How I Shed My Skin (9 page)

The Uncomfortable Dark

Some of the children at our white elementary school in Pollocksville were brown-skinned all along. Manny Potter was the child I remember best. His skin was olive, his hair shiny and thick, silky and straight, his eyes black as coals. He was handsome, the darling of the pale-skinned boys partly because he had failed second grade and was older than the rest of us, and partly because he sat loosely in his chair, offered little respect or deference to the teachers, and drew excellent pictures of naked women in his notebook during class. In his art he displayed a sophisticated sense of perspective, mass, and proportion.

His family was as brown as he. I remember that he had a number of sisters, maybe a younger brother. My mother early on, in second grade, warned me to have nothing to do with him. When I asked why, she said without hesitation that he was too brown. I asked whether he was a nigger and she said no. I asked what was he, and she said maybe he was a Mexican or maybe he was Indian or maybe some of both. But whatever he was, I should keep my distance from him.

He made a strong impression on me when he was in the room with the rest of us, but that might be true because he was handsome and I liked to look at him. There was nothing disruptive about his behavior except that he was essentially indifferent to what the teachers had to say, as if he knew all along that school was not for him. He preferred to draw his pencil sketches, or to snicker with the other boys about the girls or the teacher or the fart he had just released. He impressed them by his skill at farting silently, signaling that he was doing so by lifting one buttock from the chair. The others would pucker their noses as if smelling something foul, and some would giggle, and the teacher would call them down, with Manny all the while sitting there deadpan.

What I knew of him came from glimpses, seeing his siblings playing in the yard when they lived on Highway 58 near Piney Grove Road, or glimpsing what he drew in his notebooks as I walked to the pencil sharpener. I recall that his clothes were different from those of the other boys, that he wore jeans less, and what we would have called trousers more, the clothes and shirts sometimes tight, as if they were hand-me-downs.

Like my family, his lived in various houses around Pollocksville, and when I was in sixth grade or thereabout his family moved into a house where my family had once lived, a place with the old detached kitchen still standing, separated from the main house by a porch, though no longer used as a kitchen.

My father had a business next door to that house, a brick building in which he repaired refrigerators and freezers and sometimes sold new ones. I was aware of Manny and his siblings since I sat in my father's shop to answer the phones, coming there after school and on Saturdays during the school year, and all day in the summer time, giving my mother relief from the job.

Manny mowed the lawn in tight trousers, no shirt, wearing no underwear, a clear sign that he was dangerous.

Manny's sister was thin, pretty in her way, dark-haired, wearing loose cotton dresses, tentative in her approach. I met her one day when I came out of my father's shop to escape the tedium, to rest my eyes from whatever science-fiction novel I was reading at the time. I made friends with girls much more easily than with boys, so I said hello and we talked a while, a conversation that started in a halting way, something like this:

“You know my brother?”

“Manny used to be in my class at school.”

“He doesn't go to school no more.”

“I know. Do you?”

“I used to but I quit. I got too tired of it. We move around a lot.”

“So do we,” I said.

“You have to sit in that place all day?” She indicated the building, Jack's Refrigeration Service, my father's business.

“I have to answer the phone,” I said. “People call my daddy to fix their air conditioners.”

“I wish we had an air conditioner.”

I'm sure she told me her name and I told her mine. We talked for a while, about the weather, the heat, our favorite shows on television. The conversation moved from hesitancy to comfort. She wanted some company, she enjoyed the chatter. So did I.

Across the street from us, out of the Jenkins Gas Company building, came one of the women who worked in the office there, and she began to holler at me from across the road. “Jimmy,” she called, “leave that girl alone and go back inside.”

Manny's sister flushed red and said nothing.

“I'm fine,” I told the woman, whose name I can't recall any more than I can remember Manny's sister's name. “We're just talking.”

She stood there for a moment. Perhaps she repeated her warning and I repeated my refusal. She grew angry at me for not listening and soon went back into the air-conditioned building. Manny's sister and I talked for a bit longer, mostly about our outrage at the interference from the woman across the street. Manny's sister was clearly embarrassed, and we shortly separated. Maybe we thought we had won that moment. But we never spoke again.

The white woman from across the street had no hesitation in asserting herself as my protector, telling me to go back into the shop, even in front of Manny's sister. She felt responsible for me perhaps because I occasionally walked over to the gas-company office to buy a soft drink from the vending machine, or because my father had once worked for the company, or perhaps simply because we were both white. She meant to save me from something.

For Manny's sister, the moment was brutal and direct. She was dismissed as a subhuman, a creature to be avoided. No doubt she had suffered this kind of outrage before. She said nothing in particular after the moment passed, and we talked for a while longer, to show that we could defy this adult and do as we pleased. But very shortly she went back into her house, and I went back into the shop.

