The Pepes and the Black Sailor

It was hot in the palm thatched bar, even with the fan circling and circling.

Don Pepe looked across the table at me, “What do you call yourself?’

I smiled and lightly said, ’Actually, I classify myself as free and a sailor.’

‘Ahh.’ Don Pepe looked to Pepe and raised his eyebrows. ‘Free is a good word but is it a race?’

I poured the beer and when I looked back up the three men were looking at me, awaiting an answer while Antonio was pouring his beer. Antonio raised his beer to me in a salute and I put my glass over to his and we clinked. It sounded like the bell that began the fight.

‘But if I were to say to a friend, oh yes, there goes Capitan Pickthorne, and he were to answer, oh, you mean the black man, would that be correct?’

I frowned at that and wondered why his question went in that direction. I took a breath, ’Cutting all the crap away. If you want to refer to me as a Black man, that is okay since first, it is politically correct as a solidifying social strategy and second because in Spanish it means black. As I told Antonio, politically, anybody identifying themselves as Black is identifying themselves as a part of a social movement to counteract the repression our ancestors and children have and are facing in the world today.’

Don Pepe shook his head. ’It is true that the term negro means black but it is not true that we, who are not influenced too much by North American racism, would refer to you as black or negro, we would classify you as Trigueño though.’

‘What does Trigueño actually translate into in English?’ I asked.

Don Pepe tilted his head, ’A Trigueño is a universal slang term for a person who is a combination of good things: good looks, good personality, good manners. Literally it means wheat coloured. Generally though, he or she cannot be dark skin for that would just fall into the other over two hundred Spanish language classifications of race. In some parts a Trigueño has more silky hair than you do and in others more kinky, that is the word, correct? Kinky?’

‘Yes.’

‘It is definitely not a derogatory term. Am I agreed?’ he looked at the others who nodded gravely. I asked, ’What do you call Vicente Guerrero?’

He smiled and nodded, ‘The General would be called a Mulatto and could be referred to as a Trigueño.’

‘To completely confuse you’ Antonio interrupted, ‘my assistant at the Club de Yates is considered by the staff as a Trigueño though he has blondish hair. There is some Indian blood and some Negro blood in him but they, we, call him Trigueño.’

‘Capitan,’ Don Alfonso spoke, ‘the reason for this conversational discussion is the concept of black in the United States and I guess much of Europe also. We heard from Antonio that you are very intelligent and sensitive and had some interesting points on the term and how it has been and is being used as an absolute description of what we would call confusion.’

I inclined my head toward him and saw that they were waiting for my response. The other Pepe had said nothing during this initial part of the discussion and I wondered why he was with us. I drank down most of my glass and wiped my mouth with my fingers. Don Pepe snapped his fingers in the air and patted his mouth to somebody out in the darknesses of the place.

A paper napkin was put by my glass from behind me. I didn’t turn to see who did it.

‘Okay’ I said with an intention of a friendly smile. ‘I have a feeling that the question is why do we refer to ourselves as Black when we could refer to ourselves as Brown or Beige or Flesh Coloured or something like that, no? Like you do in Spanish, right?’

They looked at each other.

Pepe finally spoke, ‘No. Capitan, I think the question is why are Black North Americans maintaining a separation from the rest of the North American, Central American and South American inhabitants?’

That hit me from nowhere. ‘I don’t understand.’

He smiled, ‘Why are Black North Americans so mad at all others who have all had similar historical and heritage experiences?’

I know I had a smirk, ’Who else has had 20 million people transported to pick tobacco and cotton?’

Pepe also smirked, ’The Spanish killed more than that number of Indios here in Mexico alone.’

‘In slavery? Transported away from their homes, families and traditions?’

‘Yes. Remember it was more than 150 years of African enslavement before the English ever even landed over on this side of the Atlantic. The priests kept records of deaths and births of Indios and Africans and through that we have a fairly substantial knowledge of how many Indios and Africans died and why. You might also consider that a part of the 20 million were sent to the countries of Latin America.’

