Crow. When I was growing up I heard that Mr.
Charlie was a bad man. And that after
the Civil War was over Mr. Charlie had brought in Jim Crow to take care of his
uppity coloreds. The first thing Mr. Jim Crow did was to explain that you could
not be white if you had colored blood in you.
There were a lot of uppity coloreds who was trying to pass and he had to
put a stop to that. He came up with lots of rules and regulation. First, he concluded that there were only two
classes of people, you were either White or you was Colored. Mr. Jim Crow came
up with beautiful phrases such as, “Separate but equal,” “segregation” and
“poll taxes.” Coon hunting became a southern pastime. All over the South, signs went up. Two water fountains, one said, ’White’ and
the other said, ’Colored.’ Two
restrooms, one said ‘White’ and the other said ‘Colored’. Two graveyards, one ‘White’ and one ‘Colored’.
Mr. Jim Crow did lots of explaining. He
even explained why the coloreds had big butts.
It made sense when he explained how the coloreds rolled their tails up
and stuffed them in their undergarments. With Mr. Jim Crow in charge and
running things everybody knew their place. The Mullato's knew their place. If
they wanted to maintain their status they had to hang with Mr. Charlie.
The funny thing about Mr. Charlie was, he talked about separating the
coloreds from the whites, but he loved to hang out with the coloreds. You could find Mr. Charlie hanging out in
the colored section of town most any night.
Sometime Mr. Charlie and Mr. Jim Crow would show up at the colored
folk’s church.
Mr. Jim Crow never spent a day in school, he was what most people
defined as poor white trash, but he could write laws and knew how to hide them
on the books. Even today after more than
one hundred years have passed, Mr. Jim Crow keeps popping up. Before the old Jim Crow could get everything
explained, simplified and legalized old Jim Crow just fell over and died. Mr. Charlie could not accept that Jim Crow
was dead, so he hid the body and pretended he was still alive. The Choctaw
Indians knew Mr. Jim Crow was dead, because they saw where Mr. Charlie buried
the body. They dug it up and buried the
body in their sacred burial ground in a place called, Tunica, Ms. The problem with all of this was the uppity
Coloreds folks kept trying to kill old Jim Crow, but old Jim was already
dead. But how can you be dead when
people are still trying to kill you?
They say the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was to convince the
world that he didn’t exist. The Choctaw
began to wonder if Mr. Jim Crow was dead even though they had the body, because
so much was happening in the name of Mr. Jim Crow.
Mr. Jim Crow had become entrenched in the institutions of the
south. He was more powerful, more dead
than he was alive. He had become immortal because he could not be killed. You cannot kill something that’s already
dead. It worked out fine for Mr.
Charlie, because the Colored was misdirected and spent a lot of time and money was
spent trying to kill a dead horse. They
enlisted the help of the NAACP and their rich Uncle Sam from Washington. Soon Uncle Sam was tearing up the countryside
looking for Mr. Jim Crow. The Choctaw Indians were sitting back on the
reservation getting high watching Mr. Charlie, Uncle Sam, the NAACP and the
Coloreds fight it out; all the while they were trying to figure out a way to
beat Mr. Charlie and Uncle Sam at their own game. The Choctaw knew if they could beat Mr.
Charlie and Uncle Sam the Coloreds would be beaten also. In a self-induced stupor the great Choctaw
Indian Chiefs were dancing around the grave of Mr. Jim Crow. They heard the
immortal words. “Man is left to gamble.”
The message was carried from coast to coast, “Indian brother unite, if
man is left to gamble, he needs a place to gamble. Let us build casinos' and take Mr. Charles’s
money.”
Anyway, let’s get back on topic. Mr. Charlie was pretty much upset over Uncle
Sam and the NAACP comes to town trying to stamp out Mr. Jim Crow. Uncle Sam was holding secret meetings with
the coloreds, and Mr. Charlie was not invited. So Mr. Charlie came up with a plan, he sent
for his old ninny colored friend Uncle Tom, who had bad hair. He was well
educated and knew his way around the colored.
