Read Online Certain People by Stephen; Birmingham - Free Book Online Page A

is—in the predominantly black South Side and not, as John Johnson did, on fashionable Michigan Avenue. “School buses with black kids go back and forth in front of my building every day,” he says. “They see it, and maybe they say to themselves, ‘There’s a black man who’s got a big business. Maybe I can start a business like that someday.’” Tours ofhis factory are conducted regularly for black schoolchildren in the area, and the message offered by the tour guides is always the same: “If there’s going to be improvement and progress among our people, it’s going to come about through more black business .”
    Not all the members of America’s black elite would agree with George Johnson’s emphasis on business education—nor, for that matter, would many upper-class blacks agree that either George or John Johnson qualifies as spokesman for either the upper class or for blacks in general. “After all, who are the Johnsons, anyway?” sniffs one black woman from Chicago, whose family hubris has been pronounced for several generations. “I knew that I was of the elite when I was born. We were the family that other blacks looked up to. Nobody really looks up to those Johnsons. Oh, of course they’ve gotten very fancy, with their big houses, their yachts and Cadillacs. We have an expression for people like that—‘nigger rich.’”
    There is more to black improvement and progress, many people feel, than simply making large sums of money—much more. It is a question of breeding, manners, speech, family background, and a way of “doing things.” Seemliness and probity count for more than property or possessions, and many Old Guard blacks regard such families as the Johnsons as vulgar upstarts, nouveaux riches who, with their ostentatious ways, are little more than an embarrassment and, as a result, do their race more harm than good. It is very much like the way Old Guard Jewish families regard the Jews who show up at Miami Beach hotels and wear mink stoles and diamonds with their swimsuits, or the way the Old Line Irish mocked their new-rich countrymen who hung lace curtains at their windows. It is the classic battle between the established family and the newcomer. If you’ve got it, the Old Guard feel, you don’t flaunt it.
    Mr. and Mrs. John W. Fleming live on a winding, tree-lined street called Iris Avenue in Cincinnati. Iris Avenue is a street of private homes in the $40,000 to $75,000 range and, because the street dead-ends, it is quiet with very little traffic. It is in an area called Kennedy Heights, which is not only expensive but also integrated. Though Lina Fleming says, “White people don’t like you if you look too much like them,” she gets along well with her white neighbors. Most of her friends, however, are black or, like herself, the color of coffee with lots of cream.
    Lina Fleming, in her middle fifties, is a woman of promptly revealed opinions, who admits that many of her tartly expressedsentiments have ruffled feathers on both sides of the racial fence. “I don’t think integration is the answer. I think the Negro schools did a great job.” (Like many Old Guard blacks, she eschews the fashionable word “black” for the more traditional “Negro.”) She also says, “I don’t believe in busing. I don’t think it’s necessary.” More than anything, she is infused with an overwhelming sense of family pride, and has outlined a book that she intends to write, to be called, simply, “The Family.” Sample from Mrs. Fleming’s outline: “Note their dress, their speech, and their habits of walking, greeting, etc. Note their table manners, manners of cleaning their houses, making and unmaking their beds, preparing their meals, especially specific kinds of food, etc.” “We were somebody ,” she says. “We were people