How I Shed My Skin

by Jim Grimsley

  In that first moment in which I witnessed the Black Power dance of the three girls in my classroom, I could feel the impact in myself. Black Power was what these girls possessed and used. They knew us so much better than we knew them. They understood that standing and dancing was not part of us, that their pride in their black skin would mock us, that their ability to move and speak in these rhythms, unified without effort, would cow us into confusion. They understood the weakness of whiteness in these terms.

  Furthermore, this strength of soul gave them the courage to confront us, here in our school room, a small pond of whiteness into which they had dropped themselves, uninvited, to make the point that our days of keeping them in their place were over. This was the message of those first weeks of Freedom of Choice, of tepid and partial desegregation. Even admitting three black girls into our midst had changed our world altogether.

  The notion of white unity was mocked, though none of us could have said this in words. We had no unity. We were not, in fact, one white people united for any purpose. We were listless and silent in the face of the dance, in the joy these girls felt in expressing themselves. They were free. We were left to wonder what we were.

  No one had taught me to be proud of my skin color. Perhaps that feeling was supposed to be inherent in the message of white superiority, or perhaps there never was any such creature as white pride. In that moment when the black girls danced, I felt only wonder and a touch of envy, and had absolutely no sense of solidarity with the white children around me, the ones with whom I had sat in these same classrooms for the previous five years. I had no desire to remain a sullen, motionless body in a desk. What I wanted was to learn to dance and to find out that I, too, had soul.

  The Sign on the Wheelchair

  By seventh grade, Marianne and I had developed our fantasy about telepathy with our favorite pop stars into a whole world system, including reincarnation, a communal mind, demons of the flame, and the beginnings of a fantasy history, parts of which I would change and employ in my own writings many years later. She had developed mind-to-mind contact with John Lennon, along with her original link to members of Herman’s Hermits. I remained faithful to Davy Jones, though I would be heartbroken, near the end of the school term, to learn that The Monkees television show would end at Season Two. I had also elaborated a long fantasy about being orphaned and adopted by William Shatner, or more precisely by the character he played on Star Trek, Captain James T. Kirk.

  Marianne’s mental link with John Lennon was a matter of some controversy between us, since, a few years earlier, he had made his infamous statement that the Beatles were more popular than Christ. As a young Baptist I was obliged to be shocked and appalled by the statement, and had dutifully frowned on the Beatles ever since. Marianne, being an Episcopalian, took a more lofty view. I had only a vague idea what was involved in her church, and wondered whether she was actually a Catholic, a religion that was akin to devil worship, according to my mother.

  Our seventh-grade classroom was the same room we had used for sixth grade, due to the fact that Judah Carl Johnson was still one of our classmates and there was no wheelchair access for the second floor. Judah Carl was one of those Southern sons who was always known by both his given names, and he had been confined to a wheelchair all his life. He wore heavy black glasses on his small, white face, and sat with his elbows sprawled on the chair and his knees looking sharp and useless. He spoke as if he could not quite draw breath. Each morning he was rolled into the back of the room by his mother, and joined in the class by his sister Pat, who had been part of our cohort all along. The Johnsons were a large family living in a tiny house, their front yard cluttered with old cars and appliances, sitting close to the road called 10 Mile Fork. There were a lot of Johnson children, Judah Carl being the oldest. He had been in my sister’s class, one year ahead of me, but failed that grade. Because of him we had a ramp leading up the steps on one side of the building, and the principal had shifted our classrooms so that the seventh grade now met on the first floor of the building. We had all looked forward to being upstairs, the domain of the older kids.

  Judah Carl was an angry, unmotivated student, and most of us in class were afraid of him, partly because of his handicap, and partly because he was older and a stranger to our group. He kept to himself, rarely spoke in class, adjusted his glasses from time to time, and doodled in his notebook. Teachers rarely called on him for much in the way of class participation. When he talked, his voice was reedy, bespeaking the effort with which he produced it, his lungs weak. Exactly what was wrong with him I never knew. I would be ashamed today to feel so little empathy for one so embattled, but I was a merciless twelve-year-old, caught up in my own head, and I did not like him for the simple reason that I considered him to be an intruder. It was wrong for him to be in the same class with his sister. He was one of the older kids and he should not have failed a grade. There was no logic to my dislike.