I thought about that moment for a long time afterward, angry at the woman across the street. Inside me was the feeling that I had done something wrong, but as it swelled I countered it with this anger, with the certainty that I had done nothing at all, that I had simply been friendly to a person who was friendly to me. The embarrassment roiled in me and I stoked it.

But I never told my mother about this moment, since I knew that she would have sided with the good white woman who worked at the gas company. She would have agreed that I should have nothing to do with the Potter family; she had already told me that years before. She would have told me not to talk to Manny's sister again.

The Maid in the Weeds

I knew of only a few people in our town who had black servants, though there were probably others. People who had maids or cooks never liked to talk about it. Even the richest people in the county pretended to be poor when speaking of money matters. None of my friends would claim to have been raised by the infamous Southern mammy who, in gothic mythology, was supposed to have loved her white family as much as her colored one.

One black person I knew who was identified as a servant to a white family was Miss Ruthie, who was my family's neighbor for a time. My mother said that Miss Ruthie had worked for the Truman family and they took care of her now. This likely meant that they helped her to go to doctor appointments or to do grocery shopping, and perhaps gave her money from time to time. She was too old to have been a servant for the Trumans when I knew her; the relationship must have been an old one.

My parents had bought a house on Barrus Street in Pollocksville next to the railroad tracks, a Jim Walker prefabricated home painted mustard yellow by the old tenants, and overpainted green when my parents bought it. We had been residents of the village rather than the surrounding countryside since a few years before, my parents marriage having settled into alternating periods of turbulence and normalcy that would mark it for a few more years, until it finally dissolved. As a family we had begun to attend the Pollocksville Baptist Church and gradually became counted among the decent white people of Jones County, our status elevated by our house-owning and churchgoing. In that tiny house we anchored ourselves and made a respectable business of our intersection, where before there had been a questionably fertile family who nearly burst the walls out.

Miss Ruthie's small, unpainted shack sat in a patch of woods behind our house, between us and the river, close enough that we could sometimes see smoke from her chimney, though the trees and undergrowth in summer were so thick that the structure was almost completely hidden. Not more than a patch of the roof could be seen. At night there was no sign of light peeping through a window, only dark leaves and shadows. In winter one might glimpse the shape of the building, given a narrow appearance by the pitch of the roof. Miss Ruthie kept to herself, my mother told me, and that was surely true. There was a rumor she had a husband back there, but I never glimpsed him.

We only saw Miss Ruthie when she walked down her path along our yard and disappeared into her house, or sometimes when she walked along the highway. She kept her face down and her gaze focused on the ground, her expression bleak and detached, as if she had long ago seen more than she could bear. She sometimes carried a burlap sack with her, to pick up discarded soda bottles that she could return to any of the local stores for a few cents of bottle deposit money. She moved slowly, with some effort, the clearest sign of her age.

One day, as my sister and I watched through the kitchen window, Miss Ruthie appeared on the path to her house, wearing a loose house dress, her head covered, maybe in a dark straw hat. Her walk was squat and tired. She was chewing something, jaw moving, as she stepped into the knee-high weeds and broom straw. In a bar of sunlight she halted, bent her knees, and hiked up her skirt. Her rump gleamed, she squatted, and started to pee. She took her ease in the weeds, unaware that we watched until my little brother opened a window and hollered at her to stop. Startled, she straightened, took a step, let down her skirt and walked into some gap in the undergrowth that led to her house. She glanced back at our house once, I remember. I could not read her expression.

The sight of Miss Ruthie bending her knees to pee in the grass made my sister laugh, and still does when we remember it, though in fact it was not all that unusual for people to use the outdoors instead of the toilet. Our new house had an indoor toilet but this had not always been the case. Most of our early houses had an outhouse, also called a johnny house, though in fact we did not often visit the outhouse itself except to empty the slop pot that we all used. The pot was usually kept in the back room of whatever place we inhabited. A slop pot was simply a poor man's chamber pot, ours made of metal enameled with white paint, fixed with a good tight lid to control the smell. A roll of toilet paper sat beside it, the most modern concession to our hygiene.

My father was prone to pee outdoors more often than in the house, and he did so without a trace of embarrassment when working on his job. During the summers when my mother worked in tobacco crews, she did the same, and so did my siblings and I.

So the idea of peeing outdoors was not what made us laugh at Miss Ruthie.

My brother opened a window and hollered, “You better quit that!” He was gleeful at his own audacity. We were safely inside the house, at the windows. She had thought the place empty and, perhaps, learned only then that she had a new neighbor. My memory of her face is hazy, but I had seen her often enough to reconstruct the expression, startled, perhaps mildly irritated. The end of the moment remains the same as the other memory; she looked at our house in some consternation, let down her skirt, and walked away from her puddle of pee.

