How I Shed My Skin

by Jim Grimsley

  Later, as I am leaving, Clarence asks me if I have any idea why none of the other white classmates are here. Since he was our class president, it is his job to organize the reunions, so he wonders what he should do. Are the white people having a separate reunion? But he knows the answer as well as I do, I expect. There is still the old stubbornness, the same refusal, whites holding on to the notion that is so deeply rooted in us, that the white race should not mix, beyond a certain point, with those of other colors. That much has never changed. And tonight I wonder whether many of the black people here don’t feel more or less the same.

  Somewhere in my memory, beneath all I’ve learned and experienced, there is still the little bigot I was meant to be. I can hope that I’ve changed; I can question my upbringing; I can examine my life for every nuance of bias and prejudice and racism; but even so I can never erase that earliest software, those assumptions that were part of my surroundings from my first breath. This is why, whenever a white person tells me he or she is not a racist, I never believe the statement. What we learn in those earliest months and years can never be deleted.

  But this fact was never a doom or a destiny. I changed. I learned to question the programming. When Violet Strahan spoke back to me in sixth grade, after I decided to call her a black bitch, something crumbled in my vision of the world. In her response she was defiantly, loudly, brazenly human, and she blazed with the fact of herself. I had thought to call her a name and score points with the other white kids. I had thought that she would be meek because she was black. I had thought she agreed with me that I was superior to her. No one was more surprised than me to learn that I was wrong on all counts. She cracked open the invisibility barrier right away. She let me know how completely present she was.

  This was no moment of revelation so much as simple recognition. I was too young for anything more abstract. She was like people I knew; when she was angry I could feel it; and when she spoke and looked me in the eye, I understood the power of her person. She was everything I had been told that black people were not. She was haughty and superior in her tone. She schooled me like a child. She was not the least bit hesitant.

  For me this was the crucial moment. Maybe if this confrontation with Violet had failed to get through to me, I would still have learned this lesson at some other time. But I understood in an instant that there was no difference between Violet, Rhonda, Ursula, me, or any of the rest of us. This was not comprehension that was conscious, but was something deeper, a knowing from the bone. I had no need to articulate it; the feeling was true in my body.

  When Ursula kissed me on the cheek in seventh grade, I felt flushed and warm. When Rhonda looked at pictures of Davy Jones with me, I felt accepted and safe. When Mr. Wexler listened to my opinions about Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, I felt respected as an intellect. During the first dance at high school, I fell into the same rhythm as everybody else on the floor, joining them for a moment. As the protests unfolded later over those two winters, I felt exhilarated that people were acting out in my high school, speaking their minds, taking action as a group. What they did made us part of the world. Violet had knocked me open. A confrontation with the facts had knocked my head open. Everybody in my town and in my high school had that choice to make, whether to see each other as equals and move on in one direction, or else to refuse and move on in another. There were no other paths.

  Now I am packing my suitcase in the hotel room, looking out the window over the parking lot at the distant line of roofs of downtown New Bern. There is still so much of me that feels a close connection to this place, the more so now because I am here and so much is familiar. I pack the car and head toward home, but this morning I travel the long way, down Highway 17 to Pollocksville, past Rhems Church, 10 Mile Fork Road, Green Valley, Killis Murphy Road, through the little village and up Highway 58 toward Trenton. The old high school sits halfway there, in the same field. I can see some new outbuildings, but the core of the school is just as it was when I stood in that courtyard, books under my arm, hearing the bell for class. I sit in my car for a while, parked by the side of the road, staring at the old bricks, at the flagpole, at the empty parking lot.

  I can see us all standing in the smoking patio, staring over that field, vain and young and sure of ourselves. In my mind it is the month before high school is over, I am about to graduate, and my long life in Jones County is soon to end. My only thought is that I want to fly away. Now, so much later, I find I am still rooted here.

  Maybe it is the fact of the reunion that sums it all up in my head. We were the mighty Trojans of the Class of 1973, the fourth graduating class of a new high school composed of all the students of the county. We slouched from class to class, adopted the poses of coolness, turned up our noses at one another in the cafeteria, called each other names, gossiped, spread stories false and true, speculated about who was with who, speculated about who was still a virgin, talked about politics in mostly uninformed ways. White people declared that the South would rise again. Black people raised one fist and chanted for Black Power. Somehow we negotiated a space between those poles and learned to sit in classrooms together. In some cases we made friendships. Some of us fell in love. The heavens neither trembled nor opened, nor did earthquakes crack the ground. God’s wrath failed to show itself, and the mixing of the races, as it turned out, was simply one more change that we learned to accept, whether happily or grudgingly. We learned to live in the presence of one another. We were the ones who desegregated Jones County public schools, black and white, male and female, sullen and stormy, happy and giddy, wanton and drunken, cool and slouched, shy and lost. Lawyers, judges, adults declared that the days of separate schools were over, but we were the ones who took the next step. History gave us a piece of itself. We made of it what we could.

  Continue the conversation with these thought-provoking Algonquin books, available in print and e-book formats wherever books are sold.

  On the Road to Freedom by Charles E. Cobb Jr.

  Panther Baby by Jamal Joseph

  The Good Negress by A. J. Verdelle

  The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

  Silver Rights by Constance Curry

  Clover by Dori Sanders

  We Were Brothers by Barry Moser

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  A Conversation with Jim Grimsley and Anne Rasmussen

  Reprinted with permission of Late Night Library and LateNightLibrary.org.

  Anne Rasmussen: Almost fifty years have passed since that first school year, in 1966, when your sixth-grade classroom in rural Jones County, North Carolina, admitted its first black pupils in response to the Freedom of Choice Act. And yet cultural tensions related to race are still very much a part of our current national conversation. You’ve obviously thought deeply and reflectively about these issues since the moment your own small-town, Southern, white world expanded to include those three black girls, and with them a discovery: that a world existed beyond what you had been taught to expect. What made you decide to write about this particular experience now, and why as a memoir rather than a novel (or play)?

  Jim Grimsley: The idea of the book came to me at least a couple of decades ago, and perhaps a bit more; I realized at some point that there had been rather little written about this event by white Southern writers. The idea for the book underwent a good deal of transformation as I considered it. My original idea was to write a memoir, but to mix fiction into it in order to make it both dramatic and true. I knew that a memoir would have a greater feeling of authority than a piece of fiction about this era, but I was constrained in making the attempt by the fact that I had already written a good deal of autobiographical fiction about this era of my life, and I did not want to write a repeat of that. My childhood story involved a number of powerful elements; I grew up in a family that was plagued by the violence of my father, his alcoholism, and the chronic illness, hemophilia, that my brother and I lived with. I told the story of this family in my first nov
el, Winter Birds, so I was aware of the power of the material. My fear was that these aspects of the story would cloud the focus of any memoir I might write about my early years.

  I did a lot of reading over the last two decades to prepare me for this writing, and meanwhile pondered how best to shape the story. I read books about eastern North Carolina history, about the type of slavery that was practiced there, about the Civil War and reconstruction. I read slave narratives recorded during the Works Progress Administration (WPA) era, which were oral histories taken from slaves who had survived in Piedmont and eastern North Carolina. This reading taught me that I actually knew very little of my own history; the process showed me that while Southerners might be reputed to be great storytellers and sharers of their own history, the history that we had handed down to ourselves in Jones County was incomplete.

  About six years ago I felt that it was time to take on this book and set out to write it. I chose to shape it as a novel, hoping that later I would be able to weave some chapters of memoir into the fictional narrative. In framing the novel I chose a child of a family different from my own, but I told his story using largely the facts of my sixth-grade class as I remembered them. That story encompassed only the sixth-grade year when Freedom of Choice was in play in North Carolina, the year that the three black girls came to our class. I finished a manuscript of the book that was some four hundred pages in length, showed it to my publisher and to some other people, and got lukewarm reactions to the story all around. Rejection was painful, as it always is, and it took me a few months to work through their responses and to understand that the failure was mine. My editor at Algonquin saw the book as promising and offered some very specific suggestions to make it better, but while I knew these were good ideas, I also knew they were not what I wanted to do.

  I decided to write a manuscript in which I simply wrote down everything I could remember about my encounters with black people and with the idea of blackness, reaching back as far as I could go. When I started this work, I very quickly realized that I was writing material that was vastly stronger than the novel. My fears about the memoir proved unfounded, as I was able very easily to limit the writing to the subject of integration and to limit the material about my family. My story was largely that of my own transformation from a young bigot to something that I now term a recovering bigot, someone who still has racist programming but who refuses to act on it, much the way that an alcoholic recovers by refusing to drink one day at a time.

  When I showed this manuscript to my editor, he became excited about the book, and he saw what I was trying to do with this story very clearly; he helped me to reshape that manuscript into the present book.

  AR: I’m interested in the point you make about growing up without knowing the true history of your own region in regards to race. (I think this could be said of white folks in other regions as well—the ability to remain ignorant of this history is a pretty major indicator of white privilege.) Can you give an example of a detail that you encountered in your research that particularly surprised you, either because it deviated sharply from your personal recollections or changed your own understanding of a memory from this time?

  JG: When I read the history of lynchings in eastern North Carolina, I was struck by the fact that the people who were involved in these events might have been friends and family. There’s a whole brutal history to the way our country was settled, and I knew it in outline, but the impact of it did not come home to me until I read about the lynching of men in Wayne County, in Lenoir County, and in Jones County, where at least three men were killed by mob violence. I pictured my relatives, my acquaintances, my friends, even myself in these crowds, and the feeling was startling and unpleasant. The last man was hung in Jones County sometime in the 1930s, about the time my parents were born. Understanding that such acts had taken place in my home, where I thought of people as gentle and kindly, made me understand how much bigger the history was than I had realized.

