Allen M. Price

I locked still standing in the living room watching on the television hundreds of pro-Trump white supremacists, insurrectionists, and neo-Nazis advance up the steps of the United States Capitol calling Black Capitol officers racist slurs. I saw blood smeared on the bust of president Zachary Taylor who opposed the expansion of slavery into the western states. An eerie sense of inexorability filled me as I took heed to some of the MAGA sycophants rubbing their feces on the walls of the Rotunda. “It felt bad. It’s degrading,” one custodial staffer in his 30s, who works for the Architect of the Capitol’s labor division told Business Insider. “We’re all Black in our labor shop.” Another janitorial employee added that he was “used to” cleaning up after white supremacists in the Capitol, referring to some of the Congress members. “I’m used to it,” he said. “The building we work in… you think [the rioters] were the only [white supremacists] here?” When the news showed Black custodians cleaning it all up, I turned the television off for it rang of the days of slavery, Jim Crow, and reminded me of the racist connection between the servant work my slave ancestors did for their owners, the maid work my mother did for wealthy, privileged whites in the 1980s, and the Black custodians cleaning up after the racist whites carrying Confederate flags, wearing Camp Auschwitz, 6MWE (six million wasn’t enough) shirts while spewing racist slurs, and leaving their bodily excrements at the very heart of American democracy. An abiding demoralizing example of our unimportance and steadfast viewpoint that many in white caste America still have of Blacks.

I knew at age eleven, I’d never do the type of cleaning work my mother was doing. Something in my Blackness wouldn’t allow me. My mother worked so hard for so little, and at the time it didn’t make sense to me. To work three jobs and only have enough money to afford to flush the toilet after pooping, to take a shower on just Sundays, and empty the cesspool once a year. Sometimes we’d use the oven for heat. Sometimes I had to brush my teeth by candlelight in the bathroom. Sometimes I‘d put too much toilet paper in the toilet, causing it to back up. When the cesspool was full, and I accidentally did that, the contents would gush out into the yard, and seep through the blades of grass, turning everything black. And the stench? We can’t even talk about the stench. It stayed until a good rainstorm came and washed it away. My mother didn’t see the work she did the way I did. She went from dead-end job to dead-end job, working for poor wages, long hours, coming home very late at night, turning her six-year-old son into a latchkey kid, letting myself in our house after school, cooking my meals, feeding my dog, Lady, and putting myself to bed.

One of the menial, back-breaking jobs my mother had was janitor. She and her Black female friend had a cleaning company, Razzle Dazzle Cleaning. They had a white van full of cleaning equipment, and would go out late every weeknight. Sometimes she let me come with her. Those pictures in my child’s mind of my mother cleaning the offices and houses of whites told the all too familiar stories of Black slaves who had to serve and clean up after their white supremacist masters. It was gutting to watch my mother emptying garbage cans, cleaning toilets, and scrubbing urinals as it was gutting to see Black Capitol custodians cleaning up the shit, piss, blood, and used IV’s of white nationalists who built a makeshift gallows with a noose hanging from it outside the building, a building that’s run by legislators who make laws that are supposed to protect us—a horrific illustration of the systemic racism in America.

The brutality with which Blacks are forced to do this kind of work cannot be overstated. It’s a state of mind learned on the slave ships over to America which continued on the plantations—to accept white America’s definition of Blacks as subhuman, which has been deliberately, wickedly hidden, and in harsher instances, taken away, but to destroy and cut us down, however difficult and unaccepting it is for whites to hear this fact. Even today, Black lives are controlled and determined by an artificial hierarchy that replicates aspects of slavery—a code of conduct that relegates Blacks to underclass citizenry. A policing of Blacks without the police, like large crowds of whites gathered to witness a Negro’s lynching—which didn’t then nor now, as the racist, venomous murder of George Floyd showed the world, always involve a rope—leaving the lynching with the flesh, bones, and pieces of clothes of the Negro as souvenirs.

