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    Black & White
    Black & White
    Black & White
    Ebook91 pages1 hour

    Black & White

    By Cat Oars

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Race? Stripes on stockings? The style choice of a documentary film maker? Or what you have to look past to see the shades of gray? Twenty-three stories from writers of various ages, sizes, shapes and skin colors.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCat Oars
    Release dateMay 14, 2011
    ISBN9781466198364
    Black & White
    Author

    Cat Oars

    Cat Oars has rowed the rivers and stalked the squirrels. Cat Oars has sang, danced, laughed and loved. We are a group of like-minded writers of all shapes and sizes, colors and creeds and what we've written will change the way you feel about the universe and the life you've already lived and the life you have yet to experience.

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      Book preview

      Black & White - Cat Oars

      Black & White

      A Cat Oars Publication

      SMASHWORDS EDITION

      Copyright 2011 Cat Oars

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

      This ebook may not be re-sold.

      Thank you for respecting the hard work of these authors.

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      R_Toady

      Community Service

      Ghostofmajestic

      Lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel

      Brimmer

      Gone, There, Now

      Leesbitch

      Missionary Position

      Meme_in_Situ

      Found Floating in the River Lithium

      R_Toady

      Separate Way

      TapasTonight

      Black Leather, White Powder

      Laiadevorah

      Photographic Memory

      Tejas

      Missionary Position (Reprise)

      Meme_in_Situ

      White Dog in the Snow

      Teenager

      And Read All Over

      CGT

      Singed Black

      Sandshovel

      Trace and the Black and White

      Brimmer

      The Penguin and the Panda

      TapasTonight

      The Black and White Ball

      Tejas

      Neegee

      Francais

      Black Grounds on White Paper

      Sandshovel

      Black and White Hands

      Litteratzi

      No Help

      Francais

      Last Reunion

      IAA

      Light Assignment

      Kohno

      The End of the Age of Cannibalism

      Joeebbe

      Negative Time

      Sheisty

      Introduction

      R_Toady

      I GREW UP in a very ethnically diverse part of a mid-sized town in southeastern Pennsylvania. Although my grandparents were all extremely racist (you better believe there were lots of nigger jokes at that dinner table) my parents did their best to raise us kids to be fairly accepting of people of other races. (Except the Puerto Ricans, all of whom were lazy slackers, according to my dad.)

      There was a black kid a few doors down from us we used to play with in the vacant lot across the street from our line of identical row houses. One day when I was about ten years old my brother and father and I were playing whiffle-ball in the field with this kid, I’ll call him Darren, who was incidentally about five years older than I and therefore really a little too cool to still be playing with us little kids. I was up at bat and he was catcher, with my dad pitching and my hyperactive brother running back and forth like a lunatic in center field somewhere. We had no bases, just a few uneven patches of dirt where the grass had been worn away. Darren was kneeling down on the bare swath of earth that served as home plate; to tell the truth I have no idea what the hell he was doing down there, but for some reason I decided to scare him with my practice swing, and so I pulled the plastic bat back and swung it as hard as I could and – whap! – it hit the side of his head. He screamed and fell to the grass, rolling around and crying, clutching his head as my dad came running over. I just stood there, still holding the bat, apologizing over and over. We walked him back over to his house; his mom was pissed but he was fine; no broken skin, no concussion. Needless to say we never played together again. I don’t know why I hit him; it certainly wasn’t done maliciously, but it wasn’t really an accident, either.

      I don’t feel guilty or proud of it now; it’s just a dumb story to add to all my other dumb stories. No lesson, no allegory; but I thought it might serve as a good introduction to this collection of stories, written by contributors to the Literary & Writing forum on Craigslist. Given only the theme Black and White and a deadline of a month, we took free rein to do whatever we wished as long as it somehow fit this theme. The stories were posted on the site Nov. 14, 15 and 16, 2005. They were about photographs, newspapers, cop cars, a penguin and a panda, and more.... Given such an open-ended assignment, it is interesting to see that so many of the writers chose to take on the challenge of grappling with some of the more clichéd images associated with the phrase in question. I consider such a strategy rather daring: There is such danger of succumbing to triteness or predictability.

      I’m reminded of Stephin Merritt, head of the musical group The Magnetic Fields, who decided to not just take on the almost completely played-out topic of love as a subject for songwriting, but to go as far as to make a triple album’s worth of 69 Love Songs that range from silly to exquisite. Offering such a huge number of different styles and perspectives on this tired subject ended up breathing new life into it. (Of course, the catchy melodies didn’t hurt.) We took a similar challenge, likewise proving that it is indeed still possible to walk the razor’s edge of cliché without necessarily cutting oneself. (And we didn’t even have any catchy melodies to fall back on!)

      I also find it interesting that most of the writers chose to take on the racial connotations of black and white. I usually tend to have an adverse reaction to stories about ethnicity or racism; I often feel that there’s not much more that can be said about these topics that hasn’t been said before. Furthermore, as most of those who tackled the topic here claim (or imply in their stories) that they are white, I admit I had to fight my own knee-jerk reaction toward what I assumed would be yet another collection filled with white people ranting about (1) How non-racist – honest-to-God-really-truly-you-gotta-believe-me – they are or (2) How horribly guilty they feel when they are forced to admit that they really could possibly be even just a teensy bit racist deep inside. Now, being as pink as a baby mole rat myself, I understand the tendency to err on the side of political correctness in the fear of offending someone. But the truth is, such a political approach often rings false and, more importantly, makes for dull reading. (As my story above illustrates – perhaps a little too effectively.)

      I was pleasantly surprised by the final results of the project, however; not once did I feel embarrassed or that anyone was compromising or pandering to anyone in their work. As in the case of Merritt’s magnum opus, the sheer

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