In 1957, when I was not quite seven, I discovered that social relations in the United States were governed by race and ethnicity. It was a Saturday morning, and my parents, two brothers and I were eating breakfast around the green Formica table in our Hialeah, Florida kitchen. The windows were cranked wide open and still it was fry-eggs on-the-sidewalk hot, years before air-conditioning became an affordable option. Imagine living through a Florida summer that begins in May and ends in October, 12 miles from the beach, fans circulating swampy mosquito-laden air. Immobile air.
A voice shot through the windows.
“Tomato boy. Tomato boy.”
I ran to our jalousie-window front door and opened it. A
twelve-year-old boy, wearing a tight short sleeve shirt and black pants eyed me
with an expression of resignation and boredom.
He stood three steps below me holding a reed basket filled
with fist-sized red bursts. “ — matoes? dollah a box, “ he drawled. His skin
was purple and smooth as a plum. He was shoeless. How could his bare feet bear
the weed stickers, the burning asphalt?
Another lanky teenage colored boy, as African Americans were
known back then — if you used the polite term — sat at the back of a green late
40’s Ford pickup truck; stacks of boxed tomatoes rose along the wooden side
rails beside him. This sixteen-year-old wore a white tee shirt and seemed happy
to be sitting. An older Negro (another fifties appellation) leaned his arm
against the driver side window. The engine coughed, grey smoke puffed and
putted out of the muffler.
I ran back to my parents and told them that the tomato boys
were here and that the tomatoes looked yummy. My mother took a dollar out of
her change purse.
I gave the boy the bill.
He put a four-pound box in my arms. “I need it back,” he
said, tapping the box. His forehead was beaded in sweat.
I nodded, smiling, and he grinned back. If he hadn’t been working, we could have played catch, Indian Ball or Flies and Grounders in our back yard. I knew a lot about baseball already — reading the Sports page of The Miami Herald had made me an English reader. This kid could be another Mays or Robinson, maybe even a Satchel Paige.
My parents Luis y Fortuna, with my brothers Leslie y Felipe
and me in the white sweatshirt.
Could I ever really be friends with this boy?
Most likely he lived on a farm and didn’t go to school.
Because he was “colored,” he wouldn’t be allowed into the Food Fair, Rexall’s
Drug Store or Schell’s Hobby Shop. Maybe his Pop could buy a six pack at Mike’s
Liquor if he trusted a white guy with his money.
The tomatoes were perfectly round. They were grown in fields
about a mile away, in Opa-locka, behind the airbase. In colored town. I’d been
warned by Jerry Easley never to ride my bike in “Niggertown.” “One them “jungle
bunnies” will steal your bike, Jewboy.”
From a 1956 Miami Herald article about this “immigrant
family” fleeing “Communism” in Guatemala
When we came to the U.S. from Guatemala in 1955, my father
was already 57. There was a recession in Florida, one of the state’s
never-ending rags-to-riches and riches-to rags seesaw. There were no job
opportunities for anyone, certainly not the elderly, especially if they had
weird accents. My father’s English was heavily German-inflected.
After emigrating to Guatemala in 1933, he ran the Royal
Home, a combination hotel and restaurant for British nationals. Then later, he
managed the canteen at the American base, though he’d fought for Germany,
during the first world war. Before coming to America, he and my mother had
opened La Casita, a restaurant that served champagne, steaks and Lobster
Newburgh, which became Guatemala City’s best restaurant. In our last year
there, my parents won the concession to supply Pan American Airways with hot meals
for passengers on their newly established routes to Central America.
My father was a people person. In the 1920’s, after the war,
he’d managed a troupe of magicians who traveled from Hamburg all the way to
Cartagena and Guayaquil. He was cultured and gregarious — he dressed in wool
suits and was always polite and deferential. He sold tickets at a movie house
in Guatemala City and then took a slow boat to China where he was the night
clerk in Shanghai’s famous Palace Hotel, before the Japanese invaded and he
returned to Guatemala.
My father witnessed the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.
