University of Northern Iowa

Negroes in Whiting, IndianaAuthor(s): James HazardSource: The North American Review, Vol. 267, No. 4 (Dec., 1982), p. 6Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25124328 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 09:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

University of Northern Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The NorthAmerican Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.251 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:43:13 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

JAMES HAZARD

NEGROES IN WHITING, INDIANA

for Paul Cebar

I heard my uncle downstairs the night he smashed

a Glenn Miller record so as not to hear it anymore,

say he wanted to marry Billie Holiday. I heard

the little shrieks and giggles. Saturday nights were party nights for grown ups and kids stayed up

stairs, listening. Louis Jordan and His Tympani Five,

Fats Waller playing Harlem stride, Billie Holiday who the grown ups got to see in Chicago live,

Louis Armstrong whose band had only one white man, Jack

Teagarden, and when the Glenn Miller record was busted

Frankie Newton played "The World is Waiting for the

Sunrise." During the war my cousin Billie, who was

an Army nurse in France hitch-hiked a plane ride home

from the Front on a weekend pass. She had armloads

of absinthe and GI records of Duke Ellington and

the party went two days and nights till she flew back

to the war in time. Kansas City, Storyville,

Harlem most of all, Chicago's South Side, all the dark

cities instructing the downstairs, my family moving and even talking to that music and it coming upstairs

to the children too. Gene Krupa's band had Roy

Eldridge and they made that record with Anita O'Day "Let Me Off Uptown." A black man and a white woman?

they played that one downstairs too. Some guys wrote girls' names on their notebooks at school.

I wrote LOUIS ARMSTRONG and HOT LIPS PAGE and wished

my uncle really did marry Billie Holiday. My father

took me to see Satchel Paige pitch his first start

in the majors. It was SRO at Chicago's Comiskey Park

and we had box seats. My Dad said, "If they didn't have

white shirts we wouldn't see anyone in the ballpark."

It was a night game, get it? "We may be the only white

people here," he said. And the same on the streetcar

home too. That was a new one on us, from Whiting:

Whiting, Indiana, where the law was, till after the

war, no Negroes on the street after dark without

permission in writing. W7ere we scared? A little

but mostly, listening to the talk?up tempo because

Satchel beat the White Sox, I felt I'd got down

stairs to the party, for the first time in my life.

And I'll take this?a yellow Bom

bi "Bombardier" towing a flat-bed

trailer. On the flat-bed a green metal

boat with two outboards. In the boat,

brown plastic bags loaded with sup

plies, and four people sitting up there, two with holstered pistols. A

large tan dog is handed up to them

and eagerly joins their company, as

they set off in high spirits for camp.

One of the men in the trailer is white: someone who stayed.

I feel I could stay too, but I know I won't. A question arises: I've taken

no snapshots, what can I bring home

with me that will inevitably remind me of this place? The shells on the beach?some are beautiful?and the

driftwood, sure I've collected some,

but these are much like shells and driftwood from any beach, only more

plentiful.

I know what I want. Behind the

Weyapuks' house, discarded among sand-grass, there's a large whale ver

tebra from that bowhead they got last

spring. It must be twenty inches across the beam, a rich creamy

brown, and nobody seems to claim it.

The morning I'm to leave the weath

er turns bad. A stong southeast wind,

heavy fog. The whitecaps are up.

KNOM announces that a Wien Twin-Otter has taken off for Shish

maref, Wales, Teller, and back to

Nome. No mention of my Forster

Cessna. It seems touch and go as I lug my suitcase, my sleeping bag, my

whale vertebra?I seem to need

another hand for all this?out to the

hangar, a quarter of a mile from town.

I watch the fog and mist lift, then come back heavy. I hear a drone. It's

the Twin-Otter taxiing up the run

way. I'll get on if I can. But it turns out to be mostly for freight and full

up. Then, as they're about to take off

they pass the word that's just come in

by radio: my charter is on its way.

I have at least an hour's wait. My

thoughts move forward and back, but

already my experiences here are

changing, acquiring a frame, becom

ing dream-like. I don't feel I'm losing them, I feel they're going deeper.

Last night I stayed up till near two a.m. and wrote most of this art

icle?just a snap-shot, really. I can't

claim more for it than that. Others will have to do the sociology, the ec

onomics, the political structure of the

place. They will see Wales, perhaps, as a problem to be solved, and, solv

ing it, will come away with answers of

a much more positive sort than any

I've acquired. What can I do? I'm just a tourist

after all. I love the place, but I can't

stay. Yesterday I asked Flo Weyapuk about the vertebra, whether it would

be all right to take it. She shrugged and said, a bit puzzled, a bit amused: "You found it. It's yours."

?John Morgan

6

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.251 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:43:13 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions