How I Shed My Skin (13 page)

We lived in a world that had taken a radical step in a direction of which we were uncertain. Integration was only one part of the sum. People had landed a spaceship on the moon over the summer. The 1960s were ending with violence, protest, and cities on fire. Would there ever be a Great Society or would Vietnam engulf us? Might today be the start of mutually assured destruction and World War III? I was hardly ready to understand the news I saw on television in any fullness, but even the contours and outlines frightened me. The world might come to an end in the blink of an eye, before I ever had the chance to live in it. When I thought in these terms, I felt a sense that anything might unfold, that tomorrow might bring a new disaster, causing everything familiar to change again. But still I went to class, prepared for high school, hoped for college, and saw barely beyond that horizon.

Cheap

The bus ride to the junior high school began on Highway 17 at the house where my family was living at the time, in the part of the county known as Green Valley. The bus carried us nearly to the county line, to the farm where my friend Dorothy Daniels lived, and then up 10 Mile Fork to the junior high school, a distance of over twelve miles, I would guess—a long ride at thirty-five miles per hour.

Bus drivers in North Carolina were drawn from the junior and senior class, teenagers with the proper license and the willingness to earn money by driving a bus route. These students were responsible for keeping discipline on the bus, for turning in students who were rowdy, started fights, or quarreled with the bus driver. At one time, I expect student drivers had been common to many states, but in 1969, North Carolina was the only place left that continued the practice, and the state would give it up a few years later. So the responsibility for keeping order on the newly integrated bus routes fell to students of one race or another.

Integrated busing had quickly settled into a pattern of turf, and on the bus routes I rode, the black students took the seats at the front and the white students the ones at the back. On the first days of our bus rides, Alex Burbank stood in the aisle and explained that the days when black people had to sit in the back of the bus were over. “Power to the people, right on,” he said. He had a swaggering walk, and a rapid, almost clipped way of speaking. He was a natural clown whom I had known at the Willie School in eighth grade, though when I was the butt of his jokes I hardly found him to be funny at all.

We white students looked at one another and blinked. Since we were in the minority, it behooved us to accept the situation quietly, and we did.

Thereafter we followed a protocol of coexistence on our bus, one that never varied from day to day. White people filled the seats from the back, blacks from front, and the two parties negotiated the middle. White people and black people did not share seats, or make any attempt to do so. A certain amount of conversation was allowed across the hinterland, and some of the most raucous of the crossracial conversations took place here, especially at the end of the day when we were all heading home.

Within these broader guidelines, we maintained the usual kinds of bus behavior learned in the long-ago of elementary school. Couples always had priority when sitting together, and they sat side by side holding hands, boy and girl, a look of silly light on their faces. Couples possessed the ability to sit in a transparent shell separate from the other riders, especially when they leaned their heads close to each other. No kissing was allowed on the bus, of course, but the couples managed to look fiercely intimate anyway.

The most desirable seats were those all the way in back, next to the emergency exit, with windows behind the seat through which one could make rude faces at the cars on the highway. Students raced to claim those. The seats at the front were equally coveted, since from those spots one could gaze in mockery or disdain at those who were struggling through the door and up the steps.

A white latecomer, either in the morning or afternoon, had to walk a gauntlet of black students in order to reach a seat. This served as a steady reminder that the black students refused to go anywhere near the back of the bus. When somebody from the front of the bus reminded us of this fact, as often as not one of the white students would reply that he or she liked the back of the bus better anyway. Maybe this was true, maybe not. It was a sensible assertion.

White people wanted to associate with white people, and black people wanted to associate with black people. This was a piece of what I had been taught. This notion found substance on our bus rides, when the color line descended in the middle of our bus, firm and immoveable, because we ourselves put it there. We reinvented it twice a day, on the trip to school and on the trip home.

In our part of the world, there was no discussion about school busing as a hardship; in Jones County, where there was only one junior high school and one high school, every student who was of age had to ride the bus for a half an hour or so. I was lucky on the bus routes that took me to school, because the Pollocksville kids in general left each other in peace. On some bus routes, black students filled up all the seats and refused to let white students sit down. This bullying behavior was more likely to take place when a bus was strongly dominated by one color or the other; I've heard from at least one student, not in Jones County, who rode on a bus where white students dominated and refused to let black students share seats.

Black students played a game among themselves, a verbal sparring, and when one person scored a particularly insulting comment on another, the victim of the insult was said to be “cheap.” The hurler of the insult had to wait for reaction, either for signs of embarrassment in his or her adversary, or for someone in the audience to say, “He cheap. He cheap now, look at him.”

Alex Burbank was a master of the game and, on the bus, would pace the aisle like a lawyer, speaking to one person or another. “Cassandra,” he would say, “even your mama can't love you, because you got a face like a hatchet, you know what I'm saying, you look like a ax blade hit you in the face, you know what I'm saying?” He would keep talking until he scored a hit. “She cheap now,” somebody would say, speaking of Cassandra, who might or might not have tried to fight back a bit. Sometimes he might attempt a rhyme or a kind of rhythm, but at other times he would simply start to speak, words rolling out of his mouth, so that I would wonder how he could keep talking so fast for so long.

To be cheap was to be put in one's place, rendered speechless, left without anything to say in rejoinder. One could prove oneself cheap simply by waiting too long to answer one insult with another, or by looking befuddled, or by being caught out in some kind of falsehood. When a person was found to be cheap, the whole community laughed at the sight. This was not a game white people had ever played before desegregation, but it was one with which we became familiar afterward. The bus rides were a good place to be made cheap, by engaging the wrong person in a debate and failing to trade insult for insult at the proper speed.

To get angry as the result of an insult was beyond cheap, entering the realm of aggression, the great sea of anger. To become angry was to lose the game.

The Mighty Trojans

I can remember walking up to Mercy and her friend Barbara one day in high school, the two of them tall and thin, long blonde hair all curl and frizz, dressed in faded jeans and army jackets, boots, leaning against one of the poles that held up the awning over the walkway. No one had thought to landscape the high school courtyard, and the grass was a wan, midwinter green, likely starved for a feeding. Andy Norton was standing with the two girls, dressed in more or less the same outfit as they were. He was one of the handsomest guys in school, a member of the football team, soon to be president of the student body, dark-skinned, with a smile that blazed. That was the day I saw that he was sweet on Mercy, and that she was sweet on him.

When I think of high school, I think of that courtyard, sunlight blaring onto the grass, the world all flat earth, open sky, and the school in some way naked under it. Neither tree nor shrub anywhere near, the school building sprawled in a field, two wings of classrooms facing each other across this bleak little open space, walkways running along it, another strip of classrooms running perpendicular to the courtyard. There was an actual hallway in that part of the building, leading past laboratories and home economics classrooms to the cafeteria and gym. Behind the main building, neat wooden walkways fanned in three directions, strings of mobile classrooms making that part of the school a bit like a trailer park.

Mercy had a sharp tongue, as I had learned, for instance, when, trying to be funny, I remarked that I was my own church, and she answered, without a missing a beat, “I guess it's a church of one.” No one had to tell me I was cheap that time, though it's likely that someone did anyway.

Barbara and Mercy together defined a certain kind of hippie coolness that brought some feeling of the 1960s to the school. So did Lamar Vickers and his one-foot Afro hairdo, swaying from side to side in the breeze as he strutted from one class to the next. So did Stella Newman with her tiny waist and generous bottom, her sharp brown eyes, her tight blue jeans. We were an endless parade of flared blues, faded green fatigue jackets from the army surplus store, headbands, snug denim pants, and ankle boots.

Mercy and Andy had danced around each other for a while before everyone realized that they were starting to lean toward each other in that peculiar way. At first they simply talked, and then one day when Andy walked up to her, there was some change in their posture that happened at the same moment, almost as though they turned away from the rest of us, as if they separated themselves inside a bubble. We continued to talk as a group, likely some subset of the usual gang of us, but Mercy and Andy occupied some other space, beyond some transparent separation. They were now together in some fashion.

Watching this dance of theirs would form one of the most vivid parts of high school, for me. By the end of high school, Mercy would become for a while my closest friend, a change I would not have foreseen when I was a plump, redheaded sophomore, puffed up about my brain because it was all I had.

