I sent a picture of my youngest in his Hallowe’en costume to my brother. The costume includes a loud shirt and a loud sports jacket, and I then asked my brother if he remembered how we got hand-me-downs from the White family who lived next door to us in the projects. Which was true; I was pretty fly for a white guy as I got not the latest fashion, but the late fashion, which was why I wore bell bottoms in 1981–because they fit, and because Dewayne had worn them a couple years earlier.
“Weren’t they black?” he asked.
I had to set him straight about some of our neighbors and schoolmates:
- The Whites, the Browns, and the Blacks were all black.
- The Sorensons were white.
- The Kolacinskis were yellow.
My brother’s best friend was in the latter family, whose father was obviously of Polish extraction who married a Chinese woman, and the three children looked more Chinese than Polish.
Milwaukee, neh?
It was a time of America being a melting pot, unlike the stew(ing) metaphor that superseded it.
