I don’t remember: How long I stood on those steps. The ride home. Why I watched an ancient rerun of The Mickey Mouse Club, singing along with Annette, Darlene, and the other pale mouseketeers.
My mother came home early that afternoon from her nursing job at Howard University Hospital. What could I tell her? But as she entered the living room, flanked and supported by two of her co-workers, a voice spoke out: Your father died this afternoon. Momma later told me that he was found in his ward room holding the telephone.
Dad had been in and out of the hospital many times that last year, dying shortly after learning cancer had spread from lung to bone, two months shy of his sixtieth birthday. He and I spoke little in that time. There seemed little to say, as if silence itself could metastasize between a man who expected much, and was often disappointed, and his only child who thought his only words to her were Think and Use your brain.
Born September 1916 in Washington, D.C., to Laura Wilson Savoy and Alfred Kiger Savoy, a principal and later assistant superintendent of the District’s “colored” public schools, Willard Wilson Savoy grew to be a man who in appearance would be accepted without question by those calling themselves “white.” Pale of complexion with gray-blue eyes, he’d not be seen or treated as other until he admitted “Negro” blood.
A memory: We are walking hand-in-hand on a Los Angeles sidewalk one bright afternoon and pass an acquaintance of his. I’m four or five years old and catch the emphasis in the question asked. “This is your daughter?”
Years before meeting my mother and more than a decade before my birth, my father had a novel published. The year was 1949. After serving in the segregated Army Air Forces during the Second World War, he wrote about an embittered “mulatto” boy-becomes-man who thinks he might escape prejudice, and his own demons, by redefining himself as white. The book’s title: Alien Land.
But I knew none of this, not until I stumbled upon the book late one night in the basement stacks of my university library. It was the end of my first year there. The dedication alone convinced me of a chance for dialogue after death: “To the child which my wife and I may someday have—and to the children of each American—in the fervent hope that at least one shall be brought to see more clearly the enduring need for simple humanity.”
Yes, I stole the book, last checked out years earlier. Yes, I ran from it many times. Kern, the boy-becomes-man, and I shared too many experiences of hurt, too many questions.
A little boy’s wondering:
A question that had become centered around that part of the pledge that said, “—one Nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” . . . Kern had for some time entertained doubts that liberty and justice were “—for all.” “Jim Crow” in Washington, the Capital of the Nation, did not seem to him to be “liberty and justice for all.” But then, he supposed such things were written into the Constitution and Bill of Rights just for white boys and girls.
An eleven-year-old’s experience:
He listened intently as Frank Richards talked about subscribers and gave him advice about setting up his route. “—keep your territory compact—” . . .
“Guess we can start you with fifty copies. Think you can get rid of them?” Kern nodded happily. “You’ll get three and a half cents for each copy you sell—”
Kern busied himself with the arithmetic of three and one half times fifty. One dollar and seventy-five cents! The total surprised him. Almost two dollars a week. He began to plan what he would do with it.
“Where do you live—uh—Kern?” Kern answered, his eyes still on a picture booklet showing a model Scott Home Salesman standing at a door, hat in hand, as he talked to a customer. He did not notice that Frank Richards had stopped writing.
“You mean Northeast, don’t you?” He had looked up at Kern.
“No sir, I mean—” Kern realized what the man meant. “I mean Northwest.” He held tightly to the booklet and hoped it wouldn’t happen.
Sick and suddenly miserable, inside, he hoped it wouldn’t happen.
It did.
“I thought white folks had all moved out from there—”
“They ha—” Kern cut himself off. Too late now to cut himself off—to say that a few families still lived there.
“What are you, boy?” Frank Richards dropped his pen on the desk and turned in his chair to face Kern. Kern looked back at him, saying nothing.
“You a white boy?”
Kern shook his head slowly. “No.”
Richards reached forward and drew Kern’s hand roughly toward the lamp on the desk. He started at the outstretched fingers.
“Blue nails! ‘Course you ain’t white. A nigger! Well, I’ll be damned!” He stood up and took Kern by the shoulder. “Come on, boy,” he led him through the hall and out to the porch.
“Get on . . . I ain’t doin’ no business with no niggers.”
That night, after the house was dark, after even the chirping of the crickets had dropped to silence, Kern lay on his bed, wide awake, staring at the ceiling.
“Why?”
The question pulsed in him. Sickness. Anger. Shame. None of these answered the question. He got up and turned on his desk lamp. Then he stood in front of the mirror and stared at his face. . . . Stared at his eyes. They were blue. His nose was lean and his mouth was thin and straight.
“Why? Why am I a nigger?”
His fingers went along the tracery of veins at his temples, dull blue under the skin. He turned and bent under the lamp to peer closely at his fingers. They were not blue. They were pink. Pink except for the little half-moon at the top of each nail. And those were white. His thought became words in the room.
“Why am I a nigger?”
My father’s “alien land” grew from the “hypocrisy which, in one breath preached the doctrine that all men were created free and equal and, in the very next breath, denied to millions the simple respect which should naturally go with such a belief.”
I understood then that I, too, lived in an alien land. A fourteen-year-old’s questions became an eighteen-year-old’s need to understand why such hypocrisy and inhumanity continued. Why my father never told me about this book, or about the wounds and scar tissue of his own growing up. About how he survived not “passing.”
Partial answer to the first “why” came soon enough in Ashley Montagu’s course on the fallacy of race, but it wasn’t answer enough. How was I to survive? I couldn’t “pass” as Kern could. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I hoped instead that safety would come from my fading into the background, unnoticed.
alien. land. ethic. Three words published midway through a century of world wars—as a young man’s semi-autobiographical novel, and as “The Land Ethic,” climax essay in an older man’s “end-result of a lifetime journey.” What happened in the postwar years while my father and Aldo Leopold wrote and revised?
U.S. immigration quotas continue to favor those from northwestern Europe while severely restricting entry from Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, southern and eastern Europe. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, devastated by the first practical use of uranium and plutonium bombs, begin to recover. Nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans who’d been confined in remote internment camps for three years under Executive Order 9066 try to rebuild their lives—about two-thirds of them citizens, the Nisei or those born in the United States to immigrant parents. Survivors of Nazi concentration camps search for