Trust is gone

Like all the 1950s rich white families here, we had Servants, domestics, who were all AfAm. The Downstairs folk, at least at our house, were usually the nicest people. Especially, as my older brother often said, compared to most of the backstabbing rich a-holes they served Upstairs at parties. It was racially divided, but not necessarily unfriendly. The 13yo hitchhiker my Grandfather picked up one day became his manservant for life and a grandfatherly figure for me as well, dear old Phinas! (FTR That rich family thing... I've not gone hungry, but that's mostly long past tense.)

There was a time the black folks' kids were just other decent kids, mostly. By the time I was in college, mom's laundress was talking about how unmotivated her kids were. Now, it's been many years since mom hired a black. That's cultural, not racial. Times & circumstances have changed, but the interracial Trust is gone, the mutually beneficial arrangements in the past.

One of the last blacks she employed was a gardener. One day, when I was in high school, mom asked me to deliver something to his home, in the Other World of North Tulsa. (Read up on N Tulsa before & after the 1929 riots - tragic). South Tulsa in those days was white and well-kept. N was... not.

I passed the wall with barbed wire on top that once separated N & S Tulsa, now overgrown and crumbling, and entered a world of poverty and deterioration.

Block after block of You Might Be A Redneck homes (except they were black necks). Unmowed lawns, peeling paint, cars on blocks and sagging people on sagging couches on sagging porches.

Then, I got to my mom's gardener's house. Pretty as could be, an oasis in a swamp. Manicured, weedless lawn, not a shingle askew, plainly proudly kept up. Would be welcome in any middle-class hood. Totally bizarre to see, like a uniformed Marine with a US flag in the middle of an OWS camp. It struck me hard how:

1. yes, my mom always did hire good people, and

2. there wasn't any reason every house in his neighborhood couldn't look like his, except, you know, the Will.