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Until I was twelve, I grew up in Robert M. Hitch Village, a government project in Savannah, Georgia, populated by African Americans. Next to Hitch Village was another government project, populated by White Americans, called Fred Wessels. The first time, however, someone felt it necessary to call me “nigger” was when I made the mistake of journeying beyond both Hitch Village and Fred Wessels to get a haircut.

I was about eight years old and my mother had sent me with my nephew Kenneth, who could not have been more than four, to the barber shop.  For some reason, the shop on Wheaton Street, on the southern border of Hitch Village, was closed that day. Why we were not with one of my older brothers I don’t recall, but black children of that time and place rarely stayed children for very long and it may be that this was one of my first outings to indicate that I was growing into a “big boy” whose turn it now was to look after others rather than expect others to look after me. It was something I would do throughout my adolescence and again, later, as an adult offspring.

Once we discovered the barber shop on Wheaton Street was closed, I recalled seeing another one up on East Broad Street with a huge shiny red and white striped barber pole that had made me think of a giant peppermint stick when I saw it. East Broad Street was on the opposite side of Fred Wessels, the white project, but we could reach the barber shop by staying on Wheaton Street and traveling west on up to East Broad, then turn left and go a few more blocks toward Jones Street.

We arrived at the barber shop with its unmistakable gleaming peppermint candy pole right outside the door, walked inside to the buzzing sound of clippers, and took two empty seats against the wall.  How I got it in my head that red-striped barber poles nullified any issues regarding skin color is a major mystery but the fact is I failed to recognize that my nephew Kenneth and I had the only black faces in the place. What did make an impression on me was that one of the barbers had red hair with eyes that I now think must have been hazel. The other’s was a smooth dark brown with thick waves that shined and a pair of black-framed glasses sitting on his face.

It did not dawn on me that something might be wrong until I noticed that neither of the barbers would look our way and say “Next,” or, “You ready?” and nod for us to get in one of the chairs. They signaled the one or two customers who had been waiting before us and a couple more who came in afterwards. But not us. Then we became the only two customers left in the shop, so I told Kenneth to get in one of the barber chairs while I got in the other. Happy that it was finally our turn, I smiled and asked, “Can we get a junior Caesar please?” describing not the salad but the style of haircut we always got.

The barber behind my chair sat down and unfolded a newspaper. Then, for the first time, one of them spoke to us:

“We don’t cut no nigger hair in this barber shop boy!” said the red-headed man behind the chair where my nephew sat, completely oblivious to anything except the fact that he was sitting in a barber shop with his uncle.

Having no idea what the red-headed barber meant, I looked up and said, “Huhn?!”

“I said we don’t cut no nigger people hair in this barber shop!”

At that moment I thought I understood what he was saying. He apparently thought we were part of a family whose last name was “Nigger.” I could understand that because I had heard both relatives and neighbors talk about the negative collective character of entire families. It wasn’t uncommon to hear someone say something like, “Don’t be bringing none of those Wilsons to my house, they always drunk.” Or: “Stay away from those Fletchers, they’ll steal anything and everything plus your drawers.” So, the barber obviously thought we were members of the Nigger family, whom I guessed must have done something to his family at some point. To clear the confusion, I smiled again and said, “Ohhh yes sir, we don’t know the Niggers, but if we meet any we’ll tell them you don’t want them coming here.”

The dark-haired barber who had sat down to read suddenly lowered his newspaper. His face had turned as red as the other barber’s hair and he yelled as if I had said something unforgivable about his mother. His voice exploded like a cannonball out of his head.

“Boy get the hell out’a my goddamned barber shop! Who the fuck you think you is nigger?! Get your black ass out’a here!”

My nephew jumped out of the chair and did exactly what I, his eight-year-old uncle, told him to do:

“RUN!!!”

We flew through that door so fast we could have had rockets strapped to our ankles and our shoulders. That was the day we learned the difference between racing for fun and running for survival. We cut across traffic, zipped past pedestrians, and ignored friends who called out as we re-entered Hitch Village and kept on moving until finally collapsing on the porch of our apartment. The feeling that I had done something amazingly stupid made me keep my mouth shut about what had happened and a peanut butter cookie or two convinced my nephew to do the same. 

For a long time, it was the barbers’ anger and not their language that left the deeper more painful impression on me. The significance, however, of the language became more apparent not long afterwards when one of my best friends angrily said to his brother, in front of their grandmother, “Nigger you make me sick!”  His grandmother flinched and snorted as if the smell of a demon had burned her nose. A woman of at least 200 pounds, she must have been using all of them when the back of her hand knocked him so hard he swallowed a tooth then coughed it back up with a mouth full of blood. The back hand was followed by a leather belt that made me cry just looking at it. At the same time that she held my friend by the collar and beat his howling behind, she lectured everybody within hearing distance on why she “better never hear y’all cussing like that again! Y’all hear me?!”

“Yes Ma’am!”

From her lecture, and others that would be delivered under more calm circumstances, I learned that the “cuss” word “nigger” had nothing do with a particular family at all. When used by Whites, it was understood as three things: 1) a denial of African Americans’ humanity; 2) an assertion that Blacks were inferior to Whites politically, socially, spiritually, and every other way; and 3) as a curse upon the person called this word. For a black individual to ape the behavior of a racist white was the disgusting epitome of ignorance, a betrayal of one’s own people, and an act of self condemnation prompted by self hatred. 

The proposed explanation of the term as one of endearment between Blacks would have held no water in that place and time––the mid-1960s. Nor would the rationale that it was viable for use as creative expressiveness or as a means toward any kind of positive end. It was, simply put, a specifically racist expression of profanity intended to justify the annihilation of a people’s worth, and most of the adults of our concrete village would have no part of it.

This expanded understanding of the word that had been introduced to me by the barber brought a strange kind of sadness into my soul. What was worse? That I had been hated and cursed simply for having been born black? Or that I had been born black and so was hated and cursed? Or did either perspective really have anything to do with me at all?

The world, I would decide as years accumulated beneath my traveling heels, often chose to assign definitions and interpretations to my presence that had more to do with its own confusions than with the peace or validity of my actual being. I could be forced to address those confusions but I could not be forced to become them. So I began to think of my flight from the angry barber as a flight from confusion that caused him an excruciating pain––summed up by the word “nigger”––that I chose not to bear and I wondered, sometimes, how he managed to live with that.

By Aberjhani

From THE AMERICAN POET WHO WENT HOME AGAIN