  During that year, Freedom of Choice was still in force and Jones County still operated two school systems, one for black students and one for white. Violet had returned to the black school, J. W. Willie Elementary, for her seventh-grade term, but Rhonda and Ursula remained in the white school, in my class.

  That our school was white, intended for white children and white teachers, remained fixed in my mind even after a year in the classroom with the black girls, and I suspect the same was true in the minds of my classmates. I had made friends with two children, but this did not change me in terms of my interior, or in terms of my training, after only one year. If I had been asked to describe what was going on in my school, I would have said that the black girls had decided to come to the white school because it was better than their old school, or something similar. I would have fallen back on the old assumption that black people really wanted to be white and that this desire was the driver of Freedom of Choice and integration. My state of enlightenment was not advanced.

  But by seventh grade the world had started to impinge on my consciousness, as slowly I learned of the riots that were sweeping the country, one black ghetto after another going up in smoke. I had an inkling of poverty as a national problem now, thanks to the Great Society of President Johnson, and I heard about something called discrimination when I listened to the news. Discrimination was something that white people did to black people to keep them in a subordinate place. An example of discrimination was using a word like nigger.

  Furthermore, the country was fighting a war in Vietnam, and had been doing so for some time, and this event became more and more vivid as the next year passed. This was a war that had suddenly surrounded us all like a fog, coming from all sides, without a beginning or an end. I heard that we were in the war before I ever heard about Vietnam or what it had to do with my friends or me. One of my cousins died in the war that year. He was much older than I, and I never knew him, but I could see the impact of his death on my father and mother.

  Our seventh-grade teacher was Mrs. Ferguson, the same person who had taught us math the year before, a woman who was smart and fierce, sharp-tongued when crossed or when making a point, contemptuous of ignorance, demanding of discipline. She was the school’s best teacher of mathematics, and liked precision in speech and thought. She was a world away from Mr. Vaughn’s slack posture and liver spots, his inability to draw respect and lack of talent for keeping order. His classroom had been a muddled affair in which little really mattered other than that we show up and sit in our desks without wrestling or hurling one another through the windows. Under Mrs. Ferguson, we learned.

  The fact that I now considered Rhonda and Ursula to be friends, that we talked, sat near each other, studied in class together, and discussed our favorite television shows and music, meant that I had learned to accept our day-to-day association. I had grown in some ways, but I had yet to examine my comfortable world. I never imagined what this classroom was like for them, sitting there among us, knowing, far better than I did, who was friendly to them and who was not. K
nowing that many of us were thinking of them as unwelcome niggers, even if we were not allowed to say so. I had no inkling yet of the world in which Rhonda and Ursula really lived. What I knew of black people in Jones County was still limited to these two girls and the inside of this classroom. Behind them was the mystery of their parents, their families, the other people they knew, their church, their kitchens, their suppers, breakfasts, Sunday dinners.

  Judah Carl personified hatred in some ways, and suffering in others. He drew the Confederate Stars and Bars on his notebook. This might have endeared him to many of the kids in school, since there was often a good deal of talk about the South rising again in our classroom. But Judah Carl was withdrawn into his own world, speaking little to anyone, making no attempt toward friendship. He appeared to have little relationship to his siblings, and Pam, his sister, who had been my classmate since first grade, hardly spoke to him.

  One day he came to school with a piece of cardboard in the side of his wheelchair with the words I HATE NIGGERS scrawled in dark marker.

  This is an incident that I remember far too dimly, a fact that speaks to the speed with which Mrs. Ferguson eliminated the problem. I do not know whether Rhonda or Ursula ever saw the sign or heard of it, thought I expect they did. Judah Carl was wheeled to the principal’s office very quickly, almost directly after I read the sign myself. Few members of the class knew why Mrs. Ferguson took him out of class, and those who did barely had time to snicker.

  His posture as Mrs. Ferguson wheeled him away was unchanged. Whatever birth defect he suffered from had caused his body to atrophy from disuse, so that he appeared sunken into himself, his hands moving almost of their own accord. He adjusted his black-framed glasses and settled deeper into the chair.

  When he returned, his face was flushed red, his expression sullen, and the sign was nowhere to be seen.

  The fact of Judah Carl’s open hatred remained with us in the classroom through that day. He had expressed something that others felt, too, and the words echoed even when the sign was gone.

  Mrs. Ferguson had a grim and unhappy face. She looked as if she did not exactly know what to do. This was a fearful revelation, that she could find herself without a clear direction, she who was always so certain and sure. She had acted to stifle this moment of ugly expression to preserve the order of the classroom and to maintain the important layer of courtesy with which Southern transactions were tinted. I am certain she had real concern for Rhonda and Ursula and their feelings in this moment. But even worse was the breach of good order that would have resulted from a confrontation between the girls and Judah Carl—and, by implication, with the rest of us. This was what she was at pains to prevent.

  Polite Southerners did not use the word nigger; there was no one better mannered than Mrs. Ferguson, and she was shocked at the attempt, just as she would have been if Judah Carl had printed I HATE BITCHES on his sign.

  Looking backward, what I see is that my classroom, placid on the surface, was in fact laced with hatred. Judah Carl attempted to express his feelings openly and so committed a breach of etiquette for which he was reprimanded. But the school made no effort beyond the maintenance of discipline and politeness to educate us about our need to accept one another. The world of white adults remained mostly mum on the issue of integration, leaving us, their children, to puzzle out the meaning of these changes on our own. We were too young for the task, and most of us simply tried to figure out what the adults wanted us to think, taking in their ideas, imitating their hatreds and prejudices.

  After that day, Judah Carl sank back into his wheelchair, remote and unhappy, less inclined than ever to do his homework, to speak in class, to smile. Steps had been taken to change his behavior. No one had the power to change what he thought.

  The Kiss

  I had grown so used to Rhonda and Ursula by seventh grade that they were a comfortable part of my day, and since I was always good at making friends with girls, we spent a lot of the school day talking across the aisles.

  “You read books all the time,” Rhonda said to me, as I was closing the cover of Have Space Suit—Will Travel, a Robert Heinlein novel I had bought for a dime at the library book sale.

  “You like that space stuff,” Ursula said. “Like that Star Trek.”

  “I don’t like anything like that,” Rhonda said.

  “My mom won’t let me stay up that late,” Marianne interjected, showing her braces, her mouth a maze of metal and rubber bands. “But I like Mr. Spock.”

  “How do you know you like him if you don’t look at the show?” Rhonda asked.

  “He has pointy ears. I like pointy ears.”

  “You crazy,” Ursula said, shifting a bit in her seat, pulling down her skirt with a tug, the hem tight over her thighs.

  “You look at Lost in Space? That show is so stupid.” Rhonda had a certainty about herself, a way of holding her face to the light, a beauty. “That robot is so dumb, talking about ‘Danger, Will Robinson.’ ”

  “I think that robot is silly,” Marianne said. “It’s not even real, it’s just a man in a can.”

  “You like Will Robinson?” Ursula asked me. “He has freckles like you.”

  Or another day, Ursula said, with a peculiar fluid motion of the neck, “Power to the people, right on.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “That means the revolution is coming,” she said. “When the Black Panthers taking over.”

  “Oh,” I said, with only a vague idea of what a Black Panther was.

  “I like it when James Brown sings that,” Rhonda added, shifting in her seat, the wood creaking a bit. Our desks bore the engravings of decades of students on the wooden work surfaces, and many of the seats made a good deal of noise at the least movement.

