by Jim Grimsley
Or perhaps they were involved in the killing of Joseph Black, father of a young man accused of rape, who was murdered when the mob, hundreds of white people, failed to find the son and, so, turned on the father. Mr. Black was first attacked by that mob while in jail in Goldsboro, but, still in custody, was transported to Kinston, where he was finally killed by scores of men who broke into the jail. Kinston is twenty miles or so from Goldsboro, a pleasant drive if one keeps the air conditioner working. In 1916, all along this route, people like me had called for the immediate killing, without trial, of the father of a man merely thought to have committed a crime. People like me had worked themselves into a frenzy of bloodlust, had demanded the death of a black man without recourse to the law. People I might have known, with whom I might have gone to a movie, or to a Wednesday prayer meeting, or to the pool hall, had transformed into a mob.
The world lit by this fierce afternoon sun hardly admits of such a possibility, the moving landscape contrasting with the relative stillness of the lanes of traffic, my hands gripping the steering wheel a bit too tight. The world has always been placid like this moment, settled into fields, roads, rivers, and towns, orderly patterns in which hardly anything moves. A few cattle stand near a watering hole. Horses lash their tails in a paddock within sight of the road. The land has such a dingy, settled look it would seem that scarcely anything out of the ordinary could ever have happened here, a deceptive sheen.
My route carries me along the border between Jones and Craven Counties, into New Bern, my destination for this trip. In New Bern, following the robbery of a store in 1905, a mob set on a man named John Moore, who was likely not the man they had chased out of the store but rather someone who was at hand when the chase went on too long. Mr. Moore was killed by the mob. His skin was black, like the skin of the man the mob had been chasing, and that was reason enough to kill him.
In Jones County, where I had lived for so long, Sheriff O. R. Colgrove and a companion, Amos Jones, were lynched during the Reconstruction era; Sheriff Colgrove was white, Mr. Jones was black. The sheriff, who might have been a carpetbagger, had been hindering Klan activities in the area, and so the Klan announced his murder, to be followed by a fine barbecue.
New Bern has become a thriving town, gorgeously sited at the conjunction of two rivers, taking advantage of its waterfront with hotels and a marina. Nearly all the stores along its main street are different from the ones I remember, which is hardly any surprise, since I’ve spent so little time here in the last decades. I used to chase my mother up and down these sidewalks when we came to town to shop for school clothes; Market Street still housed a couple of dime stores in those days, though even then there were larger stores at the edge of town. Now the street is home to health-food restaurants, coffee shops, and art galleries.
As I cruise through town, find my hotel and park, I am noticing the mingling of black and white people on the street, in the businesses, in the hotel as I register for my room. Public accommodations have not been segregated here for forty years or more, and no one pays any attention to the fact that blacks and whites move together in and out of shops, passing each other without much more than the occasional smile or nod of acknowledgment. In my earliest childhood, even the idea of such commonplace mingling of the races was looked on as a sign of doomsday, or of communism, or both. Here in New Bern, a town I knew pretty well in those days, I am seeing integration as if it just happened, as if my eyes are new.
I settle into the hotel room, check with the front desk to find out whether Mercy has arrived yet, and wonder whether I will recognize anyone at the church service to honor classmates who have already died. I thumb through the yearbook, faces and names from long ago, memories pushing forward.
THE HOTEL IS pleasant but ordinary, smelling of too much carpet cleaner, walls of glass facing the riverfront, friendly faces at the front desk, a basket of free cookies on the counter. I meet Mercy in the lobby and we chat a bit, catching up. We have been out of touch for a decade or more, but she is the same steady, sane voice I remember from high school, and any feeling of separation quickly disappears. We remained close friends through college in Chapel Hill, living together in the same house for most of a year. We finished our last college exam in the same class on the same morning. When I moved to New Orleans, I sold her my old car. She is one of the few people from Jones County with whom I have stayed in touch in any kind of consistent way.
We drive to Pollocksville for the memorial service, chattering about the last few years, other mutual friends, her son and husband. Like me, she’s worried that she won’t recognize anyone at the memorial service. We both wonder whether any white classmates will show up. Years before, she and I attended what was supposed to be our tenth high school reunion, held at Quaker Neck Country Club, between Pollocksville and Trenton. As we learned when we arrived, that reunion was for the white students in our class, and included several people who had left the public schools as soon as integration was enforced. I never heard about a twenty-year reunion; for the thirtieth, there was a concerted effort to hold a true reunion of all the class, but I was traveling when that one was held.
At about dusk we cruise along the main street of Pollocksville. I am pierced with memories. The place appears unchanged except in cosmetic ways: a good deal of growth around the houses has been trimmed back or cleared, and thus many old houses are now visible near the river, buildings that were mostly hidden when I lived here. The boat landing is visible from the street, and the railroad depot that sat next to my house has been moved there and renovated. The village has the aura of a bedroom community in the making, though it shows its age, too, in the look of the houses. There is no Starbucks, no fast food, no strip mall; there is still little or no retail; some of the gas stations have closed; but the core of the place is the same as I remember. The single traffic light on Main Street, knocked down by truck a few years after I left for college, never was replaced. To travelers along Highway 17 the tiny hamlet must seem little more than a nuisance with a lower speed limit, the proverbial bump in the road.
