Four letter words

We didn’t use the N word in our house. You know the one. I said it last week when repeating something someone said and it felt foreign and left a bad taste in my mouth; like gritty sand, something that’s not supposed to be resting my tongue, or grating between my teeth. That word does not belong in my vocabulary.

I was introduced to its daily use when I met a friend's family seventeen years ago. She has ten brothers and sisters and they care deeply for each other, this is evident because they haven’t been able to move farther away than 1,000 feet from the old homestead. Each one has put up a doublewide in the expansive ten-acre back yard. There’s no more grass. The dogs that run wild and have tens of puppies each year have trampled every last bit of green, leaving nothing but mud and scattered brown tufts in its place. But those yards aren’t completely bare. Cars that have long since died are scattered helter skelter, turning a deeper shade of rust with every rain. But they’re not completely without purpose. The dogs can lie under them when it rains, or find shelter on those long hot summer days. They have to, there are no porches to rest under, just cinder blocks or milk boxes that appear as if they’ll topple any moment, and have a time or two under the weight of an adult. And if they get hungry, they can tear into the 50 bags of garbage lying behind any tin lean-to that doubles as a garage slash storage building. The blue tarp that flaps in the wind doesn’t keep much of anything out, except that dumb-ass that’s too lazy to drive the trash to the end of the mile-long driveway every Monday morning for pick-up.

But they’re better than the rest of the others. You know the others. That minority that took all the jobs away, or is causing the collapse of the educational system because they’re filling classrooms with children that can’t speak English. Then there’s that other one that lives off welfare, causing taxes to go through the roof, but still manages to drive a BMW with the hub-caps that spin to the food pantry for free chicken and okra Saturday mornings. You know where they get the money don’t you? It’s drugs, they sell drugs.

But hey, there’s a remedy. Just keep the kids out of school. Apparently there’s a way to do that even if you don’t have a high school diploma. That way they won’t be corrupted and can really learn the difference between right and wrong. That way they’ll know it’s not okay to hang around the others because they might get pregnant, or the color of their eyes may change from blue to brown, or they might start listening to that hip-hop shit, or think it’s okay to swim in the public pool that lets in people from the bottoms.

My family wasn’t prejudiced at all. We never used the N word. We never talked down about different races around the dinner table, at family gatherings, or any other time. I was taught to respect all people and understand that our differences are what make us unique. I went to public school, but we lived in an upper-middle class neighborhood, so everybody except one girl in our school looked just like me. And she was an exceptional person. You know the kind…one of the good ones.

My family wasn’t prejudiced. We were tolerant. The word today signifies acceptance, but that’s just not the case. Tolerate: to put up with. Acceptance: to receive willingly; to give admittance or approval to, accept as part of the group; to regard as proper or normal. With the exception of speech, my husband’s family and mine weren’t so different. I didn’t bring any black people home, and living in Upstate New York, I didn’t know any Hispanics. Even though I felt comfortable that anyone of the opposite sex I brought home to meet my parents would be accepted, no matter their race, as long as they were a Christian, went to a spirit filled church and spoke in tongues. We didn’t use the N word, we were tolerant. We only used words like sinner, fag or tramp.

Tolerance is a four-letter word. Tolerance means I don’t actively seek out those that are different from me in order to seek a better understanding. Tolerance means I don’t care to learn about anything outside the boundaries I have created for myself. Unfortunately this means I won’t learn anything new about myself either.

Tolerance is a four-letter word. Tolerance is hell.