One hears a lot about alleged racial discrimination today--and most of it, I believe, is nothing but bullshit, of the type that rabble-rousing racists like Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton dredge up. But here's a story of something that really did happen, back in the Thirties or Forties: Eddie Futch's second wife was a white lady, named Bobbie. (I don't know what happened to the first wife, who was black; and I never met the third one, a glamorous blonde from Scandanavia that Eddie married after Bobbie passed away, and who was apparently very devoted to Eddie.) The one I knew was Bobbie, and she was a sweetheart. I never heard about this from Eddie, or from her--but she told my wife and a couple of other ladies, in a "just us girls" conversation in my home one time, while Eddie and I were watching the fights on TV, that back in the "Jim Crow" days, she and Eddie were driving cross-country to get to the bedside of a relative who was dying--and they got down into Texas, or maybe it was Arkansas, and they had been driving long and hard, and were exhausted when it came nightfall. They went to two or three motels, and were turned away at each one when the person at the desk observed that they were an interracial couple. So they stopped at a wide place in the road, and SLEPT ON THE GROUND. And on the return trip, they carried along sleeping bags and a bag of food and slept on the ground again, rather than suffer the humiliation of being turned away from a restaurant or motel. It's a sad story--but that's how it was in those days, even for people with class. But Eddie never carried any kind of grudge about those experiences. He was equally comfortable with blacks and whites / and with people of all economic levels, in any situation. As fine a man as I have ever known. "THE OLD SALT"
Uhm, if you're having trouble getting a hotel room because you're an interracial couple, shouldn't you just park on the side of the building, let whoever is white go pay for the room, go inside and just go the fuck to sleep? I don't know, maybe it's just me but it sounds alot better than sleeping in the fucking road. What a bullshit story.
Agreed.. After you get shot down at the first motel why not let the chick go get the room at the next place? Answer: Then Eddie wouldn't have had a cool racism story to tell.
