Southern Discomfort

by Tena Clark

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  * * *

  You’d have thought my disastrous experiment taking Virgie to eat in Petty’s would have taught me a lesson about forcing someone else to be part of my civil disobedience, but it didn’t. I remained naïve to how slowly social change can come. Several months later, I was driving my brand-new car—a Monte Carlo—through downtown Waynesboro and saw a small group of people going from car to car passing out pamphlets and taking donations in little buckets at the four-way stop in front of the First Baptist Church. They were all wearing white robes and white pointed hoods.

  I knew the Klan existed, of course, but I rarely saw it up close. Under those white hoods and robes I could see real people. For all I knew, they were my very own teachers and preachers and doctors and store clerks. All full of hate and rage, hiding under their shameful robes. I knew what the Klan had done and what they were capable of doing still. I had heard about fourteen-year-old Emmett Till of Money, Mississippi, a few hours north of Waynesboro, beaten beyond recognition and killed for speaking to a white woman. I knew that the civil rights activist Medgar Evers had been shot dead in his driveway in Jackson. I had been to the Shubuta Bridge, just a few miles up the Chickasawhay River from our farm, where four blacks, including a pregnant woman, were lynched in 1918. Someone had pointed to a large dent in one of the bridge’s iron struts and told me, “That’s where they hanged the pregnant one.”

  But mostly people around Waynesboro just shushed up talk of the Klan, like they did most ugly and awful things.

  “That was a long time ago” was their glossing over of the murder and rape and carnage of our shared history.

  “Let it be,” they’d say, to which I would mutter, “Like hell I will.”

  Outraged by having the brazen barbarians right in front of me on the main street of Waynesboro, I made a quick U-turn, and headed to the dry cleaners where I knew Virgie’s daughter Cindy was working.

  Cindy looked up from the back where she was pressing sheets as I rushed in.

  “Hey, Mr. Graham,” I said, talking to Cindy’s boss behind the counter. “Can I talk to Cindy outside real quick?”

  “Sure thing, Miss Tena. How’s your daddy been? Haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “Oh, he’s just fine,” I said over my shoulder as I pulled Cindy out the door.

  “Listen!” I said, the minute we were outside my words coming out in a jumble of nerves and anger. “The Klan is passing the collection plate on Azalea Drive! I need you to go with me and take a stand, tell those rednecks they’re evil and to get out of town!”

  “Naw!” Cindy said. “I ain’t doin’ that!”

  “Come on, Cindy,” I pleaded. “Just go tell Mr. Graham that my mama is sick and I need you, but you’ll be right back.”

  I knew, like Virgie before her, she wouldn’t be able to say no to me. In the same way I’d forced Virgie to eat in Petty’s, I didn’t stop to think that I was pulling Cindy into what could have been a very dangerous, even deadly, situation. All I was thinking about was showing those horrible people that not everybody goose-stepped to their hate.

  Cindy followed me out to the car. Like her mother, she instinctively reached for the back door, but I insisted she sit up front with me. Without a word, but with her eyes asking me if I knew what the hell I was doing, she got in and we drove to the intersection.

  As my car stopped, all eyes, those behind white sheets as well as every other pair in nearby cars and on the sidewalk, turned to me and the black girl in the front seat next to me.

  “Oh Lord, Tena, what they gonna do t’ us?” Cindy was bouncing up and down on the seat, like a kid who has to go to the bathroom, but I knew it was her nerves. She and Virgie both had a nervous habit of bouncing their legs and feet up and down. They also both had an anxious laugh, but she wasn’t laughing now.

  I looked over at Cindy and saw something I had never seen on her open, wide face: terror. I too felt a fluttering of fear tickle deep in my belly, but with it I also felt indignation and, yes, excitement. Like I had at Petty’s, I thought I had the best insurance policy around: Lamar Clark. I also felt that something had to give. Enough was enough. They might get mad, but I trusted they wouldn’t hurt me, or her. Cindy, wiser than I, knew she had no such guarantee of safety with these illiterate rednecks and quickly turned around so that she could jump in the backseat.

