How My Parents Gamified Racism
Our parents invented a game to help me and my brothers cope with racism
Hillenbrand Industries is the holding company for two operating businesses; Hill-Rom, which operates in the healthcare industry, selling and renting hospital beds, furnishings, and other hospital accessories. If you’ve ever spent a night in a hospital, chances are you’ve slept in one of their beds.
Hillenbrand’s other operating business is Batesville Casket Company. Although the name is probably unfamiliar to most people, Batesville is the largest coffin manufacturer in the country, controlling nearly half the US market. Funerals may be uncomfortable to discuss, but it’s a $20 billion industry.
No matter what anyone tells you, just about every industry in America has some degree of racism in its history. The funeral business is no exception.
Even in the 70s and 80s, white funeral homes only buried white people, and Black funeral homes only buried their own. The companies that depended on funeral homes for business, the chemical suppliers and, of course, the casket manufacturers, participated in the industry’s racist structure.
Around that time, my father was a salesperson for Batesville Casket Company. He was one of a dozen or so Black men who worked in casket sales at the company. As late as the eighties, Batesville Casket Company prohibited its Black sales force from covering white-owned funeral homes. Although segregation was supposed to be over, it didn’t matter.
Once in Memphis, Tennessee, my father accidentally contacted a white funeral home. Realizing his error, he apologized and exited the business. Still, the Memphis funeral director contacted the company’s headquarters to complain that a Black salesman visited his business. My father was reprimanded by his boss.
For years, my father and his Black colleagues accepted their handicap without question. To have a shot at the same living as their white colleagues, they had to accept things the way they were.
There were only two salesmen for Batesville Casket Company in Arkansas — my father and a white salesman. Not long after my father joined the company, we had dinner at the white salesman’s home. During the meal, he mentioned how great it was to have a job that let him travel across the state and still be home for dinner each night.
My father explained to us later that the white salesman’s territory consisted of every white-owned funeral home in Arkansas. Since there were dozens, if not hundreds of white funeral homes across the state, his white colleague never had to travel more than a few hours away from home to make a good living. That’s why he could be home for dinner almost every evening.
On the other hand, my father’s territory was very different. It spanned all the Black-owned funeral homes in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and parts of Texas, Alabama, and Tennessee. He traveled the Deep South for weeks at a time.
He also had to absorb the extra travel cost associated with covering five times as much territory. Unlike his white counterpart, my father was rarely home for dinner. It was impossible for him to earn the same money as his white coworker under those conditions.
After a few years, father’s job allowed my family to live a better-than-average lifestyle. But in the beginning, things were tough. Some of the Black-owned funeral homes in his territory were promising prospects, but most were small, undercapitalized operations. Many had poor credit, so they couldn’t afford to buy his products. In Alabama and Mississippi, some of the funeral homes were in buildings so run down they seemed on the verge of collapse.
In the summer, our family traveled with my father for a few weeks. Since he worked along the way it wasn’t a true vacation, but my brothers and I enjoyed traveling from one state to another. What excited us most was the opportunity to swim in at the motels we stayed in along the way.
Ironically, the “Black people can’t swim” stereotype contains a grain of truth.
Even in the late seventies and early eighties, Jim Crow was alive and well in the South. Although desegregation mandated equal access to public facilities, many cities closed their swimming facilities rather than integrate. Some white communities built neighborhood pools with restricted access; many residents installed backyard pools.
Where we lived in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, there two Boys Clubs; one for white children and a separate, less fancy one for Black kids. My high school’s golf and tennis teams were segregated. And there were separate swimming pools for Black people. As a result, generations of Black children never learned to swim. Even today, over 60% of Black children have low or no swimming ability.
In our town, there were only a few public places Black kids could swim. I went to one of the public pools once, but the water was so crowded all I could do was stand in the shallow end of the water.
Our desire to swim was where racism kicked in. Whenever we jumped into a motel pool, all the white swimmers left the water. At first, we thought it was a coincidence, that we were just paranoid. But soon, there was no denying it: white people wouldn’t stay in the pool once my brothers and I got into the water.
Women grabbed their children as if suddenly they were in danger. We were just kids ourselves, so this bothered us. “Why won’t white people swim with us?” we asked our parents. “Do they think we were dirty?”
After a while, my parents came up with an ingenious idea to distract us from white people who had an issue swimming with us. When we checked into a motel, my father would say to my brothers and me, “Are you boys ready to clear out the pool?” to which we responded with an emphatic, “YES!”
Once we checked in, he’d stroll us out to the pool, still dressed, to look things over. We’d laugh among ourselves at stares from white people, unnerved at the thought that we might seriously consider swimming in the same pool with them.
A few minutes later, we’d come back and jump into the water. Before long, we had the entire swimming pool to ourselves.
From time to time, a white person would check to see if we’d left the pool. But our parents insisted that we stay in the pool as long as we wanted. So my brothers and I played amongst ourselves for hours.
Instead of being upset by the hatred, our parents taught us to turn their racism around on the racists. So we made them wait for hours. If they wouldn’t swim with us, it was their problem, not ours. After all, the only thing keeping them from enjoying a swim was their racist attitudes.
Eventually, my mother talked my father and his Black coworkers into suing Batesville Casket Company for discrimination. The lawsuit took years. But in the end, he and all the other Black salesmen won a healthy settlement for the years of discrimination.
In the meantime, we moved into a house with a lovely swimming pool. All the kids in the neighborhood were welcome to swim in our pool with us—even white kids.
