Birth of a Nation'hood by Toni Morrison

Author:Toni Morrison [Morrison, Toni]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48226-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

Buying and Selling Houses: Home and the Traffic in Style

Simpson’s wealth underwrote a Southern California existence that took him far from his roots in inner-city San Francisco to fabulous homes in overwhelmingly white areas. His lifestyle-of-the-rich-and-suburban image reinforced his seeming transcendence of color in a nation in which upper-class whiteness is often cast as the normative experience. However, not only did Simpson’s pride in grand homes grow out of his past, but white fascination with his lifestyle and with what flavor he could bring to suburban blandness fundamentally hinged on Simpson’s racial identity. At fifteen, and just out of a short stay at a youth detention center, O.J. Simpson got to spend much of a day with the Giants’ centerfielder Willie Mays. During this adventure, Simpson later and often related, he was not awed. But the ease of Mays’s manner and the absence of any preaching regarding staying out of trouble deeply impressed Simpson. Equally impressive was simply viewing Mays’s house and possessions. This visit convinced Simpson of what success could bring. He worshipped Mays not simply for being a great player but for having “a big house to show for it.” Fiercely defensive of Mays when the latter was said to pay insufficient attention to using his fame to further African-American causes, Simpson argued that his teenage encounter with superstardom provided a model for celebrity role modeling. In Heisman-year interviews and after he emphasized not only a desire to fund a boys’ club in the “old neighborhood” of Potrero Hill but to build an impressive house for himself outside of it. He cast both acts in terms of aiding black youth. “I feel that it’s the material things that count,” he told reporters when explaining how to impress lessons on young people. To accusations that he played the “Establishment game” to acquire “the money … the big house,” he replied that such acquisitions would “give pride and hope to a lot of young blacks.” From his early Sports Illustrated interviews to the video he has sold after acquittal, Simpson has toured America through his houses. Indeed, prosecuting attorney Christopher Darden has recently complained that Simpson gave such tours when the jury in his murder trial visited his Rockingham home.17

Simpson’s passion for houses and homes as the symbols of success was not surprising, given his own youth as a resident in housing projects built as temporary shelter for World War II shipyard workers in the Bay area and his father’s absence from the family. Simpson could enthuse, in an interview with Playboy, over the projects as “America the Beautiful,” and a “federally funded commune,” but he seldom looked back after his move to Southern Cal. Although Time referred to him as “molded by the slums,” reporters and biographers showed little interest in the facts of his youth. (The mainstream press spelled Potrero Hill no less than four different ways, and usually wrong. His own autobiography, with Pete Axthelm doing the writing, offered the least plausible misspelling.)18 The “old neighborhood” became,

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