  I put out my hand and held her arm.

  “No, don’t you jump in the backseat. This is nineteen seventy, you have every right to sit up here with me. These creeps aren’t going to stop you, not with me driving.”

  I still didn’t get it.

  “Please, Tena, just drive on through. Please. No need to get ’em all riled up. They seen me in the front seat. That’s enough. Keep drivin’. Please.”

  “No. You sit tight.”

  I rolled down my window and looked at the eyes under the white hood nearest us. I could see the hate and outrage burning through the little holes cut into the cheap, white muslin. The man nearest us leaned down, looking across me at Cindy, then back at me, his eyes behind the white mask moving like a doll’s.

  “Ya’r goin’ straight t’ hell havin’ that nigger in your front seat. God’s ’shamed of you. God hates niggers and He hates nigger lovers worse!”

  The muslin covering his face moved in little puffs as he spoke, and his voice was high-pitched and whiny. I could tell, just by the thick, backwoods drawl, that these men and women—and yes, there were women, judging by their hands poking out of the sleeves—were the poorest of the rural Mississippi poor and about as ignorant and hostile as they come.

  Rage took over. I opened my door and jumped up on the running board of the car.

  “No,” I screamed, my finger pointed to the closest white sheet’s face. “YOU’RE the ones goin’ to hell. God is ashamed of YOU, the way you act and talk!” My words were coming out in a frenzied rush, and I started pointing at the other white robes gathered around the car. “You and you and YOU are going to hell! Why don’t you take off those hoods? If you’re so damn sure you got God on your side, why don’t you take off those hoods?”

  “You gonna git yo’self in a whole lotta trouble, ’less you git back in tha’ car, little girl,” the man closest to me said. “We all know who yo’ daddy is. Maybe we’s give him a call. Whaddya say t’ that?”

  “I say call him! Cowards! Call him!”

  Behind me I heard Cindy’s pleading voice, sobbing now, “Please, Tena, let’s go. Git back in the car. Please!”

  I looked in the car and saw Cindy curled up in a ball, shaking, but I wasn’t quite finished.

  “I bet y’all don’t have a full set a teeth between you! NO ONE is going to tell me who I can and can’t have in my front seat!” I yelled at the holes in the sheets.

  “Y’all gonna git yo’self in a whole lotta trouble,” a voice growled near me.

  “Cowards!” I gave them a wave of my arms. “Y’all a bunch of country-ass, redneck cowards! God is ashamed of YOU!”

  It was then that I saw a familiar car come careening around the corner. Daddy jumped out before it came to a complete stop and ran over to my car. As he got closer, I saw something in his face I never had before: real fear. Oh, he was also pissed as hell all right, but he knew the Devil with whom he was dealing better than I, and that those folks around him in white hoods made up their own rules.

  “Tena, git in the car, now,” he said, calm to the point of conversational. It was one of the rare times when he didn’t stutter.

  “Yo’ little girl’s been sayin’ some ugly things, Mister Lamar, some downright ugly things,” one of the white hoods said.

  Almost imperceptibly, I saw Daddy register relief: They know who I am. It’ll be okay.

  “And she’ll be hearin’ some ugly things from me when I get her on home, you can be GODdamn sure of that,” Daddy told the man.

  I stumbled off the running board. My fight was gone. In fact, as my adrenaline rush faded I realized I was
exhausted to the point of nearly falling over. I got in the car and with trembling fingers turned the ignition.

  “I’ll see you at home, young lady,” Daddy said, but I could see the fight had gone out of him too. He just wanted to get all of us the hell out of there before anyone decided my little confrontation should end differently.

  From the rearview mirror, I saw Daddy get in his car. The hoods watched as we drove down the street.

  When I got to Mama’s after dropping Cindy back at the dry cleaners, she was pacing nervously, waiting for me. Her phone had been ringing off the hook.

  “Oh my Lord, what in the hell are you thinking? You’re gonna get us all killed. Is that what you want? You, me, your sisters, Cindy, Virgie—they could come after all of us. They could burn a cross on our lawn!”

