How I Shed My Skin (18 page)

Priscilla Potter, originally my sister's friend in elementary school and now my friend, too, started inviting me to go out on the weekends, not on dates but rather on adventures that made me feel almost like a normal teenager. We traveled to Kinston to watch Lamar Vickers's band. Once she drove me to pick up Ursula Doleman and Peter Strahan, and we went to New Bern and drove around awhile, then came home. By the following Monday the rumor had flown through school that Priscilla had been dating Peter, and I had been dating Ursula, two interracial couples in one car, the sort of sin that by rights ought to have caused an explosion in the vehicle, at the very least.

This story came out in advanced math class, when Mr. Riggs had stepped out of the room. I first heard a kind of buzz of conversation, as I was daydreaming about a boy I had met at Governor's School. Something pulled me out of the fantasy: Delores Rickets, who sat in front of me, looked at me somberly. “I am so disappointed in you,” she said.

I realized that everybody was staring at me except Ursula, who had her head bowed and was staring at her desk.

“What?” I asked.

Several voices spoke at once about seeing us in New Bern and me and Ursula in the backseat of the car, and I realized what had happened.

My remaining white friends from elementary school were mostly in that class, and they shook their heads. The black kids were upset with Ursula, as her boyfriend would later be. No one bothered to ask what had actually happened. It was apparently too much to conceive that we were simply friends who preferred, that night, each other's company, largely out of boredom with staying at home.

It felt somehow right that the black girl I was supposed to have dated was Ursula, who had kissed me on the cheek in seventh grade. There was comedy in the fact that the people who called me sissy behind my back also condemned me for interracial (and heterosexual) dating.

Mercy

One weekend during the fall of senior year, Mercy and I were invited to East Carolina University for a recruitment event aimed at gifted students in the region. Neither of us had any plans to attend ECU for college, but we accepted the invitation because it meant two nights away from home. For Mercy, this was also a chance to spend time with Andy, and I could provide her with a certain level of camouflage if I went with her. I am tempted to say it was she who convinced me to go on the trip, since that is the way I would write the story if I were making it up. But I can't have been that hard to convince. Governor's School had given me a taste of the independence I craved, and this weekend on a college campus might reinforce the lesson.

We took a bus to Greenville, a little over an hour's drive from Trenton, and attended orientation for the weekend's recruiting events. Once we had our keys and room assignments, we headed to our rooms. Mercy had a room in Cotten Hall, one of the older buildings on the quad. I dumped my little suitcase in the room I was supposed to share for the weekend with one of the upperclassmen. He was asleep on his bed. I set my belongings on the other bed, guessing it to be mine. Then I headed back to Cotten Hall.

In Mercy's room, large and high-ceilinged, she told me that her roommate was gone for the weekend, and she had the whole room to herself. “Can you believe it?” She had a glittery, almost feverish look in her eyes at the prospect. “Is that luck or what?”

“My roommate was asleep. I didn't even talk to him.”

“Andy is about to get here. Oh, my goodness.” She sat on her bed and bounced a bit.

“Does he know how to find you?”

“We're going to meet him in front of the dorm,” she said.

“Great.”

“You want to get stoned tonight? You want to try pot?”

This was that moment I had waited for all my life, peer pressure to do drugs. I caved in right away, shrugging, trying to look as cool as possible. “Sure.”

She laughed, a sound with a bit of a maniacal edge. Here we were, prisoners of Jones County, escaped for a few hours, and about to do as we pleased.

Andy and the people he had come to visit met us after dark, and we took a ride with them to a field outside of Greenville. In those days a car could easily fit three passengers in both front and back seats, and the car was full. Andy introduced us all and we sat in the dark, quietly passing a joint, Andy and the others sharing a bottle of Boone's Farm wine. The wine was wrapped in a brown paper sack that rustled as it passed from hand to hand.

“Jimmy is getting stoned,” Andy said, and giggled, passing the joint to me.

I grinned in the dark, inhaled, the strong taste of the smoke filling my head.

“It doesn't always work the first time you smoke it,” Mercy warned.

One of the guys in the backseat agreed.

