people lived in Harlem. Whatever my feelings for Bill and Lorraina, and regardless of their feelings for me, I had already internalized America’s racial hierarchy, and while I might never attain the same heights scaled by my fair-haired brother in that highly racialized scheme of things, I definitely didn’t want to be a black person who served people, had to work all the time, and went home to scary neighborhoods. I also didn’t like the thought of looking like black people because to me white was the only way to be. It was obvious: White skin was better than brown skin. Blond hair was better than dark hair. A narrow nose was better than a wide one. Uncle Al made it sound as if I were in the same league as a butler or a cook when he called me Blackie, and I wanted him to stop.
It was a complicated problem for a boy to navigate; Bill and Lorraina were central figures in my childhood. But there it was. They were black and I was white, and I liked being white. It didn’t lessen my feelings for them, but I knew my color was better, and theirs marked them as lesser people. When Bill and Lorraina went off on Thursdays and Sundays after breakfast, I remember missing them terribly. As I grew older, my love for Bill and Lorraina took the form of thinking about them enough to wonder more about their situation, so I questioned my parents about the way they were treated. They invariably replied that “the help” had Thursdays and Sundays off, but it didn’t seem that way. Bill and Lorraina worked parts of those days, which meant they worked every day of the week.
“That’s the way it is,” my parents said. “That’s how everyone does it.”
Because I wanted Bill and Lorraina around as much as possible, I was easily reassured. But something seemed not quite right to me. That said, I was a kid, and my focus was on myself. I was generally able to hold on to a perceived injustice, real or imagined, only if it related to me, and even then, not always and not for very long. My brother the golden boy. Uncle Al calling me Blackie. The tough kids from the other side of the tracks. Whatever. I remembered those things—what it felt like to be the underdog. But I certainly did not make the leap connecting my perceived grievances to the much-harder-to-comprehend status of being black.
* * *
The racial hierarchy had become ingrained. I knew it from the microcosm of our relationship with Bill and Lorraina. They were in our apartment to help, and they were paid salaries. My mother had a buzzer placed strategically in the dining room, and she used it when she wanted the help to do something. The relationship was hazy to me as a child, but I understood the broad strokes. The job description for domestic help in our household, had one existed, would not have included “Love and be loved by Lewis.” They were there to work, and that was that. It was this divide between “the help” and me that provided my first introduction to the relationship between race and social hierarchy. Power was a birthright, which was manifested in the way my parents treated the servants. I suppose that—compared with some households—they did so gently and with everyone’s humanity mostly intact.
I sensed that while Bill and Lorraina were completely available to my parents in their worker roles, their friendship and finer emotions were not. Those things had to be earned. I liked that thought, because they liked me. What I didn’t see then was the big picture, where being pleasant and helping my parents raise me was part of the job description. Years later I began to understand that the complicated love that existed between me and Bill and Lorraina—all three of us wired not to engage in it entirely, or not in an open, uncomplicated way—had a lot to do with my lifelong attempts to change the pervasive racial dysfunction in our society. The fact that I never did ask Bill and Lorraina how they felt about me, or my not telling them how I felt about them, and that we had to rely on the hugs that adults and children give each other has stayed with me all my life.
* * *
When I was about twelve, my father gave me a book about the French resistance which I think was called