High Price

available to the British working class. Our economic prospects were viewed positively, which was far from the case in South Florida.
    Back home, one of the most conspicuous forms of racism I’d observed was related to interracial romance, particularly between blacks and whites. So when I started to date Anne, a tall, soft-featured brunette whom I met about three months after I arrived in England, I was especially aware of our respective races. As a boy, I’d always had to hide the brief encounters I’d had with white girls in high school and junior high. It was clear to me that seeing them publicly would bring nothing but trouble, so I stayed away. If I’d been on the street or in a store with a white girl in Miami, we would have run a gauntlet of stares and muttered remarks or worse. However, in London and even in smaller British towns, no one seemed to care. I moved in with Anne not long after we met.
    And although she felt she had to diligently work to prepare me before she thought I’d be ready to meet her parents, her concerns about how they’d see me were about class markers, not race. Anne came from the British upper middle class. She was seen to some extent as the family fuckup because she didn’t go to university. Her father was an aviator for the sultan of Oman and her parents spent most of their time in that country.
    But as an American airman, I was seen as a “good catch” because of the economic opportunities open to me through the military and by virtue of being an American citizen. Compared to the Brits she’d dated previously, I was a definite improvement. Her parents didn’t even object when I moved in with her to the family home. They had a huge four-bedroom house in Wootton Bassett, a suburb of Swindon; it was where I’d been headed when I was pulled over by the police that night. To assuage their slight discomfort about us “living in sin,” I paid rent.
    Before Anne introduced me to her parents, she carefully taught me to use silverware correctly and other table manners, which to me had been previously obscure. I didn’t find this condescending or inappropriate. Instead, it was educational. I had a spongelike attitude and was determined to soak up any kind of potentially useful knowledge. I wasn’t intimidated by the British class system because, even with all I knew about America’s deep flaws, I still retained the notion of our country’s ultimate superiority.
    I learned a great deal from Anne and from observing British attitudes. The way they viewed American ideas about race, their support for civil rights and the equality of black people in the United States, confirmed for me that such positions were normal; this was how all thoughtful people should think about these questions. Fighting for civil rights wasn’t some kind of “special pleading,” or refusal to let go of “ancient history,” the way it was often presented by white folks back home. Of course, criticizing the United States was easy for the Brits because it was another country; they weren’t looking at their own issues. And their tolerance was far from perfect: they still had police brutality targeted at ethnic minorities and there was a persistent stereotype of Jamaican blacks as “lazy.” Nonetheless, it was an improvement for me.
    And hearing Gil Scott-Heron perform in a small club, with a mixed-race audience of about fifty people, further provided me with a real sense of being part of a conscious community. We all sat on the floor and he interacted and conversed with us, as though it were an intimate party and we were part of the music, not just an audience. Anne and I listened together. Times like that—and turning other guys on to him myself—energized me to take action and learn more.
    Importantly, in England, I began to be repeatedly encouraged both by the professors with whom I formally studied and by the men I schooled about the black experience. They thought I had something special and that I could and should use my brain to help others. My job on base was to be a supply clerk in stock control, ordering necessary items via a very primitive computer. From salt for the runways to uniforms for the basketball team, if it had to be obtained and supplied, we had to order it, sometimes millions of dollars’ worth at a time. But usually, this wasn’t a particularly demanding position. There was plenty of time to think and study. Inspired by Scott-Heron and by my earlier talks with Mark in Japan, I