But it worked fine.

We drove back to campus and said good-bye to Andy's friends. I hung out in the room with Andy and Mercy for a while; Mercy kept her eye on me, feeling a bit protective or responsible, maybe. I had started to giggle and could not stop. I kept repeating, “This is amazing,” and giggling some more, wiggling my fingers from time to time.

Mercy and Andy were spooning on the other bed. They were quietly resting against each other, their voices all murmur and softness.

It seemed an eternity passed. I realized I needed to leave and stood, more or less steady on my feet, gathering my courage, reasonably certain I could find the dorm where I was staying.

“You leaving?” Mercy asked, raising up her head from Andy's shoulder.

“I think so.”

“You're fucked up, Jimmy,” Andy said. “You're going to get lost.”

“No, I'm not.” I heaved myself toward the door, the motion feeling so odd. My head was gliding but my feet were plodding.

“Be careful. Come back here if you can't find your room.”

“I'll be fine,” I said.

Mercy settled against Andy again as I closed the door behind me. I stumbled into the dark, took a couple of wrong turns, giggled a good deal, and eventually found the dorm where I was staying for the night. My roommate was still asleep in the room, more or less in the same position as before.

Mercy and I never spoke about whether they were having sex, though I would guess from things that Mercy told me later that they were not. I have no idea whether they ever crossed into that territory. Mercy was not one to share her life unnecessarily.

This weekend sealed my friendship with Mercy, and after it, we talked regularly at school about Andy, about her home life and mine. A couple of times I visited her in Trenton, meeting her mother and her little sister, her brother and even her father, who had the gaunt, pop-eyed look of a drinking man. Lean and tough as whipcord, like my own father. When Mercy could no longer tolerate living under the same roof with him, I helped her move into her grandmother's place, a house a couple of blocks away in Trenton.

Only a few weeks before school ended, Mercy's grandmother died, and her family moved into the house where she had lived. Mercy and her father quarreled, and Mercy moved out, living with her sister in Kinston for the rest of the year. She rode to high school with one of our teachers.

Almost our last act as friends in high school was to escort one another to the prom. I had made no plans to go, since I had given up dating after those two dates. Mercy and I were part of the group who decorated the gym, though, and we decided we might as well go to the prom since we'd done so much work to get ready for it. We made the decision only a few days before, and I wore a suit rather than a tuxedo, picking Mercy up at her house, taking her to the dance, then, later, taking her to rendezvous with Andy, with whom she had arranged to spend the end of prom night. We had been a cute fake couple, we thought. My last memory of the evening was the happiness on her face as she stepped into the car with Andy.

Sometime after school ended, the two of them lost touch with each other. Mercy made it to Chapel Hill a year later than me, and Andy was there, too. But he wanted little to do with white people by then; I learned this from Mercy many years later. At the time, she just shrugged and moved forward.

Commencement

At graduation, student body president Stella Newman spoke to the crowd in the gymnasium. She said the sorts of things that one usually says in graduation speeches, and whatever I once remembered of the content has been erased. I wonder what of our real experience there she chose to mark. What I remember is sitting among my classmates, knowing the ordeal had come to an end. I shook hands with people, milled among them, felt a stirring of sadness at moments, but never for very long. My family waited patiently till I was ready and we drove home from the school. I was leaving it for the last time. Most of those people, with whom I had lived an intense drama, a piece of history, I never saw again.

In the fall I attended university in Chapel Hill, coming home to Pollocksville twice more, once for Thanksgiving and once for Christmas. At the end of Christmas, my mother met a man with whom she fell in love, and she moved our family to Goldsboro to be with him. She had already divorced my father. She took this step knowing that the people of Pollocksville would gossip, that any respectability we had established would vanish, and that any tenuous welcome we had enjoyed there would come to an end. She didn't care anymore. She saw her future elsewhere. So we left Jones County for good.

There was never a moment when I decided that I would not go back to eastern North Carolina to live. I remained for a long time a creature who looked only barely past the horizon. In Chapel Hill I studied and built a self, learned to love my freedom, and made some steps toward understanding how to live as a gay man. After Chapel Hill I moved to New Orleans in order to live among gay people for a while. Years went by, I only went back to North Carolina from time to time, and home was no longer Jones County.

