How I Shed My Skin

by Jim Grimsley

  We were left to trade rumors about the walkout and its causes, and the rumors soon established themselves as facts, even though they were false. Most white people never learned about the teacher or his remark about the scum of the earth, or else learned it but decided some other explanation would be more interesting. Years later I would hear white people repeat the story that the black students rioted in order to get out of classes for exam week. I would also hear that the problems at our high school were instigated by visitors from New Bern, where the high school had to be closed due to conflict the same day. But newspaper accounts of the New Bern school problems made it clear that the issue there was between students, while the Kinston newspaper confirmed my own memory, that the walkout in Jones County sprang from a hostile remark made by one of the white teachers.

  Since the conflict had never been between the students, our pattern of behavior toward one another went unchanged. This is not to claim that our relations were in any way harmonious; they were simply never hostile to a point that approached group violence. But the underlying problem remained, and black students continued to feel conflict with the teachers and administration. These problems would arise again the following year.

  IN FEBRUARY OF my junior year, the principal moved to dismiss a black math teacher, Mr. Fleming. In the aftermath of this action, black students walked out of class once again.

  My memories of this second year of protest are more sketchy than those of the first, though the event proved to be more prolonged and serious this time around. Students refused to go to classes for at least a portion of three days, and some marched the five miles or so from our school to the county school administration building in Trenton. On the final day of the walkouts, the protesters blocked the main hallway at school and did some violence to the building. The principal called for help from the local sheriff’s office, though our sheriff, famous for being drunk all day and for not much more than that, was not likely much help under the circumstances. The superintendent ordered schools closed in the county, and they remained so for a week.

  At the same time, a freak snowstorm hit eastern North Carolina, dumping inches of snow onto the villages, roads, and fields.

  In my memory, the snow became the reason that school was closed; such a large snowfall would certainly have prevented schools from operating for part of the period. I thought of the walkout as simply more evidence of the trouble between black students and the faculty. By the time we returned to school, in my memory, Mr. Fleming had won an appeal to retain his job, and the issue was resolved.

  The facts were different, however, as I learned when I studied articles printed in the Kinston Daily Free Press. The Kinston paper circulated in the portion of the county around Trenton; in Pollocksville, we were more likely to read the Sun Journal, the New Bern paper, which offered little or no coverage of the problems in Jones County schools. (In my household, we read no newspaper at all, so I would not have known what was in them in any case.)

  From the newspapers, I learned a number of details that I did not know at the time. It was from the news reports that I learned that schools were closed because of the unrest in our high school and not because of the snow. The paper recorded details about the firing of Mr. Fleming, the claim that he had failed some evaluations and refused to participate in others, as well as the claim made by his students that he was fired because he had mixed sex education with work on arithmetic during class.

  I also learned about an open forum that took place during the days when school was closed. As part of the investigation into the walkout and the violence at school, the superintendent and principal held a public meeting in Trenton, and many parents attended. I have no memory of this meeting at all, and do not believe I ever heard about it at the time. My mother remembers nothing about this meeting either. So I have no idea how it was scheduled or how parents learned about it.

  The newspaper reported this event in some detail. The discussion was lively and exposed a number of issues. Parents and students claimed that the school administration was not listening to their wishes. School administration claimed that neither parents nor students had expressed any wishes. Most people at the meeting agreed that the Parent-Teacher Associations had died out in the aftermath of integration. Mr. Cooper, the high school principal, noted with some frustration that parents were not supporting the high school at all. He implied that the problems of integration were being solved by the administrators, teachers, and students, without much input from the community.

  Students countered that Mr. Cooper himself was part of the problem, since he offered little or no communication with students himself. They pointed out that student government was mostly inactive.

  Everyone agreed that the problems at the high school were largely between black students, faculty, and administration; the white and black students were getting along pretty well, and had accepted integration without much fuss.

  When school resumed, the county hired a number of adults to patrol the halls and open areas. The teachers requested this protection, fearing anger from the student body. I do recall the guards, and the uncertainty of our teachers. But classes resumed without incident.

  This year, however, the principal and administration took more action than they had in the first year. We elected representatives to student government, one from each homeroom class, and the student body president, Andy Norton, led meetings during which we discussed what had happened. I was part of the group and was assigned to write a new constitution for student government, to help make its workings regular, and to give it some independence from school administration. No such document existed before.

  According to the newspapers, seventy black students were suspended for their participation in the walkouts, and one student was prosecuted for trespassing when he refused to leave school grounds after being suspended. Our student government discussed the justice of these suspensions, though I have no recollection of the number of students being mentioned, and was surprised to learn later that the number was so high. Student government voted that the student suspensions should not be enforced. Black students voted against the suspensions, and white students voted for them. There were two exceptions—Eben Strahan, a black football player, voted with the white students, and I voted with the black students.

