February 05, 2025

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JIM McCUTCHON

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When I was a boy in New Orleans, Negroes were called “Colored”.  I often heard the word “nigger” used, but it was not used in our home. No one called Colored people Black. Black was considered almost as disrespectful as nigger. However, time seems to change all things, and Black is the term now preferred by those whose skin is really brown. Because of mixed parentage, I grew up among people whose skin was all shades of brown, but I didn’t ever see a truly black person until I was a teenager with a summer job at Metairie Cemetery. Since I will be 95 years old in two weeks, it is easy to see that I worked at the cemetery in the 1940s.

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Shine was a grave digger by profession, and he had black skin. Not dark brown. Shine was Black - all over. I can testify to that because, at the end of a workday, we all went to the barn to shower before going home. We were so filthy dirty we weren’t allowed on the buses and street cars. I mentioned the barn, so I need to explain. Some funeral processions were led by a horse drawn hearse, and mules were also used for heavy work of various sorts.

 

Backhoes were in the future in those days, and though Metairie Cemetery is famous for the beautiful above ground marble vaults found there, those vaults were for people whose families could afford them. Most graves were dug, and they were dug with shovels by Shine and the other grave digger whose name I do not recall.

 

Shine’s black skin actually shone when he sweated, and he sweated every day in the summer, but I think his nickname was given to him because his face shone. Shine had a loving and joyful personality, and his presence lit

up his surroundings. One day, as I happened to be working near Shine, I heard him refer to his shovel as his spoon. Curious, I asked him why. His answer: “Because young feller, it’s how an ignorant man feeds his family.”

That answer struck me as sad, but Shine said it with a smile. He had been denied by the circumstances of his birth what I took for granted, a good

education, but I knew him to be intelligent, and I grieved for him even though he didn’t grieve for himself. I still remember his smile.

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The other Black man I have met was entirely different from Shine. He was a physician from Ethiopia who was studying at the Brooke School of Aerospace Medicine at Randolph Field in San Antonio. A group of doctors from around the world studied there, and, sometime in the 1970s, our local medical society in Corpus Christi invited some of them for dinner at one of our monthly meetings. After dinner, some of us, one of them being me, took a pair of doctors on a tour of one of our hospitals and then back to our homes for a drink and conversation.

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The two doctors assigned to me included the Ethiopian doctor and a white doctor from another country which I will not name because I don’t want to stigmatize it. The white doctor was rude, pompous, and self-centered. The Ethiopian, whose name I still remember, was a gentleman. Both had learned to be physicians, but the white doctor had not learned to be humble. Dr. Makonnen, the Ethiopian, had perfect manners.

 

I had never met an Ethiopian, and I knew very little about his country. Stupidly, I asked him a typical American question, “Where did your people come from?” As soon as the words were out, I was fumbling to recover by saying that, of course, they have always lived there. The Olduvai Gorge is nearby. Dr.Makonnen, the perfect gentleman, did not laugh at my gauche question. He thought for a minute and said, “I did hear that some Hamitic people had come down from the north.” I realized that he was talking about the sons of Ham, who was the son of Noah, but I said nothing. I had embarrassed myself enough and learned a lot.

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Later, when I had returned the two foreign doctors to their hotel, I did some reading about Ethiopia and discovered, among other things, that Haile Selassie is not the birth name of the Emperor. It is a title. One of the Emperor’s birth names is Makonnen. It was too late to ask, and I would not have had the courage to ask, but I have always wondered if my new friend, Dr. Makonnen, was his son or a relative of some sort.

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