Cashews and pistachios are my favorite nuts. There are a few, however, on my list I will never eat because of the psychological effects they have had on me. I think it was nuts that opened the window of racism for me although, at the time, I didn’t understand the implications.
I was around seven years old while walking to school one morning when a friend offered me a walnut. I had had walnuts before so I gladly accepted. It had a hard to open shell so I placed it between my teeth and bit down. It cracked open and when I separated the shell with my fingers, the interior was a brown sawdust looking mess and staring back at me was a worm. I screamed in disgust and tossed the nut into the street. My friend offered me another which I refused. I have refused walnuts to this day unless the meat has already been extracted from the shell.
The above is a nice way to ease into the next category. Being under ten years old, most of the words I learned to identify things were from my parents. Unknowingly, I am certain, they taught me in the ignorance of the times without understanding the long range effects it would have on me as well as others.
I liked certain nuts my parents, and everyone else I knew, called “redskins.” I knew them by no other name until one day saw a newspaper ad regarding a sale on a pound of Spanish Peanuts. I was confused as to why they were called Spanish when the name redskins implied (to me) Native Americans. Needless to go into detail, it took a while for me to understand the social incorrectness of my parents terminology. Eventually, I didn’t like the way the flaky skins stuck in my throat so I stopped eating them.
Then there was the nuts I knew, again, by no other name but “N-word toes.” The term, as my mother had to explain was not because we were actually eating someone’s toes, but only that they looked like that and so, the name. Well, I didn’t know, because I had never even seen a person of Color (much less their toes) in our neighborhood on the Northwest side until I was fourteen years old!
I grew up in all White neighborhoods, went to all White schools and shopped with my folks in all White stores. Honest, it was that segregated at the time. The first Black people I even talked to were two men who cleaned the Will Rogers movie theater when I was an usher at fifteen years old.
I do not blame my parents for their ignorance because they grew up learning the same things they were passing on to me and, I didn’t know any better for many years because of my non-association with people of color. So it was not only me calling them Brazil nuts “N-word toes,” because when my mom went to the store and ordered a pound of them by that name ( she, like many others, probably never knew their actual name) as she also did with “Redskins,” the clerks knew exactly what she wanted. She was never confronted nor admonished. No one was. It was the 1950s.
By the way, I never did eat Brazil nuts, only because of the mental image I had of eating someone’s toes, even until this day.
As an aside, I never heard my parents use the N-word when discussing people of color (only when ordering Brazil nuts) and the folks in my neighborhood did not have to deal with the presence of people of color until the City started bussing Black students to schools in 1967! Then racism, exposed, reared its ugly head and things began to change.