  The discussions in student government eased any tensions that might have existed between black and white students, if there were any in the first place. White students as a whole had no sympathy with the walkouts, which they called riots; but they had no real stake in them, either.

  The Kinston paper noted that three white students were injured at the peak of the protests. If this was the case, I never heard any details. If true, this would likely have led to further tension between students, especially if the injuries were severe or deliberate. But for the rest of the school year, we students got along as well as we had before, and white people mostly snickered about the protests, repeating the story from the previous year, that black students had just wanted to get out of school for a few days.

  Mr. Fleming agreed to undergo teaching evaluations and to cooperate with the administration, so he returned to his duties.

  NEITHER I NOR any of my white friends became involved in the walkouts. None of my black friends ever talked to me about the issues that made them angry. These facts are illustrative of the degree to which cross-racial friendships remained tentative and incomplete, no matter how genuine the affection between the parties. No matter how good-hearted I might be, no matter how willing I thought I was to engage with my friends, I was still white, and whiteness was still a problem for all my black friends. So it would remain.

  Would I have demonstrated with my friends, had they asked? In my particular case, the answer is very likely no. My hemophilia would have stopped me. Had I not been a free bleeder, would I have joined them? The answer would probably have been the same, though I would very much like to pretend otherwise.

  Did my black friends want white allies in their
fight? I would guess that they did not, since they never asked, and since, when the walkouts happened, black students often warned their white friends to steer clear of the action. Even more important, these students had no reason to trust white people to take part in a healthy way, and every reason to believe that involving us might lead to negative consequences. I suspect their parents counseled against inviting white students, maybe for fear of awakening greater animosity among white adults.

  In both these years, when students demonstrated, they did so for concrete reasons. The causes of the walkouts were documented in at least the one local newspaper. Yet among white people, the facts never took hold, and we spoke of the events as riots, attributing the cause to whatever came to mind that fit our prejudice. Black students just wanted to get out of school for a few days at exam time. I heard this more than once, at the time and in later years, when in fact the walkouts took place in late February, long after exams were over.

  God Gave Me a Song

  Our high school had a chorus of black students who sang gospel music, and the chorus featured Violet Strahan, my classmate from sixth grade, who had a powerful singing voice. The chorus occupied its own mobile classroom at the end of a long plank boardwalk, and its members practiced in the chorus for one full class period every day. I remember this chorus from my junior year in high school, though likely it was in place during my sophomore year, too. By senior year there was no more choir by virtue of the fact that the student in charge of the class had graduated—a very gifted student, Isaac Urban, who had taught himself to play the piano at a very young age, and who would go on to a career as a composer, singer, and musician.

  The chorus was likely a relic of the old black high school, and its place in the new high school came about as a result of that. I suspect it was Isaac’s passion for music that preserved the chorus. There had been no school chorus at the white high school, and perhaps this explains why there were no white students in the chorus.

  The choir was a matter of pride for our school, as was Isaac, his maturity, and his genius at music. They competed in local gospel chorus competitions and did very well.

  When I heard the chorus rehearse, I sometimes envied them. But I never had the impulse to try to join the class. White teenagers were not allowed to aspire to become members of black gospel choirs. Neither group would have liked it much. White people already feared that the government would force integration onto churches next, and if that happened, then surely the end of time would follow. Black people already felt the loss of their own schools and the community that had come together to support them.

  There were still strong prohibitions in place as to how much association whites and blacks were allowed outside of school. Most extracurricular activities were integrated to some degree, though few of these clubs or groups involved much in the way of social activity. The athletic teams drew almost entirely from the black student population, with one or two white students participating in most sports. The high school basketball team, our mighty Trojans, had two white members in my junior year, both of whom rode with the principal when they went to away games, avoiding the ride with their black teammates on the school’s activity bus.

  In these years, the school revived the Beta Club, a society for students with good grades, though the membership comprised mostly white students. The Beta Club involved a certain amount of social activity, including a trip to the state Beta Club convention that involved our staying overnight in Raleigh, some two hours away by car. We managed this trip without any resistance on the part of parents or people in the community. The fact that this was a trip for smart students in some way defined it as acceptable, not too radical, even though black students and white students were sleeping in the same building, side by side.

  Other groups and clubs took on a different balance. Wherever one race predominated, there was a strong possibility that the minority would endure a good deal of bullying.

