A SLAP IN THE FACE

In 1959 or perhaps 1960 a bunch of us from the USS Valley Forge were at a road house someplace in Virginia. We went there with barmaids from our homeport hangout, the Tidewater Café, East Main St, Norfolk.

This was a bottle club with a band; if you were old enough, you could bring spirits. I drank beer. East Main St. didn’t have bands or whiskey; it had juke boxes and beer. A conversation among us touched on race. I said that I really didn’t see any problems with blacks. One of the Tidewater Café girls asked me how I would feel if my sister wanted to marry a black. I thought about it briefly before I said I would rather she marry a white guy but if she were in love with a black well then that would be ok with me. It was her life and she should be able to do as she wanted.

A barmaid from the Tidewater stood up, reached across the table and slapped me hard. Everyone hushed. I was embarrassed. We were all young and the conversation moved on. We were not worldly people, and as much as some of us might have been aware of a cultural divide, I and some others perhaps were unaware of the depths of a chasm that lay in our midst.

Today, I regret that brief demurral. The Tidewater Café, The White Hat, The Brig, and other bars on East Main St. are long gone. We have some memories. Rest in peace Mildred Loving.

(On May 2, Mildred Loving died. She was a Virginian about our ages at the time I write of who was banished from Virginia for marrying a white man. Ultimately the Supreme Court struck down the law(s) that made her marriage a crime. The New York Times obituary, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/us/06loving.html/ tells us about her and her husbands's bad experience. I didn't know of this sad story until I read the obituary. This article will take you to Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther, and Gunnar Myrdal who wrote American Dilemma. Over the years, I read a bit of each of Myrdal's two volumes. Written by a Swede, it gives you an objective look at American race relations. Over one hundred years earlier Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman, wrote of race in Democracy in America and he too saw what some in America wouldn't. Read the Times obituary and think how close we still are to racism today. If not in law, then in fact-in culture. Sometimes we are too close to a thing to know that we are near it or that it even exists. Perhaps a chasm that lies near. Read.)

Tom Paine

Chief As White As Me

Onerous and offensive as it is we are commonly asked to identify ourselves by race to government agencies and other organizations to meet various statutory reqirements. Church and state laws also chronicle (not necessarily sanction) our births. Absent church and state law, many of us would still be happy bastards and others still rotten. The state, the law, can only document race and birth; it cannot create. That was tried infamously in Germany, South Africa, and the United States.

In the Navy from August, 1958 to December, 1961 I slowly learned of another world. The USS Valley Forge, CVS 45, was an aircraft carrier home ported in Norfolk, VA. and it wasn't until years later that I realized I never saw any blacks on liberty in the places I and the other guys I hung around with went to.

We were at sea. I worked in after engine room. The Chief Petty Officer (CPO) in charge of forward engine room had ordered a sailor to work in the bilges. Hey, we all took our turn there. The sailor demurred saying that he didn't do that kind of work (or words to that effect). The Chief told him to get his BA to the bilges or he would be written up. The sailor told the Chief that he was as white as he. Now the sailor was a black man. No mistake about that. He told the Chief to check his records in the Personnel Office; they would show that he was a caucasian.

The sailor went to the bilges and the Chief went to the Personnel Office. The records indicated the sailor’s race was caucasian. He was from the United States Virgin Islands. I seem to remember the Chief shaking his head in wonderment which was the best part of all this. I remember their names but the Chief will always be rememembered too as Chief As White As Me. Shaking his head.

The ship's nickname was The Happy Valley.The picture here shows the ship as we entered Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1959. I was aboard then. Eighteen years old. A happy bastard for the most part I would think.

Tom Paine