Confession #311:Sorry this is long.. I've never really talked about this as an adult. I grew up in a rural part of the nation.
Let's just call it the south. My parents were extremely traditional: They hated Jews. They hated black people.
When I was about 14, my dad got a job offer in a big city. My dad decided to move. We couldn't afford good housing right away so we lived in the ghetto. It was a decrepit brown building with exhaust stains in the eaves and bars over the windows. The front lawn was made up of old dead grass that turned to powder when you stepped on it. The front fence was about 5 feet tall, and was bowed where a car had run into it.
I was driven to and from school every morning. My parents didn't want me riding with those "coloreds". When I got home, I was allowed to watch as much television as I wanted after my homework was done.
I couldn't leave the house.
I wasn't allowed to play with the neighbor kids. Facing the street, on our left was a Peurto Rican family. On our right were some black folk.
Summer came and since both of my parents were working at that point, they were gone for most of the day. I started sneaking out during the day to play with the neighborhood kids. There was Angel Jr. (Junior) and Dishon. We played all summer together and became really great friends.
Nearing the end of summer, we were playing football about two blocks from our houses in the street with some other kids. It was about 11am. I saw my dad's car round the corner. I stopped. Everyone stopped. Everyone knew about my parents.
My dad slowly drove up and got out of the car. He didn't say a word, but grabbed me by the hair and literally threw me through the open car window into the passenger's seat. I hit my head on the e-brake and started to bleed.
I was grounded. I sometimes saw Dishon and Junior, but was never allowed to speak to them. We moved about 6 months after that to an extremely white neighborhood.
A couple weeks before we moved, somebody spray painted on the side of our house. My dad heard them doing it and ran outside. He caught one of them and beat the living shit out of him. I'd never seen such a bloody mess. The guy was very unconscious.
He held him down and spray painted the "N" word on his t-shirt. Then he brought him out onto the street and made me go get some rope from the garage. He tied him to a telephone pole in front of a house a half a block from ours and then called the police, saying that there had been a disturbance. Basically, we heard the guy screaming as the cops picked him up. My dad started leaving a loaded shotgun near the front door.
Anyway, after we moved things settled down. Occaisionally when I'm visiting home, they still say racist stuff. But I don't think he's been violent in a long time.
