How I Shed My Skin (5 page)

The Kiss

I had grown so used to Rhonda and Ursula by seventh grade that they were a comfortable part of my day, and since I was always good at making friends with girls, we spent a lot of the school day talking across the aisles.

“You read books all the time,” Rhonda said to me, as I was closing the cover of
Have Space Suit
—
Will Travel,
a Robert Heinlein novel I had bought for a dime at the library book sale.

“You like that space stuff,” Ursula said. “Like that
Star Trek
.”

“I don't like anything like that,” Rhonda said.

“My mom won't let me stay up that late,” Marianne interjected, showing her braces, her mouth a maze of metal and rubber bands. “But I like Mr. Spock.”

“How do you know you like him if you don't look at the show?” Rhonda asked.

“He has pointy ears. I like pointy ears.”

“You crazy,” Ursula said, shifting a bit in her seat, pulling down her skirt with a tug, the hem tight over her thighs.

“You look at
Lost in Spac
e
? That show is so stupid.” Rhonda had a certainty about herself, a way of holding her face to the light, a beauty. “That robot is so dumb, talking about ‘Danger, Will Robinson.' ”

“I think that robot is silly,” Marianne said. “It's not even real, it's just a man in a can.”

“You like Will Robinson?” Ursula asked me. “He has freckles like you.”

Or another day, Ursula said, with a peculiar fluid motion of the neck, “Power to the people, right on.”

“What?” I asked.

“That means the revolution is coming,” she said. “When the Black Panthers taking over.”

“Oh,” I said, with only a vague idea of what a Black Panther was.

“I like it when James Brown sings that,” Rhonda added, shifting in her seat, the wood creaking a bit. Our desks bore the engravings of decades of students on the wooden work surfaces, and many of the seats made a good deal of noise at the least movement.

“Who is James Brown?” Marianne asked. “Is he like a singer?”

“He has soul,” Ursula said. “He makes soul music.”

“What's soul?”

“Soul is when you know how to move.” She did a bit of a shimmy in the desk to demonstrate the kind of moving she meant.

“Do white people have soul?” Marianne asked.

“Sometimes,” Rhonda said. “But most of y'all don't have any.”

When
Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In
premiered on television, we immediately seized on the catchphrases from the show, parroting them like everyone else did. We chanted “Sock it to me sock it to me sock it to me” as fast as we could, like Judy Carne, and on occasion we threatened to sock it to one another, to boot. When Mrs. Ferguson bustled into the room, all energy and focus, one of us might whisper, “Here come the Judge, y'all,” and the rest would giggle into our hands. We had to be careful of that kind of behavior, however. Mrs. Ferguson appeared to know everything that went on in her classroom, and she had a sharp tongue for scolding. None of us wanted to test her.

(These moments are true, even if the conversations themselves are not quite literal. My memory is not so fine that it yields whole dialogue from such a long time past. But these were our voices, and these are the subjects we would have covered, given that we chattered about the world in these terms: what TV we watched, what phrases we remembered, what bits of news we heard, and what adults did and said.)

“All this stuff about Vietnam on the news,” Ursula said.

“You might get drafted,” Rhonda told me.

“No, I won't,” I said. “They won't take me.”

“Because you a bleeder,” Ursula said. “That's right.” She was using the short form of the term “free bleeder” by which my classmates understood my hemophilia. Teachers had cautioned our class, year after year, that I was not to be touched or struck for any reason, because I would then bleed to death and die. Even Rhonda and Ursula had heard the tale twice now.

“Can you have sex?” Rhonda asked in a whisper. “Because of your blood?”

Marianne giggled at the word
sex.

I shrugged. “I think so.”

“But you might bleed. Then you would die.”

I had no idea what that meant, since my ideas about sex were uninformed; I had heard the process described by some of the boys in class but it sounded so awful I was certain it must happen by accident, perhaps when a man rolled on top of a woman in his sleep. What did blood have to do with sex, anyway?

Ursula said, “I bet he can do just like anybody else can.”

“You don't know.”

“I bet he can.”

Ursula had struck me as shy at first, though on coming to know her, I understood that her temper was the more fiery, and her nature the more ardent. They bore comparison not because they were both black but because they were sisters. She had a less extravagant beauty than Rhonda, her body sturdier and plumper, her hair short, sometimes straightened and sometimes not. Her clothes must have felt tight on her, because she adjusted them constantly; this was an era of young women tugging at defiantly short skirts. About Rhonda I always had the sense that she was easy in herself, happy with her body. About Ursula, I noticed the constant fidget.