Maybe it was her bare rump hovering over the grass that made us laugh, or maybe it was the stream of piss, or the fact that she wore no underclothes, only the dress. Our grandmother had the same habit, finding drawers too hot and too much trouble, preferring the comfort of her thin dress against her bare skin. But my mother had trained us to wear underclothing, always clean, always changed every day, since she was certain that small clothes were a part of civilization and the social ladder that she meant us all to climb.

I have called Miss Ruthie a maid in the title of this chapter. In fact I have no idea in what capacity she served or was connected to her white family, only that I heard of the connection more than once. I knew her by name, and I knew her face, because a prominent white family had a responsibility for her, in some fashion. Like the shoe repair man, Miss Ruthie's narrative had lifted her out of invisibility in my eyes. She had some connection to the white world and thus I had a reason to know her and to remember her. This was more important than the fact that she was our neighbor; we had lived near black families before and I had never learned their names. Miss Ruthie was one of the few black adults whom I would have recognized before the integration of public schools and the collision of the separate black and white worlds that came with it.

In the end it was that moment of watching her relieve herself in the grass at the edge of my family's backyard that made me remember her so vividly. I laughed at her in order to feel superior to her. I laughed to remind myself that she was less than me, and to reinforce that truth. She would live there, a hundred yards from my back door, for the rest of the years I lived in Jones County, and I would never speak a single word to her.

CHANGE

Integration

In May 1968, the Supreme Court ruled that Freedom of Choice plans, while not unconstitutional, were likely insufficient to provide a remedy for the problem of school segregation. The court noted that the choice of what school to attend must in fact be a free one, and that most such programs failed this standard, since hostility between the races brought pressure to bear that tended to keep black students in black schools. The ruling stated, in effect, that black students were not free to choose in the South, regardless of whether a free-choice plan was in place. The court reaffirmed that all jurisdictions had an obligation under law to take positive steps to end the operation of dual school systems for blacks and whites. This decision brought about the end of segregated public schools in Jones County.

This rocked our little community, and the resentment of the adults around me was palpable. Jones County's school board made plans to consolidate the schools into one integrated system in the fall. Jones County's white people made plans to open private schools in order to avoid sending white children into schools with the black children of the county. In my town, the Pollocksville Academy was born.

Though I was aware of the hostility to integration, discussions of the issue at the adult level passed me by, and I had little inkling of the plans for the new public school system or for the private school until late in the summer. I doubt my parents were involved in these talks, since there was no possibility that my brothers, sister, or I would attend private school. My mother worked at the restaurant as a waitress and heard a good deal of gossip there, I expect, but she hardly ever shared any with her children. As usual, our family was focused on its own affairs. My father had been sober for some months, and we were attending church as a family.

There was never any discussion about where my brothers, sister, and I would attend school. We never considered the idea of private school for ourselves. The public schools were free; why pay for something that was free? Segregation was well and good, but it was not worth spending any money on it. Given this fact, there were no discussions about integration in our family, other than the occasional gossip about who would be attending private school and who would not.

The Russells, who owned the restaurant where my mother worked and the house we rented behind it, were smugly certain that their grandchildren would go to private school, and that this was the Christian choice.

Irene Miller, my sister's sometimes friend, would attend the private school.

So would Marianne, who had been my best friend for so many years. She told me at some point that summer, over the phone.

So when school started in the fall, my old, comfortable set of classmates from Alex H. White Elementary School would be scattered forever.

While I had grown accustomed to having Rhonda and Ursula as my friends, I had no personal desire to pursue integration any further. I would have stopped integration myself at that point, if I could, simply because I was afraid of change.

This was the summer in which my eyes began to open to many things. A presidential election campaign was taking place, with the president, Lyndon Johnson, on the sidelines. He had announced earlier in the year that he would not stand for reelection, and most people blamed this on the conduct of the war in Vietnam.

I had begun to watch the news more carefully, and occasionally sneaked a peek at the newsmagazines
Time
and
Newsweek
at the local drugstore. I began to read about the Vietnam War, the race riots in U.S. cities, and the coming presidential election. The word
ghetto
entered my vocabulary. The Tet Offensive had torn the curtain off the Vietnam War and opened it to public discussion, and significant parts of the country began to oppose the war. Presidential campaigns by Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey played themselves out on television, along with the campaigns of Nelson Rockefeller, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace. I watched the Democratic National Convention nominate Hubert H. Humphrey as its candidate in the midst of savage violence on the Chicago streets. The Republican Convention caused less uproar but offered up Richard Nixon, whose nose was pointed like Pinocchio's, and who had eyes like lifeless buttons.

George Wallace, a segregationist, campaigned for president as a third-party candidate, and drew strong support from the white people in my county who wanted to return to legal segregation and to refuse any push toward equality with black people. He had attempted to halt the enrollment of black students at white schools in Alabama, and this had made him a hero to many. The anger at integration that had been suppressed during the years of Freedom of Choice found its voice in support of Wallace and his ideas, discussed haphazardly at the Baptist church I attended, between Sunday School classes and the preacher's endless sermon. Mr. Russell expressed his outrage that black people could now eat at the Trent Restaurant, and he was afraid the government would soon force us to attend church with black people, too. George Wallace offered hope that segregation might by some miracle continue, or, at least, he gave people a means to vote their anger.

Integration struck fear into white people because it meant the possibility of total dissolution of what we called our way of life. I sometimes heard that phrase, “our way of life,” though no one was ever very specific about what it meant. It had something to do with keeping black people out of our toilets and restaurants in order to stave off the wrath of God. But we already had to eat in restaurants with black people. We already had to share public bathrooms with them. So the old way of life was already gone, wasn't it? Well, no, the government might do even more; it might force us to admit black people into our churches, or make us live next to them as neighbors. The government might encourage white women to marry black men and have black babies.

In fact, black people and white already lived as neighbors. They had already been copulating with one another, by choice and by coercion, for centuries. My own family lived next to Miss Ruthie, the woman who had peed in the grass in our backyard. In one direction from our house lay the houses of white people. In the other direction lay the houses of black people. Resistance to the idea of integration made us fear the idea of black neighbors as if this arrangement of our homes were new.

Integration implied a knitting together of many threads, the making of a cohesive whole out of diverse elements. An integrated circuit, for instance, was a single electrical circuit that performed the duties of what had before been multiple circuits. The notion of integration had about it an air of the ideal, a belief that our different colors of people could be blended into one harmonious whole. As a result,
integration
was a term that could not have frightened white people more if it had been designed to do so. In our eyes, integration assumed the white race was obsolete and would be superseded in the new order of things. And I knew it was true that black people were already threatening to get rid of us during the revolution; Rhonda and Ursula had told me so.

The substitution of desegregation for integration removed the idealism and restated the notion in practical terms. There was something realistic in the newer word, and also something diminished. A process of desegregation simply meant dissolving the legal barriers between white people and black people, and ending the provision of separate public accommodations and schools. This idea contained no bringing together of the peoples but simply tore down the walls between them that were publicly enforced. As time went by, desegregation appeared to be a better description of the process that was taking place. In the end, the lines of separation between blacks and whites merely shifted a bit to accommodate the fact that they had to share space from time to time. But in this I am referring to the white people who stayed in public schools. A large number of whites fled the school system during that first summer.

I had no idea that something like a school could be put together so quickly. I began to hear about the Pollocksville Academy in August.

So eighth grade was to begin, for me, with many friendships broken. The life of our community was disrupted in many ways by the change. Schools were one of the mainstays of social activity for all of us. Both white and black communities had built up social rituals attached to support for their high schools, such as attending football and basketball games, dances and fundraisers. Now both races had to rebuild these separate patterns into something new and shared.

Further, what had appeared to be one race was now divided into two: those white people who would attend public schools, and those who refused.

Still, it was summer, and hot, and the fields were full of tobacco, corn, and soybeans. People fished in the rivers, made trips to the beach, attended Rotary Club meetings, and moved through the familiar patterns of their daily lives. The changes to the schools and the new rules of integration joined the quiet tide of life moving forward. The news of the school changes came in the midst of the whole of life, including my chronic health problems, my parents and their troubles, my first jobs as a babysitter, my life as a young Baptist, the growth of my first pubic hairs, and the changes in my body that came with my status as a soon-to-be teenager. The integration of schools was one part of this world, important but not all-encompassing.

The plan for school consolidation that emerged in the latter part of the summer specified that none of the county's schools were to be closed. For one more year the separate black and white high schools were to remain open. Grades one through eight were to be consolidated, their student populations split between the former black and white elementary schools in the four towns: Pollocksville, Trenton, Maysville, and Comfort. In the following year, the black high school would become a junior high school and the white high school would become the county's only high school. Both those schools were to be renamed. These plans, in their initial incarnation, showed a certain level of enlightenment. In other parts of eastern North Carolina, white high schools retained their names and mascots, and black schools were closed in favor of their white counterparts. Jones County chose its different course out of necessity, perhaps, since the county was desperately poor and lacked the funds for new school construction.

The eighth grade in Pollocksville was assigned to the J. W. Willie School, the former black elementary school located just outside of town, named for a member of a prominent local family. This school was markedly more modern than Alex H. White, which I had attended before then. The decision appears curious in hindsight, since it forced the younger children to deal with the older school, its rickety stairs and its poor access for the handicapped. We older students inherited the newer school. My teacher for the year would be Mrs. Ferguson again, as she moved to the Willie school with us. Other of our old teachers would do the same.

From eighth grade through my senior year, I would attend school as a member of the minority: black students outnumbered white students nearly two to one in the public schools of Jones County. Soon I would have a lesson in what it was like to be in the minority.