The Class of '65

by Jim Auchmutey

  Greg stepped closer to the boy who had just hit him and jutted out his chin as if awaiting another blow.

  “I love you, Thomas,” he said.

  The two stared at each other. Thomas said nothing. He looked confused. His arms seemed to fall limp.

  Just then, a coach and a plainclothes policeman pushed through the crowd to break up the confrontation. They had been watching from a car across the street.

  “Do you need an explanation?” Greg asked one of the men.

  “No. Get your books and get out of here.”

  Greg scooped them up and started to walk away, and another biblical scene came to him as the crowd parted before him—Moses and the Red Sea. He headed across the street toward the black neighborhood where he had parked. Despite the presence of the adults, a few students tossed gravel and dirt clods after him, and many more shouted and called him names. Greg did not acknowledge them. He slowed down and walked deliberately, as if to show that the debris and the catcalls couldn’t touch him. When he reached a safe distance, he turned around and wiped his shoes on the curb as if he were scraping cow plop off the soles. Almost everyone there came from a churchgoing family, but it’s doubtful that many of them understood the significance of the gesture. It came from the Bible, the ninth chapter of Luke, when Jesus tells his disciples what to do if they attempt to preach the gospel in a town that rejects them: “And wherever they do not receive you, when you leave that town, shake off the dust from your feet as a testimony against them.” The verse was well known at Koinonia. It made everyone think of Americus.

  Among the classmates who witnessed the one-sided fight that afternoon were Joseph Logan and David Morgan. At the time, they drew opposite lessons from it.

  Although David jeered and hooted with everyone else beside the baseball stands, he was having misgivings. The threat of violence had always made him uneasy. He didn’t talk about it much, but he had been bullied himself as a sixth grader—typical playground stuff that had nothing to do with politics or unpopular beliefs. While he didn’t make the connection then between what he had experienced and what Greg was going through, it no doubt influenced his sympathies. “I knew it was wrong to goad him into a fight when we knew he wasn’t going to fight,” David reflected later. “My raising was better than that. I felt kind of ashamed to even be there.” But in the fall of 1964, he kept those reservations to himself. He didn’t dare object to Greg’s mistreatment, not if he wanted to be liked.

  Joseph, on the other hand, was only disappointed that Greg didn’t get hit more than once. Joseph had worked his way up to cocaptain of the football team, and he instinctively stood with his teammate T.J. It was that tribal loyalty again. “We didn’t like Greg, and Thomas was going to beat him up, and we all wanted to see someone beat the crap out of him,” Joseph said later. As Greg walked away from the mob and scraped his feet, Joseph cursed at him, still blind to the moral dimensions of what he had seen.

  ____________________

  After the showdown, Greg drove home and went about his usual farm work. He hitched a load of hay to a tractor and hauled it into the fields to feed the cows, his cheek sore from the punch. After dinner with his family, he pulled his mother aside and told her that he had been attacked while what seemed like half the boys in school cheered; she looked pained but had little to say except that this sort of thing had been happening to believers since the birth of Christianity. He later confided in his friend Collins, who agreed that his boxing lessons probably wouldn’t have done Greg much good in the presence of so many angry young men spoiling for blood. Despite the trauma of the day, Greg slept well that night. He was relieved. The worst had happened, and he had survived.

  For the first time that fall, Greg looked forward to school the next morning. He wanted to show everyone that he hadn’t been hurt, that the intimidation hadn’t worked, that he and everything he represented weren’t going away. Principal McKinnon, who had been eager to talk the day before, did not send for him. In fact, no one in the administration asked Greg about the act of violence that had been perpetrated on school property. The only adult who said anything to him was Mrs. Crabb, who had heard about the incident and asked Greg whether he was all right. Throughout the day, none of the students uttered a word to him—especially not Thomas, who looked uncomfortable in his presence during government class. It was like nothing had ever happened.

  But something fundamental had changed in the conflict between Greg and his classmates. He was the center of attention more than ever. He could sense the other students’ eyes following him and could tell that they were whispering about the boy who wouldn’t fight back. He watched them in silence, back in his bubble, feeling for the first time that he might be doing some good after all.

  chapter 9

  A Lesson Before Leaving

  The emotional lift that came from standing up to the crowd did not last. After Thomas struck him in the jaw in front of dozens of boys, Greg felt noble and vindicated for a few days, but as Thanksgiving came and went, he sensed that nothing had really changed. The badgering and shunning continued as before. To Greg, the confrontation behind the baseball grandstand had seemed like the turning point in a great moral struggle. To his classmates, he now realized, it must have been nothing more than an unrequited fight. If it had affected any of them more deeply, it was not yet apparent.

  As the Christmas break approached, Greg was losing his resolve. His grades were flagging, and he didn’t think he was learning much of anything. He wondered why he was staying in school at all. One of the main reasons he had stuck it out so far, he had to admit, was pure sibling rivalry. Greg wanted to show that he was tougher than his older brother, who had lorded over him and sometimes scuffled with him when they were young. Billy had left Americus High after one year, and Greg was midway through his third, so he had already won that contest. Proving himself a worthy second son no longer seemed a compelling motivation.

