25 October—Yesterday’s disquisition elicited a gratifyingly large, positive, and informational response from readers, a number of whom remembered last year’s story about George teaching me to catch a nigger by the toe and get my mouth washed out with Ivory soap. But they couldn’t find it using the search facility in the header. My bad, not so easy to find. That’s why I didn’t provide a link; it dates from 28 August 2021, before I learned (the hard way) that it was better to post the disquisitions individually.

New readers may enjoy it, too. So here it is, title and all:

A small step for a boy, a giant leap onto the path of perdition

28 August—Just after the war—World War Two; in 1947, it was simply The War—when I was in kindergarten at PS 122 in Brooklyn, NY, one of my classmates was a kid called George. I didn’t like George. He was what in those days we were allowed to call a Negro. But that’s not why I didn’t like him. No, I didn’t like him because he constantly taunted me with the reminder that his father was a surgeon, but my father was only a doctor. He always emphasized “only.”

George’s father was indeed a surgeon. And my father, even though board-certified in surgery and pediatrics, was a dedicated general practitioner—only a doctor, as George reminded me—and damn proud of it to his dying day.

When I was four years old, I was particularly innocent. (In my senecitude, I still am, but that’s another story.) I didn’t know about race; it hadn’t occurred to me that George and the other Negro kids I knew were different even though they were darker; I don’t think I even knew what darker people were called. And I didn’t know any dirty words. I didn’t even know there were dirty words that nice people didn’t utter. [Editor’s note: I still don’t—because there aren’t any.]

George was more worldly than I and, I reckon, most of the other kids in the kindergarten class. So, one autumn day, during recess in the schoolyard, George picked the teams for batless baselessball, using a little poem that I and most of the other kids had never heard.

The poem was short and easy to remember, useful for choosing up sides. So George was good enough to teach it to us kids.

And I was so impressed with the little poem that I recited it to the family at the dinner table. “Eeny meeny miney moe,/Catch a nigger by the toe./If he hollers, let him go./Out goes Y-O-U.” I absolutely loved it and was proud because I remembered the whole thing without a single mistake.

My brother, a couple of years older, chuckled. My father’s jaw dropped. My mother hit the ceiling. “If I ever hear you use that word again, I’ll wash your mouth out with soap. Where did you hear it?”

“What word, Mater? George taught us the whole song.” (Mater? Sounds better than Mommy in an essay.)

“Nigger.” She hesitated when she said it. “George taught you?” she gasped. “You and who else?”

“All us kids. What’s wrong with it?”

“Nice people don’t say it. It’s a bad way of saying Negro. It’s filthy. Never say it again. The word is supposed to be tiger. Catch a tiger by the toe. Never, never say nigger. Say Negro.”

“What does Negro mean?”

“It means a colored person, like George. George is a Negro. Did he really teach you that word? I’ll have to talk to his parents. They wouldn’t like it.”

“But George isn’t colored, Mater, he’s brown.” (Luckily, George wasn’t black, because that surely would have led to a discussion of the physical and philosophical aspects of the color black, which—when not capitalized, of course—connotes evil and is actually the complete absence of color.)

My mother, being a very liberal teacher, explained the facts of what we now call critical race theory and woke life to me and apologized for losing her temper. After all, I didn’t know any better. My brother, who had never taught me the important stuff, was disappointed because he didn’t get to see or hear me have my mouth washed out with soap. We used Ivory.

Why didn’t it occur to me to ask Mater if it would be okay if I said “Catch a Negro by the toe”?

And George went on to teach me another word—and concept—I hadn’t known: shitpot, not as a toilet or chamber pot, mind you, but as a term of derision and abuse, which he regularly called a nasty little girl who teased him at school. I don’t recall ever having heard that word in any context after George and his family moved to Larchmont.

That was the year before my family moved to Queens and I learned to separate the two parts of shitpot at PS 174.

And I expect that George grew up to be a politician . . .