After our family moved from the bush to Toowoomba, and whenever I was at home for the weekend during the football season, my Dad and I walked a mile down Arthur Street to the ground, in the face of the coldest wind in Queensland. We weren’t all that close, he and I, but we both loved watching football, which in Toowoomba meant Rugby League, on which American football was based.
A large crowd turned up every Saturday – rain, hail or freezing wind – to watch the same four teams battle for the local title and the individual players battle for selection to the Toowoomba team and maybe even the Queensland team.
Our town had always been the heart and soul of the State’s rugby code ever since the local team had beaten a touring England national team in 1920. The greatest player of that era, and the first Toowoomba boy to play for Australia, was Nigger Brown. He was so revered that they named the new grandstand after him in the 1960s. Calling it The E S (“Nigger”) Brown Stand was not controversial at the time, though there was a big fuss when it was proposed to retain the name for a replacement grandstand forty years later.
He always introduced himself by his nickname – which he had come by in his youth either as a reference to a popular commercial shoe-polish colour called Nigger Brown or as an ironic reference to his blue eyes and fair hair and skin. It was never established which.
(Nigger was never a common word in Queensland, by the way, until American soldiers came over during the war against Japan. We had plenty of terms of racial abuse, but that wasn’t one of them. Especially in Toowoomba...)
The name of "Nigger Brown" was so well known that even the elders of the local aboriginal community backed its retention in 2008, and refused to sign a protest-petition to change it. However, they did eventually buckle under pressure from some of their young bloods. The football administrators eventually gave way, too, though they did defiantly erect a statue to their hero (inside the ground) with the taboo word prominently included.
Here in Cayman, the n-word and its compounds are considered rude among ethnic Caymanians of all colours, but not excessively so. (Only among white expats are the words utterly taboo.) They’re not usually spoken in a racial context: “us niggers” as a self-deprecatory term is not all that uncommon – though Caymanians are well aware of its shock value to white foreigners. As a white expat I myself would never in a million years use the word or any of its compounds in any circumstances.
But, well (blush), I did once. It happened in my earliest days as captain of the Village Greenies Seconds cricket team. One Sunday, we were batting against By-Rite (I think) and a new bowler came on – a young black chap who was new to me. As keeper of the scorebook I asked my team-mates who he was. “You don’t know him? That’s Nigger Charlie.”
“Ohh-kay. Well, I can’t write that. What’s his real name?” “We don’t know. People only ever calls him Nigger Charlie. Just write it down.” “No!” “Well, here, I'll write it down for you.” “No! Not in my scorebook. Jesus!” Gales of laughter at my discomfort, from everybody who heard the exchange. Red-faced and unamused, I left a blank space for his name until the lunch-break, when I went up to the man himself and asked him. He told me, and I wrote it down – Edward Smith or something like that.
Next week, some member of our team who had missed the game was flipping through the scorebook. He pointed at the name and asked “Who’s that?” I hesitated a second (one-Mississippi...), and grimaced. “That’s Nigger Charlie,” I said. He nodded in recognition. “A good bowler. Fast, man!”
