The “N-Word”

What makes night within us may leave stars.

- Victor Hugo, Ninety-Three

It was Sunday afternoon. August 7, 1977. The sky was cloudless, the temperature ninety degrees—perfect beach weather. And that is exactly where we headed, my girlfriend Christy and I: Rehoboth Beach.

The day could hardly have been more promising. I was twenty-six, fit and full of myself. I had a charming young woman at my side. I had a couple of twenties in my wallet—more than enough for dinner out. And I had my whole future in front of me. I was between semesters of law school and working as a summer intern at The Washington Post—my dream job. By August, the internship was beginning to wind down, and I had one front-page story after another. The next day—Monday—another story, this one about young men who had been mislead by Army recruiters, was ready to run on A1.

I was behind the wheel of what had been my father’s `73 Olds Cutlass Supreme—he’d died at fifty, three years earlier. That perfect Sunday, we were cruising between endless fields of corn, the windows open, the radio blasting. There was no one behind us, no one in front. We owned the road. Hell, we owned the world.

We’d gotten off to a late start. It was already 2:30 p.m. We were on State Route 18, two lazy lanes that shimmered in the August heat. I have no recollection of what we were talking about—if we were talking at all—the moment that the car first appeared as a tiny speck in the rear-view mirror. But it was closing the distance between us quickly. Too quickly. And there was something erratic about its approach. Against the torpor of that day, the elongated road, the sloth of a late Sunday afternoon, it seemed not menacing but cartoonish. That would change, and change swiftly.

Instead of passing us, or slowing down as it approached us, the car sped up and came within inches of our bumper. In the rear-view mirror I could see the faces of two men. Black men. The one behind the wheel was mature, the other my age. In their faces I saw a crazed hilarity.

I was already going the speed limit. I motioned them to pass. They did not. Instead, they clung to our bumper for what seemed like many miles, though it might have been much less. Christy was afraid and feeling threatened. I was angry and fueled by adrenaline. And then, they hit our bumper—no, not hit. Just nudged. Enough to say the road was no longer ours, but theirs.

And in that instant, that blink of an eye whose aftermath can last a lifetime, I, a white man, said it. The n-word. “Nigger.” It was not shouted or even truly spoken, but simply passed between my lips as a toxic whisper, two syllables that never before had come out of my mouth, a venomous utterance that, once unleashed, could not be recalled but seemed to instantly turn on me. What had I said? Was this who and what I really was, beneath the polish and the sanctimony? It had taken so little to extract from me—a mere bump—and now I had joined that legion of faceless others with whom I had imagined I shared nothing and for whom I had nothing but contempt. Christy never even heard me say it.

She had me pull over, hug the berm, to make their passing more inviting, and pass they did, leering as they shot by us at some one hundred miles an hour and disappearing twenty or so yards ahead as they rounded the only bend on a straight-away stretch of country road.

A second after they passed us, after they vanished into the curve ahead, that second that I was weighing the word that had escaped my lips, we caught up with them at the bend of the road, though for a moment I was not sure it was them. What lay before...