Fifty Seventh and Osseo Road where my family lived in
Brooklyn Center, was a mile and a quarter beyond the end of the
Penn Avenue streetcar line north of Minneapolis. That was 1943-55. Every house along Osseo
Road was occupied by a white Christian family, accustomed to working the
sandy-soiled vegetable farms, which covered most of the area.
At an early
age I learned the importance of being able to pass, a word I borrowed from
African Americans, who use it to refer to light skinned Black Americans who
learned they could pass for being white. While I was definitely very
white, I learned how to pass for being the son of one of the uneducated blue
color father and mother who spent their entire lives digging the dirt out from
under their fingernails from the extraordinarily heavy, hard work they did over
long hours and for little pay. Our neighbors attended one of the local
Protestant churches, mostly Lutheran. Some, but not all had
graduated from high school and none had gone to college. Reading was not
a priority in my community. There were no libraries in Brooklyn Center at that
time. Higher education was considered an effete activity for rich Easterners.
The school bus ride from the corner near our house to
Twin Lake Elementary School, a mile away, provided my introduction to the first
rule of passing. My parents had gotten me eye glasses in second grade
because I had trouble reading what the teacher had printed on the black board,
which was otherwise all blurry. The first day I proudly donned my new
black rimmed glasses, several boys on the bus called me "four eyes,"
"teacher's pet," and "sissy." I stopped wearing my glasses
on the way to school. I didn't understand the connection at first, but
later I figured out they thought the glasses made me appear excessively
studious, which was definitely verboten.
Although I liked to draw and paint pictures from an
early age, I learned to hide that fact from other boys my age who called me a
"fairy," when they found out I liked to draw and paint.
Apparently art was for girls only, and a boy who liked art must be
effeminate. In fourth grade I became interested in science, and checked
out books from the school library about astronomy. I had found where my
interests lay, and it was within the world of science. A boy on the bus
grabbed the book from me and held it up waving to and fro for the others to
see, as though he had found pictures of naked women in my possession, yelling,
"Travis is a brown nose," and another yelled "Teacher's
pet!" From then on I was careful to hide my science books from other
kids.
In sixth grade I noticed several guys consistently
shoved other kids on the playground or when waiting in line. They punched
girls in the stomach and picked fights with other boys. They said
"shit," a lot and called other kids "assholes," when there
didn't seem any reason to do so. Most of the other guys in my class
shrugged and seemed to accept their obnoxious behavior as though it were
something you just had to tolerate, like an annoying pimple. I began
feeling I must be from another planet, because their behavior seemed totally
unacceptable and so alien to me. When I told them to cut it out, they
threatened to “beat me to a pulp.” No
one took my side.
When I was in 7th grade we were transferred to
Robbinsdale Public Schools five miles away. After school I walked into
town down to West Broadway to get a haircut. The barber was an older balding
guy who did his best to make conversation with his customers, including kids
like me. As he clicked his scissors around my ears he said with a chuckle,
"How about them Gophers, sure kicked the Hawkeyes butts! He was referring to the previous Saturday's
football game. I said, "Yep," but had no idea what he was
talking about. That was when I learned about guy talk. I
played touch football nearly every day after school in Fall, and played
basketball outdoors all winter, and softball in the spring, but I had no idea
who the Hawkeyes were. I didn't follow
sports news. It was of no interest to me. I was a doer, not a
watcher. My dad wasn't much of a football fan either, though he enjoyed
watching Friday Night Fights on television. After that, I looked up
the Gopher game scores before going to get my next haircut; it was part of
passing.
My parents let me get a driver's license when I was 16
years old. The problem was that I didn't have a car. I saved my
money and for $24 bought a dark green '37 Plymouth. I earned enough money
working odd jobs to buy gas and oil. It used way too much oil.
When my friends gathered round to see my purchase, I discovered I
was expected to lift the hood lid and prop it up so they could see and listen
to the engine running. I wasn't sure why, but that was definitely what guys
did. The really cool guys lifted one foot and rested it on the bumper while the
engine was running, as they talked about compression, carburators, distributors
and plugs. I tried to do that in order to pass. I knew what a sonnet was,
where the superior vena cava was located and the names of Mars's moons,
but I couldn't remember the difference between a carburator and
distributor. That's a real problem when you're trying to pass.
When I was a feshman at the University of Minnesota I
came upon Dick Guindon cartoon that explained everything to me. Guindon had
drawn cartoons for the Minnesota student "Daily" before he made it
big. The first frame showed some cows in a pasture standing on their hind
legs chatting with one another. A fence and
roadway ran along the field. In the second frame, one cow shouted to the
others, "Car!" and they immediately got down onto all fours and
started chewing grass. In the final frame, as the car passed into the
distance at the furthest end of the field, they all stood up on their hind legs
again and resumed their conversation. I finally discovered what passing was all about.
