PLAYING CHESS WITH
MONKEYS
10 Little Race Stories
Volume 5  BEFORE BARACK: My Life among White Folks
Bernestine Singley
This book is for those without whom this work would be
neither necessary, possible, nor worth it
As always, for Gary Isaiah Reaves whose steadfast love, seamless support, &
legendary patience are priceless in all beings and utterly beguiling in a spouse
…Gretchen Bost, the late Gwendolyn Carraway, Trinitia Nichols, and Betty
Martin, my first and last partners-in-string at John Taylor Williams Junior High
…Prof. Walter O. Weyrauch who always stood with me, his favorite Alien
…JaDawyna C. Butler, Esq., the glittering other end of my University of Florida
College of Law arc and the beginning of her awesome own
….Lynne Karsten for luring me to Tampa for Election 2004 and worrying about
that mobile masseuse I found in the Yellow Pages
…Hays Alexander and Virginia Lee for keys to (& pretzels in) my Quiet House
…Tramassa Tellis White, Ashley Wilkerson, Keevonya Wilkerson, Aileen
Mokuria, JaDawnywa C. Butler who keep me honest, challenge, and inspire me
…and most especially for Sara Mokuria who read—and Amari Tesfaye Tappen
who heard (in utero )—every word of these way too many words
First & last, for Odessa Roberts Singley, the ancestral source of the fire in my
belly, the blade of my mind, and the steel in my spine. I’m still burning, Ma!
…and for Kolleen Egan Kellom, who changed my life with that first letter. Thank
you for letting me change yours. We’re still here & we’re winning!
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 2
Missed a volume? Find it @ http://www.BeforeBarack.com/
…
BEFORE BARACK
My Life Among White Folks
Volume 1 Assuming the Position
Volume 2 Land of the White Folks
Volume 3 One Thousand Southern White Men
Volume 4 Stomping on Thin Ice
Volume 5 Playing Chess with Monkeys
Volume 6 Blood Work
Download this book & the rest of the Before Barack series FOR FREE
@ http://www.BeforeBarack.com/
Permission to duplicate and distribute copies of this book is granted so long as it is
distributed in whole, without addition, subtraction, or modification, and so long as
it is shared without charge or compensation of any kind .
© Copyright 2013 Bernestine Singley. All rights reserved worldwide.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 3
Playing Chess with Monkeys
10 Little Race Stories
Table of Contents
Word from the Author 5
Prologue 7
1980s
 Something for Leanita (1986) 8
1990s
 Anatomy of a Race Relation (1999) 13
The New Millennium
 Sorry (2003) 19
 JaDawnya C. Butler (2003) 21
 Election Protection Flashback (2004) 29
 Tampa Vote (2004) 32
 I Coulda Been Condoleeza (2005) 36
 Toe-to-Toe with a Serial Offender (2010) 38
 JaDawnya C. Butler: The Remix (2012) 42
 Notes 44
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 4
Word from the Author
In the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Sen. Barack Obama brilliantly beat back Sen.
Hillary Clinton (and her alter ego, Bill) over and over again. Early in their slugfest, o ne day it hit
me. ”This is like watching Barack play chess with monkeys.”
Don’t get me wrong. Bill and Hillary are legendary for their combined political IQ. As
former White House residents, they were experts at playing a game with rules historically and
still profoundly stacked in their favor. And, yet, somehow Barack’s deft maneuvers always kept
him just beyond their reach.
How did he do that?
After all, the Southern white Clintons were also revered in certain circles for instinctively
knowing what made black folks tick. That the black Obamas didn’t quite tick like that drove the
Clintons crazy. Eventually, in their desperation to win back the White House, Bill and Hillary
sank to playing chess like monkeys: hissing and flicking shit. Ever since then, Obama has been
stuck playing chess with monkeys.
Only now, it’s Republican members of Congress who have assumed the position. Throughout
President Obama’s first term and already into his second, there they are: crouched back-to-back
in the middle of the chess board, they are a 21st century monkey cabal with one strategy and one
strategy only—to obstruct, sit, and flick shit.
~ ~ ~
Welcome to Playing Chess with Monkeys: 10 Little Race Stories,Volume 5 of the memoir
series Before Barack: My Life among White Folks.
Before Barack: My Life among White Folks is a collection of seven short books that bring
forward our recent past, making it easy for the next generations to see the roles their parents,
grand-parents and great-grandparents have played—and still play—in creating our current
political, social, and economic environment.
Although the entire Before Barack series begins in the mid-1950s and covers nearly 60
years, each volume focuses on a specific time period. Each book tells my stories about
integrating private and public spaces by race, class, gender, and attitude. These tales move from
major cities to tiny towns, from the South, to the Midwest, to the Northeast, and ultimately the
Southwest.
Separately and collectively, the volumes that make up Before Barack trace the impact
American racism has had on me, many people I know, and hundreds of millions I don’t. By
walking us backward in time, Before Barack shows us how we ended up where we are today.
~ ~ ~
Playing Chess with Monkeys: 10 Little Race Stories, the volume you’re reading now, begins
in the 1980s and 90s—the era before Barack Obama came into our public view. These ten stories
capture the thinking and behavior of Americans twenty years after the Civil Rights movement,
setting the scene of Obama’s rise.
Playing Chess with Monkeys tracks the latest resurgence of white supremacy from a
groundswell in 2000 with the election of George W. Bush to the tsunami the world has witnessed
in the wake of the election and re-election of President Barack Obama.
~ ~ ~
Politicians and their supporters screeching and fouling our political space are nothing new.
They descend from a centuries-old line born and bred to do exactly what they’re doing. And
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 5
aready they’re cultivating their next generations. Prof. Jennifer Jensen Wallach, a historian and
author who is white, describes both the defect and the cure:
I am not sure that - as the often quoted phrase goes - we are necessarily doomed to
repeat the past if we don’t learn from history. History isn’t that neatly cyclical.
However, I do firmly believe that wrongheaded policy decisions are frequently made
by people with limited historical understanding and selective amnesia. Those of us who
have devoted our lives to the study of history are obligated to bring historical context
into the arena of public debate.
Before Barack: My Life among White Folks is designed to do precisely that: bring
historical context into the arena of public debate. And Playing Chess with Monkeys, like each of
the books in the series, is intended to push young white Americans into deeply personal
reflections that spark sustained dialogue that nourishes public debate and informs public policy.
Playing Chess with Monkeys is the antidote to Americans’ collective ignorance and
collective amnesia.
~ ~ ~
Some black and other young people of color have already heard their elders tell stories like
the ones in the Before Barack series. Those whose elders have been privileged to move among
the educated and high-wage earning elite can probably tell stories like mine in Playing Chess
with Monkeys.
But far too many young people of color, like their white age peers, have been raised in
ignorance of that part of our shared past. Their reality has been distorted and masked by the
mantra they learned while growing up: “We’re all the same.” Of course, those who can see and
think for themselves know full well that’s a crock. They are not blind to the abysmal social,
political, and economic inequities all around us.
Those fortunate few understand “We’re all the same” is language of aspiration—how we
hope the world will one day be—and not yet language of description— how the world actually is
today. They are the hopeful, young, mostly people of color. But they are also white allies who
peeled off from their parents and voted for President Obama’s vision in 2008 and again in 2012.
They are open to making “We’re all the same” be true.
Young folks of conscience, integrity, and any hope for a just future have their work cut out
for them. In “Playing the Fool,” Robert Jensen, another white professor, describes the special
obligation of young white activist allies on this journey:
Throughout history white people have often cast non-whites, especially blacks, as the
fool to shore up our sense of superiority. But in that game, it is white people who are
the fools, and it is difficult and painful to confront that. We have to face the ways in
which white supremacy makes white people foolish and forces others to pay a price for
that foolishness.
I propose that we white people admit that we are mostly all fools within a whitesupremacist society…What if we just acknowledged that? I am often a fool. I am a white
person living in a white supremacist society who still sometimes feels racist feelings...,
thinks racist thoughts..., and acts in subtle (and on occasion, not-so-subtle) racist
ways… I struggle. I try to correct my mistakes. I try to find ways to be accountable. I
don’t want to be congratulated for it. I’m not looking for absolution. 1
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 6
Playing Chess with Monkeys is dedicated to the next generations of progressive activists
searching for the rest of our collective story. It is written to help them understand the vile white
supremacist pushback we see daily did not start with the election of President Obama, but is in
keeping with a tradition often violently sustained by centuries of white folks devoutly committed
to playing the fool.
In the face of such intransigence, young critical thinkers understand we have only one choice
for an inclusive future: to keep aiming the blowtorch of reason on race Neanderthals already in
late-stage meltdown.
Playing Chess with Monkeys is my gift to the Next Generations who inspire me. Unlike their
parents and grandparents and even some of their peers, they are not working with one foot nailed
in a bitter racial past, the one that still too often traps me. In countless important ways, the Next
Generations are freer and less burdened.
To them, I say read this and leap.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 7
Prologue
When I left for college, Ma was worried I was too naïve. By the time I finished law school
the first time, though, she was worried for another reason.
“I just don’t understand why you hate white people so much,” she said to me one day. “I pray
for you because I didn’t raise you like that. What did they ever do to you anyway? I kept you off
your knees scrubbing their floors like I do, so you never had to put up with their mess. What on
earth do you have to be so mad about? ”
I didn’t answer her. If she didn’t already know, there was no point in me trying to explain.
Years later, when I was leaving ten years of life in Boston behind, another black woman
asked me a different question. It was my therapist wrapping up our final session.
"Your Grandma used a shotgun. Your mother uses religion. Since words are your weapon,
what would it take for you to disarm?"
I didn’t have an answer back then for her either, but I do now. It’s the same for both her and
Ma: Read what I write and it’ll be clear I don’t hate white folks. In fact, some of my best friends
are white.
I just love myself and the future more. My words will always be my weapon. And as for
disarming? Until the war is over, that is totally out of the question.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 8
Something for Leanita
“Experience”
I am not one of those, despite a comfortable life, who have forgotten my origins. It is just that
I had not been so rudely reminded of them in so long.2 (Leanita McClain)
White Blood
They had just returned from visiting South Africa and had dropped in to see their daughter,
our hostess.
The mother studied me from across the room, visibly displeased with her husband’s
insistence on engaging me in conversation. It was just as well that she kept quiet. She was a
composite of all of the tight-lipped, tight-assed white women whose houses Ma had cleaned for a
living. And like the best of those trained in feral Southern womanhood, the one perched stiffly on
the edge of the sofa had sniffed the air, smelled the menace, and skittered to her corner where she
was firing eye missiles.
The father, on the other hand, was a fat, florid blowhard, babbling nonstop about the
beautiful flowers all over South Africa. His rhapsody included no mention of the bloody riots
that were sweeping the black townships as they toured the blooming gardens. Pity a riot didn’t
catch them up and take them for a spin, I thought.
Like any common, garden variety white man staring me in my face, the father could not
fathom that I wasn’t dying to hear everything he had to say. And what he wanted to talk about
was something he had figured out as soon as he laid his eyes on me—and that was the source of
my intelligence and my professional success so far.
“Don’t you think you’ve done so well because of your white blood? I mean, obviously,
you’ve got some white blood in you somewhere. Don’t you think that’s it?”
“No.” I hoped that would be the end of it. It wasn’t.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 9
“Really? Well, just you think about it,” he continued. “I know another smart colored gal. She
looks a lot like you, works in our field office. She didn’t go to Harvard and she ain’t a lawyer, of
course, but she’s pretty smart. Yessuh, prit-tee smart.”
Ten years of slugging it out in Boston’s apartheid of race, class and culture had driven me
south where I hoped to catch a break. So, I decided to let my host’s father slide. Months later,
though, I was not so inclined when her husband stepped to me with a serenade, spraying me with
his foolishness.
Shady Niggers
”White folks work all day, white folks work all day. White folks work all daaaay--NIGGERS SLEEP IN THE SHADE!”
Grizzled and mocking, he stood before me softly singing his taunt, chest bare except for the
sprinkling of dusty red and gray hair that lay in nappy tufts from his belly to his neck. His bony
legs protruded from beneath red swimming trunks which matched his face, glistening brightly
with sweat. His lips remained slightly parted finding it hard, I suppose, to completely close
themselves over the last strains of his choral offering. His eyes studied me from beneath bushy
brows made more preposterous by their proximity to his bald head.
“You asshole!” my friend yelled, walking up behind him, laughing as he ended the
second verse, same as the first. “I can’t believe you sang that to her!” She giggled again and
boxed his arm.
“Don’t get mad at her because she’s not stupid like you are and doesn’t want to get out
there in 100+ degree weather and work in the yard with you. If you weren’t so cheap, Chuck
would still be doing it. Nobody asked you to take your old ass out there and wear yourself out.
“Hell! It’s all my money we’re spending anyway,” she said archly. “If I say it’s okay to
pay somebody to do the yard work, just pay em!”
“Okay, kiddo,” his eyes still on me as he spoke to her. He adjusted his glasses and
honked into a handkerchief. Then mopping his brow, he followed her from the room. It was
Saturday morning. I left.
Monday afternoon I was back, standing in the kitchen drinking water when I saw his
pickup truck pull into the driveway and heard him unlock the front door. I had been gone since I
left Saturday morning, but his song had not moved from that space.
”White folks work all day, white folks work all day. White folks work all daaaay--NIGGERS SLEEP IN THE SHADE!”
I had spent the weekend trying with my black friends, each of us taking turns guessing
what would make an Ivy League-educated, multi-degreed clinical psychologist sing me that
song. What threat had I posed that sent him scurrying more than sixty years back to the
droppings that spawned him?
A guest in their house against his will, I knew my presence was profoundly unsettling to
him. That seemed to be the case with many men I came upon in the South, especially the white
ones and others my age or older. That was one of the unintended benefits that came with life in
the region: my endless capacity to intimidate just by being.
So, I had given the geezer wide berth. I did not speak to him unless he spoke to me first.
I never once mentioned to her that he had a habit of plundering through my personal belongings,
purposefully leaving my things in disarray to make sure that I knew he had been where he was
not wanted. Yet despite my diligent efforts to avoid a confrontation, I had scratched the surface
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 10
of some genetic marker, causing him to raise his leg to piss on me in a move to reassert
dominance.
He walked into the kitchen with his head bent, squinting at the day’s mail which he held
barely a nose-length away. When he stopped at the butcher block countertop and looked up, my
face was inches away from his. Lush potted plants swung from the cathedral ceiling that rose far
above our heads.
His cotton shirt was open at the neck until I closed it by grasping both lapels in one hand,
pulling his face even closer.
“By the way,” I began, “I didn’t say anything to you Saturday out of respect for your
wife. But now that we’re alone, there’s something you need to know.” My breath, warm and
moist, bounced off his face.
“I know it’s hard for you to be a decrepit old bastard, watching the world change and
finding yourself on the wrong side of every equation. And I know that I scare the shit out of you.
I do it on purpose.
“But I promise you this: If you ever say anything else to me that even reminds me of that
shit you fixed your mouth to sing last Saturday, I will stick my foot so far up your ass, you won’t
be able to brush your teeth without shining my shoe.” His eyes bulged, unblinking.
I released him and walked over to the sink, flipped on the faucet, and reached for the
orange dishwashing detergent in the clear plastic bottle on the ledge beneath the window beyond
which stretched her kidney-shaped pool and her tennis court.
Southern Pining
Moving South, temporarily sharing quarters in someone else’s home, and my grueling job
search had reshaped me. For six years before that, I had lived alone in my own 3-bedroom, 2bath home and had taken my own space for granted, including, especially, my solitude inside
perimeters I controlled. Sure. I could close the guest bedroom door in my friend’s lovely home,
but that wasn’t keeping out mounting intrusions.
Meanwhile, I already felt like a gentler, kinder person down South, something I’d never had
a chance to be for in Boston. I had hoped my new surroundings would spur exactly such a
change, but battling prejudices—real and imagined—was draining my resolve. I wanted to shed
my Boston barnacles, the prickly crust formed over the preceding decade as protection against
pathologically rude Bostonians.
Carving a new Southern niche was exhausting. I wanted everybody to be quiet and leave me
alone. But the universe had other plans for me when headline news several months old and a
thousand miles away turned me into the object of a new friend’s concerned outreach.
Something for Leanita
A Southern belle diva of protocol had awakened one morning to stories of a Chicago
columnist’s suicide. So, of course, she called and invited me out to lunch. The mistress of
manners was a lovely woman, relentlessly polite in the custom of someone steeped in
generations-deep training in how to be a Southern lady. She was so pressed and tucked in, had it
not been for a mutual friend, we would never found each other on our own.
Lunch was at a posh private club downtown, a watering hole for the powerful stallions of
business. Until a few months earlier, it had been a males-only preserve, open only to women on
the arms of the right white men. But After Things Changed, an elite group of white women—
those attached to the right white men at their needs—were allowed meal privileges without male
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 11
chaperones. In the thickly-carpeted, hushed atmosphere, a cadre of smiling, articulate black
waiters with white napkins draping their forearms, served the white folks and me.
We had finished our meal and ordered dessert when my dining docent learned across the
table. “I was concerned about you,” she whispered. She had read a disturbing article that caught
the nation’s attention, but had escaped mine.
Leanita McClain
(Photo: Chicago Writers Association ©2009)
It was the story of Leanita McClain, a black woman journalist who grew up in a Chicago
public housing project. It had taken Leanita only ten years to work her way up from general
assignment reporter to become the first black and second woman on the Chicago Tribune’s
editorial board. At 30, she had become the paper’s youngest columnist. 3 As she continued rising,
she tried to bring black others along.
As editor of Perspective, a section of opinion and analysis, one of her first acts was
to recruit black writers to integrate thought. Her dream, like Dr. Martin Luther King's,
was to see the Perspective section, the newsroom, the corporate offices, the city, the
state, the nation all integrated….
Her writing, whether in the "My Turn" column she did for Newsweek magazine on
"The Middle-Class Black's Burden," or her columns in The Tribune, consistently
addressed the problems of race relations in this nation with fairness and compassion,
offering an idealistic vision of how they might be worked out.4
Leanita was stunned by the racist vitriol from Chicagoans, especially white aldermen,
provoked by Harold Washington’s historic mayoral win in 1983. The day after Washington won,
Leanita rushed to work joyful and ebullient only to be met by the sullen silence of her white
peers. It was more than she could take and she vented her outrage in a brutally frank freelance
column for the Washington Post.
Despite Leanita’s protested over the headline given to her column, editors ignored her and
used it anyway: “How Chicago Taught Me to Hate Whites.” She resented being overruled and
felt the headline distorted what she had written and the message she intended. A deluge of hate
mail swamped Leanita and the Tribune.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 12
Nearly a year later, Leanita was still under siege from personal attacks based on her column.
Meanwhile Glamour named her one of America’s Top 10 Career Women in its March 1984
issue.5 Two months later, she committed suicide with an overdose of antidepressants.
Beautiful, young, black, brilliant and successful in public, McClain had been something else
in private. Close friends described her as a rising star blown completely off-course by racism.
Her highly publicized death tragically punctuated the end of her stellar resume. My lunch mate
was reaching out to make sure I wasn’t traveling Leanita’s path.
Amid the sea of gray suits and crimson ties, I sipped sweet ice tea and assured my host I was
not in danger. Once upon a time, though, I could’ve pulled a Leanita.
Smart, well-educated, professionally-credentialed black women, women who run the gamut
from Leanita to Condoleeza, constantly field invitations to buy into systems of power designed
to crush most people who look like and are like us. Always, the threshold question is the same:
Are you predator or prey? I always knew I had a choice and I’ve always refused to be either.
You don’t just wake up one day, having suddenly become Condoleeza or Leanita. If you’re
black and a woman, it takes brilliance, desire, focus, drive, and moments in history converging to
push you to such heights. You get there because—one way or another—you worked hard for it.
You stay because you choose to. When you’ve had enough, you choose how you go.
~ ~ ~
Easy then the falling slide, soft the temptation to let despair absorb even the remnant voice.
Easy for unheeded seers, unheard listeners, easy for interrupted utterers to clasp the immediate
destiny, yield and be pressed to serve victorious barrenness. Easy the call to whiteness...6
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 13
Anatomy of a Race Relation
-iThe Wildebeest
I wanted to kill her. As in put my hands around her neck and squeeze the small hollow at the
base of her throat until I could feel my thumbs touching my fingers at the back of her neck. I
knew exactly what she would look with my hands properly placed: fat florid face first speckled
with big red splotches, then pink slimy tongue curled back on itself—suddenly all gone. Sucked
down in a final gurgling gasp of last breath.
How can you be friends with them? Well, I can’t.
Damn. You would think I’d know better by now. Thirty years of life among white folks and I
still let one creep up on me and take me by disguise.
Of course, they’re not all like her, which is why some of my best friends are white. For more
than half my life, I’ve been the black one in their wedding photos, bedside at the birth of their
babies, comforting love lost and dead mamas. All these years, a sliver of praline afloat in vats of
potato soup.
So, here’s my sorry excuse: I thought I was so good at sniffing out wildebeests there was no
way one could slip past me. Ha. This one waddled up, sidled in, and tried to make off with the
goods.
-iiStalking Prey
October 1997. I first met the Wildebeest on the Internet as she cruised a literary Serengeti,
searching for other folks’ word meat to pad her pouch. Broad at the shoulder with considerable
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 14
girth, she would’ve been easy to spot out on the range. Hidden in cyberspace, though, it was hard
to see her coming.
I was among nine hundred black Internet hopefuls, she claimed, who took her bait and
competed for the chance she offered us to be published, most for the first time. After choosing
thirty-three essays to complete the book, she got paid and we each got one copy of the book. Her
name loomed large and alone on the cover of our stories about growing up black in America.
Imagine Miz Scarlett birthin all dem black babies.
So, her second time around, what did I do? Threw open my door and waved her in with a
bouquet of flowers. My kindness, my weakness. Our pattern was set.
She wanted my “voice” for her next book project, she said. Instead, I invited her to join me
on my journey: my Race Relations Book Project, by then twenty years in the making. And we
were off.
In no time, I was picking my way past the droppings she spread—and ignoring the warning
grunts that accompanied them—as she began marking off her territory.
If she hadn’t tried to run me off and steal my book, we could have finished what I started.
Actually, steal is not the right word because that makes it sound like she snuck around behind my
back and tried to snatch what belonged to me without me knowing about it. The fact is, when
that strategy didn’t work, she was breathtakingly bold: told me in writing that she was hijacking
my book and demanded a ransom for its return. Once she headed down that road, I was
determined to be the only traveler to make it back.
-iiiArmed
June 1999. The Wildebeest and I hadn’t been working on the Race Relations Book Project
for six months before I knew I needed help. Actually, I knew long before then, but my roiling gut
had finally driven me to pitch myself to Vanessa as a client. A psychotherapist expertly trained
in human behavior, Vanessa was born black and raised in post-integration US, making her also
an expert on the ways of white folks.
“Whatever happens with the Race Relations Book Project, I am determined to be a different
person when I finish than I am now,” I told Vanessa. “I am sick and tired of letting white folks
drive me to murderous rage and I refuse to keep ending up here. You need to help me fix myself
before I wake up dead from a stroke. Or, better yet, land in jail for mass slaughter.”
