How I Shed My Skin (12 page)

No Longer Separate, Not Really Equal

During my ninth-grade year, my civics teacher, a black woman named Mrs. Murphy, provided me a model of the classic schoolteacher, in manner reserved and stern, affable enough to be liked by her students, but not one to allow any sort of disrespect. She taught us the workings of our federal and state government, including a reading of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Amendments to the Constitution.

She was a tall woman, erect and slim, with a tidy figure. I recall her strong posture, her calm way of sitting at the desk or standing in front of the chalkboard as she lectured. She wore simple dresses, whites or pastels, modestly cut, skirts occasionally narrow but not tight, flat shoes, a set of wedding rings on her hands. She had an easy, friendly smile. If she had any sense of unease in teaching a room partly constituted of white children, some of them inwardly hostile to her, she never showed it.

Mrs. Murphy endured the change in school systems without showing much of the effort and anxiety it must have cost her. She had not been asked to teach at the high school and remained in the junior high school for the remaining years that I was in school in Jones County. If this caused her any disappointment, she left it outside the classroom. Inside, she was sure of herself, and I developed an affection for her over the course of the ninth-grade school year. This feeling of friendship with an elder led me to one of the acts from those days that showed how little I had understood, in a conscious way, about my bias against black people. For I thought I respected Mrs. Murphy as a teacher and a person.

One day in spring I found out that her first name was Betty, Betty Murphy. Knowing this name for some reason awakened in me a glint of mischief or daring, and at the end of a class period, I walked up to her desk and smiled and said, “Hey, Betty.”

Her affable expression changed, her eyes sharpened, her brows knit together, and she said, “Jimmy Grimsley, don't you ever call me by my first name again. You will call me Mrs. Murphy. Do you understand?” She waited, her eyes fixed and insistent, while my stomach churned.

My little idea of a joke had earned me a moment of mortification. “Yes, ma'am,” I said.

“That will be all.” She pursed her lips, adjusted her glasses, and was done, and ignored me after that.

She had restored the authority required by the relationship of teacher and student. She had put me in my place, undercutting my attempt to demean her by use of her first name. I had tried to shame her, and she had told me she would not allow it.

The moment echoed. As I considered it, I realized that I had shown her a deep level of disrespect. When I called her “Betty,” I had placed myself on an equal level with her, although I was a child and she an adult, I a student and she a teacher. With her admonition in my ears, with the sudden fear that she would not like me anymore, I was already blushing in embarrassment by the time I left the classroom.

The next day I apologized for having used her first name. I cannot remember the words I used. I hope I told her that I had not meant to disrespect her, though, if I did say that, I am not certain I was telling the truth. It would be more accurate to say that I did not understand the lack of respect until I heard the words come out of my mouth. And then I realized I must have intended it at some level.

She took the apology as her due and forgave me with a quiet, prim expression on her face. The apology satisfied her, but I doubt she forgot what I had done. I had crossed a line.

As for me, I learned that some part of me would test the black people around me, would bully them, would disrespect them, unless I took hold of it in some way. I learned that this behavior could take the form of an impulse that I would not fully understand until I acted on it. I was a functioning young bigot, a sneaky one, who might act only occasionally from this side of myself, but who nevertheless had the impulse.

Before, black people had simply been irrelevant in my world. Now that I was learning to see them as people, the prejudice I had learned moved to another place, acting with different tactics. The child sees difference, marks it; the adult acts on it. I would either learn to be a better bigot, or I would learn to stop being a bigot at all. Two paths. I had a choice to make.

I HAD ENTERED
the ninth grade and attended what was now called Jones Junior High School. In that year, integration of Jones County schools was complete through all twelve grades, ending many decades in which our underfunded county operated separate school systems for the two races. If integration meant an end to racism, through the fact that the two races would now have to deal with each other directly, as equals, then that process should have been well under way.

But by then the county had already resegregated. The dual school system had reinvented itself through the actions of the private sector. Miserly white Jones County families somehow scraped together the resources to fund academies for the education of their children, designed to protect them from associating with black children, obedient to the idea that God never intended whites and blacks to mix. As if God had time to intend as many things as people claimed He did. Some of these private schools were operated by churches, and some were not. The Pollocksville Academy was now housed in a brand-new building outside town, about halfway to Maysville. I had started to forget which of my old schoolmates went there, since I no longer saw them. Now they were the ones who were invisible.

The junior high school building had formerly served grades nine through twelve for black students, and was located just outside the city limits of Trenton, the county seat. The white and black high schools had always had the same core programs, but overall there were some differences, most notably that the black high school had a substantial facility dedicated to instruction in bricklaying, training that was missing at its white counterpart.

At the junior high school, most of my teachers were white. I had homeroom with Mrs. Corbin, science with Mrs. Wells, civics with Mrs. Murphy, and language arts with Miss Trundle. I took mechanical drawing with a white teacher whose name I can no longer recall. In the afternoon I sat through physical education with Mr. Spears, the school coach, as teacher. Four of these were white teachers, two black.

Mrs. Corbin taught with a crispness that struck me as more modern than Mrs. Murphy. Both were easy to talk to, but with Mrs. Corbin I worried that I was wasting her time, while with Mrs. Murphy I felt her patience. The difference carried over to their appearance, Mrs. Murphy wearing neat print dresses that fit her well, but obscured her slight figure, and Mrs. Corbin, who was made along more generous lines, wearing clothes that hugged her body a bit tighter. Our white English teacher, Miss Ford, came to us directly from college, a stocky woman with short, dark hair and a fine, thin mustache. Mrs. Wells was likely the oldest of the group, her skin finely wrinkled, chin puffy and starting to form a waddle. For her, I dissected an earthworm, opening its pickled skin and pinning it to reveal the tiny, shriveled innards.

