How I Shed My Skin

by Jim Grimsley

  A room painted in total blackness was a cave, a grave, a pit, a dungeon, forbidding, gloomy, gothic, wrong. A room painted all in white passed without notice.

  Cleanliness was whiteness. Dirt was dark. Good triumphed over evil. White won out over black.

  These symmetries were built into the images, in the language, in the background of consciousness, foretold everywhere. Simply reversing the color scheme produced nonsense. One could not speak of ignorance sweeping over a people like a tide of brightness. The phrase merely puzzled. The antagonism of black and white shaped the world of meaning inside my head, and black bore the negative value in all cases.

  To view a situation as black and white produced an expedient clarity; all other views resulted in the confusion of gray, the realism of the murk.

  Even when I understood that I had made certain assumptions about whiteness and blackness, I continued to employ the metaphors because the language insisted that I do. The pairing of whiteness with virtue and blackness with negatives was too useful in the making of metaphor to abandon. Dark comedy, blackguards, the dark arts, realms of shadow, a cloud crossing the sun, a shadow falling over a face in a film. Darkness was menace, fear, uncertainty, chaos, a harbinger of endings. Blackness was blindness, the loss of movement, the space of nightmare. I would turn to the light for hope. I would confront the dark to face my fears.

  All this had begun in the simple notion that white was good, and black was not. Evidence accumulated, white as snow, dark as soot. I saw what I was meant to see.

  Good Old Boy

  One morning, not long after we moved from Riggstown Road to a house on Island Creek Road, I found my father in the kitchen with my mother as she tended to cuts on his face. I could smell the sharp scent of the open bottle of merthiolate on the kitchen table, sitting next to a tin pan full of water and some cloths colored with pink and red. My father’s eye was swollen and a small gash, diagonal to his eyebrow, oozed dark blood. They were speaking quietly, in short sentences. Their words were something like this:

  “Is it still bleeding?” my father asked.

  “Little bit,” Mama said. “You might need stitches.”

  “I ain’t going to any damn doctor.” Daddy set his jaw and knotted his brows. “Just put the merthiolate on it like I told you.”

  “Hold pressure to it,” Mama said. “Get the bleeding to slow.”

  He grunted and took one of the cloths, pressing it to the wound. The kitchen was quiet a while. Mama stirred to make coffee, bringing him a cup from the percolator pot. When he took it to drink, she held the cloth to his eye. By then the oozing had slowed to thick drops.

  She lifted the bottle of merthiolate. “You ready?”

  “Yeah. Go ahead.”

  She looked at him carefully. If she hurt him with the merthiolate he might slap her just because she was the one who put it on the cut. He was like that, my father. “You want me to fan it? It’s going to sting.”

  “Shit, no,” he said, and she painted the cut while he sat there, stoic. He was a man, the pain was nothing to him. That would be his reaction this time. His posture told me this.

  No one had lived in this house for a long time, nor can I remember anyone living there after we moved out. The place had been abandoned by its owner and looked to be falling down, set in an empty field near the edge of the wide, dark Croatan National Forest; the top story was boarded up, unlivable. We lived in the four downstairs rooms.

  There was no heat in the house when we moved in, so Daddy installed a small space heater, open flame, purchased from the place where he worked, Jenkins Gas Company. This was a new job for him, and so there was little money in the family that winter, and we were eating potatoes, nothing but potatoes, the only food we could afford.

  These details matter because the poverty and the threat of hunger made my father angry. I could see the anger in the set of his jaw, sense it in his deep, sullen quiet.

  Now he sat in the kitchen with a bruised face and cuts over one eye.

  He had been out all night and returned with wounds. When he lay down in his bed to sleep, I asked my mother what happened.

  “He got in a fight, I guess,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “Maybe somewhere in Richlands, he don’t want to say.” She was pumping water at the sink, the old hand pump rusty and creaking. There was no plumbing in this house, other than the pump and the drain. “Maybe somewhere in Hatchville. Him and his friends.”

  Hatchville was one of the places where black people lived, a stripe of houses on either side of Highway 58 at the crossroads with Highway 17. There were other black neighborhoods in or near Pollocksville, these being the Heights, a cluster of houses on a rise of land across from the sawmill; the Back Streets, inside the village limits of Pollocksville; and Murphytown, a stretch of brick houses along Highway 17. Black families were scattered through other parts of the county, too.

  We kept quiet that day, and Daddy stayed sober when he woke up, looking more thoughtful than usual, sitting in the living room, smoking cigarettes and watching a western on the television.

  White men gathered wherever they could to drink and raise a bit of hell on a Friday or Saturday night. Black men, no doubt, did the same. This was what a good old boy was expected to do. In Pollocksville, there were only a few places to have fun, and the pool hall was one of them. Since the sale of liquor by the drink was illegal in North Carolina, public drinking took on a sinful, shadowy taint, regardless of its circumstances. People here did not drink in restaurants, and even if such a practice had been legal, there was only one such eating place in Pollocksville, the Trent Restaurant, where respectable people ate chicken pastry and country-fried steak and sipped nothing stronger than sweet iced tea.

