I moved to Washington, DC in the fall of 1977 with a freshly minted English degree and no marketable skills that anyone could discern. After several dispiriting weeks of dead-end interviews, I responded to a classified ad for “laborers wanted” in the Washington Post. After a 10-minute interview, I filled out the usual paperwork and was told to report to an address in old-town Alexandria on Monday. The hiring manager couldn’t tell me the exact nature of the work beyond saying that I’d be working as a laborer. With no other immediate prospects and dwindling funds, there hardly seemed to be a decision to make. Also, I’d begun to feel adrift, and the work would at least bring the certainty of a daily routine for a few weeks.
In the hiring office, I’d noticed that I seemed to be the only Caucasian applicant, so I presumed I’d be working with African Americans. This would be a new experience for me. Like many whites from well-intentioned, educationally privileged families, I’d been brought up to firmly reject anti-black prejudice but had had very little personal contact with African Americans. One of the ancillary benefits I’d anticipated in moving to the then majority-Black city of Washington, DC was that it would give me a chance to ground my principles in personal experience.
On the most basic level, the three weeks I spent working on this project gave me a brief experience of being in the role of the “other,” the one who is “different” and noticed for my differentness. It was an experience of struggling to operate in a world whose codes I didn’t recognize or understand. It wasn’t always pleasant, but it was valuable. It gave me a tiny but real base of experience from which to extrapolate a few truths about what black and brown people — those folks on the other side of our country’s racism equation — experience every day.
I joined a crew that consisted of three other laborers and a foreman, all African American. I’ve created names for those whose names I don’t remember. Johnny the foreman was serious, elaborately proud of his role. Jimmy was big, solidly built, dark-skinned, and with wounds you could sense just below the surface of his strength. Darnell, his buddy, was the comedian and troublemaker.
And me? I was affected by two problems I didn’t fully recognize at the time: I have more than a touch of ADHD — that is, the dreamy, inattentive variety. I also have a lifelong challenge with motor planning — ask me to move a sofa, and I might get it stuck in a doorway. I’m guessing that I was the least efficient laborer on the crew. On the other hand, I remember myself being polite to everyone and deferential to the foreman.
Our job was to remove the interior walls from a group of older townhouses and apartments to prepare them for renovation. It was tedious, dirty, and chaotic work, and there were moments of friction between all of us. Everything around us seemed broken and dirty: shards of drywall, splintered beams, and shafts of sunlight filled with the swirling dust we’d raised.
Darnell, the comedian and troublemaker, tested me from the beginning. Simulating a robbery disguised as a sexual advance, he would pretend to caress my upper thigh while gradually kneading my wallet toward the opening of my front hip pocket. I dreaded this and but couldn’t find a civil way to make him stop. In one of his less creepy routines, he would pantomime beating me while singing “We shall overcome” in his thin, scratchy voice.
During the first week, Darnell and Jimmy seemed to be arguing with Johnny about something they wanted to do during the lunch break, but I couldn’t follow the details. Darnell and Jimmy asked me to get a 6-pack of “bull beer” (Colt-45 malt liquor) and told me to meet them across the street, pointing to a row of run-down brick town houses. No address given — just “over there” with a gesture toward the end of the block.
When I emerged from the corner store with the beer, there was no sign of them. I crossed the street and wandered toward the corner where he had pointed. I noticed a skinny, absent-looking woman standing near the doorway of a corner townhouse, so I climbed the front steps and asked if she happened to know Darnell and Jimmy. Before I could finish, she turned from me and disappeared inside the door, leaving it ajar. Confused, I pushed the door open a little further and saw Darnel, Jimmy and an older man gathered around a table eating sandwiches. The girl I’d spoken to took the beer and brought it to the kitchen. The older man genially invited me to “pull up a seat and rest my feet,” so I sat down in a folding chair that had been left vacant for me. The place was tidy with a few houseplants in pots and some weathered-looking furniture.
Jimmy and Darnell ate their sandwiches without saying much. Someone offered me a sandwich and a soda, announcing a price. Finally, I reached a point where I couldn’t contain my curiosity.
“Is this some kind of restaurant?” I asked of anyone who’d answer.
Jimmy, already laughing, caught my eye and answered the question: “No, man — this is a whore house. ”
The look of slowly dawning recognition on my face cracked everyone up and provided a rare moment of connection and grace: Jimmy, Darnell, the older man, myself, and even one of the women, sharing in the laughter for a brief moment.
However, most of the first week was tense and difficult for me. At one point, Jimmy and I started to argue about where to store some salvageable construction materials we’d found in one of the buildings. We were in a weedy, trash-strewn lot behind the building. Suddenly, he picked up a beer bottle by the neck, flicked it against a chunk of concrete to break the bottom off and displayed the improvised weapon for me to contemplate.
I’m sure he saw the look of shock and fear on my face.