  “We have to do something, Mama, we have to take a stand!”

  “No we don’t, because it ain’t gonna do any good. You and I both know it ain’t right, and those folks hidin’ under their sheets are pure evil, but they don’t care what a little rich white girl and her mama think about their lynching and their burnin’ crosses. They’re crazy, Tena, and so are you for thinking your shouting from your car is going to change them any!”

  “I’m so sorry, Mama, but I had to do something. I just had to.”

  “I know, honey. But next time don’t drag poor Cindy into it. Bless her heart. She must have been scared half to death.”

  And I knew she was.

  I wasn’t looking forward to seeing Daddy, but turns out it was Elizabeth who was loaded for bear. Like Mama, she had already heard the story and came flying through the door a short time later.

  “You need to be careful, Tena, or else people around town are gonna start talkin’, maybe thinkin’ you’re a . . .”

  Her words trailed off, but I knew what she was about to say. I stared at her, shocked. Elizabeth had always had my back. Sure, as an older sister she often gave that back a mighty pinch or shove, but I knew she loved me and would do anything for me. But now, fear and anger had gotten the best of her. I knew she loved Viola and Virgie. But that day in Mama’s living room, she wasn’t thinking about them. She was only thinking that the whole damn town would be talking about her nigger-loving sister.

  I didn’t answer her. I didn’t know what I could say. So I just walked away.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  * * *

  By the summer of 1970, after sixteen years of delays and token desegregation, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Mississippi to dismantle the state’s ninety-five-year-old “separate but equal” education system. Knowing that that included Waynesboro Central High School, Daddy took action. One afternoon a few weeks before the start of my senior year, he called me at Mama’s house.

  “Hey, Tena Rix! I got excitin’ news! You’re g-g-gonna go to a p-p-private school in Meridian!”

  I just stared in shock at the wall phone in Mama’s kitchen.

  “And,” he continued with his best salesman’s voice, “I g-g-got you and ya mama a nice apartment up there so y’all can live t-t-together while you finish out high school.” He sounded extremely pleased with himself.

  “Daddy, what are you talkin’ about? I am not leaving my senior year to finish up with a bunch of strangers in Meridian.”

  “Listen to me, Tena,” he said, getting to the point of it all. “No d-d-daughter of mine is goin’ to go to school with n-n-niggers. That’s for d-d-damn sure.”

  “Well, none of my friends are leaving, so I’m not leaving either!” I said. “I’m not the one who has a problem going to school with black kids!”

  “The only ones who ain’t leaving Waynesboro d-d-don’t have the money to go, but I do, and you’re g-g-goin’!”

  “No I’m not!”

  “Now d-d-don’t you go thinkin’ like a girl, Tena Rix,” he said, his voice all smooth and oily again. “All I ask is that you drive up there with your m-m-mama and t-t-take a look, that’s all.”

  After a few more rounds of “You’re goin’!” followed by “No I’m not!” I realized I had to at least drive up to take a look. The next day Mama and I drove up to Meridian.

  The “private school” turned out to be nothing more than three broken-down trailers that looked like they had been thrown together overnight with a handmade sign tacked to one of the doors. I could just picture it: a few good ole boys sitting around one night, swilling their bourbons and coming up with this sorry excuse for a school—anything so that their precious little darlin’ girls didn’t have to share the same classrooms with them niggers.

  As we turned into an empty field and drove up the dirt path to the trailers, Mama looked over at me, nervous.

  “Now, honey, don’t you be judgin’ a book by its cover. Come on, let’s go in and take a look.”

  After the school’s “administrator” took us on a tour, which took all of ten minutes, I turned to Mama and said, “Okay, I’ve seen it. Let’s go.”

  On the ride back to Waynesboro, I repeated over and over, “No. Way. I am not going.”

  “Well, your daddy is set on you going there. I think it’s pretty much a done deal, and I don’t see how there’s anything you can do.”

  I looked over at her, wishing I could say that those words sounded downright strange coming out of her mouth. She was, after all, the only person in the entire state of Mississippi, as far as I could tell, who had told Daddy to go straight to hell. But this time, she wasn’t thinking about herself. She was thinking about me and what my battle against him would be like.

