by Jim Grimsley
With this exit began a drama in which my father would attempt to return to our house over and over, only to be rebuffed. In the midst of this chaos, I entered twelfth grade. This was the fall of 1972, another election year, with the war in Vietnam providing a bloody backdrop, and the draft threatening every eighteen-year-old with military service, as it had for all the years I could remember. The war had overshadowed the civil rights movement by then, though the two were never entirely separate, since part of the reason for continued African-American violence was the fact that African-American sons and daughters had served and died in Vietnam in numbers much larger than their proportion in the population. This was especially true during the Johnson years. The war had eaten at our faith in nearly everything, from government to the military itself. I had written a term paper during my junior year about the massacre of civilians at My Lai. My friends had peace symbols on their army fatigue jackets and their ripped jeans. We wanted McGovern to win the presidential election but we knew he would not.
We were old enough to think we mattered, and to have opinions, though it was not cool to dwell on such things. What was cool was to keep up with rock bands, to flaunt our friendships across the color lines, to smoke marijuana in secret, and to wear bell-bottomed jeans that looked as though they had never been washed. I don’t speak of myself as a wearer of cool clothing, however. I was still carrying a good deal of baby fat, I had a red bush of hair, and my clothes were mostly bought in company with my mother during a two-day flurry of back-to-school shopping, thus limiting any idea I might have had of self-expression through dress. Truth is that I had no such sense of clothing and have labored all my life with a crippling indolence of taste. I can remember one pair of pants in which I often went to school during my senior year, a rust-brown plaid that must have been a complete eyesore, the cuffs a bit short since I was still growing, my body shaped like a spindle with thread wrapped thickest around the middle. I hated having to tuck my shirt into my britches because I felt my belly hanging over my belt all day. My connection to my body was tenuous, and my opinion of it quite low.
While I continued in friendships with the same core group of students who were actually attempting to integrate, the group itself was changed by the exit of the previous year’s graduates and the addition of cherubs from the sophomore class. All my friends were older and had changed, same as I had changed, and maybe I looked the same to them as they appeared to me. I saw my peers as harder, colder, more distant and skeptical, not of me but of the school, of the place we lived. Our school had a new principal and some new teachers, including a new crop of servicemen’s wives from Camp LeJeune and Cherry Point. There were enough outsiders on the faculty now that the old-time teachers who hailed from the county might easily have felt threatened. Tensions remained between the Afro-American students and the faculty, a feeling that last year’s violence had done no good.
Conversations were starting that would continue for decades. Student tracking, the separation of students into those who had college potential and those who did not, was used as a way to segregate classrooms once again. It had ensured that I never sat in a classroom in which I was in the minority. Black teachers were losing their jobs and school boards were claiming that there were not enough qualified black teachers to provide the needed balance of numbers, so most school faculties had a majority of white teachers. Segregation had suffered a defeat but had not ended.
As for my friendships from that elementary school class at Alex H. White, the group with whom I had begun school twelve years before, these had become little more than memory. We had lost each other. The old tradition of white solidarity had cracked, although it still had a good deal of vitality. But we were the faces of the students who had done the work of integrating the schools.
For everyone, there was a certain degree of bitterness involved in the realization that the consolidation of the black and white school systems had likely caused as many problems as it had solved. This need not have been the case. Had the adults all chosen to accept and support the new schools, our county would have been a different place. It is certain that segregation had to end, and equally certain that the end could have come about in a better way.
Still, even when seen with all its flaws, the fact of integration, the end of the separate-but-equal school systems, was enormous. I have no idea what kind of person I would have been had I not lived through those years.
AS IF TO express her irony, nature provided me with a certain kind of cover during my senior year, and I kept my secret to the end.
Priscilla Potter, originally my sister’s friend in elementary school and now my friend, too, started inviting me to go out on the weekends, not on dates but rather on adventures that made me feel almost like a normal teenager. We traveled to Kinston to watch Lamar Vickers’s band. Once she drove me to pick up Ursula Doleman and Peter Strahan, and we went to New Bern and drove around awhile, then came home. By the following Monday the rumor had flown through school that Priscilla had been dating Peter, and I had been dating Ursula, two interracial couples in one car, the sort of sin that by rights ought to have caused an explosion in the vehicle, at the very least.
This story came out in advanced math class, when Mr. Riggs had stepped out of the room. I first heard a kind of buzz of conversation, as I was daydreaming about a boy I had met at Governor’s School. Something pulled me out of the fantasy: Delores Rickets, who sat in front of me, looked at me somberly. “I am so disappointed in you,” she said.
I realized that everybody was staring at me except Ursula, who had her head bowed and was staring at her desk.
“What?” I asked.
Several voices spoke at once about seeing us in New Bern and me and Ursula in the backseat of the car, and I realized what had happened.
