"THE people. That's the word I prefer. Because THE people ARE my people." --Duke Ellington

"I don't think anyone would pay a nickel to watch me fight a dog or a fire hose -- but they'll pay a lot to watch me perform." --Johnny Mathis (1963)

Even at my age, I still look up to Johnny Mathis quite a bit. Even though the world he lives in is decidedly different from the one I am forced to inhabit, there's a lot to be said for how he's lived his 63 years. I, as a denizen of the real world, can't apply all that he seems to have stood for, but surely there are snippets of wisdom that I can still gather from a man I still consider so sage and learned.

Especially when it comes to matters of race.

Mathis, at one time, thought it silly to limit one's relationships. He once told a writer, "It's foolish to draw a circle around yourself and not let any stranger cross over. That goes for colored or white." Mathis goes on to reflect on all the friendships he would have missed out on "by limiting myself to my own people."

That works for me, too, for the most part. I cherish the people I consider my friends, and am friendly with anyone who is respectful, regardless of color. It's just that living in the real world as an adult rather cruelly exposes the lie of the Sesame Street world I lived in as a child and a young adult; the world where people and Muppets coexist happily without regard to each other's different hues and shades. No discussions there about, "well, if the blue Muppet marries the red Muppet, they can't call their children purple because they'll always be part red in the eyes of society," or some such nonsense. I like the expression the younger generation came up with, "reality bites". It does bite. And HARD. I've oftentimes considered whether it shouldn't be against the law to feed this Utopian PBS ideal to the very young, as it is such a bitter disappointment when one learns the truth.

Oh, well; one learns to gradually handle the truth. Handling truth involves growth. Growth is achieved by passing through several of life's doors, except in each threshold there's a thin membrane. In order to pass through each membrane, such as the one that separates the embryonic existance from infancy, or the one that separates childhood from adulthood, one must endure pain. Going from the Sesame Street world, the "world that could be", to the "world that is", involves passing through yet another painful barrier. It seems one can't pass through any of them without crying.

I think that Mathis, because of his wealth, can still inhabit that other world. As far as race matters and the "world that is" are concerned, for the most part Mathis rarely speaks of it in public. Instead, he seems to prefer choosing songs to express his feelings on the "world that could be" in a decidedly nonconfrontational manner. Upbringing probably had a lot to do with this.

Mathis' father, Clement Lamont Mathis explained it this way in the early 60's:

"Johnny has had a lot of help from white people. You read the newspapers, and you feel that all the people in the world are bad. All the race troubles in the world confuse a person so he thinks everybody hates everybody else. But this isn't true. If Johnny had hatred in his heart to begin with, he never would have gotten help."

"...Soapbox speeches don't help to my way of thinking. If you practice fair play, people see you and they respect you. In fact, they have to. They respect what you stand for."

Well, there is something in what the senior Mathis had to say. I was shocked to learn recently, through an old magazine article published before I was born, that young John grew up in a school system that had different ethnic groups, and this was YEARS before Brown vs. the Board of Education, which was the landmark decision forcing school integration. I thought that everybody was segregated everywhere before 1954. So as Clem Mathis seemed to imply, you can't always trust what you read in the papers. Come to think of it, I should know this for a fact! I work for a newspaper. I know how the news can be skewed a bit, or be inaccurate due to one-sided reporting.

And I can't say I haven't had my fair share of help from white people myself, usually with things that don't involve money. Sometimes you have to go "outside the circle" and, like Blanche Dubois said, depend upon the kindness of strangers, basically trust people. Especially when one travels, one is pretty much at the mercy of strangers.

There was the time I took my first plane ride, to see Mathis at Carnegie Hall in '97. Years of apprehension were climaxing as I took my seat, when I met a 250-pound white guy who needed to get in the middle seat next to me! Not an easy task if you're familiar with how airplane seats are arranged. Anyway, we exchanged greetings, he seemed friendly, so I told him it was a first for me. The planes engines had powered up by then and I asked him about the incredible, frightening noise...I could barely hear myself think. The man told me I'd get used to it. The plane started to taxi..another new experience, but I could handle it. It was kind of like being on a school bus, the way it bounced along. My neighbor was constantly talking to me and even got me interested in looking out the window from my aisle seat as we taxied, and I was feeling OK about the whole thing. All of a sudden the wing engines whined and then ROARED and I was thrown back into my seat..my neighbor said, "Don't worry, they're sucking in more power so the plane can get lift," and I could just catch the ground rushing by faster, but the noise, that deafening noise, was causing my heart to beat wildly and I looked away and up at the ceiling. The man looked over at me and asked how was I doing, I nodded, and he said, "you'll notice we're no longer on the ground." !!!!! As I watched the ground pull away from the plane, my head started to spin, tears were streaming down my face, and I was getting nauseous. My "guardian angel" asked again if I was OK, I said, "Oh, sure..." To make a long story short, this kind stranger, again whom I never saw again after Cincinnati, took up the rest of the flight explaining all the different noises I was likely to hear on this and other planes, how to look down the aisle when I started getting motion sickness, and talked me through a particularly turbulent landing. For the remaining leg of my flight, and both return flights, I no longer feared air travel; I was even comfortable enough to consider a nap on the last leg out of Atlanta on the way home!

Then, on the coldest day of the year, my car broke down and the wind chill was in the minus 20's. I abandoned my car to hike up to the off ramp, when a "guardian angel" pulled up in a Blazer-type vehicle and gave me a ride to the Homeland grocery store a mile up the road, where I could call a taxi. "You'd have never made it in this wind," he said. It had only briefly occurred to me not to accept this stranger's offer, but I was in no position to argue--- I was freezing! This unknown white stranger took no money for his trouble, and he did me no harm, and to my knowledge I've never seen him again, although I'm sure he lived in the neighborhood.

Sometimes "the world that is" isn't all that bad.