How I Shed My Skin (10 page)

The J. W. Willie School / Bag Lunch

On my first morning at J. W. Willie School I learned that change, no matter how necessary, could be deeply uncomfortable and unsettling.

What I remember is that the schoolyard lay flat as a tabletop, and the school sat on a concrete slab on the ground, with rows of classes lined side by side, each opening onto a covered walkway. The wings of the building formed a cross. A bit of playground surrounded the school, with monkey bars and seesaws, maybe a swing set, all unused, since the younger grades who would have played on them were now attending my old school. The upper grades, five through eight, occupied the Willie School, and we were far too old to do anything on monkey bars except drape ourselves against them in as cool a fashion as we could manage.

The building felt alien and strange, sitting so low to the ground, bringing the outside world so close to the classroom. At Alex H. White we had been raised up from the ground, protected by interior hallways, removed from the trees and lawn, looking down on them from what felt like a great height. That had been an older building, a different idea about the relationship between the classroom and the world, imposing, occupying a central place in the village. The Willie School was more modern, simpler in design, a different way of relating to the outdoors.

In the early heat of that first morning, students milled about the yard, in and out of the classrooms. Most of them were strangers to me. Most of them were black. I had not gone to school with strangers in years, nor I had been in a space before where black people outnumbered white people. From the first moment, standing in front of the school, I could feel the difference as a kind of fear inside me. Strangers were watching me, thinking thoughts about me, perhaps forming opinions about the way I looked or the way I dressed. I had no idea what they were thinking or who they were.

In class I found Mrs. Ferguson, looking very much herself, familiar and welcome. I watched her move at her desk and at the chalkboard before the school day started, and I was unable to detect any difference in her demeanor, though she must have felt the change as keenly as I did, especially in those first moments.

Black students had taken the seats at the front of the class, and white students clustered in the seats to the rear. I expect we had a bewildered air. Ursula and Rhonda had taken their seats among the black students, and they faced us, the white kids, with an air that was expectant and perhaps a bit exultant. So, from the beginning I could feel many of the energies that would shape the rest of my school years: the lines of color that were drawn in the classroom and on the buses, the feeling that integration was a victory of black people over white people, and the sensation of being in the minority.

ABOUT HALF THE
white students from my old class had made the decision to attend the new Pollocksville Academy, but it was Marianne's absence that I felt most keenly. We had been talking through the summer by phone, still maintaining the make-believe that we were in contact with popular singers and television stars, that we were actually aliens with incredible mental powers, that we were more than lonely country children in a county where there was never much to do for people who did not hunt or fish, who were too young to drink and carouse. It would have been easy, one would think, to maintain a friendship that had taken place by phone in summer months anyway. But once we stopped sharing a classroom, a chill fell over our friendship, and we lost each other.

Most of us were thirteen by then, as I would be before the end of September, and most of us were agitated by the changes that had taken place over the summer. This was 1968, the turbulent year in which Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, in which racial tensions kindled into fire across the country, in which people protested the Vietnam War and brought down the curtain on the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. By this age I had begun to follow the news, to read newspapers more regularly, and to understand something of the world. I had watched both political parties' conventions on television, following Huntley and Brinkley and their crew for most of the day. I brought this change with me to the new school, too, a new awareness of the world.

Like me, some of the other students were following the presidential election. At moments when Mrs. Ferguson was absent from the classroom, the two halves of the room hurled taunts back and forth. We covered the various topics that we would use for the rest of the year to pinch and provoke one another. The white kids brought up George Wallace and Richard Nixon, states rights, and the like. The black kids responded with Black Power, the Black Panthers, soul, Malcolm X, and the coming of the revolution.

Violet, who was now my classmate again, exacted a certain degree of payback. “Slavery time is over,” she said one morning, in response to some crack Harry Bell made about the good old days. “The black man don't have to bow down no more.”

“That's all right,” Harry answered. “When George Wallace is president, you'll find out.”

“I'll find out what?”

“You just wait, you'll see,” Harry said.

“You be the one to get a surprise when the people take over,” said a girl named Evelyn Hall, in a quiet, steady voice.

“That's right,” agreed Ursula. “It's a revolution coming, y'all.”

I reflected that last year she had promised to put me on the list of white people who would be spared, and I wondered whether she had remembered.

At lunch, the white students all sat together at one table, barely filling it. We brought our lunches, in my case two bologna and cheese sandwiches on white bread, a touch of French's yellow mustard on the bread, wrapped in plastic, carried in a brown paper bag. All the white kids ate lunches brought from home, turning our noses up at the food prepared by the black workers in the school cafeteria.

This strikes me as odd as I think of it now, since white families in the South employed black cooks, and white people never showed any qualms about eating food prepared by black hands in a white kitchen. The fact that all the parents sent us to school that year with bag lunches for the first time indicates a level of discussion and agreement behind the scenes. At the time I had no reservations about it and rather liked the novelty, though the sameness of the fare was wearing. Once or twice it occurred to me that the cafeteria workers might be insulted by the implications of our boycott of their food. I am certain this was something the black students noticed about us. Neither Rhonda nor Ursula had ever hesitated to eat the cooking at the white school during the years of Freedom of Choice. But this choice of ours was never a subject of much discussion beyond the in-class taunting that continued through the year. I expect the black students were not surprised by our behavior.

The white students drew closer together in the atmosphere of this new school, mostly because we were outnumbered and viewed with suspicion by the black kids. Knowing that enormous pressure had been brought to bear to force integrated schools on Jones County, the black students were skeptical of our attitudes. This does not mean we white kids liked each other any better, and I grew neither closer to nor more distant from any of my tablemates at lunch. But I felt the presence of the black kids in the lunchroom around us, as the days and weeks passed, and their faces and names became more familiar to me. I understood that our table of white kids represented a kind of stubbornness that I might have to face, a part of myself that I might come to question.

I HAD BECOME
conscious of the wider world through watching the news, reading newspapers and newsmagazines, and especially through watching the election of the president in that fall of 1968. Like many other people, I felt as though I had a personal attachment to my leaders, and the fact that I would someday be a voter encouraged me to choose sides. This occurred after the assassinations of King and Kennedy in the summer, and after the conventions of the two parties, which gave me a sense of right and wrong where politics were concerned. I felt a kinship with Democrats and a distrust of Republicans. On the whole I liked television reporters and thought they were telling me the truth.

In Mr. Wexler's civics class, we discussed some of these topics openly. Mr. Wexler was also the principal, supervising the teachers and running the school. He was a black man in his late thirties or early forties, handsome if a bit plump, affable and smiling. He was my first black teacher and the first person with whom I debated issues of politics. We studied history and government with him, and our time in his classroom turned into a long discussion of the election, at least through the fall. He had a way of making discussion safe. He was a Nixon advocate, while I backed Hubert Humphrey. The fact that, under his guidance, we were sitting in a classroom in the South, black and white students discussing who should be president, strikes me as more important than anything else taking place that year. This is not to say that the conversations were elevated or the arguments cogent. We did not open up the more dangerous topics for debate, and avoided much mention of our situation, of the fact that we were dealing with integration ourselves. We never discussed our own history, the long past of Jones County. But we were talking, in ways that moved past our divisions, at least to a degree.

The networks were discussing the notion of the Nixon Southern Strategy, playing on Southern fears of integration. Maybe because at school I was part of a minority of students myself, this idea caused me to examine myself and my ideas about skin color for the first time. My thinking on the subject moved from unconscious to conscious in that year. The national debate taking place indicated that the idea of race was far more powerful than I had suspected, perhaps the most powerful of all the ideas acting on my world. It became clear that I had a choice to make.

In our discussions about politics in Mr. Wexler's class, the opposing roles that we took on by accident, his advocacy for Nixon and mine for Humphrey, made me think even harder about what I believed. For Mr. Wexler, the Southern strategy was less important than distrust of the Democrats, their Great Society, and their many programs for social intervention. He had the feeling the government was overreaching. He was a middle-class man whose skin color appeared secondary to his worldview, a neutrality that he projected, no doubt by design, to make his classroom presence more appealing. He distrusted Humphrey because of his association with Johnson, and because of Vietnam. He also enjoyed the debate, and found me very amusing, I think. I was a smart child, and he liked smart students, as most teachers did. He also enjoyed the fact that now he was a teacher to all the children in the community, though he never said so directly.

There were many people whom I came to know that year, but the two who stood out, other than the friends I already had, were Evelyn Hall and Steven Rockley. Steven was the handsomest of the black boys, taller than me, solidly built, with skin of a creamy coffee brown. I found myself staring at him in class at times. Evelyn was a demure young woman with a rich, quiet voice. She had a strong, calm presence that resonated, and her manner of speaking was full of self-possession. She wasted no words.

We learned about each other, all of us, in those moments between our bickering, when we worked on a school project together, or when we talked about music, or television, or the news, idle moments at our desks, or moving from class to class. Some of this conversation sprang from simple curiosity. With the end of black and white separation, black people were curious about white people, and white people about black. But this curiosity took a backseat to other agendas. Sometimes when a black student spoke to me or asked me a question, I knew I was being tested. Some of the tests I failed. When asked about black musicians or singers, most of the time I was ignorant. I knew about the Supremes but not about the Temptations. I had listened to records by the Shirelles, an older group, but had no idea of the names of the singers.

“You know Malcolm X?” asked Violet one day, meeting my eye across the aisle, during one of these discussions at the end of a period change when we had moved from one classroom to another.

After a while, sheepishly, I shook my head.

“Malcolm X say the white man is a devil. You a devil. What you think about that?”

I shrugged. “I don't know.”

“I believe white people killed Malcolm X,” she said.

I did not know he was dead, and so I had no reply.

In spite of my ignorance, I was willing to talk. To an increasing degree, it was clear that many of my white classmates were not. Embattled and surrounded, they closed ranks, spoke disparagingly of James Brown and the Temptations, drew Confederate flags on their notebooks, and praised George Wallace, under whom, they claimed, the South would rise again.

One day matters came to a quiet peak. I was working with Evelyn Hall on a display for the bulletin board. We stood at the back of the classroom, lettering signs and cutting words out of construction paper. My white classmates were snickering and making some remark about what would happen once George Wallace was president. They were talking within their own group, but making a conspicuous show of it, a performance for the rest of the class. This was one of the moments when Mrs. Ferguson was absent from the classroom. Evelyn Hall turned to me and indicated the huddle of white boys laughing about the return of segregation. “You see your people, don't you?” she asked.

I said, “Those are not my people.” I kept working quietly on the bulletin board. She took in my answer and said nothing more herself.

This was a defining moment for me, and even after so long a time has passed, I can feel my own calm as I said the words. I was making a choice.

I still brought my lunch to school every day. I still sat at the table with the white students. Breaking no conventions and behaving as was expected of me, I nevertheless had begun to stand apart from my white friends and to differ from their point of view. I accepted equality and its implications. No longer would I act on notions that my skin made me superior to anyone.