How I Shed My Skin

by Jim Grimsley

  No one protested Mrs. Blount’s firing, though a year later, when the school system tried to fire another black teacher, black students would walk out of class in protest.

  While in the past the school had relied on stable teachers who lived in the nearby towns, following integration some of the older teachers retired, and the replacements were young people, many of them fulfilling a college-scholarship requirement or married to a soldier posted nearby on a military base. Vietnam had filled the army and marine bases with young wives looking for work, and these teachers had no knowledge of the county or its people. They brought strong young energy to their teaching, but they were white women, every one that I can remember.

  I often felt tested by the people I knew, every action scrutinized. This was no different for me than it was for most other students, and for the teachers, too. The white students were watching to see who was too friendly to black people. Whites had been reinforced in their negative feelings about desegregation by the backlash against it in the South, typified by George Wallace’s ongoing third-party presidential campaign. For many Southerners this caused a resurgence in Civil War nostalgia, with the Confederate battle flag reappearing as a symbol of defiance. Students drew it on their notebooks or placed bumper stickers with its image on their trucks.

  Black students decorated their notebooks with the single raised fist of the Black Power movement and bumped fists when they greeted each other, but, for the most part, owned no trucks on which to place bumper stickers. They tested white students who wanted to ignore them, saying hello, forcing interaction, in order to gauge how freely response was offered. This had been going on since the early days of integration, but in high school I noticed it more. “Why you don’t speak?” a black student would ask of a white person. “You don’t want to speak to me, do you?” To which a blushing white person might offer some fumbling answer about not paying attention, didn’t hear you, didn’t see you there, or the like. Or offer a weak, “Oh, hey.” Others of us simply said hello, made eye contact, and moved on. Individual interactions between the races were still bound by the laws of politeness, and even a white person with a Confederate battle flag drawn on her notebook would attempt to be polite in the face of a suspicious Afro-American. This was politeness with a purpose, as Southern courtesy has always been. To have replied in any discourteous way would have invited escalation and perhaps conflict. White students were sullen but wanted no violence. We were outnumbered, after all.

  I am hesitant as to where to place myself in all this. I was still a racist by training but I had abandoned as much of its practice as I could find in myself. Lacking the self-awareness to compass the process going on inside me, I was cautious in all my dealings. The day-to-day workings of my consciousness contained all the old elements of white supremacy, but alongside these were the mechanisms of the other knowledge I had gained. I was aided in this by my friends, the white and black kids who mixed, who made friends with each other, who talked.

  White and black interactions were constant, and ran the spectrum from surliness to occasional courtesy to outright liking and open affection. High school opens up all these emotions in any case, but in our case, we had the added layer that we were the first classes in which the two races mixed. It was not simply a matter of a group of students who had mixed friendships while the rest snarled at each other; relationships of all kinds and flavors took place, all at once, without rehearsal. We behaved toward each other in all possible ways except with open violence. The adjustment, learning to live together in one school building, took place very quickly, and a sense of normalcy followed. Though always there was tension, the flaring up of disputes and confrontations, the usual sparring and spatting of teenagers with the added edge of race.

  Certain sights always made me look twice, which indicated they touched my programming in some way. A black boy talking to a white girl always drew my attention, especially if they were alone, especially if no one was near them. This even though I had friends who were flirting, and perhaps more, across the color line; this even though I was aiding and abetting their romances. Still I would always look again to make sure of what I had seen. The same if a black couple were standing very close or kissing. I had to look twice. Movies and television were rife with images of white people spooning and groping and connecting in various ways. I saw people at high school who did the same, like Robert Andrews and Delores Rickets, or Eustace McKinney and Ellen Bell, and I thought little of it. But I had never seen black people in love with each other, holding hands, kissing, and, of course, that was what high school was all about for everybody.

  Had I seen two boys mooning over each other in that high school courtyard, I would probably have dissolved from fright.

  Was this reaction sprung from my prejudice, or was it simply a reaction to sights I had not seen before? The likely answer is that both causes played a part.

  BUT IN THE case of Mercy and Andy, I never felt a sense of strangeness when I watched them together, maybe because I knew them both, or maybe because I only rarely saw them in some kind of physical contact with each other. At school they courted in a discreet way, hands shoved into pockets, looking but hardly touching, standing a bit closer to each other than to anybody else. As a couple, they radiated a sweetness that was palpable, both them of them too shy to show too much of their feeling, neither of them able to disguise how much they were attracted to each other.

  Their coming together would play itself out against a background of national drama, and they would be the first interracial couple to be acknowledged at our school, though they themselves never made their relationship very public. We could not help but watch them, I suppose. People in love are often fascinating to watch.

