How I Shed My Skin

by Jim Grimsley

  While I remember the fight as being loud and lasting for three or four minutes, in our classroom afterward there were no repercussions, and I suppose Mr. Vaughn had not been near enough to be aware of it, or simply did not care.

  The exchange proved that some level of human recognition was taking place in our classroom, though it was hardly universal and had no likelihood of erasing the ideas of difference to which we white people were still clinging. Harry might think black girls were inferior to him, but a part of him would not cross the line so far as to hit a girl, even when she dared him. He had always been a bit tenderhearted, an only child, spoiled and coddled, and I knew this about him in the same way that I knew too much about all my classmates, because there were so few of us. The fact that Harry found this limit in himself, though—that he would not have a physical fight with Violet—did not mean that he would ever accept her as his equal. Most of us in class, perhaps all of us, were like him in this regard. Our prejudice might find its boundaries, but it would refuse to vanish.

  Tiger Beat, Teen, Ebony, and Jet

  My friendship with Marianne peaked during that year, and most people who observed us likely thought we were caught up in a childhood romance, since we were constantly in one another’s company, talking at school all day and on the phone in the evenings. She was the daughter of a local farming family, and lived a couple miles outside town, a circumstance that left her isolated and, I expect, a little lonely. Her mother was one of the few divorcees around, with a reputation as a snob, though were that true, it would hardly have been unusual in Jones County, where there was a good deal of pride in ancestry. The Howard family was an old one, and Marianne told me on more than one occasion that her family was related to the royal family in England, distantly at least. In this she was repeating her mother’s claim.

  She was a good person, with little or no snobbishness in her own conduct, and she adopted me as a friend before I was aware of her fully, in fourth grade I think. One Christmas her mother called mine to ask that I be allowed to come to visit that day, to play with Marianne. Her mother came to pick me up in the family’s car, and we spent a peaceful day at her house. She showed me her Santa Claus gifts, played the piano for me, and we talked so much that I was nearly intoxicated.

  Because I was a sissy from an early age, with a slightly effeminate way of speaking and moving, my friendship with Marianne helped to ease my years in elementary school. People had started to move beyond calling me a sissy to hint that I might be something worse. Marianne wore braces, dressed oddly, and was a bit too pretentious to get along well with the other girls. We were both misfits in our way and were drawn to each other because of that. The fact that I was close to her likely helped to normalize me in the eyes of the other people in class. This was a benefit to which I was blind, and it was certainly not planned. But the effect was there.

  At the time what mattered was that she had chosen me as a special friend. My family was very poor and not at all the equal of hers in social terms, though poverty was not the whole measure of a family’s status in the community by any means. I felt the difference between our circumstances keenly when I visited her house, which was built of brick, with an actual dining room, much nicer than any of the houses where my family lived over the years. But that hardly mattered to Marianne.

  She had introduced me to music groups like Herman’s Hermits and Paul Revere & the Raiders, and to teen magazines with glossy full-page pictures of television and pop music stars. We poured over these in school. We talked about the television shows we watched, especially American Bandstand and The Monkees, and in sixth grade, during one long day in Mr. Vaughn’s class, we both practiced telepathy. She read my mind and I read hers. No matter what the outcome, when she guessed my thought, I swore she had it exactly, and she did the same for me.

  When I developed an obsession with Batman and Robin on the television series, and when in the sixth grade I grew a gigantic crush on Davy Jones of the Monkees, Marianne never questioned my feelings or viewed them as abnormal. As the year developed, our telepathy game grew in scope to the point that she claimed to be in mental contact with members of Herman’s Hermits and I did the same for Davy Jones. Whispering from desk to desk, we shared stories of what we were learning through our mind-reading efforts.

