How I Shed My Skin (2 page)

They sat among us thirty-odd white children, composed and prepared for whatever might come. The rest of us, who knew each other so well from five long years in classroom and on playground, who had grown so used to each other, who had established our social order, suddenly found our world was much different than before. We had dealt with few newcomers to our group.

A bell rang. Mr. Vaughn gave the clock over the door a bleary, yellow-eyed look. School began.

MARIANNE HAD COME
to school in her mother's car, as she always did, wearing her brown hair tied behind her head with a girlish ribbon, her blouse with a sort of sailor's bib, her pale legs under a modest skirt. She had a mouth full of braces that made her talk a bit moist at times. I can't recollect where she sat that first day of school, though she, Virginia, and I would contrive to sit close to one another for most of that year.

I don't recall much in the way of conversation, though we must have chattered as we always did, not simply Marianne and me but all the rest of us. The boys snickered in the back of the room, told dirty jokes, had farting contests, and talked about their weekend at Catfish Lake. Friends in adjacent desks whispered to one another, girls sharing chewing gum, which they were not supposed to chew, sliding the gum into their mouths in secret.

Marianne and I talked about Batman, maybe, or about the new show
Star Trek
that would premiere in a few days. She might have brought an issue of
Tiger Beat
to school that day, in which case she showed me a picture of her secret crush, the guitarist for Herman's Hermits, Derek Leckenby, who rivaled Prince Charles for her affections. I can hardly remember what I contributed to these conversations.

At my back was Violet Strahan, the black girl, sitting in the desk behind me.

I had an impulse to say something to her, to call her a name.

Of my memories of that day, this moment comes to me the most clearly. I had a feeling it would be funny to call Violet a name, and I knew I was daring enough to do it. The feeling of that thought in my head is far more vivid than any other detail of the beginning of school. I am fairly certain that this happened either on the first day of school or soon after. I knew that calling Violet a name would make the boys at the back of the room laugh. That moment inside my head rings down through the years so clearly. I was eleven years old, filled with a vague sense of purpose, and ready to do my part, though for what, I could not have said.

The moment was clear, sunny. Mr. Vaughn had left us unattended for some reason, maybe to smoke a cigarette in the teachers' lounge. Our schoolroom had fifteen-foot ceilings that made the sound of our chatter ring, and windows that nearly reached to the top of the ceiling. The windows would have been open, maybe a breeze coming through to stir the heat. I had the impulse to speak again, and I turned to Violet, and a moment of silence fell over the classroom, into which I said the words I had been planning. “You black bitch,” I said, and some of the white boys looked at me and grinned. People giggled nervously.

Violet hardly even blinked. “You white cracker bitch,” she said back to me, without hesitation, and cocked an eyebrow and clamped her jaw together.

I sat dumbfounded. There had been no likelihood, in my fantasy, that she could speak back. A flush came to my face.

“You didn't think I'd say that, did you?” Her voice was even louder than before, and her eyes flashed with a kind of angry light. Everybody was listening. The laughter had stopped. “Black is beautiful. I love my black skin. What do you think about that?”

“You are a black bitch,” I said again, stupidly, blushing. Some of the white students continued to snicker and I could tell they thought I was really brave. But the moment did not make me feel the way I had thought it would.

“And you a white one,” she said, folding her arms across her chest.

Pretty soon after that Mr. Vaughn returned. The moment came to an abrupt end. Violet said nothing further about what I called her. All the rest of the day, I could feel her gaze boring into my back.

She had reacted to my declaration in an unexpected way. When I called her that name, she was supposed to be ashamed, she was supposed to duck her head or cringe or admit that I was right, that she had no business being in our white classroom. If I had followed my thought far enough, this is what I would have found. But she took my insult as a matter of course and returned it. In her sharp eyes and fearlessness were evidence of a spirit tough as flint, a person unlike any of the milder beings around me.

She had a voice so big it pushed me back into my desk. To make such a sound come out of herself caused her no self-consciousness. I could sing loud in the choir but otherwise I spoke quietly. She was very different from me, but not in the ways I expected.

She was real. Her voice was big and it reached inside me. That moment lingered in my head for the rest of the day. It had ended abruptly. She had not told the teacher what I had said. We were two children, having an odd kind of fight. She had not tattled. Why had I called her that name? I used cuss words so rarely the other kids usually giggled when I did.

If I was superior to her, as I had always been told I was, why didn't she feel it, too?

An Awkward Fight

I had only a vague understanding of what had led me to call Violet such a name, and certainly at the time could not have described my reasons. At least in part, I had a desire to perform for the other white students, to prove something to them, perhaps that I was daring and brave. A longing to please other people often consumed me in school. My memory of the moment contains the thought that the boys at the back of the room would think I was funny; I liked the thought of making those boys laugh. None of us welcomed these newcomers that first day, and I would be the one to say so.

