I told my son I planned to use the word nigger in my blog and he was appalled to no end. His face contorted in alarm and said that the word connoted poison. He rightly commented that I shouldn't strive to be controversial at the expense of ruffled feelings of Afro Americans. Well, I said I wanted freedom from having to whisper the word nigger. I want to be able to say nigger without the recrimination. Barack Obama would have changed its meaning in history. Now you can say it without feeling you stepped on a cat. In the same way that Flips got their redemption because of boxing glory from Manny Pacquiao.
There was a time when the newly married Reginald Lewis, (now deceased) founder of Beatrice and first black billionaire , a fine lawyer and a Harvard grad, paid a courtesy call on my Dad at our home in Magallanes Village in the company of his young bride, Loida Nicolas Lewis. My father, Atty. Raul D. Leveriza, who was Vice President of PNB (Philippine National Bank) had helped NicFur, the company of the father of Ms. Loida Nicolas survive a bad time by restructuring its loans with the state owned bank.
My siblings and myself were lukewarm to the prospect of meeting him. He had not broken ground yet in Harlem as a corporate innovator to put up his Beatrice business empire. We were put off by the choice of Ms. Loida Nicolas who came from solid Manila gentry, schooled in foreign shores and a former ramp model in picking an American Negro to be her husband. It was only when my father trumpeted Reginald Lewis' credential as a Harvard law graduate that we all made a beeline to the living room to uneasily shake his hand in awe.
My father took me aside and scolded me for my standoffish attitude. He admonished me that all guests should be accorded the same warm welcome no matter the color of the skin, station in life, or educational attainment. I jested that I thought I did a lot better than him in the case of Mr. Hans Richter from Germany. That recall froze him in his tracks with the tinge of embarrassment. It somehow got me off the hook albeit temporarily from a more serious dressing down.
My cousin who was a nurse in Germany brought over her new German husband to be introduced to my father for the first time. As they were ushered in through the front door, my father who was descending the stairs with a smile on his face to welcome them, spied our German Shepherd named Hans peek his face through the door behind the gathering. Unaware of the visitor's name or ethnic background, my father bellowed to the dog from his perch on the stairway, "hans, get out." "down hans, down boy". Poor Mr. Hans Richter who didn't see the dog couldn't make heads or tails of the situation and thought that World War II war movies had left such a lingering stigma in the psyche of Filipinos against Germans.
Back in the 1950's when we were young boys in Pasay the misconception that black skin suggested villainy was bolstered by an unsavory incident. There was a single mulatto, a young teener who lived on Leveriza street and stood out like a sore thumb in a sea of brown and yellow. He was ostracized and catcalls followed him wherever he went. He probably got tired of it and went over the edge because when my brother Dennis teased him as he passed in front of our yard, he reacted violently by throwing stones at us while we clung up a tree beside the gate. One rock found its mark and bloodied Dennis' scalp who was barely eight years old. Getting him down from the tree wailing and bloodied was a horrifying ordeal.
My father refused to press charges and said we deserved it. He accepted the apology of the Filipina mother who brought the teener over to face the consequence of his actions. My father was so annoyed with our budding racism. He said we should behave better than the mindless street urchins outside who didn't know any better because he spent a fortune to send us to Ateneo. As part of our cultural immersion he made us sit through his favorite Sidney Poiter movies every time one came along in the box office. He made us sit still and listen for hours to long playing records of his favorite warbler Nat King Cole. That's why I do a mean 'Besame Mucho' when afforded the chance at the karaoke.
Fast forward to Houston, Texas, in the 80's. My brother in law got into a traffic altercation with a black right there in the driveway of our apartment complex in Inwood Forest at Harris County. The black in the heat of passions hit and damaged my brother in law's car who went down and grabbed the adversary by the front collar. The commotion caused a lot of the inhabitants to come out to watch the ugly scene. My brother in law never forgave me for not running over to help him beat up the guy. My first instinct was to restrain my young nephew who came down toting his absent Dad's shotgun. Everybody owned a shotgun in good old Texas. I grabbed my nephew by the arm and pointed to the long line of blacks who stood a neutral distance from the imbroglio as an obvious sign of restraint to prevent a racial gang war. I made him come to his senses and respect the demarcation line. The two protagonists were left to resolve their own issues one on one and rightly so.