In Memphis, Tennessee 1892, at a place called the Curve, Thomas “Tommie” Moss owned a grocery store called the People’s Grocery. The store was very successful, and brought a lot of money to the Black Memphian’s, as well as a sense of pride. But as Tommie’s store grew, William Barrett—a white grocer whose store had served the community before Tommie opened his—saw his business significantly decline, and feared a Negro would put him out of business. Barrett accused Tommie of plotting a war against whites, and with a mob of whites he attacked Tommie and two of his employees, Calvin McDowell and Will Stewart who defended themselves against their attackers, but were hauled off to jail. Three days later, a lynch mob of seventy-five white men pulled the three men from the cells, loaded them onto a switch engine that ran at the back of the jail house, and dragged them to the nearby Chesapeake and Ohio rail yards where they were brutally killed.

It was economic jealousy, an instrument of terror and control, wrote journalists and close friend of Tommie’s, Ida B. Wells in her newspaper The Memphis Free Speech. She urged Black Memphians to leave, and thousands of them followed her west. But their migration out of the south posed a huge dilemma for whites who were dependent upon Blacks to do the work that they themselves believed they were too superior to do. The economic exploitation of Blacks was coming to an end and it terrified whites.

“The transition from slavery to freedom was made with little interruptions to the habits acquired during slavery,” wrote sociologist E. Franklin Frazier in his book, The Negro Family in the U.S. “The transition from servitude to freedom took place in many places with scarcely any disturbance to the routine of life established under slavery.”

From the age of five, after my mother divorced my father, I watched her spend every waking free moment trying to renovate the American Dream in our cape-style white house with a picket fence. She had plastic on the couch, chairs, dining room chairs and table despite the dining room door being closed and off limits. She had placemats on top of the plastic that was on top of the kitchen table cloth, red runners on the maroon rug in the living room, coasters on the coffee tables, counters, windowsills, and picnic table. Newspaper was laid out on the back hall floor during the winter season to put our snowy and rainy boots on. The front door was dead-bolted, and whenever someone rang the front doorbell, we poked our heads through the bow window curtains, and told whoever it was to go around back. Dirty dishes on the counter or in the sink were grounds for a lecture. In the family room, my mother preferred I sit on the mauve carpeted floor even though plastic covered the gray couch. Shoes weren’t allowed on in the house. The toilet seat had to be down at all times to hide the urine sitting in the bowl. A Glade plug-in sat in the bathroom mirror socket to diffuse the odor. And she cleaned as though a slave master was watching her and would check her work when finished. Vacuuming was a Saturday matinee. Dusting involved several types of devices and cleaning products. Endust was used regularly while Pledge, the more expensive polish, was used only when company was coming. I teased my mother by saying Better Homes & Gardens was never coming to photograph the house. I thought this obsession of hers was just that, but as I grew older, and learned about my slave ancestors, I came to realize that it was an inherent trait resulting from the forced labor whites had Blacks do for hundreds of years. My mother’s cleaning tactics were a reflection of her mother’s and her grandmother’s and her great-grandmother’s.

On my July 10, 1987 birthday, my mother drove me to Rocky Point Park, and made me fill out a job application. She ran a concession stand there for many years in the summer, and said many times that as soon as I turned the legal age a Rhode Islander can work, fourteen, I was going to, and start working that day. I loathed the job before it even began. Rocky Point was a hangout for teenagers. No one in my school or neighborhood worked at Rocky Point. No one’s parents did either. It wasn’t cool, wasn’t fun, and paid a mere $3.75 an hour. It was the same kind of work Blacks had been doing for centuries: working in a system set up for us to stay irrelevant. There was no way making that little bit of money would do anything other than keep us struggling to keep the electric and gas on, not be able to take a shower more than once a week or flush the toilet after going pee. If I had to work, I believed, I must make more than chump change to live like white America, and told my mother that.

I went from being a games to a ride attendant at Rocky Point to a cook at Burger King each summer. My mother forced me to work those jobs I found degrading. But at the same time a decolonizing of my Black mind was taking place. In my sophomore year of high school, I put myself in college-prep classes, graduated my junior and senior year with high honors, and found myself a job at the men’s clothing store Chess King making $5.25. During the summers in college I worked at the men’s clothing store, Structure, the vitamin shop, GNC, Staples, and interned at the brokerage firm, Merrill Lynch. When I graduated from Rhode Island College with a bachelor’s in accounting, I landed what I consider my first real job, my first full-time job as a pricing analyst at what was back then the world’s largest mutual fund company, Skudder Kemper Investments. I went on to earn a master’s degree in journalism from Emerson College, attended Harvard Summer School, attained internships at Men’s Journal, and The Harvard Crimson, wrote for Muscle & Fitness, Natural Health magazines, and published fiction, essays, and creative nonfiction stories in some of the world’s highly-respected literary journals. I’m unapologetic and proud of my accomplishments and never having to do the work my mother and ancestors had to do. My strength flagged though when I saw my Black brothers and sisters cleaning the Capitol, realizing that my desperate attempt to fit into white America came at the expense of their respect.

I was in my forties before I understood the consequences of my actions. I read something William Monroe Trotter, the first Black Phi Beta Kappa key holder at Harvard University, wrote in his newspaper, The Guardian, “I realized that the democracy which I had enjoyed at dear old Harvard was not secure for Americans of Color because of their pigmentation. The conviction grew upon me that pursuit of business, money, civic or literary position was like building a house upon the sands.” If race prejudice and persecution and public discrimination was to spread-up from the South and result in a fixed caste of color. It would mean that however native and to the manner born, every colored American would be a civic outcast, forever alien in the public life. So I plunged in to contend for full equality in all things governmental, political, civil and judicial as far as race, creed, or color was concerned.”

It’s upsetting and disturbing that Black folks had to clean up racist whites excrements from their failed insurrection attempt. Twenty years into the second millennium, it shouldn’t be this way. The Black income and power inequalities on display that day shouldn’t still exist but they do. Blacks have always been forced to love a place that’s hated us. According to Insider, another janitorial employee said that he was “used to” cleaning up after white supremacists in the Capitol, referring to some Congress members. “I’m used to it,” he said. “The building we work in… you think [the rioters] were the only [white supremacists] here?” Our presence at the Capitol signified something deeper than work. Blacks cleaning up after a white mob trying to undermine democracy is a powerful image, especially when you add in a white man parading around the confederate flag, and the Black workers focused on getting the place back in order, not caught up in returning hatred with hatred, anger with bitterness, confrontation with balled fists. That’s been how my ancestors survived chattel slavery, how they endured a century of oppression, segregation, and Jim Crow, opposing it with a non-violent movement. Even in the face of a racist-appealing President, a man who spent more than a decade claiming Barack Obama, the first Black president, was born in Kenya and not America. With each stroke of the broom, each wipe of the mop to wipe off the feces and urine, they were piecing American democracy back together. It’s what Blacks have done no matter the circumstances, or the burden placed upon our backs to allow the American dream to continue.

My entire life, I watched my mother pursue the American Dream, but many seasons of sorrow passed, leaving my memory tainted with her unsuccessful attempts, my heart throbbing with bitterness, and an unhappiness that colored my childhood. That treachery was folded under the sealed pages of my youth, and the throb of that unutterable horror couldn’t be soothed by my mother’s kiss. That memory, still roused in all its suffering, taught me the hostility of my fellow white Americans, and to distinguish a real from a pretended type of white American. January 6, 2021 taught me that slavery may be dead as a formal institution of human bondage, but it’s alive and well in the hearts and minds of too many Blacks who haven’t yet the ability to remove its habitual shackles that has us working jobs where we have to endure racist treatment as if we’re still on the plantations. Because no matter what my mother did, how many jobs she had, how much dirt she came home with under her fingernails, how many corners she cut, we never got out of the financial pickle that seems to me to be American Black folks’ destiny. And even though my mother struggles financially to this day, she still believes at sixty-nine-years old that if she could continue working twenty hours a day, clean floors, and scrub all the urinals in America she’d make it out of poverty. What she doesn’t realize is what Ralph Ellison explained in his book Shadow and Act, “For Negroes that dream contains a strong dose of such stuff as nightmares are made of.”