How I Shed My Skin (17 page)

The Smoking Patio

At some point in the spring of that year, it had become clear to all that Mercy and Andy had fallen in love with each other. I had known Andy for a year or so, Mercy for two. Her family was old and prominent, though still poor, and included an eccentric judge who was our county's only novelist. She had grown up on integrated military bases all over the world, only to move to Trenton, where she learned that God had intended the races to live separate from one another. Andy was the student body president, a member of the football team, one of the most popular people around. He had grown up in Trenton. That he was attracted to Mercy became clear after a short bit of flirting. That Mercy returned the attraction was plain to those of us who knew her. She had a sharp tongue, long legs, a mellow presence. In the art of verbal sparring she gave as good as she got. Andy had a breathy voice, a handsome face, a gentle laugh, and a clown's willingness to please.

One of the places where they came in contact was outside the cafeteria after lunch, when smokers gathered to inhale their cigarettes. On the smoking patio, Andy could flit from his main group of friends to our group by taking only a few steps.

Their courtship played itself out in front of all the smokers, and for that reason they contained their attraction and made it as tidy and unobtrusive as they could. They liked each other, talked, kept closer to one another than anyone else, but went no further in public. This was enough, under the watchful eyes of the other students, to start rumors and to create a bit of scandal.

Mercy's father owned the small restaurant in Trenton and was a committed segregationist, a drunkard, and a bully. Part of what had drawn the two of us into friendship was the fact that our fathers were similar, and we could share this with one another. In all my life I'd had no one to whom I could talk about the problems my father caused. Queen of sarcasm though Mercy might be in some settings, she was a good friend, and once we knew we lived under the thumb of similar bullies, we relied on each other.

She would face real trouble if this courtship with Andy became known to her family. We knew this at the time and dealt with it to the degree that we understood it. On the smoking patio, our group of hippy imitators provided a bit of cover, since at least a small group of people were usually involved in integrated conversation. We provided a context in which the two of them could talk to one another without drawing more attention than was wise.

“This is just fucked up,” Mercy said. She could swear and make the words sound natural; people always giggled when I tried to cuss. “This place is so fucked up. I like this guy and I'm not supposed to do anything about it.”

“That is messed up,” Barbara agreed. We were standing near one of the picnic tables on the patio.

“I can't wait to get out of this place.”

“One more year.”

I generally kept quiet when the topic of conversation turned to romance. That was probably the year I dated Becky Howard exactly once. She was the second girl I had dated, a pleasant, agreeable person, and I enjoyed the afternoon. But I had not liked holding her hand, and knew I never would. I had decided I never wanted to date a girl again. I saw no reason to pretend otherwise.

STUDENTS WERE ALLOWED
to smoke cigarettes on a patio outside the lunchroom, a concrete slab surrounded by a low brick wall. Because some of my friends were smokers, I often accompanied them to inhale their secondhand smoke, a term unheard of at the time. I had escaped any desire to inhale nicotine, but a large percentage of my schoolmates were smokers, or had friends who smoked, making the patio a lively place. This was the era in which the link between tobacco and cancer was being made explicit, but hardly anyone cared. Many of the students came from families who raised tobacco, or who worked in tobacco in some fashion, its being a reliable and profitable crop. Cancer was our business and our livelihood; tobacco money flowed through the pockets of all our parents in one way or another.

By its nature, enjoying cigarettes was an integrated activity at our school, since there was only one smoking area and all the tobacco addicts had to share it. The patio was a cool place to spend the minutes after we scraped our plates and separated our silverware from plasticware at the dishwashing station. We sat on picnic tables or stood near them, fists shoved into jeans, our hair longer than our parents', even in rural North Carolina where no one wanted to be thought a hippy. We gazed across the flat field adjacent to the school, across the broken cornstalks to a distant line of hedge and a barrier of sentinel pines.

While we students shared the space, black and white groups demarked their own neighborhoods within it, white sitting with white, black sitting with black, some of us mingling, the core of each group posing with their cigarettes, inhaling, blowing smoke, tapping ash. The cigarette was an easy kind of prop for the movie of living, and gave the hands and the mouth something to do that created a sense of self-satisfaction and ease. The smokers appeared to be mugging for an invisible camera.

