How I Shed My Skin (6 page)

On Main Street of Pollocksville stood service stations, a post office, an antique store, two general stores, a small drugstore where the proprietor also wrote insurance policies, and a pool hall, the latter being the closest we came to possessing a den of iniquity. The state-owned liquor monopoly sold liquor legally from its store a couple of miles outside of town, and some of the local people built private stills and sold moonshine. A dry-goods distributor kept a small warehouse on Main Street near one of the two barber shops, the one owned by the younger barber, where town boys went to get cooler haircuts than the older barber knew how to give. There was a beauty parlor in town, opened by one of the local daughters when she graduated from cosmetology school. These businesses were owned by white people. Black businesses were rare, and I can remember only a second pool hall and a shoe-repair shop, these being located in nearby Hatchville. This means only that I was ignorant of any black businesses nearby and not that they did not exist.

The isolation of Jones County was a state of mind. A saying that we repeated from time to time ran something like this: “There is a right way to do things, and a wrong way, and a Jones County way.” That third alternative, mixed of right and wrong no doubt, defiant of both, grew out of centuries of stubbornness, a rural life interrupted only occasionally by the events of the greater world.

There were good people in that town, and I grew up there with a feeling that a community surrounded me, that I was known and recognized wherever I went. Perhaps that would have been enough if my eyes had never opened, if the world had never changed. There was peace and safety in that town, and probably for most people in the county, as long as we each knew our place and kept to it.

TH
E SOUTHERNER WHO
feels a rich connection to a place is mostly likely nostalgic for that place the way it used to be. Place is history, not because the connection between the two is inevitable, but rather because the past has become idealized, covered with the gauze of memory, softened and obscured. The Southern dream of place is choked with longing. For the white Southerner, the past was a better time than the present, even though it was tragic and painful. For all this supposed link between the Southerner and history, the obsession with the past, the South is not inhabited by students of history. People were more inclined to repeat truisms about the past than they were to read the documents and learn the facts. The Southerner is comfortable with oral history, with tales spoken from mouth to mouth, and suspicious of the rest. The Southerner is comfortable with a view of the past that is inherited without much question. Stories change in the telling, and even more in the repeating. The past is bendable and adaptable. We see in it what we will.

Place is hierarchy, above all. This sense of Southern place, and of any Southerner's given place, is entwined with that other notion of attachment to the land. The Southerner was indeed expected to know his place, not simply in a geographical or mythological sense, and to accept this place and adhere to it. The Southerner had a position in the social order: white trash, slave, merchant, overseer, paddyroller, artisan, master. This functioned as a kind of temperature, which moved up or down with one's fortunes or behavior. Knowing your place in the world and accepting it, paying respect to your betters and giving a good kick to those beneath you, these were and are part of the Southern order.

A Southerner accepted his station in life but tried to find the means to rise above it. That same Southerner accepted the station of others in life and tried with all his might to keep them in it. The Southern world spent much of its energy deciding who was entitled to advantages and who was not, and most especially who was better than whom. The social hierarchy was complicated and endless, Southern memory long and vengeful. Violations of the social order, lack of respect for one's betters and their relations, brought quick retribution along with slow and thorough revenge.

God never put us equal onto the earth. The very notion was absurd. God put us in a hierarchy, some better and many worse, and He gave us life so that we could discover who was the better and who was the worse. Southerners have never believed in equality, even when they have believed in some kind of democracy. The two ideas have never had much association with each other.

In this, I am mostly speaking of the white Southerner, though I don't doubt that black and brown Southerners share some of the same traits. The history I mean to trace here is my own white history, in which I grew up with an assigned place, one low in the Southern social order. I was raised to be a believer in the United States as a white nation, in the South as a white paradise, and in the superiority of my European-descended race over all the other races of the earth. No one ever said these words to me in such clear terms, but, nevertheless, I learned the ideas behind these beliefs. In particular, I was raised to keep black people in their place, and to see to it that they stayed there. My purpose here and now is to examine how good people perpetuated this in the raising of their children and in the living of their lives in my part of the South. Or, to be more personal, my purpose here is to examine how, as a child, I learned bias against black people from the good white people around me. For there is no one else from whom I could have taken this lesson.

The Learning

Maybe the instruction began with nursery rhymes.

Nigger, nigger, black as tar

Stuck his head in a molasses jar

Jar broke, nigger choked

And went to heaven in a little rowboat

I learned this rhyme early enough that the memory of its origin escapes me, so that the doggerel appears to exist in my head from birth. The verse was useful for the clapping-hands games that I played with girls, or the jump-rope sessions in which I sometimes participated. Like that of a good pop song, the rhythm of the stanza stuck in the brain so that the words repeated themselves over and over again. I chanted this verse before I knew what a Negro was, late in the 1950s as I woke up to being, three or four years old, suddenly stuck in the world, trying to figure it out.