  That December, Greg told his mother that he didn’t plan to go back to school after the holidays. He wanted to quit. “Mom, they don’t care what I think, and I don’t care what they think. I’ve been smacked in the face and I’ve worn my food—I’ve taken their best shot—but it hasn’t changed anything. It isn’t doing me any good. It just seems like a big waste of time.”

  Greg could talk to his mother like that, bare his vulnerabilities, confess his fears and worries. Margaret might not have much practical advice to impart, but she could cloak him in maternal love and bolster his strength to face another day. It was different with his dad. Will seemed to come from an earlier time, a late-pioneer era when people placed a greater value on being stoic and self-reliant. When his son came to him about the latest tribulations at school, Will tended to fall back on biblical truisms, as if to say: “We’re Christians. People are going to throw stones. It isn’t right, but you’d better get used to it.” Greg didn’t confide much in his father anymore.

  Margaret wanted her son to earn his high school diploma and didn’t think he should quit school just yet. She urged him to give it one more chance. “Go back that first day after the holidays, and if you still want to quit after that, we’ll support you. Just give it a day. At least do that.”

  Greg reluctantly marched back into the trenches.

  ____________________

  If any student rivaled Greg for unpopularity, it was Andy Worthy, a gangly, flat-topped senior whose acned face and Coke-bottle glasses typecast him as the class nerd. Poor Andy tried to fit in. He was usually there when people picked on Greg, laughing and grinning as if joining in the mockery would win him admittance to the fraternity of regular guys. It didn’t. They made fun of Andy, too. It was so easy with those homely looks.

  Not long before the holidays, Andy approached Greg in a sympathetic manner and started to say something to him, one misfit to another. At least that’s how Greg read it. He cut him off before he could say a word. He couldn’t forget the times Andy
had scoffed at him. Greg would size up his scrawny frame and reckon that he could pummel it into the ground with one blow, but he didn’t think it was worth the effort, so he ignored him. Now Andy was acting like he wanted to be friendly.

  “You were picking on me a little while ago. What changed?” Greg said, and turned away. He came to regret the encounter.

  One of Andy’s gifts that Christmas was a double-barreled shotgun. A few days into the new year, the lonely teenager went into his backyard and turned the gun on himself.

  During his classes that January, Greg thought he could detect a change in the atmosphere. While one boy used the tragedy as cruel ammunition, suggesting that Greg should follow Andy’s lead and kill himself, most of the students were shocked and chastened by the terrible intrusion of mortality into their world. Teenagers weren’t supposed to die. The suicide of one of their own seemed to give the young people pause and leech out some of their spitefulness.

  In the early weeks of 1965, Greg noticed that people didn’t call him names nearly as often. The tripping and shoving stopped. There were no more physical attacks like there had been in the fall. Maybe he had outlasted his enemies and they had become bored. Maybe the seniors were looking ahead to graduation and preoccupied with life after high school. Whatever the reasons, Greg was happy for the reprieve. “I had been their favorite joke, and it seemed like the joke was over.”

  The new dynamics were apparent in Mrs. Bailey’s government class, where the alleged insult that led to the confrontation with Thomas had been uttered. It was the final period of the day, a time that seemed to loosen inhibitions. During a discussion early that year, David Morgan told everyone that he had been thinking and that maybe they should stop bothering Greg, even if they disagreed with what he stood for. “I’m not saying that you have to be his friend. I just think we should leave him alone.”

  The outcry was immediate, as some of the boys razzed David for suggesting something so conciliatory. “What’s the matter? Are you a nigger lover, too?” one of them taunted.

  David didn’t say another word. He didn’t need to. A door had been cracked open. Greg had never heard anyone at school give voice to the proposition that an American citizen had the right to hold out-of-favor opinions, even in Sumter County. He looked around the room and wondered how many of the other students agreed, because most of them, he noticed, had remained silent and had not told David to shut up.

  No one had ever talked with Greg in his classes if they didn’t have to, but that also started to change. Mrs. Bailey let her students debate current events, and Greg, with his lightning-rod political views, was often at the center of the disputation. There was a lot to debate; during that winter and early spring, Malcolm X was assassinated in Harlem, the United States sent the first ground combat troops into Vietnam, and the battle for voting rights reached its epic climax in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama. Greg was the only person in class who spoke against the war and in favor of racial equality, which left him isolated, as usual, but he was heartened that other students were quizzing him about his beliefs instead of just ignoring or dismissing him. It felt good to explain himself instead of sleepwalking through the day like a zombie. It was refreshingly educational. “We had some hot discussions in there,” David remembered. “Sometimes Mrs. Bailey lost control of the class.”

  The subject that came up repeatedly was, unsurprisingly, civil rights. Greg’s classmates were still struggling to come to grips with integration and wanted to know why the federal government was trampling on their rights of free association.

  “We don’t want to be forced to do anything,” one of the girls said. “We don’t want anyone telling us who our friends should be.”