The place looks so tiny now. Whereas earlier it was vast, my whole world.
The old Alex H. White Elementary School has been torn down, and a new school called Pollocksville Elementary School has taken its place on the same site. The J. W. Willie School is gone, too; so, in fact, even those traces of the dual school system have been erased. The practice of a prominent doctor has grown to fill most of an old field outside town. Some of the older houses have finally fallen into heaps, including the one that the actual Alex H. White built for his family on Main Street.
At the church I meet old friends, recognize them, we embrace, the awkwardness altogether endurable. As old people do, we tell each other how good we’re looking, the phrase like a chant that crosses the crowd. It’s a hot afternoon and I’m sweating in my jacket. No one else is wearing a tie, so I take mine off and put it in my pocket. When I was growing up here, no one would have contemplated walking into a church service without a tie.
During the service I gaze from face to face, seeing the contours of the younger self in the softening and aging of the older, face after face, person after person, leading me back through decades, seeing that courtyard between the wings of classrooms in our old high school, these bodies lounging against the cinderblock wall, fierce and restive where we are now easy and settled. The evening is full of talk of God and church and faith; I do not remember so much religious conversation in our high school days.
One person stands to give a eulogy for classmates who have died. Cousins speak for cousins; everyone in the county is second or third cousin to everyone else. What surprises me is that we are all so old, so full of gravitas; we look now so much like the adults who surrounded me when I was a child.
These are the people who stayed. A few of us have traveled here from other states, a few more from other towns, but many of these people have lived in Jones County all these years. Just as our teachers used to warn us, some of us wou
ld stay but most of us would leave, and many would never come back. Mercy and I are the only white classmates who showed up. At first I am aware of the absence of so many others; then, after a few minutes, I am simply in the room with people who mattered to me very much, whether I understood it then or not, once upon a time.
AFTER THE MEMORIAL service Mercy and I drive to Maysville for what is called, in the reunion schedule, a meet and greet. By now, after dark, I find that I can picture every bend in the road. In daylight, I might have seen differences, but in the dark it is as if I am riding down this road on a night long ago. We are riding through old plantation country; down Highway 17 in one direction lie the Foscue house and lands, still owned by members of the family; and in the other direction is Ravenwood, once a very large plantation owned by the Pollock family, whose ancestor gave the town its name. Just up the road from Hatchville is the old Oakview Farm and house, now called the Bell Farm, named for the family that has owned it for many decades. More plantations are mentioned in various historical records, owned by the McDaniel, Foy, Banks, Noble, and Whitaker families, to name a few. The 1850 census recorded 2,139 whites, 2,757 black slaves, and 142 free blacks living in Jones County, which was, at the time, a very wealthy place, if one defines wealth as what was owned by white people. The county would fall into poverty with the freeing of its wealth, which is to say the freeing of the slaves; nearly every narrative concerning the fortune of one of those old planter families includes the number of slaves it owned and how that number grew over time, this statistic outranking even the count of acres under cultivation.
How much of this land was cleared by the labor of slaves? By the forced labor of the ancestors of people I know, with whom I went to school? Some of these fields have been under cultivation since those days; in places, the outline of forest and field has hardly shifted since records have been kept. How many slaves were beaten, how many families separated and sold? What did white people do to enforce the subordination of black labor after the war? How far did we go to prove to ourselves that we were the superior ones? I know the general outlines of the answer; I know that the last person lynched in Jones County, Jerome Whitfield, was killed here in 1921, accused of the rape of a white woman. I can remember the days of separate bathrooms, water fountains, restaurants; I can remember black people deferring to my father as “Captain Jack,” when they had no reason to respect him that I could see. I know that crosses were burned, I know that gangs of men roamed the night in trucks and cars, liquored up and ready for a fight. In the days of slavery they were slave patrollers, looking for runaways, stopping travelers on the road, checking to make sure no black person traveled without the proper paperwork. In the days of Reconstruction they were night riders, their purpose to perform acts of terror in the countryside. In the modern day they are good old boys, doing what good old boys have always done. In each age a different reason for the same pattern, white men policing the night.
How close did I come to being one of those men? To setting a lit match to the foot of a fuel-soaked cross?
The meet and greet is held at a small restaurant on the outskirts of Maysville, and we park in the crowded lot beside a neatly mowed ditch. The sky threatens rain as we head into the building. I have brought along a copy of the high school yearbook. Once inside, we eat fried chicken wings, raw vegetables and dip, cheese on a platter, while the yearbook passes from hand to hand. People are pointing to old pictures of themselves, hooting at the clothes, the hairdos. The room is cramped, the tables close together, so that we can shout from table to table. We trade stories about one another, about classmates who are not here, catch one another up on the last four decades. The talk is about boyfriends and girlfriends, football or basketball games, classes, rivalries, old stories of arguments with parents; no one mentions integration, the walkouts, the anger, the confrontations. We talk about the ordinary side of high school, dialogue that might be lifted from any number of generic class reunions as depicted on TV shows. There is something so very Jones County about this moment, all of us shoved into a room that is too small, chairs too close together, people climbing over each other to get to the food.
