"Play That Funky Music, Whiteboy."
Integrating My Story, the Great Migration, and the American Story. Part II.
In Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, she describes the massive self-relocation of six million souls from 1915 to 1970 along three separate geographical paths: African Americans from the coastal Southeast moved north up the East Coast, Blacks in the middle of the South moved north into the Midwest along the Great Lakes, and migrants from Texas and Louisiana most often traveled West to California. As I indicated in Part I, a great migration of white Americans transpired during the same time period from many of the exact same places on similar paths to similar destinations.
When I was a kid in Southern California, one could encounter migrants from the South almost everywhere. White Southerners were in abundance. Looking back, if a person wanted to meet a Texan, simply visit the nearest Southern Baptist Church. You could not throw a stick at one of these local evangelical congregations without hitting a transplant from the Lone Star State. My parents were constantly finding lost Texans and bringing them home. They had all come for some strain of liberation. Mostly, in the end, these new Californians found the freedom they sought and quietly melted into the culture.
Back then native Californians still called these newcomers Hicks, Hillbillies, Okies, and Rednecks. In high times and low, my parents remained sensitive to the way others received them, recoiling with disgust at the notion of being “treated like a peon.” As a young person, I instinctively understood the word as scatological—but, of course, the term of derision reflected generations of hard times under the soft peonage of the Agrarian South.
As a United States Marine Corps recruit, my father first came to Southern California in 1957. Like Wilkerson’s characters, albeit on a less violent scale, Wayne Cruseturner believed that a poor kid from Marlin, TX, faced insufferable limits in his hometown. After serving his enlistment at the now decommissioned MCAS El Toro near Irvine, he went back to Texas. He maintained a deep and abiding love and pride of place for his native state. But, for the rest of his life, he was a Californian at heart. Born in 1937, moving from farm to farm in East Texas, his family finally settled in Falls County in Central Texas. He proved an intellectually curious kid and loved the written word, but he felt underserved by teachers whom he believed catered to the small-town elite. Restless and aching for a freedom he could not quite articulate, he seized upon the Golden State as an idyllic place to begin his life anew. A few months shy of his thirtieth birthday, he left Texas for good with his young wife and a two year-old son.
With no line of credit, no safety net, and just enough cash to make the trip, with everything hanging on a vague promise from a high school chum already in Hollywood who knew somebody in the business who was hiring, my dad bet our lives on his creative drive. Miraculously, the lead on the job panned out, and he worked steady as a “cue card boy” while he hammered out scripts on “spec” into the wee hours of the morning. Supplemented by various freelance jobs, with my mom working intermittently during the lean times, he eventually achieved a modest portion of hard-won success.
Like Robert Foster, who traveled across Arizona and New Mexico in a stylish 1951 Roadmaster a decade earlier, my dad preferred Buicks—unless he could afford a Cadillac. Unlike Robert Foster, no proprietor ever denied my family lodging because of our race. But, for us, over time, driving nonstop across the Southwest became a measure of fortitude and also took on mystical significance. In our family tradition still, a Cruseturner road trip represents domination over the elements, a test of physical strength, and a declaration of independence. Hitting the highway conveys the capacity to conquer space through patience and stamina.
A Fifties kid, my dad loved Fats Domino and Chuck Berry. My mom was partial to Little Richard and, of course, Elvis. A song ever present in our Southern California life, the “Promised Land” (always the Chuck Berry version, never Elvis) related the story of the “Poor Boy.” In the tune, the protagonist perseveres through a star-crossed journey to the Golden State, facing a succession of obstacles and mechanical calamity, but, with the help of friends and his own determination, tastes the fruits of the New Canaan:
“Tell the folks back home this is the Promised Land calling;
and the Poor Boy is on the line.”
We made it out of captivity. We are here now in the land of milk and honey. Expect great things in the near future.
Over the years, with a mix of gleeful anticipation and reverence, we regularly loaded up our flashy white Eldorado with red leather interior and visited loved ones “back home,” ritually reliving our original exodus across the desert. With the confidence and good cheer of a local boy “made good,” my dad happily greeted friends and old antagonists alike on the aging streets of Marlin, Texas. During the citizen’s band radio craze of the 1970s, rolling down Interstate 10 in his Cadillac, traveling at well over the national speed limit of 55 miles per hour, my dad employed the C.B. handle the Poor Boy.
