How I Shed My Skin

IN WRITING THIS BOOK
I am mindful that the real people from whom this story is drawn were my neighbors and friends for the first two decades of my life. I have changed the proper names in the story to preserve their privacy, though I have not changed place names or names that appear in the historical recordâone example being the list of old family names from Jones County.

I have altered none of the incidents in the book, or if I have done so, it is the fault of fading memory. While these years of my life are distant, they remain vivid and present in my mind, in some ways more so than events that are more recent. Conviction that one's memory is correct means little, of course. But my aim is to tell a story that is largely my own, and I believe I have come close to the truth. I am tracing the ways in which the events of these years shaped my thinking about skin color and difference. The memory of that process has not faded.

While I have made this point in the narrative, it bears repeating that the conversations I have written are all reconstructions; I do not remember exact dialogue from fifty years ago. I have strong memories of what we spoke about as children and teenagers and believe I have presented faithful substitutes. In the cases where these little dramas recreate specific memories, they are likely to be close to the original. They are certainly as close as I can come.

To many people, I owe thanks for their help in this process, among them my family, who have once again allowed me to reach into our past and write about it. My editor, Charles Adams, and my former editor and present publisher, Elisabeth Scharlatt, have brought this story back into the Algonquin family, and I am deeply grateful for that. My former agent, Peter Hagan, helped me with this book in its early iterations, and my present agent, Melanie Jackson, has been an equally valuable voice in the final stages of its shaping. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the staff of the Wilson Library's North Carolina Collection provided assistance in my research of the history of Jones County. The North Carolina Collection and Special Collections of the Joyner Library at East Carolina University helped me to understand the history of school integration in that region, and also provided me with microfiche access to the newspapers from Kinston and New Bern that helped to jog my memory about the years of demonstrations and walkouts at our high school. Margaret Bauer provided me with moral support and free housing in Greenville while I worked at the Joyner Library in the summer of 2013, a span of weeks that reminded me what the heat of eastern North Carolina can be like. Lynna Williams, Roxanne Henderson, Elisabeth Corley, and Kathie de Nobriga helped with early readings of the book. My colleagues at Emory University, and the institution itself, have provided the steady support on which I have come to rely.

I owe a great debt to the people of Jones County, both fifty years ago and today. Even then it was a community that was extraordinary for its closeness and caring, though it was, of course, full of the pettiness and imperfections that plague all human places. As a part of the writing of this book, I renewed contact with a number of old friends from high school days, and I would like to list them all. But since these are people whose names I have altered in the text, citing their real names among these acknowledgments would be inappropriate.

An early version of the first chapter appeared in Foster Dickson's anthology
Children of the Changing South
(McFarland, 2011); I am grateful for the encouragement that this provided.

While I have done a good deal of reading on various topics related to the subject of integration, there are relatively few facts in the book for which I have cited sources. In general, I have used my background reading as just that, and have limited the text to what I remember and knew at the time. One notable exception is the material concerning lynchings that I have included in the final chapter; information about these public spectacles of mob murder are drawn from Vann R. Newkirk's
Lynching in North Carolina
(McFarland, 2008).

At our worst we are creatures who tear at each other, feed on each other, abuse each other; at our best we are unspeakably sublime. My awe at the dreadful aspect of the human is unceasing even as I age and look beyond it to the awful dreadfulness of the universe into which I shall dissolve. When I was seventeen and headed to college, I was certain I already knew nearly everything I needed to know. I have told this story in order to reclaim some of the feeling I had in those days, including my optimism that the world could change for the better. Now I am old enough to know that I know almost nothing. While the world changes, it also stays the same, fixed by the past. Much is different between the races in the South of the third millennium, but the old ways remain side by side with the new.

BIAS

Freedom of Choice / Black Bitch

On a day in late August 1966, my little village woke to the fading edge of summer and the beginning of a new school year. A quiet dawn betrayed scarcely any sign of agitation within the placid houses, grouped under pecan or oak or elm trees, taking comfort in the shade even at that early hour, already touched with the beginnings of heat. On the main highway through town a single stoplight shuttered through its changes from red to yellow to green. The lone restaurant opened a bit past dawn to serve country breakfast to truckers and travelers and locals. Post-office workers arrived to sort mail, one or two storekeepers opened their doors, and the owner of the Trent Motel shuffled check-in forms at the front desk while the neon
VACANCY
sign glowed in the window.

Beyond main street under the ranks of trees wakened the rest of the village, black residents in the rows of houses we called Back Streets, white residents in the houses we thought of as Pollocksville proper, the real place, the real world. Outside the town limits, scattered among the fields and forests of Jones County, farmers were already abroad in the early morning, continuing the tobacco harvest, readying the cured, golden leaves for market. A couple of miles from town, a clerk opened the local Alcoholic Beverage Control store, collapsing the iron security barrier against the walls, stepping behind his long counter, shelves of liquor bunched behind him in the small space. In North Carolina, liquor could be sold legally only in ABC stores, and ours was located outside of the village, decently separate from our homes and churches.

Down the highway, closer to the old Methodist church, Mrs. Willa Romley opened her fish market. At another busy intersection, Mr. Paul Arnett unlocked his thriving store on the route to the beaches. Across the county, school bus drivers, all of them students at the high school, swept their buses and started their engines. The first of the teachers arrived to inspect the classrooms.

I had begun my morning, too, slipping out of bed, skinny and pale, my white jockey shorts, my hairless body, all of me destined to begin sixth grade that morning. What I felt was mostly sadness that the free days of summer break were over. I dressed in stiff new clothes in the bedroom I shared with my brothers, new jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, a plaid that I liked, the starchy smell like a perfume in my nostrils. The night before I had carefully removed the tags, pins, and excess labels from my jeans and shirt, from my new socks and belt. New shoes made a bit of a squeaking sound as I stepped to the window to look out at the side yard. At eleven, I was in a brooding state, in my third year as a baptized Christian and member of the Pollocksville Baptist Church, attempting to resolve a belief in God with the world as I understood it from the novels of Robert A. Heinlein, P. L. Travers, Madeleine L'Engle, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. My life for the summer had revolved around Vacation Bible School, reruns of
Batman,
and walks to the public library to borrow more books. I had saved my allowance for trips to the local drugstore, where I purchased DC and Marvel comic books and read them while sipping a vanilla Coke. I wandered and daydreamed in a patch of woods on the other side of the old Jenkins Gas Company building, and read the Bible and prayed. A couple of times a week I talked to my best friend, Marianne.

On my mind that morning was the coming of the fall broadcast television season, now only a few days away, when shows like
Th
e Monkees
and
Star Trek
were advertised to premiere. That was my consolation for the end of summer. I would be entering a new grade at school, and would have my first male teacher. I would also be going to school with black children for the first time.

On the phone with Marianne, I must have mentioned this last subject to her at some point, or she must have mentioned it to me, and we shared some opinion about it. We had been talking regularly that summer, which made her practically my girlfriend, a thought that gave me a certain pleasure and a certain discomfort. Most of the time we discussed Prince Charles of England, Herman's Hermits, Paul Revere & the Raiders, other pop bands whose music we heard that summer on
American Bandstand.
She had told me about her family, her brother who was really her half brother, her mother who had divorced her first husband, her family that counted the King of England in its ancestry. I told her about books I was reading and the work I was doing in the family's vegetable garden. My family had no famous ancestors, as far as I knew.

Somewhere in all of that, we must have mentioned the fact that we would be going to school with black children in the fall.

I can no longer recall what it was like to be endlessly fascinated with Marianne's accounts of what she had read in
Tiger Beat,
or with speculation about the coming television season, or the next rocket launch, or whether people could read each other's minds if they tried really hard. What I can remember is that these were the important issues in general, whereas the news that our school classroom would include three colored girls was harder to digest. We knew what it meant to like a song or think a singer was pretty or cute. We had no idea what it meant that this change called integration was coming. If we spoke of it at all, it would have been to speculate about how many black kids we would get in our sixth-grade class, or to reassure ourselves that there would still be mostly white people in our school.

Marianne and I had been in the same class with the same children for all five years of our education, Pollocksville being so small that there were only enough white children to fill one classroom for each grade, one through eight. At the time, I thought all schools operated in this tidy way and was appalled to learn that in New Bern, close to us, there were two or three sections of first graders and they went to school in different classrooms. All my life I had lived in a community where whites and blacks were legally separated from one another. To the degree that I knew anything about this situtation, I thought it was the natural shape of the world. Now, suddenly, there was a law that said any child could choose to attend either the white or the black school system.

The thought that I would have to sit next to black children had made me fearful when I first heard it. The fear came from what I had already learned about race, though if asked, I would likely have denied that I had been taught anything at all. To the degree that I understood the fear, I knew it came from a feeling that the world was rearranging itself, the shift being bigger than I could take in. I had a quiet conviction that change was unfair in some way, because I had hardly gotten to know the old world, when, suddenly, here was the new.

I felt the same fear when I saw news stories about demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, race riots in the inner cities, and the possibility of nuclear war. The world was burning before I had even had a chance to grow up and enjoy it. A hollow settled into my middle at such times, and I found another Heinlein novel, maybe
Th
e Star Beast
or
Have Space Sui
t
â
Will Travel,
and escaped into the future.

Exactly what had happened to bring about the new world I was not sure. Outside of school or church, adults rarely explained history or taught about how things worked, leaving us children to figure things out as best we could. Nobody ever told me why blacks and whites had to go to separate schools, use separate restrooms, and keep a distance from one another. No one ever pointed out a black person to me and said, “You cannot drink water out of the same glass as that person, or call him âsir,' or sit next to him in a public place.” Yet the knowledge of those truths had come into me in spite of the silence.

At church, Mr. Russell sometimes declared that God did not intend for the races to mix. He owned the only restaurant in Pollocksville, so the issue concerned him, since he had recently been forced by law to serve colored customers. According to his worldview, black people had their place just like white people had theirs. They did not want to associate with us any more than we wanted to associate with them. This was a statement I would hear echoed in other voices at other times. At church, Mr. Russell would not have used the word
nigger,
but in his restaurant he would have. His was a voice I remember, and some people in the small congregation agreed with what he said. Others did not. So the uncomfortable subject never took the center of our discussions, which were largely concerned with choir practice, the building fund for the new church, and the fact that too many of the girls were wearing those new miniskirts to Sunday service.