He was the night clerk at the Palace Hotel. He told us that the Japanese
soldiers went in the hotel and pulled out any Chinese and shot them pointblank.
He had an impossible time getting a job in Miami, but
finally he was hired as a host at a Dobb’s House, a restaurant on West 36th
Street, across from the then fledgling Miami Airport and a long bus ride from
our Hialeah home. It was his kind of job — greeting and seating guests. The
only problem was his high standards: he was critical when his manager
substituted paper for cloth napkins his first week of work and when he
overheard the manager cursing the Negro dishwashers as “lazy beasts.”
One day, a couple came into the restaurant. My father
escorted them to a table near the air-conditioner. During the meal, the manager
came up to my father and asked why he had seated “them niggers” in an area
reserved for white people. My father said that he didn’t know there were
different sections for people of different colors in the restaurant.
“Can’t you see they’re black?”
“And so? What difference does that make?” He had previously
worked six months for the railroad in Livingston, Guatemala, a totally Garifuna
village.
“Unger, next time a couple of “niggers” come, sit them in
the back.”
“But it’s too hot back there.”
“You do what I tell you to do!”
That was my father’s last day working at Dobb’s House.
There were no colored kids in my Palm Springs Elementary
School in Hialeah though I knew that some lived closer to the school than me.
Also, few Latinos.
My classmates were the children of working-class parents:
airline mechanics, policemen, plumbers, milkmen and the occasional single
mother cocktail waitress or on rare occasions, a cashier at the Food Fair or a
hairdresser at the local salon. None of our neighbors had college degrees, none
spoke a word of Spanish. They knew nothing of opera or art, like my father.
None were Jewish.
When a classmate got angry at you, he’d call you tomato boy
or nigger. It was normal. My brothers and I never called anyone “nigger”
because it was an ugly sounding word and we had often been called kikes, spics
and dirty Jews; we had black eyes and curly hair to prove we were foreigners.
One Saturday morning we found that someone had thrown rotten eggs against the
side of our house. Another time someone painted a wooden wire roll with the
words “Dirty Jues. Get out.” Like the tomato pickers, we suspected that we
weren’t really welcomed.
One afternoon when I was sixteen or so my father and I were
at Miami International Airport, waiting for my mother to return from visiting
her mother in Guatemala. We were walking down the concourse when we suddenly
saw a towering Negro, well over six feet tall, walking towards us. He was
busting out of a suit that barely concealed rippling muscles. The man was quite
handsome, with short-cropped hair and a smile that implied royalty.
We knew it was Muhammad Ali. He was in Miami training at the
5th Street Miami Beach gym to fight Big Cat Cleveland Williams later in the
year. A two-time felon, Williams, was a puncher with a mustache and a bullet
still lodged in his hip to underscore his mettle. But all his power proved
hopeless when Ali scored a decisive 3rd round TKO at the Astrodome in November
of 1966.
My father was all of five foot eight and a fiery boxing fan.
We religiously watched the Wednesday and Friday Cavalcade of Sports fights on
television with him. We loved Luis Rodriguez, Floyd Patterson and Federico
Fernandez who had style and hated boxers like Carmen Basilio and Gene Fullmer
who pummeled their opponents during clinches, threw low blows when the
referee’s vision was blocked, delivered rabbit punches that hammered the back
of their opponent’s necks. Emile Griffith was our favorite boxer though he
“killed” Benny ‘Kid’ Peret in the ring after continuously taunting the gay
boxer by calling Griffith a “maricon.”
Ali was ballet encapsulated — handsome, witty, and defiant.
He wasn’t colored or a Negro — he was beyond classification. He was a proud
black man with the gift of gab. My father admired him not only for his boxing,
but because he spoke his mind and somehow, unlike himself, seemed to revel in
his audacity.
We went up to Ali. “I want to shake your hand,” my father
said to him.
Ali smiled and shook my father’s puny mitt.
“You make your people proud,” my father said, barely able to
spit out his words in an intelligible English.