“Well, if you’re that clear about the outcome you want, no problem,” Vanessa assured me.
So I hired her as my cyber-shrink to render aid by phone and e-mail, 5’2” of prevention or,
failing that, my advisor on preemptive strikes. She called it coaching; I called it survival. I
suppose it is a testament to racial progress that this time the person getting paid was black.
We worked out a routine. Whenever the Wildebeest lowered her head and pawed the ground,
I took a deep breath, stepped aside, and Tapped into My Better Self before tapping out my e-mail
response. In a crisis, I would send the first fifteen draft e-mails to Vanessa and the final one to
the Wildebeest.
-ivProvocation
October 1999. My descent towards murder and mayhem was sparked by the morning mail.
The incendiary device was a bulky brown envelope bearing The Wildebeest’s postmark. After
nine months and thousands of hours of feverish labor, I held in my arms the product of my and
the Wildebeest’s union: our book proposal. My copy, as it turned out, was not the sleek package
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 15
the Wildebeest sent to our agent, but a stack of loose-leaf pages crammed in a brown envelope
and sent to me only after my relentless requests.
“Don’t dawdle over presentation details” I chastised myself. “Move on.”
Further examination fostered some relief as our mixed-race book baby seemed to have all of
its parts: table of contents, introduction, authors’ bios, a marketing plan, even an appendix. I
settled in for a more leisurely read.
Something was missing. The kid had no spunk and absolutely no rhythm. Baby was
respectably hefty though, which might have been one reason it couldn’t raise itself up off the
page.
Then there was that astonishing new name, the one I could no longer ignore. But really,
what’s in a name? Well, a lot if you’re expecting a firecracker when a book of wet matches
shows up instead. Trembling, I dialed the Wildebeest, the baby’s other mother.
“You mailed it without even sending me a final draft?”
“I was going crazy getting it done by the deadline,” she snapped. A deadline she had created
and changed frequently at will, I resisted reminding her.
“You changed the title without even discussing it with me?”
“I told you I didn’t have time to call you.”
“You didn’t include a single one of my revisions,” I said exactly the way I had practiced it
aloud for five minutes before dialing her number.
“Look, all I agreed to do was consider your suggestions. I never said I would use them.”
“Excuse me?”
“My sole consideration was what was in the best interests of the book proposal. Your
changes did not enhance the final product.”
The final product was the mess in my hands: the Wildebeest’s cookie cutter child birthed
without a trace of me or my lean edgy energy. Another one e xactly like all her other ones. A big
wan wad of words.
Sitting there nursing the book proposal from which I had been studiedly erased, I was in
crisis. I phoned Vanessa.
-vSelf-Defense
October 1999. “Well, Berni, what do you think you should do?”
“FedEx some plastic gloves and a heavy blunt instrument to myself on the west coast. Fly out
there in time to pick up the package, hide in the bushes outside the Wildebeest’s house, and…”
“Berni, why don’t you try that again.”
“Okay. How about I walk from Dallas to Portland, roll up on her big ass, and stomp her
down?”
“Sooo, you’re thinking this would be a healthy, constructive way for you to handle this?”
“Hell, yeah.”
“’You see, your Honor,” I said, imagining myself on a witness stand, “I was overcome by a
severe case of race fatigue, a chronic condition induced by white people playing games of
domination, subjugation, and thievery and then claiming ignorance and innocence when
confronted with the overwhelming evidence of their criminal, life-threatening behavior. When I
realized that the Wildebeest had stolen my labor and then tried to wipe me out, it was either
strangle her or explode. This is a clear case of self-defense.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“I think maybe you should just sit with this for a little while longer,” Vanessa suggested.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 16
-viTemporary Restraining Order
October 1999. As the week wore on, I slogged towards clarity while Vanessa called out
encouragement from the sidelines. Much fretting and moaning marked my path to a
breakthrough, which finally dawned as Sunday night slid into Monday morning.
My loud cursing had penned my husband in his office at 2:37AM. Gracie, our dog, kept a
wary one-eyed vigil from the spot where she dozed by the door.
“All of this shit about us modeling a successful interracial collaboration, a black writer and a
white editor working together—that means nothing to her. Those are just words on a page!”
“But don’t you see, honey? That’s it,” Gary explained. “If you want to finish this book, do
exactly what she’s doing: Just let them be words on a page.”
“Way too late for that,” I wailed. “I already messed up. Why didn’t I just stick to my original
plan to meet her for the first time on ‘Oprah’? If I had never hugged her and her woman, had
never eaten their food, or drunk their wine, or petted their dogs, I wouldn’t be in this situation.
“Ever since we met in person, I haven’t been able to do anything right as far as she’s
concerned. Now, this tired piece of shit!” The stack of pages flew up and then fluttered down
around us like giant confetti.
“Okay, honey, how about this? What if what’s happening between you and The Wildebeest
has nothing to do with race?”
“What?”
“Well, everything was fine as long as you were the novice and she was the expert. Then—
boom!—one day she looked up and there you were right beside her, disagreeing with her,
changing what she had written, in other words, acting like an equal.”
“Okay,” I said, tilting the recliner to zero-gravity position and feeling my muscles unfurl.
“Now get to the part about why this is not about her being a racist, imperialist, tyrannical,
dominating bitch.”
“Think about it, honey. How is this any different from when you worked for Delon or Art?
Both of them are black. And what about your boss at the transit authority, the one you said you
always cussed out? He was black. What do all of those situations have in common?”
“You’re the one doing the analysis. You tell me.”
“Control. The Wildebeest had a formula that always worked until now: Find a bunch of dead
or unknown writers eager to get published, take their work, and slap her name on the cover.
Bam! She has total control, the unknowns get published, she keeps all the money, and
everybody’s happy. If you just keep gathering and schmoozing the writers, wading through thei r
submissions, and assembling the book, her formula could still work. All she has to do is manage
you and the process.”
“Manage me, my ass.”
“Okay, so maybe you did throw a wrench in all of that when you stopped being impressed by
what she knew, but what’s probably really unforgivable is you didn’t just pull up alongside her,
you pulled ahead.”
“I pulled ahead of her? How the hell can I be ahead of her when she’s the one who publishers
bring book ideas and contracts to while you can count the stories I’ve published on two fingers!
What kind of sense does that make?”
“Alright, who decided the book should include famous people and not just be another
collection of unknowns?”
“Me.”
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 17
“Who personally recruited every single writer?”
“Me.”
“If she decided to snatch this project and complete it without you—which I’m sure must’ve
crossed her mind by now—how far do you think she’d get?”
“Nofuckingwhere. None of these writers even know who she is, but that’s the way she set it
up. Making all the personal contact was my job. She was damn near phobic about avoiding
them.”
“Precisely.”
“Fine, but so what? I don’t care about all of that anymore. All I want you to do is tell me
what to do now.”
“The first thing you need to do is calm down. Next, just let her keep ignoring your
contributions for a little while longer. Before you know it, you’ll have a book and she’ll be
history.”
“It is amazing though,” Gary said, stooping to help me scoop up the scattered sheets. “She
probably could’ve gotten away with submitting the book proposal without letting you see it first.
I mean, you would’ve eventually gotten over that. But to completely change the title of the book
without even consulting you—now, that was just plain stupid.”
“No, what was stupid was us showing up at her house in a candy red Mustang convertible.”
-viiAssault
November 1999. Vanessa called shortly after sunup a few hours later.
“Ah, Berni, I’m rereading this e-mail where the Wildebeest demands that you not tell anyone
about the problems you two are having. I’m specifically looking at the part where she forbids
you to say anything about this to your friends, your agent—and even Gary. That she feels
entitled to control what you say to your husband or anybody else, actually, is very disturbing.”
“Uh huh. I keep telling y’all the bitch is psychotic,” I muttered.
“Well, just watch out for the next couple of messages you get from her. She’s building up to
something big.”
Maybe Gary was right. If I just let go and let the Wildebeest, maybe everything would work
out. In any case, the book proposal was done and I was beat. I left town and stayed gone for a
week.
-viiiIndictment
November 1999. The Wildebeest’s greetings lurked in my e-mail inbox, awaiting my return
home, rested, calm, resolved.
First: “I do not recall any prior agreement about your vacation, which makes six for you and
none for me since we started this project.”
The second one sent the following day: “If I do not hear from you within forty-eight hours, I
will conclude that you have abandoned the project and will proceed accordingly.”
And finally: “You are hereby notified that I have terminated you from this project and will
finish the book without your further participation. I advise you to seek legal counsel.” Surely she
was trying to be funny, trying to lighten the air between us with jokes.
The crazy bitch wasn’t kidding. So there I was, once again stricken with end stage race
fatigue, nearly paralyzed by the rage provoked by domination, subjugation, and now attempted
theft. I phoned my shrink.
“Vanessa?”
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 18
“Berni? Damn! I’m glad you called because I got this e-mail you just sent me and I was
just about to call you. What’re you doing?”
“Talking to you.”
“Cute. You haven’t bought a plane ticket to the west coast in the last twenty minutes,
have you?”
“Nope.”
“Well, what’re you planning to do for the rest of the day?”
“Not much.”
“’Not much’ doesn’t happen to include a packed bag and murderous intent, does it?”
“Not if you do your job,” I laughed. “Help me finish the book instead of finishing off the
Wildebeest.” Vanessa didn’t laugh back.
-ixTrial
December 1999. Things flew apart. By then the Wildebeest and I shared an agent on
Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. I had acquiesced early on when she insisted that he talk only to her,
not to me. “Less confusing,” she explained. Fine with me since she was the one who had brought
him to the table in the first place. Plus, I wasn’t looking for another white person to train. After I
sent him more of my work, though, he won me over with his enthusiasm about my future in
print. So, while ditching her was a no-brainer, I agonized over cutting him loose.
To be totally rid of her, I had to sacrifice him. His final act on our behalf proved the depth of
her madness: the Wildebeest was demanding ransom and the agent came with the particulars:
She would go away and leave me alone, he said, if I paid her $20,000. I sent him back with my
counteroffer.
“Before I pay you a fucking penny, I will find a hit man to off your crazy ass.” So much for
quitting law to write full time, to finally calm myself down.
-xVerdict
June 2002. Nearly three years after the Wildebeest waddled off my literary savannah, WHEN
RACE B ECOMES REAL, my book, was published.
Wherever she roams, may her tribe decrease.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 19
JaDawnya C. Butler
April 2003
---
I am wary in Gainesville, mindful that Florida has always proved to be treacherous
geography for me no matter my location. In the parking lot just as the sun sets, I stop to get my
bearings. Except for cars and parking spaces, which seem to have increased exponentially, thirty
years don’t seem to have made much difference.
Exactly as it did when I was a student there, Spanish moss drapes towering pines, creating an
arbor over a scattering of concrete tables and benches occupied by students chatting or bent
silently over books. With a few minutes left in Prof. Walter Weyrauch’s class, I ease into a seat
by the door. As class ends, he introduces me as his former student. No one seems all that
interested.
Standing near the door as students file past, I count four or five women who appear to be
black or at least not white. All of them except one steer clear of me, their eyes averted. The one
who stops in front of me is electric. Smiling broadly, eyes afire, I can feel her energy before she
grips my hand with a firmness that belies her petite stature. When she says she is delighted to
make my acquaintance, I have no doubt. The difference between her—vivacious, articulate,
abuzz—and the zombie sistas who preceded her is startling. She is JaDawnya C. Butler and she
is definitely black.
It seems JaDawnya read the article in the law school alumni magazine several months earlier
featuring WHEN RACE BECOMES R EAL and had decided I was someone she wanted to meet. “And
now you’ve just walked into my class!” Of course, I am flattered, imagining that I might react
similarly to a black woman who showed up in 1971, announcing she had graduated from the law
school in 1941.
