On March 7, 1965, my father, John Harrawood, and I were watching the ABC movie of the week, Judgment at Nuremburg. This has become a film classic, with a cast that reads today like a who's who in the cinema of the period: Spenser Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Maximillian Schell, Richard Widmark, Judy Garland, Marlene Dietrich, Montgomery Clift and -- I'm not kidding -- William Shatner. It is about the trials in Nuremburg for War Crimes in 1945 of 22 Nazis. The movie is shockingly frank: it deals with Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's support of eugenics and Churchill's initial support of Hitler. And, to it's credit, it questions the position from which an American-led international court could make the accusations it did against the Germans.
Just at the moment where Burt Lancaster was giving the great closing speech I've embedded above -- confessing his guilt, but doing so in a way that implicated not only his judges but the film's viewers -- ABC interrupted the broadcast with 15-minutes of tape from the riots in Selma, Alabama, which had happened only a few hours before. I don't think anybody reading this has not seen those tapes, which live in our nation's memory like a nightmare. Over popcorn and diet soda, we watched the cops club citizens, set dogs on people, run them down on horseback, turn fire hoses on crowds. But what was most stunning about watching it as it happened was the gloating pleasure the cops were clearly taking in brutalizing their own citizens. This was one month before my 15th birthday, sitting on the couch with my father in front of the rabbit ears in Charlotte, North Carolina.
When they went back to the movie, my father said "Those niggers are going to get a lesson."
This was pretty much the end of my relations with my father. Not because he used a racial epithet, or because he took palpable pleasure in the carnage on TV. Such language was common in my childhood, and I had experienced my dad's pleasure in bullying way before this. No, it was because my father couldn't understand Irony. Briefly put, he could not see that what he had said to me put him on the side of the Nazis being judged in the film. More than that, it put him there at the very moment we were supposed to be edified by the judgment against the Nazi high command and filled with the warm satisfying sensibility, common in the post-war years, of the rightness, inherent superiority and worthiness to judge that came with having won the war in Europe.
Now, I'm an English Teacher, and I write the word Irony on the board in every course I teach. Any of my students can tell you what it means: Irony is meaning the opposite of what you say. So that when somebody says "Oh, GREAT! It's raining!," he or she doesn't really mean "Great," like "I'm happy!" When you're getting soaked, "Oh great!" means Not Great: You can't study literature without knowing what irony is and how it works. Irony celebrates the power of a word to be in two places at once, of meaning to be supple, complex, and multi-layered. It also allows us to forgive ourselves for being weak and for failing to live up to the ideals we set for ourselves. Irony is usually used to mark boundaries for communities of interlocutors or writers. There will never be a children's version of Lolita, for example, because you can't understand the story, or even tell it, without the irony. Irony is what sets the boundaries of sexual maturity. What we call "Adult" entertainment is for adults, not because of explicit sexual content, but because the production and consuming of that content relies on our power to be in two places at once. The porn industry makes videos that run against the values held most dear by the very people who nevertheless manage to spend an unbelievable amount of money on it every year.
My father fought in the war and was rightly proud of his service. But that means also that what he said to me directly contradicted all the value sets for which he had served. This isn't so much what I'm interested in here. He wasn't the only returning GI using racial epithets, and we all contradict or tacitly deny our deepest values at some time or another.
We were white Southerners, and shared our community's blindness to the ironies of our racial notions. I find something like this blindness at work in our country now, in the current immigration debate (if you can call it that) and the rather frighteningly fascistic laws presently being passed in Arizona (my birth state!).
The last time my family and I all sat together was in 1975, and we were again in front of the tube, this time watching my father's favorite show The Bionic Woman. When the show went to commercial, one of my brothers, the father of my nephews, turned to our father and asked this:
"Hey, Dad. If some fucking nigger tried to break in here at night would you use the 38 or the 45 on him?"
I was 25 years old, my brother was 22. I was visiting from Paris, where I had been working in circuses for the past few years. I remember the same shrink-back, body-stiffening horror that I had felt in 1965. We had all been here many times. My father liked questions like this, and the conversation, which I here reproduce from memory, went like this:
"Watch your mouth. . . Well, you know, a 38 will make a hell of a hole in a nigger."
"Yeah, but shit! A 45! You can put a slug in an engine block a hundred yards away!"
"I said watch your Goddamn mouth!. . . Yep. A 45 will really do the job."
"Know what I'd do? I'd blow off his fucking kneecaps."
"I'm not gonna tell you again. . . Your mother and sister are here. Capping is good, or you could shoot him in the gut. It takes a nigger a long time to die from a gut-shot."
"Yeah! Give him something to think about!"
"Yeah. But I'll tell you. Some nigger tries to break in here. He's a dead nigger."
"Yeah. . . dead nigger. . . Head shot."
"Head shot," my father said.
The commercials were winding up and, satisfied, my father and brother slid back into silence for the program. What horrified me at the time was the thought of my father or brother sitting up in bed at night, holding his handgun and secretly wishing some black guy would try to come through the window.
Before he died last year, my father gave away nearly one hundred thousand dollars to some scam artist in Jamaica. The guy, a black man, got him on the phone off a list of war vets and told him, you know: You've Just Won the Jamaican Lottery But First You Have To Pay a Small Fee blah, blah, blah . . . You know the game. My father sent them several payments of five or ten grand each, and the guy kept the scam alive right up until my father died.
As he grew more fragile, my father apparently continued with some belligerence to insist that he had won the Jamaican Lottery. It became a point of deep alienation with my brothers, who got him declared incompetent and got Power of Attorney over him. My father, who -- to give him his due -- had made his own money during a life of hard work, had feared in his 40s and 50s that welfare blacks, Jews, and government liberals wanted to take it from him. By the time he was talking about knee-capping and head shots in 1976, it had become a near obsession with him. In his last years all this fear shifted to the two sons who had remained in his life. He accused them of robbing him and kept threatening to take them to court or to take them out of his will. With his money cut off, he also got a rep for trying to bum money to send to Jamaica from the other seniors he lived with, even, apparently, from the dark-skinned guy serving up the Big Gulps in the corner 7/11.
The thing is that in the end of his days, alone in some Assisted Care Facility in Eastern North Carolina, surrounded by strangers who were also fragile and dying, with his family pretty much torn apart and his children rarely visiting, my father's last friend was this black scam artist.
[Since I originally posted this, late last night, my nephew, Hank Harrawood, has written to tell me my father was quite frequently visited, by him and his brother, and by their father, my brother. I admire him for this and am grateful for his comment. I don't want to dishonor here either the memory of my father's last days or the quality of love he got from the generation that came up behind me, and so mention here my nephew's comment. I think the fact that he spent so many years living in such a place makes my point for me.]
The scam artist spent hours on the phone with my father and would talk to him when his own children would not. He did this to keep the scam alive, but he also had the effect of solacing my father in some way. My father never stopped believing he had won the lottery, that the black man he had wanted to shoot now had a gift for him. My father didn't need the money. But after a while he needed the vindication. From time to time he would assemble all the people in his nursing home on the front porch because, he told them, today the armored car would pull up with his ten million. He would phone my brothers so they could come watch uniformed guards unload his money.
Truck never came.
It was the last irony my father would fail to see.
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