WHEN I ENROLLED
in Jones Senior High School, I was part of the second tenth-grade class in the school's history. The old white high school had been called Jones Central, its colors red and white, its athletic teams the Rockets. As best I can recall, the old black high school had school colors of blue and gold; I never knew the name of the athletic teams there. When the new school was formed in the old building, students elected colors of blue and white, and selected Trojans as the name of our teams. Now, in the fall, as I became a student there, the high school football team was practicing, a handful of white players on the squad, and the mostly black cheerleading squad rehearsed its cheers. Such a small change in some ways, that this was simply the school responsible for the last three years of my education, and integration hardly mattered.

The feeling of high school was starkly different than anything that had come before. This was the end of the line. Seniors carried themselves with the strut of the oldest in the pack, almost finished with schoolrooms forever; the juniors were so close to the same milestone that they were giddy, too. We sophomores, the youngest class, waited expectantly for that same feeling to mantle us. All this was to be expected from any high school, I suppose. But this was a new school, only two years old. Simply in attending to our work here, we were doing something that had never been done before.

Some counties made a different choice, preserving schools, including school colors and mascots and closing historically black schools. By these actions, white people were seeking a bit of revenge for integration, or simply devaluing the black schools altogether. In taking another route, Jones County avoided some of the troubles that plagued her neighbors, where disputes and complaints about the closing of schools would continue for years.

Only a few dozen miles away, in Hyde County, Afro-Americans boycotted the school system for a year in order to put a halt to the plan to close all the facilities that had served them. Schools into which the black community had poured effort and struggle were to be closed in favor of white high schools, white athletic traditions, white school colors. The county would expand the old white schools at considerable expense, meanwhile closing down perfectly good facilities that were identified with black people. Hyde County protesters won their fight after two years. At the time, I never heard a single word about this action, even though I lived within an hour's drive of the place; I learned of it much later in life, when I began to read the history of my region.

Having absorbed the changes of desegregation, the Jones County school system set about returning to normal. The football team had already played for one season, and now it was time for a second to begin. Friday-night football games at the high schools must have played an important part in the past, though I had been unaware of them. But as a sophomore I started to attend, often helping out in the concession booth, selling soft drinks and popcorn. I paid attention to the football game and cared when my team won or lost. We did a bit of both that year. Televised sports were integrated by that time, and white fans were growing accustomed to cheering for black players, and perhaps this speeded the transformation.

Even though there were only a few white boys who were willing to play on the team with black boys, white students and some of their parents came to the football games, maybe because the games had been a tradition, or maybe because there was nothing else to do. The result was something not coerced, a mixing of black and white on Friday nights in the bleachers, an event people attended voluntarily, resulting in an intregrated social activity that was, most likely, the first of its kind in Jones County.

Eben Strahan starred as the running back for the Trojans, and he became a local football hero over the course of that fall. He was a regular fellow in the way of personality, easygoing, making friends across the color line. White people who rarely said much to the other black students spoke to Eben as if he were a friend, a sign that he had a leader's personality. He came from a good, old family in the county. He had his sights set on playing college football, and everybody said he had the skill and the talent.

The football game drew a crowd for a lot of reasons, among them that the game was a natural gathering place for the events that would take place afterward: driving around; drinking; finding other spots where different groups would meet, share their liquor, and spend the late evening in company with one another, finally heading off to the woods to park, make out, and maybe more. A date like that might have taken place mostly in Jones County, where the social offerings were very basic. Most couples interested in romance drove to Kinston or New Bern or Jacksonville when they wanted to hang out at a hamburger stand or watch a movie. The football game served a function that was too valuable to set aside simply because of race mixing, and so the tradition of attendance survived the consolidation of the two school systems.

This proved that the humans thereabouts were, in fact, willing to mingle when there was a purpose to it, and when there was a possibility to maintain boundaries. One might almost have been encouraged by this development, see this as an important step forward. But off in the dark somewhere were the families of the white people who were not willing to take any such step, the ones who had built new schools for their children, the ones who would not be sullied by contact with black skin.