Rhonda was the more outgoing; she was friendlier, readier to talk and share. Ursula was tender and fragile, harder to know, slower to return liking. Rhonda had an overt strength, while Ursula's was quieter and more hidden. What Rhonda felt or thought lay on the surface and expressed itself more easily. Ursula kept her feelings to herself, at least the personal ones. She had the courage to express herself about her blackness, and her temper was quite strong and apt to flash out when she felt wronged. Rhonda's anger ran deeper and lasted longer.

We must have heard that our country experienced the Summer of Love in 1967, but at thirteen years old I was terrified of the word. The students in our class played boyfriend and girlfriend games, same as any other group of children our age. I can't much remember who was coupled with whom in the class at that point, since the attachments were brief, consisting of little more than hand-holding, note-passing, and maybe a brief interlude of fondling in one of the closets at the back of the room. I had done a bit of note-passing in the early grades, little or no hand-holding, and no fondling at all. Marianne and I never discussed becoming formally enthralled to one another at any point, and we certainly never held hands or passed notes.

There was something wrong with my conception of romance, and by that year I could feel it.

There was this boy in my class, named Robert.

He was older than me, having failed fifth grade, with a reputation for wildness, though in his case this added to his prestige among the rest of us, probably because he was handsome. Wildness for a seventh-grade boy had to do with some kind of exploit with liquor, or guns, or girls. In Robert's case, I never entirely knew what it meant. He was an only child, known for his physical strength. I was aware of him in some manner that was different from anyone else I knew. I had tutored him in math for a couple of days, while Mrs. Ferguson worked with the other students in the class. During the work, a closeness had come to the two of us, something that I felt inside my body as a kind of comfort when I sat next to him, heard his voice, or, later, even when I thought about him. These feelings were related to romance, but I was having them about another boy. I accepted this, but wondered what it meant.

This experience was not new, and my obsessions about young men in magazines and on television were not new, but my awareness was changing. I understood now that this kind of desire would mark me with difference. My hemophilia protected me from teasing to a degree, and explained the fact that I was a sissy in a way that would satisfy other seventh-graders. I rested in that uncertain security for the moment. But I was coming to understand that this safety would not last.

No one had ever singled me out in that particular way, by making me the object of a crush.

The day Ursula kissed my cheek, I remember in this way: the core of the memory is the kiss. I have the feeling that we were in spring, in the freshness of afternoon, windows open in the classroom; that flash of bright afternoon light, a breeze, a feeling that we were nearer the end of the school year. Whenever I remember that day, these glimpses come with it.

I was standing at the chalkboard, having decided to sit inside through the break from classwork. This might have been our physical-education hour, which was really no more than playtime, when we were allowed outside. That day I had elected not to leave the room, as had some of the others, girls mostly. Judah Carl sat in his wheelchair staring at his notebook, or out the window. Maybe Marianne was at her desk whispering to Virginia. Mrs. Ferguson had left the room.

Maybe Ursula and I had been talking? We must have been, or she would not have felt whatever feeling carried her so quickly next to me. She kissed my cheek, made it warm, and murmured something. I remember the surprise of the moment more than anything else. After that, I remember her face, full of some delight, she having decided to cross this boundary, to kiss my cheek in public, to tell me I was sweet. This expression on her face is what I remember. The surprise came in the next moment, realizing that Ursula liked me. I had not known. Then, next, came the understanding that she was not supposed to like me that way.

Immediately shy, Ursula ran out of the room. I remember the look of her running, body leaning forward, hands held low, feet splayed a bit, a child in a flush of feeling. I could still feel the print of her lips on my skin. I was surprised and sat at my desk. I could feel the other students staring. One of them asked another, surely: “Did she just kiss him? Did they just kiss each other?”

To be kissed by a girl so unexpectedly, for the first time in my life, left me speechless and fearful, because the kiss was public, and because the girl was black. Ursula was not supposed to kiss me in this way. I knew this without asking, in the same way that I knew Robert was not supposed to kiss me, either. I had never heard anybody speak these rules out loud, but it had been built into me as if it were hardware. Now this had happened, a girl had liked me and kissed me and people had seen it, and this was exactly why integration was a bad idea, wasn't it? The fact that a black child might kiss a white child?

