Black and White in Grays Harbor County

Angela Walker worries she might sound too sensitive. Really, she says, she often smiles when people come up to her in the checkout line and ask to touch her sons' hair. High- spirited Myhles, 4, has an intriguing wild mop of dreadlocks, as does brother Tahj, 7. "It's just when they say, 'I never felt a colored person's hair before,' that I get upset and think: Our kids are not part of some petting zoo," says Walker, 39. A sturdy moon-faced woman with black curly hair, she is sitting across from me on a beat-up couch in the front room of her fixer-upper rental home on Chenault Avenue in Hoquiam, an ever-struggling timber town like its symbiotic neighbor, Aberdeen, set at the waters of Grays Harbor on the Pacific Ocean. Walker's trusty Astro van is stranded in the driveway. "Someone put sugar or something in the gas tank," she says as her family fills the room: husband Simmie, 39, and the five kids—Jordan, 14; Tashianna, 13; Rico, 12; Tahj; and the mighty Myhles, suspiciously eyeing a cartoon on the TV screen. All are black. Angela is mixed. Though her grandmother was black, some see her as a white woman in an interracial marriage. The Walkers, out of the Midwest by way of Florida, are the pepper in a salt-white small town whose history is recorded in trees chopped, pulp stacked, and people out of work. Hard times and a soggy climate have turned some prime older neighborhood homes into an Appalachia of waterlogged shanties. Many of the town's better-offs live on the hills above the Walkers' cream-and-red home, where the neighbors are not always neighborly. Out the Walkers' window, a security camera is mounted on the front of the turquoise home next door. It is trained on the Walkers' front yard. "He said he put it up because of us," Angela says, having coffee and asking if she can smoke. Simmie sits across the room, watching. "My kids have bigger hearts than me sometimes," Angela says. "They're able to make friends with kids who once called them nigger. It's harder for me to turn that other cheek." She leans forward. "So many things make me terrified that my kids aren't going to survive this town."

The coastal town of Hoquiam,on Grays Harbor. (Kevin Hong / The Daily World)

It's a question others around Grays Harbor have asked. In recent months, a black Aberdeen eighth-grader was attacked by schoolmates, and a Samoan U.S. Coast Guard officer at nearby Westport asked to be transferred after her car was keyed and she was harassed by locals. Eighteen months earlier, a black Coast Guard officer was transferred because of similar harassment. On Feb. 15, a man associated with white supremacists was arrested at his relatives' home in Hoquiam for conspiracy to sell C-4 explosives. He was nabbed in a multicounty sweep that included an alleged Seattle gunrunner who once bragged about trying to kill Martin Luther King Jr. On Feb. 17, police arrested an Aberdeen man on suspicion of unlawful imprisonment and rape of a black girl, a 16-year-old from Maryland, whom he met on the Internet. Arriving in the midst of this was a new book, Death on the Fourth of July, reopening the wounds of July 4, 2000, in the resort town of Ocean Shores, where a Vietnamese man from Bellevue was attacked by a group of skinheads waving a Confederate flag and shouting, "Gooks go home!" The Vietnamese stabbed to death the group's leader, an Olympia man, and wound up facing a count of manslaughter. (The case ended in a mistrial.)

Angela Walker: Her children are "able to make friends with kids who once called them nigger. It's harder for me to turn that other cheek." (Sativa Miller)

Angela Walker has her own book to write. She tells of white kids driving past, calling out "niggers!" and a teenage girl who let it be known to the Walkers that she was on a "nigger hunt." Walker talks about son Jordan being chased home by two kids with an ax and a knife, calling out, "You fuckin' nigger." Two other kids were outside one day with bats. Another time, a neighbor hit one of Walker's sons with the handle of a mop; police were called but the neighbor wasn't charged. A mother and her two kids threw rocks at the Walkers, and, after school officials and police failed to take proper action, Angela says she got a restraining order against the mom. Another day, Walker's teen daughter came home from a dance in tears after someone wrote on the school bleachers that "Tashianna is a stupid nigor!!!!!!!" She responded with a note she passed out to students, citing the offender's misspelling and asking who the stupid one was, adding: "Being a nigger isn't about skin color, it is about the way you ACT. Judging by the words that you used, the nigger sure isn't ME!" Nonetheless, a few weeks later, between classes, a boy called her a slave. "He was 'talked to,' the school told me," says Walker. In January, a woman in a car drove wildly up onto a grassy area in west Hoquiam where Jordan was standing, causing him to jump over a fence. "She was trying to hit me, no question," says Jordan. Sometimes, when Walker reports incidents, police tell her to contact the schools, and the schools tell her to contact police. On one occasion, when Jordan opted to fight back, he got after-school detention. Friends who witnessed the fight protested by writing "Free Jordan" on their arms.