  Some of Us Dancing

  The school hired a band to set up in the gym after football games, often the band for which Lamar was drummer, his hair shaking and keeping the beat as certainly as his hands and feet. Faculty chaperones stayed to keep order at these dances. The band played songs that everyone recognized, covers of soul hits, mostly. These dances provided another place for students in the county to gather, and the need for that trumped the need to segregate. Students of both races showed up at the dances, listened to the music, and experimented with this new social setting.

  The first of these events took place after one of the early football games, and I attended with my friends. My sister Jackie and I had taught ourselves to dance on Saturday afternoons watching American Bandstand, and whatever money we earned from babysitting usually went to buying 45-rpm records. I never knew exactly what steps we were practicing, I simply moved the way I saw the dancers on television move. But she and I made the house shake, rather literally. She was a good dancer and so was I.

  My church taught that dancing was of the devil, that Christians shunned such movements, but I had been dancing since I was small. The first named dance I remember doing, years before high school, was the Twist, listening to the Chubby Checker record while my parents were visiting a friend who had a stereo. Even at that age I liked moving to music, and so did my sister, so that our later dance rehearsals on Saturday afternoons felt familiar, and when we danced together we connected in a different way, an affirmation of one another. The house truly did protest a bit, and sometimes the knickknackery shook on the shelves. It was not a terribly substantial house but it did hold up under our hip-swiveling, gyrating, and two-stepping.

  We danced to soul music, like nearly everybody else in the country. We danced to the Supremes, the Temptations, Sly and the Family Stone, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye. We danced to the best beats on American Bandstand. It is odd that we accepted these black musical groups but, for some reason, like other white people, shied away from James Brown. Maybe his music was too raw and erotic, maybe we felt it was for black people only and not for us. His sexuality was open and he displayed it in performance, and this was likely too much for me at sixteen. We also danced to music by white groups, when it had a decent beat, but soul
music offered a more reliable background sound for our groove.

  After all that preparation, my sister and I had no intention of missing the school dance, and so, after the football game, we went into the gym to hear the band.

  We were each with our friends, mind you. My sister was too cool to be seen with me at school, and I had my own friends, as strange as it seemed.

  A number of the white kids showed up, too, maybe because there was nothing else to do on that particular (or most any) Friday night in Jones County. At first I sat in the bleachers with my white friends. There were a few dozen black couples on the dance floor, and the band was pretty good, Lamar was a strong drummer. The musicians had Afros the size of pumpkins. They played loud and hard. The dancers were, some of them, doing steps I had practiced with my sister.

  As I recall it, Stella, one of my black friends, asked me to dance, and I knew it was a dare, another test, but I also knew I could do it, and so I stood up and danced with her, to a song like “The Tears of a Clown” or “Band of Gold.” Maybe I danced with Jackie first, though, and we cut out a place for ourselves on the gymnasium floor, and maybe that was why Stella asked me to dance in the first place, because she already knew I could keep up. Anyway, we were dancing, a few mixed couples, a lot of black couples, while sullen white kids sat on the bleachers. The white guys were not asking anyone to dance at first, so my sister danced with a black guy. As she told the story, one of the local farmboys said to her afterward, “I’m really disappointed in you, Jackie. I thought you were a good girl.”

  She responded, “I’m just fine, Eustace,” and moved on past him.

  No one said anything to me.

  The choice to dance and the choice not to dance were each cultural decisions, and both expressed long-standing differences. The fact that black people danced as a group celebration was one of the facets of character that the white world used to support our characterization of them as primitive. Afro-American culture found movement to be easy and natural, the rhythm of the body matched to music, to the drum, to the spirit, and this was visible in the way the black students of my school interacted. Even in the brief intervals between class periods, girls sometimes showed dance steps on the way from one room to another, and the guys demonstrated their jive walk. Whereas white children found movement to be suspect and possibly evil, born as we were among Christians who found in dancing a gateway to all the sins of the body. Disapproval of dancing was disappearing even before desegregation, but it had not yet vanished.

  But nothing could keep dancing from looking like fun, like something that a person should enjoy. Nobody told me I shouldn’t take part because of my hemophilia. So it was that I danced, uncertain Baptist that I was.

  When I danced, I was simply moving to a beat that compelled me, not caring about any statement my body was making concerning equality or morality or the gatekeepers of sin. If there was a beat, I felt it; when other people were dancing I started to move, and I would dance with anybody who was willing to show me steps. As the music took over and the loud beat rattled through us, the dancing got easier, and the fact that we were simply having fun drew more and more people onto the dance floor. Even the white couples danced after a while, the boys giving it a try. So, like it or not, wrong or not, perfect or not, we had fun together, in spite of ourselves.