I told him that he didn’t have to do that to make his point. As I remember, he immediately dropped the broken bottle in the weeds.
Somehow, I felt bold enough to make a request: I told him that I wished that he and the others would use words more to say what they wanted to say. I told him that that was how I was raised and that was what I was used to, that it was hard for me to operate the way they did.
As I spoke, I could see dark clouds of frustration and anger crossing his face. By the time I was done, I could see he was agitated. He spoke slowly to me, stressing the ugly words that told me how the world had seen him.
“That’s the way us big, black n-ggers are.”
I got it, and there was nothing for me to say. I just nodded. The two of us walked back together in silence to rejoin the main group.
During the second week, a new worker joined us, one who turned out to be an ally. Claude didn’t seem to be prior buddies with Jimmy and Darnell, and he operated a little differently. While working, he kept up a friendly stream of chatter with whoever was nearby. One day, while we were picking up pieces of broken drywall, he suddenly stopped and tapped me on the arm.
“Hey, Clark — I thought you was white,” he said, pointing to the pure white drywall I was holding next in my sandy-pink skin. I looked down to take in the contrast and shrugged.
“Well, I guess I’m sort of beige.”
Claude broke into a long guffaw, and he began to circulate around repeating my observation to everyone.
“Clark say he not white, he beige.” This color observation didn’t seem to amuse or impress anyone else, but it showed me where Claude stood. He knew I was going through a difficult experience and tried to make it easier. I appreciated that.
One day during the second week, Darnell restarted his sport of trying to extricate my wallet from my front hip pocket. He’d sidle up to me in a parody of affection and run his hand up the front of my upper leg as if kneading bread, pushing my wallet closer to the opening of my pocket.
This seemed to go on and on, no matter how many times I told him to quit. In a moment of intense frustration, I pushed him away hard. He must have been off balance, because he stumbled back a few steps, falling backwards over a wheelbarrow and landing squarely on his coccyx.
There was a low exclamation of surprise from the group of teenagers who had been hanging around the work site. Suddenly, the bystanders were an audience, watching to see what would happen next.
Instantly, my frustration turned to fear, and I heard myself asking him if he was OK and apologizing. Darnell came toward me, grabbed the front of my shirt near the collar with both hands, lifted me just off my feet, then dropped me. I stayed on my feet in a crouch with my arms around my head, but felt no punches. When I looked up, Jimmy was standing behind Darnell, with his arms on Darnell’s shoulders as if restraining him.
As I dusted myself off, Darnell commented. “You did pretty good — a lot of guys fall if you lift them off their feet and drop them.” It took me a moment to absorb the fact that he was complimenting me on my balance.
Work went more smoothly after that. Darnell made no more attempts to take my wallet.
On one of the last days of my work, Darnell invited me to the row house nearby where he lived with his mother. He brought out a leather jacket he’d found in one of the houses we had gutted, which he offered to sell to me for $10.
“Look at that: genuine leather,” he said, a salesman of the moment, praising his wares.
“Yeah, look at that,” I countered, pointing to the tattered lining. “Genuine holes.”
From the doorway into the kitchen, I could see his mother smirking, amused at our gamesmanship. It was a kind of rapport. We settled at $5, though I didn’t really want the ratty thing.
On one of the last days, we spent several hours on a rooftop for the man who was to pay us. Hours seemed to go by, with the group scanning the streets for a familiar-looking car. I hated the waiting and I couldn’t imagine a worse way to spend time. At last, Darnell called out “I see a white man,” like a sailor in a tall ship spotting land. I had a moment to wonder how it was that I wasn’t the kind of white man who paid off a work crew. What did it say about me? We were all paid in cash.
There was to be a new set of houses to gut after a short delay, and I showed up at the appointed time and place the following week to find Jimmy and Darnell already at work. When I approached the foreman, he told me I wasn’t needed; I hadn’t worked hard enough. I protested without passion, perhaps sensing something about my inefficiency. Jimmy and Darnell were within hearing range, but showed no reaction, seemingly absorbed in their work.
I’d had enough anyway. It was dirty, unpleasant work, and I was ready for something different.
In the years that followed, I gradually established a career path for myself around writing and computer skills. Perhaps not surprisingly, I came to enjoy working relationships with many African Americans whose education and communication style were much closer to mine than Jimmy or Darnell’s.
What I did learn from my three weeks with the demolition crew is just how much we Caucasians take for granted the privilege of working with people who look, act, and speak like us, who observe the same norms. We don’t have to leave our comfort zone to be successful in this society.
For Jimmy or Darnell, moving up the social/economic ladder meant having to navigate a world as alien and uncomfortable to them in some respects as their world was to me. For them, “staying within their comfort zone” meant continuing with low-paying, unskilled work and being a permanent part of a disadvantaged underclass.
Those of us in the racial majority need to understand this and to hold on to the knowledge. When I need reminding, I remember my three weeks of demolition work with Jimmy and Darnell.