I thought for a second, 'You Indio?’ He looked Indian now that he was talking.

Pepe had a face that was in a continuous smile and grimace. He was squat but beefy with lean arms and loose clothing. ‘I do have the blood of Indios, the Indios of this region. There is some blood of Africans also in me, as well as the blood of Blancos.’

‘You are a maestro also?’

‘Yes. A maestro in ship building. Yes.’

I smiled at him. ‘You are a ship builder, a shipwright?’

‘Yes, all of my life I have been building ships and boats as my father and his father before him have done. I follow a long line of shipbuilders. But, still the question is: do you know why you are so mad?’

‘Mad, yes but not angry. I am mad enough to have a lifestyle that puts me out into nature with no one to take my excuses for fuckups, no concrete pavement to pretend that life exists only for me, but not angry at being a Black man.’ I didn’t know where all that came from but I was ready for them now.

Pepe smiled and looked concerned, ‘But you refer to yourself as a black man and your skin is actually oaken in complexion.’

‘Your English is really good, Don Pepe.’

He tilted his head. ‘No. He is Don Pepe and I am just plain, old Pepe.’

‘Okay, Pepe, sorry. The thing is that we in the States have been for many years now trying to come together as a group in a country that until the 1920s legally held us as second-class citizens. It helped us to have a common linkage, even if the linkage was based on negativity, and we then called ourselves Coloured and Negro. After the Civil Rights Movement began, the term Black came in and that was in anger at the struggle to push ourselves into first-class citizenship for such a long period after we were supposed to be legally made first-class citizens. It put us on the opposite side of White.’

‘But,’ Don Pepe began ‘it also pulled you away from Brown… and Yellow, and Red and White. It segregated you. You made yourself into what they wanted you to be. Do you understand?’

‘I understand that. We understand that. But, what you do not understand is that we had no assistance during the Civil Rights Movement marches until they got big, then all the celebrities were okayed to participate in certain ones that were granted permission and had a lot of press. We had a few Whites, Latinos, Orientals but not the vast majority of the populations that inhabited that country across the border. They did not take up arms. When for the most part they got threatened, they found they had obligations elsewhere, and left a whole bunch of coloured people out in the white heat to turn themselves black for simple self-defence.’

‘The Civil Rights Movement is over, no?’ asked Antonio with a frown.

My chuckle seemed the right thing to do, ’I hope not or we are really fucked.’

‘But,’ Antonio continued, ‘there are over 300,000 Black millionaires in the US. That counts for a large gain in civil rights, no? That is a lot of money to put into whatever struggle still exists, no?’

I smiled at Antonio and looked around at their earnest expressions. ‘Money pulls you from that circle of unity and makes you White, or at least the concept that Whites have of themselves. Lots of those millionaires are Republicans because they stand for safeguarding the abstract of the dollar. I say abstract because the dollar is not related to anything any more and is now based on credit, which should be called debit. It has always been a class struggle from the time class became important to society. The Black millionaire is proof of that reality.’

Antonio frowned deeply, ‘You are a socialista?’

‘Naw. I am a sailor.’

He asked differently, ‘What are your politics?’

‘They change with the countries I enter under sail.’

Following Don Pepe they all leaned back in their chairs, put their hands forward surrounding the beer glasses, lifted them and drank deeply, as if they were in a united thought.

Don Pepe put his glass down first, licked his lips, cleared his throat and spoke looking me straight in the eyes. ‘Rod, I was beat a few times by both the police and those who did not like our protesting for civil rights. I joined a group of men and women who were not going to take the beating without striking back. The group was made up of quite a few Mexicans and led by Blacks. Eventually the Blacks pushed us out through innuendo. Not telling us about things, that kind of thing.

‘We had a Civil Rights Movement here in Mexico that lasted over thirty years as an armed revolution and still pops up every so often as in Chiapas. But, we did not settle into the ruler’s laws nor into their economies. We created our own laws and our own economy and allowed them to settle into our’s or leave the country or die. Our’s was a socialist revolution until the latter part of the 20th Century. It changed and went Hollywood and I went to the States to teach about Mexican socialism through English Literature. Most of the students did not know anything about the Mexican Revolution except for Pancho Villa and Emeliano Zapata, both made famous by Hollywood capitalists. And, they did not know about the many many women who rode, fought, cooked, washed clothes, drank, played, fucked and had babies in the many front lines of that glorious Revolution.