Here we are, nearly sixty years old, each of us fat and tired, heaving ourselves in and out of chairs with huffs and puffs, exactly as our parents and teachers used to do. I talk to Steven and his wife; I talk to Clarence Winkle, Andrew, Mercy, Barbara; the longer I’m in the room with these old friends and acquaintances, the more I recognize the younger faces within the old. It is fine that we talk about our high school days as if they were ordinary, simply a matter of remembering who dated whom; we all know better. The party ends early, when the chicken wings are eaten, and we drive home in the heavy rain that has begun to fall.
GOOD PEOPLE TAUGHT and still teach racism to their children without a second thought. This was true in the South of my birth and remains so to the present. Good people who would help a neighbor, including a black neighbor; people who would pray for the benefit of God’s love; people who would never harm one of their own. We teach that like wants to be with like, and that this is only natural. We teach that white people should be allowed to have white schools, white churches, white social clubs, just like any other group. We teach that God created the races to be separate from one another for a purpose, and we preach that this purpose cannot be to mix, because why then would He have created the separation in the first place? We teach that when people are different from each other, one is better and the other worse.
We teach that black and white are not simply different but opposite. We reserve our special ideological fury for blackness.
What we avoid teaching and telling is what we did in the name of that difference once upon a time, in these fields and in these woods of eastern North Carolina. A superior race has the right to treat an inferior race as it chooses, including the right to reduce it to the status of property, to trade people like livestock, useful only for the labor that can be flogged out of them. This was the assumption our Southern culture embodied from the beginning. The history is there for anyone who chooses to learn it. But we refuse to face what that made of us, the whip hand that we became.
It is easy to see racism in the violent events, in lynchings and beatings, in rapes and other acts of terror. It is easy, too, to pretend that we are not racist if we did not take part in such overt acts. But I was taught to believe in white superiority in small ways, by gentle people, who believed themselves to be sharing God’s own truth.
THE FOLLOWING NIGHT, at the banquet in the New Bern hotel, our class shares a meal, attends to presentations, and listens to Mrs. Corbin speak. She is nearing eighty, but healthy and strong-voiced, reminding us that our class made history, that we are part of the group that ended segregation, that we were a part of something important in the world. She refers briefly to the walkouts, reminding us that the problems in our high school had come from friction between the students and the administration, that we had played our part well, behaved well, and accomplished the change with grace. I am glad she spoke so directly.
I am the only white person from our class in the room tonight. Surely some of our white classmates could have come? Surely they heard about the event, since so many of them still live in the area?
Evelyn Hall comes to the banquet with her husband; other friends are present who were not with us the night before. For a few minutes I sit hand in hand with Ursula, and we talk about sixth grade, about our kiss, about the march from the high school to the school superintendant’s office, about a play we did together in drama class, about a score of other moments we remember. Speaking in a rush, one as delighted as the other, we run through the forty years we have been separated. She has the same kind face, the same warm smile. We talk about Stella, Mercy, Reginald, Barbara, Gary, others. She tells me Rhonda is in Paris with her daughter, and I am struck by the wonder of it, little country Rhonda now with a grown daughter, Rhonda an established grownup visiting Europe.
We have all grown up, become more subst
antial, planted ourselves here and there. Many of the men and women in the room have spent years in the military. Many work as teachers. Dreams have come true for some. The room sounds lively and happy, and people are turning over the pages of the yearbook again, reliving old rivalries, reminding each other that we were once young together, faces turned outward from that old high school, looking forward.
The dinner speaker, a local reverend, begins to deliver a sermon drawn from the New Testament parable about the prodigal son. He is making the point that a person gains significance by helping others, and in some way this leads him to the tale of the son who asks for his inheritance while his father is still alive.
Relaxed in my seat, I suddenly hear the minister say, “And Mr. Grimsley, let me tell you. No black man would ever ask his daddy to give him his inheritance early.” The room erupts in laughter, and I blush a bit and smile and make a show of enjoying the joke.
A moment later, finishing the story, the minister refers to the prodigal son as “the Jew-boy,” and I shake my head in disbelief. I lose the thread of what he is saying in contemplation of the epithet.
Am I really welcome here? Or would the rest of my classmates be happier if I had not come?
How many times in sixth grade did Rhonda and Ursula feel like this, alone in a crowd of white people who ranged from openly hostile to mildly friendly? The moment is a reminder that even these people, classmates from a troubled era, have their own flaws, their own biases, their own ideas of difference. We have a long way to go before we are ready to live together without the consciousness of race.