Racism, the first encounter.

My Dad told me what nigger meant when I was around 10 years old. His favorite book is Catch 22, I've got a retrospective photo of him laying down on a bed in short-shorts during what seems to be a vacation of sorts reading Catch 22, the same copy that was on our bookshelf my whole childhood, teenage-hood, and post-school life while I still lived with mum, and most probably will be there every time I visit her house. He used to try to read it to me but I could never swallow it. Then for my 19th birthday my mother bought me a copy of my own, and I still didn't read it for a while because I just couldn't get into it.

Then when I was in the middle of a life crisis around the 07/08 new year I got really soaked up in it, it was literally attached to me. I used to walk into town reading it on the way - I didn't live too far from the CBD and beaches so I usually walked or rode around the place, as do most people around Byron. The walk from my house was a cruise and outside of heavy pedestrians so it was no problem to walk and read. Once I hired a book from the local library then caught up with a friend of mine, it got dark and she was coming to mine that night anyway so we started walk and I got out the book I had hired her and started reading it to her along the way because that pathway had lights from town to a little past my house and from that night onward if I ever had a book handy it would keep me company if I were walking home at night. The book I had hired that time was Crow, a series of poems by Ted Hughes, and in that 10 minute walk I knew it would be one of my most memorable books. Until now, I have never found anything as interesting and exciting as that book.

So I would get to town and usually meet up with friends or just get a water at The Beachy, a pub that over looks the main beach I grew up with, and just read Catch 22. It became a kind of joke between my friend at the time, I took it everywhere with me because I couldn't stand not having it with me in case I found myself with any spare second to keep reading it. It only takes one good book to get you into reading, and Catch 22 was it for me!

Anyway, when I was around 9 I moved into the L shaped room in the house I lived at the time, not Flowers Road, this one was Lismore Road, or as my family reflects on it "The White House," because it was pure white as was hard to miss. A you came round a corner on a hill just outside of a nearby township, there was a big empty paddock and on the other side was our white house sticking out like an Ethiopian in the middle or a KKK meeting. Which leads me to the title of this post. It was in this L shaped room that my dad was attempting to read Catch 22 to to me before bed every night. At the beginning of the book they are talking about the 'Soldier in White,' a soldier in the hospital that is bandaged from head to toe, and one of them states "..don't even know if it's a nigger in there!" At that point, my dad put down the book with a kind of smirk, not because he is racist, but because he could tell I had no idea what nigger meant and the subject is about as awkward as a sex talk; "A nigger is a black person.. right?.. but, umm.. it's not a very nice word. ..I don't know how to tell you why but, umm.. just don't ever call a dark person a nigger.. ok?" and I nodded and he smiled and all was ok.

Isn't it funny how seemingly insignificant moments can stay with you more than the biggest and the best moments. Like in primary school when Healthy Harold, a kids safety giraffe that used to tour the schools in my areas once a year, showed a bike safety movie and one scene in that was about watching out for cars coming out of drive ways - it scared the crap out of me to the extent it was almost a phobia whenever I was riding on residential footpaths for a while after that. To this day, although I don't directly think 'Healthy Harold' when I'm riding past driveways, my brain will subconsciously calculate the fact that in primary school I learnt that a car could pop out and I could hit it and go flying over the handle bars like the kid in the video with the red helmet, so I should be cautious.

To this day that is the moment that subconsciously goes through my head when I hear the word nigger.. come to think of it, if anyone mentions Catch 22 I specifically think of that moment in life before I go on to explain how I love the book for every other reason.