  The fact that I felt a romantic attraction to men at that age never concerned Marianne, and I accepted it myself without much understanding of what it might mean. Davy Jones was far from the first crush I had on a handsome celebrity; I had daydreamed about courting Little Joe Cartwright for a long time, living with him on the Ponderosa, my body mysteriously changed into that of a slim girl, blonde, dressed in a poodle skirt. As I aged I no longer transformed myself into a girl in the narrative; I became instead the adopted son of Davy Jones, and later of William Shatner.

  Marianne never questioned the fact that we were both in love with male celebrities, and I assumed from this acceptance that she thought of me as a friend more than as a romance. I had an inkling that my preference for males was not normal, and so kept it hidden from most other people, though Rhonda also became aware of it when we began to share magazines and speak in breathy voices about Davy Jones’s blue eyes.

  Marianne was not the only one to supply magazines to the class. One day Rhonda brought an issue of Ebony magazine, and as she leafed through its Life-sized pages, I stared over her shoulder in some confusion. The issue in question would have been from 1966, most likely fall or winter. Perhaps what I saw over her shoulder was the September issue of the magazine, Bill Cosby and his family, his wife with her hair swept to the side in one of the iconic sixties hairdos, Mr. Cosby’s hair natural, a short Afro, and their plump-faced son raising his hand to the camera. Printed on Mrs. Cosby’s shoulder were the words, “Life with TV Award Winner Bill Cosby.” Also on the cover was a headline that read, “Stokely Carmichael: Architect of BLACK POWER,” and another, “Australia: Its White Policy And the Negro By Era Bell Thompson.”

  Rhonda was reading the magazine between lessons, or maybe during one of the many intervals when Mr. Vaughn lost control of our classroom and sat at his desk to consider his plight. She flipped pages idly, and I glimpsed the pictures inside. So many black people in suits, in nice clothes, smiling at the camera. I stared and stared. I had never seen black people depicted in this way before, as if they were just like white people, as if there was no social or racial difference. In my tiny world, I had been taught to concentrate on the differences, and to view them as inferior, and my limited exposure to the new girls in school had so far made only the slightest dent in my attitudes. Black people were like Miss Ruthie who lived behind my house, worn and stooped, almost weathered to blankness. They were never so smoothly urbane as these people in Rhonda’s magazine. I was simply amazed.

  The cover of Ebony was designed to resemble Look or Life, the defining photojournalism publications of the time. Ebony’s logo was similar in design, and there was a full-page color photograph on the cover. The paper looked to have the same gloss. All in all, this was a slick piece of work, but I was amazed. I had never dreamed that black people had their own magazines.

  Pollocksville’s one drugstore featured a stand of magazines and comic books, and I had become familiar with Superman, Batman, the Flash, the Fantasic Four, Captain America, Spiderman, and Dr. Strange during my visits to this shrine of publications. I had also glimpsed Time, Life, Newsweek, and Look, official adult magazines for news. I walked to the drugstore whenever I had a couple of quarters to spend. Ebony was nowhere to be found on those shelves, and black people were absent from the magazines and comic books I saw there. Superheroes, like lawyers, doctors, senators, governors, presidents, were white.

  Nor did these professional, citified black people appear on television, with the exception of Bill Cosby in I Spy and, with the coming of the new television season, Nichelle Nichols in Star Trek. I never knew much about I Spy. I devoured Star Trek, however, starting in September of the year our school was placed u
nder the Freedom of Choice program, and I watched Uhura, the black communications officer, with fascination. Unlike the images in Ebony, Uhura occupied a role that had no parallel in my world, and since I had no prejudice as to what a starship lieutenant should look like in five hundred years or so, she was fine with me. Watching her place the silver earpiece of the subspace communicator to her ear, I accepted the picture without any resistance. She was simply part of the crew, an equal with the others. I could accept this equality when presented in these terms, as something from the future.

  But when I looked at the pages of Ebony, I could only see the black skin, and was amazed at the fact that these were Negroes appearing in advertisements, sitting at desks, sipping cocktails, wearing fine clothes, laughing in restaurants, discussing important issues. Black people had created a world within my world, and all the categories of my world were repeated there. (It had to be “my world,” you see, and their world had to be contained in mine.)