I told Mrs. Ferguson what had happened, not knowing what else to do or what reaction to expect. I feared what my classmates would think, but I cannot remember a single specific reaction. Ursula would not look me in the eye when she came back into the room. We passed a few hours of awkwardness, Ursula quiet and uncomfortable, same as me. After that, the incident vanished in terms of classroom import. It remained in my head for a while longer as I wondered whether I should tell my parents or whether I should become more upset about the kiss. I decided to say nothing at home and to forget. Within a few days, Ursula and I were simply friends again, though we retained a kind of closeness afterward. I knew now that she really did like me. I felt pleased about that. Even though I knew I was not the kind of boy who would ever feel romance for a girl, I was pleased that she had feelings for me in that way. At the same time, without any contradiction, I was wondering about the implications of the action, that a black girl had kissed me. I had allowed a kind of contact that was not supposed to happen. But since it had happened, what was I supposed to feel? Anger? If a black girl was not supposed to kiss my white face, should I not be more convinced after the fact, and not less?

Would I have been as surprised and frightened if a white girl had kissed me on the cheek? If Marianne had kissed my cheek, I think I would have felt the same shock, though without any fear of a reaction from my classmates other than the usual teasing. I think I would have been more frightened if it were Marianne because of the closeness that was already between us. Would I have told the teacher? Even with the fact of witnesses, I would have waited to see whether anyone tattled. I would certainly have kept the secret from my parents.

This moment provides a snapshot that captures me with my prejudice still intact. I am certain my fear of Ursula's kiss was different from what I would have felt had she been a white girl.

But even so, the sweetness of the kiss lingered, and when the surprise faded, I liked Ursula better, because she had preferred me.

What might I have done had I been a straight boy? I have no way to answer this question at all. I can speculate that I might have liked her as a girlfriend, maybe in secret; but it is as easy to imagine that we would not have had any connection as friends at all. As a heterosexual, I would have been part of the boys' group, perhaps, ruled by the need for their approval. That might have prevented any friendship with Ursula.

What would have happened if Robert had kissed me that way? Or if, through some fantastical misjudgment, I had done the same to him? Of course, these ideas never came to me then. I did not live in a universe where such a thought was even possible.

ORIGINS

The Hierarchy of Place

I had found this bias against black skin in myself. I had known it was there but had not understood what it meant. Such a bias was only natural, or so I had learned, since black people themselves were inferior. I thought of Rhonda and Ursula as my friends, true, but, at the same time, I thought of them as black people, as something different from me. As something not as good as I was. My experience was colliding with my upbringing. Where had these ideas come from?

Looking backward, what can I see? If I was taught to discriminate between colors of skin, when did these lessons happen, and how did I come to absorb them?

The first part of the answer must come from the place itself, a tiny village in an old county in the eastern part of North Carolina. The first part of the story must come from my place in the South.

To hear the tale as it is commonly told, the Southerner is a creature of place, formed by a connection to the earth, to the soil, to the rivers and swamps and ponds. I was born in the country and grew up there. When I think of home, it is this landscape that comes to mind, that flat land east of Raleigh, two-lane roads curling around and over rivers, farmland opened on either side, a line of pines along the horizon, sometimes, though, marching right up to the road, standing alongside, tall as guardians. Loblolly and longleaf pines, dogwoods, oaks, elms, a green country, soft with grasses, ferns, blackberry tangles, moss.

Jones County was a hard place to love: poor, flat, thinly populated, with few comforts or amenities, racially divided. Even the people we called rich would have appeared poor in most places, I expect. But the country was quiet, the roads splitting and disappearing into mossy forests, the rivers and streams meandering. The people had taken on the quiet of the land and had sat on those roads and in those fields for two centuries or more, most of them. Stubborn, stingy, mean, and hard, with a goodly layer of religion and a way of feigning warmth and courtesy. These were my neighbors and friends, my schoolmates and church buddies. We knew each other by name and often by history, though my family, being outsiders, not native to the county, were not full citizens of the place. We would be interlopers, at best, until we had lived there a generation or two.

The county had always been poor, sprinkled with a few of the very rich, who nevertheless were wealthy in field and forest and movable goods rather than in money. Family names such as Foscue, Foy, Pollock, Banks, Ipock, Howard, Bender, Duval, and Simmons dated back to the first settlements. People of many nationalities had moved into those early forests in search of land to claim for themselves. French, German, Swiss, English, and Scottish settlers had taken land at New Bern, where the Neuse and Trent Rivers came together. They spread along the two rivers, cleared a bit of land, built houses, bought slaves, killed and expelled Native Americans. The county never became populous, and never attracted much in the way of industry. For generations the same families farmed the land, hunted the forests, fished the rivers, and eyed each other with suspicion. In each generation, many of the children found greener pastures and moved away, while a few stayed behind.

