How I Shed My Skin

by Jim Grimsley

  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, wh
ite 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.

  The J. W. Willie School / Bag Lunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’ll find out what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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