Educated with public school textbooks that taught the science of race, and acculturated on the premise of white supremacy, my dad never fully overcame the segregationist indoctrination of his youth. He could be prickly and blunt when it came to expressing core beliefs—and he grew even more vocal as he aged. Having said that, generous to people of all walks of life who touched his heart, his humanity was more complicated than a narrow racist cartoon sometimes offered up in sophisticated circles.
In addition to Chuck Berry and Fats, Muhammad Ali occupied prime space as a hero in our house. Somewhat counterintuitively, my dad loved the “people’s champ.” He even got over calling him Cassius Clay—a name I barely heard as a kid. In my dad’s estimation a man retained the right to change his name—especially if it represented a past that limited the future one might envision. Because my dad loved Ali, I loved Ali. I was shocked when I first realized this was a controversial position outside our living room.
A fairly conventional “hawk,” my dad ignored Muhammad Ali’s purported antiwar stance. If you asked my dad about Vietnam, he would have verbalized the basic conservative position: politicians, generals, and protesters lost a winnable war for self-interested and shortsighted reasons. Agnostic in terms of vital national interest, he viewed Vietnam as a conflict not overly important in itself but, once joined, a mistake to lose. But he never associated Ali with the strategic misfortune of Vietnam. He never quite accepted that Ali was truly against the war out of principle. Rather, he read Ali’s refusal of induction as a protest against a broader system intent on punishing a renegade. Ali, the talented kid from the wrong side of the tracks, through hard work and steely determination, demanded respect and fair reward for his uncanny ability to entertain. Now the system moved to humiliate him and assert dominance over a truculent rebel with the temerity to challenge the established order. To my dad, surely, Ali represented an outsized metaphor for his own struggle.
When someone suggested the flamboyant master of hand-to-hand combat lacked courage, he would scoff. Foolishness! “It takes a hell of a lot more grit to face Sonny Liston than it does to join the Marines.” Many times I heard him say, the Army would have never put Ali into combat. He was too famous. “They would have treated him like Elvis. He would have mugged his way through exhibition fights and laughed it up with starry eyed, celebrity-chasing generals.” No, in my dad’s mind, Ali pursued a much more daunting path telling the establishment to go to Hell. He was no coward for refusing to go to war.
My dad was holding cue cards at NBC when Elvis taped his 1968 Comeback Special. He always claimed no one paid any attention to the session until a handler put up a closed set sign that interfered with the normal routine of the other productions, manufacturing a buzz that would not have existed otherwise. This reinforced his long-held suspicion that Elvis possessed as much talent for hype as he did for music. His mild contempt for Elvis mostly abated after his unnaturally early death in 1977, which struck my dad as a milestone in his own life and inclined him more sympathetically toward the boy from Tupelo.
By comparison, my dad never loved Martin Luther King—not before 1968 or after. While he felt kinship with Ali fighting against a cruel fate, and could forgive Elvis for doing what a country boy had to do to survive a fickle world, he never could accept MLK as authentic. “He was a fraud.” The pampered and loquacious preacher, educated at the best schools, wearing Brooks Brothers suits, living in a fine house and driving a luxury car paid for by his parishioners. With Ali and Elvis he understood the struggle to overcome the powers that kept men down—regardless of race. With King, my dad was forever on alert for the grift.
When my dad ultimately failed to fulfill his most ambitious dreams in Hollywood, he found it easy to believe his manners and accent belied his low-born station. He suspected prejudice and a system stacked against people like him. An able writer who saw contemporaries of lesser talent succeed along pathways closed to him, he grew frustrated and insecure. He could be sympathetic to explanations of cronyism and nepotism and the pervasive notion that “the Jews” ran the town and favored their own. And, of course, conspiracies aside, success did often depend on nebulous factors such as social intelligence and networking, reflecting the Hollywood truism oft repeated in our house: “if you aren’t working your friends, you are working someone else’s.”
By the time I started kindergarten in 1969, schools and neighborhoods were more and more desegregated. White kids played with Black kids. Blacks and whites mingled at the workplace. Parents socialized sometimes awkwardly but more and more regularly. When you met an adult Black person they were often from the South (lots of Texans) or from the the depositories of the Great Migration from the generation before, Chicago, Detroit, New York, and sometimes from the West Indies via the East Coast. As I got older, I started meeting immigrants directly from Africa, Nigerians and Ethiopians mostly.
In 1975, three Black families lived on our suburban block located on the Northeast edge of the San Fernando Valley. They were all young married couples with children, so I knew them well. As I say, our parents socialized—but not always easily. The most intimate adult friend groups hewed to racial cleavages. Of the three black families, two were salt of the earth and one was objectively disagreeable—but the two upwardly mobile Black families had a more comfortable relationship with the outlier Black family than they did with any of the white families with whom they should have held more in common. The Black families sensed they were viewed with askance. They could guess what the white families said about them in the security of their trusted relationships—and, often, they were right.