Uncle Tom could attend the meeting and report back to Mr. Charlie what
was going on. With Uncle Tom attending
the meeting it was like Mr. Charlie had a front row seat. This worked fine until Rosie; the Red-bone
was pulling a double shift With Mr. Charlie’s son at Mr. Charlie’s house, and
saw Uncle Tom sneaking in the back door.
She followed Uncle Tom and caught him and Mr. Charlie in bed together.
The word spread around town about Uncle Tom.
Uncle Tom was labelled a snitch and ran out of town on a rail. Uncle Sam
gave up its search for Mr. Jim Crow after assuring everyone that Mr. Jim Crow
was dead and as long as they supported him with their vote he would take good
care of them.
Uncle Sam formed an exclusive club for all of those who had walked
behind the mule. Uncle Sam even used a
picture of a mule as the symbol to represent the group. Once each year they would get together and
have a Democratic party. The Colored
were to make sure that Uncle Sam had enough votes to throw the party, and Uncle
Sam wrote big checks to take care of his colored folks. Uncle Sam made laws to open gates for the
coloreds. Before the gates could be
closed the gays, lesbians, Red bones, Jews, Indians, Gentiles, people with bad
hair, dogs and cats, all came marching in screaming, we want our rights. Soon
all animals began clamoring for their rights. They demanded lawyers be
appointed to represent them in court. Uncle Sam became known as the “Civil
Right Giver.” and he published books on how to get rich while sitting on your
butt.
Since Uncle Sam was giving the coloreds welfare checks, that destroyed
the DNA of the colored family, Mr. Charlie figured he could make money off the
coloreds by selling their big cars. He
created the Big Motor Company and started selling Cadillac cars and
trucks. Uncle Tom bought a cabin at the
edge of the swamp in the Bijou country. He spent the rest of his life writing children's
stories. Rosie, the Red-bone married Mr. Charlie’s son and they open up a shoe
company that specialized in selling over priced sneaker to the colored
folks. The Choctaw chiefs continued to
solidify their plans to control Uncle Sam’s money. They opened up a string of
Casinos and today they are busy raking in money and getting the coloreds
evicted from their homes. The Coloreds
soon found out that Uncle Sam had lied to them, now instead of having to deal
with Mr. Jim Crow; they now had to deal with a stinking monkey on their back.
Every time a colored was born, the pimps, player, preachers and pragmatics all
entered into a conspiracy to take charge of the poor child’s mind and shape it
and process it. To enforce their will a stinking monkey was assigned to each
Child.
I think it was the stinking monkey
that really sent the NAACP, Jessie, Al and the ‘poor’ colored folks over the
edge. Some say it had something to do
with bad hair and some say it had something to do with good hair. The reality
of the situation was one morning the coloreds, Jessie, Al and the NAACP got
together to kill the stinking monkey. First, they buried the ‘N-Word’, then the
rap stars dug it up. They changed the
spelling and the poor coloreds spent millions of dollars to glorify it. Then, they demanded that Mr. Charlie Kill his
stinking monkey so that little colored boys and girls could live without a monkey
on their back. Mr. Charlie explained to
them that he never had any stinking monkeys. I think It was at that moment they
realized that the monkey on the poor colored’s back wasn’t white. The stinking monkey was black. The NAACP became an irreverent organization,
and most colored folks decided to become just plain folks.
In the famous words of Rosie, the Red-bone, “Colored folks just got to
learn to live with each other. They have
got to learn to trust. Forget about
words. Stick and stones might break your bones, but talk will never kill
you. Get that stupid monkey off your
back, and pull your pants up.
You know I have seen a lot of pretty girls with bad hair, and I have
seen lots of ugly girls with good hair, but I have never seen a pretty girl
looking ugly because she had bad hair, and I have never seen an ugly girl
looking pretty because she had good hair.
If you are wondering what all of this is about, or better yet what hair
got to do with anything. It's all about
nothing and nothing never mean anything.
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