Skin color suddenly means so much

It was a sunny Sunday at a church in south St. Petersburg.

He had learned after Sunday school that I was coming from Ghana, an African country the size of Oregon.

"Do you love soccer?" he asked with delight. "I play soccer," he continued, with his head tilted and a broad smile.

I smiled back.

"Where do you live here in St. Pete?" was his next question.

My answer was "northeast."

He seemed jolted, and asked why I chose to live in the northeast part of the city and not on the south side.

Stunned, I asked myself why a 12-year-old boy would ask this question. What does it really mean to reside on one side of this sprawling city?

Smiling again, he said bluntly, "You are black and you will be liked and treated better on the south side."

The truth is, I have never been so conscious of the color of my skin my entire life as I have in my 10 weeks here in the United States and in St. Petersburg. I'm at the St. Petersburg Times as a visiting Alfred Friendly Press Fellow.

If you think the reminder from the 12-year-old African-American boy that I am black was an isolated case, you would be wrong.

All you need to do is head either north or south of Central Avenue and the unmistakable split between blacks and whites in this city strikes you in the face like the sunshine.

"The south is for us and the north is for them," somebody said to me in my early days here.

There is a generally marked difference in the look of the two sides of St. Petersburg. Much of the south side, at least the part now called Midtown, is made up of smaller buildings, weedy lawns, cars of older American models, including some that are broken down, and young people idling about. The lawns of the other side of town are largely better kept, the buildings are bigger and the cars are fancier.

The reminders of race, however, go beyond the geography.

The other day, to mark the unofficial end of the summer, I attended a cookout organized by a colleague at the Times. Of about 20 people I was the only black, but that meant very little to me. Indeed, it didn't cross my mind to check the shade of the skin of the people at the cookout.

We were engrossed in chitchat as we feasted at a couple of tables standing on the well-manicured grass of the Pass-a-Grille beach home of this friendly colleague. People I spoke to were generally excited about my fellowship with the Times and were curious to know about my country. Nothing they said reminded me of the color of my skin.

But as the night wore on, an elderly man and his wife sang some country love songs before singing a song about a slave. Interestingly enough, before the man started his song, he stretched a hand of friendship toward me and drew my attention to the theme -- slavery.

The song was about a slave whose shack was torn apart. The shack had been built by his great-grandparents, who first settled in the unidentified town before it was developed into a city. The new residents, all white at some point, told the mayor to get rid of the frail man, his family and his shack to make way for flowers to be planted to beautify the city.

Unfortunately for the old black man, it was close to election time and so he had to be evicted if the mayor wanted to maintain his seat.

When the man finished his song, I began to wonder how the average African-American might react to it. So I posed this nagging question to a female friend of our host. "I was also thinking about it," she said. She was emphatic that the song could offend African-American sensibilities.

Actions that might be interpreted as racial discrimination by some of my African-American friends could pass as an ordinary unprejudiced human attitude for the average Ghanaian and, by extension, African. But after having been here for 21/2 months, it's hard not to begin to racially dissect the attitudes of people.

Reflecting on the question posed by the 12-year-old in the church, I have noticed, with trepidation, that many of the towns and cities I have visited in this country are heavily divided along racial lines.

His question reveals just how deep the wounds of division in this society have gotten and what it will take to overcome them.

-- Kwesi Wrekon Obeng is an Alfred Friendly Press Fellow at the St. Petersburg Times. He comes from Ghana.

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