Reunion

Decades later, I am driving toward Jones County once again, headed for the forty-year reunion of the class of 1973. Late August heat weighs over the highway, but I am proof against summer in the cocoon of the car, and the flat fields of eastern North Carolina are thick with corn, cotton in bloom or in bales, tobacco yet to be harvested. The land wants rain, the sky is enormous, filling most of the world, just as I remember from years ago when this countryside was all I knew.

I learned about the class reunion via social media, where I have reconnected after a fashion with people from my past: college, family, high school, elementary school, and various jobs. I peer at pictures of my friends, straining to see the younger face in the older. They all look so old on Facebook, I wonder how they can bear it. Whereas I am certain I look more or less the same.

It has been a season of reunions of one kind or another as I draw near to sixty, gathering the loose threads of a lifetime, trying to understand what meaning can be woven of them. I have been remembering so deeply, even dreaming of places I left behind when my life in Jones County ended: the cramped green house on Barrus Street in Pollocksville, the railroad trestle that has been torn down, the overgrown riverbank where I sat and dropped stones into the dark water.

While I've returned regularly to this part of North Carolina, I've only made the trip to my old home place a handful of times; when my family moved from the town during my freshman year of college, I lost my link to Jones County. Chapel Hill took me over so completely that I felt as if I had been born there. I turned my back on rural life, figuring there was no place for me in it. My family settled in North Carolina in the counties where my mother grew up, a bit west of the coast, and none of us kept much connection to Pollocksville. So I am unsettled as the miles go by, time slowing as I pass through a pine-framed territory that is at once distant and familiar. Through the changes of the present—the new houses, cleared land, new-built highways—comes the tug of the past, the glimpse of some house I saw as a child, some ruined storefront with a sign I remember, some curve of the road where a field stretched out, some churchyard or tree-lined street. I am a time traveler, moving into the past.

My first destination is New Bern, where the reunion banquet will be held on the second night; even forty years along, there are no hotels in Jones County where those of us coming from out of town can stay. My route carries me past Goldsboro, where my mother lives, and Kinston, another prominent eastern North Carolina town; both were once important tobacco markets, and Goldsboro was named a “Most Liveable City” in the country by
Money
magazine sometime back.

In Goldsboro, as I have learned, John Richards was lynched in 1916, accused but never convicted of the murder of a white man, the deed carried out by a mob of hundreds, the man castrated, tortured, shot. Goldsboro nowadays has the quiet feeling of a town in which a breeze barely stirs. I am picturing hundreds of white people, angry, hungry for the blood of a black man to the point that they break him out of jail, savagely kill him, mutilate his body, and commemorate the event in pictures. I have cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, who lived and died a few miles down the road. No doubt I had ancestors in the crowd that lynched Mr. Richards.

Or perhaps they were involved in the killing of Joseph Black, father of a young man accused of rape, who was murdered when the mob, hundreds of white people, failed to find the son and, so, turned on the father. Mr. Black was first attacked by that mob while in jail in Goldsboro, but, still in custody, was transported to Kinston, where he was finally killed by scores of men who broke into the jail. Kinston is twenty miles or so from Goldsboro, a pleasant drive if one keeps the air conditioner working. In 1916, all along this route, people like me had called for the immediate killing, without trial, of the father of a man merely thought to have committed a crime. People like me had worked themselves into a frenzy of bloodlust, had demanded the death of a black man without recourse to the law. People I might have known, with whom I might have gone to a movie, or to a Wednesday prayer meeting, or to the pool hall, had transformed into a mob.

The world lit by this fierce afternoon sun hardly admits of such a possibility, the moving landscape contrasting with the relative stillness of the lanes of traffic, my hands gripping the steering wheel a bit too tight. The world has always been placid like this moment, settled into fields, roads, rivers, and towns, orderly patterns in which hardly anything moves. A few cattle stand near a watering hole. Horses lash their tails in a paddock within sight of the road. The land has such a dingy, settled look it would seem that scarcely anything out of the ordinary could ever have happened here, a deceptive sheen.

