You know one thing I am sorry about is that after he graduated Gaylord came to see me once in my classroom after school where I was a high school English teacher. He was home on leave from the army before he was sent to ‘Nam. He was a very dark-skinned Hawaiian, which, of course, made no difference as to how he was treated on Kauai in those old days.
He told me that he was trained in the deep south of America somewhere and one day he was downtown in uniform on a pass when a white lady standing on the street corner next to him got knocked over by a bus. He was the first person to reach her and when he bent down to help her she started shouting: “Get away from me you nigger!” He asked me why she had acted like she did and it made me (a white man) ashamed.
. .
No comments:
Post a Comment