The Rare Ugly

Met my third or fourth ugly person in 30 years yesterday. I met a few of them in New York — at a rate of approximately one per decade. Met this one in my fourth week back in my home state. Maybe I won’t meet another until 2026.

I was chatting with a clerk at a grocery store in downtown St. Louis. She welcomed me back to Missouri, then plunged straight into a warning about people “who don’t have a long bloodline going back in the community here, ruining the city with crime” I never like the wink-wink-nudge-nudge way of talking about something, so I asked who she was talking about — Mexicans? Muslims? Blacks? “Oh, yeah,” she said, and by way of proof said, “I was held up just a few weeks ago by a black guy.” She said this at full volume. Standing beside us, facing away but close enough to hear her, and visible to both of us, was an old black woman. The old woman showed no reaction. In Brooklyn, where I’m from, there would have been a reaction, instantaneous and impressive.

“Poverty messes people up,” I said.

She shook her head. She told me she comes from a long line of military people and cops and she’s got two biracial babies in her family, and she loves “those little things.” She was countering what she guessed I was getting at. She guessed correctly, but she didn’t really counter it. Not in my mind.

She could have told me how beautiful and interesting St. Louis is. She could have said how friendly and kind the people here are. She could have asked me how I like being back. That’s what everyone else does. I’ve met a lot of strangers since moving back, and nicer people I’ve never met anywhere. Interesting, interested, hospitable people. People who know how to greet a stranger and have a conversation.

But she chose to stand in the middle of a crowd, talking in a loud voice, not caring who heard her, to say this other kind of stuff.

She was friendly, I’ll give her that. But she was friendly in a way that made me feel I was talking to a recruiter of some kind.

Thanks for the invitation, but no thanks. I like the future better.

Susan Macdonald Bray: So Sorry, Tom. 

I was with a couple women I worked with years ago in the Parks here. We have a tradition of hiking (now more like strolling) together in a natural area on New Years’s morn. 

We all mourn, as do you, the strange turn of the political climate now. 

One of my friends commented how her black friends were surprised at how hard white folk were taking all of this. “Oh, we’ve got this! We’ve been through soooo much worse.”...was the sentiment. 

As are you, I am so aware of subtle racism. I worked for 32+ years in a park that white folk were often afraid to drive to and black folk were grateful to have access to. It was a “safe” meeting grounds for those who ventured past their fears. 

Tom Beaver: There are bad apples in any bunch. And even a bad apple has its sweet spots. It darkens the moment when someone manifests such smug unkindness and self interest, but such is life. We just have to keep staring it down until it’s gone.

Jeff Stache: To the powerless theres a lot of power in feeling you’re better than someone else

Tom Beaver: For the powerful, too. For anyone. Some people apparently like the experience of seeing others as inferior. I think it’s less about their own station in life than about 1) their natural born temperament and 2) the amount of bigotry in the air where they happen to have found themselves living.

Bonnie E. Bailey: There is always a loud mouth boisterous person in every crowd!! Sorry you had that type of experience! So chalk it up to a place /person you most likely will not patronize again!! The majority of the folks here in St Louis are not ugly like that!!

Tom Beaver: I’m sure you’re right, Bonnie. Most people are mostly good, is what I’ve found.

Pete Baker: Still referencing your grocery store apples: most people are a mixed bag.

Tom Beaver: Agreed. The way I put it above is that even a bad apple has some sweet spots.

Pete Baker: Her comments were emotional. Some of the cognitive psychology people say that our emotions are neither mysterious nor impossible to control. That conversation over four dollars worth of spring mix salad may set her on the road to rethinking her current feelings on a topic she clearly has some emotional stake in. Especially if she has what your fellow Missourian Mark Twain would call ‘good p’ints’.

Tom Beaver: What seemed to put her on that train of thought was me saying how nice downtown St. Louis was. She wanted me to know it hasn’t always been that way and who she blames for the un-nice stuff.

Tom Beaver: But she did seem quick to get aboard. She might have been halfway on that train already, perhaps because she was mugged a few weeks ago, perhaps anything. My objection wasn’t that she had emotions, but that she seemed satisfied to blame individuals according to their ethnicity rather than the conditions of their life and their individual choices, and to do it with an air of not belonging to an ethnicity herself that has produced some bad individuals, and that she did it so loudly among people who could find that kind of talk in public to be personally humiliating, enraging and frightening. I would have liked her better if I’d seen some subtlety of reasoning, a sensible amount of humility, and some everyday kindness. If she had, as you suggest, controlled herself better.

Jeff Stache: You know, I’m starting to prefer the loudmouths to the conservatives who insist there is no racism and no violence, and liberal are making it all up. Who’d have thought Nazis and Klansmen, who at least accept and admit it, have more integrity than “ordinary” people who lie about it.

Tom Beaver: Haha, sort of. I like that they makes themselves easier to identify. But I don’t think it comes from anything admirable, like honesty or courage. It comes, I’m afraid, from a greater chance of getting away with it — because they are in a place or time that winks at or even applauds bigotry.