Viewed from the most basic perspective, the history of the place can be summarized rather simply: People farmed, hunted, raised families, parts of which dispersed into the world, and parts of which stayed on the old land in the old place. Complications might come to Jones County from beyond its borders, but within them it kept to a simple pattern. Small settlements remained that way. Roads wound through forest, houses clustered at crossroads, river settlements grew to be villages, but at a certain point all that reached a limit. None of the villages grew very big. Most of the land remained forest. Most people made their living from the land.

The history of my little home village of Pollocksville is equally stark. Historical records, to the degree that they exist, describe a settlement that grew up where a road from New Bern crossed the Trent River. The intersection attracted boat traffic, merchants, and a few businesses in service of the surrounding plantations, huge tracts of land owned by Foys, Foscues, Pollocks, and others. One of the planters deeded land for the town that had by then grown to surround the cluster of stores, a lumber mill, boat landings, and the bridge. Its founding as a proper township followed that of its stuffier, more snobbish neighbor, Trenton, by a couple of decades, and was delayed further by a disputed rendition of the name. The proper spelling of
Pollocksville
would prove to be a curse for its residents from that time forward. All my early life, in the days of Polack jokes, I heard the same tired mispronunciation, “Polacksville,” from anyone who heard where I lived.

When speaking of history, it is traditional to include in the biography of any Southern place the outline of what happened there during the Civil War. White Southerners rarely speak of the mark made on the past and on the landscape by slavery, though they are quick to highlight any ancestors who had wealth. Old records speak of a family's fortune in terms of the number of black people they owned, so often that it is clear that slaves and wealth were synonymous. Black people were the riches, and they shaped the landscape. When the war granted them ownership of themselves, and when railroads opened up transportation routes unconnected to the old rivers and roads, the wealth and vitality of early Jones County began to wane. What remained was the scar of ownership, one race over the other, unresolved and undiscussed.

During the Civil War, Jones County served as a battleground between Union troops stationed in New Bern and rebel troops stationed in Goldsboro, and for some two years it was laid waste. One soldier's account from the era speaks of a trip through Pollocksville when he could see only one family still in residence there. It is the romance of this war, this wasteland, that colored the past afterward, drawing a veil over the time that came before it. We spoke of the war but never of its real causes, describing our defense of a Southern way of life rather than admitting we fought to preserve human ownership of human chattel. We spoke of slavery as an inevitability, an unavoidability, a misunderstood and historical necessity; but most of the time we did not speak of it, and certainly were taught very little about it in the years when I was young.

In the years after the war, Jones County followed the general outline of its neighbors, suffering and rebelling during Reconstruction, even lynching a sheriff described in one source as a carpetbagger. Our county provided the Senate with a senator, Furnifold Simmons, during end-of-century elections that functioned as a national referendum on white supremacy. The nineteenth-century population of about four thousand swelled to about ten thousand, and stayed there. Teachers founded schools in the various communities, nearly all of them identified by race. The schools evolved as ideas about education changed, consolidating from many locations to a handful: Comfort, Maysville, Trenton, and Pollocksville. This pattern was settled by the time I enrolled in first grade; there were two schools in each village, one for black students and one for whites. In Trenton, there were two high schools, one for blacks and one for whites. The county struggled to operate two school systems side by side when in truth it could barely afford to run one.

Through all this, Jones County folk farmed the fields, growing tobacco, soy beans, corn, even a bit of rice. No one I knew grew cotton in the 1960s, due to the impact of the boll weevil, though my mother told stories about working in the cotton fields when she was a child. Men and women hunted and fished, sportsmen stalking black bear and deer while those feeding their families aimed for smaller game. In spring and summer people planted gardens and harvested tomatoes, pole beans, eggplant, yellow squash, bell peppers, okra. We attended church, organizing our social life around it. White people kept black people at a distance, confined them financially and legally, and perpetuated a worldview in which this treatment was right and proper. On occasion, ugly and savage events occurred in the neighboring counties, and in Jones County, too: crosses were burned, people were lynched. Acts of terror mixed with everyday life.

