Photo: Charlotte’s Trade and Tryon  Streets during the 1960’s

It was during the early 1960’s when I first came into substantive contact with Charlotte’s black community.  I was fourteen. My uncle owned a small supermarket in the Greenville area of the then segregated city. Located on Oaklawn Avenue directly across from Fairview Homes (the city’s first affordable housing project long-since removed), our store served an African American community.

It was there that I first experienced the value of stepping out beyond my own white culture. For me, this area became something of a “second home”, where I grew up under the protective and watchful eye of the customers I sought to serve.

I would soon realize that I probably knew more people of color than white. I recall waiting for a bus in front of Eckerd Drugs  at Trade and Tryon, and realized that if I crossed Tryon I would find many of my customers. (In those days all buses parked facing the Square, pointing North, South, East, or West.) So I left the white folk at my bus stop and crossed over. There I could visit until my customers would remind me that my bus was coming.

I grew to adulthood working at the little Piedmount Super Market, often managing the Produce Department. I recall fondly when after I was newly married, that one of my customers encouraged me to take home some collard greens to my wife. She even provided written instructions on how to prepare them.

To this day, I think of her every time I prepare collards, following her cooking directions .

Over thirty years later I was teaching an introductory computer class for the building maintenance staff of UNC -Charlotte. After class one of my students, a black man about my age, asked if I could show him how to use the internet to research the area where he grew up. When I told him that I used to work in his old neighborhood, he responded with excitement, “I knew it! I knew it was you. I remember you when we were both teenagers. I lived in Fairview Homes.”

He even described how I used to leave marks above my apron’s pocket where I kept the black or red marking crayons after writing the price on the bag of produce that I had weighed for my customers.

Feeling a connection with this “white guy” who had visited his world decades earlier, he shared details of a troubled life, complete with a failed marriage and loss of his family, of despair, and a stint in prison where he had seen several others that I remembered. I later visited in his home and met his current family. There I found a man of religious faith, a survivor of a difficult past.

Embracing and being embraced by people of color does not make me an expert on, or participant of, the black experience.

Nonetheless my interactions outside of my white culture have become a part of my personal story. If we truly are the sum of our experiences, then this has changed who I am.

It changes how I view others. It also allows me to “think a little less white.”

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This article, originally titled “Thinking a Little Less White”, was published in 2017 in YouDidntAsk.org.