In junior high school I met children from unfamiliar parts of the county, from Trenton, Comfort, and Maysville. At the time, these strangers felt as exotic as if they'd sprung from different edges of a continent. The people of Jones County pretended that people from different parts of the county were vastly different from one another. The Pollocksville kids claimed the Trenton kids were stuck up. The Pollocksville and Trenton kids considered the Maysville kids to be hicks, and also stuck up. People in Comfort thought they were the best of everything. The need to imagine differences based on county geography had a long history in all the townships. We used these claims to reinforce our own groups, and to declare loyalty to our own place.

School was school, and students were students, and that year felt ordinary in many ways. As at any school, we were cliquish and petty, driven by gossip, secretly learning to drink liquor and smoke marijuana, clumped into social groups aligned in every sort of way. We noticed who sat next to whom, who liked whom, who should go ahead and drop dead, and the like, just as on any schoolyard. In the time between classes, it mattered that certain people walked together, and it was noticed, and the same general conversations occurred, about who was liked, who wasn't, who should suffer agony, and on and on. This felt familiar enough, an outgrowth of the habits of recess, though the scale was different, since there were so many students, compared to elementary school.

Looking back at that year I remember world turmoil, while school passed in a mostly tranquil way. Beyond our limited horizon, there were peace talks in Paris to end a war while bombs rained over North Vietnam. Charles Manson, using a madman's twisted logic, murdered people in California in order to bring on a race war, and the Weathermen tried to provoke another kind of war in Chicago. Black Panther leaders fought with one another. Woodstock happened. The president withdrew troops from Vietnam, and Jack Kerouac died.

In school, I learned about the Constitution of the United States, took mechanical drawing, rewrote Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart” for an English assignment. Many new people crowded into view, and I grew fond of some. I watched Robert and his girlfriend and was jealous of her and felt longing for him. The novelty of integration had worn off, and we were simply going about the business of school. In some ways, skin color hardly mattered by this point. I had never attended a school of such size before and was most interested in the fact that junior high had so many people in it, every day. I was in a new world, larger than the little class at Alex H. White, or the slightly bigger one of the Willie school, and I took it in.

In most ways, we were still adjusting to the idea of housing all skin colors in one school. Once there, blacks and whites mixed only when necessary, and not in any settled pattern. The banter across classrooms often enough took on a scornful edge, one side preaching to the other; but our teachers never let this go very far. Within the school we invented a kind of separation, a habit of the races clumping rather than mixing. The result was only slightly more convoluted than normal for a junior high school.

The school itself, and the community behind it, made no effort to teach us how to see past our differences. Adults were silent on the subject of what it might mean to be black and white together, at least in public. In private, our parents quietly encouraged adherence to some version of the color line.

It would be easy to say, then, that integration was pointless, since segregation simply found a new pattern and reimposed itself at most levels. But we were in one place, in the presence of each other, no longer invisible. To be a white minority student in a majority black school system was teaching me all kinds of lessons. It was in fact turning the old world upside down.

Marianne came to public school for the ninth grade. But we had not talked by phone in months by then, and our friendship came back only to a degree. By then I had forgotten Davy Jones, and the game we had played in which we read the minds of pop stars seemed merely silly. She soon developed a crush on one of the boys who lived north of Trenton, and told me about him, a fellow who looked like Karl Green, the bass player from Herman's Hermits. Her attention was now fixed on boys in the real world. So was mine.

I shared classes with Rhonda and Ursula, along with the rest of the students on the college preparatory track. Most of the students in my class were white, even though most of the students in the school were black. I recall no discussions about that distinction in junior high school, though these subjects would arise again in later years. Rhonda and Ursula remained friendly, but they had their own social circle now, boys who thought they were cute and girls who wanted to be a bit like them. My friendship with them continued at a distance. Steven was part of the same track of students, and he shared some of the popularity spotlight. I stayed on speaking terms with most of the new friends I had made at the Willie School, but I grew closer to the college-bound students with whom I shared classes. I hardly saw Evelyn Hall any more.

We still spoke of two races only, black and white. I was trapped in this language, too, even though I knew that there were more skin colors, and had learned in biology that there was in fact only one human race. Skin color in biology was a minor matter of variation within a species, insignificant. In the world, though, its importance only grew as time went by. I understood some of the terms of the debate that was resonating everywhere, the aftermath of the Johnson years: the Great Society, the Voting Rights Act, fair housing laws, money spent to erase the wrongs of the past. But our public language was drifting beyond the notion of integration, which carried with it notions of assimilation that were no longer welcome. Black ghettoes across the country were exploding into violence, and the language of the revolution, the idea that black people would take power for themselves, would make their own world, had taken over the discussion. Race had become an issue that had siezed the nation.

Even at that age, I saw the irony in the fact that schools were no longer segregated at a time when Afro-Americans (a term used in that era) were discussing the formation of a separate black nation. But by then I would not have changed the schools back to what they had been before. My own life of hiding, of masking my sexuality and damping it down to nothing, would have been far harder in a white junior high school. In breaking the old social patterns, integration had done me a service. I saw this truth and felt a bit lucky, though still was not so daring that I ever acted on any attraction I felt. But at least I was not forced to pretend to have a girlfriend, or to trick a girl into thinking I liked her.

When I remember that year at Jones Junior High School, I am struck that I was biding my time, and that the rest of the students were doing the same. The schools were peaceful that year, students got along with one another, and we shared the school without much more bickering or quarreling than one would expect. That we refused to mingle completely was not a surprise.