  Another magazine Rhonda and Ursula brought to school was Jet, containing articles like, “How Dispute About Making Eve Black Almost Scuttled Bible Movie,” and showcasing pretty women like “Peggy Fino, Chic model,” both featured on the cover of October 27, 1966. The look of Jet gave me a different feeling than Ebony, as if I were gaining access to information that was not meant for me. Given its smaller format, it resembled Guideposts, the Baptist prayer magazine my mother picked up at church, but it featured pretty women on the cover and so had a bit of a lewd feeling. Mine was a world of Baptist morality, in which dancing and drinking were forbidden and women who graced the covers of magazines with their glamour were most likely bad candidates to be witnesses for Christ. The three black girls at school shared Jet as if it were private, passing it from one to the other, adding to my suspicion that it was a magazine I ought not to read.

  So I learned about the pop culture world and its boy bands with Marianne, and became acquainted with the Black Power movement through Rhonda and her friends. They read articles in the pages of Ebony and Jet and discussed them quietly. Maybe it comforted them to bring these pictures into that hostile white enclave. From their discussions of the words of Stokely Carmichael I learned about the chant “power to the people,” about what it meant to stand with one fist raised, and about the revolution that was to come, when black people would take arms and fight to overthrow white people once and for all.

  When black people rose up to kill white people, there would be a list of those who would be spared. Rhonda said she thought she might put me on the list, one day when I was listening to their discussion, and Ursula agreed. By then we had become friends, or at least this was true from my side of the equation. Even Violet spoke to me with some freedom, though we had never warmed to each other. Since I had called her a bad name, albeit many weeks earlier, I had no idea how she felt about putting me on the list of those spared by the revolution, a time when most white people would die, or so the girls claimed. I was flattered that Rhonda and Ursula might want to save me. I hoped they might put Marianne on the list, too.

  Information of this kind, that black people had their own magazines and could create their own world independent of white people, that black people discussed a revolution in which they gained power, added further to the changes in my ideas about reality. The weeks of school wore on, and the presence of the girls inspired acceptance in some of the white students, anger and quiet resentment in others. In this we children echoed the world of our parents. We had been taught to look for inequality in the relationship of blacks to whites, but, faced with the facts, this was becoming hard to understand.

  We shared the issues of Tiger Beat, but never Ebony or Jet. Rhonda and I shared a crush on Davy Jones, but I stopped short of liking any of the black pop stars in the magazines, mainly out of fear. I do not recall even having asked to look at one of the Ebony issues, though I remember staring at the open pages whenever she brought an issue to school.

  Nevertheless these images began to change me. So did the fact that a kind of desegregation was in progress all around me, on television, in the news, in the pages of mostly white magazines, and in my schoolroom. The shell of the all-white world had cracked, and color had begun to spill throughout.

  I was supposed to be the member of the superior race, but my parents did not subscribe to Look or Life, or watch the news regularly, or discuss current events, or do any of the things that I imagine went on in Rhonda and Ursula’s house. I had no idea what the Civil Rights Act was, or what Jim Crow was, and I had only a vague idea of what the Black Power movement meant, or why people were becoming angry at the fact of the war in Vietnam. Perhaps the black girls had no real understanding of such forces either, but at the very least they read magazines in which these ideas were discussed. They had some idea of what was going on in the world outside Jones County. I on the other hand had little or none, unless it counts that I knew Davy Jones’s life story, or could give all three middle names of the lead singer for Herman’s Hermits.

  By then there was a group of us sitting in adjacent desks who felt an eleven-year-old’s version of friendship, or at least of cordiality, toward one another, and this included Rhonda and Ursula, and Violet to a lesser degree. Most of the white girls held themselves aloof from any conversation involving the black girls, but there were a handful who, like me, apparently felt no barrier between us.