My remaining white friends from elementary school were mostly in that class, and they shook their heads. The black kids were upset with Ursula, as her boyfriend would later be. No one bothered to ask what had actually happened. It was apparently too much to conceive that we were simply friends who preferred, that night, each other’s company, largely out of boredom with staying at home.
It felt somehow right that the black girl I was supposed to have dated was Ursula, who had kissed me on the cheek in seventh grade. There was comedy in the fact that the people who called me sissy behind my back also condemned me for interracial (and heterosexual) dating.
Mercy
One weekend during the fall of senior year, Mercy and I were invited to East Carolina University for a recruitment event aimed at gifted students in the region. Neither of us had any plans to attend ECU for college, but we accepted the invitation because it meant two nights away from home. For Mercy, this was also a chance to spend time with Andy, and I could provide her with a certain level of camouflage if I went with her. I am tempted to say it was she who convinced me to go on the trip, since that is the way I would write the story if I were making it up. But I can’t have been that hard to convince. Governor’s School had given me a taste of the independence I craved, and this weekend on a college campus might reinforce the lesson.
We took a bus to Greenville, a little over an hour’s drive from Trenton, and attended orientation for the weekend’s recruiting events. Once we had our keys and room assignments, we headed to our rooms. Mercy had a room in Cotten Hall, one of the older buildings on the quad. I dumped my little suitcase in the room I was supposed to share for the weekend with one of the upperclassmen. He was asleep on his bed. I set my belongings on the other bed, guessing it to be mine. Then I headed back to Cotten Hall.
In Mercy’s room, large and high-ceilinged, she told me that her roommate was gone for the weekend, and she had the whole room to herself. “Can you believe it?” She had a glittery, almost feverish look in her eyes at the prospect. “Is that luck or what?”
“My roommate was asleep. I didn’t even talk to him.”
“Andy is about to get here. Oh, my goodness.” She sat on her bed and bounced a bit
.
“Does he know how to find you?”
“We’re going to meet him in front of the dorm,” she said.
“Great.”
“You want to get stoned tonight? You want to try pot?”
This was that moment I had waited for all my life, peer pressure to do drugs. I caved in right away, shrugging, trying to look as cool as possible. “Sure.”
She laughed, a sound with a bit of a maniacal edge. Here we were, prisoners of Jones County, escaped for a few hours, and about to do as we pleased.
Andy and the people he had come to visit met us after dark, and we took a ride with them to a field outside of Greenville. In those days a car could easily fit three passengers in both front and back seats, and the car was full. Andy introduced us all and we sat in the dark, quietly passing a joint, Andy and the others sharing a bottle of Boone’s Farm wine. The wine was wrapped in a brown paper sack that rustled as it passed from hand to hand.
“Jimmy is getting stoned,” Andy said, and giggled, passing the joint to me.
I grinned in the dark, inhaled, the strong taste of the smoke filling my head.
“It doesn’t always work the first time you smoke it,” Mercy warned.
One of the guys in the backseat agreed.
But it worked fine.
We drove back to campus and said good-bye to Andy’s friends. I hung out in the room with Andy and Mercy for a while; Mercy kept her eye on me, feeling a bit protective or responsible, maybe. I had started to giggle and could not stop. I kept repeating, “This is amazing,” and giggling some more, wiggling my fingers from time to time.
Mercy and Andy were spooning on the other bed. They were quietly resting against each other, their voices all murmur and softness.
It seemed an eternity passed. I realized I needed to leave and stood, more or less steady on my feet, gathering my courage, reasonably certain I could find the dorm where I was staying.
“You leaving?” Mercy asked, raising up her head from Andy’s shoulder.
“I think so.”
“You’re fucked up, Jimmy,” Andy said. “You’re going to get lost.”
“No, I’m not.” I heaved myself toward the door, the motion feeling so odd. My head was gliding but my feet were plodding.
“Be careful. Come back here if you can’t find your room.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
Mercy settled against Andy again as I closed the door behind me. I stumbled into the dark, took a couple of wrong turns, giggled a good deal, and eventually found the dorm where I was staying for the night. My roommate was still asleep in the room, more or less in the same position as before.
Mercy and I never spoke about whether they were having sex, though I would guess from things that Mercy told me later that they were not. I have no idea whether they ever crossed into that territory. Mercy was not one to share her life unnecessarily.
This weekend sealed my friendship with Mercy, and after it, we talked regularly at school about Andy, about her home life and mine. A couple of times I visited her in Trenton, meeting her mother and her little sister, her brother and even her father, who had the gaunt, pop-eyed look of a drinking man. Lean and tough as whipcord, like my own father. When Mercy could no longer tolerate living under the same roof with him, I helped her move into her grandmother’s place, a house a couple of blocks away in Trenton.
Only a few weeks before school ended, Mercy’s grandmother died, and her family moved into the house where she had lived. Mercy and her father quarreled, and Mercy moved out, living with her sister in Kinston for the rest of the year. She rode to high school with one of our teachers.
Almost our last act as friends in high school was to escort one another to the prom. I had made no plans to go, since I had given up dating after those two dates. Mercy and I were part of the group who decorated the gym, though, and we decided we might as well go to the prom since we’d done so much work to get ready for it. We made the decision only a few days before, and I wore a suit rather than a tuxedo, picking Mercy up at her house, taking her to the dance, then, later, taking her to rendezvous with Andy, with whom she had arranged to spend the end of prom night. We had been a cute fake couple, we thought. My last memory of the evening was the happiness on her face as she stepped into the car with Andy.
Sometime after school ended, the two of them lost touch with each other. Mercy made it to Chapel Hill a year later than me, and Andy was there, too. But he wanted little to do with white people by then; I learned this from Mercy many years later. At the time, she just shrugged and moved forward.
Commencement
At graduation, student body president Stella Newman spoke to the crowd in the gymnasium. She said the sorts of things that one usually says in graduation speeches, and whatever I once remembered of the content has been erased. I wonder what of our real experience there she chose to mark. What I remember is sitting among my classmates, knowing the ordeal had come to an end. I shook hands with people, milled among them, felt a stirring of sadness at moments, but never for very long. My family waited patiently till I was ready and we drove home from the school. I was leaving it for the last time. Most of those people, with whom I had lived an intense drama, a piece of history, I never saw again.
In the fall I attended university in Chapel Hill, coming home to Pollocksville twice more, once for Thanksgiving and once for Christmas. At the end of Christmas, my mother met a man with whom she fell in love, and she moved our family to Goldsboro to be with him. She had already divorced my father. She took this step knowing that the people of Pollocksville would gossip, that any respectability we had established would vanish, and that any tenuous welcome we had enjoyed there would come to an end. She didn’t care anymore. She saw her future elsewhere. So we left Jones County for good.
There was never a moment when I decided that I would not go back to eastern North Carolina to live. I remained for a long time a creature who looked only barely past the horizon. In Chapel Hill I studied and built a self, learned to love my freedom, and made some steps toward understanding how to live as a gay man. After Chapel Hill I moved to New Orleans in order to live among gay people for a while. Years went by, I only went back to North Carolina from time to time, and home was no longer Jones County.
Reunion
Decades later, I am driving toward Jones County once again, headed for the forty-year reunion of the class of 1973. Late August heat weighs over the highway, but I am proof against summer in the cocoon of the car, and the flat fields of eastern North Carolina are thick with corn, cotton in bloom or in bales, tobacco yet to be harvested. The land wants rain, the sky is enormous, filling most of the world, just as I remember from years ago when this countryside was all I knew.
I learned about the class reunion via social media, where I have reconnected after a fashion with people from my past: college, family, high school, elementary school, and various jobs. I peer at pictures of my friends, straining to see the younger face in the older. They all look so old on Facebook, I wonder how they can bear it. Whereas I am certain I look more or less the same.
It has been a season of reunions of one kind or another as I draw near to sixty, gathering the loose threads of a lifetime, trying to understand what meaning can be woven of them. I have been remembering so deeply, even dreaming of places I left behind when my life in Jones County ended: the cramped green house on Barrus Street in Pollocksville, the railroad trestle that has been torn down, the overgrown riverbank where I sat and dropped stones into the dark water.
While I’ve returned regularly to this part of North Carolina, I’ve only made the trip to my old home place a handful of times; when my family moved from the town during my freshman year of college, I lost my link to Jones County. Chapel Hill took me over so completely that I felt as if I had been born there. I turned my back on rural life, figuring there was no place for me in it. My family settled in North Carolina in the counties where my mother grew up, a bit west of the coast, and none of us kept
much connection to Pollocksville. So I am unsettled as the miles go by, time slowing as I pass through a pine-framed territory that is at once distant and familiar. Through the changes of the present—the new houses, cleared land, new-built highways—comes the tug of the past, the glimpse of some house I saw as a child, some ruined storefront with a sign I remember, some curve of the road where a field stretched out, some churchyard or tree-lined street. I am a time traveler, moving into the past.
My first destination is New Bern, where the reunion banquet will be held on the second night; even forty years along, there are no hotels in Jones County where those of us coming from out of town can stay. My route carries me past Goldsboro, where my mother lives, and Kinston, another prominent eastern North Carolina town; both were once important tobacco markets, and Goldsboro was named a “Most Liveable City” in the country by Money magazine sometime back.
In Goldsboro, as I have learned, John Richards was lynched in 1916, accused but never convicted of the murder of a white man, the deed carried out by a mob of hundreds, the man castrated, tortured, shot. Goldsboro nowadays has the quiet feeling of a town in which a breeze barely stirs. I am picturing hundreds of white people, angry, hungry for the blood of a black man to the point that they break him out of jail, savagely kill him, mutilate his body, and commemorate the event in pictures. I have cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, who lived and died a few miles down the road. No doubt I had ancestors in the crowd that lynched Mr. Richards.