  AR: One thing that really struck me about the first section of the book, which follows the first year that Violet, Ursula, and Rhonda join your class, is how overwhelmingly silent the adults in your world (parents, teachers, and other whites in your community) are on the subject of race relations or desegregation. The teacher introduces the new girls as though they’d simply moved there from another town. And you and your white classmates receive no real cues from adults about how you are expected to respond or behave in this unprecedented situation: you and your peers are left to decipher the silence. Whereas the three newcomers (not having the luxury to ignore—or pretend to ignore—their racial difference) seem quite a bit more prepared for the possibility of confrontation. You and your sixth-grade classmates learn by trial and error what you can and can’t say or do; you form friendships and alliances in spite of (or perhaps because of) this. What do you imagine caused such a total silence on the part of the adults in your world, particularly your teachers, in the face of this tremendous cultural shift?

  JG: I think the people in my little town felt a deep discomfort with the whole idea of race and that they kept silent about the process of integration for a whole spectrum of reasons. So when I say that the community was silent on the subject, what I mean is that there was no consensus, no open discussion, no preparation for integration. White Southerners were deeply conflicted about civil right legislation and about the end of the two separate school systems. Some whites openly opposed integration; some saw it as inevitable; some even approved of it but looked on its coming with trepidation, not certain what this enormous change would do to what we called our “way of life.”

  People kept silent about this issue because to pursue it too directly would bring about conflict, and the adults I knew did not like open discussions of anything controversial. It’s not the way of small-town people to discuss their feelings, their problems, their fears. The idea of integration was very frightening to people and so they ignored it as much as they could. When somebody mentioned integration at our church, usually in a negative way, the subject hung in the air uncomfortably for a moment or two and then disappeared again. This is what I remember from the people I knew.

  There were exceptions, I’m sure. There were parents who told their children to respect the black students in our classrooms, though I can remember only one or two families in which this kind of conversation took place, and I only learned about those families much later. In my own family, issues of survival overpowered even the idea of integration.

  There had to have been some discussions about integration among the adults that went further than those to which I was exposed, because many white people took action to oppose the consolidation of schools. Private schools were formed in our county and the neighboring county, starting around 1968. I have no idea what this process was like, but it had to involve a good deal of discussion.

  The silence of our schoolteachers on this subject was the most surprising to me. My elementary schoolteachers were nearly all women, very strong-minded people, and I doubt they would have been afraid of this kind of conversation without good reason. It’s possible they felt they could not control such a discussion in their classroom; it’s possible that some of them did not approve of integration or that they did not want to teach black students; it’s possible that they did not want to come into conflict with our parents by having such discussions. I simply don’t know why there was so little preparation for this process on the part of the schools.

  AR: In 1968 the Supreme Court rules Freedom of Choice insufficient to integrate the public schools, and a more enforced plan of busing and integration follows. Many of your white peers abandon the public system in favor of hastily created private schools, and you find yourself in the minority in high school, hoping to fit in with an entirely new set of peers. And there are institutional challenges as well: the teaching staff is mostly white and many are inexperienced new teachers working off their educational debt. Some resent having to teach black students and make racist remarks. When y
our black peers attempt to address these issues by staging a walkout, it’s reframed as a “riot” in subsequent reports. You and your classmates forged alliances, friendships, and romances across racial boundaries within the self-contained world of the school. And yet outside of school, most folks reverted to their (separate) communities. You were the only white person to attend your fortieth high school reunion—one classmate even asked you if the whites were holding a separate reunion elsewhere. What do you think could have been done to make these connections more lasting and meaningful over time?

  JG: The personal connections that we made were in fact lasting and meaningful over time, at least to some of us. Facebook brought me back in touch with a lot of my high school friends, and the sense of connection we feel to one another is palpable. Living through those years was intense for all of us, and it forged bonds that are strong. The people I knew in high school can cut through to my core very easily and quickly, and some of them still do so, even in the shortest message on my Facebook page. I have a reverence for those folks that is not like any of my other friendships. They remind me of my childhood; they call me by my childhood name, Jimmy. They saw me at my worst and weakest, before I had developed my adult ability to disguise myself.

  It’s hard for me to speculate about why the white students did not come to the reunion because I don’t live there any more. There are a lot of reasons that make it hard to face people you knew in high school; there is likely still to be a reluctance on the part of blacks and whites to socialize with one another, especially in groups. Since writing the book I have heard that the practice of holding racially segregated reunions is not all that uncommon in the South even today, and I expect this reflects a continued reluctance on the part of white people to accept integration at the social level. White people by and large do not see black people as their social equals, and this is particularly true in rural areas.