“Thank you,” said the champ, a bit bemused.
Ali gave me his autograph on a card that had the fight song
of my new high school in Miami Springs on it. As he was signing, my father
added: “You know, you can come to my house for dinner any time you want.”
What my father was saying was that in separate-raced Miami
where signs warned blacks and dogs to stay out of Miami Beach after 6 PM, my
father would be honored to break bread with Muhammad Ali despite what the
neighbors would say…
“I just might do that,” Ali said. He smiled in a way that
made me think he understood what my father meant.
In 1964, when I was in the middle of 9th grade, my parents
had moved from Hialeah to Miami Springs — from a house with no air-conditioning
to one with central air. As soon as we moved in, that first week, we had
worshippers from the local Methodist, Lutheran and Baptist churches come and
visit. We never told them we were Jewish, only that we were not interested in
religion.
In 10th grade, I took a World Humanities seminar taught by
Mr. Gonzalez, a Cuban exile. It was a course in which we read Gordon Allport’s
The Nature of Prejudice and Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer and discussed race,
Communism, The John Birch Society and the Vietnam War. We read The World’s
Great Religions, and defined what made someone an atheist or an agnostic. We
listened to classical music and compared Mozart to Beethoven to Stravinsky.
There was one black kid in the class. Skid was a towering,
skinny kid who sported a scraggily goatee. He always wore black shades even
indoors and he would look over their tops when he whispered to me sitting
beside him. He had a nice smile and a very red tongue which protruding from his
buckteeth.
His mother had been coming to our house once a week to do
the ironing and the folding since my mother worked full-time as a secretary at
Pan American Airways. Skid and his mother lived across the canal from Miami
Springs in the black part of Hialeah. The poor treeless part where the streets
were rutted and the telephone poles wobbled.
Skid and I breached the racial divide five days a week. We
really liked each other. He talked like a Black Panther and I like a future
Students for a Democratic Society member.
We agreed that Satch Paige of the Negro Leagues was probably
the greatest pitcher ever, till Sandy Koufax, a Brooklyn southpaw, calmed his
wildness and went 25–4 and won pitching’s Triple Crown in 1963. He was Jewish
and his refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, made him a
hero in the larger Jewish community. But we both understood why it was
necessary to have different heroes that reflected our ancestry without talking
about it.
In our senior year in 1968, Mr. Gonzalez, invited us to be
on a local TV show that aired on Saturday mornings called “Youth and the
Issues.” I remember sitting in the lobby with Skid, his mother and my mother
waiting for our moment to go film our segment. Martin Luther King had been
assassinated a month earlier and Newark and Gary, Indiana had gone up in
flames. LBJ had decided not to seek re-election and the Vietnam protest
movement was in full throttle.
I remember that our host, a likeable liberal, was more
interested in getting across his argument that democratic America would find
peaceful solutions to each and every one of our problems. He was a happy
warrior ala Hubert Humphrey style. Skid spoke admiringly of Huey Newton and
Stokely Carmichael, claimed Malcolm X was the man; I admired Ernest Gruening,
William Fulbright and Al Gore’s father, all of whom had voted against the Gulf
of Tonkin resolution. I remember we had fun on that show, frightening our host.
But what the hell? In the lobby, Skid went home with his mother and I with
mine. It was a beyond awkward when Skid’s mom said to us: “See you on Saturday
morning.”
In my yearbook Skid wrote something like “Say brother. With
your bright mind and good heart you are going to go far in life. One day maybe
our children will play together. Keep being the way you are.”
Skid’s words nearly broke my heart. He knew that the gap
between us, in southern Florida, had been insurmountable for teenagers of our
generation. There would have been hope for his dream to be true, but I had
already decided that I wanted to get as far away from Miami as I could. I
eventually ended up in Boston and later learned that Skid had enlisted to fight
in Vietnam.
The separation of races was entrenched in Miami. The Negroes
lived in Opa- Locka, Allapattah, Overtown and a hot and ghetto city called
paradoxically Liberty City — this is where my brother and I went to buy beer in
high school, giving young black men a fifty cents tip to get us a six-pack of
Busch Bavarian for $2.50.