  “Who is James Brown?” Marianne asked. “Is he like a singer?”

  “He has soul,” Ursula said. “He makes soul music.”

  “What’s soul?”

  “Soul is when you know how to move.” She did a bit of a shimmy in the desk to demonstrate the kind of moving she meant.

  “Do white people have soul?” Marianne asked.

  “Sometimes,” Rhonda said. “But most of y’all don’t have any.”

  When Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In premiered on television, we immediately seized on the catchphrases from the show, parroting them like everyone else did. We chanted “Sock it to me sock it to me sock it to me” as fast as we could, like Judy Carne, and on occasion we threatened to sock it to one another, to boot. When Mrs. Ferguson bustled into the room, all energy and focus, one of us might whisper, “Here come the Judge, y’all,” and the rest would giggle into our hands. We had to be careful of that kind of behavior, however. Mrs. Ferguson appeared to know everything that went on in her classroom, and she had a sharp tongue for scolding. None of us wanted to test her.

  (These moments are true, even if the conversations themselves are not quite literal. My memory is not so fine that it yields whole dialogue from such a long time past. But these were our voices, and these are the subjects we would have covered, given that we chattered about the world in these terms: what TV we watched, what phrases we remembered, what bits of news we heard, and what adults did and said.)

  “All this stuff about Vietnam on the news,” Ursula said.

  “You might get drafted,” Rhonda told me.

  “No, I won’t,” I said. “They won’t take me.”

  “Because you a bleeder,” Ursula said. “That’s right.” She was using the short form of the term “free bleeder” by which my classmates understood my hemophilia. Teachers had cautioned our class, year after year, that I was not to be touched or struck for any reason, because I would then bleed to death and die. Even Rhonda and Ursula had heard the tale twice now.

  “Can you have sex?” Rhonda asked in a whisper. “Because of your blood?”

  Marianne giggled at the word sex.

  I shrugged. “I think so.”

  “But you might bleed. Then you would die.�
��

  I had no idea what that meant, since my ideas about sex were uninformed; I had heard the process described by some of the boys in class but it sounded so awful I was certain it must happen by accident, perhaps when a man rolled on top of a woman in his sleep. What did blood have to do with sex, anyway?

  Ursula said, “I bet he can do just like anybody else can.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “I bet he can.”

  Ursula had struck me as shy at first, though on coming to know her, I understood that her temper was the more fiery, and her nature the more ardent. They bore comparison not because they were both black but because they were sisters. She had a less extravagant beauty than Rhonda, her body sturdier and plumper, her hair short, sometimes straightened and sometimes not. Her clothes must have felt tight on her, because she adjusted them constantly; this was an era of young women tugging at defiantly short skirts. About Rhonda I always had the sense that she was easy in herself, happy with her body. About Ursula, I noticed the constant fidget.

  Rhonda was the more outgoing; she was friendlier, readier to talk and share. Ursula was tender and fragile, harder to know, slower to return liking. Rhonda had an overt strength, while Ursula’s was quieter and more hidden. What Rhonda felt or thought lay on the surface and expressed itself more easily. Ursula kept her feelings to herself, at least the personal ones. She had the courage to express herself about her blackness, and her temper was quite strong and apt to flash out when she felt wronged. Rhonda’s anger ran deeper and lasted longer.

  We must have heard that our country experienced the Summer of Love in 1967, but at thirteen years old I was terrified of the word. The students in our class played boyfriend and girlfriend games, same as any other group of children our age. I can’t much remember who was coupled with whom in the class at that point, since the attachments were brief, consisting of little more than hand-holding, note-passing, and maybe a brief interlude of fondling in one of the closets at the back of the room. I had done a bit of note-passing in the early grades, little or no hand-holding, and no fondling at all. Marianne and I never discussed becoming formally enthralled to one another at any point, and we certainly never held hands or passed notes.