  The gospel chorus sang for the school at assemblies in the gymnasium. At an assembly in the spring, near the end of the term, they performed “God Gave Me a Song,” written by renowned gospel singer Myrna Summers. The song featured a simple, passionate lyric; the choir was powerful and clear, with Violet singing the lead in a voice that simply swelled around us, ringing from the girders of the gym roof. Isaac moved from side to side on his piano bench, lifting one hand from time to time to make a small gesture that directed the singers. Placed at the center of the choir, Violet’s round face, small chin, and intense eyes gave over to the song, the sound pouring out of her like a force. “God gave me a song that the angels cannot sing.” I had never quite lost my fear of her, and she continued to make it clear that she wanted little or nothing to do with white people. When I remember her, I remember first her anger when I called her a name in sixth grade, and then I remember her voice singing this song in high school.

  Watching the chorus, I also wanted to sing that song, raise my voice. I pictured myself as one of the singers. This was not out of any solidarity, any budding social consciousness or desire to push the boundary of social equality. My wish sprang more from vanity, from wishing to be part of this sound, wishing that it might fill me, that I might participate in it.

  Were I writing a book of fiction I might pretend that I had sung with that chorus, since the memory of the moment is so vivid even after the passage of so much time. At least I might report that I had made a brave effort to become a member of the chorus, earning the trust of the other black students, and in the process becoming a beacon of change, a little white hero. But in fact I had accepted the status quo, for the most part. I was willing to edge myself toward the limits of what was acceptable, but no further.

  In a novel or film, the character who was me would have taken that moment and found purpose from it. Brave and preternaturally confident, he would have asked to be in the choir, made a place for himself in those voices, sung beside Violet, moving as she did, proving that the separation between the races could one day be conquered. He would have overcome all obstacles, including the skepticism of the teachers, the principal, the resistance of his parents, the mockery of the students on both sides of the color line, all to prove that true unity and community were possible. In the movie, he would have been the best chorus member of all. I can spin this fantasy quite easily as I write, knowing as I do that such a thought never occurred to me at the time. I had adapted myself to hiding, and my only real ambition for high school, and for Jones County, was to survive and escape. I had too many secrets to be brave.

  Even while I was taking some risks in school by siding with black students on issues like those related to the protests, I was only changing my own attitudes to the degree that I needed to do so. Race was still, for all its importance, only part of the life I had to lead. I had made some choices, seen the reality of discrimination, and come to some marginal understanding of its impact on the world. I had come to understand my part in the problem of skin color, had learned some ways to subvert my tendencies toward prejudice. But I made these changes in myself only because integration happened, only because I had consequently grown to know black people as friends and equals, at least within the sphere of equality that school provided. I had learned to listen and had made a kind of commitment to believe, always, that black people were telling the truth about racism, and white people were not.

  This was surrounded, however, by all the rest of my life, the realities I lived with, including the fact that I was gay and in hiding, the continuing collapse of my parents’ marriage, my father’s mental illness, my brother’s much more serious hemophilia, conflicts between my sister and mother, my urgent need to write, all the books I read, and the fact that I would leave home in a year, headed to college. I was self-absorbed, sometimes dangerously so. The world and all its troubles often felt unreal. Only the world inside my head mattered, and I hid in there as much as I could.

  Still, I would like to have lived in a world where I could have sung in that chorus, where what mattered
would have been only the way my voice blended with the others and the sound we made. I think I could have added to the music.

  The Smoking Patio

  At some point in the spring of that year, it had become clear to all that Mercy and Andy had fallen in love with each other. I had known Andy for a year or so, Mercy for two. Her family was old and prominent, though still poor, and included an eccentric judge who was our county’s only novelist. She had grown up on integrated military bases all over the world, only to move to Trenton, where she learned that God had intended the races to live separate from one another. Andy was the student body president, a member of the football team, one of the most popular people around. He had grown up in Trenton. That he was attracted to Mercy became clear after a short bit of flirting. That Mercy returned the attraction was plain to those of us who knew her. She had a sharp tongue, long legs, a mellow presence. In the art of verbal sparring she gave as good as she got. Andy had a breathy voice, a handsome face, a gentle laugh, and a clown’s willingness to please.

  One of the places where they came in contact was outside the cafeteria after lunch, when smokers gathered to inhale their cigarettes. On the smoking patio, Andy could flit from his main group of friends to our group by taking only a few steps.

  Their courtship played itself out in front of all the smokers, and for that reason they contained their attraction and made it as tidy and unobtrusive as they could. They liked each other, talked, kept closer to one another than anyone else, but went no further in public. This was enough, under the watchful eyes of the other students, to start rumors and to create a bit of scandal.