Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 2

August 17, letter, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat

Good morning, Sheila. It’s Sunday, the Lord’s day, and I thought I would take a while to write you a letter. I’m sorry to have ambushed you like that last night at the Palestinian art exhibition. There were dozens of people around when I gave you a cluster of essays that must have been surprising reading, telling you that they added up to a presidential conspiracy to subvert the Constitution. I take it Janis Blue, who organized the event, explained to you afterwards. She certainly believed the gist of my allegation. The majority of the people there did.

I’m sorry I was abrupt, loud and very public, but I wanted to make sure that the materials didn’t fail to reach you, the way material I’ve sent in April and July has failed to reach you, and the way my cell phone calls to your staff over the last five months have failed to reach you.

I guess we just had to meet face to face. That’s the only moment of truth, isn’t it? Well, as I told you in front of the crowd, I’d met you face to face before. You probably don’t remember, but in 1992 Mayor Lanier and the City Council of Houston (of which you were then a member) gave me a standing ovation for breaking up an offshoot of the Southeast Crips that had decided that Mt. Carmel High School, the bishop’s inner-city outpost, was their territory. The mayor mentioned how I had volunteered to investigate while all the other teachers, staff and clergy were terrified, had personally guaranteed all the students I questioned that I would die before I would compromise their safety, and had in fact been in danger of assassination by the Crips for several weeks thereafter. It was pretty impressive stuff, and it showed that a man like me, who had been trained by the U.S. military, had enough backbone to put it all on the line for the right thing.

I can’t remember just how much of all that the mayor said before you took up and said the rest, on behalf of the council members. We chatted afterwards and I told you that I had once been the president of Smiley High School, now a mostly-black high school in your current Congressional district. Since it’s Sunday, let me tell you that story, because it has a political moral.

When I was a youngster out here in Northeast Houston, all I ever heard the white folks talk about was how the blacks were going to ruin us all. Well, in 1972 the federal government finally got around to desegregating our district, North Forest. The next four years I saw at least one major race riot a year, usually because the redneck power structure wouldn’t accommodate the black kids. School dances had stopped with desegregation; the band music was white folks stuff, and the only place black folks got to have their say was in basketball games, where they were the only ones on the team and in the bleacher. Those were grim times.

I was an outsider even then, though. You see, my parents had been too enlightened to raise me racist, though my family was southern back to the civil war and Granddad May had run for Texas governor in ’52 on a segregationist ticket. They had studied drama and literature, and were Kennedy liberals. The first memory of my life was mama’s hysteria when she learned that JKF had been killed. Another memory was when she caused a scene at a family gathering when a redneck cousin of mine said that us white folks shouldn’t have shot Martin Luther King because it wasn’t coon season. One day, I remember very specifically asking my father whether my white friends were right when they said that blacks over across Mesa Road weren’t as good as us. He answered, wise as Atticus Finch, “No, they’re just a different color, son.”

We were enlightened but poor, so we stayed our ground while the white folks grumbled, went to occasional cross burnings, voted massively for George Wallace, and moved to the suburbs. What was left was me and the brother, so I learned the other side of things. Candidly, what that mean at first is that I learned to get my ass kicked, because only a black person who had been in an all-white neighborhood can imagine what it’s like being a white person living in an all-black neighborhood. I got smacked around, robbed occasionally and, as I didn’t crawl away, hide, and resent like most white people, I got accepted.

In 1976 I celebrated the bicentennial by saying to hell with the racist system. I blew my dirty blonde hair, naturally kinky, out into an afro, told the white folks they were bigots, and ran for president of the student council as a self-admitted nigger lover. I got brick batted by the local Klanners for that, one dark night outside Lakewood Park. I got brick batted in broad daylight by the school rednecks outside the snack bar. But you know what, Sheila, I also got elected president.

Did you enjoy the cluster of essays I gave you? I believe that in the note I wrote on the front I gave you my phone number, along with a reminder that I tried hard to get this material to your attention in April. I even tried to reach you through intermediaries. Well, whatever happened, happened. Let’s just say that all the calls, emails and faxes got misplaced. I’ve kept my notes if your staff wants to figure out who goofed. The important thing is that we met.

I know you came late to the exhibit for a photo op, but I wanted to give you a rundown on what it was about. Palestinian people were showing their art at the Station, a downtown museum, and honoring Rachel Corrie. I believe you know who Miss Corrie is, or rather was. She was the person who told racist oppressors in Palestine that they would only destroy the property of others over her dead body. They made her prove that she meant it. The folks occupying Palestine play tough, don’t they?

The man who was sitting on the floor with me when you came in was her father, Craig Corrie.

Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 2