Rhonda and Ursula accompanied their boyfriends to the smoking patio sometimes. They never smoked themselves, and so while their boyfriends were occupied, they circulated and talked. This was one of the ways we maintained the friendships we had begun years earlier. We talked about music, especially soul music, and Vietnam, and the way that Mr. Riggs, our math teacher, pulled up his pants so high that his belt wrapped just beneath his lungs. We talked about who was in love, who was breaking up, who had been caught cheating on his or her steady mate. Classes, colleges, clothes, music, makeup, what we might do on a weekend. I joined the conversations that were safe for me, avoided the ones that touched on my secrets. Since I had no steady girlfriend, I had to plot a cautious path, aware that most of the boys, white and black, considered me to be a sissy, and possibly something much worse—in their eyes, if not in mine.

MERCY AND ANDY
were not the only couple who were flirting across the color line. I remember three couples from the time who were meeting in secret, all involving young black men and white women; and I recall one pair, a white boy and a black girl, who had a long flirtation that went nowhere. As I have already noted, at least one of my black friends was impersonating me in order to call a white girl with whom he wanted to flirt; she had been my girlfriend briefly in elementary school, in the days when we passed notes with boxes that said
CHECK YES OR NO
. There was also a hidden romance among two teachers, Mrs. Osterman and Mr. Byrd; she would leave her husband for him the next year, thus costing the county two good teachers, since they moved to another part of the state.

All these people were my friends and in some cases I helped them to meet outside school. Once I went to a drive-in movie with Priscilla Potter and Georganne Clark, whose boyfriend, Earl, joined us in the car at the movie, the two of them taking the back seat, doing their business as the movie unfolded. I stared at the screen intently, pretending not to hear what was happening behind me in the dark. The drive-in theaters in Kinston and New Bern were convenient for this kind of rendezvous, since cars offered some privacy and concealment. The worst exposure was the moment of getting into or out of the car, when other people could see who was who.

Earl and Georganne also hung out on the smoking patio, though they, like Mercy and Andy, kept their feelings for each other low key. They could not spend their time together openly, or declare themselves to be officially going steady or even dating. We were still living in a South that avenged such relationships, and in the past, the punishments had been murderous. I heard rumors of cross burnings from black students now and then. I knew that black men were accused of rape when caught consorting with a white woman, and that white men punished this by lynching.

The patio provided the kind of setting that white segregationists had always feared, an arena in which whites and blacks could mingle as equals. While the groups did segregate, and each attempted to assert some kind of superiority, there was none to be had. The space belonged to both groups equally. Both needed it enough not to endanger access by any serious misbehavior. The addiction to nicotine trumped the need to maintain de facto borders and a wider separation. The students coexisted without much incident, even around the weeks of the riot. There was likely some mouthing off from time to time. I witnessed nothing memorable.

Even people who supported integration might balk at interracial couples. Once again we had strayed into the territory of, “But would you want your sister to marry one?” I heard that phrase often enough during those years, framed sometimes as a statement and sometimes as a question, though the idea remained the same. There was equality and then there was the territory beyond. The question probed for a common ground of separation. Surely no white person wanted to be kin to a Negro? Surely no Caucasian brother, no matter how liberal he might be, wanted his sister to be married to a black man?

The phrase, mentioning always the sister and never any other relation, presented itself as essentially masculine. Was the brother then to be free to marry whomever he pleased? Was he to decide the disposition of his sister in the end? Approve her choice of mates?

In reaching for a new order of the world, in ending Jim Crow and beginning to face the idea of true equality among all people, were white liberals abandoning all ideas of color and difference? Was everybody to be allowed to date everybody? Was the sister to be allowed freedom to choose her own mate? Was this not chaos?

On the smoking patio, attempting to appear older and cooler, comfortable with ourselves, we acted out old rituals of flirtation amid a new social order. We did so in a compressed space where the smokers competed for a stage, a place from which to pose. In spite of the refusal of the races to mix completely, we were likely no more sullen or vain than any set of teenagers had ever been. By now the fact of mixed schools had become ordinary, to a degree. We were learning to live with this new pattern. We had courtships and mating to carry on, and these needs overshadowed everything else.

As I observed in the hours of watching my friends smoke, I noted the ebb and flow of all the groups, fluid clusters of people drawn together by an idea of comfort. It would be naïve to describe this interaction as of two groups, or three; the black people were hardly homogenous, nor were the white people. The set of students who mixed across the color line was neither fixed nor isolated in any way, and people of both races, sometimes shyly, moved into and out of this space.

I watched all this with such detachment as I could muster. There were no longer any boys in school to whom I was drawn; I allowed no such feelings to evolve. I hung out on the smoking patio but smoked no cigarettes; I hung out with couples but showed no interest in love. Other people likely knew this was a pretense, but no one bothered me.

I watched Mercy and Andy, envying the gentleness of their interactions, the cautiousness of their approach to one another. As to the details of their feelings, I knew only what I saw. Mercy was never one to talk about herself very much, and what I learned came out in bits and pieces. They talked by phone. They met where they could. They kept the secret of their closeness through the rest of that year. Then, at last, summer came, and we had only one more year of high school to go.

Horizons

During my last year in high school, and what would prove to be my last year in Jones County, I recall turmoil that had more to do with my life than with questions of race. My father's drinking had driven him into rehabilitation, and then into a new job. My parents' marriage was beginning to unravel in a way that looked to be permanent. I had spent the summer away from home, at Governor's School, and Mercy, with whom I had become close, was unhappy at home and thinking about moving out.

It is hard to recall at my present age how long and slow were the weeks and months when I was seventeen. Even the thought of waiting a single year to graduate from high school felt dense and thankless, especially when so many chapters of my early life were closing. My parents were divorcing. My sister had left for college, heading to East Carolina University to study nursing. Our family became smaller and quieter.

The summer between junior and senior years of high school was dominated by the weeks I spent at Governor's School, a program for smart students run in Winston-Salem, across the state a good ways to the west. At Governor's School I was granted a taste of freedom, a few weeks' exposure to a city, a few weeks in which I did not have to worry about my father's drinking, a time when I could be around people my age who were also smart. I glimpsed the world beyond Jones County and understood myself to be a part of it. I began to say good-bye to my old home.

The school lasted for six weeks during the middle of the summer, housed on the campus of Salem College in the old Moravian neighborhood of Salem. I was roommates with one of the members of the chorus, music being one of the several areas of study in which a student could be chosen to attend the school. Our room, small and plastered, with one window, was on the third floor of Clewell dormitory, and on the first day, when my mother had dropped me off and headed home on the drive of four hours or so, I lay on my narrow bed and listened to the other students settling into their rooms. I had a curious sense of lightness and homesickness, a quickness, as if I could rise from the bed and drift anywhere I chose, and a dread that I had lost all the life I had lived before that moment. My past had dissolved into the east somewhere. A place where I had spent nearly seventeen years had dwindled to tiny size, to be replaced by this one, where I had my own bed and took my meals in a cafeteria and had nothing to worry about except the classes I was expected to attend.

Freedom for me consisted of nothing but the ability to remove myself from conflicts brought into my life by other people. It was as simple as having a bed of my own in a dormitory and enough separation from my old life that it could not reach me. My mother wrote me every day. I was happy for the letters and missed her from time to time, but otherwise thought of nothing concerning home. I had entered this world-within-a-world and I had embraced it.

The place was ideal in some ways, meant to reaffirm the value of having a strong mind when the culture at large often appeared more concerned with looks or athletic prowess, wealth or good family. We attended classes in our specialty, English being mine, but also went through a process akin to group therapy, doing exercises aimed at probing our differences, our prejudices, our pains. Our last sessions involved the study of F. S. C. Northrop, a philosopher, and his theories of knowledge. I had strengths for English and group therapy but no real grasp of Northrop.