Part of my motivation was clearly that I wanted to assert power over Violet because she was black and I was white. While no one had spoken to me directly about what it meant to sit in a classroom with black students, I had gathered that it was against the good order of the world. If anyone had asked me before that morning what I thought about integration, a word I had heard only through adult conversation, I am not at all sure I could have formed a response. But the conflict with Violet demonstrated my training in prejudice to be rather well advanced. I was a good little racist, prepared to put her in her place.

What I had learned about the world had led me to believe I had the right to do so. But her reaction showed me clearly that this information, whatever it might be, was faulty. She had insulted me back and beaten me at the game of words. She had made me blush.

When she called me a cracker, she expected me to hear the word as an insult. Nobody had ever used that word to me before, except to describe a saltine. I had no idea what she meant.

She had behaved toward me just as any child would have, if we had started calling each other names out in the school playground under those tall pines. Recognition of this fact came to me after the moment was over, and a part of me changed. She might be black and large and loud, but in the end she was a child like me. This is, again, more articulate a statement than I would have made in the moment, but this was the fact that became plain in the aftermath. Violet was a person, more or less the same as me. This sounds such a small thing as I look back. But as the school day progressed, as I walked home through the hot streets of summer, this was the feeling that resonated through me.

I was timid about facing Violet again the next day, but she made it easy by getting right to the point. She looked at me with those scornful eyes and asked, “You going to call me any black bitch again?”

I shook my head at once and said no. She must have believed me since she let the challenge go. As the school day progressed, we talked back and forth across our desks from time to time, about something we were supposed to do in class, maybe, or about Mr. Vaughn, who was peculiar in ways that might invite an eleven-year-old's comment. I found ways to be friendly to her, my way of saying I was sorry, and she accepted them. She demanded nothing like an apology, at least at the time, and I offered nothing. But I signaled that I would not call her a name again, and that was enough for peace between us.

I remember being grateful that the moment faded so easily, helped by the fact that school moved forward and the long days of heat melted us into a community halfheartedly united by sweat, learning, and puzzlement at Mr. Vaughn. Even after so many years I can recall my own fascination at Mr. Vaughn's rich crop of nose hairs. He was the most peculiar of the teachers I would have in school, with his belt cinched at the level of his ribs, his tanned arms grizzled with twisty hair, and his nostrils of a size to swallow small fruit. His nose was traced with visible purplish veins, his eyes weak, his glasses large and owlish. When he spoke, flecks of spittle sometimes flew from his mouth.

He was old, at least as old as Miss White, the second-grade teacher, but unlike her, he had lost some vital force that once might have enabled him to command a classroom. Our small town knew far too much about everybody, Mr. Vaughn included, and my friend Virginia, who lived within sight of his house, swore she heard his wife screaming at him sometimes in the evening, “Roger Vaughn, you need to get in here and wash these dishes!” Upon which summons he would shuffle into the kitchen meekly and do as he was told. Virginia told this story to Marianne and me, and since the new girls sat near us, they heard it, too. This left us with an image of him as hapless and uncertain.

He was one of three teachers our class had as sixth-graders, if I recall correctly, since for one hour a day Mrs. Ferguson taught us mathematics, and Mrs. Armstrong taught us science. These were not subjects in which Mr. Vaughn was strong. He was most knowledgeable in the teaching of history and of the classics; my sister still remembers the way he led her class through Homer's
Th
e Odyssey,
and she was much fonder of him than I. In fact I cannot recall that
Th
e Odyssey
was actually part of the official curriculum in our class. My most vivid memory of Mr. Vaughn is his struggle to explain rocketry to us, on one of the mornings when NASA was launching one of the Apollo missions. He thought that rockets flew straight up and hung motionless while the earth turned under them. I was aghast; even I knew better than that.

The teachers moved to our classroom rather than our moving to theirs, likely because of Judah Carl Johnson, a student who was wheelchair bound. The teacher movements took place in the early morning, leaving us with Mr. Vaughn for most of the day. The women teachers were very good disciplinarians, which made Mr. Vaughn's lack in this area all the more obvious. We were also in class with him for much of the hottest part of the day, and there were times when he simply sat at his desk mopping sweat from his brow, or left us alone and went to the teachers' lounge. Whether he was in the class or not, we talked fairly freely.

With all the hours of the day to fill, some of us forgot that we were supposed to be racial strangers and talked to one another as friends. Virginia, Marianne, and I formed a circle of chatter with Rhonda and Ursula, and with Violet on occasion, and other people joined us from time to time. We were united by the fact that we were students and Mr. Vaughn was the teacher, by the tedium of the hot classroom, and outside the school by the shows we watched on television. As eleven- and twelve-year-olds, we had more in common than not.

