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like adults. They must have been poorer than even we were.
They were black and we were white: and whoever it is I remember, on your knees by the bathtub, as the blond-haired baby boy and I splashed and squealed, as you dabbed and
rubbed, whoever it is: where are you now? and why were you
there at all? and why couldn’t you stay? and while mother lay
dying, you were kind.
*
Once mother was hiring the girl herself. She must have been a
little better then, standing up in the living room, dressed in
regular clothes not sick clothes, without my father there or any
doctor. I came in and there were lots of women and my mother
talked to them one at a time but all in the same room and one
was white and the rest were black and my mother said who
would you like to have and I said hire the white one.
*
I had never seen a white one so I said hire the white one.
*
Hire the white one, I said, maybe seven years old. Hire the
white one. My dying mother hit me.
*
When we had to move from Camden because my mother
couldn’t walk steps or breathe and was frail and dying, the
neighbors on our block got sullen and banded together and
came and said don’t you sell to blacks. Our next-door neighbor
got sullen and threatening and said don’t you sell to blacks.
These are our friends, said my parents. We will do what’s
right, don’t you worry, said my father ambiguously. We sold
to Polish Catholics, blond, with heavy foreign accents. Not
Jews but not black. The best offer, my father swore. The
neighbors were chilly anyway but soon they all moved. The
blacks were coming closer. So they sold to blacks and moved
out.
*
One of the houses where I had to stay was my uncle’s: marriage, not blood. He was richer than us, a judge, a reform democratic politician even though he had friends in the Klan,
and he was vulgar, and I hated him, and the reform democrats
won and my uncle and his friends looted the city and got rich
and that’s why the blacks in Camden are so poor.
I would be delivered to his house and his cronies would
come and they would talk about the niggers and even when
they were the government of the city they were planning to
move out to somewhere else and they planned to steal especially from the school system, or that was the part I heard: they stole equipment from Head Start programs and looted school
equipment and cheated on school-lunch programs and left the
blacks to die and called them niggers and my uncle had a bar
