by Jim Grimsley
However, I know from talking to some of my friends in Jones County that the line of separation between the races is far easier to cross than it was fifty years ago. There has been a lot of intermarriage in the intervening decades, and most families are now integrated to some degree. It is easier now for white people and black people to maintain friendships and to visit one another in their homes. The world changes in part and stays the same in part.
I think our biggest failure during those early years of integration was to fail at organized dialog with one another, and I fault the adults in Jones County for this. There were no active parent groups who stepped forward to encourage black and white students to talk to one another about the process of integration. It would have made a big difference if we had learned to discuss how it felt to be part of this enormous change. But those kinds of guided conversations were not all that common in any arena in the 1960s and 70s. Counseling was much less visible and active in that time.
AR: In the middle section of the book, “Origins,” you explore the ways in which bigoted ideas of race first entered your consciousness, possibly as early as you learned to speak. The word nigger enters your lexicon through nursery rhymes and children’s songs, in overheard jokes and stories, and in its casual, widespread usage as an adjective for “substandard.” Though you are taught not to use the word in conversation (it was “coarse”), its negative meaning and association with black people was clear. And in church (your mother’s claim to cultural respectability), the symbolism is underscored: white is equated to goodness and black to evil and sin. You have this rooted notion of social order related to skin color long before you enter school, much less encounter any black people. I loved the detail and sensitivity with which you unpack these early childhood experiences. (I was reminded of the playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s examination of her own earliest impressions of race—like her fascination with Snow White—in her memoir, People Who Led to My Plays.) Since many of these early impressions were subconsciously formed, at what point did you become explicitly aware of them as bigoted?
JG: I only examined the process that taught me racist ideas about blackness and black people when I was writing these chapters. I remember approaching the writing of these chapters with a good deal of anxiety, since I was not sure I would be able to find the earliest bits of this programming in myself. But once I started to write, I saw more and more deeply into what I had learned as a very young child. The chapter about the nursery rhymes was one of the first pieces of the book that I wrote, and I remember being horrified as I was writing those rhymes in which the word “nigger” appeared as a kind of chant. We spoke these lines of doggerel in play, but play is a very important part of shaping a child’s world.
I only became aware of myself as a racist when I encountered the girls in my sixth-grade class, and even then my awareness was not very deep. By the time I was in high school I was able to discuss bias-issues with what passes for clarity among teenagers, but I had no real understanding of how pervasive an issue it was in our county. In college I became aware of black political movements, and my own coming out as a gay person began to educate me in the mechanics of oppression. After college I moved to New Orleans, where the problems between whites and blacks were visible everywhere; and after I moved to Atlanta I worked for twenty years in the public hospital here, Grady Memorial, where the patient population is largely black and where the staff is largely black. So throughout my life I have worked and lived in settings that were far from homogenous or white. This taught me a great deal about the way white people maintain power even in settings where black people predominate, but once again these were lessons that only became explicit to me when I started to write about them.
AR: How did those early lessons in language, storytelling, and symbolism shape your sensibilities as a writer?
JG: These ideas are still shaping me as a writer. In my early years I was reluctant to write black characters into my work because I did not want to be seen as attempting to speak on behalf of black people. Those first books were mostly about the lives of poor white people, the class from which I emerged, and my focus there was on working through material related to my family. The first story I wrote in which I dealt with race overtly was a story called, “Jesus is Sending You This Message,” the tale of a fussy, uncomfortable white bachelor who tells a black preacher woman to shut up on a commuter train in Atlanta. Her bold willingness to preach in public frightens him and makes him afraid that his own Christianity is tepid. After writing that story I began to be more bold about writing overtly on subjects of race. The novel I am currently working on tells the story of the transfer of administrative power from white people to black people at Grady Memorial Hospital, a process that I witnessed while I was there.
JIM GRIMSLEY is the author of several award-winning novels, including Winter Birds, Dream Boy, and My Drowning. He is a professor at Emory University. (Author photo by Kay Hinton / Emory University.)
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© 2015 by Jim Grimsley. All rights reserved.
First paperback edition, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, February 2016. Originally published in hardcover by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2015.
eISBN 978-1-61620-493-8
Praise for How I Shed My Skin
“Simply put, a brilliant book . . . Achingly moving and intimately honest, and it does more to explain the South than anything I’ve read in a long, long time.” —Josephine Humphreys, author of Nowhere Else on Earth
“Excellent . . . Layer by layer, young Grimsley sheds his deepest beliefs, prime among them that white skin bestows superiority . . . A must-read book.” —The Charlotte Observer
“The boy in this narrative is becoming a man in a time of enormous change, and his point of view is like a razor cutting through a callus. Painful and healing. Forthright and enormously engaging. This is a book to collect and share and treasure.” —Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
“In a world that continues to struggle with race relations, How I Shed My Skin is a stunning beacon of hope.” —Shelf Awareness for Readers
“In this sensitive memoir, Grimsley probes the past to discover what and how he learned about race, equality and democracy ‘from the good white people’ in his family and community.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Beautiful and brilliant . . . How I Shed My Skin does more to explore the racially inspired shootings and hate crimes of our present time than anything I have read.” —The Washington Missourian
“Once again, as How I Shed My Skin so poignantly proves, it may fall to the next generation of children to be the face of a better future.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Looking back some 40 years later, acclaimed writer Grimsley offers a beautifully written coming-of-age recollection from the era of racial desegregation.” —Booklist, starred review
“Like Randall Kenan, [Grimsley] catches the weird ethos of a generation caught with one foot in Gone with the Wind or To Kill a Mockingbird and another in the world of Star Trek and Motown . . . How I Shed My Skin reminds us how far we’ve come in 40 years, and how far we didn’t go.” —Wilmington Star News
“Grimsley’s book illuminates a very large theme—the shadow old evil casts upon
the young . . . Here, he renders history not on the grand, sociological scale where it is usually written, but on the very personal terms, where it is lived.” —Moira Crone, author of The Not Yet
“Vivid, precise, and utterly honest, How I Shed My Skin is a time-machine of sorts, a reminder that our past is every bit as complex as our present, and that broad cultural changes are often intimate, personal, and idiosyncratic.” —Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire