Mr. Lanier

Or “When the Black Family Moved Into Our Neighborhood”

In the small neighborhood I grew up outside of East St. Louis, in the 1960’s, every single person was white, as was the small private school I attended.

The only time I met a black person was at a Halloween party, and it was a fourth grader who had dressed up as a “Negro”. He seemed pretty nice, though.

After I moved to Ohio, I lived in a neighborhood with 150 modest colonial homes with well-manicured yards and not a single black family. The new elementary school was walking distance from our house and had 500 students, of which two were black.

The first time I ever really met a black person was at the age of 12, when our new neighbors, the Laniers, moved into our cul-de-sac. As usual, my friends and I were playing basketball on someone’s driveway when they first pulled up, and the father stepped out of his car. He was black. He was tall. That could mean only one thing.

He was a professional basketball player!

We knew he wasn’t tall enough to be Bob Lanier but we figured he was probably a relative.

After they moved in, we knocked on the door to meet them, and Mr. Lanier opened the door. We told him our names, welcomed him to the neighborhood, and then we said excitedly,

“Are you a basketball player?”

He kind of smiled and replied, “Well, I played in high school, but not really much since then. I’m a dentist.”

“Can you dunk a basketball?”

“ I could in high school, but probably not now.”

“Oh, Ok……well, goodbye,” we said, decidedly less excitedly. And we left.

A short while after he moved in, Mr. Lanier installed a basketball hoop on his back patio. Only instead of setting the height at 10 feet, he set it at an appropriate height for his 7 year-old son, which was also the appropriate height for 12 year old boys who dreamed about dunking. Looking at that hoop was like looking at a Playboy magazine for the first time, and we started thinking about dunking on that hoop, on average, every 7.8 seconds during our waking hours.

We finally snuck on to that patio after he left for work one day. We dunked 1-handed, 2-handed, off the backboard, and alley oops. It was awesome, and we snuck on his patio more often afterwards. We were playing one night when he was out with his family, lost track of time, and were still there as it got dark, and the family unknowingly came home. As we were playing, we saw the drapes on the sliding glass doors pulled back, and the big, black man was staring at us. We stopped playing because we didn’t know what he was going to do — call our parents, yell at us, or, in a rage, pick us all up, 2 in each hand, and throw us in the ravine behind his house. Or possibly politely ask us to leave. What he did next, though, surprised us.

He turned on the patio light so we could play longer.

Maybe he did it because he was new to the neighborhood and wanted to leave a good impression, or maybe he did it because we had let his son play Spy Tag with us, but I think he did it because he was a nice man, and that is what nice men do.

Around the same time, we ran into our neighbor, Mr. Williams, and asked him about his son who was our age, and sometimes spent the Summer there. We talked a bit and then he asked us if we had seen that the jigs had moved in. In his naivete, my friend Bill said, “Yeah, but their names are the Laniers, not the Jigs.”

“Well, there goes our property values”, he replied.

It didn’t sound like very nice things to say, so I asked my parents about that later. They told me “jig” was short for jigaboo, a slang term for a black person. They added that “jigaboo” was offensive and mean. I rolled my eyes because it didn’t really take a rocket scientist to figure that out. I should know, because I later asked my brother-in-law, a rocket scientist, and he said that, no, you didn’t need a degree in Rocket Sciencetry to figure out that “jigaboo” is not a term of affection.

They then told me that some people had the idea that when a black family moved into a neighborhood, the value of the homes would go down a little. Another white family would move out, sell their home to a black family, and the house prices would go down some more. It would spiral down and pretty soon the neighborhood would be completely black, and the homes would be worthless. If you didn’t sell early you were going to lose everything. It was supposedly what happened in East St. Louis while we were there.

I didn’t like hearing that. I didn’t want to move, but I was white, and I didn’t want to lose everything, so I asked them if that was true.

They laughed, and then said that property values were associated with a number of factors, such as economic production as well as growth potential, desirability of location including recreational and cultural activities, and of course, supply and demand. East St. Louis, they explained, was an industrial city built due to easy access to railroads and coal. Once those became less important and the factories became outdated, the industry moved elsewhere and the decline was inevitable. Ethnicity, they said, had nothing to do with it.

My parents were very smart people, and they sometimes assumed I was smarter than I actually was, so when they saw my blank face they said,

“No, it isn’t true.”

I was relieved, because I liked Mr. Lanier, and I really liked playing basketball on his back patio.