How I Shed My Skin (19 page)

How close did I come to being one of those men? To setting a lit match to the foot of a fuel-soaked cross?

The meet and greet is held at a small restaurant on the outskirts of Maysville, and we park in the crowded lot beside a neatly mowed ditch. The sky threatens rain as we head into the building. I have brought along a copy of the high school yearbook. Once inside, we eat fried chicken wings, raw vegetables and dip, cheese on a platter, while the yearbook passes from hand to hand. People are pointing to old pictures of themselves, hooting at the clothes, the hairdos. The room is cramped, the tables close together, so that we can shout from table to table. We trade stories about one another, about classmates who are not here, catch one another up on the last four decades. The talk is about boyfriends and girlfriends, football or basketball games, classes, rivalries, old stories of arguments with parents; no one mentions integration, the walkouts, the anger, the confrontations. We talk about the ordinary side of high school, dialogue that might be lifted from any number of generic class reunions as depicted on TV shows. There is something so very Jones County about this moment, all of us shoved into a room that is too small, chairs too close together, people climbing over each other to get to the food.

Here we are, nearly sixty years old, each of us fat and tired, heaving ourselves in and out of chairs with huffs and puffs, exactly as our parents and teachers used to do. I talk to Steven and his wife; I talk to Clarence Winkle, Andrew, Mercy, Barbara; the longer I'm in the room with these old friends and acquaintances, the more I recognize the younger faces within the old. It is fine that we talk about our high school days as if they were ordinary, simply a matter of remembering who dated whom; we all know better. The party ends early, when the chicken wings are eaten, and we drive home in the heavy rain that has begun to fall.

GOOD PEOPLE TAUGHT
and still teach racism to their children without a second thought. This was true in the South of my birth and remains so to the present. Good people who would help a neighbor, including a black neighbor; people who would pray for the benefit of God's love; people who would never harm one of their own. We teach that like wants to be with like, and that this is only natural. We teach that white people should be allowed to have white schools, white churches, white social clubs, just like any other group. We teach that God created the races to be separate from one another for a purpose, and we preach that this purpose cannot be to mix, because why then would He have created the separation in the first place? We teach that when people are different from each other, one is better and the other worse.

We teach that black and white are not simply different but opposite. We reserve our special ideological fury for blackness.

What we avoid teaching and telling is what we did in the name of that difference once upon a time, in these fields and in these woods of eastern North Carolina. A superior race has the right to treat an inferior race as it chooses, including the right to reduce it to the status of property, to trade people like livestock, useful only for the labor that can be flogged out of them. This was the assumption our Southern culture embodied from the beginning. The history is there for anyone who chooses to learn it. But we refuse to face what that made of us, the whip hand that we became.

It is easy to see racism in the violent events, in lynchings and beatings, in rapes and other acts of terror. It is easy, too, to pretend that we are not racist if we did not take part in such overt acts. But I was taught to believe in white superiority in small ways, by gentle people, who believed themselves to be sharing God's own truth.

TH
E FOLLOWING NIGHT,
at the banquet in the New Bern hotel, our class shares a meal, attends to presentations, and listens to Mrs. Corbin speak. She is nearing eighty, but healthy and strong-voiced, reminding us that our class made history, that we are part of the group that ended segregation, that we were a part of something important in the world. She refers briefly to the walkouts, reminding us that the problems in our high school had come from friction between the students and the administration, that we had played our part well, behaved well, and accomplished the change with grace. I am glad she spoke so directly.

I am the only white person from our class in the room tonight. Surely some of our white classmates could have come? Surely they heard about the event, since so many of them still live in the area?

Evelyn Hall comes to the banquet with her husband; other friends are present who were not with us the night before. For a few minutes I sit hand in hand with Ursula, and we talk about sixth grade, about our kiss, about the march from the high school to the school superintendant's office, about a play we did together in drama class, about a score of other moments we remember. Speaking in a rush, one as delighted as the other, we run through the forty years we have been separated. She has the same kind face, the same warm smile. We talk about Stella, Mercy, Reginald, Barbara, Gary, others. She tells me Rhonda is in Paris with her daughter, and I am struck by the wonder of it, little country Rhonda now with a grown daughter, Rhonda an established grownup visiting Europe.

We have all grown up, become more substantial, planted ourselves here and there. Many of the men and women in the room have spent years in the military. Many work as teachers. Dreams have come true for some. The room sounds lively and happy, and people are turning over the pages of the yearbook again, reliving old rivalries, reminding each other that we were once young together, faces turned outward from that old high school, looking forward.

The dinner speaker, a local reverend, begins to deliver a sermon drawn from the New Testament parable about the prodigal son. He is making the point that a person gains significance by helping others, and in some way this leads him to the tale of the son who asks for his inheritance while his father is still alive.

Relaxed in my seat, I suddenly hear the minister say, “And Mr. Grimsley, let me tell you. No black man would ever ask his daddy to give him his inheritance early.” The room erupts in laughter, and I blush a bit and smile and make a show of enjoying the joke.

A moment later, finishing the story, the minister refers to the prodigal son as “the Jew-boy,” and I shake my head in disbelief. I lose the thread of what he is saying in contemplation of the epithet.

Am I really welcome here? Or would the rest of my classmates be happier if I had not come?