But our generation of children reflected a tabular rasa that even now seems unfathomable. Happily we had no sense of time or history. Happily we had no memory of the Civil Rights marches and the racial violence or even the assassinations. Medgar Evers and JFK fell to murderous fanatics the year before I was born. Even the assassinations that transpired during my lifetime were beyond my conscious recollection: Malcolm X, MLK, RFK. I would remember the attempts against George Wallace, Presidents Jerry Ford and, of course, Ronald Reagan, and the slayings of John Lennon and Harvey Milk. But, in my experience growing up, killing leaders in the streets seemed much more of a “developing world” phenomena: Indira Gandhi, Yitzhak Rabin, Banazir Bhuto, Benigno Aquina. For us, racial violence and even legal segregation existed only as explained concepts from a distant past. Only ten years earlier, and eight years earlier, and even six years earlier, the country was on fire and coming apart. But all that history lay just beyond our memories and experience.
Not that we were race blind. We had parents, of course. And our parents recalled vividly the turmoil of the prior decade. And, later, as my friends reached their mid teens, there was an appreciable tension around interracial dating. My mom and dad grew up segregated—and that cultural training did not melt away so easily that they might see the light with immediate clarity. But the 1970s gave them a palpable sense that we were in a new moment that they mostly welcomed. I remember my father on the phone to my grandmother back in Marlin, whom he dutifully called once a week on Saturday when the long distance rates were most affordable. I came into the room unnoticed, and he was telling her that we had entertained one of my friends, a “little black fellow,” for an overnight sleepover. I don’t know what she said on the other end of the phone—but I imagine shock. From her perspective, so much was happening so fast.
And, full disclosure, my cohort was not immune to dividing up by race at times in terms of music and sports and culture. We once briefly split over the unlikely 1976 pop hit by Wild Chery, “Play That Funky Music”:
"Play that funky music, white boy
Play that funky music right…”
A disagreement broke out over whether the lead singer was singing “play that funky music, white boy” or “play that funky music right, boy?” Even in a world without Google, it was eventually resolved. But the determination and the debate made clear our world was a little more equal than it might have been a few years before. In a similar way, as we listened quasi stealthily to Richard Pryor albums and laughed uproariously with one another, in addition to the changing standards of decorum, we could all sense racial deference fading fast. The movie sensation of the bicentennial year, Rocky, landed clearly as a movie for white people, as the titular underdog hero, a great white hope, battled fictional Ali stand-in Apollo Creed. But, even so, the film bowed to reality as Rocky merely fought for a moral victory by going the distance and losing courageously to the great champion, fully affirming our certainty that no white fighter could ever beat Muhammad Ali. By 1976 we were increasingly aware that a majority of our favorite sports heroes were Black.
I distinctly remember the 1977 NBA Championship. I favored the Portland Trail Blazers, led by the big redhead, Bill Walton, former UCLA Bruin standout and a longtime favorite in my house. My Black friends rallied around the Philadelphia 76ers and Julius Erving, “Dr. J.” But, even then, the rivalries were all in good fun. When my team miraculously won, and I composed a triumphant Ali-esque poem to celebrate my unexpected victory, my friends laughed and punched me good-naturedly and maybe even hugged me, and we played basketball in Robert Hobley’s driveway for the rest of the afternoon.
Perhaps too much misty nostalgia here. Am I “whitewashing” my childhood into a LeRoy-Neiman-Norman-Rockwell fantasy collage of American life?
In truth, we were complicated with a lot of moving parts.
But there were something different about that moment. My generation, uniquely connected to a tumultuous recent history, but not directly a part of it, quietly, maybe even subconsciously, leaned into racial reconciliation. Bonds formed in locker rooms in Sun Valley, California (and I think also places like Lacy Lakeview, Texas), launched us on a different trajectory from our parents forever shaped by the harsh and unforgiving protocols of the Old South. In a way, we represented the generation with the greatest good fortune in terms of a golden transitional moment of great possibility.
Next time.
Part III: Coming of Age in the San Fernando Valley. Sons and Fathers of the Great Migration.
Later.
The Capstone Essay: When the pursuit of art collides with cultural appropriation. Is it possible for all our stories to coexist in an American Narrative?
So many great memories! Can't wait for pt III!