  None of the white girls ever disapproved of my dancing, whoever my partner might be, since they were frustrated at how hard it was to get the white boys to dance. White boys were reluctant to move like that in front of their peers. Sometimes they would do it anyway, and as the season of dances progressed, it became easier to get white couples onto the dance floor. More mixed couples appeared. Indeed, once I became established as a willing dancer, both white and black girls kept me busy, and I hardly ever sat down during any of the dances that followed.

  The strange, awkward dances of sophomore year evolved into the familiar, awkward dances of senior year, and by then a certain sense of normalcy had settled into our high school. The fact of desegregation had become established, we had grown accustomed to the sight of each other, knew each other’s names. High schools were always and perhaps will always be full of factions, no matter the circumstances. Once we were no longer strangers to each other, we moved to the default level of high school pain, awkwardness, and discomfort that was and is the lot of teenagers.

  A network of friendships formed among a solid core of black and white students, maybe forty or so. We were part of the college prep group, academic achievers; we were the group who were in the drama class, or Jones County’s first creative writing class; we did the yearbook, and sat on the student council. We were the kids who hung out together on the smoking patio, including those, like me, who never smoked tobacco. At the dances we were the kids who danced together, and planned the dances, and decorated the gym. Our friendships made a matrix that drew the two parts of the student body into some form of a whole, even when its parts refused to associate with each other directly. We were the intersection.

  I was only dancing, not dating, not loving, not marrying. I mixed freely with black people at school but none of my black friends called me at home or visited me there; but I suspect my hemophilia was to blame for this, since I know of other people who did visit each other. Such contacts as did occur outside of school were secret and hidden. One white friend of mine admitted to me that one of the black guys called her at home and they talked, but he pretended to be me, because he had a quiet voice like mine. This was the reason for her confession, I suppose, that the two of them had involved me in their deception. In this need to hide our friendships away from school, we children were following the lead of our parents, who had been forced to accept this much segregation but refused to give way to more. White people and black people remained separate in the larger life of the county, and their ideas of difference remained intact, ready to be transferred into their children.

  I never danced with a boy in high school, or dated a boy, and the only one I kissed frightened me by proposing that we have sex the next day, in his house, while his parents were away. I broke off any contact with him and committed what was likely the worst sin of my childhood by telling my parents about him; I was agitated by the kiss and the idea of sex and could not sleep, finally confessing to my mother what the problem was. Nothing happened except my embarrassment at having told what should have been a secret, but it was a betrayal nonetheless. I did date two girls, once each, and then abandoned any attempt to take these relationships further, knowing that I would be no good at pretense. This was, in fact, the extent of my romantic experience in high school.

  In an all-white high school, the fact that I was queer would have caused me problems, and likely I would have started to date a girl, pretending to love her in order to provide a cover for myself. But the fact that the social core of our school had been dismantled prevented the kinds of harassment I might have experienced otherwise. I was protected by my friends, who hardly cared that I was a bit effeminate. I was protected by the fact that I would dance with people, that I would talk and laugh with black girls the same as white girls. I was protected by my hemophilia, which had always kept me separate from the group of boys, and by the fact that I was smart and cool. In an all-white high school, the cool kids would have been defined differently, and I would have been nowhere near that group. In our high school, to the degree that the cool kids existed, I was one of them.

  Dancing brought me out of myself into contact with these other beings from whom I held back so much, all the secrets I was keeping, all the things that I dared not share. In this I doubt I was much different from the other teenagers there. We all felt isolated, we all felt alone. But when I was dancing I understood that I was one of many, not so different, not really apart from the rest. When I turned out to be a decent dancer, I knew I had a place among those kids. I knew I would be all right.

  The Human Relations Committee

  One day early in my sophomore year, the principal, Mr. Cooper, asked me to
serve on what he said was an important committee designed to provide a forum for discussions of problems related to integration. Flattered, I agreed to be a part of the group, and he told me when the first meeting would be held.

  We assembled for that first meeting of the new Human Relations Committee in one of the school’s temporary classrooms, mobile units that had been trucked to the back of the grounds and laid out in an L-shape around the new library and science classrooms. The name “mobile unit” glorified what was actually a double-wide trailer in which desks, chalkboards, and fluorescent lights had been installed. A couple of narrow windows brought in frames of the outside world, a view of the flat, brown football field.

  Mr. Cooper was a slim, athletic fellow in his forties or early fifties, with the kind of aging good looks that made me guess he was a former athletic coach of some kind who had furthered his career by moving into administration. He had married a woman with a ready-made family; she was shy and a bit introverted, as I noted the few times I served as their babysitter. They made an odd group, since the three sons all looked like her, remarkably so, and Mr. Cooper hardly resembled any of them. They were like a family he had bought on discount, as an accessory.