The Lost Continent - Bill Bryson [56]
At the diner where we went for our snack, there was yet another curious thing that made me think. White people like us would come in and take seats at the counter, but black people would place an order and then stand against the wall. When their food was ready, it would be handed to them in a paper bag and they would take it home or out to their car. My father explained to us that Negroes weren’t allowed to sit at luncheon counters in Washington. It wasn’t against the law exactly, but they didn’t do it because Washington was enough of a Southern city that they just didn’t dare. That seemed strange too and it made me even more reflective.
Afterwards, lying awake in the hot hotel room, listening to the restless city, I tried to understand the adult world and could not. I had always thought that once you grew up you could do anything you wanted – stay up all night or eat ice-cream straight out of the container. But now, on this one important evening of my life, I had discovered that if you didn’t measure up in some critical way, people might shoot you in the head or make you take your food out to the car. I sat up on one elbow and asked my dad if there were places where Negroes ran lunch counters and made white people stand against the wall.
My dad regarded me over the top of a book and said he didn’t think so. I asked him what would happen if a Negro tried to sit at a luncheon counter, even though he wasn’t supposed to. What would they do to him? My dad said he didn’t know and told me I should go to sleep and not worry about such things. I lay down and thought about it for a while and supposed that they would shoot him in the head. Then I rolled over and tried to sleep, but I couldn’t, partly because it was so hot and I was confused and partly because earlier in the evening my brother had told me that he was going to come to my bed when I was asleep and wipe boogers on my face because I hadn’t given him a bite of my frosted malt at the ball game, and I was frankly unsettled by this prospect, even though he seemed to be sleeping soundly now.
The world has changed a lot since those days, of course. Now if you lie awake in a hotel room at night, you don’t hear the city any more. All you hear is the white sound of your air-conditioner. You could be in a jet over the Pacific or in a bathysphere beneath the sea for all you hear. Everywhere you go is air-conditioned, so the air is always as cool and clean as a freshly-laundered shirt. People don’t wipe their necks much any more or drink sweating glasses of lemonade, or lay their bare arms gratefully on cool marble soda-fountains, because nowadays summer heat is something out there, something experienced only briefly when you sprint from your parking lot to your office or from your office to the luncheon counter down the block. Nowadays, black people sit at luncheon counters, so it’s not as easy to get a seat, but it’s more fair. And no-one goes to Washington Senators games any more because the Washington Senators no longer exist. In 1972 the owner moved the team to Texas because he could make more money there. Alas. But perhaps the most important change, at least as far as I am concerned, is that my brother no longer threatens to wipe boogers on me when I annoy him.
Washington feels like a small city. Its metropolitan population is three million, which makes it the seventh largest in America. And if you add Baltimore, right next door, it rises to over five million. But the city itself is quite small, with a population of just 637,000, less than Indianapolis or San Antonio. You feel as if you are in some agreeable provincial city, but then you turn a corner and come up against the headquarters of the FBI or the World Bank or the IMF and you realize what an immensely important place it is. The most startling of all these surprises is the White House. There you are, shuffling along