Miami Negroes were very angry when during the Kennedy
Administration thousands of Cubans came to Miami to escape Castro and were
given several hundred dollars as soon as they arrived. Then Cuban adults
received $100 a month for a whole year to get readjusted in the U.S. At the
time, the minimum wage was a buck and a quarter in Miami, which meant that if
you worked a 40-hour week you earned $150 a month after taxes. Nobody ever gave
the colored people any support when they came to Miami from Georgia, Louisiana
and Alabama to work as crop pickers. Or should I say from Palatka or Pensacola,
Florida, where many of their relatives had at one time been lynched.
Within two years, the industrious Cuban exiles had bought up
most of the gas stations and shoe repair shops in Miami and soon replaced the
black porters and maids in most of the Miami Beach hotels. Calle ocho, less
than a mile from Liberty City, became the main thoroughfare for them.
The Negroes had no choice but to sit on their hands and
watch. Eventually they rioted later in 1968 Frankly, who could blame them?
Unfortunately, they burned down, in frustration, the few businesses in their
neighborhoods which would then take decades to rebuild.
By the time Obama became president in 2008, I had lived in
New York City for upwards of 35 years. My wife and I campaigned for him on the
outskirts of Philadelphia, in a poor white ghetto that reminded me of the
Hialeah of my youth. White people answered their doors suspiciously. They
didn’t know who John McCain was; I think many thought Obama was trying to oust
George W. Bush — their kind of American — from the White House. It was a rough
day of door knocking, in the pouring rain. Our solace was when we knocked on
the door of a black family, whose hearts welled up with pride at seeing two
white fifty year olds campaigning for their man — think Satchel Paige — in the
cold, pouring rain. We gave their kids all our Obama buttons, which we were
supposed to sell for a dollar each. His election seemed providential: maybe my
adoptive country had finally achieved the greatness of what the Constitution
says should be a “more perfect union.”
I wonder if Skid made it out of Vietnam and returned to
Hialeah. Did he ever become an electrician? Under different circumstances, I
think we might’ve stayed friends, but the social and racial gap between us in
the ’60s, in the south, was titanic.
David Unger received Guatemala’s Miguel Angel Asturias National Literature Prize for lifetime achievement in 2014, though he writes in English and lives abroad. Novels include In My Eyes, You Are Beautiful (Mosaic Press, 2023), The Mastermind, (Akashic Books, 2016) [translated into ten languages including Spanish, Arabic, Italian, Turkish and Polish], The Price of Escape (Akashic Books: 2011; into German, Romanian and Spanish) and Life in the Damn Tropics (Wisconsin University Press, 2004). He has translated 18 titles including his celebrated re-translation of Guatemalan Nobelist Miguel Angel Asturias’s Mr. President (Penguin Classics, 2022), Folktales for Fearless Girls (Penguin, 2019), The Popol Vuh, (Guatemala’s pre-Columbian creation myth) and books by Rigoberta Menchú (Guatemala), Enrique Lihn (Chile), Silvia Molina (Mexico), Nicanor Parra (Chile), Ana Maria Machado (Brazil), Elena Garro (Mexico) and Teresa Cárdenas (Cuba). He has also translated many stories by Mario Benedetti (Uruguay), Denise Phe-Funchal (Guatemala), Sergio Ramirez Mercado (Nicaragua), among others.
His children’s books are José Feeds the World (Duopress,
2024), Moley Mole/Topo Pecoso (Green Seeds Publishing, 2021). Sleeping With the
Light On (Groundwood Books, 2020), and La Casita (2011, CIDCLI).
Other books include Ni chicha, ni limonada (F y G Editores,
2019, 2009) ). His short stories and essays have appeared in the Paris Review,
Medium, Puertos Abiertos (FCE, 2011), Guernica Magazine (February 2016, April
2011, November 2007 and August 2006) and Playboy Mexico (October 2005).
