CALLING AT THE BACK DOOR

My job as teacher at a black college (Bishop College in Dallas) gives me the opportunity to visit informally with Negroes who have distinguished themselves in the field of education. When I have such ones across the table from me in the student union, I encourage them to talk about their youth, their struggle to get an education, and their experiences in white America. When they tell their stories of what it means to be black “down in Mississippi” and of the deprived schools they attended in East Texas, I am made to marvel that they ever made it. I can recall the poverty of my own youth and the desperate struggle to get an education, but these men cause me to realize I had one distinct advantage that was denied them, however poor I was. I was white.

There is one gentleman at Bishop whom I especially enjoy. Having some attraction for philosophy, he drops by my office quite often for a chat, but I am always the one that learns from these brief visits. For some 40 years he served as teacher and principal in the Dallas high schools, and he is now in his “second career” at Bishop, serving as assistant to the president. A highly cultured man, he has the bearing of a diplomat. He could as well pass for our ambassador to Ghana as well as a school principal. He was the first man in Dallas to serve as principal of an integrated school, having a white assistant principal and 19 white teachers under him in a predominantly black school. And that was back when it was still dangerous as well as delicate, and it was in Texas.

I like to hear him talk about those days. He never had any problems stemming from the integration. He made one rule that proved to be preventive, he thinks, and that was that everybody on the staff was to be Miss, Mrs. or Mr. No “first name” informalities. He dropped a little of his philosophy at this point, asserting that informality tends to break down the pursuit of excellence. He’s the kind that would appreciate Army dress and discipline. When you get sloppy in your dress and manners, you are not as good a fighter. I’ll have to admit that when he addresses me with an August “Good morning, Dr. Garrett” that it inclines me to my better self. Nobody ever says that like he does!

This bit about discipline in education reminds me of a Chinese professor we had at Bishop last year. Born in Peiping [Now Beijing (gt)] and reared in Hong Kong, he was educated in the West, taking his doctorate at Zurich. He was terribly disturbed by the lack of motivation and the lack of interest on the part of so many Bishop students. He told me what he thought would help matters: put them all through military discipline! He insisted that the students would learn better if they were trained to stand at attention and click their heels when the professor entered the room, and then wait until he nods in response before taking their seats. The kids’ informality frustrated him to no end. That Teutonic stamp was clearly visible in his educational outlook. While I always called him by his first name, which he accepted as appropriate, I could never get him to call me Leroy, not once. It was always Doctor Garrett, with emphasis on the tor. When I was first introduced to him, he bowed emphatically from the waist, with hand on abdomen, as a gesture of respect for a senior professor. He’s moved on now, and I fear the year at Bishop made a racist of him!

Before I get back to my “ambassador” friend, I want to tell you about this Chinese professor and his cats, which he took into his apartment out of pity when they appeared at his door. When they had diseases, he took them to a vet; when he was made to get them out of his apartment by the landlord, he paid for their board at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Being a bachelor and having no relatives in this country, they became the objects of his personal concern.

When they made him take his cats away, he came to my office to tell me about it. He closed my door for the sake of privacy, and he was so distraught that I thought maybe he had been fired. He began to relate his loss as if it were a tragic tale, and I found myself not only relieved but almost smiling when he began to talk about the cats. But I soon saw that this was far more important to him than it would have been to me, so I generated a sympathetic attitude in a hurry. He told of how one of the cats would cuddle up to him and purr, and of how sure he was that she would not live very long in a cage. He then cradled his head in his lap and wept like a child. I was of course deeply touched by this scene. How badly a man needs to love and be loved, I thought. As he sat there in tears I thought of the humble people of the soil of his native China, a people made sensitive to suffering through six thousand years of deprivation. Tears over the predicament of a cat, I thought, while most of us Americans can barely show concern for the plight of human kind.

It was a good lesson for me. I resolved that hour that I would show more tenderness to all that lives, to cultivate a keener reverence for life, to use Schweitzer’s term.

Well, when my Chinese friend left, he was threatening to take the cat to Hong Kong with him. The other cat had run off in the meantime, but the one he loved so much was still around, boarded out at first but finally slipped back into his apartment. Rather than for him to go to such trouble and to show him that Americans do sometime care for animals, I volunteered to take the cat. She is still around, except that soon after my kindly gesture she multiplied into five cats. That shows you what happens when you try to be benevolent!

But back to my diplomatic friend. He stands tall, erect and dignified, and he is a good and humble man, a Christian Scientist. He told me of how he learned while growing up that he was always to go to a white man’s back door and never the front door. This he did all through the years, even during his professional career as a principal, and in the Negro world a principal is somebody. Even when the white man’s house was inferior to his own and the white man himself was less refined, still he went to the back door. Always to the back door!

There was once, however, that he called at a man’s back door on school business, when the man of the house met him and said something like: “The idea, sir, you coming to my back door! I will not have this. If you come into my home, it will be by the front door like everyone else.”

“I’ve never forgotten that,” he told me, with a twinkle in his eye, “He treated me like a gentleman.”

That simple story made my heart ache. “My God, what have we done to our black brothers,” I cried out to myself. The cruelties that we’ve shown can only be matched by the indignities that we have heaped upon ourselves by such behavior.

It grieves me to realize that if this fine man had called at our home back in those days he would have gone to our back door too. And we wouldn’t have directed him to the front door! I can distinctly recall their coming to our door, the back door, sometimes for food or water. If food, they ate it on the back porch. If water, it was never served in a glass, but in a jar that could easily be boiled or thrown away. And we were probably an average Christian family. But we didn’t know better, and I’m thankful that God has brought us to a brighter day. Here we are, black and white together, trying to educate these young people.

When I asked him what would contribute most to a lessening of the existing racial prejudice, he told me a sweet little story about a white minister of his acquaintance, who had a black cook in his family for so long that she was almost one of the family. On occasions when visitors would be sitting at his table and complimenting the food, the minister would praise the virtues of “Miss Jones.” Never Rachel, which was of course customary, to call the black help by their first names. So at the minister’s home it was always “Miss Jones did this” and “Miss Jones did that.” And the guests were always astounded when the minister would at last introduce the one who had prepared the delicious meal “Friends,” he would say, rising to his feet when the cook made her appearance, “1 want you to meet Miss Jones.”

Time fails me to tell about my students who work in Dallas stores, but who are denied the raises and promotions that the white students from SMU get. They still have to call at the back door! Or of another professor friend who had trouble housing and feeding his students on a field trip through South Texas into Mexico. Or of the Bishop students in assembly when they sing “We Shall Overcome,” and when they chant the lines that make my backbone tingle: “I may be white, I may be black, and I am black, but I am SOMEBODY.”

And we are less than decent when we allow any SOMEBODY to call at our back door. And that has to apply to all the “back doors” in the area of employment, housing, opportunities, church life, education, and social intercourse.—the Editor