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A Subtle Cruelty

Copyright John F McMullen 2021

Gail Lumet Buckley
the widow of
my oldest friend
Vietnam correspondent
editor and author
Kevin Buckley
is a gifted writer
in her own right

While reading her earliest book
The Hornes —An American Family
a passage caused me to close the book
and exclaim for the first time
while reading a well-known expletive

Gail recounts being in Hollywood
as a young girl while her mother
the incomparable Lena Horne
was making a movie and to
keep her occupied
Lena took her to the nearest
Girl Scout Troop to join

Lena was told that Gail
might be more comfortable
in a Troop in a more distant
and poorer (black) neighborhood

Lena was having none of it and
was then told Well, she is
light-skinned and it may be
alright for her to join here

I slammed the book with a howl
The fucking Girl Scouts!
I had always thought of the
Scouts – Boy and Girl – as
teachers of American Values

Yet here was a whole other aspect
of racial bigotry that I had not seen
I knew of the horrors of slavery
the terror of the KKK and lynchings
I had seen the exclusion of American
soldiers from bars in Oklahoma

I had hired black professionals
over the objections of superiors
in a Wall Street firm BUT
I had never seen cruelty to
a child from a supposed
American institution.

These people did not
mean to be mean
they just were! It was
a cruelty that was
woven deeply into the
very fabric of society

In the many years
since that incident
much has improved
but Charlottesville
and many other
news stories have
shown us that
some do not
consider racism
to be Un-American

Thank you, Gail,
for this education
and for many
other things

 

(In one of the many coincidences that we see all around us, General Colin Powell,
who wrote a blurb for the back cover of Gail’s terrific book, “American Patriots”,
was laid to rest the same week that Kevin died )

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