He was in the passenger seat of his dad’s truck picking his nose and wiping his hands on the side panel.  The air was thick from cows and it worked well for blowing the boogers away before they stuck to the old paint.  His dad hadn’t noticed the boy’s routine.  If he had noticed, he might have made his son wash the entire truck using only his toothbrush.  Then he would have folded his arms and nodded his head.  With that nod and his dad’s moustached sneer, the boy would have only one remaining move – to brush his teeth with the blackened toothbrush.  A hard lesson, but well deserved in his father’s eyes.

The boy went to school during the week.  Like most kids, his attention was attacked by wasps whenever the task at hand wasn’t exhilarating.  He bounced and scooted in his chair until his teachers threatened him with detention.  The boy was too young to take any interest in the opposite sex, so most of the school day was spent running around with the other boys in his class. 

They all had this aversion to sitting still, but our boy, Charlie, had it the worst.  On the weekends, he spent most of his time following his father around.  The boy’s dad was a farmer and a mechanic of sorts.  Thick forearms and chest hair that always found a way to undo the top buttons of his shirt.  He wore a scowl like jewelry.  It wasn’t always plastered on his chin out of anger, sometimes that was just the position his face fell into when it relaxed.

Charlie, on the other hand, had a constant look of glee in his eyes.  He must have gotten it from his mother.  The boy and his dad spent most of the day outdoors, working in heavy tractors that coughed smoke, and then crawling underneath them to adjust this bolt or that.  The boy’s face and cheeks turned red after long days in the sun, but his dad never burned.  His neck turned pink in the summer, but it never got worse than that.  He’d worked outdoors so long that he’d become immune.  The same went for the cold.

The boy’s mother was always inside.  She wouldn’t last but a few minutes out in the sun before she started complaining.  She preferred to stay indoors, in an apron, preparing food and cleaning until the boys got done with whatever it was they were doing.  If she finished all the cooking and cleaning for the day, she’d just as soon start up cooking and cleaning for the next.

At dinner, the boy’s mother always said an ambiguous little prayer. It took all of the boy’s might to resist picking at his plate before she finished.  He had learned the hard way to be patient.  His dad never closed his eyes during prayers.  The same scowl sat on his face like a pothole, watching to make sure his son didn’t nudge a single pea off the plate until his wife was finished.

The television played as they ate, but it was position in a way so that only the boy and his dad could see it.  The boy’s mom sat with her back to the TV.  Most of the things her husband chose to watch during dinner were uninteresting to her.

The president of the United States came on one of the channels and the boy’s father let out an immediate huff.  The boy looked over and saw that the scowl had worsened on his father lips.  He didn’t think much of it, and turned to listen to what the president had to say.

Barack Obama made a speech with too many pauses and used long words that the boy didn’t understand.  So after a minute or two, he stopped trying to understand at all.  Instead, he ate in a rush, hoping that he might be excused.

As the speech went on, the boy’s dad grunted and growled through his teeth.  The boy, who had spent most of the day tagging along behind his father, innocently began mimicking.  He hummed and hawed and looked over at his dad for assurance.  His father offered him nothing, too caught up in his own twisting scowl.

The next day, a Sunday, the boy went with his father to go pick up some parts for an old bulldozer.  In the passenger seat, the boy picked his nose and let the wind take the crisps away.  Again, his father didn’t notice.

At the shop, a black man came out to greet the boy and his father, asking them if he could help with anything.  The boy noticed that his father, again, made that strange huff before the man got any words out.  It wasn’t a loud huff.  Just a minor huff, as if he had gently punched his dad in the belly – which of course he would never dream of doing.

His father asked to speak with the manager, but it was Sunday and the man was the only one working.  The boy’s father grumbled and put in his order without making any small talk.  The boy watched his dad’s scowl sunk into his teeth.  Without trying, the boy’s cheeks began to twitch.  The muscles in his face were attempting to mimic his father’s scowl, but his cheeks was so used to grinning that it wasn’t physically possible.

On the way back home, a truck passed the boy and his father in the right lane.  The driver, a dark man with a clean shaven face, nodded and smiled at the boy as he went by.  From the driver seat, the huff came again.  The boy shot a glance at his father who was sneering at the passing truck.  The boy wondered what it meant, and again, naturally mirrored his father.

It wasn’t a conscious thing.  After a while, the boy began to pick up on his father’s huff and he began to master the hardened scowl.  It became almost instinctual.  Soon, the boy and his father scowled together at certain people as they drove down the road.  It made the boy happy when his huff and his father’s huff clawed out at the same time.  His dad never acknowledged it, but it made the boy happy anyway.

The boy learned hundreds of lessons from his father, out on the farm and under tractors.  It only took a few years before the boy was a master at both the huff and the sneer.  He knew which people to huff at, and the perfect times to unleash an irritated scowl.  What he didn’t know was, his father was teaching him life lesson – a lesson called racism.