sell—”
Kern busied himself with the arithmetic of three and one half times fifty. One dollar and seventy-five cents! The total surprised him. Almost two dollars a week. He began to plan what he would do with it.
“Where do you live—uh—Kern?” Kern answered, his eyes still on a picture booklet showing a model Scott Home Salesman standing at a door, hat in hand, as he talked to a customer. He did not notice that Frank Richards had stopped writing.
“You mean Northeast, don’t you?” He had looked up at Kern.
“No sir, I mean—” Kern realized what the man meant. “I mean Northwest.” He held tightly to the booklet and hoped it wouldn’t happen.
Sick and suddenly miserable, inside, he hoped it wouldn’t happen.
It did.
“I thought white folks had all moved out from there—”
“They ha—” Kern cut himself off. Too late now to cut himself off—to say that a few families still lived there.
“What are you, boy?” Frank Richards dropped his pen on the desk and turned in his chair to face Kern. Kern looked back at him, saying nothing.
“You a white boy?”
Kern shook his head slowly. “No.”
Richards reached forward and drew Kern’s hand roughly toward the lamp on the desk. He started at the outstretched fingers.
“Blue nails! ‘Course you ain’t white. A nigger! Well, I’ll be damned!” He stood up and took Kern by the shoulder. “Come on, boy,” he led him through the hall and out to the porch.
“Get on . . . I ain’t doin’ no business with no niggers.”
That night, after the house was dark, after even the chirping of the crickets had dropped to silence, Kern lay on his bed, wide awake, staring at the ceiling.
“Why?”
The question pulsed in him. Sickness. Anger. Shame. None of these answered the question. He got up and turned on his desk lamp. Then he stood in front of the mirror and stared at his face. . . . Stared at his eyes. They were blue. His nose was lean and his mouth was thin and straight.
“Why? Why am I a nigger?”
His fingers went along the tracery of veins at his temples, dull blue under the skin. He turned and bent under the lamp to peer closely at his fingers. They were not blue. They were pink. Pink except for the little half-moon at the top of each nail. And those were white. His thought became words in the room.
“Why am I a nigger?”
My father’s “alien land” grew from the “hypocrisy which, in one breath preached the doctrine that all men were created free and equal and, in the very next breath, denied to millions the simple respect which should naturally go with such a belief.”
I understood then that I, too, lived in an alien land. A fourteen-year-old’s questions became an eighteen-year-old’s need to understand why such hypocrisy and inhumanity continued. Why my father never told me about this book, or about the wounds and scar tissue of his own growing up. About how he survived not “passing.”
Partial answer to the first “why” came soon enough in Ashley Montagu’s course on the fallacy of race, but it wasn’t answer enough. How was I to survive? I couldn’t “pass” as Kern could. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I hoped instead that safety would come from my fading into the background, unnoticed.
alien. land. ethic. Three words published midway through a century of world wars—as a young man’s semi-autobiographical novel, and as “The Land Ethic,” climax essay in an older man’s “end-result of a lifetime journey.” What happened in the postwar years while my father and Aldo Leopold wrote and revised?
U.S. immigration quotas continue to favor those from northwestern Europe while severely restricting entry from Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, southern and eastern Europe. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, devastated by the first practical use of uranium and plutonium bombs, begin to recover. Nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans who’d been confined in remote internment camps for three years under Executive Order 9066 try to rebuild their lives—about two-thirds of them citizens, the Nisei or those born in the United States to immigrant parents. Survivors of Nazi concentration camps search for home. The president of General Electric suggests “a permanent war economy,” while a business magazine reports that President Truman’s policies assure “maintaining and building our preparations for war will be big business in the United States for at least a considerable period ahead.” Archibald MacLeish, then assistant secretary of state, reflects on these years: “As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief . . . without moral purpose or human interest.”
What else? The United States chooses not to ratify UNESCO’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document Eleanor Roosevelt believed would “establish standards for human rights and freedom the world over.” The nation’s capital, my father’s home, remains a segregated city. Even Red Cross blood is segregated. (Dr. Charles Drew, the African American physician who developed the blood bank—and a surgeon who worked with my mother at Freedman’s Hospital—had been fired from his job of coordinating wartime donations when he tried to end this government-approved policy.) And, in this decade, at least thirty-three persons, nearly all African Americans, are lynched.
Both Aldo Leopold and my father offered telling visions of American life at midcentury. A Sand County Almanac and Alien Land are inseparable in my thinking. Yet who else, then or now, would put these books on the same shelf?
• • •
After Odysseus returned home, the aged nurse Eurycleia informed him that a dozen of his serving women had misbehaved during his long absence, having slept with Penelope’s suitors. Odysseus hanged them. Leopold began “The Land Ethic” with a reference to the “slave-girls” in Homer’s Odyssey, noting that the “ethical structure of that day . . . had not yet been extended to human chattels.” He continued:
An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content. . . .
There is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus’ slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.
Leopold added that an ethic could be regarded “as a mode of guidance for meeting ecological situations so new or intricate, or involving such deferred reactions, that the path of social expediency is not discernible to the average individual.” As “a kind of community instinct in-the-making,” ethics rested on the premise “that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts” now enlarged to include the land. Then: “This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the
