The Beach

The children had run ahead of us to the beach. We were still lagging in the dunes with our bag full of towels and a sun shade. When we got to the beach, we saw where the children had left their flip-flops, so they could run down to the water. It was low tide, so it took us a while to find them jumping in the waves.

Vacationing near water is in these children’s DNA – from their mother’s, it goes back to swimming in Austrian lakes all summer and from their father’s side, it comes from escaping to breezy Atlantic sandy beaches from the urban summer heat.

Us parents looked for an ideal spot on one of these favorite Carolina beaches of ours that we had tried to come to at least once a year, ever since we were parents. 

That is when we noticed all the black families.

We had been parents for almost fifteen years. In our fifteen years coming to the beach, this was the first time we noticed black people on our beaches. Black couples, black children, black families.

A few months after my beach experience, this was the cover of the New Yorker.
Coincidence?

It caught us off guard. 

Yes, it caught us off guard. We were used to seeing only white people at the beach. White people, trying to get a little darker with a tan. White couples, white children, white families. All getting darker as the week at the beach passed. Until right now, black people were only seen a little bit inland from the coast – working at the stores or selling local produce at stands or working in the restaurants. But never at the beach.

It caught us off guard that there were black people all of a sudden and even more it caught us off guard that we had actually never realized that although black people lived all along the coast, they never went to the beach and we never realized that they were missing from the beach.

One hundred years ago, my great great great grandfather in Austria sold off some land for very cheap to the first buyer interested. It was water-front property on a pristine lake and totally useless to him at the time when people wore about five layers of clothes and never showed even forearm skin in public.  Five to six generations later, we kick ourselves that that wealthy man didn’t have the foresight that that land would be prime property for tourism development, or for his own middle class descendants, who would love a private beach front to lounge around on or dock a boat from.

It would have been easier, if we were whites in the South. Had my great great great grandfather made the mistake, say, of selling seemingly useless beach front land to his former slaves 100 to 150 years ago, and descendants a few decades had later realized the potential value of such beach front property for tourism development, well, those descendants, also my grandparents, could have easily bought back the land at a low price or, if the black folk didn’t accept that, the white folk could have scared these black land owners away from their property with death threats, and then bought it from them for really cheap. My ancestors didn’t have that option for lake front property in Austria.

So, when vacationing in Austria, I just share a public beach with other common folk. I do the same when vacationing on public beaches in the Carolinas; but now, about fifty years after the Civil Rights movement, it seems I have to get used to the fact that the common folk on the beach will also start to include people with black skin – the kind that is dark before it even tans.

Well, if all that bothers me, I can go to my suburban neighborhood pool here in the South East USA, where membership is exclusive to paying neighbors, neighbors of this all-white part of town, who two generations ago during the civil rights movement created neighborhood pools so they wouldn’t have to share public pools with people with black skin – you know the kind that is dark even before you get a tan.