  “Don’t worry, Mama, this is my fight with Daddy and I will fight it. If I have to, I will run back to Waynesboro every time I get dragged up there. I’ll just run home and back to school with my friends.”

  Which is exactly what I told Daddy when we got home.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he said. “It’s all s-s-set. I paid for you to go, I g-g-got you and your mama a nice apartment c-c-close by. That’s it. You’re going.” He stood with his hands on his hips, a cigarette bouncing in his lips as he spoke.

  In the end, I didn’t go. Eventually even Daddy knew he’d lost the battle and I stayed put in Waynesboro. But that doesn’t mean my senior year was much fun, and it certainly wasn’t what I expected it would or should be. The tension was thick the entire year. The white kids stuck with the whites, and the blacks stuck very much with the blacks. Try as I might to make the black students feel welcome and comfortable, I largely failed. I had a few black girlfriends, mostly those kids whose mamas I knew, like Cindy, but there were many more who kept their distance.

  One day I was at my locker and was suddenly surrounded by a group of about four or five black girls. Tough girls. They had already made themselves known at Waynesboro Central High.

  “We heard you called one of us a nigger,” the biggest girl sneered as she pushed me into the steel lockers behind me.

  Alarmed, but also just plain shocked, I responded, “I would never use that word! Not ever.”

  “Don’t you lie to me,” the girl said, her face only inches from mine and her index finger pressing hard against my chest.

  “Listen, y’all got the wrong girl. I’ve tried to welcome y’all here,” I said. “I’m on your side!”

  “They ain’t no sides, white girl.”

  Suddenly, three other black girls I had befriended appeared and they pushed their way through to me.

  “Y’all best move on,” one of my friends told the girl in my face. “Tena ain’t said anything ’bout ch’all.”

  Finally, the tough girls moved on, but not without a lot of sneers and even some spit on the floor.

  Things didn’t get much better from there. Just as I had been wrong about Virgie wanting to eat inside Petty’s, I was also wrong about assuming every black boy and girl was dying to attend the previously whites-only Waynesboro Central High. Those kids were leaving the comfort and familiarity of their school, the only one they’d ever known, and entering hostile territory. Very hostile. Never again
in their years in Mississippi public schools would they see a black student elected president of their class. It would come, but not in their time. Never again would one of them be voted King or Queen or “Most Likely to Succeed” or “Most Congenial” or “Best-Looking.” Never again would their best football player receive the MVP award and be carried around the field on the shoulders of his teammates. Instead, they would be shunned, harassed, spit on, jeered at, bullied, beat up, and worse. School would become yet another battleground in their struggles to survive in our white-dominated world.

  The white kids and their parents were mad, and the black kids and their parents were mad and frightened. We became a school with an invisible dividing line down the middle. Most of the white parents had no interest in seeing their kids share desks and bathrooms and hallways and football teams. When it came time for our prom, it remained stubbornly segregated. We white kids had our prom, and the black kids had theirs, a shameful two-prom tradition that would last well into, and in some towns through, the 1990s and 2000s.

  As far as I remember, integration didn’t spark violence in white Waynesboro. No one had a cross burned on their lawn, no one got strung up on Shubuta’s “hanging” bridge or run off the road. That said, my cousin Rita Faye will tell you she drove by burning crosses as late as 1973 on her way from Waynesboro to Alabama, and she remembers kids at our football game yelling “Kill the nigger!” when a black player on the other team scored a touchdown or caught a Hail Mary pass. For whatever reason, I didn’t or couldn’t see it. Maybe I was too wrapped up in my music or focused on my last year in high school and getting the hell out of Waynesboro. Or maybe, I just didn’t want to see it, along with the Confederate flags flying over the bank and post office and gas station and general store.

  One thing that was integrated in name, but not in fact, were the various Mississippi beauty pageants. I know because I competed in the Miss Wayne County Junior Miss Pageant in 1971 and I didn’t have a single black competitor.