We played games around the tobacco farms or near the back doors of houses, our mothers visiting inside, sipping thin coffee in the kitchen, children in the dirt yard kicking aside the sweet-gum balls and saying whatever nursery rhyme or scrap of a country song we knew. We played tag or hide-and-seek or we ran with tobacco sticks between our legs, pretending they were horses and we were the Lone Ranger and other cowboys. I remembered some songs we sang, a Kitty Wells divorce song, Johnny Cash when he heard the train a'coming, a'rolling around the bend near Folsom Prison; I knew “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” and I knew the nigger rhyme.

Eeny meeny miney moe

Catch a nigger by the toe

If he hollers, let him go

Eeny meeny miney moe

This rhyme was used for selecting, often to determine who would be “it” in a game of tag or the first seeker in a game of hide-and-seek. We children chanted, pointing from one to the other on each beat of the verse, and the person on the last beat was chosen; a chorus of shrieking greeted the selection. Sometimes a person might say “rabbit” in place of “nigger,” but mostly we said “nigger.”

Children chanted these verses in play, mixed in with “Pop Goes the Weasel,” “Little Miss Muffet,” and “Ring Around the Rosey.” In such a way the notion of
nigger
entered my brain and stayed, starting likely before I knew language myself, listening to the sounds of other children at play. In chanting these rhymes I was learning a word that would shape my view of the world, and my knowledge of what a nigger was would thereafter organize itself and grow.

I played with other children at Lee's Chapel United Methodist Church, in the interval between Sunday School and the main service. This took place once a week. Later, in school in my hometown of Pollocksville, playtime would become a daily routine. I played with cousins at family gatherings in Rocky Mount, where my father's family originated, or in Princeton, where my mother's people lived. The rhymes were ubiquitous and, attached to the supposed innocence of play, taught me their lessons through the medium of fun. Learning them in the shadow of the church or in the pine-shaded schoolyard, knowing their acceptance by the adults around me, meant that the word was acceptable, at least to a degree. Women who might have objected to the casual use of
nigger
as a word, on the grounds that it was not nice, nevertheless accepted it in the guise of a child's rhyme. A child might be corrected for calling someone a nigger at the wrong time or place, or using the word in a sentence in polite company, but adults might not object to the chanting of an old rhyme in the yard during a game of jump rope. The doggerel was a part of play.

Adults in that era told nigger jokes, in which the theme of inferiority played out in many ways, generally involving the dumbness of Negroes, who often mistook one word for another, or one process for another. I would hear my father tell these jokes to my uncles when they were out of hearing of their wives, or else I might hear them at a country store or a service station, places where men talked to other men. The jokes usually involved the nigger getting instructed to do something simple and making such an obvious mistake that the result was hilarious and embarrassing, and the joke served as proof that niggers were never very smart and got even the simplest facts mixed up. When we laughed at the joke, we accepted the premise.

Learning about blacks shaped my expectations. What I observed about black people was meant to fit the frame this word created inside me, so that I would see what I was supposed to see. The space of
nigger,
once prepared in my head, would resemble that same space in the heads of all the other children who played with me, and the other children with whom they played. It was a word that organized the world, and we began to learn it at the same time that we learned to speak and walk.

The word was used in many ways, always for the same purpose, to reinforce the association between
nigger
and anything bad. When my father was angry at my mother, he would accuse her of being part nigger. People who danced with too much hip movement were doing nigger dances. Something that smelled bad smelled like a nigger. Clothing that was too loud or colorful was like something a nigger would wear. Putting on deodorant rather than bathing was a nigger bath. A house where a black family lived was a nigger shack. A white person with thick lips had nigger lips, and a person with kinky hair had nigger hair. An unruly child might be called wild as a nigger, while a slothful adult was as common as a nigger, or as sorry as one. Certain kinds of flamboyance, like a penchant for lawn ornaments or a taste for bright colors, were described as niggerish. If a house fell into bad repair it was a place not even fit for a nigger to live in, a truly terrible abode. If food was particularly poor in quality, it was something even a nigger wouldn't eat. A stopgap or sloppy solution to a repair problem was a nigger rigging. In all its uses the word had a nasty, bitter edge, and, as a child, I heard the scorn and placed these feelings alongside the word, till in its final form it embodied a little of everything bad. Information and nothing more, as far as I knew. A child of three or four is not apt to question what is observed. The warp and woof of the adult world must be understood before it can be examined.

How would I have seen black people without these voices speaking in my ear? Is there were a way to know?

In the same way, by the same methods, I was taught about the weakness of girls, their place in the home, all that embodied what I was supposed to think about the opposite sex. But in the case of girls, I had access to real ones, and the evidence of what I saw and learned directly, to counterbalance what I was told. Even then, with the contradiction of real examples, some of the false information would win out over observation, and I would grow up with ideas about the weakness and inferiority of women that would later prove to be false. In the case of black people, I had only the whisperings and no direct experience, until years after my first ideas were formed.

The Fight in the Yard

I climbed down from the school bus to see my younger brother fighting a black boy in the driveway that led through a field to our house. We lived in a plain frame structure set up on cinderblocks, one grade better than a shack. It had a kitchen sink only after my father put one in. We were living in a part of the county where lower-class white people had settled, Riggstown Road, inhabited by a goodly number of Riggses and a smattering of people with other surnames.