My route carries me along the border between Jones and Craven Counties, into New Bern, my destination for this trip. In New Bern, following the robbery of a store in 1905, a mob set on a man named John Moore, who was likely not the man they had chased out of the store but rather someone who was at hand when the chase went on too long. Mr. Moore was killed by the mob. His skin was black, like the skin of the man the mob had been chasing, and that was reason enough to kill him.

In Jones County, where I had lived for so long, Sheriff O. R. Colgrove and a companion, Amos Jones, were lynched during the Reconstruction era; Sheriff Colgrove was white, Mr. Jones was black. The sheriff, who might have been a carpetbagger, had been hindering Klan activities in the area, and so the Klan announced his murder, to be followed by a fine barbecue.

New Bern has become a thriving town, gorgeously sited at the conjunction of two rivers, taking advantage of its waterfront with hotels and a marina. Nearly all the stores along its main street are different from the ones I remember, which is hardly any surprise, since I've spent so little time here in the last decades. I used to chase my mother up and down these sidewalks when we came to town to shop for school clothes; Market Street still housed a couple of dime stores in those days, though even then there were larger stores at the edge of town. Now the street is home to health-food restaurants, coffee shops, and art galleries.

As I cruise through town, find my hotel and park, I am noticing the mingling of black and white people on the street, in the businesses, in the hotel as I register for my room. Public accommodations have not been segregated here for forty years or more, and no one pays any attention to the fact that blacks and whites move together in and out of shops, passing each other without much more than the occasional smile or nod of acknowledgment. In my earliest childhood, even the idea of such commonplace mingling of the races was looked on as a sign of doomsday, or of communism, or both. Here in New Bern, a town I knew pretty well in those days, I am seeing integration as if it just happened, as if my eyes are new.

I settle into the hotel room, check with the front desk to find out whether Mercy has arrived yet, and wonder whether I will recognize anyone at the church service to honor classmates who have already died. I thumb through the yearbook, faces and names from long ago, memories pushing forward.

TH
E HOTEL IS
pleasant but ordinary, smelling of too much carpet cleaner, walls of glass facing the riverfront, friendly faces at the front desk, a basket of free cookies on the counter. I meet Mercy in the lobby and we chat a bit, catching up. We have been out of touch for a decade or more, but she is the same steady, sane voice I remember from high school, and any feeling of separation quickly disappears. We remained close friends through college in Chapel Hill, living together in the same house for most of a year. We finished our last college exam in the same class on the same morning. When I moved to New Orleans, I sold her my old car. She is one of the few people from Jones County with whom I have stayed in touch in any kind of consistent way.

We drive to Pollocksville for the memorial service, chattering about the last few years, other mutual friends, her son and husband. Like me, she's worried that she won't recognize anyone at the memorial service. We both wonder whether any white classmates will show up. Years before, she and I attended what was supposed to be our tenth high school reunion, held at Quaker Neck Country Club, between Pollocksville and Trenton. As we learned when we arrived, that reunion was for the white students in our class, and included several people who had left the public schools as soon as integration was enforced. I never heard about a twenty-year reunion; for the thirtieth, there was a concerted effort to hold a true reunion of all the class, but I was traveling when that one was held.

At about dusk we cruise along the main street of Pollocksville. I am pierced with memories. The place appears unchanged except in cosmetic ways: a good deal of growth around the houses has been trimmed back or cleared, and thus many old houses are now visible near the river, buildings that were mostly hidden when I lived here. The boat landing is visible from the street, and the railroad depot that sat next to my house has been moved there and renovated. The village has the aura of a bedroom community in the making, though it shows its age, too, in the look of the houses. There is no Starbucks, no fast food, no strip mall; there is still little or no retail; some of the gas stations have closed; but the core of the place is the same as I remember. The single traffic light on Main Street, knocked down by truck a few years after I left for college, never was replaced. To travelers along Highway 17 the tiny hamlet must seem little more than a nuisance with a lower speed limit, the proverbial bump in the road.

