No speakie

When we were spics

A relatively well-kept secret is that I am a prep school dropout. More accurately, a prep school kicked out. St. Peter’s Prep, to be exact. I made it through two-and-a-half years at one of Jersey City’s oldest private schools, on scholarship (academic scholarship, thank you very much.) I was asked (advised, ordered, whatever) to leave Prep in the middle of my junior year, after, among other things, several fights, getting caught smoking in the boy’s room and qualifying for indefinite detention (then called JUG, as in Judgement Under God. Hey, they were Jesuit priests.)

While Prep offered a tremendous formal educational opportunity for me, I’m amazed, in retrospect, that I made it all the way to my junior year. There were maybe three or four Latino kids in the school at the time (OK, 1976-1978) and, if it weren’t for the black kids (there were maybe 20 of them) we would’ve really stood out. As it was, we were subjected to our fair share of verbal abuse. It was at Prep where I first remember hearing the word spic.

The word spic supposedly comes from a Latino’s inability to properly pronounce speak. (Sorry mister, I no spic the English.) A cousin to nigger (as in Get those spics and niggers!), spic was our throw-down word. If anybody used it against you, they did it at their own peril. It was at the root of many, if not all, of the (few) fist fights I had at Prep, most infamously in my final year when Joe D., a Heights shit talker with a brick for a brain, used it on me for the first (and final) time. Former classmates still talk about that epic brawl that spilled out onto the York Street parking lot and ended with Joe D. in the hospital with a fractured cheekbone and me with what I learned much later was a concussion.

By the time I “transferred” to Ferris High School I was happy to be among the spics and niggers (not to mention the girls!), where I never again heard the word. Unlike with nigger, which was reclaimed as a term of endearment by some, you don’t hear Latinos refer to a friend as my spic. We still recoil from the word, even when it’s used in jest or to illustrate racism. In a recent conversation with a few 20-something relatives, all said they had never heard anyone even use the word, much less direct it at them. Hmm, I thought, progress.

So it was that over the weekend on Grove Street, while on my bike, stopped at a light, I overheard a conversation in the car next to me, in which the (Caucasian?) passenger said to the (Caucasian?) driver, upon surveying the largely Latino immigrant hustle and flow of the sidewalk near La Conguita Restaurant, “look at all these spics,” both shaking their heads. Taken aback, I was about to say something (I’m not sure what) when the light turned green and the driver pulled off, leaving me standing there, chewing on whatever words I thought I was about to say, like a gunslinger too slow on the draw.