The Manson Women and Me: Monsters, Morality, and Murder by Nikki Meredith

Author:Nikki Meredith [Meredith, Nikki]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2018-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

chapter thirty-five

“EENIE, MEENIE, MINEY, MO”

1954–1960

I lived fourteen years before I heard the verb “to Jew.” The first time I heard it was from one of the older girls in my social club when she was talking about her father’s purchase of a car, as in “He Jewed the guy down on the price.” I was familiar with the concept: my father’s mother and sister used to take my mother along on shopping trips because they were convinced her Jewishness would enable them to get better deals. My mother joked about it—it was one of many anecdotes in her repertoire of marrying into an Irish Catholic family. So when I first heard this girl use the expression, I felt I had permission to not be offended. I wasn’t yet sophisticated enough to know the rules of the road. Later I would understand that it was one thing for my mother to talk about her family’s provincial attitudes and quite another for someone outside the tribe to do so.

The longer I was in the Gammas, the more aware I was of ethnic and racial slurs. One of the other older girls (it was always the older girls), for example, had a penchant for doing riffs in a fake Yiddish accent: “Oy vey,” usually followed by a crack about Jewish frugality or big noses. Slurs against Asians were not uncommon, either, and African Americans were not left out of this, though the latter didn’t come up much because there were only two or three in the entire school and they were only there to attend special classes for the deaf.

When I started noticing these remarks, I thought my father had been prescient that day at the airport. How did he know that’s what the club was like? Did he have inside information? I realized later that the club members weren’t any more anti-Semitic or racist than other kids in the school or, for that matter, society at large in the 1950s. This was the language they heard at home.

There was, however, a particularly gut-churning incident for me, primarily because it involved one of the girls I really liked, a popular, effervescent senior, who, early on, had taken me under her wing. A bunch of us were riding in her car to a basketball game at University High School. Her method for deciding who would be assigned to the backseat, who in the front, was to employ the “eenie, meenie, miney, mo, catch a n—ger by the toe.”

When I was very young, my mother had used this children’s counting rhyme as an opportunity to teach me about the maltreatment of African Americans. She didn’t just say don’t ever use the n-word, she talked about the history of slavery and how, to that day, there was no equality for Negroes. (Decades later I Googled the rhyme and discovered that it might not have had anything to do with slavery.) She said the word was hurtful and that she couldn’t think of another word in the

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