The place looks so tiny now. Whereas earlier it was vast, my whole world.

The old Alex H. White Elementary School has been torn down, and a new school called Pollocksville Elementary School has taken its place on the same site. The J. W. Willie School is gone, too; so, in fact, even those traces of the dual school system have been erased. The practice of a prominent doctor has grown to fill most of an old field outside town. Some of the older houses have finally fallen into heaps, including the one that the actual Alex H. White built for his family on Main Street.

At the church I meet old friends, recognize them, we embrace, the awkwardness altogether endurable. As old people do, we tell each other how good we're looking, the phrase like a chant that crosses the crowd. It's a hot afternoon and I'm sweating in my jacket. No one else is wearing a tie, so I take mine off and put it in my pocket. When I was growing up here, no one would have contemplated walking into a church service without a tie.

During the service I gaze from face to face, seeing the contours of the younger self in the softening and aging of the older, face after face, person after person, leading me back through decades, seeing that courtyard between the wings of classrooms in our old high school, these bodies lounging against the cinderblock wall, fierce and restive where we are now easy and settled. The evening is full of talk of God and church and faith; I do not remember so much religious conversation in our high school days.

One person stands to give a eulogy for classmates who have died. Cousins speak for cousins; everyone in the county is second or third cousin to everyone else. What surprises me is that we are all so old, so full of gravitas; we look now so much like the adults who surrounded me when I was a child.

These are the people who stayed. A few of us have traveled here from other states, a few more from other towns, but many of these people have lived in Jones County all these years. Just as our teachers used to warn us, some of us would stay but most of us would leave, and many would never come back. Mercy and I are the only white classmates who showed up. At first I am aware of the absence of so many others; then, after a few minutes, I am simply in the room with people who mattered to me very much, whether I understood it then or not, once upon a time.

AFTER THE MEMORIAL
service Mercy and I drive to Maysville for what is called, in the reunion schedule, a meet and greet. By now, after dark, I find that I can picture every bend in the road. In daylight, I might have seen differences, but in the dark it is as if I am riding down this road on a night long ago. We are riding through old plantation country; down Highway 17 in one direction lie the Foscue house and lands, still owned by members of the family; and in the other direction is Ravenwood, once a very large plantation owned by the Pollock family, whose ancestor gave the town its name. Just up the road from Hatchville is the old Oakview Farm and house, now called the Bell Farm, named for the family that has owned it for many decades. More plantations are mentioned in various historical records, owned by the McDaniel, Foy, Banks, Noble, and Whitaker families, to name a few. The 1850 census recorded 2,139 whites, 2,757 black slaves, and 142 free blacks living in Jones County, which was, at the time, a very wealthy place, if one defines wealth as what was owned by white people. The county would fall into poverty with the freeing of its wealth, which is to say the freeing of the slaves; nearly every narrative concerning the fortune of one of those old planter families includes the number of slaves it owned and how that number grew over time, this statistic outranking even the count of acres under cultivation.

How much of this land was cleared by the labor of slaves? By the forced labor of the ancestors of people I know, with whom I went to school? Some of these fields have been under cultivation since those days; in places, the outline of forest and field has hardly shifted since records have been kept. How many slaves were beaten, how many families separated and sold? What did white people do to enforce the subordination of black labor after the war? How far did we go to prove to ourselves that we were the superior ones? I know the general outlines of the answer; I know that the last person lynched in Jones County, Jerome Whitfield, was killed here in 1921, accused of the rape of a white woman. I can remember the days of separate bathrooms, water fountains, restaurants; I can remember black people deferring to my father as “Captain Jack,” when they had no reason to respect him that I could see. I know that crosses were burned, I know that gangs of men roamed the night in trucks and cars, liquored up and ready for a fight. In the days of slavery they were slave patrollers, looking for runaways, stopping travelers on the road, checking to make sure no black person traveled without the proper paperwork. In the days of Reconstruction they were night riders, their purpose to perform acts of terror in the countryside. In the modern day they are good old boys, doing what good old boys have always done. In each age a different reason for the same pattern, white men policing the night.