‘The reason I bring this up is for you to know that in place of sitting in front of a Cadillac retail outfit because they did not hire Blacks, we would burn it down and create our own type of car, thanks to Volkswagen. In place of putting Standard Oil gas in the Mexican car we shot them all dead and took over Standard Oil in Mexico and called it PEMEX, Petroleos Mexicanos. We did not stop there.

‘At the very beginning of our revolution we brought in the greatest minds in changing society from class structures into equal participation by all of our citizens. Before that we elected our second president, who was a cowboy, and a mulatto, who tore down the concept of race and class within our national census taking. Without reference to race or class in a deeply racist and classist society in your archival history essentially erases race and class references for our future. Good idea but it did not work. The world outside Mexico did not like what Mexico was doing and did everything it could, including armed invasion and war to the easiest method of purchasing people through lobbies to create a top end politically. Politics became classist. The end of the revolution except in pop-ups every now and then as is the case in Chiapas.’

I nodded, ’So, you are a socialista?’

‘Me? No, I am not a socialista at all. I am the opposite, which is not capitalista. Capitalism and socialism meet in their own definitions of what they are. That is why the erasing of race and class in our census did not work. They are essentially the same thing being defined by the other. No, I am an anarchista, if there is such a thing. Ahh, but you are also, are you not? An anarchist?’

I shrugged, 'Probably, if I needed a term.’

‘Exactly. That is exactly how I define myself through not defining myself politically. I vote when there is something to vote on. There very seldom is somebody to vote for, but I do vote when I consider there to be a dedicated anarchist reaching a position to be voted for. They never win.’

‘The question remains, Rod.’ Alfonso spoke through a thick moustache that did not move, ‘Why are Blacks in the States so fucking angry?’

I looked closely at Alfonso, studying his moustache and it’s stray hairs. His eyes were that kind of brown that can turn greenish when reflecting some lights. He had some blackheads where moulded indentations for glasses went just before his medium length sideburn. Thinking about the why we are so angry with a fucking in it, I could not come up with an answer that I had already not given but came upon a solution.

‘Alfonso, why are we so fucking angry has first to deal with how we came to be put into the position of anger if we acknowledge that we are so fucking angry to begin with. I put forward that we discuss the repercussions of slavery when identified by physical characteristics, such as colour, hair texture, spread of nostril? You know what I mean?’

Alfonso looked thoughtful and the others were waiting for our interplay to begin.

‘Not quite.’

‘When Mexicans were singled out because they had certain physical attributes, say straighter hair or no beards, and made slaves because of that, then they could not run any place in Mexico without notice, right?’

‘Okay.’

‘Well, the first bunch of enslaved people were the Indians in North America, and the second were either the Scots or the Irish, then came the African. Well, the Indians looked like Indians and the Scots and Irish looked like Europeans but the African looked like an alien from another planet and were easiest to spot, hard workers, conditioned for tribal hierarchies and without leadership were extremely independent of others felt to be peers. Perfect.’

‘You are angry because back a long time ago you could be singled out?’

‘Partially. We are angry because we are taught to be angry and we have been taught for so long that that anger has infused itself into our blood streams. Down deep as African Americans we feel that our history can touch Africa but is rooted in our enslaved era. We cannot get past that and that is who we are is mainly kept in the mindset that has been handed to us under the table that to be equal to whites we have to adopt their habits and measures in place of our own. I am hearing that you did not settle on those scraps but of their type of menu and created your own kitchen. That might to be the secret, our secret that needs to be fed to us, or even to know how important our development as a people has been.

‘I have to say that, well, listening to you bunch, that maybe we need to share our strengths with your strengths.’

Don Pepe smiled broadly, ‘Can you imagine?’