The group of students was of mixed skin color to a small degree, but it had been years since I sat in class with so many white students. Here in Governor's School I met my friend Sheria, with whom I would later attend college. She was African-American, smart as a whip, more fun to talk to than almost anybody I had ever met, making one joke after another, though sometimes with a kind of desperate edge. I think we understood each other's fear. We were both the products of deeply unhappy homes, as we would learn later.

I met other boys who were like me, and we talked around the issue, though never openly. In Clewell dorm I was teased about being a sissy and one boy harassed me every time he got the chance, asked me whether I would like to put his dick in my mouth, crude and leering, a pudgy fellow with black glasses and weak, owlish eyes. Finally at the end of the session I exploded and screamed at him that it was none of his business what I was and that if I wanted to suck somebody's dick it would not be his. After that he sobered and later apologized for having spent so much energy in tormenting me. I understood he had meant no harm, and I think I knew that all along. He was picking at me in order to make himself fit into the group of boys, all of whom had spotted me for one of the sissies, a probable queer. He was not alone in calling me names, but he was the loudest and most persistent.

At Governor's School I came to understand that groups choose to ridicule and exclude certain people in order to define themselves, in order to create a sense of commonality. By teasing the sissies, including me, the other boys bonded and formed a group. Not all of them, of course, but enough. In fact, this process is often institutionalized, fraternities being a good example. No group is worth joining if everybody is welcome. The notion of a world of equals is not nearly as interesting as a world ruled from the top down. Every group comes with a built-in presumption of its own superiority.

Having been invited to a gathering of students who were intelligent, I began to understand the need to go even further in terms of thinking for myself and making my own choices. So it was that I learned to make friends there and move freely among the students in spite of the fact that some of them liked to call me names. I learned to toughen my skin a bit. This was probably what my high school would have felt like but for the shock brought on by integration. Had there been a greater diversity of students at Governor's School, had its racial mix more resembled that of the state from which the student body was drawn, I wonder whether the gang of boys would have felt so free to make my life unpleasant. I suspect that different racial groups of boys would have been, instead, preoccupied with posturing for one another.

By the time I returned to Jones County, I was changed in some fundamental way. With my suitcases I walked into the front door of my house, looked at my mother and burst into tears. “Mama, I was so happy there,” I said, maybe the cruelest moment I ever put her through. She understood that I could not be happy to come home, no matter how much I had missed my family. It was not so much the place that I had enjoyed as the freedom; I had found the independence addictive, so that for the remainder of my senior year I had one foot already across the county line. I was already fleeing.

I wanted to leave not because of Jones County or its people, not because of the constrictions of the life there, not because of the quiet. It was my family and its troubles I wanted to escape more than anything else. This being the case, I was also torn by guilt at the thought of leaving my mother and brothers, at the fact that my mother was losing all her children, that soon she would have nothing but my father and that house and that town. Yet most of my life I had been told I would grow up and leave Jones County, that there was little to keep me there, that I would go to college and become something or other and never look back.

As for my family, that issue quickly took a turn that I had thought would never happen, the final separation of my parents. My father had spent part of the year in an alcohol rehabilitation center. He stopped drinking for a while, and then, suddenly, his will simply collapsed. He gave up working at all. He moved from his chair in the living room to the bedroom, where he slept a good deal. With the rest of us he took on a childlike affect, asking us in a high-pitched whine to bring him Pepsi-Colas from the corner filling station, for instance, doing so every time one of us left the house. However, a few weeks after that, the drinking started again.

After so many years of his drinking and bullying, my mother had reached the end of her ability to cope. In past days she had endured his bad treatment because she felt she had no other choice, and, in truth, divorce was never an option for a person who wanted a good reputation in Pollocksville. My father had always managed to keep a job and bring money into the house. But now he was no longer working, and my mother understood that she would have to take care of our family on her own. So she found a way to put him out of the house for good. When he drank and started quarrels with her, she fought back in ways he had never expected, throwing pots of coffee at him, breaking dishes, screaming at him till she was red-faced and shaking. On the last day my father lived with us, she collapsed, as if she were truly losing her mind, after a fit of fury at my father, who was, by then, drinking as heavily as ever and adding pills to the mix when he could. I took my mother to the local doctor, a man who finally listened to her and took a step that ended my parents' marriage of nearly twenty years. The doctor called Aunt Dora and told her she had to get my father out of our house. Whatever he said to my aunt, she listened. She had known this day was coming, I don't doubt. My father's family had helped us when they could, and knew the kind of trouble into which he was descending. A couple of hours later Aunt Dora showed up with my uncle and took my father home with her.

