Herb and Jamaal
Mon., January 3, 11:37 AM
My local newspaper has discontinued the comic strip “Herb and Jamaal.” I protested, of course; I’ve quoted the strip occasionally because I think it speaks to everyone – if they’re listening. When the paper got around to publishing letters, I was not encouraged. The headline read “Herb and Jamaal will be missed.” Doesn’t sound as if there’s a chance of its returning, does it?
I suppose they feel obliged to print one “black” strip. They first replaced it with “Boondocks,” which was offensive to all ethnicities. This morning I found “Curtis.” Maybe H&J was just too cerebral – for the editors, not the readers. I can still read it on line.
Sunday’s H&J appealed to me. There’s Herb, looking over his old purple jacket, which he threw in the trash. (I’m not sure the annoying color was significant; it did make it easy to follow the jacket in subsequent panels.) His daughter, Uhuru, spotted the jacket and pulled it out of the basket.
Uhuru mended the torn jacket, washed and dried it, and folded it neatly. Then she carried it out to the street and gave it to a man who had no coat.
The quotation was from Martin Luther King: “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individual concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”
On a cold morning a couple of weeks ago, I regarded my overstuffed closet – much as Herb regarded his – and pulled out my blue storm coat. I had laundered it a couple of springs ago, and I hadn’t worn it since. It is size 14-petite; there is no way that anyone in this house is ever going to fit into it again. I folded it into a plastic bag and left it in a used clothes bin, thinking “at least someone will have a warm coat this winter.” (Not to mention that my closet was a little less stuffed.)
What does an old white woman have in common with a little black girl? And who says that wisdom is addressed to only one color?