  An optimist might have seen this shift as evidence that integration was beginning to work, that the girls were being assimilated into our class, but this would have been the wrong assessment. Our friendly relations were, if anything, an adaptation of courtesy. Our school was a microcosm of our sparsely populated county. Our community saw itself as a place that had no truck with fights, or with openly expressed hatred, and no room for public displays of anything beyond piety and frugality. Far more important than any idea of segregation was the imperative to be good children and behave in school. The order to behave never required any modifier.

  Something was changing in me, though, and the change was real. Quietly, one day at a time, I was losing my sense that black people were different from me in the ways I had been taught. Faced with Rhonda, Ursula, and Violet, I saw them as being like me. Certainly I saw differences, especially with Rhonda and Ursula, who lived in a nicer house than mine, who read magazines, who dressed in nice clothes. The differences were not what I had been led to expect, though, and they did not add up to superiority for me or for my skin color. The issues of Ebony taught me this lesson in pictures. Black people looked and acted exactly the same as white people in all the ways that were important. I was too young to articulate this change in my thinking, but it expressed itself in a much more tangible way, as a shift in what I saw, how I listened, and what I felt. The machinery of my brain was receiving new information and had begun to adapt.

  Included in that machinery was my own secret, that I had something inside me that drew me to handsome boys rather than to pretty girls. Still I saw no connection between that and the other layers of difference that crumbled inside me as I watched the three new girls in our class. I had no words for these ideas, not yet.

  Black and Proud

  One morning the three girls rose from their desks to dance to the tune of the James Brown song, “Black and Proud.” Violet sang the chorus, “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud,” and they moved their bodies to the rhythm she set. I stared and felt the movement in my bones.

  Their performance was impromptu, rising out of some moment of taunting and baiting across the classroom, our teacher out of the room, the classroom dividing as it often did between the mouthiest of the white boys and the black girls. Whatever instigated the dancing is lost to my memory, but it had to be some remark related to Black Power, to the coming revolution, or to the idea that slavery times were over and done. Someone made a remark that implied the girls were ashamed of their skin color, and they rose from their desks to perform the chorus of the song.

  They danced in unison, the same moves, the same grace, withou
t so much as a signal to show that they were coordinating with one another. Had they rehearsed the moment they could not have carried it off more completely. I, who had never danced any step more complicated than the Twist, was captivated and frightened in the same moment. These girls shared this dance, these lyrics, this feeling of pride. They shared this movement with each other. Such a moment had no parallel in my world, in which Baptists like me were supposed to avoid dancing at all costs. Excessive hip movements were known to be the work of the devil.

  I can still see them standing beside their battered old desks, framed against those tall windows, their fluid bodies silhouetted against the pines outside.

  There was a difference between the races, all right, or at least the trio told us so. White people had no soul and could not move. Black people had soul. The evidence was the way their bodies flowed when they danced, the way James Brown’s body gyrated and shook, feeling every emotion of the motion, when he sang this anthem. He was black, he was proud, he could dance. We were white, we were uncertain, and we hardly dared to move.

  The idea of soul would punctuate the next decade, and its importance was clear from the first time I heard the term. It was meant to provoke envy, to advertise the fact that black people possessed a spirit of life that white people did not, and to connect those who possessed it in an extended family of soul brothers and soul sisters. Anyone could share in its benefits—anyone could listen to soul music or visit a soul food restaurant—but not everyone could possess any amount of soul. The gatekeepers of soul were black people. They decided who had it and who did not.

  The soul movement crossed the borders of race far more effectively than the Black Power movement in that many white teenagers found soul music and soul singers irresistible, and many of them coveted the idea of soul from afar. My white friends, when they learned of Black Power, had no idea what it meant and were largely frightened by the idea. The idea of soul, however, as embodied in crossover music from Motown, entered white culture from many directions, even in my closely proscribed world.