With this exit began a drama in which my father would attempt to return to our house over and over, only to be rebuffed. In the midst of this chaos, I entered twelfth grade. This was the fall of 1972, another election year, with the war in Vietnam providing a bloody backdrop, and the draft threatening every eighteen-year-old with military service, as it had for all the years I could remember. The war had overshadowed the civil rights movement by then, though the two were never entirely separate, since part of the reason for continued African-American violence was the fact that African-American sons and daughters had served and died in Vietnam in numbers much larger than their proportion in the population. This was especially true during the Johnson years. The war had eaten at our faith in nearly everything, from government to the military itself. I had written a term paper during my junior year about the massacre of civilians at My Lai. My friends had peace symbols on their army fatigue jackets and their ripped jeans. We wanted McGovern to win the presidential election but we knew he would not.

We were old enough to think we mattered, and to have opinions, though it was not cool to dwell on such things. What was cool was to keep up with rock bands, to flaunt our friendships across the color lines, to smoke marijuana in secret, and to wear bell-bottomed jeans that looked as though they had never been washed. I don't speak of myself as a wearer of cool clothing, however. I was still carrying a good deal of baby fat, I had a red bush of hair, and my clothes were mostly bought in company with my mother during a two-day flurry of back-to-school shopping, thus limiting any idea I might have had of self-expression through dress. Truth is that I had no such sense of clothing and have labored all my life with a crippling indolence of taste. I can remember one pair of pants in which I often went to school during my senior year, a rust-brown plaid that must have been a complete eyesore, the cuffs a bit short since I was still growing, my body shaped like a spindle with thread wrapped thickest around the middle. I hated having to tuck my shirt into my britches because I felt my belly hanging over my belt all day. My connection to my body was tenuous, and my opinion of it quite low.

While I continued in friendships with the same core group of students who were actually attempting to integrate, the group itself was changed by the exit of the previous year's graduates and the addition of cherubs from the sophomore class. All my friends were older and had changed, same as I had changed, and maybe I looked the same to them as they appeared to me. I saw my peers as harder, colder, more distant and skeptical, not of me but of the school, of the place we lived. Our school had a new principal and some new teachers, including a new crop of servicemen's wives from Camp LeJeune and Cherry Point. There were enough outsiders on the faculty now that the old-time teachers who hailed from the county might easily have felt threatened. Tensions remained between the Afro-American students and the faculty, a feeling that last year's violence had done no good.

Conversations were starting that would continue for decades. Student tracking, the separation of students into those who had college potential and those who did not, was used as a way to segregate classrooms once again. It had ensured that I never sat in a classroom in which I was in the minority. Black teachers were losing their jobs and school boards were claiming that there were not enough qualified black teachers to provide the needed balance of numbers, so most school faculties had a majority of white teachers. Segregation had suffered a defeat but had not ended.

As for my friendships from that elementary school class at Alex H. White, the group with whom I had begun school twelve years before, these had become little more than memory. We had lost each other. The old tradition of white solidarity had cracked, although it still had a good deal of vitality. But we were the faces of the students who had done the work of integrating the schools.

For everyone, there was a certain degree of bitterness involved in the realization that the consolidation of the black and white school systems had likely caused as many problems as it had solved. This need not have been the case. Had the adults all chosen to accept and support the new schools, our county would have been a different place. It is certain that segregation had to end, and equally certain that the end could have come about in a better way.

Still, even when seen with all its flaws, the fact of integration, the end of the separate-but-equal school systems, was enormous. I have no idea what kind of person I would have been had I not lived through those years.

AS IF TO
express her irony, nature provided me with a certain kind of cover during my senior year, and I kept my secret to the end.