As if a curtain had lifted on the new act of a play, suddenly I had friends in the tenth grade, people whom I had known in junior high school, who came to matter more to me now. The previous several years of school changes had detached me from the group of children I had known in Pollocksville, many of whom were no longer in public schools anyway. At Jones Senior I felt most at home among the students in the college prep classes. These, as before, were made up of roughly equal parts white and black students, though any particular class could range one way or the other. Rhonda and Ursula became my friends again, not just people I knew; Stella Newman and Craig Everley became friends and rival students; Mercy Wheeler and Barbara Carter allowed me to linger in their aura of cool. We, along with a few others, formed a group of people who mixed the races in terms of friendships, conversations, friendliness, respect. We thought of ourselves as right-thinking people, as young hippies, maybe as nonconformists, in the language of the day.

People had hardened in their opinions and were making their feelings plain after two years of integration. White people were in general unyielding in refusing to mix with blacks in social ways, since this would have implied equality. While both races attended events like football, interaction among blacks and whites at the game was minimal. People might speak to each other, meaning, in Southern parlance, to say hello or good day or make some ordinary talk about the weather, the tobacco, crops in general. But whenever a white person was too friendly to a black person, the moment was noted, and comment was made. During the days at school, the races clumped and self-segregated in most social situations, including in the cafeteria, at assemblies, and in the many interludes when students changed class. Many white students never spoke to black students during the day, or had only the most cursory conversations. Interactions when they occurred were often strained by a fake friendliness. Actual hostility was rare, however; the parties that might have clashed or confronted each other instead kept their distance.

The idea of segregation had been adapted to circumstance, and the limits of acceptable behavior had changed for those of us who attended public school. Whites were to hang out with whites. We could be polite to blacks but this had to stop well before the line of friendliness. The mixing of the races could occur only at school or school functions, and even there whites had to stick together, preferring their own. A white person who mixed with blacks after school or on weekends was going too far. We were to make it clear that we had accepted segregation as a fact but would not be pushed beyond that. The protocol had begun to evolve at junior high, and the pattern carried over to the high school, where it solidified further.

This was what was expected. Like my close friends, I no longer behaved as expected and made friends as I pleased. But simply having friends who were black was no cure for years of training in bias.

I can remember walking from one end of the school courtyard to the other, at a time when I had made it clear that I didn't particularly care what white people thought of me anymore. I passed clusters of people I knew. Stella Newman said something funny and slapped at me with a composition book. This would be one of the moments when I saw Mercy and Barbara ambling together in the sunshine, and sometimes Andy might be at Mercy's elbow. Across the courtyard clusters of white students stood in the grass. By then nearly all the guys had long hair and the girls wore secondhand army jackets. They were watching me and my friends, who were mingling, black and white. I headed toward my next class, farther down the courtyard, passing sullen clumps of black boys and white boys, standing separately, slouching in nearly the same manner. None of them were my friends, though there were faces I knew. On the walk, I had the feeling I was running a gauntlet of eyes.

The faculty was mostly white. This imbalance would cause problems before the year was out. In my three years in the high school, I had only one black teacher, and she was fired in the middle of the spring semester. That woman, Mrs. Blount, appeared to have some kind of collapse during the year, at first making erratic efforts at having class, then sitting at her desk and abandoning any pretense of a lesson, then simply not showing up at school anymore. I remember her more vividly than some of the more placid, more serviceable teachers. She had a fussy way of gesturing with her hands, and when she spoke French, she tilted her nose up just so. Whenever she spoke to me I had the feeling that she was looking at someone else, or at the wall behind me. She was finally let go and our new French teacher was a man, Mr. Sisk, a recent graduate of college doing his years of teaching to repay an obligation. He was very handsome and I became instantly enamored of him, and would remain so for his two years at the school. Alas, however, I did not learn any more French than before.

No one protested Mrs. Blount's firing, though a year later, when the school system tried to fire another black teacher, black students would walk out of class in protest.

While in the past the school had relied on stable teachers who lived in the nearby towns, following integration some of the older teachers retired, and the replacements were young people, many of them fulfilling a college-scholarship requirement or married to a soldier posted nearby on a military base. Vietnam had filled the army and marine bases with young wives looking for work, and these teachers had no knowledge of the county or its people. They brought strong young energy to their teaching, but they were white women, every one that I can remember.