My Ancestors

 

Early picture of the Toscano family. 

Starting in the upper left and going clockwise, Rose, Mike, Grandmother Fracesca, Antonia (my father Louis's twin who died in infancy), Anna and Julius. My father, Luigi, isn't pictured. 

Nurturing Racism by Ace Toscano

 

He never had an innocent encounter with a little black child by the swings of his local playground. Or by the water fountain. Or taking turns on the slide. Or on the see-saw. Without color being a thing. Just kids at play.

He didn't live around black people.

Black people didn't live around him.

The first time he saw a black person in the flesh was indelibly imprinted on his mind. They were out in the country, all piled into his father's two toned green '49 Chevy, taking one of those Sunday drives many people used to enjoy back in the early 1950's. They were passing an area he'd since learned to identify as “the onion fields” when one of his mother's sisters declared excitedly, “Look, there's a nigger.” Someone hushed her but someone else soon observed, “He's been out in the sun too long – he's burnt.” They all giggled.

His father turned to him as they sped by and swore an oath, “You'll never have to work in the fields like that.” It seemed he had high hopes for his son.

As he recalled that man, a shirtless giant, his black face and upper body glistening with sweat, standing a short way off the road, towering over their car, he was convinced that in reality on that fateful day he had been a much smaller distant figure.

Yet the impact he had had on his life was enormous.