Welcome To Brunswick, Georgia

I've actually been to Brunswick, GA. That was long ago, before Route 95 was an interstate highway. Well, technically it was already an interstate highway, but at the time you were driving on a two-lane-blacktop with no lights that went straight through every little town between Roanoke, Virginia and the Florida border.

My grandparents had moved to Florida in the mid-1950s, and we went down to visit them regularly. One year, on the return trip, my father decided to stop in Brunswick overnight so we could do some sightseeing. It was one of our summer trips to Florida. Brunswick is the gateway to Sea Island, which is something like the Newport, Rhode Island of the south.

Sea Island is a really beautiful place, and if you've ever been there when it's hot you know why it's very popular with rich people. Especially rich people long ago, before air-conditioning. Georgia is a very hot, humid place, miserable, actually, but on Sea Island, it's like the air-con is on high all day long, even when there's no air-con. To get to Sea Island you first must find Brunswick, and from there, a low causeway bracketed by reeds leads out to Sea Island, which I believe is actually a couple of islands. As you go out the causeway, the temperature starts to drop. If it was ninety-five in Brunswick, which is nothing in Georgia, it'll be about seventy on Sea Island. Maybe even sixty-seven. It's cool. Hence the rich people. The houses were very impressive.

Ahmaud Abbery got gunned down for nothing last week in Brunswick, or some other little municipality on the outskirts of Brunswick. I'm not surprised at all. They say that he had been running around various neighborhoods for fun for many years. I'm surprised that he lasted as long as he did. Brunswick might look nicer than almost any similarly sized town in Georgia, but that doesn't make it a nice place. Those people are still fighting the Civil War; they have not yet accepted that they lost the Civil War. Black Americans? Hell, they hate most white Americans too. I learned that lesson very young.

Another year, on another trip, we had been to Florida for Christmas and my father knew that it was freezing cold in New York. We stopped for gas in Georgia, and he spotted a hardware store very close to the gas station. For those of you who mercifully grew up in a place that never froze, the door locks on a car will freeze solid if the car is left out in freezing weather overnight. You need to un-freeze the locks to get into the car, and the easiest way to do it is with this little spray thing of graphite powder that is called Lock-Ease. So my dad set me up for an adventure. I'm sure that he knew what he was doing. He gave me a buck or two and sent me to the hardware store. “Ask them if they have Lock-Ease.” Very simple. I had seen the stuff, and I knew what it was. I walked into the store, a nice eleven year old white kid, as white as a sheet of loose-leaf. “Hi,” I said, “you guys sell Lock-Ease?”

There was a guy on my side, and he just laughed and turned away. The guy behind the counter made a face and said, “Lockees? This is a hardware store! We don't sell cigarettes.” Just like that, as God is my witness. I was a regular little Bugs Bunny at the time, so I was happy to sarcastically explain to him what LOCK . . . EASE was, and ask him again if he had any. I guess it doesn't freeze overnight in Georgia, because the answer was still no. The lesson was that as soon as they heard my Nu Yawk accent, I was immediately put on the shit-list. 

What chance did Mr. Abbery have running around places like that? He should have known better. He was a tall, sturdy, athletic black man too, just running around the neighborhood like he owned the joint. That's a good way to make the white folk angry in Brunswick, GA. God help him if he ever tried running out that causeway to Sea Island! I'm sure they have a gate by now, checking IDs. He'd have been killed long ago if anyone saw him running around a neighborhood on Sea Island.

This is your shining City on the Hill, America. What a bunch of bullshit.