Unsentimental Journey

Walt Harrington’s quest to understand race in America could have started anytime. Such as the day he, a white man, married a black woman. Or when he stood in a hospital, awaiting the births of their two children.

But in the end, a racist joke in a dentist office jolted Harrington on his way.

As the dentist worked on Harrington’s teeth, another white man entered the office and said he had “a good one.” Harrington can’t remember the joke’s details, only that the punch line centered on a stupid black man.

He had heard racist quips all his life, Harrington says: “But for some reason, it struck me for the first time that this idiot was talking about my kids. It struck me in a way that makes your heart pound.”

The moment passed, but not the pain and confusion. “I realized if I could be so shocked at that simple realization, then I really didn’t understand anything about race. . . . And I was a little bit frightened because I realized I’m raising these kids, and I really need to know more.”

So he took a leave of absence as a writer for the Washington Post Magazine and embarked on a journey.

“Crossings” (HarperCollins) is the chronicle of his seven-month trek across a swath of black America--from the cotton fields and quaint towns of the South to the company boardrooms and crowded streets of the North, through the Western trails once stomped by the legendary Buffalo Soldiers into the homes and high-rise offices of black actors and managers in Hollywood.

His is not a story for black Americans. Harrington realizes he cannot know what it is like to be them.

Instead, the book is for his children; a snapshot of what it was like at the turn of a century for a people whose blood they share. And it is for white Americans like himself, who may have questions about the parallel universe of black America.

Harrington, 42, says the idea was “to take white America to a place where they won’t or can’t, are afraid or are too indifferent to go.”

In his travels, he visited the first black youth he ever knew, the college activists who once labeled him a bigot, a black woman whose white father never acknowledged her existence. And he asked them how they felt about their lives, about race, about America.

Some skeptically thought his idea sounded too similar to “Black Like Me,” a book in which a white man chemically darkened his skin and traveled the South to experience what it was like to be black.

Harrington admits the jury is still out about how blacks will view his book. Though he received a positive response during most of his promotional tour, he admits that many black interviewers were initially skeptical. And one black man at a Seattle reading told Harrington that he should be ashamed to think he could communicate the feelings of African-Americans.

Harrington explains what he thinks makes his journey and book different: “The idea was to go out and engage black America in a way that white and black Americans have not (been) engaged for more than a decade, to try and encourage a dialogue across these boundaries that blacks and whites seem to have.”

He scoured old black periodicals, looking for places to stop, and asked friends and family where they would go if they undertook such a trip. He gathered names and information. Ultimately, he decided to rely primarily on curiosity.

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Nearly two years to the day after he hit the road, Harrington finished his book. And as he sits in a West Hollywood hotel room at the end of his first book tour, he says that, at one level, he learned “racism and the debilitating effects of racism are raging today as much as in the past, particularly when it comes to the third of black America that is poor.”

He saw such devastation in the face of Brenda, a struggling, young Sacramento mother who couldn’t see her own beauty because she wasn’t fair-skinned or blue-eyed. He heard it in the voice of Michael, a Houston cowboy with no horse or pride who believes that his people have created nothing and conquered no one.

Harrington also retraced his own footsteps, back to his home state of Illinois and towns called Crete, Ford Heights, and Carlinville. He witnessed how the oppression of one generation can sap the determination of the next and realized that for some who once seemed so similar, life offered much different truths.

Henry (Pee Wee) Hampton was still playing amateur ball when Harrington found him in Minneapolis, more than 20 years after they had played together. Harrington had been the only white player on the all-black Ford Heights, Ill, team.

Both men had come from humble beginnings, their fathers earning $150 a week in blue-collar jobs. Harrington and Hampton shared rides after a game and playful banter on the field--a casual friendship that faded with the end of the season.

But there was much Harrington came to realize he never knew, never bothered to ask, about Hampton. While Harrington’s father could buy a modern home, in a town where blacks could not drive after dark, Hampton’s house in a black suburb had no running water or electricity. Harrington’s father could join the Teamsters, but union membership was uncertain for a black man such as Hampton’s dad.

And while Harrington never doubted he could one day be President, Hampton’s boyhood dreams of playing pro ball disappeared with the need to find a decent job.

“Maybe my folks aspired higher, handled money better,” Harrington writes. “But there was also the unfair advantage. . . . These truths reach out and touch us and our children today. Except that I was white, I could have been Pee Wee. Except that he was black, he could have been me.”

Harrington and his wife, Keran, were introduced by a mutual friend in 1975 while he was working at a small magazine in Springfield, Ill. They married in 1979 and have a 10-year-old son, Matthew, and 7-year-old daughter, Kyle. Harrington graduated from Blackburn College and the University of Missouri, and worked at newspapers in Harrisburg and Allentown, Pa., before joining the Washington Post in 1981.

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Harrington cautions that race or racism are not always to blame for distrust or individual conditions. On his trip, he realized there are many subtleties, such as class and background, that can cause negative or positive reactions.

“Every white parent is not a racist because they are nervous about sending their children to a poor school,” says Harrington, noting that many upper-income blacks have made similar decisions. “We have to figure out when it is race we’re responding to, or something else.”

Nevertheless, Harrington adds, whites also have to admit that prejudice may be a factor in many thoughts or decisions: “I don’t think you can ever get it out of your bones. You have to be willing to acknowledge it, put it on the table.”

Harrington remembers how other whites--at such places as a Southern Laundromat or a Western diner--casually used a racial slur to describe blacks.

He says he’d never heard the word used so nonchalantly and so often in Washington. His quest to find answers about race had now given rise to more questions--about his own race. And himself.

“I do wonder if because people where I live know I’m married to a black woman, they don’t say things like that to me,” he says. “That could very well be it. I just never thought about it.”

Yet, Harrington says that while some blacks should be more careful before labeling a white person’s attitude racist, whites should be conscious that the signals they send may be misinterpreted.

“White people don’t understand the impact they can have on a day-to-day individual basis if they’d stop complaining about how black people are always calling them racist,” Harrington says, “and started trying to change their behavior.”

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But perhaps the most important thing Harrington says he learned was that despite a painful history and a far-from-perfect present, many blacks were not blinded by rage. And with admirable resilience, they were striving for, and living, full, rich lives.

“I learned there isn’t any one way to be black in America,” he says. “There is really as wide a range of outlook, approach, style and manner in black America as there is in white America. . . . and white folks just don’t have much appreciation of the diversity that you find (there).”

Blacks have always had to be bicultural, Harrington says, and it would be healthy for whites to be the same: “Because they don’t have to be around (blacks) very much, they’re not forced to learn to be comfortable. What they don’t realize is that when a black person is in a white setting, that person may also feel uncomfortable. The difference is they’ve had to live in two worlds at one time.”

If an effort is made to look at and value a culture alongside your own, he believes, the results can only be positive. “It’s not something we should worry about preserving just because black people think it should be preserved,” he says of African-American culture. “Everybody in this country should have an interest in understanding and preserving it because it’s only in this place that it happened.”

When he returned home, Harrington says that he was hopeful for his children.

But what about white America? Would many people be interested in seeking an understanding to bridge real and imagined gaps?

Harrington sighs deeply and responds with cautious optimism:

“My own belief is there’s a real deep-seated confusion and fascination about black America. And if people can be led to a place where they can get a better view, I think they’ll take a peek.”