The three girls were neither shy nor intimidated by the fact that white students outnumbered them ten to one. They were defiantly proud of themselves, and in their behavior, they made it plain that they were proof against any level of white scorn, like my calling Violet a bad name, or like the kind of sniping they received from the white boys in class.

“When George Wallace gets to be president, you won't think you so big,” said Harry Bell one morning, in response to something Violet had said.

“I ain't studying no George Wallace, he nothing but another cracker, he ain't got nothing going on.”

“He'll stop all this mess,” Harry said. “He'll help all y'all get back to Africa.”

“Ain't nobody going back to Africa, baby, this is just as much my country as it is yours.”

“We'll see.”

“Yes, we will. Power to the people.”

Back and forth. Taunting of some kind, on some subject, would likely have been the rule of the classroom anyway. But we spoke about skin color, about difference.

The fight likely began at one of those moments, and escalated when one side or the other poked at the boundary a bit too hard. It was an abortive altercation at best, between Harry and Violet. He was one of the boys who liked to make Violet mad, the son of the owner of a filling station, an only child with big blue eyes and a head of thick blond hair on a rather large head. He must have said something to Violet that day. The two of them were the ones who had the sort-of-a-fight.

Our elementary school was small, slightly more than two hundred students, eight teachers, one principal, one maintenance person, one school secretary, and three cafeteria workers. Our principal doubled as the fifth-grade teacher. Because we were so few in number, and because all our parents knew one another, the school was plagued by few discipline problems. Even the altercation between Violet and Harry was tentative and bloodless.

They had words in class, or at least this is what I imagine must have happened. The inciting incident did not register with me, though the conversation above is a good approximation. Such moments had become routine. Topics of these exchanges included assertions by the new girls that white people did not have soul, countered by giggling and scorn at the notion of soul on the part of the white boys. The girls informed us at one point that the revolution was coming, when black people would be taking over. The white boys made some weak response. The debate often moved to the topic of music. The black girls talked about black musicians like James Brown, and the white boys hooted with laughter at the notion that soul music was anything but noise.

The argument between Harry and Violet had started during one of the intervals of dispute, when Mr. Vaughn was out of the classroom, probably off once more to the teachers' lounge. Times when he was absent were opportunities for all kinds of conversation, and the exchanges between the white boys and the black girls happened in that space. But there was something different about that day's spat. Maybe Violet, who bore the brunt of the harassment, had simply taken all she could.

On the way to the playground that afternoon, Violet and Harry continued their argument. Violet commanded attention with her voice, her fierceness, and her blocklike body, small fists clenched. Soon the moment escalated, a circle formed around them, and it appeared that the two would fight. Harry appeared befuddled and flushed, and Violet glared at him with fierce eyes and battered at him with her voice. She was telling him that she was proud of her black skin. She was daring him to hit her. I recall a bit of pushing, perhaps some hands flapping.

Harry towered over her, probably outweighed her, but blushed deeply and never struck her. No fight happened, even when she stepped close to him, standing almost under his chin. Something in him refused to cross the line. Something in them both. The shouting calmed, the circle of students broke up, the boys went off to play softball in their field, and the girls and I went to jump rope.

What was said in this argument? Voices overlapped one another, confusion and challenge: go ahead and hit me, you won't do it, I dare you, ain't nobody scared of you, go ahead, call me some names, I dare you, call me some nigger—phrases on this order, the two of them circling each other, no one in the watching crowd quite sure what to do. Some of the other boys found Harry's predicament to be funny. Nothing happened that differed from any other fight between sixth-graders, or I would guess this was true, since in our quiet and usually harmonious world I had never seen a school fight at all.

While I remember the fight as being loud and lasting for three or four minutes, in our classroom afterward there were no repercussions, and I suppose Mr. Vaughn had not been near enough to be aware of it, or simply did not care.

The exchange proved that some level of human recognition was taking place in our classroom, though it was hardly universal and had no likelihood of erasing the ideas of difference to which we white people were still clinging. Harry might think black girls were inferior to him, but a part of him would not cross the line so far as to hit a girl, even when she dared him. He had always been a bit tenderhearted, an only child, spoiled and coddled, and I knew this about him in the same way that I knew too much about all my classmates, because there were so few of us. The fact that Harry found this limit in himself, though—that he would not have a physical fight with Violet—did not mean that he would ever accept her as his equal. Most of us in class, perhaps all of us, were like him in this regard. Our prejudice might find its boundaries, but it would refuse to vanish.