Darius: Growing up Black in the 1950s

Last updated on: July 17, 2020 at 8:48 am by Margaret Blair Young

Darius: Growing up Black in the 1950s 2020-07-17T08:48:57-07:00 Margaret Blair Young

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Darius Gray–a few years after this incident

I am posting daily to invite empathy into Black lives. My main focus is Darius Gray. This is an excerpt from our third book, The Last Mile of the Way. We refer to Darius as Aidan, which is what his family called him.

Like many of us, Elsie and Derrus Gray subscribed to Ebony and Negro Digest. Around this time, the second of those magazines ran a series of articles by famous colored Americans titled “How I Told My Children about Race.” Gwendolyn Brooks reported how she explained things to her son when the two of them were taking a stroll and a car full of fools hurled rocks and obscenities their direction. Arma Bontemps described how it felt to tell his five-year-old son why the Nashville papers included photos of the Vanderbilt football games but not the Fisk ones. Others told how they explained why newspapers showed white brides’ photos but not any Negro brides.

It was a hard thing—harder than you might suppose—for Elsie to tell her son he couldn’t talk to a white girl. He’d done it innocently at a roller skating rink, and word had gotten back to Elsie’s employer. It’s a bad, bleak task for any mother to tell her son he can’t presume he’s the same as other children. He’s colored, and that means he will likely be invisible to whites. If they do see him, they’ll see him as a sprout of danger.

“Honey,” she said, “I don’t like it any more than you do, but you got to understand. Mama could lose her job if you talk to that young lady again. This is Mama’s job.”

Aidan narrowed his eyes, for he loathed injustice. Nobody needed to identify it; he recognized it like he was born to. He may have been sickly, but he had his daddy’s temper and his daddy’s sense of right ways. He knew when ugly was ugly.

Still and all, he was a hopeful, happy boy, for he was Elsie’s son too. He sought out joy in a natural way, following her example. And he expected great things out of life, no matter what barriers tried to get in his way.

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