When I was a child in the early 1960s, I lived in a small town called Livermore in Calfornia. My father was a small businessman there, but we lived on the same street with scientists and mathematicians employed at Lawrence Livermore Labs, known then as Lawrence Radiation Laboratories. "Where they build the bomb," as locals liked to say. These brilliant people came from all walks of life, so our neighbors were Jewish, and also Japanese, Chinese, and any domestic blend you can imagine.
Equality of races and religions wasn't exactly instructed, it was exemplified. For instance, there was no Christmas tree at my friend, Craig Goishi's house. I may have thought that was puzzling, but there wasn't one at Angelica Hemple's house, either. Hemples had a big candelabra instead, and they called it a Menorah. These things weren't pointed out and compared, they just were.
I heard my parents talk about the camp that Craig's parents were kept in before he was born because that's where his parents met. They compared the stories Watt and Minnie told with the stories they'd heard of the concentration camps of Germany. I was too young to understand the cruelty, and could not process it.
My parents' folks lived in Vallejo, a Navy town about an hour from Livermore. There were many black families there, along with Filipinos and the usual American mix. My cousins and I played alongside all of them at the city parks.
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| Grandma's famous neighbor |
I was thinking of this today because it was so easy then, as a child, to play together. We could see the differences in each other, but we'd shrug our shoulders and get down to the business of sharing a swing set, whoever was next on the swing would push the kid who had the swing. It was understood.
And I was just remembering the four little Filipina girls who lived in a basement apartment across the street from my grandma. They were hitting sticks together and pounding fists on the sidewalk singing, "Iko Iko." I knew the song was on the radio those days, sung by the Dixie Cups, and I thought that must be a Filipino folk song after that.
It's not. Today I looked it up on Wikipedia. It's a Mardi Gras song and it's got a smattering of West African rhythms and Carribean dialects in it, along with other influences no one can really identify. It dates back to the mid 50's, performed in the French Quarter of New Orleans by Mardi Gras Indians. The song is about competition between these tribes; their music, their dress, and their popularity among the revelers. Mardi Gras Indian tribes? How come they look like black men? Again, Wikipedia has a great article on how this can be.
"The tradition was said to have originated from an affinity between Africans and Indians as minorities within the dominant culture, and blacks' circumventing some of the worst racial segregation laws by representing themselves as Indians."
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| Big Chief Monk Bordreaux, of the Golden Eagles |