How many times in sixth grade did Rhonda and Ursula feel like this, alone in a crowd of white people who ranged from openly hostile to mildly friendly? The moment is a reminder that even these people, classmates from a troubled era, have their own flaws, their own biases, their own ideas of difference. We have a long way to go before we are ready to live together without the consciousness of race.

Later, as I am leaving, Clarence asks me if I have any idea why none of the other white classmates are here. Since he was our class president, it is his job to organize the reunions, so he wonders what he should do. Are the white people having a separate reunion? But he knows the answer as well as I do, I expect. There is still the old stubbornness, the same refusal, whites holding on to the notion that is so deeply rooted in us, that the white race should not mix, beyond a certain point, with those of other colors. That much has never changed. And tonight I wonder whether many of the black people here don't feel more or less the same.

Somewhere in my memory, beneath all I've learned and experienced, there is still the little bigot I was meant to be. I can hope that I've changed; I can question my upbringing; I can examine my life for every nuance of bias and prejudice and racism; but even so I can never erase that earliest software, those assumptions that were part of my surroundings from my first breath. This is why, whenever a white person tells me he or she is not a racist, I never believe the statement. What we learn in those earliest months and years can never be deleted.

But this fact was never a doom or a destiny. I changed. I learned to question the programming. When Violet Strahan spoke back to me in sixth grade, after I decided to call her a black bitch, something crumbled in my vision of the world. In her response she was defiantly, loudly, brazenly human, and she blazed with the fact of herself. I had thought to call her a name and score points with the other white kids. I had thought that she would be meek because she was black. I had thought she agreed with me that I was superior to her. No one was more surprised than me to learn that I was wrong on all counts. She cracked open the invisibility barrier right away. She let me know how completely present she was.

This was no moment of revelation so much as simple recognition. I was too young for anything more abstract. She was like people I knew; when she was angry I could feel it; and when she spoke and looked me in the eye, I understood the power of her person. She was everything I had been told that black people were not. She was haughty and superior in her tone. She schooled me like a child. She was not the least bit hesitant.

For me this was the crucial moment. Maybe if this confrontation with Violet had failed to get through to me, I would still have learned this lesson at some other time. But I understood in an instant that there was no difference between Violet, Rhonda, Ursula, me, or any of the rest of us. This was not comprehension that was conscious, but was something deeper, a knowing from the bone. I had no need to articulate it; the feeling was true in my body.

When Ursula kissed me on the cheek in seventh grade, I felt flushed and warm. When Rhonda looked at pictures of Davy Jones with me, I felt accepted and safe. When Mr. Wexler listened to my opinions about Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, I felt respected as an intellect. During the first dance at high school, I fell into the same rhythm as everybody else on the floor, joining them for a moment. As the protests unfolded later over those two winters, I felt exhilarated that people were acting out in my high school, speaking their minds, taking action as a group. What they did made us part of the world. Violet had knocked me open. A confrontation with the facts had knocked my head open. Everybody in my town and in my high school had that choice to make, whether to see each other as equals and move on in one direction, or else to refuse and move on in another. There were no other paths.

Now I am packing my suitcase in the hotel room, looking out the window over the parking lot at the distant line of roofs of downtown New Bern. There is still so much of me that feels a close connection to this place, the more so now because I am here and so much is familiar. I pack the car and head toward home, but this morning I travel the long way, down Highway 17 to Pollocksville, past Rhems Church, 10 Mile Fork Road, Green Valley, Killis Murphy Road, through the little village and up Highway 58 toward Trenton. The old high school sits halfway there, in the same field. I can see some new outbuildings, but the core of the school is just as it was when I stood in that courtyard, books under my arm, hearing the bell for class. I sit in my car for a while, parked by the side of the road, staring at the old bricks, at the flagpole, at the empty parking lot.

I can see us all standing in the smoking patio, staring over that field, vain and young and sure of ourselves. In my mind it is the month before high school is over, I am about to graduate, and my long life in Jones County is soon to end. My only thought is that I want to fly away. Now, so much later, I find I am still rooted here.

Maybe it is the fact of the reunion that sums it all up in my head. We were the mighty Trojans of the Class of 1973, the fourth graduating class of a new high school composed of all the students of the county. We slouched from class to class, adopted the poses of coolness, turned up our noses at one another in the cafeteria, called each other names, gossiped, spread stories false and true, speculated about who was with who, speculated about who was still a virgin, talked about politics in mostly uninformed ways. White people declared that the South would rise again. Black people raised one fist and chanted for Black Power. Somehow we negotiated a space between those poles and learned to sit in classrooms together. In some cases we made friendships. Some of us fell in love. The heavens neither trembled nor opened, nor did earthquakes crack the ground. God's wrath failed to show itself, and the mixing of the races, as it turned out, was simply one more change that we learned to accept, whether happily or grudgingly. We learned to live in the presence of one another. We were the ones who desegregated Jones County public schools, black and white, male and female, sullen and stormy, happy and giddy, wanton and drunken, cool and slouched, shy and lost. Lawyers, judges, adults declared that the days of separate schools were over, but we were the ones who took the next step. History gave us a piece of itself. We made of it what we could.

Continue the conversation with these thought-provoking Algonquin books, available in print and e-book formats wherever books are sold.

On the Road to Freedom
by Charles E. Cobb Jr.

Panther Baby
by Jamal Joseph

The Good Negress
by A. J. Verdelle

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
by Heidi W. Durrow

Silver Rights
by Constance Curry

Clover
by Dori Sanders

We Were Brothers
by Barry Moser

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL