by Jim Grimsley
So many layers of this moment can be seen only now, when I look backward: that my mother and the black woman were engaged in the toxic business of making cigarettes, that they were breathing tobacco dust as they sorted the leaves, that my mother had worked in fields and on farms with black people for many years. But she was uncomfortable now. I saw this in her face and in the way she sat in the chair.
I had no experience of black people, and now here was this woman with her grandson. Maybe she called him her grandboy. She might have nodded and said, “That’s my grandboy out yonder,” nodding toward the young ’un. In the dialect of Jones County this last part might have sounded like “ow chonder,” as in, “Thass my granbo-ey ow chonder.” Vowels were stretched so that a long vowel sound might make up two spoken syllables. A black speaker would have curled the vowels one way and a white speaker would have curled them another.
I was six years old. The memory is dim, and I cannot remember whether I called the boy a nigger to his face while he and my brother circled each other, or whether my brother did, or whether anyone did. Maybe this was why they were fighting. The best memory I have is that nothing was said, and the fight simply started, the two boys being of a similar age, circling each other like two kittens with their backs raised, then colliding.
It is doubtful that the word was said aloud, in fact, since my mother would not have allowed us to say it, especially in front of a black woman with whom she was working. That woman, old and hard-skinned, clear of eye, had no reason to accept such language from us in the first place. She knew that we were as low on the social scale as she and her grandson, and even if we were white and thus enjoyed a certain kind of status denied to her, she could have still objected. Perhaps she would not have articulated such a thought, but it was surely there. She sat in the open front door with my mother, but a wall of difference separated them.
I could only see the color of her skin, the way she sat in the chair with her legs spread, skirt draped over them, a pile of dried leaves in her lap. The idea of a difference between her skin and mine was already planted in me, and in looking backward at this memory I am tempted to read the moment only for its racial content, the fact that this was my earliest moment of close contact with a black person, even though black people lived all around me. For this woman as much as for my mother, this moment was more about survival than anything else. They could earn money of their own if they would tolerate each other and work together. So they did.
I had learned already to see the world in terms of many types of difference, but particularly between rich and poor, black and white, decent and not. Country people made a life’s work of deciding who was better than whom and what was better than what. Judged were individuals, families, members of families, churches, members of churches, denominations, villages, towns, makes of automobile, ways of canning, recipes for slaw, and on and on. The world was a grand hierarchy of such rankings. When necessary, the process of judgment could be bloody and mean. I would never entirely force that process—that need to decide who was above and who was below—out of my thinking, and it would be a long time before I even tried.
White Nigger
I was not to use the word nigger, my mother told me, because it was an ugly word and its use would mark me as common.
I must have said the word to earn this scolding, but I have no recollection of the context. The lesson was not an attempt to teach me tolerance but rather to shift my language to a path that would help me and our family to raise ourselves from the level of the poorest whites to something better.
Most white Southerners in the present will make a similar kind of statement, of course, as proof that they were raised to practice a certain level of tolerance. Nearly every white person I have spoken to about this time has uttered some variation of the statement, “We were not allowed to use the word nigger in my family.” One should remember that most Southern mothers also proscribed such words as shit, fuck, and cunt, often to no effect whatsoever. A mother’s admonition that certain language was bad only made that language appear more attractive and more useful. The prohibition against the word nigger had little to do with ideas of equality, and everything to do with standards of politeness.
Nigger was not a polite word but a coarse one. Good white people used other names for black people in conversation, reserving nigger for moments of deeper contempt. In polite company one spoke of colored people, or Negroes, though this word was more used in writing than in speech. The long vowels felt uncomfortable on the white Southern tongue. There was also the feeling that colored people, in wishing to be called Negroes, might be getting above themselves.
My mother taught me that the word niggra, was more acceptable. It was a kind of compromise.
(Many years after I was grown, in the mid-1980s, a white Southern boss of mine noted that he failed to see why coloreds wanted to be called blacks when the word Negro was so much nicer. I pointed out to him that he was saying he preferred to call this group of people black in Latin rather than in plain English. This was our last discussion of race.)
Women who wished to be thought of as decent were not allowed to use bad language. They must avoid cuss words, sexual references, and name-calling. My mother, wishing to better herself and her children, behaved like the people she met when she started to go to church. Churchwomen never said cuss words, never called names, and never used the word nigger in polite speech.
“Is nigger a bad word?” Maybe I asked this question. Maybe she gave her lesson for another reason. I picture her in the kitchen of one of the many houses we lived in, the room white-walled, probably plaster, scrubbed of stains when we moved in, though not repainted. Plastic curtains of some floral pattern hung at the windows, bought in New Bern at the Montgomery Ward store. I picture this as Sunday morning, with my mother dressing me for Sunday School. She had no clothes of a kind she could wear to church herself, but she sent my sister and me to church with a neighbor who came to pick us up in his truck.
“It’s not a nice word,” my mother answered. “Nice people don’t say it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not polite.”
There was a further part of the explanation. I cannot remember whether my mother said this herself, but I heard it more than once from other people. “Colored people are not all the same,” a white person would say. “There are white niggers, too, and they’re just as trashy and low as the black ones.”
Spoken of in this fashion, nigger was supposed to describe a way of life and not a skin color, someone trashy and common, someone whose children ran naked in the yard, who didn’t bathe or keep the house clean, someone with no sense of decency. Someone who was just barely human. There were white people like this, too, or so the story went.
“White people who are like that are even worse than niggras.” Perhaps my mother said this. If so, she did not need to explain further. By then I understood. Since white people were naturally superior, to lose one’s decency as a white person was like jumping off a much higher cliff.
The cognitive trick involved was simple but powerful. The bad qualities that were attributed to the lowest class of white people were considered to be the normal qualities of a nigger. In general, as I had learned, white people were good and decent, though some of them came from bad stock, or went bad for other reasons. Whereas, in general, black people were bad, though some of them might learn to be better.
A white person who lived in a dirty house, who took no pride in his own hygiene, who kept his family living at an animal level, was said to be as low as a nigger, or some other similar phrase. A black person who kept himself and his house clean, had pride in his appearance, and took care of his family was trying to be like a white person. This was reasoning that a child could easily compass. Once grasped, it reordered the world. A good Negro was the exception to the rule, and the same was true of a bad white person. This neat construction explained the outliers in both races, the ones who did not fit the pattern. All evidence obtain
ed thereafter supported the idea of white superiority almost without effort. Once the trick was taught, perceived exceptions to the racial stereotypes could be dealt with in real time.
I never heard any white person actually referred to as a nigger, not in any context, though I would hear the “white nigger” explanation over and over again. I can recall hearing a white person explain this concept very patiently to a black person, in a friendly tone, as if it made the insult all right. Someone, sometime, had invented this tale of the white nigger as a justification for the word, and I expect it is still a commonplace of the white South.
Whether or not my mother repeated this tale to me, I accepted her explanation in general and understood that she was trying to tell me something about the world. At least, I was seeing something beyond the simple lesson. She preferred that I speak politely and nicely and use words that were well approved. She wanted me to understand that reality was more complicated than I knew. To the degree that either of us understood the world, we both meant well. But in offering this explanation she underscored a layer of discomfort in herself. Whether she intended it or not, she left me with the message that there was something wrong with the way the world talked about colored people.
Divinely White
In church I learned that black was the color of sin, and white the color of purity.
Church was important to my mother, for whom it had provided a support throughout her childhood, and by associating herself with church people, she found a means of escaping the poverty in which she spent her early life. She was the only churchgoer in her immediate family, drawn to the clean interior of the sanctuary and the well-kept members of the congregation, who dressed for Sunday with care and who took pride in themselves in a way that enabled my mother to do the same. She became a member of the denomination called Church of God, attended Sunday services whenever her parents allowed, and grew up as a devout Christian.
In Jones County, she sent my sister and me to Sunday School as soon as we were old enough to ride with a neighbor, who stopped at our house on Riggstown Road and picked us up on Sunday mornings. At the time, my mother lacked Sunday clothes for herself and our family had no car in which she might have driven us. We attended Lee’s Chapel United Methodist church, a very old congregation and a very small one. We rode in the pickup truck of a farmer who traveled to services by himself. At Sunday School we studied Bible stories and memorized verses, and afterward in the official church service, we listened to a preacher who talked more about the Bible from the pulpit, a height that seemed impossibly high and far away to me at that age. He appeared to stand between heaven and me.
In church, I learned that I could be washed as white as snow by giving myself to Christ, but that if I failed to take him into my heart I would be consumed by the blackness of sin. I had the choice between falling into darkness or turning to the light. The reward for embracing the brightness of heaven was eternal life, streets of gold, many mansions, choirs of angels. Along with darkness would come a lake of fire, eternal torment, the gnashing of teeth.
The lessons of church applied to the world at large, and the church reflected the world in many ways. Like all else in my early world, churches were segregated by skin color, but the stratification they provided went beyond this. The protestant denominations themselves were arranged in a kind of hierarchy, with the best people belonging to the Presbyterian church, the second best being Methodist, the Southern Baptist church being of less prestige, the Free Will Baptist churches a further step down, and the Holiness Church, or Church of God, serving the least of the white people, the ones who brought electric guitars into church, who found and cast out demons from one another on a regular basis, and who appealed to those who lived in the poorest parts of the county.
My friend Marianne was an Episcopalian, a denomination so refined there was only one small church dedicated to its worship services in the whole of Jones County.
The lessons about the purity guaranteed by whiteness, the pollution caused by any taint of blackness, crossed these denominations. The Christian Bible depicted God’s son as a white-wooled lamb, God’s adversary as a prince of air and darkness, salvation as a cleansing that leads to shining whiteness. God, Christ, and all the angels wore white. Death and sin were robed in black. God lived in a heaven that was always shining. The devil dwelt in the dark.
So I understood that white and black were polar opposites in many senses, not simply in terms of appearance but also of meaning and quality.
At six years old, I was hardly equipped to question the words I heard spilled into the air high above my head in the Lee’s Chapel sanctuary. Church was like nothing else in my life. People sat attentively in pews, stood up at intervals with hymn books in hand and sang, closed their eyes in prayer, and deferred to the thundering lessons about the Bible that the minister broadcast from the pulpit. The subjects dealt with the largest of lessons—that the world had been created by God some time ago, that Eve brought sin into the world by conversing with a snake, that God once destroyed all earthly creatures by means of a flood, that there were certain acts and gestures that brought me into closer touch with the purpose of the world. That God so loved me that he gave his only begotten son. That everything would come to an end in a great cataclysm of beasts, earthquakes, apocalyptic horsemen, and stars falling from the sky.
Lee’s Chapel sat among pines and sycamores about halfway between Pollocksville and Maysville, along Highway 17. The church was older than the highway though not older than the road the highway had replaced; the building included a tiny sanctuary to which an equally tiny Sunday School building had been added in recent times. My sister and I attended both Sunday School and church, the two hours of Sunday service stretching into an eternity. The congregation shared its preacher with the Methodist church in Pollocksville, so that he preached one sermon in the village and another at Lee’s Chapel. I doubt that there were more than thirty or forty congregants in attendance on Sundays, even in those days, but to me the crowd seemed enormous. As I walked through the gathered adults, bearing a child’s invisibility, I could hear them discussing the preacher, who was held to be a good speaker, with the fire of God in his words. The adults spoke of many subjects quite out of my reach, but I took something comforting from their presence, from their acceptance of my quiet listening.
One Sunday, so intent was I on wandering the churchyard during the interval between Sunday School and the main service, I forgot to go inside the church when the others did, and played outside for the whole of the hour, missing the sermon altogether. After that, I learned to pay better attention to the cues.
A few years later at another church, while waiting for service to begin, I heard the owner of the Pollocksville restaurant say, “If God had meant black people and white people to mix he would have made them one color.” By then I understood better than to believe such an assertion, since blacks and whites were mixing at school with no ill effect that I could see. But if a man could say those words at such a time, and use the churchyard as his vehicle for a conversation on the subject, then the same might have happened in the Lee’s Chapel congregation, before I was old enough to know what he meant.
God himself ordained that black and white people were unequal and were never to mix in any way. He had made this stipulation in order to preserve the unique purity of whiteness. Like the Israelites of old, we were his chosen people, and the world he had created belonged to us above any claim that others might have on it. I understood all this from such an early age that I cannot recall when the lesson began. But I can be relatively certain where the lesson began: during church, listening to what was said by adults, either from the pulpit or in the yard. Mixed in with lessons of obvious virtue. While I learned that I should do unto others as I would have them do unto me, while I learned that I should turn the other cheek when harmed or insulted, I absorbed the teaching that black people were a race unto themselves. I came to see black as the opposite of white in terms of the inner quality of peo
ple as well as the hue of their skin. I would only change this view years later, when in sixth grade I came face-to-face with Rhonda, Ursula, and Violet.
My lessons in racism, therefore, came to me as part of my training in goodness. So tangled was this message that I would be years in making sense of it.
The process of teaching that defined black as the opposite of white continued far beyond the walls of the church. That opposition became one of the patterns that enabled me to sort through the world. From television I understood that good cowboys wear white hats while bad guys wear black ones. From fantasy I learned that white magic is positive, black magic is evil. Loving the light, I learned that I should fear the dark.
From every side, during every movie, every television show, in the pages of every book, came images that reinforced the code. A bride married in a white dress, and the whiteness stood for purity, for virginity, for innocence, for newness. A widow draped herself in black from head to toe. Black as death, we say, black as night, black as coal, which burns red and orange. Black as sin. Black is an abyss into which we fear to fall.
To follow a dark path. To walk in the shadows. When we were with God we were in green pastures, beside still waters. Our peril was the valley of the shadow of death. God was a light we carried with us. God repelled the dark. The light was supreme because God was supreme. White was supreme because the light was white. Blackness could never be bright.
Lucifer fell from the light into a pit of darkness. Satan fell from white to black.
Savagery was darkness, and darkness was savagery, in which people and nations could become lost. Dark ages were times of chaos and ignorance. To emerge from such a period required rebirth and enlightenment. Blackness consumed, whiteness illuminated.