From 1956 to 1960, my family lived in Atlanta. I was in third grade in 1959 and took a school bus to Jim Cherry Elementary School a few miles away. There was a poor African American neighborhood across the street from the school, but, of course, no kids from there attended.
I didn't know any black people other than Ero and Mary. Ero was our old, gentle Negro maid who I remember hummed soft hymns while ironing laundry. I remember playing with cars on the floor nearby, listening to Ero hum in her low quiet voice as she ironed there, her stockings rolled down to her ankles in the heat. One evening, my father drove her home and he let me come along. We dropped her off at a tin-roofed, ramshackle house at the end of a dirt street. A dozen people relaxed on the raised, covered porch while lazy dogs panted beneath. It must have been an odd sight for them to see white people driving into their neighborhood, let alone providing escort to one of their own. They sat silent and without expression as we dropped her off.
Mary replaced Ero after Ero got sick. I remember her as a sweet and smiling young woman. She had a baby after working for us for a few months. My father again let me come along when we visited her to take her some money. We drove up through a long stand of woods to a tiny cinder block house with a flat roof and no windows. We knocked on the door and a faint voice beckoned us in. There was Mary on a bed alone in the house with her infant. She had had the baby at home. We stayed less than a minute.
My father in 1959 taped a sentence onto the dashboard of his car. He worked as an outreach professor for the Georgia Department of Education, a job which sent him to Georgia prisons to advocate for educational programs for inmates. He might pass chain gangs along Georgia's country roads, the black prisoners in striped jumpsuits slashing away at brush or picking up trash, their master nearby on horseback. I guess that's how I envisioned black men back then: mean and menacing, but safe at a distance. Years later, I remember Dad telling me how he felt when challenging a system hell-bent on preserving ignorance and cruelty. He tried to bring a message of hope to penitentiary officials afflicted with ears that would not hear and eyes that would not see.
But in his boxy Rambler, off he would gallop on those Atlanta mornings to his appointments, over the hills to the north or over the flatlands and cotton fields to the south, east, or west. He had a wife and four kids to support and a job with meager pay to promote the impossible. He may have felt undaunted much of the time, like a Don Quixote charging forth against all odds. But often he despaired. It was at those desperate times, so he later told me, that he would glance over at the dashboard to gain an ounce of courage, glance over to the meditation he wrote to himself: "Ride 'em cowboy!"
One day we were driving down Atlanta's main thoroughfare, Peachtree Steet. While stopped at a light, a black woman in a colorful sweater walked by on a crowded sidewalk, wearing the exact sweater as my mother. Mom was so mortified that she slunk down in the passenger's seat to prevent any detection by the white people around. My father chuckled at her for feeling humiliated but she frantically stripped herself of the sweater and threw it on the floorboard. She never wore it again.
My actual contacts with African Americans were sparse. I remember going bowling for the first time at my brother's birthday party. Raggedy black boys worked as pin setters. They sat at the end of the lanes on stools and after a ball was bowled, they tossed the toppled pins back into a bin and rolled the ball back to the bowler on the return chute. The boys would then return to their stools and comic books until the next ball. They weren't much older than me, about eight years-old, but how alien they seemed.
We kids knew "nigger" was a bad word and not to say it at home or at school. It was always NEE-gro, you've got to say NEE-gro. But one morning a loudmouthed boy in my classroom let fly the n-word when degrading his family's maid. "You mustn't say that word," the teacher said. "You must say "niggra." How odd that "Negro" wasn't her correction. White people mainly described African Americans as "colored," though my parents never did. They always said NEE-gro, as the educated, northern-born were wont to do. If the "Negro" moniker was intended to give black people some equivalence, no equivalence seeped into me, at least not in that place and time.
No, I absorbed Jim Crow into my bones. One summer afternoon, my friend, Phillip, and I were walking near our neighborhood church when we observed a young black man hustling down the nearby road. A black pedestrian was an unusual sight in our white neighborhood. "Let's yell at him," I said.
We took positions up a rise and behind a low wall on the church property, a safe distance away with an escape route if he should chase us. On the count of three we would let him have it. "One, two, three," we whispered together and rose from behind the wall to scream, "HEY NIGGER!"
The man froze and turned to see us gazing down at him. "What you want, snowballs!" he yelled, seeming mad as hell. He held his stare. Philip giggled. My heart pounded, ready to run. But then the man turned and quickly went on his way down the road.
I never felt proud, nor right, nor thought the racist taunt was funny. But I wasn't ashamed either, like the way I felt after I shot a turtle dove through the neck with my bb gun. I never shot at birds again after that. But I am ashamed today. Did that man slough ours off as just one more of a thousand insults? Did we fan an inner rage? Did we cause him to lash out at others? Did he cry? Would he forget?
My family moved to Lafayette, Indiana, when I was nine and entering fourth grade. On the first day of school, my teacher asked if I as the new student would stand and announce my name to the class. As I rose and in my distinctive southern drawl, I responded, "Yes, ma'am." The class howled. I stood red-faced. I learned then and there to eliminate that southern "ma'am" from all encounters. And my drawl soon morphed into something twangy without my realizing it.
It's easy to hatchet out certain words and give new parlance to accepted ways of expression. But you can't simply extricate bone-deep feelings born in childhood. Even though your father may have been Atticus Finch, we all lived near Peachtree Street. Long ago I let go of the big, vicious lies I learned as truth in Georgia. I like to think that today I'm more like my father. But there's no denying that those feelings, not completely defeated, still lurk darkly within me.
I didn't know any black people other than Ero and Mary. Ero was our old, gentle Negro maid who I remember hummed soft hymns while ironing laundry. I remember playing with cars on the floor nearby, listening to Ero hum in her low quiet voice as she ironed there, her stockings rolled down to her ankles in the heat. One evening, my father drove her home and he let me come along. We dropped her off at a tin-roofed, ramshackle house at the end of a dirt street. A dozen people relaxed on the raised, covered porch while lazy dogs panted beneath. It must have been an odd sight for them to see white people driving into their neighborhood, let alone providing escort to one of their own. They sat silent and without expression as we dropped her off.
Mary replaced Ero after Ero got sick. I remember her as a sweet and smiling young woman. She had a baby after working for us for a few months. My father again let me come along when we visited her to take her some money. We drove up through a long stand of woods to a tiny cinder block house with a flat roof and no windows. We knocked on the door and a faint voice beckoned us in. There was Mary on a bed alone in the house with her infant. She had had the baby at home. We stayed less than a minute.
My father in 1959 taped a sentence onto the dashboard of his car. He worked as an outreach professor for the Georgia Department of Education, a job which sent him to Georgia prisons to advocate for educational programs for inmates. He might pass chain gangs along Georgia's country roads, the black prisoners in striped jumpsuits slashing away at brush or picking up trash, their master nearby on horseback. I guess that's how I envisioned black men back then: mean and menacing, but safe at a distance. Years later, I remember Dad telling me how he felt when challenging a system hell-bent on preserving ignorance and cruelty. He tried to bring a message of hope to penitentiary officials afflicted with ears that would not hear and eyes that would not see.
But in his boxy Rambler, off he would gallop on those Atlanta mornings to his appointments, over the hills to the north or over the flatlands and cotton fields to the south, east, or west. He had a wife and four kids to support and a job with meager pay to promote the impossible. He may have felt undaunted much of the time, like a Don Quixote charging forth against all odds. But often he despaired. It was at those desperate times, so he later told me, that he would glance over at the dashboard to gain an ounce of courage, glance over to the meditation he wrote to himself: "Ride 'em cowboy!"
One day we were driving down Atlanta's main thoroughfare, Peachtree Steet. While stopped at a light, a black woman in a colorful sweater walked by on a crowded sidewalk, wearing the exact sweater as my mother. Mom was so mortified that she slunk down in the passenger's seat to prevent any detection by the white people around. My father chuckled at her for feeling humiliated but she frantically stripped herself of the sweater and threw it on the floorboard. She never wore it again.
My actual contacts with African Americans were sparse. I remember going bowling for the first time at my brother's birthday party. Raggedy black boys worked as pin setters. They sat at the end of the lanes on stools and after a ball was bowled, they tossed the toppled pins back into a bin and rolled the ball back to the bowler on the return chute. The boys would then return to their stools and comic books until the next ball. They weren't much older than me, about eight years-old, but how alien they seemed.
We kids knew "nigger" was a bad word and not to say it at home or at school. It was always NEE-gro, you've got to say NEE-gro. But one morning a loudmouthed boy in my classroom let fly the n-word when degrading his family's maid. "You mustn't say that word," the teacher said. "You must say "niggra." How odd that "Negro" wasn't her correction. White people mainly described African Americans as "colored," though my parents never did. They always said NEE-gro, as the educated, northern-born were wont to do. If the "Negro" moniker was intended to give black people some equivalence, no equivalence seeped into me, at least not in that place and time.
No, I absorbed Jim Crow into my bones. One summer afternoon, my friend, Phillip, and I were walking near our neighborhood church when we observed a young black man hustling down the nearby road. A black pedestrian was an unusual sight in our white neighborhood. "Let's yell at him," I said.
We took positions up a rise and behind a low wall on the church property, a safe distance away with an escape route if he should chase us. On the count of three we would let him have it. "One, two, three," we whispered together and rose from behind the wall to scream, "HEY NIGGER!"
The man froze and turned to see us gazing down at him. "What you want, snowballs!" he yelled, seeming mad as hell. He held his stare. Philip giggled. My heart pounded, ready to run. But then the man turned and quickly went on his way down the road.
I never felt proud, nor right, nor thought the racist taunt was funny. But I wasn't ashamed either, like the way I felt after I shot a turtle dove through the neck with my bb gun. I never shot at birds again after that. But I am ashamed today. Did that man slough ours off as just one more of a thousand insults? Did we fan an inner rage? Did we cause him to lash out at others? Did he cry? Would he forget?
My family moved to Lafayette, Indiana, when I was nine and entering fourth grade. On the first day of school, my teacher asked if I as the new student would stand and announce my name to the class. As I rose and in my distinctive southern drawl, I responded, "Yes, ma'am." The class howled. I stood red-faced. I learned then and there to eliminate that southern "ma'am" from all encounters. And my drawl soon morphed into something twangy without my realizing it.
It's easy to hatchet out certain words and give new parlance to accepted ways of expression. But you can't simply extricate bone-deep feelings born in childhood. Even though your father may have been Atticus Finch, we all lived near Peachtree Street. Long ago I let go of the big, vicious lies I learned as truth in Georgia. I like to think that today I'm more like my father. But there's no denying that those feelings, not completely defeated, still lurk darkly within me.