Soon, I am racing to keep up with Butler’s staccato description of life as a black woman law
student at the University of Florida in the 21st century. The vignettes she paints remind me so
much of my own experiences decades earlier, I am dumbfounded. How can this be? The fall
2000 class admitted 105 women and 28% “minority” students out of a total enrollment of 213.
Still, despite those numbers that would appear to signal change, oppressive white male
supremacy remains as staunchly embedded as the concrete walls and pillars that surround us. 7
From classmates foot-shuffling en masse to anonymously—and cowardly—silence her; to
caricatures ridiculing her class participation that mysteriously end up as wallpaper around an
entire lecture hall; to the white female dean who turned a deaf ear to her plea for the
administration’s intervention to relieve the law school’s hostile environment, it is easy to
understand why JaDawnya has decided she refuses to spend another term serving out this
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 20
sentence. With only one year left, she has just decided to leave and finish her studies at another
school.
“But I feel like my leaving would not be honoring your legacy,” she ends, dismayed. It takes
a second for her meaning to click in because I’m still stuck back in the mounting fury and
disbelief that battles we fought in 1971 are still being waged. When her words last words finally
penetrate, I am surprised by the vehemence of my response.
“No. No! NO! You honor my legacy by doing exactly what you know is best for you. Thirty
years ago, I stayed because I didn’t feel like I had a choice. First, even if I could get admitted to
another law school—which I doubted—I knew it wouldn’t be any different.
“Second—or maybe this is actually first—if I had left, I knew it would make it much worse
for any black students—especially sistas—trying to come behind me. White folks who never
wanted us here in the first place would’ve been sitting around, licking their chops talking about,
‘See? Told ya they couldn’t cut it. No reason to get them all excited and upset by lettin’ em in
when we know ain’t none of em ever gone get out.’
“Nobody could make that argument now and be taken seriously, though. Too many of us
have successfully navigated this maze. So if you want to stay, stay. But if you want to go, go. Go
have a full life where you can laugh and party and hang out and be a whole person instead of
walking around here in a Kevlor vest, waiting for one of these lily-livered jerks to take you out—
and I don’t mean on a date, either!” We bend towards each other, laughing.
“You’ll be fine no matter what you decide to do,” I assure her, drawing her into my hug.
“You honor my legacy just by being here, putting up with this bullshit all these many years later.
You honor my legacy by being fine, fierce, and fearless and staring down these dried up
oppressors and their trembling spawn day after day. Nothing more is required. By the way,
where are you from?”
Her answers build a mound of convergences. Apart from the law school, we both had
childhoods in Charlotte, NC as well as lives in Atlanta and Texas. Then it is her turn to
interrogate me. Restored to her former ebullience, she wants to know what brings me back to
campus. After hesitating momentarily, I confess my plans to search the University’s archives to
see if they have recorded my place in our history.
On 11 April 1973, when the 23,000-member SGA elected me Vice President, I became the
person The Independent Florida Alligator correctly described as, “Singley, a senior law student
and the only black woman ever elected UF student body vice president.” 8 Only four months
later, I had been amputated then erased. Poof!—all gone by dint of ex post facto rulemaking and
administrative fiat.
My crime? Count one: Being black, female, and powerful in 1973 at the University of
Florida College of Law. Count two: Refusing to know my place.
Eyes slanted in disbelief, JaDawnya slowly nods her head side to side. Of course, she has
never heard this story, never heard of me in that context. When folks feel they have all the
power, they don’t even bother to create counter narratives. They just wipe out the part of the
story that doesn’t serve their ends. But, fortunately, memory can circle back and find new
opportunities to restore what’s missing. There are always loose ends flapping beyond control, a
corner that somehow escapes the clean sweep.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 21
“But don’t you worry, honey. It might’ve taken me thirty years to make it back, but here I
am. And here you are: the other end of my arc. I am so proud of you—of us!” I puff my chest out
and feign a strut.
But as soon as they are out, my words bring me up short and suddenly I’m not clowning
anymore. Decades of emotion swell, forcing me to swallow repeatedly to keep from bawling like
a baby right outside the classroom where I took Estates and Trusts in the Dark Ages. JaDawnya’s
eyes glisten in response. I force myself to recover because, more than anything else at this
moment, I want to stamp her with my impression of myself as stalwart warrior come to make
wrongs right.
“These bastards have erased me for thirty years, right? Well, now I’m here to put me back.
We’ll see what version of this story is left standing after the showdown.”
~ ~ ~
The next morning, I am up before dawn ready to pound out what’s percolated overnight. My
laptop is dead. Nothing I do—including plugging in the power supply—draws any juice. Even
without power, the black-faced monitor still manages to emit an ominous message. Reduced to
pad and paper, I head for the University archives.
Like the dead battery that started my day, a library system named Smathers is another bad
sign. Like Stephen O’Connell, to me, George Smathers spells Florida dynasty: white, male,
powerful, arch conservative. As a US Senator, Smathers voted against the Civil Rights Act of
1964, signed the “Southern Manifesto” that condemned desegregation of public schools, and
objected to Thurgood Marshall’s appointment to the US Supreme Court. Consequently, his name
is not comforting in connection with my people and me. But I have spent a lot of money and
come a long way for this, so I open the doors, enter the library, and drop over the edge of irony.
It is a quiet, large open room, solemn but with lots of natural light, the kind of library space I
love. Since I called ahead of time to discuss the archives I want to search, the boxes I need are
already on a cart next to the reference librarian’s perch. After reading printed material describing
how archived information is to be handled, I am ready to roll.
Before long, I am lost in the past. My breathing becomes shallow, my hands tremble, and I
am bathed in a film of perspiration. After thirty years, how can mere sheets of paper, most of
them only copies, trigger this response? When I find what I have come to see, I am tempted to
stop. Instead, I keep going. Much like cleaning a carpet soiled by a pet, I have to scrub beyond
the spot to make sure I arrest the odor, remove all the stain. Willing myself into a detached,
mechanical mode, I am a study in time and motion: document face down on the copier, push
“print,” original face down in one stack, copy face up in another. When I finish and turn back to
the table where I am working, a black man stands next to my chair, sizing me up.
~ ~ ~
“They called upstairs and told me you were here. My name is Joaquin Boswell. I work here.”
“So, they pay you to keep an eye on the black folks who come through?”
“No, they just said, ‘Joaquin, come down. There’s a young lady here you need to see. She
says she graduated from the law school thirty years ago.’”
A black, middle-aged one-man investigation committee, Boswell seems harmless enough
even if a tad proprietary and officious. Since he has been dispatched to find out what I am up to,
I tell him as I distribute new copies atop the growing piles.
It has taken me thirty years to get back to the spot where I am: on the University of Florida’s
campus, working my way, box by box, document by document, through Student Government
Association (SGA) files in the university’s archives housed in Smathers Library. I am there to
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 22
piece together the university’s story of my stolen election. I am the lion come back to check the
hunter’s tale of the hunt.
As I finish this summary of my excavation, I wave two pages jubilantly at Boswell. The
miracle is that my name is anywhere at all in the files. After all, the loser’s story usually resides
in what is missing from the archives. Though there is plenty missing, except for one student
newspaper article, I have found what I came looking for.
Boswell perks up when I mention the one issue of the Independent Florida Alligator I wasn’t
able to find. The story rings a bell with him, which he indicates with his raised index finger. “I
think I know exactly where to find what you’re looking for. I believe I saw that upstairs.” He
hands me his business card and disappears.
~ ~ ~
Fresh from my encounter with Joaquin, I push through the door to the Dean’s office on the
2nd floor of the law school and tell the receptionist that I have come for my transcript. She directs
me to the floor below, to the office of the junior dean who handles community affairs. I assume I
will be dealing with a black woman because this is an institutional title normally reserved for the
lowest person on the administrative staff totem pole—i.e., the black woman.
I tell the first floor receptionist why I’ve come. She points to a young man to my left, eating a
burger at his desk, as the person who can help me. I wait for him to swallow and wipe his mouth
before I repeat my request: I want a copy of my transcript and the contents of my file folder. He
pushes his half-eaten burger aside, tells me he’ll return shortly, and takes the elevator up. Since
the receptionist has returned to her work, I am left standing staring at the top of her head. A few
minutes pass as students come and go, handling their business.
Paying particular attention to the black students who enter, I notice a pattern: they are all
male, seem to be older, and seem to come from various parts of the African continent as best I
can discern from their accents. None of them acknowledge my presence. Deciding to give them
more privacy than they are afforded by my standing there listening to their conversations with
the receptionist, I look around for a seat and spy a row of empty chairs behind some file cabinets
outside an office door. As more time passes, occasionally I stand up to see if the young man
helping me has returned since he would not be able to see me in the corner behind the file
cabinets.
The young man returns about twenty minutes later. He has a cream-colored folder in his
hand. When he flips it open, its contents are few. He seems hesitant about giving me what I
want: copies of the contents of the folder in his hand. I announce that I am willing to pay for the
copies if that’s his concern. He says that he needs to check with someone first and turns to walk
away. I call him back with a request.
“I know I’m entitled to a copy of everything in that file, so if you find someone back there
who disagrees, please ask them to come out here and talk to me.” When he returns, he is wary
and fingering the contents of the file. Before he can get out whatever seems hard for him to tell
me, he turns back around and nearly runs into a tight-faced, officious woman. It seems this is the
person from whom he is taking his instructions. Despite my assumption based on her title, she is
not black. She also doesn’t look very happy. But she is the person who controls the distribution
of the information I seek, so I approach her, smiling and chatty.
“Hi. I’m Bernestine Singley. I graduated from here in 1974 and I’ve come all the way from
Texas for a copy of my transcript and the contents of that file in his hand. Do you need me to pay
you for copies?”
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 23
It is as though I am not there. Giving me the side of her head, she focuses all her attention on
the now visibly uncomfortable young man. Looking at her wristwatch, she barks out her
instructions. “She can get it at 3PM tomorrow.” Then she turns on her heels and walks away.
My watch shows 3PM. I have traveled thirty years and, on this last leg of my journey, one
thousand miles collecting evidence along the way to prove I belong where I am. Where I am is
standing two feet away from the young man who has what I want in his hands. Where I am is
staring at the retreating back of a garden variety power-tripping bitch who has just ordered him
to refuse it to me for another twenty-four hours. And she has done this for no reason except that
she could.
It is all I can do to stay put. All I can do not to chase her down, haul off and slap her as hard
as I can, and then stomp her lifeless beneath my cowboy boots. But I have come too far, paid too
high a price to allow her to take me down so easily. So I thank the sheepish young man for his
attempt to help me and tell him I will see him tomorrow.
Back outside, I head for the house where I am staying. Though it is within easy walking
distance of the law school, the trek back expends enough energy to quell my shivering rage. Too
angry to cry and too furious to sit, I stand at the kitchen sink, taking long, deep breaths while
cold water courses over my hands.
In a white supremacy, whiteness can sneak up and trump black me without warning and
leave me gagging on murderous intent. This is part of the unrelenting toll of being black in the
US, which few care to talk about, but with which I am obsessed.
No matter how old I grow, how far I travel, how much money I make, how many degrees I
earn, how quantifiable the measure of my success, in a flash, even if I am a rocket scientist, I can
find my black hands twisted and handcuffed behind my black back as I am marched, barefoot
and black, into the police station, yes, during Black History Month. Don’t take my word for it.
Ask Mae C. Jemison, MD—engineer, physician, educator, jazz dancer, African Studies scholar,
and Endeavor space shuttle astronaut—about a “routine traffic stop” in Houston in 1996. 9
Of course, this is not a lesson I ever wanted to learn. It is a fact of US life that many—maybe
even most—black folks can’t admit even now. If only denial would make it disappear. Instead,
denial is killing us.