  The local pool hall, called simply that, and not even distinguished by a sign as far as I can recall, took the place of a bar. For this reason it had a bad reputation. There were clubs of various kinds in the larger towns in the larger counties around ours, but in Jones County, there were few places where a man could drink in peace. Even at the pool hall, a man generally brought his own liquor and kept it in his truck or on his person, wrapped in a paper bag.

  The pool hall was also the rumored central location for the local Ku Klux Klan, though it was too small for meetings, which were supposedly held on the upper floor of Mr. Paul Armstrong’s general goods store. This was, at any rate, the local gossip. The man who owned the pool hall also owned a service station next door. He was a sullen fellow with an artificial leg and a well-known hatred for black people. Exactly how he earned this reputation was a matter of mystery, though it was natural to guess that he was part of the Klan.

  My father’s fight would likely have had something to do with the pool hall and the good old boys who were its patrons. He was friendly with the men who hung out there, and might have begun a night of drinking thereabouts. At some point he and his friends would have decided to look for trouble, and found it. They would hardly have questioned their own motives since this kind of behavior was expected of men of their kind. The fight that night was not likely to have been anything official, or to have involved white sheets or hoods, or to have had any real purpose other than to pass the time. The fight might not have involved black people at all.

  Over a few days my father’s cut healed, and whatever story he might have told about the fight remained unspoken. Such was his temper that if I had asked him about it I was as likely to make him angry as to get an answer, and there was never any accounting for how angry he became.

  In recalling this memory I have presumed that this moment of violence had some connection to black people. At least in part this is a fictive assumption, meaning that I am forcing the connection beyond my memory. I cannot recall the exact conversation between my parents that morning. My father was in every case a violent man, and I remember the unfamiliar sensation of his calm that morning, the fight having burned away his anger. Whether or not he had been fighting a black man or a white man on th
at occasion, he was part of a system from which violence could be extracted at any moment.

  Black people called my father Captain Jack, though he had never served in the army or held any rank. At the time I simply thought this a polite mode of address, perhaps a mark of respect that my father had earned. As a man who delivered bottled gas to people’s houses, and later as a refrigeration and air-conditioning specialist, he moved constantly among black people, hooking up big steel bottles of gas to cooking stoves in houses throughout the county, repairing refrigerators and freezers for anyone who could pay. He had little or nothing to say on most subjects, and I never heard him express an opinion about segregation, integration, politics, or even television shows, except on occasion to look at the TV screen in disgust and say, “Turn that goddamn shit off.” Whatever thoughts he had, he kept to himself, almost to the point of pathology.

  But he and his friends were the men who would have been called on, in earlier times and perhaps in these, to ignite together in mobs, to burn crosses or houses or both, to hang black men without benefit of trial. Perhaps he was called on to do so in his own time, and I never knew. It would not surprise me to learn that this was true. His store of anger would have been sufficient to such a task. All he would have required was a few friends to back him up and a reason to act.

  I would only have known the personal edge of this at the time, the fact that my father, and the men around me, were all kings of their castles, empowered to act as they saw fit in their houses and on their land. I would only have known that living with my father was like living with a fire that could barely be controlled. But later I would learn about all the cruelties and inhumanities of slavery and Jim Crow, including lynchings, rapes, beatings, torture, forced labor, and much more; and later still I would understand these atrocities had been practiced in Jones County and in the region around me at one time or another. Practiced by people much like those I knew. By men like my father and his drinking buddies, by good folk like those with whom I went to church. By people like me.

  Johnny Shiloh

  On Sunday nights I lay on the linoleum floor in front of the television and watched The Wonderful World of Disney, a practice so regular it took on the form of ritual. Disney could be relied on to provide the same kind of entertainment week after week, child-oriented stories full of sentiment and heart-warming treacle, often featuring a beloved horse or dog or other pet. On one such night in the early 1960s, I watched a movie called Johnny Shiloh, and this began my education in the Civil War.

  Johnny Shiloh offered up the story of a boy from Ohio who ran away from home to join the Union army, a retelling of the life of John Joseph Klem, who left home at age eleven to serve in Mr. Lincoln’s army. In the movie, Johnny pestered the adult soldiers into accepting him, demonstrated his pluck by undergoing the same training in arms as any soldier in his unit, and served with bravery at the Battle of Shiloh. He was later captured by Confederate soldiers and befriended by a boy his own age; and he escaped in time to warn his superior officers of Southern troop movements. He was a child who saved the day, a theme repeated over and over in the lore of Disney.

  I fell into the story for ninety minutes, enthralled at the notion that a boy my own age could earn the respect of manly men like Brian Keith, one of the male leads. Johnny’s capture by the Confederate army would have had me on the edge of my seat had I not been lying on the floor at the time. His friendship with the red-haired Southern boy overwhelmed me with a desire for a friendship of my own. At the end of the movie I wanted to be Johnny myself. “He sure wanted to help out President Lincoln,” I said.

  “He did,” my mother agreed.

  “I think those Rebs didn’t have any business fighting against the president like that. They couldn’t win anyway.”

  My mother gave me one of her disdainful looks. “Well, you wouldn’t have thought so at the time.”

  “Why not?”

  She pursed her lips. “Because back then we would have been on the other side.”

  The mild rebuke gave me pause, since my mother rarely made assertions of that kind. She was hinting at a knowledge of the past that she declined to share. But her words did nothing to dint the romantic connection I felt to the story of Johnny Shiloh, including his loyalty to Abraham Lincoln, his passion for preserving the Union, and his contempt for the Rebs. The Rebs were the Confederates, I supposed. As for the notion that the Rebs were my people, I had no real understanding of what she meant. In the movie, the Confederates were the bad guys. Why would I be on the side of the bad guys?

  Still, she left me with the impression that I had failed in my understanding in some way. She herself merely found it amusing to a degree.

  My response amounted to nothing more than my romance with the notion of being Johnny Shiloh, standing at the center of adult attention, the boy about whom everyone around him cared. The movie scarcely dealt with the real themes of the Civil War, its terms reduced to support for or antipathy toward Mr. Lincoln, whom Johnny so revered. The issue of slavery hardly came up.

  But I had only weakly identified with a profound story, the idea of the fallen South and the glory of yesterday, that should have enthralled me. The past had failed to make some essential connection with me. I had no sympathy with the idea of plantations, or rich people owning slaves, or Southern belles, or patrician gentlemen, or any of the trappings of that older time. In fact, I had scarcely any knowledge of that past. What little I had learned made me skeptical of the things I was supposed to think. What history textbooks had taught me about slavery, cursory as it was, made me think it was a bad thing. What I understood about the Civil War made me certain that the good guys had won.

  The Shoe Man

  Commerce in Pollocksville had been dying slowly since the advent of the automobile, which gave people the ability to shop in New Bern or Kinston, where the stores were bigger and the discounts more frequent. I have mentioned most of the businesses in town, the largest being the gas company, the oil company, the school supply warehouse, and what was called a candy company, though it served more as a distributor of various kinds of dry goods. From this business, each summer, I bought a new pair of tennis shoes.

  Along the highways, at various intersections, were family-run grocery stores, some with a gas pump, most of them slowly going broke. My mother ran one of those stores along Highway 17, eking out a bit of extra money selling pop and candy and some food items, around the time my brother was born. We lived in the house behind the storefront. My father was jealous of my mother and accused her of cheating on him with various men who came to the store, including some of the salesmen, and the store wasn’t making much money anyway. So Mama closed it and we moved again.

  Some businesses were segregated and some were not, prior to 1964. The motel was for white people only, as was the restaurant. Black hair and white hair being different, there were barbershops and beauty parlors for each. General stores and country stores were sometimes segregated and sometimes not, depending on the attitude and reputation of the store’s owner. White people rarely patronized businesses owned by black people, especially when there was a white alternative at hand.

  One exception in our village was the shoe-repair shop in Hatchville.

  The first time I went there, in the company of my mother, I would have been in school, no earlier than fourth grade, as far as I recall. Now that I was growing more slowly, I wore my one pair of good shoes longer, and often wore out the soles. My father’s Sunday shoes occasionally needed a new heel, and perhaps he wore out a sole or two, though he spent most of his time in work boots that simply had to be replaced from time to time. My sister had penny loafers that required stitching at the back and new soles. Being frugal, Mother often took new shoes to the shoe man for taps to be put on the heels, not to provoke us to dance but rather to give the heel and tip of the shoe a longer wear.

  Hatchville was a small, unincorporated village of black people at the junction of two main roads. The houses in Hatchville sat close t
o the road on both sides, some in good repair and well kept, some unpainted or falling down, a mix of the old style of swept-dirt yard with the new style of grassy carpet. Some small streets ran through the settlement, though I do not remember these with any clarity. In some places there were two or more rows of houses, the interior street almost hidden.

  The shoe shop appeared much like a house on the outside, weathered clapboard or brown shingle, something like that, raised on pillars of cinderblocks a couple of feet above the ground. I expect there was a sign outside, but I can’t remember it. Inside, the building had an unfinished feeling, walls of unpainted board, signs hand-lettered, neat but homemade. Shelves on the walls held rows of shoes, either used and for sale or repaired and awaiting pickup by their owners, all shining brightly, renewed and hopeful. The room smelled of shoe polish, sharp and musky.

  In one part of the store the shoe man had built a long counter to house his iron shoe forms, heavy scissors, the machine for leather stitching, shoe brushes, electric polisher, and cloths to polish and shine. He could remake a battered old shoe to a state that was almost new, excepting the creases in the leather. A comfortable shoe, life extended, pleasing to both thrift and pride. A man could get by owning only one pair of good shoes with a good cobbler like the shoe man at hand.

  I cannot remember his name, nor whether my mother called him by name when she brought him shoes to be mended. I remember some outline of their talk, simple and polite. “How do, ma’am?” he’d ask.

  “I’m just fine, just fine,” she’d reply.

  “So you brought me some work?”

  “That’s right.” She opened the shopping bag she carried and told him what kind of work she wanted done on each shoe, laying them on the counter. He picked them up from there, examined them, put them back.