My mother was ashamed of our house because no one had ever bothered to paint it, and because there was no bathroom, only an outhouse. We had come down in the world since my father lost his arm. But this place was better than the place we lived before, an old country store, one big open room with a counter running down the middle, that would later become Willa Romley's Fish Market. Our new house had four rooms, a back porch, and had never been used as a store. It had an electric water pump instead of a hand pump, and soon my father planned to install a sink.

September was the season for the grading and sale of cured tobacco, and my mother, to make money, had taken a truckload of dried tobacco into our house. My mother and father did this, I should say, since he was as glad to have my mother earning money as she was. The tobacco belonged to a farmer named Riggs, a drinking buddy of Daddy's. To grade tobacco, a person broke the twine that held the fistfuls of leaves to the pole on which they had hung to dry, piling the leaves on the ground, a process that released all the dried dirt and mud from the leaves into the air. Then one sorted dried tobacco, separating the golden, unblemished leaves from the brown or mottled, gathering the stems of leaves together and tying them in bundles shaped a bit like broom ends, one leaf wrapped around the top of the bunch to hold the stems fast. The front two rooms of our house were filled with dried tobacco, the smell unmistakable, pungent and dusty.

The children on the school bus saw that there was a black boy in our driveway, fighting with my little brother. No one on the bus said anything, as I recall. My sister and I clambered onto the dry grass beside the mailbox and the bus pulled away.

I stood at the end of the driveway, not certain of what I should think or do. There was a nigger boy in our yard and an old nigger woman in our house, along with pallets of dried tobacco and dust. The facts collided as if the one caused the other. I cannot remember whether this thought was explicit in my head. But it is certain that I used the word
nigger
in my thinking about the little boy and the old woman.

My brother and the black boy were fighting each other as if by instinct, without any words or any cause. I walked past them to put away my schoolbooks, then came back to see what was going on. Mother and the black woman were sitting near the open front door to catch the breeze and to keep an eye on the front yard. Mother introduced me to the black woman, but I cannot remember her name. She was there to help meet a deadline for preparing the tobacco for market. Between them was the pile of mottled leaves and, behind that, a high rectangular stack of cured tobacco tied to what we called tobacco sticks—long, thin poles of rough wood. The leaves when green and sticky with tar were tied to these sticks for hanging inside heated curing barns. When dried, the leaves ranged in color from bright yellow to rich gold to burnt black. My mother and this stranger woman made a set wage for taking the tobacco off the sticks and grading its quality so the best golden leaves could be sold for the highest price.

So many layers of this moment can be seen only now, when I look backward: that my mother and the black woman were engaged in the toxic business of making cigarettes, that they were breathing tobacco dust as they sorted the leaves, that my mother had worked in fields and on farms with black people for many years. But she was uncomfortable now. I saw this in her face and in the way she sat in the chair.

I had no experience of black people, and now here was this woman with her grandson. Maybe she called him her grandboy. She might have nodded and said, “That's my grandboy out yonder,” nodding toward the young 'un. In the dialect of Jones County this last part might have sounded like “ow chonder,” as in, “Thass my granbo-ey ow chonder.” Vowels were stretched so that a long vowel sound might make up two spoken syllables. A black speaker would have curled the vowels one way and a white speaker would have curled them another.

I was six years old. The memory is dim, and I cannot remember whether I called the boy a nigger to his face while he and my brother circled each other, or whether my brother did, or whether anyone did. Maybe this was why they were fighting. The best memory I have is that nothing was said, and the fight simply started, the two boys being of a similar age, circling each other like two kittens with their backs raised, then colliding.

It is doubtful that the word was said aloud, in fact, since my mother would not have allowed us to say it, especially in front of a black woman with whom she was working. That woman, old and hard-skinned, clear of eye, had no reason to accept such language from us in the first place. She knew that we were as low on the social scale as she and her grandson, and even if we were white and thus enjoyed a certain kind of status denied to her, she could have still objected. Perhaps she would not have articulated such a thought, but it was surely there. She sat in the open front door with my mother, but a wall of difference separated them.

I could only see the color of her skin, the way she sat in the chair with her legs spread, skirt draped over them, a pile of dried leaves in her lap. The idea of a difference between her skin and mine was already planted in me, and in looking backward at this memory I am tempted to read the moment only for its racial content, the fact that this was my earliest moment of close contact with a black person, even though black people lived all around me. For this woman as much as for my mother, this moment was more about survival than anything else. They could earn money of their own if they would tolerate each other and work together. So they did.

I had learned already to see the world in terms of many types of difference, but particularly between rich and poor, black and white, decent and not. Country people made a life's work of deciding who was better than whom and what was better than what. Judged were individuals, families, members of families, churches, members of churches, denominations, villages, towns, makes of automobile, ways of canning, recipes for slaw, and on and on. The world was a grand hierarchy of such rankings. When necessary, the process of judgment could be bloody and mean. I would never entirely force that process—that need to decide who was above and who was below—out of my thinking, and it would be a long time before I even tried.