I recount this tale during dinner with friends familiar with the law school and describe the
woman who barely escaped my beat down a few hours earlier. One of them immediately
recognizes and names the object of my ire. Armed with this information back in the guesthouse, I
sit down to my computer, which has come alive as mysteriously as it died, allowing me to log
onto the Internet to test a hypothesis.
As her online vita unfolds, it seems my nemesis is a sort of sister in law, having graduated
from a different law school nearly twenty years behind me. I’ m guessing she is not of blueblood
origins, but one who came up hardscrabble. Perhaps she wasn’t pleased to see me because she
knows that if I hadn’t been where I was thirty years ago, she wouldn’t be where she is today.
Clicking through a few search engines, I have finally pieced together her resume. It is utterly
unimpressive. First thesis confirmed: When black merit and entitlement trump whiteness, white
folks can be downright spiteful to the black folks who paved their way. White women often
suffer this affliction even worse than white men and, despite decades of evidence to the contrary,
I keep expecting my pale sisters to know and behave better. So now I’m thinking this chick had
flexed because, squared off against me, a black Harvard law graduate twenty years her senior,
she had nothing else to use in her scuffle for dominance.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 24
Thirty years earlier, there had been a tiny core group of feminist law students who stood in
solidarity with each other and accepted responsibility for smashing hierarchies of race, class, and
gender. One of us had even been the first to hold the post this oppressor harpy now occupied, a
similar deanship that had been offered to me just before I graduated.
True, there had been the requisite bevy of wispy wilting Southern violets among us, straining
to be heard, fingers daintily fluttering about their pearl necklace-encased throats, coaxing their
voices to break free of the prison of their well-bred Southern lady-whispers. But who would’ve
guessed that they would be the ones left standing, good old boys in drag, pimped out hussies
pledging allegiance to the way things were?
Yet, there is good news. No matter their obstructionist behavior—O’Connell’s disgraceful
resistance more than forty years ago or this bimbo’s antics in this moment—we keep coming. I
made it through and I am back just in time to shore up JaDawnya who will, without doubt, pass
on the favor. We will never stop fighting back. They cannot stop us.
~ ~ ~
The next day, Joaquin Boswell and I talk by phone. He launches into an effusive description
of his university connection. The more he talks, the more I understand his approach and attitude
from the day before. From his point of view, I was on his turf. Despite my repeated efforts to
reach him again, that phone call was our last contact. He never again mentioned the newspaper
article that he went to get for me and I never found it.
~ ~ ~
A year later, in January 2004, I was back on campus, this time as a guest lecturer at the law
school. It had been thirty years since I graduated and it was the first time anyone had ever invited
me to speak at UF. Though the Justice Thornall Campbell Moot Court was my host organization,
my invitation had been negotiated and flawlessly orchestrated by JaDawnya C. Butler, a Moot
Court leader and the brilliant, focused, vivacious young black woman law student, who had
introduced herself to me during my law school visit the year before.
The lecture goes well and the next night, a bunch of black UF faculty members—and Jill
White and Walter Weyrauch—sat around the dinner table at Prof. Kenneth Nunn and Dr. Patricia
Hilliard Nunn’s house. A refreshing straight-talker, Prof. Nunn had resigned several years earlier
from his post as an Asst. Dean of the UF law school to return to his tenured law faculty position.
At a public press conference, he announced that he was relinquishing his deanship to protest the
law school’s lack of serious commitment to creating a more diverse faculty. In ten years, Nunn
was the lone black professor on the faculty. He attributed the lack of progress to some white
professors who blocked hiring of black professors for years and who resisted advancement of the
few blacks hired. His resignation was widely reported, including in The New York Times.10
During dessert, I mentioned meeting Joaquin Boswell the year before. I was puzzled that he
had seemed so enthusiastic the one time I talked to him, but I had never been able to reach him
again.
“Joaquin Boswell?” Nunn looked surprised.
“Yes. You know him?”
“I believe that’s the same gentleman who caused a bit of a stir when black students were
protesting O’Connell being honored here not long ago. Boswell spoke up for him, in fact recalled
O’Connell quite fondly. He was O’Connell’s manservant back in the late 60s and early 70s.”
“His manservant?”
“Yes, O’Connell’s butler. His personal valet.”
~ ~ ~
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 25
The year I entered first grade in Charlotte, NC was the year O’Connell joined the majority of
the justices of the Florida Supreme Court in their decision to defy the U. S. Supreme Court and
refuse to admit Virgil Hawkins to UF College of Law. It was the same year Joaquin Boswell, a
black Gainesville native, entered first grade in Gainesville, FL.
By the time I graduated from high school, O’Connell was moving into the UF President’s
mansion. A year later, Joaquin Boswell was a UF student employed as O’Connell’s doting
attendant, a position he recalls drawing “resentful stares” from the other few black students on
campus in 1968. He attributes the hostile looks to black students’ jealousy of “the privileged
position” he held in O’Connell’s life where he “created floral arrangements in … O'Connell's
house, and unlike other black staff members who worked there, was allowed to enter through the
front door.” 11 Occasionally, Boswell even ate at the same table with O’Connell himself. 12
In 2000, Boswell fondly remembered his dead boss: "He was always a judge and a gentleman
to me." 13
~ ~ ~
They say reasonable minds can differ.
Whatever O’Connell was, apparently he remained that until the day he died. In 1999, he
wrote a letter to the editor, responding to an Alligator article that explored his history as a white
supremacist.
Letters to the Editor: O'Connell: Setting the record straight
Editor: Because of the errors and the one-sided slant by the writer in the April 20
[1999] "UF's Pride and Prejudice," I am compelled to write this to set the record
straight.
I begin with the statement of the writer that I refused requests for an interview. This
statement is false.
Next, on the cover page it was written by another reporter that I, as a former
Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice, denied Virgil Hawkins' appeal to enter UF's law
school. Chief Justice B.K. Roberts wrote the 1957 opinion, the last of five and the only
one I participated in. I agreed to the opinion, because it held that Mr. Hawkins'
admission at the time would, as reflected by testimony taken in Gainesville, result in
violence and "great public mischief at the university," as was occurring at other
universities.
Mr. Hawkins went to the Federal District Court in Tallahassee, which upheld
blacks' right to enter the UF College of Law but denied Mr. Hawkins' entry because he
scored about 200 on the entrance exam. The minimum required score was about 300.
The article makes it appear the black invaders were the only ones arrested for
occupying a university building, and that their arrest was an arbitrary act on my part. It
is difficult for today's reader to visualize the condition existent on our campus in the
late '60s or early '70s. Because of the number of militant student groups attempting sitins, the University Faculty Senate adopted a policy to be followed in such cases. It
provided that those sitting in would be told to leave within three minutes or be subject
to arrest.
This procedure was followed the first and second times the black students burst into
my office handing me a list of their demands, and I told them I would be glad to meet
with a representative if they scheduled an appointment. The third time they returned,
they took over the reception room and the hall outside. They were warned to leave or be
arrested. After more than an hour, they were arrested.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 26
Roy Mitchell, a black engaged as coordinator of minority affairs and who recruited
most of the students, was asked to intervene. He refused. It was later learned he had
encouraged, if not arranged, the sit-ins.
The article states that "in the following days ... O'Connell pledged to file sanctions
against the arrested students..." This is untrue. I instructed the university's attorney not
to pursue charges against those arrested and not to pursue suspension. Many elected to
withdraw, but most returned.
The statements of the black (former) students that their sit-in caused an
improvement in the university's treatment and recruitment of black students and faculty
are not correct, although understandable as an attempt to justify their acts. The
university did not alter its well-made plans and continued to implement them with
success in the number of black students, faculty and administrators attracted.
But the event and their demands caused resentment toward black students by a
large number of white students who felt blacks were afforded special treatment and
were demanding even more special treatment.
Stephen C. O'Connell
Former UF president14
So O’Connell and his segregationist thugs had predicted correctly and look what happened.
All those uppity blacks creating havoc instead of just being grateful and conducting themselves
appropriately. Instead of just one troublemaker named Virgil Hawkins, UF was faced with a
whole passel of them stirring up mess, trying to act like they were equal to whites. What a
thunderous clap of déjà vu it must have been for the law-breaking former Florida judge to see
these black “intruders” daring to stand in opposition to the policies he created specifically to
corral them. The nerve of them to come clawing for the “special treatment” Hawkins and others
of his era had won for them nearly twenty years earlier.
Who did they think they were?
~ ~ ~
At the height of O’Connell’s rein in 1970, there were about 4,000 African American lawyers
15
in the United States. The year he died, the number had leapt to nearly 40,000. Despite his best
efforts to snuff out the ambitions of Virgil Hawkins specifically and Black college students
generally, neither O’Connell nor the white supremacist forces arrayed on his side could stop
16
them.
Despite his inability to preserve American apartheid, O’Connell’s enduring legacy must be
preserved because he worked so hard to earn it. And nowhere is it better framed than in William
C. Kidder’s study of law school admissions practices as they relate to Blacks, Latinos, and
American Indians over the last fifty years of Twentieth Century.
Perhaps the most extreme example of entrenched obstructionism in defending Jim
Crow racism in law school admissions involves the University of Florida College of
Law (UFCL) and Florida public officials.
Virgil Hawkins first applied to UFCL at the age of 43 in April of 1949, and was
denied admission solely because he was Black. Hawkins’ tortuous legal battle spanned
nine years and it became embroiled in the Florida gubernatorial race.
The litigation included several petitions to the U.S. Supreme Court and five appeals
before the diehard segregationist Florida Supreme Court, which repeatedly and
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 27
illegally ignored the U.S. Supreme Court’s orders that Hawkins be admitted without
further delay.
By 1958, Hawkins withdrew his application to UFCL in exchange for an agreement
that other African Americans would at last be permitted to enroll, but he never gave up
his dream of becoming a lawyer.17
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 28
Sorry
(October 2003)
“Compassion”
Sitting on a park bench on the edge of the plaza surrounding the Sydney Opera House, I’m
gazing at the site of Sorry, wondering.
What really is the measure of forgiveness for torture, murder, maiming; for universal
subjugation at home and abroad; for unearned privilege and bottomless deprivation across town
and around the world?
What constitutes sufficient apology for wrongs that trace the arc from minor transgressions to
unspeakable evil?
Sorry. That’s what Australians strung across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 2000, five bright
red letters, 50 feet high, a public apology to the Aborgines, original owners of the land and
culture, people Australian whites have systematically decimated for centuries.
Sorry…for enslaving you, stealing your children, erasing your past.
Sorry…for the murder, rape, and pillage. Sorry.
In South Africa five years earlier, a black limousine driver, an ad hoc pitchman for “the New
South Africa,” explained the workings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to my
dozing husband and astonished me. Both the driver’s hands had whacked the air as our vehicle
careened forward, momentarily driverless.
“We don’t care if they killed our mothers and fathers or our sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles,
and cousins!” he shouted. “All we want to know is, ‘Where did you bury the bones?!’ Tell us so
we can find them and give them a proper burial.”
The Sydney banner and the TRC, two models of Sorry writ large.
When Joanne, my Aboriginal sister, tells me about the gigantic Australian apology—not
from the Australian government, mind you, but from 250,000 Australian people who showed up
on the Sydney Harbour Bridge that day—it gets me thinking.
Why did I bend to the theft of my Student Government Association Vice-Presidency in 1973
Florida18 instead of beating down my pursuers? Had I fought with all I had against Dick Julin,
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 29
Roy Hunt, the university’s lawyer, and my male running mates, would I be sitting here in 2003,
halfway around the world, nursing this gnawing remorse about not doing all I should have done
back then? Did my retreat start the slide that led to rightwing Americans proudly and blatantly
burying black votes in Florida?
Had I not forced the Florida Law Gators to learn how to flip elections in 1973, is it possible I
might have saved the planet from George W. Bush in 2000?
All these years later, looking at the space that once held Sorry, I am begging my own self’s
forgiveness.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 30
Election Protection: Flashback
“Risk”
Monday. I am lying face down, my nose buried in dingy, wrinkled sheets reeking of cigarette
smoke. Not that nearly pleasant first curl rising from a freshly lit cigarette, but that weeks-old
stench buried in the clothes, hair, and hands of the woman standing over me. Although I am
positioned for a session of intense relaxation, my gag reflex is kicki ng in big time, so much so
I’m certain I’ll soon be strangling on my own vomit.
It’s not just the smell of this woman or her sheets that flipped me into throw-up mode. It’s
the totality of my circumstances: the crushing feeling that if I had lived my life differently—no,
if I had lived it better—I would not be in this dank, dark motel room along a Tampa highway.
And a snaggle-toothed, tobacco stained stranger would not be hovering above me because I have
already paid her to touch me.
I am not lying here of my own volition although I am the one who thumbed through the
phone directory and placed the call that purchased her services. Before I called for her, I was
standing on a curb beneath a big tree in a church yard talking to Polly on my cell phone. We
were discussing the irony of my being in two places of uplift and trauma—the state of Florida
and a church—both of which I left about the same time decades ago.
And before I was under the tree, I was inside the church, in the company of a roomful of
mostly black, devoutly religious ladies like ones I have known all my life; the ones who
occupied that same space (the church kitchen) in the same kind of church (modest sized) in the
same kind of neighborhood (black and poor) where I grew up.
~ ~ ~
When Lynne Karsten called and asked me to join her in Tampa for poll monitoring through
Election Protection in 2004, I was ripe for picking. “They need lawyers,” she coaxed. “C’mon,
you can do this. You can be a lawyer just once more, just for this.”
We are the first trickle of what soon becomes a massive flood of volunteers determined to
stop white, rightwing Americans from blocking African Americans and Latinos from voting.
We believe we are the poultice for the abscess that is George “Dubya’ Bush—the First Idiot—
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 31
and his venal cabal; that we can stop them from stealing another presidential election. All across
the nation on Election Day, our scene repeats itself.
Florida is not a place I ever planned to step foot in again. Being a lawyer is not something I
ever planned to do again. Yet, here I am going back on my word and paying the price.
The coiled muscle in my lower back is radiating into a literal pain in my ass. By the time I
greet Lynne with a hug, continuous spasms are jackhammers pounding pure pain. I hobble
outside, lest my gasping curses scandalize the church ladies. Polly is my best friend and a Reiki
master. I am activating the intervention plan she and I devised before I left home.
The only thing is our plan isn’t working because the longer I stand beneath the tree talking to
her, the further I double over in pain. Pretty soon, my back has ratcheted me so far forward that I
am nearly parallel to the ground from the waist down.
Polly has taken my call in Vermont. That morning, as she has for months of mornings, she
donned her black armband and took to the street with other antiwar protesters in Craftsbury
Common’s icy pre-dawn. Now, in the spaces between my swearing, she paints the rosiest of
forecasts in two words: “We’re winning.”
Lynne is white like Polly, but a born and bred Southerner like me. During the height of
Boston’s violent racial upheaval in the 70s, we three had lives in Boston in common. But I split
that scene twenty years ago and landed in Dallas, TX, a city as racially backwards in 2004 as my
hometown, Charlotte, NC, was in 1964. Lynne at my side and Polly on the phone outline the
contours of my racial life.
Bottom line, I am a hardcore veteran of race wars and I am a torture victim who easily
shreds; a lapsed lawyer who signed on as an Election Protection Legal Volunteer convinced I
have sufficient juice left to power the pushback against Bush’s fascist regime.
It seems I have miscalculated.
~ ~ ~
I am in such agony I can’t complete a sentence. Polly advises that I need a laying-on of
hands, which is how I ended up with the gaunt woman and her stinking sheets. What my mobile
masseuse does not know is that in the parking lot directly outside my motel door, the Election
Protection volunteer who drove me back has positioned himself to ensure she neither
misinterprets the nature of my purchase nor exploits my severely weakened condition.
It is a needless caution because this poor, white, hardworking woman gets right down to
business. Although I am not Catholic, there is something about massage tables that turn me
confessional. As she kneads the spot where I’ve directed her, my pain-tied tongue loosens.
I flew into town with such noble intentions, I tell her. But then my feet hit Florida ground and
my ass was in trouble. In all the years since I have been gone, there were things I was supposed
to do, cautionary tales it was my duty to spread. I saw these vote-suppressing bastards in the
making, sat cheek and jowl with them in law school, squared off against them, stared them down.
It was my responsibility to out them if not completely rout them. Instead, somehow I let them
slip by.
“Honey, I don’t think you’re the one responsible for this voting mess,” she admonishes. Then
tapping my back, she continues. “You’re doing this to yourself, you know. You got a lot of
power, but you just let it get away from you.”
It is her voice I hear the next evening when I square off against the grizzled geezer who
pushed up on me. Her voice is what saves me from stomping this creaking vessel of oppression
and landing my ass in jail at the end of Election Day. On my own dime and my own time, I came
one thousand miles for this?
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 32
TampaVote 2004
Tuesday (Election Day). Thirty years ago, I fled Florida after graduating from law school,
vowing never to return to this treacherous terrain. After ten years total practicing law in Boston
and Dallas, I quit law altogether with another vow, this time about lawyering: Never again.
Yet, here I am at the end of Election Day 2004: fist cocked, ready to clock a Florida cracker
who, despite being stooped by age, just body-slammed me. In Tampa, Florida. Where I am as a
legal volunteer.
“What’re you doing in line if you’re not here to vote?” he demands, still pressed against me.
I shove him away.
“You know who I am and why I’m here,” I say calmly and quietly. “You’ve been looking at
me all day. But more importantly than that, right now, you need to step the fuck away from me.
And whatever else you do, don’t ever touch me again.”
A black woman poll worker with a Caribbean accent appears. She watches us silently. Their
Anglo female supervisor, designer-clad from head to toe, stands nearby. She, too, is silent. I walk
over to her and repeat my warning.
“You’d better tell him. He’ll be sorry if he touches me again.”
He strolls over, openly gloating. “Let her write that down in her little report,” he says to the
supervisor as though I’m invisible, referring to the election violations reports we have been
recording and phoning in all day. “I don’t know why she thinks I know who she is. They all look
alike to me. Hee hee.”
* * * *
Just twenty-four hours earlier, I had such noble intentions. Our massive coalition of
volunteers gathered to stop one group of Americans—white—from denying other Americans—
African American and Latino—their right to vote.
But as soon as my feet hit Florida ground, I knew I was in trouble. Going back on my word
set off my surefire sign of terror, the coiled muscle in my lower back that spiraled off into
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 33
continuous spasms. Before long, waves of shooting pain drove me from Election Protection
headquarters to a masseuse’s table back in my hotel room.
“Honey, I don’t think you’re the one responsible for this voting mess,” she admonished when
I confessed what I believed was the source of my distress. She tapped my back. “You’re doing
this to yourself, you know. You got a lot of power, but you just let it get away from you.”
It is her voice I hear as I square off against the grizzled geezer who just pushed up on me.
Her voice is what saves me from stomping this creaking vessel of oppression and landing my ass
in jail.
This day—Election Day—did not start out like this. On my own dime and my own time, I
came one thousand miles for this?
~ ~ ~
I.
Gladys 19 is our first voter challenge of the day. An ex-felon whose civil rights have been
restored, under Florida law she is legally entitled to vote a regular ballot. She is furious and
crying when Alex20 and I walk up.
Here’s her story: Ancient white-haired Anglo poll workers have not simply turned Gladys
back. Rather, to reinforce their oppression, they have called the Elections Board in Tallahassee
and put Gladys on the phone. The voice on the other end has threatened that if she votes,
“It might even be a criminal act."
Alex, my volunteer lawyer partner, is a born and bred southerner like me. Like Gladys, I am
black; Alex is not. He lives in and has flown here from Europe, as I have from Texas, to
personally help save votes of Americans like Gladys.
Together, Gladys and Alex wrench a provisional ballot from the naysayers. Transformed by
this voting victory, she throws her arms around us. “I already helped 200 people early vote,” she
explains, flicking away huge tears of relief. “I wasn’t about to go out like that.”
Twelve hours later, Gladys is back. She double parks, hustles her carload of passengers up
the sidewalk, and shoves them past the scowling white male sentry seconds before he bolts the
door to the polling place.
* * * *
II.
A mile away, at another precinct, an elderly woman—la Señora—frustrated and forlorn,
beckons me. Speaking only Spanish and gesturing, eventually she grabs my arm and leads me
inside the polling place.
Another face-off with another set of tight-faced old white folks determined to deny another
American her vote. Señora’s determination, pulsating and palpable, pins me to her side. We wait.
Florida law requires Spanish-speaking poll workers in this precinct. There are two Latina
women present, but I can’t get their attention. Señora hunches me in the side and shakes her head
at my efforts. When I say they will help us, she nearly spits her disgust. No, she says, they are
the same ones who refused to help her before.
“Ellas estan como los otros (waving at the whites seated at the table). No quieren los negros,
(pointing to me) y los moreños (pointing to herself) a votar!” They are like the others. They
don’t want blacks and browns voting.
Our waiting finally pays off when Señora exchanges her absentee ballot for a voting card. I
hold her place in line while pushing her towards the Latina poll worker who has spent more than
fifteen minutes repeating voting instructions to an old white man.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 34
An hour after we first entered, Señora has finished voting. Rejoining elderly Latino and
Asian friends waiting outside in the bright sunshine, she thrusts her fist skyward and shouts, "I
been in this line for three hours and I voted!"
~ ~ ~
III.
They stream steadily throughout the day: pressed, permed youngsters, people of color, poor
folks, old folks, laborers, mamas with babies, brothas slinging bling, sistas rocking the spandex.
Vote warriors.
A trio of 18-year old black girls races up. “We just voted for the first time,” one breathlessly
proclaims. “Aw, she saw you way back there and she picked you to say that to because she knew
it would make you happy,” her friend chimes in. “We just made history!” the third one shouts.
They prance off the curb.
I fantasize that it is Warrior me, fierce guardian of the vote, emitting the scent of
protection—not me of the beleaguered spirit and bent back of the day before—that drew the girls
to me.
Around 6PM, back at the precinct where our day started, I spy a weary young woman leaving
the polling place.
“Did you vote without a problem?” I ask. No, she’s been in line for forty-five minutes and
just can’t take it anymore. “If I had voted, though, this would’ve been my first time,” she offers
sadly.
Pointing to her beautifully round belly, I ask, “So, when are you due?”
“December 5th.”
“Oh, please, y’all have to vote! Do you want a sandwich? Water? Want me to stand in line
for you?”
She hesitates. Nearly nine months pregnant, after working all day, she is visibly exhausted.
Then her chocolate face loosens into a smile and she trudges back to her place in line. More than
an hour later, she votes.
~ ~ ~
IV.
Inside the door, I take my place behind the last voter to mark the end of Election Day in this
precinct. This is when the old white man rolls up on me. I am there to make sure that everyone in
line gets to vote. He’s there for something different.
The Latina is pretty and spirited. She, too, has witnessed my exchange with the old man vote
blocker. She smiles knowingly when I return to my place in line behind her. Accompanied by
three grandchildren she is “raising alone,” she points to her own “baby” across the room, an 18year old son bent over a voting screen.
“They tried to send him way across town to some place that was gonna be closed by the time
we got there. I told them, ‘No way. This is his first time voting and he’s doing it right here where
I vote. Ask us those questions again. Now we know the right answers.’” A quick study, in an
instant, she has outsmarted the would-be vote suppressors.
~ ~ ~
Up since 4:30AM, twelve hours moving nonstop among three precincts, my job is finally
over. In the balmy darkness, I am aswirl with teary emotion. Thirty years. Never again. Yet, here
I am, standing in history.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 35
A stir lifts my head. Two black boys strut from the polling place, grinning. Immaculate in
razor-creased jeans and gleaming white t-shirts, these brothas break stride, face each other, and
leap into the air. Backlit by reflected light, outlined against the sky, without saying a word, they
slap high five.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 36
I Coulda Been Condoleeza
Only a really shattered, scotch- or martini-guzzling upward-mobility-struck house nigger
could possibly deny the relentless tension of the black condition.
James Baldwin21
“I know Dean Julin is dead, but what about the rest of the good ol boys—Roy Hunt, Tyrie,
Richard?” In a Florida restaurant in 2004, I am wondering aloud about what became of the
scheming Gators. Turns out my dinner date knows.
“Are you ready for this? Roy was Katherine Harris’ advisor in the 2000 election.” Katherine
Harris, Florida Secretary of State and overseer of massive vote “irregularities” that stole the 2000
election for George Bush. Shot-caller for harassment and armed disenfranchisement of Democrat
voters. That Katherine Harris. More recently, Hunt was honored by the State of Florida for his
lifelong commitment to keeping things in Florida the way they are. 22
“Well, what about Tyrie?” Seems he answers to “Your Honor” in Jacksonville while Richard
Cole plies his trade further south where he is a Miami lawyer.
Successfully axing me had not been a foregone conclusion because, as University of Florida
law school and university administrators could see, Tyrie Boyer and his cohorts immediately set
about seriously screwing things up. The law students’ malevolence so greatly exceeded their
collective intelligence that their botched attempt to oust me was going nowhere. So, Assistant
Dean E. L. “Roy” Hunt stepped in and orchestrated the law school’s hatchet job. By violating the
most fundamental rules of law and ethical conduct, Hunt made history of my historic SGA
tenure.
It is said that gators are cold-blooded reptiles who swallow their prey whole. As one who got
away, I offer myself as Fate’s Exhibit 1. Instead of reviling Florida Gators for trying their best to
do me in, though, I owe them a debt I can never repay. After all, had they welcomed me into
their fold back then, I might still be creeping through the slimy backwater swamp of politics,
looting public coffers, trading in cronyism, fear- and hate-mongering, all in service to white
supremacist oppression.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 37
The way I see it, but for getting mauled by Gators, I coulda become Condoleeza. 23
~ ~ ~
Ezola was a kind of evil I hadn’t encountered very often: a black woman who had no special
feeling for other black women…It isn’t that I think black women are perfect. It’s just that I
always think, deep down, there’s a little spark of sisterhood that binds us together, no matter
what. Sometimes we don’t nurture it like we should, and sometimes we let other people abuse it,
but I always think it’s in there, waiting for the right moment to leap out, warm your heart, feed
your soul, and save the day.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe sisterhood doesn’t always survive everything intact and come
out unscathed. Maybe it can be twisted and warped to the point where you think you deserve a
throne and everybody else is just a sorry black bitch who can’t—and won’t—do better…24
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 38
Toe-to-Toe with a Serial Offender
Fall 2002
I first got the drop on Jethro in the shadow of the nation’s capital. We were in a large city on
the east coast headlining a book signing and panel discussion featuring my essayists from When
Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories 25
My friends who organized the event and I were worried about turnout even though we had a
high-octane lineup. Among the panelists were an MIT Ph.D. economist and columnist; a
syndicated columnist who would win the Pultizer Prize months later; a popular, young white
activist and writer; and Jethro, activist, writer, and teacher. As the editor of the book and
convener of the event, I was the panel moderator.
Despite our worries, folks packed the bookstore to standing-room only. When the crowd
spilled out of the bookstore, down the steps, and out into the street, we had to turn people away.
The bookstore owners had stopped counting guests when they passed 200. We sold 100 books.
Still abuzz after the gathering, a few friends and I retired to a nearby bar to rehash the
emotionally wrenching two-hour discussion. The fury, contrition, and hopefulness that had laced
our conversation in the bookstore had turned into an emotional slurry that crept down the street
behind us and seeped into our bar room conversation. Jethro was the only white person among
us. His eyes glittered with tears as he moaned about what he considered his humiliatingly
disappointing performance. Two of my best friends—African American women who are
corporate executives, mothers and extremely racially astute—sat on either side of Jethro,
clucking and comforting him. From across the table, at first I joined them in trying to lift Jethro’s
spirit. Suddenly, I saw his game.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 39
“Both of yall, take your damn hands off him!. He’s just upset because Tim Wise is the young
cock on the block who breathed up all the air in the room. Jethro came in there just knowing he
was gonna be the starring act. Then, all of a sudden, right outta the blue, here comes Timmy,
stealing Jethro’s thunder. So, this right here? This is just a white boy trick to make Jethro the
center of attention here because he couldn’t be the center of attention back there.”
I said it half jokingly, but Jethro and I knew I had nailed hi m. We had already dispensed with
our assessment of Tim Wise, about how full of himself he had been right up until that tiny,
white-haired, elderly black woman stepped to him. By the time she backed him down, he was
sitting in stunned silence and the room was in sobs.
“So, this ain’t just about Jethro because a couple of folks got their comeuppance today. Back
up off him and let him take care of himself.”
Later as we prowled U Street in the rain, looking for a place to eat, Marilyn said what she
was thinking.
“Girl, don’t you think you were being a little hard on Jethro? I think he really did feel bad
about his performance today. He really didn’t seem to be into it.”
“Bullshit, I was hard on him! He’s lucky I didn’t go harder on him in front of yall. And,
yeah, he felt bad alright. That’s exactly why he was weeping. Jethro’s used to being the only
white boy in the room saying stuff about race that black folks rarely hear white folks say. So,
that’s always gotten him plenty of props among adoring black folks. Hell, it’s what brought him
to my attention. But Tim Wise has got that game down, too, and that face-off today, Tim walked
away with alla Jethro’s stuff. That’s all that bar scene was about and that’s why Jethro was
literally crying in his beer.”
~ ~ ~
Spring 2004
In a Virginia college town, the night before the book festival that has brought us here, I’m
sitting in the hotel bar near midnight catching up with Malcolm. We’re talking about When
Race Becomes Real, the book that has brought us to the east coast again, discussing what we’ll
be doing the next day with Jethro.
“So, what do you know about this Jethro fellow?” Malcolm asks. Although Malcolm and I
have met only twice before, he feels comfortable inviting me to share in an intimate, deep
tradition among black folks: comparing notes on white folks.
I tell Malcolm my story about Jethro at the 2002 book event. And since Marilyn is one of
Malcolm’s protégées, I tell him about our bar conversation as well as the one Marilyn and I had
later. Malcolm listens intently and then says, “Hmmmm. That’s a very astute observation.”
“Hey, don’t take my word for it. You can check him out yourself tomorrow. So, don’t forget
to tell me what you see.”
As I head back up to my room, though, I feel guilty. In the stories I’ve shared with Malcolm,
it’s clear I not only question Jethro’s sincerity, I’m close to deciding he’s little more than a rank
opportunist. How two-faced was I to be talking about Jethro behind his back? Even though my
black friends and I routinely dissect white folks when they’re not in the room, I feel like maybe
Jethro deserves better from me. After all, good race allies are hard to come by and I’m always
complaining that most white folks try to pretend race doesn’t even exist. So when I find one
who’ll not only say the “r” word, but even use it in a sentence referring to himself, why shouldn’t
I give him the benefit of the doubt?
Next morning, we had our discussion with a mostly black roomful of book lovers and that
was that.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 40
Summer 2004
A month later, Jethro was back again, this time with a published essay about his version of
what happened at the book festival. As he has recorded his story for posterity, he was sitting
there with Malcolm and me, feeling superior—to Malcolm.
I’m pissed off not only about his sentiments, but also because he’s gotten another book out of
it. And I stay pissed off for another six months beyond that because that’s how long it takes me
to sort through my feelings enough to write my version of that experience.
Before I can get my story down, I spend time being pissed off about getting pissed off and
staying pissed off for so long. Even when it comes to race, white boys can just knock out their
snappy little race essays—bam! bam! bam!—all in a row of serial publications. They’re on their
productive grind while I sit, stalled from stewing.
Can a sista get a goddamn break anywhere?
~ ~ ~
“I’ll be in the car, so come on out when you’re ready to go,” my husband calls out to me as
he heads for the garage. We’re supposed to be on our way to Sunday brunch.
“In a minute,” I promise, having just opened Jethro’s e-mail. His e-mail subject line is the
title of a work-in-progress about his propensity—naturally—to feel superior to black folks in his
vicinity no matter what vicinity that is. And since Jethro’s race work is essentially self-inflicted,
public bloodletting, naturally, he feels soooo bad about—and drained by—constantly feeling so
superior.
Jethro’s e-mail attachment is his essay about our Virginia panel discussion with Malcolm, an
award-winning, continent-hopping, Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran black male journalist, a
managing editor revered inside and outside his industry. We three were a panel at a book festival
which has apparently ignited a racial epiphany for Jethro. He notes that he’s also sending it to
Malcolm for his feedback because, “These kinds of pieces are tricky; easy for them to slide into
self-indulgence.”
Barely 300 words into his tricky piece, I smack the print button, snatch up the first two pages,
and race outside to find my husband.
“Awrrrriiight! I knew it! It’s about damn time one of them admitted it!” I crow, waving the
paper like it’s State’s Exhibit 1.
“’Them’ who, honey?”
“Arrogant, racist white folks, that’s who? But, you know what? I give this white boy credit
for one thing: He will step up and tell the truth. Listen to this.” Whereupon, I read a snippet in
which Jethro says he felt superior to Malcolm even knowing Malcolm was way beyond Jethro’s
competence or accomplishments in every, objectively measurable way.
“Well, what else did he say? You can’t just run out here yelling like that, read a few
sentences, and stop. Give me a two-sentence synopsis.”
“You already know the rest. It’s just more of Jethro’s eternal dick-waving. The only twist is,
in this story, the dickless one on the stage—that would be moi—isn’t even a factor in the
equation.”
“Aw, c’mon, honey, he didn’t really say that, did he? I know you don’t want to hear it, but I
think you’re taking this too personally. Any chance you might be overreacting?”
“Hmmmm, let’s see. Yup, you’re right. I was wrong. He did include me. Here I am right
here: ‘the other panelist.’ And then…poof! He’s through with me. Just wiped me off the stage.
Racist, sexist asshole! Without me, neither the book, the panel, nor his latest opportunity for
another self-congratulatory confession would’ve happened. And, yet…”
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 41
"No, no, no! That's not what he's saying. It's not about you at all. He and Malcolm are
journalists and professors, so Malcolm was more of a threat than you. It’s a man thang, honey."
“Ohhhh, I get it alright. But he doesn’t get it and, obviously, neither do you, which is why
you can cut me off mid-sentence, dismiss what I haven’t even finished saying, tell me I’m
overreacting, and explain that this ain’t about me?”
“I don’t want to argue. Can we just go eat? You always feel better with a full stomach.”
“Well, one thing a full stomach won’t change is the fact that you’re a sexist asshole just like
Jethro! I can’t believe it…I mean…wow. I never thought you’d turn out to be one of them.”
After nearly twenty years together, seventeen of them married, Gary and I are experts at
navigating this terrain. When I’m mining the race pit, he steers clear unless invited and even then
he might refuse to go where I’m headed. We drive to the restaurant in silence.
In the parking lot, I lower my sunglasses to signal a truce. “If you hope to have any
semblance of a civil conversation with me during this meal, you cannot mention Jethro, race, or
white folks.” He grins and opens the restaurant door for me.
Back home, I sprint to my office for the remaining eight pages of Jethro’s race navel-gazing.
I prance into Gary’s office, plant myself between him and the football game he’s watching, and
drop the document in his lap. “You think you’re so smart, Mr. Man. Read the rest of what Jethro
had to say. I was right. You were wrong.”
~ ~ ~
I never answered Jethro’s email. If he was looking for an ass-kickin or an ass-kicking, he
didn’t get either. But I’d be lying to say it was as cut and dried as that because after my first flush
of rage, I started marveling at his “bravery.” How hard it must be, I thought, for him to confess
his shortcomings. Harder still to erase his fantasy of racial superiority and face up to the crushing
reality of his white bread mediocrity.
The next day, though, I was back to “Fuck him!” I didn’t know what made me more tired:
Knowing Jethro’s feelings of racial superiority were true and omnipresent and me feeling
murderous in the face of white folks’ constant denials; or finally having Jethro confess what I
already knew and then just being damned depressed because I was right all along.
Next thing I knew I was thinking maybe I should congratulate him. I mean, back in DC in
2002, I just assumed his smug, white boy manipulations would simply become his modus
operandi. Yet, a mere two years later, he was going public about his chronic illness and his
pining for a cure. But Barbara, a writer friend, put me in check.
“No, sweetie, your first reaction was right. What Jethro’s doing is called ‘being human.’
White folks don’t get congratulated for that. That’s what they’re supposed to be.”
Years later, after putting up with Jethro’s constant public fingering of his white supremacist
wounds; after witnessing him perform his public confessions—up close and personal and from
afar; after throwing down on him privately and publicly, I was still there. Hope kept overriding
my experiences with white folks like him and with him. Hope still does. Many of my black
friends shake their heads in disbelief, some in horrified wonder, that this is so.
Jethro, however, has left the building. After one long, excruciating ordeal we shared
unevenly—as is always the case, especially when black women work in the presence of white
men—Jethro gave up on me and him. Mowed down in the line of dutifully dismantling his own
white supremacy, Jethro pronounced it all futile and returned to the podium where lone male
voices have always prevailed, authoritative and unchallenged. He is back to being in a place
where his minions look up—but don’t speak up—to the white man.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 42
JaDawnya C. Butler: The Remix
Of the African Americans students who entered law school in the fall of 1991…about 40%
did not graduate or graduated but had not passed a bar exam within two years of graduating.
Only 17% of the white students in this 1991 cohort suffered either of these fates.26
On a bright sunny December day, perfect for a law school graduation, JaDawnya darts out,
robe and mortarboard in hand, beckoning me. I remember nothing about my graduation
ceremony thirty years ago: where it was held, who our commencement speaker was, or even who
took top honors. But this December day—JaDawnya’s day—I will never forget.
Not only did JaDawnya stick it out at UF, she remained a vocal student leader, won multiple
state, regional, and national Moot Court competitions, and achieved the ultimate honor when her
classmates chose her to deliver the class speech at graduation. To sweeten that victory even
more, one of the contenders she beat was a conniving white boy who, for three years, fronted to
her face as a friend while trying to gut her from behind. She is too noble to stoop to gloating. I
am not.
Having argued for and won permission for my participation, JaDawnya has asked me to
“hood her”—lower the collar over her head—at graduation. On 16 December 2004, I do so,
signaling her lifetime achievement up to that point and welcoming her to the world Virgil D.
Hawkins made possible for us both.
Today, the O’Connell legacy is touched with a profoundly benign brush on the website of the
University of Florida’s Office of the President which reads, “Perhaps [O’Connell’s] greatest
achievement was the reorganization of the Alumni Association and the creation of an Office of
Development staffed by professional fund raisers.”27 Uh huh, perhaps.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 43
While O’Connell lies buried somewhere in Florida, Joaquin Boswell has buried himself in
Gainesville in a different kind of way. A 2005 press release announcing Boswell’s appointment
to a position as a public steward describes his job as “Archivist of Negro History.” 28
Meanwhile, in a twist that would be insufferably cliché if it weren’t true, Professor Walter O.
Weyrauch, my mentor, lifetime friend, and esteemed law anarchist, spent his final years holding
the Stephen C. O’Connell endowed chair on the University of Florida law faculty. 29 Walter held
that chair until the year before he died in October 2008, three weeks before Barack Hussein
Obama was elected President of the United States. I thrill to the image of O’Connell, a whirling
dervish six feet under, spinning in outrage as Walter, with his characteristically intense curiosity,
gazes on.
In the fall of 2005, Ms. Butler kicked the odds in the teeth again when she passed the Georgia
Bar exam—one of the toughest in the country—the first time. Then, after five years in a
successful solo practice she built in Atlanta, Georgia, Attorney JaDawnya C. Butler became a
Fulton County Assistant District Attorney.
In the 27 August 2012 issue of the Daily Report, a bible for her Georgia lawyer peers, she is
smiling, elegant, and taking up the full front cover. Turns out Assistant DA Butler is one of 13
young lawyers who beat out 117 other lawyers for the distinction of being tagged by her lawyer
colleagues as a star “On the Rise: Rising Lawyers Under 40,” the title of the article.30 How did
Butler land a spot among that elite?
Someone in the newsroom…reminded me several weeks ago that unlike some lawyer
lists and rankings, our annual On the Rise picks are not a reward. ‘This is more of a
horse race,’ she said.
She hit the nail on the head. Every one of this year's 117 reader-nominated
candidates deserves an award for their hard work, intellect and passion for the law.
And every one of them would make a great story.
Our picks were chosen not because of where they've been, but because of where we
think they're headed.31
For Stephen O’Connell, for Walter O. Weyrauch and for his protégés—JaDawnya C. Butler
and me—there is a saying in the law that applies: Res ipsa loquitur. The thing speaks for itself.
I rest our case.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 44
Notes
1
Robert Jensen, “The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism, and White Privilege (San
Francisco: City Lights 2005), pp. 71-72.
2
Leanita McClain, “How Chicago Taught Me to Hate Whites,” Washington Post 24 Jul. 1983.
Monroe Anderson, “My Bittersweet Memorial Day Memory of Leanita McClain,” 29 May
2009. http://monroeanderson.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/05/my-bittersweet-memorial-daymemory-leanita-mcclain.html.
3
4
Anderson 29 May 2009.
5
“Leanita McClain: Writer’s Death Puzzling,” The Victoria Advocate 31 May 1984, p. 11A.
From the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame: “With a bright future ahead of her, McClain gained
national attention with publications in Newsweek Magazine and The Washington Post, and was
selected by Glamour Magazine as one of the ‘USA's Top Ten Working Women for '84.’”
http://www.chicagoliteraryhof.org/PersonDetail.aspx?PersonID=81
Steve Rhodes, “McClain’s Pain,” The Beachwood Reporter 18 Jun. 2009, on the 25th anniversary
of her death, a look back at McClain’s life through a compilation of clips by her journalist
colleagues.
Irma McLaurin-Allen, “Incongruities: Dissonance and Contradiction in the Life of a MiddleClass Black Woman,” pp. 315-333.
http://duca94.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/irma_black_mc001.pdf
6
Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons (Oxford: Heinemann 1979), p. xiv.
7
“Nationally, the percentage of women entering the nation’s law schools has grown from 4.2
percent in 1963 to 48.7 percent in Fall 1999, according to the September edition of Student
Lawyer Magazine, in an article titled ‘The New Majority’ by Jane Easter Bahls. The UF law
school’s percentage of female students parallels that, according to Admissions Office figures for
Fall 2000. Of the 1,180 total law students, 574 – or 49 percent – are women (and 27 percent are
minorities).” FlaLaw, October 23, 2000.
8
Independent Florida Alligator, 31 May 1973, p. 1.
9
Jesse Katz, “Shooting Star: Mae Jemison,” by Jesse Katz, Stanford Today July/August 1996.
10
William Glaberson, “Accusations of Bias Roil Florida Law School,” New York Times 30 Oct.
2000.
11
Andrew Marra, “Forum Offers New Angle on UF Racial History,” Independent Florida
Alligator 28 Nov. 28 2000.
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 45
12
Marra 28 Nov. 2000.
13
Marra 28 Nov. 2000.
14
http://www.alligator.org/edit/issues/99-sumr/990511/c03lets11.htm
15
Cheryl I. Harris and William C. Kidder, “The Black Student Mismatch Myth in Legal
Education: The Systemic Flaws in Richard Sander’s Affirmative Action Study,” Journal of
Blacks in Higher Education Winter Issue 2004/2005.
16
“The Real Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in American Law Schools: An Empirical
Critique of Richard Sander’s Study,” David L. Chambers, Timothy T. Clydesdale, William C.
Kidder, Richard O. Lempert, Stanford Law Review, February 2005, p. 1.
http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/sander_rebuttal_v5_draft.pdf
17
William C. Kidder, The Struggle for Access from Sweatt to Grutter: a History of African
American, Latino, And American Indian Law School Admissions, 1950-2000, 19 Harvard
BlackLetter Law Journal 1-41 (Spring, 2003) (footnotes omitted)
18
For the full story of “the theft in Florida,” see Bernestine Singley, One Thousand Southern
White Men: The Florida Years http://www.beforebarack.com/one-thousand-southern-white-men/
19
Not her real name.
20
Not his real name.
21
Baldwin, James, “Every Good-bye Ain’t Gone,” The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction
1948-1985 (NY: St. Martin’s/Marek 1985), p. 643. Originally published in New York magazine,
December 19, 1977.
22
“Citizens recognized for historic preservation in Florida,”
http://dhr.dos.state.fl.us/news/news/2007_HP_announce.pdf
23
Katherine probably should’ve taken notes from Condoleeza because Katherine didn’t fare
nearly as well when it was payback time. Brian Montopoli, in “Jilted: The Bush Brothers Kick
Katharine to the Curb,” 30 June 2005, reports Katherine was tricked into not running for Florida
Governor in 2004 with the promise that she would receive White House and Republican Party
support for a Senate run in 2006. When 2006 rolled around, said support didn’t. Oops.
http://www.slate.com/id/2121746/
24
Pearl Cleage, Babylon Sisters (New York: One World/Ballantine ), p. 264.
25
Bernestine Singley, ed., When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their
Personal Histories. 2nd ed. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008).
http://www.siupress.com/catalog/productinfo.aspx?id=2838
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 46
26
Cheryl I. Harris and William C. Kidder, “The Black Student Mismatch Myth in Legal
Education: The Systemic Flaws in Richard Sander’s Affirmative Action Study,” Journal of
Blacks in Higher Education, Winter Issue, 2004/2005.
http://www.equaljusticesociety.org/Sander_Harris_Kidder_JBHE_Article_2_05.pdf
27
http://www.president.ufl.edu/pastPres/oconnell.htm last accessed 16 Jun 2006.
28
Emphasis added.
29
After teaching law at the University of Florida for fifty-one years, Walter retired in December
2007. He died on 17 October 2008.
30
Greg Land, “On the Rise: Rising Lawyers Under 40: JaDawnya Butler, 32, Fulton County
Assistant District Attorney,” Daily Report, 27 Aug. 2012
http://www.dailyreportonline.com/PubArticleDRO.jsp?id=1202568844755 bit.ly/TFsbhO
31
Mary Smith Judd, “On the Rise 2012: Editor’s Note,” 27 Aug. 2012
http://www.dailyreportonline.com/PubArticleDRO.jsp?id=1202568844755
Playing Chess with Monkeys Page 47