Synopsis "black friends"
The inspiration to write "Black friends" came to me while auditing Professor Julie Saville's class: History 28201: 'The U. S. Civil War and Reconstruction, 1846-1898, ' taught at the University of Chicago during the winter quarter of 2011. To be sure, I was aware of the 2011 sesquicentennial marking the beginning of the Civil War, and I have since been further motivated by reading Salman Rusdie's non-fiction piece 'The New Empire within Britain' from his book of essays and criticism "Imaginary Homelands," but "Black Friends" was completed long before I began reading Rushdie. As I read the books and articles in the Civil War class, I began to reflect back on my upbringing and subsequent life. I realized that there were points of contact throughout that life with black friends. These encounters -- ranging from individuals to groups and extending across age groups, locations, social organizations, and unequal time periods -- added up to a very warm and moving set of experiences. I felt privileged to have lived all my married life in Hyde Park in Chicago and, despite my poor attempts to assist those around me in areas where I felt I had some ability, one feeling I recognized was present throughout: my sense of pride of place by having resided in a community that was given to me as a legacy from earlier times. The fact that Hyde Park was an integrated community together with my course readings further reinforced what I had known all along -- my residence was a blessing -- I would not have exchanged it with any other location in the world; it remains an uplifting experience, something I have always been proud of when I told strangers where I come from. "Black Friends" focuses on the major elements of my relationships with black friends but there are numerous and constant minor interactions, often with unknown black residents. These occur on a daily basis and are very difficult to capture; they form what I would term an 'atmosphere of community collegiality.' I have then, as a consequence of these experiences, tried to capture the way in which these feelings were engendered over a period of seventy-three years. I hesitate to say that my words form a piece with the celebration of the sesquicentennial as that event was not in the forefront of my consciousness until long after I had finished writing. It would be more correct to say that I wished to set down what I felt might be an often unwritten sequence: reflections on the unique experiences that formed the sensibilities -- with respect to the black race -- of a white boy who grew up in a privileged and segregated environment, and how, by the grace of circumstance and his own actions, he came to thankfully embrace a dimension of his life that, if lacking, would have made him less complete as a human being.