Likely at church I had heard the term “Freedom of Choice,” the name of the new law that maintained separate school systems for blacks and whites while allowing for a certain degree of race-mixing. After service, having been reminded of their salvation during the preacher's sermon, adults stood in front of the sanctuary and talked a bit, especially in the warm months, which in eastern North Carolina comprised most of the year. I wandered among them sometimes and listened to their deep voices, their serious tones, watching as the men adjusted their ties and the women fondled their purses. Church was one of the rare places where I heard adults talk, and where they discussed the government, the war in Vietnam, and politics.

As I dressed for school that morning, I combed my hair carefully in the way that my mother had taught me, parted on the side, with a little flip at the front that she called a rabbit hill. My mother inspected it and approved. There were four children to get ready for school, and Mother herself also worked there, in the cafeteria, so she would be driving the few blocks. But I had decided to walk to school. We had lived in the village proper only a few months, and I was still delighted with the novelty. The town was huge to my eyes, and I felt immeasurably more important now that we lived in it. On leaving the house with my new notebook and pencil case, I listened to the starched sound of my new jeans with each step. I had rolled up the cuffs of the jeans over my new black shoes. The clothes felt like a kind of carapace, my shirt collar so stiff it poked at my neck. As soon as I was out of sight of the house, I rubbed the rabbit hill out of my hair. It had become important to me, lately, to take some control of the way I looked.

MY THOUGHTS WERE
on the trivialities of the day, or my family's troubles, or the fact that I would see Marianne again. I was thinking about the fact that I would have Mr. Roger Vaughn as my teacher this year, when my first five teachers had all been women. In the same fashion, my conversations with my mother that morning were about what cereal I would eat for breakfast; that I should eat even if I wasn't hungry, because I would be hungry later; and that she thought I could wear my shirts to school twice before they needed to be washed. As in so many other cases, the biggest issue, the biggest change, went unspoken and unmarked. Never once did any adult give me any advice about how to treat the new black students in our school. On the rare occasions when I heard adults discuss integration, they spoke to one another in the coded, guarded manner typical of adults, presuming a knowledge I had yet to gain.

So I walked into the classroom and took a seat in a desk at the head of a row. The room was quiet, as best I can recall, more so than normal for a first day of school, with Mr. Vaughn sitting at his desk, droopy-eyed, nose covered with veins twining this way and that, tanned like leather from a summer at Bogue Sound. None of the school buses had arrived yet.

The three black girls walked into the classroom together, each holding a notebook and a purse. They had a wary air to them, faces stiff and frozen. As I recall, they were escorted into the room by the principal, Miss Julia Whitty, who introduced them to Mr. Vaughn and, in saying their names, spread the introduction to the rest of us as well. Violet, Ursula, and Rhonda. Miss Whitty was smiling, speaking in her confident voice, fingering the glasses she wore on a chain around her neck. She treated the girls as if they were simply new students who had moved to Pollocksville, though she knew as well as anyone that new students hardly ever moved to Pollocksville, and certainly not three at a time. In the way of beginnings, this was all. The girls took their seats.

One of them, Violet, sat in the desk behind mine. Ursula sat behind her, and Rhonda sat across the aisle. Violet's last name was Strahan. Both Rhonda and Ursula were named Doleman. They were sisters. I remember being mildly surprised at two sisters in the same grade of school. By that age I knew where babies came from and how long it took for them to arrive.

The girls talked to those of us sitting nearby that first day, but I have no recollection of what we said to one another. The three girls were very different from each other, and I stared at them a good bit. Violet was large, almost barrel-shaped, with very small breasts tucked up high on her ribs. She wore her hair short. I don't recall whether she straightened her hair that first day or whether she wore it natural, in the style that was called an Afro. Her skin was polished and smooth. Given the heat, she often wore sleeveless dresses, and in my recollection that is what she wore the first day of school, her arms perfectly smooth, a bit thin compared to the density of her torso. She spoke in a powerful voice, so much so that it was hard for her to whisper. She had fierce, hard eyes. Whenever she moved in her desk, it rocked against mine.

Ursula was younger in affect, with a pretty, rounded face and a softly curved body. She looked ample and plump, her movements betraying a certain shyness, her eyes gentle. She had the look of someone who could be friendly, who could be trusted. When she spoke, her voice was easy and lilting. She tugged at her dress from time to time, as if she were self-conscious about it, or as if it were too tight.

Rhonda had big brown eyes, long, straight hair, and a face that was lovely to watch. She carried herself with a liveliness, a sense of herself, that was complete, and she had an air of confidence that verged on defiance. She wore a pleated skirt and blouse that first day, or, at least, that is the way I will draw her. What she wore drew stylishness from her way of carrying herself, the fact that she knew who she was. Her pride was unshakable.

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