My first real deep connection with an Afro American was at work in Sunlovers in Houston. Our outfit was a tour wholesaler to Acapulco and Cancun in Mexico. It was not a good guage about inter racial equanimity because the truth is unbeknownst to my wife, Mona, I fell truly and madly in love, totally smitten by my office colleague Patty, the first black I grew to meet up close. Patty you should know is a carbon copy of Nicole Scherzinger and was a model like Nicole , and in Patty's case she served as a late hours floor model for Neiman Marcus in Houston. She'd work with us until five p.m. then run off to the ritzy department store to do her stint until closing time.
It was that fateful, afternoon in a Viet restaurant over Imperial rolls that we had a private tete a tete to let out our true feelings in the open. I began of course with a litany of my undying affection for her coupled with a proposition to toast the whole affair with a physical highlight. She turned her face away so dramatically and strained to check her facial expression. She said that she had been waiting for this chance to tell me for so long but couldn't find the strength and the right atmosphere. Whew, I trembled in anticipation with all my being. Then she said with teary eyes, " Joey, don't take this as a personal affront, I want to be your friend forever, but you need a stronger deodorant." "The ethnic food you fix at home leaves you with a distinct odor."
My youngest son Regis Josef was born in the New York State University Brooklyn hospital. The place was teeming with blacks. All the newborn babies to the the left and right of him were all mahogany skinned. Most of the nurses cooed and swayed like Janet Jackson or Paula Abdul. But despite my son's multimedia exposure to the exploits of the likes of Lebron James, Kobe Bryant, and Tiger Woods, my son was not necessarily enamored with the black race. He waxed apprehensive about living there after graduation from college in La Salle and kept pestering me with questions about surviving in a milieu filled with the intimidation from living shoulder to shoulder with black rapper gangsters.
I am such a lucky writer. I always have aces to end a story with dramatic flair. It seems I can pull them out from my sleeve with such ease like they were stored in a subliminal threshold waiting to be told with the right occasion. But rest assured they were not concocted to lend poignancy to a narration. But you be the judge. Try to see if such a tale could be invented from imagination without the intricate points ever really happening.
Like my father to me it is my sublime duty to set my youngest son straight about racial equality. And so I told him about the story about how America said goodbye to us when we went home in 1989 and I carried him on the plane in a bassinet. On the eve of our departure, California greeted us with a 7.1 magnitude earthquake on the Richter scale. It was like doomsday because a major freeway collapsed. The San Francisco airport where we were supposed to take our flight out was immobilized for three whole days.
We were doing last minute shopping at the Serramonte mall in Daly City when the tragedy happened. The ground shook and an eerie rumble from hell made everybody panic and run for cover. My eight year old eldest boy, Ramon and seven year old daughter, Lesley scampered away frantically to seek refuge in a nearby shoe store. My wife Mona had left me to watch the three kids while she checked out some items down the corridor. In my haste to catch up with the toddlers, I lost my presence of mind and abandoned the baby in the stroller in the middle of the atrium.
When I realized it before even reaching the shoe store, I wheeled around and saw to my amazement that in the middle of it all when the roof threatened to cave in , a black gentleman draped his whole body over the stroller to protect Regis just in case all hell broke loose from above.
I'm so overcome with emotion even at this point to continue with this typing. That's the way America said goodbye to me and my family. A display of unequaled heroism and decency. A decency that comes from every grain as a human being with instinctive, impulsive, and automatic reaction to every trying moment.
And so I rest easy with Barack at the helm of things. I will sleep soundly for four years during his term and know that we are in the hands of a decent man. If there is anything I can can do to help him, he needn't even ask me. Plus to top it all he is a Harvard law graduate. Emperors at the oval office just don't grow better than that.
When I See You Smile - Bad English
