Rich White Folks -- Growing Up Black in America -- Chapter 7
Chapter 7 -- It was about 1945 when my Dad’s business empire crumbled. By then, I had survived my entry into life in Lebanon. I had learned my multiplication tables up to the twelve's (twelve times twelve is one hundred forty-four) and was shakily reading long passages of “Dick and Jane” with only a few corrections. Life was moving along rather smoothly, when Dad decided to expand his business. That bad decision is what caused his empire to crumble a short time later.
CHAPTER 7 – King Bob’s Empire Crumbles
It was about 1945 when my Dad’s business empire crumbled. By then, I had survived my entry into life in Lebanon. I had learned my multiplication tables up to the twelve's (twelve times twelve is one hundred forty-four) and was shakily reading long passages of “Dick and Jane” with only a few corrections. Life was moving along rather smoothly, when Dad decided to expand his business. That bad decision is what caused his empire to crumble a short time later.
In those days, Missouri state law prohibited the sale of any kind of liquor on Sundays. Mindful of this law as well as the enormous profit potential, Dad could not resist the temptation. He bought a house directly across from the barbecue place. A White couple lived there and they were probably happy to get away from this noisy neighborhood with all kinds of cars driving up and down their quiet street until restaurant closing time.
On Sundays, Dad spread army blankets on the floors and stocked the kitchen with tubs of cold beer. Somehow, he got the word spread to the Black troops stationed at Fort Leonard Wood and they flocked to this house in Lebanon where they could drink beer and shoot craps all day Sunday. This was the beginning of the end.
Either hostile neighbors or uninvited town locals, blew the whistle on Dad’s illicit operation. In order to stay out of jail, Dad had to sell everything except the small house where we lived. His White, uptown lawyer friend was very effective in helping with the liquidation. Who knows, maybe there was some kind of conspiracy “to stop that nigger from buying too much land.” Eventually, we had to sell the small house where we lived. We moved from there down the block into what was once the gambling house. The Barbecue place closed and was sold. It had been the first to go. Somehow, Dad managed to save enough money to buy a truck. He roamed around the Missouri countryside hauling wood, corn or anything he could to make money. I sometimes went with him to do my share. Eventually we had to move out of the gambling house, when it too had to be sold. The only place we could go was to move in with one of Dad’s erstwhile partners -- William “Bill” Cooper. Bill and his wife, Lucille, had five children -- three boys and two girls. We moved into their small three-bedroom house. I slept on the floor in the boys’ bedroom. Margery, one of the Cooper girls was about my age. I spent a lot of time trying to get her to snuggle under my blanket to play “doctor” when our parents weren’t looking. Somehow, her little brothers knew what was going on, and they did their best to thwart my attempts at playing “doctor” with their sister. In a few months, Bill and Lucille decided to move back to Galveston, Texas where they were born. We had to move again.
Brief Venture into the Grocery Business
Thankfully, Dad had made enough money from the trucking business to rent a large building. The building was a long rectangular structure with a galvanized metal exterior. There was enough room to create a grocery store in the front end with enough room for living quarters in the back end. We moved from the Cooper’s house into the store.
Not the kind of businessman to be swayed by market research, Dad decided there would be enough customers to support a second grocery store in this neighborhood. Therefore, we began stocking the shelves with groceries.
When Dad got an idea, he went with it no matter what. Somehow, he took no notice of the fact that a White-owned, well-established grocery store was on the opposite corner. That store, I can’t remember the name -- let’s call it Sam’s -- had been there for twenty or thirty years. Sam’s had become a kind of cornerstone in the Black community. Credit accounts were its main offering. Any Black family that was down on its luck could go into Sam’s, and get a bag of groceries by signing the credit book. That was Sam’s major competitive advantage. It became a major hurdle for the success of our grocery store.
It took a while for us to build up a grocery inventory that could compete with Sam’s. The first few months of operation were a real struggle. One day, about three months after we opened, Dad got an idea for a competitive breakthrough. He decided to offer fresh pork meat that was better than anything that Sam’s could offer.
Not being the kind of entrepreneur that took the easy road, Dad purchased a huge glass-enclosed meat case and had it shipped from Texas. Even though it took a long time to get to Lebanon, the shiny glass-fronted case was going to insure our ability to compete with Sam’s. The meat case deal included a washing machine, which broke down shortly after it arrived. Undaunted, my stepmother used the rollers on the machine to wring out clothes after washing them by hand. Even that was a big improvement over the manual system.
Seizing on the fresh pork meat as our new competitive edge, Dad used his contacts with farmers that had supplied him black market meat during the war years. Just as he did during the war, he went out to the farms, slaughtered and butchered hogs on the spot. He advertised widely in the Black community that our meat came directly from the farm, and not from some meat packing plant in Chicago. We began stocking fresh-killed pork. My stepmother made laundry soap from the extra fat trimmed from the hogs Dad brought home for the meat case. For a brief period, it seemed that the store would be a success and Bob Randolph, the ex-Barbecue-man, now Bob the grocery man, would make a comeback.
This was about the time my "rich white folks" lessons began. For example, one day I said, "I ain't going to play with those kids anymore." Dad heard me. He looked at me with a stern face and said, "rich white folks don't use words like ain't." At first, I thought he was kidding. Then I realized that he was serious. So, I never used the word "ain't" in a sentence again. Since, during my early years in California, I had spent a great deal of time with rich white folks, I could easily relate to his point of view.
My lessons based on the "rich white folks" standard of excellence continued until I was about fifteen. One day Dad said something about "rich white folks" and I laughed. It just struck me as funny. There were a few nervous moments until Dad got the joke of that phrase. Then he, too, laughed. Although he never admitted it, I think in that instant he knew that I would be okay -- that I would at least have a feeling for the simile he was speaking about. I think he knew that I would have some sense of the style, the class, the responsibility, the self-confidence, etc., that he had observed from his narrow experience with “rich white folks.”
Black Community Vents Its Rage
For several months, although I was unaware of it, Dad placed himself at the center of a major Lebanon controversy. The all-White, Lebanon School Board had to do something about the decrepit, “colored only,” one-room school building which was literally falling down. The school board suggested that the old school be torn down and that all the Black kids be moved to an old abandoned building, which had been a USO Center during the war. This huge USO building was built in the center of the Black community to make sure that none of the Black soldiers from Fort Leonard Wood ever ventured into downtown Lebanon for entertainment. The soldiers had to make do with the entertainment found in the USO building surrounded by Lebanon’s Black folks.
My Dad had the audacity to suggest, through various channels, including his White attorney, who was part of the downtown establishment, that there were some other alternatives. Dad had the gall to suggest that it might be better to build a new school for Blacks. Dad even went so far as to suggest that, given the small number of Black children, it might be more economical to integrate the schools. I don’t think Dad knew that the Missouri State Constitution specifically forbade Black children from being educated in the same school with White children -- “the races must receive separate but equal education.” A key section of the Missouri State Constitution, stipulated that, "No white child shall be taught in the same public school classroom with a Negro child." The State Constitution was worded that way or words to that effect.
Traditionally, Lebanon’s Blacks had operated with a kind of slave mentality. They were happy with anything the White folks gave them and they would simply accept it without question and say, “Thank you, thank you Massa.”
With his uppity attitude, Dad, an “outsider,” had created a seething cauldron of resentment and hostility in the Black community. One night, all of that hostility boiled over into the front yard of our grocery store. A large number of the town’s Blacks formed a boisterous protest mob to show their anger against Dad’s outspoken challenge to the Lebanon School Board. This near riot took place, coincidentally, directly across from the USO building across the street from our store.
The crowd was yelling and inviting Dad to step out of the store. One loud voice said, “Come on out here Nigger!”
I don’t think I ever saw my Dad so calm and collected as he stood in the narrow doorway of the grocery store, he shouted back, “I am not going anywhere. You folks need to go home.”
Another loud voice in the crowd said, “Nigger, we don’t like your uppity attitude. You don’t belong in Lebanon anyway!”
“I belong here just as much as anybody else.” As he shouted this back at the crowd, he reached behind him and my stepmother put his 30-caliber army carbine in his hands. When he turned around, he cocked the rifle to put a bullet in the chamber. That sound sent a brief shudder through the crowd. My stepmother was standing right next to him with the huge Smith and Wesson 45-caliber revolver, which occasionally had been used to restore order in the barbecue place. She rather casually let the crowd see it too.
I was standing right behind them trying to figure out what was going on. Finally, after a long pregnant silence, it became clear that no one was willing to take the first step to heaven, and the mob quietly drifted away. As you can imagine, the grocery business fell off dramatically after that confrontation. Lebanon’s Blacks staged a subtle, yet effective, boycott against our grocery store. That was the end of our grocery business. We had to move again.
Stay tuned for Chapter 8 -- King Bob exiled to Kansas City
It was 1946 and we had to make another new start. We moved to a small rented house on a side street about three blocks from where the grocery store had been and Dad took off for Kansas City, Missouri to find some kind of work. There was nothing he could do in Lebanon. This is the story of how we transitioned to the big city.