  “You’re missing the point,” Greg rebutted. “No one wants to dictate who you should be friends with. But you can’t have two classes of citizens. We all have the same rights. Black people pay taxes just like white people, and they shouldn’t have to stand in different lines or go to different schools. If you just want to judge people by the color of their skin, you’re the one who’s missing out.”

  In a way, Greg was judging his classmates through a similar oversimplification. He didn’t know them any better than they knew him, and because of that, he tended to lump them together into one faceless mass of opposition. But there were distinct faces in that mass and an array of attitudes. While most of the students felt threatened by the changing rules of society, it was beginning to dawn on some of them that they were going to have to come to terms with the new day.

  Greg got a preview of the coming accommodation that spring when one of the seniors who had been an outspoken hardliner on race told the government class about an interesting film he had seen. During a visit to the New York World’s Fair, he watched a movie that was playing continuously at one of the pavilions there, the Protestant and Orthodox Center. It was a controversial short subject called Parable, which depicts a Christ-like clown dressed in white who rides into town on a donkey and takes up with a traveling circus. He comes to the aid of several performers but angers the show’s autocratic impresario, who takes his revenge by leaving him lifeless and dangling from marionette strings like a lynching victim. The obvious religious allegory disquieted the senior and raised uncomfortable questions in his mind about persecution and inhumanity. He admitted to the class that he was reexamining some of his views about justice and civil rights, then quickly backtracked after some of the other boys swatted down his musings and wondered what the hell was getting into him.

  Greg was astonished. This was one of the guys who used to call him “Greg Witt-nigger from Korn-a-nigger Farm.” He never thought that he would hear him, of all people, express doubts like that.

  Later that year, when a reporter from the Southern Conference Educational Fund interviewed Greg about his high school experiences for its monthly newspaper, the Southern Patriot, he put a positive spin on the discussions with his schoolmates. “If I had just had a little bit longer,” he said, “I could have made believers out of some of them.”

  He didn’t win any obvious converts in government class, but he may have made some of the students think about things they had never questioned, and that was a step in the right direction.

  ____________________

  Every weekday after lunch, Greg looked forward to study hall in Mrs. Crabb’s room downstairs in the annex building. He left the cafeteria as soon as he had scarfed down his food so he could arrive early and have a few minutes to visit while she was getting ready for the next class. She was curious about Koinonia and wanted to know what it was like to live there. Greg told her about their communal system and their belief in pacifism and how they had remained nonviolent when they were bombed and shot at. Mrs. Crabb nodded approvingly, but there was one detail she did not like; as a good and proper English teacher, she was appalled by the way Greg referred to the Jordans by their first names. She urged him to show more respect for his elders and at least call them Uncle Clarence and Aunt Florence.

  Greg and Mrs. Crabb talked about a wide range of topics: news events, drug abuse, civil rights. She suggested that just as the other students ought to tolerate his beliefs, he should make more of an effort to be sensitive to their traditions. “You have to remember that they were brought up a certain way, to have pride in their race.”

  “You can get carried away with racial pride,” Greg replied.

  One day Greg came to study hall and found Mrs. Crabb in a somewhat testy mood. She had heard a rumor and wanted to get to the bottom of it. “I heard that you’ve been seen walking around town with black girls, holding their hands? Is that true?”

  Greg wasn’t sure whether Mrs. Crabb disapproved of such behavior or merely thought it was foolish for him to openly flout one of the South’s strictest taboos, interracial dating. She seemed placated when he denied the gossip. But Greg wasn’t telling her the whole truth. While he wasn’t so dumb as to swan around Americus with a black girl o
n his arm, he had dated them and more than a few times. He took them to dances and on outings to Koinonia and to basketball games at the black high school. He would later go to the prom there at the invitation of one of the students he knew, wearing his brother’s old tuxedo vest and boogying the night away to Motown hits. Although Greg was usually honest with Mrs. Crabb, he didn’t see the point in spelling out his predicament: he was a healthy American male who desired female companionship, and he certainly wasn’t going to find it among his white schoolmates at Americus High. “There were girls in my classes who I thought were attractive, but I knew that making any advances was totally out of the question.”

  As if to confirm the point, one of the girls in government class asked Greg outright whether it was true that he went out with black girls.

  “Sure,” he answered. “I mean, none of you are going to go out with me.”

  “Eeeeew!” the questioner said, as if she had spied a rat. Greg laughed to himself. After all the bad names he’d been called—criticizing his religion, his politics, his manhood—none was more common than the one about his love for black people. He got pleasure from confirming that the slur was, in this case, true.

  Among the young ladies Greg saw was a good friend of Jan Jordan’s, Lena Turner, a civil rights activist who was a couple of years older and had already been married and divorced. His mother did not approve of him spending time with such a knowledgeable woman; the racial aspect was irrelevant to her. Greg also saw Rosie Rushin, another civil rights protester, who was still in high school. She was the granddaughter of Rosa Lee Ingram, a sharecropper who had become the focus of a case that drew national attention when she was given the death penalty in 1948 for killing a white neighbor who she said had threatened her with a shotgun.