Peanut Butter and Rags

My Father was always intolerant with people of color, but I was starting to see my mother was just as intolerant as he in her own ways.

One day in particular I came home to find her in her usual spot of the afternoon asleep on the sofa, sobering up before my dad got home. She was either taking a nap, watching TV or reading the magazine she liked when I would come home from schools. Her favorite magazines were Family Circle or McCall, but Hints from Heloise was her favorite part as she glanced over the pages, often reading to one of us kids the latest nifty new remedy or solution out of the; Heloise Hit’s section. One of Heloise hints she just had to try was using peanut butter on the coffee table to polish it.

Every weekend we would be busy cleaning the house perfectly because my father was home, so this was the only time I actually saw my mother quite busy with house work duties, giving my father the illusion that this was the normal way her day went. Every Saturday we would polish the maple and walnut furniture around the house. This one Saturday she decided to try out the new Hint from Heloise which was a strange one to us all, but smelled good to us kids.

The new hint was to take ”regular creamy, not nutty; Peanut butter” and use it instead of furniture polish on all your wood furniture! Heloise claimed it worked better then the expensive polishes in the store. So mother on her last visit to the grocery store bought two jars of peanut butter. One of the cheap brands, for the polishing she would have us try out, and the other more expensive brand for us to use in making our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. One jar went straight into the cupboards where all the canned good were stored, and the other went on the top shelf of the kitchen sink cupboard.

This Saturday she was anxious for us to try out this new hint she read about in Heloise. I was given the honor to try out this new discovery for the first time in our home. So I opened the jar and she gave me some old rag for spreading it around. It smelled good as I rubbed the goo all over the table then wiping up the excess with the rag and folding it over, then in circular motions I would go to town rubbing away all the excess peanut butter to make a high gloss polish on the front room coffee table.

It worked and my mother was proud her little hint was successful, not to mention the smell was by far much better than that of the chemical polish sprays of that time. This would continue on every Saturday mid morning for quite some time, then after each use the rag was stuffed back into the big jar and put back up on the shelf and once the chores were complete I could go outside and play.

Next door to us was an Indian family that had a house full of kids with a single mom that left them with barely anything to eat and to fend on their own. The mother was somewhat of a lose woman, always bringing home different men to spend the night. She was probably looking for a husband to help support her and her children, but rumors were going around the neighborhood that she was a part time prostitute going out and meeting men from the navy who had just come into town on a ship.

None of them seemed to stay long, in fact most left and never came back after the first night. The house was always untidy and unclean with sticky stuff on the floor at all times. The kids were always dirty and had a bad odor to them, and just looking at their hair you could easily see they hadn’t had a bath in awhile. Their ages ranged from 1 year to 12 years, one for every few years. Out of all of them there was only one boy, all the rest were girls.

I was young, and when you’re young none of that nonsense bothers you about them not being clean except one time when I saw “Cindy” (one of the girls that was my age) put her dirty long fingernail in her mouth to clean it, scraping it along her teeth as she licked away all the dirt embedded within them. That about made me want to vomit, for some reason that has stuck with me to this day, as I myself am absolutely intolerant of any dirt under my own nails since witnessing that, it’s just something that stuck with me and made impact on me.

Cindy had a younger sister named “Linda” her and I used to joke about our names being the same and how all Linda’s were beautiful because that’s what the name meant in Spanish. She and I were more friends than Cindy and I were, we just got along better and we seemed to laugh more together than Cindy and I ever did.

One afternoon Linda came over tapped on our screen door and asked my Mother if she could borrow some peanut butter, my mother quickly replied "sure hold on!" I was in the kitchen at the table making a peanut butter sandwich so I screwed the lid on and went to hand it over to my mother having heard the conversation at the door. I turned around to hand it to my mother when she looked over at me shook her head silently back and forth, then smiled and said “No not that one!” She then reached up and grabbed the one we used to polish the furniture with, quickly opening the lid and taking out the rags tucked down within the jar, closing it back up, then headed straight for the front door and handed it to Linda with a smile, and said “here you go!” I was astonished and mortified! She used that disgusting one we used to polish the dirty furniture with and the one that had an old rag in it to feed these poor kids next-door.

I felt so ashamed and sorry for them, and so mad deep inside towards my mother and father and how sometimes they were just crappy to people and treated some people so badly, it was embarrassing to me and I felt gutted. Not so much just because she was a friend, but because she was a person and their family was poor and I knew the kids didn't have a lot to eat most of the time.

We would always see programs on TV about the "Starving African Children" and that was used against us to make us eat our food, it wasn’t used because the had sympathy for these people nor was it used to make us appreciative of what we had when others were less fortunate than us in this world either. It was used because they were heartless people forgetting the hard times they had experienced through in the depression era, they just wanted us to finish our dinner faster.

I went to my room and thought this all over sulking in my own way but hiding the thoughts that went throught my mind in shock over what she just did. I called these people friends and enjoyed playing and talking with, walking to the candy story, eating pickles from the deli on a summer days, talking about toys and just hanging out and making clubs in the garage. I was feeling some hatred towards my parents because they were such merciless intolerant bigots before I knew this word existed. All I thought about was how they judged people and were ever so wrong about all the crap they used to try and sell me on.

In my own way I tried to prove them wrong, without me shouting it back in their face. It was my secret not theirs and sometimes they proved themselves wrong while I did nothing but sit back and laugh as they made their judgments and comments about others in the neighborhood.

I recall thinking “what’s wrong with them?" “Why are they like this?" I was always the odd ball, worrying about innocent people, which seemed to come easy for me thanks to the fine examples my parents set for me. What fine examples of bigots they were at times, only fueling my questions and observation to be called upon at later dates.

There were poor people amongst us in our neighborhood, mostly comprised of single mother's, not having the fathers income coupled with women’s wages being lower than that of a men back then, often times this alone was the cause of their poverty, just too many mouths to feed and not enough to make ends meet which left some hungry children at school during lunch time or after school let out.

Ricky Johnson was one of these kids; I will never forget the look on his face at lunch time one afternoon. I recall one day in the cafeteria 12 noon all the kids gathered to eat the lunches their moms had made. Brown paper bags lay on the table and some lunch box's with cartoons on them, thermoses poring special Kool-Aid or juices into their thermos cup lids. The smells of cheese, lettuce, white bread and potato chips could be smelled outside the building. Everyone was busy eating and enjoying their food when I looked over to the side of me and there was Ricky's big eyes looking at my food as I took a bite. He shyly looked away but soon was drawn back to my food with mouth hanging open and licking his lips as he tasted my sandwich visually. He just couldn't seem to take his eyes off my food, over and over he would glance at me eating and then quickly look away.

He was pretending to play and too busy to eat, but the truth was he didn't have anything to eat! I remember that feeling of him looking at me and me doing nothing. Here I was overweight and within the cupboards of our home was enough food to feed all his siblings. Our cupboards were always full along with the fridge and freezer, just chock full of food of every kind, and he had nothing to eat! To this day that look in his eyes still affects me I can see it right now or whenever I need to be reminded of it.

Ricky changed my life that day.


Ricky's family was comprised of 5 kids and one Mother working her tail off to support them after the father left one day following one of his drunken binges. Mrs. Johnson was a tall Black woman with a large body frame. She had a very kind face and always a sweet smile dispite her troubles and worries in life. I used to watched her walk up that hill every day rushing home from work after being on her feet all day at the hospital, with her white nurses’ uniform on and a purple sweater, walking up that hill with long very quick strides.

Her one son Ricky Johnson was my age and been in my school and classes for years since kindergarten. Ricky was the poorest kid in class, all the kids made fun of him, especially the other black kids that came from proper home and dressed even better then some of us white folks. Ricky was made fun of every day, but he was always nice, never speaking back to any of the comments thrown at him. His big black eyes bugged out of his football shaped head with short nappy hair and pieces of lint stuck to it, and most times snot crusted on his upper lip and wearing clothes with missing buttons, made him an easy target for other kids to make fun of.

I remember one day in particular when he was laughed and pointed at by all the class except me. I was in shock because that was something I have never seen before in an actual classroom. Everyone knew he was poor, but this time someone said it out loud in class most his ridiculed was done on the playground where he could easily escape it, but this time he couldn't. I remember being confused by and shocked with the teacher listening and laughing along and not saying anything in his defence but behaving like one of the brat kids. Something was wrong I could see it in his eyes.

He had lifted his leg up to cross his legs with one foot shooting straight across on his knee. He thought nothing of it, just getting comfortable in class when all of the sudden, Fred another black kid in my class that was from a very well off black family, looked at Ricky's shoes and started laughing an obnoxious laugh while pointing thus erupting the whole classroom and teacher in laughter.

What was visible to the eye was a shoe with a huge hole in the bottom and the "Corn Flake Rooster" showing through the hole. Fred laughed and laughed pointing until Ricky's face turned dark purple with embarrassment. Fred was on the floor and the class followed suit even the teacher laughed. I saw Ricky's face and the shame he was feeling, I knew he couldn't help it.

“Skillet” was the nick name Fred gave him and Ricky hung his head whenever Fred called it out to him. "Hey Skillet" Fred would shout in front of everyone, "Did you eat your corn flakes today?" Laughter would always ensue because everyone saw the hole in Ricky’s shoe he had patched up with an empty box of Corn Flakes that day and no one would let him forget. Fred had a hatred for poor blacks that represented him in a white man's world, but Ricky didn't know anything other than poorness and hunger. Unlike Fred whose parents had good jobs and nice things, dressed nice and had a beautiful home.

Later that same summer after my mother gave the poor kids next door the dirty peanut butter, Ricky came over to my house when my mother wasn't there; he was probably more hungry then I could comprehend at that age. He too knocked on the screen knowing it,s day time and my father wasn't there or he wouldn't have made it up the stairs, with his rich chocolate Skin and dusty looking hair. I answered the door and said “Yea Ricky what's up?: He said humbly "Do you have any peanut butter I could borrow." Remembering what my Mother did a few weeks before when asked that same question, and fully aware that the power was in my hands, because she wasn't there to dictate the outcome. I said to him “Hold on,” then walked to the kitchen opened the cabinet and reached up and pulled the Crunchy Skippy out and walked into the front room opened the screen and said, "Here you can have it we have another one" He smiled and said “Thank you!”

I was a rebel from way back wanting a change in the way things were done from the old. This was my little way of making up for Ricky staring at my sandwich and Linda from next door getting the Peanut butter with the rag, and never being able to react. My mother later on that week needed to buy more peanut butter because as she put it us kids made pigs of ourselves and ate the whole jar too quickly.

I softly smiled inside like I have done before when seeing my parents make fools of themselves and having that feeling inside that comes from doing something so opposite of what you are taught when you know what you were taught was wrong. Little did they know that their teaching me to hate others of color and difference was going to actually do the opposite and make me colorblind, and who ever knew Peanut Butter could taste so good.