PEOPLE DID NOT
often immigrate to Pollocksville, but we Grimsleys had done so. My father had taken a job on a farm called Ravenwood, a remnant of an old plantation. He had a family connection with the farmer who owned the land, and we moved into a cinderblock house there when I was six months old. What was left of Ravenwood belonged to a man named Dixon MacArthur. He was in business with a farmer named Grimes in Pitt County, with whom he provided hybrid seed corn to area farmers. My father and some of his brothers worked on Mr. Grimes's farms in Pitt and Edgecombe Counties, and later my father brought us to Jones County to work on Mr. MacArthur's end of the operation. Father worked as a foreman until the day he tried to clean off the belt of a cornpicker while it was still running. He caught his hand in the machine, which shredded his arm and nearly tore it off. Doctors in New Bern amputated the arm and buried it there somewhere. After that, my father lost his job on the farm and worked for the local bottled gas company, delivering liquid propane to farmers to cure their tobacco crops in the summer. My father's accident provided a narrative that shaped my early life, a story that people told about my family to mark us as relative strangers to Jones County who had brought our own doom with us, apparently, when we moved there.

The farming accident that cost my father his arm and his job embittered him for the rest of his days. My family moved from the somewhat respectable status accorded the foreman of a large farm to the poverty of a laborer, someone who drove a truck. As a deliverer of bottled gas and a man who could repair most appliances, my father became something of a local legend. People liked to say he could do more with one arm than most men could manage with two; in fact, they liked to say it so much I think they would probably have said it even if it were not true. That he was an alcoholic, a wife-beater, and a schizophrenic descending gradually into madness were simply additions to the color of his reputation. Most Southern men flirted with a drinking condition, if not outright alcoholism. A man's home was his castle, in the parlance of the era, and he had a duty to smack his wife a time or two if she behaved badly, as women were apt to do. Everybody had a crazy relative. This was the land of Southern gothic, after all. We were the heirs to Southern darkness.

People like my father became part of the landscape, a feature of the town, his one arm and the story of its loss a piece of the local history. The fact that we were part of a story meant that we had become attached to the place, since involvement in local stories was the proof of belonging, and the telling of them was confirmation. In this, though my family was generally accepted in Pollocksville, we were at a disadvantage. We did not know enough of the history, we could not tell the stories of the local boys who had marched off to war, or hunted the ranges of forest, or fished the rivers. We could not join in the gossip about the local families, being ignorant of who had married whom and who had wronged whom over the last several generations. We meant to put down roots in Jones County, and to a degree we did, but our roots were young and shallow compared to the other families who had been sitting on this soil, feeding from it, for a hundred or two hundred years or more.

OUR TOWN HAD
no movie houses, no supermarkets, hardly a single clothing store, and only one restaurant. We had churches in abundance, and church events ruled the calendar, with nothing but high school athletics for competition. In my Baptist church, Sunday morning brought church service, Tuesday night was choir practice, and Wednesday was prayer meeting, with the occasional business meeting and the occasional revival to punctuate the seasons.

To say that our lives were quiet is not to claim that they were simple in any way. In the quiet places of the world, human nature becomes convoluted, spreads out to claim more space for its twistings, and makes knots of the Gordian variety. The countryside and its beauty sheltered much that could be described as gothic, and hid many a blemish. Old houses fell down into heaps of lumber, overgrown with weeds and vines, while next door, or in the backyard, the family parked a mobile home or built a new cinderblock house. Yards overflowed with old appliances and rusted cars. Torn screens hung from porches on a house crying for paint, unlikely to be soothed. Old tobacco-curing barns collapsed or leaned to the side next to the metal-sheathed bulk curers that dried the tobacco much faster. The past collapsed and decayed even as the future replaced it.

One fine plantation house on the road to Trenton still stood during my childhood, and we passed it often enough that I remember it, a white-columned structure down a long lane lined with oaks. I would learn much later that the house had originally been quite modest, a one-story frame farmhouse, but the owners had long ago, likely long after the Civil War, raised it by one floor and added a neoclassical porch. The Simmons family, who lived in the house, owned many square miles of land thereabouts, parking a private plane behind trees on one side. On the other side of the house stood a row of what were rumored to be old slave cabins, and we pointed these out to each other over and over again as we passed them. That is where the slaves lived, we would say, as if this were an important fact to remember. So it was that a ride through the country could show me something of the hierarchy in which we lived, rich and poor, black and white. Geography provided a lesson in who was high and who was low. I marveled at the thought that somebody could own and fly a plane, and there it was, behind a row of trees. But I hardly blinked at the thought that the same family had once owned slaves. I do not remember a time when this fact was new to me. It was a part of the background, something I had learned earlier than memory.

People in the county took jobs in the logging industries, at the sawmill in Pollocksville (until it burned), at the DuPont plant in Kinston, at the schools, or in county government. They delivered bottled gas or fuel oil, or sometimes ran a small business. After the accident, my father made a living first at the gas company, and later worked for himself, installing central air-conditioning and heating systems, repairing refrigerators and freezers, occasionally selling new ones. The county and surrounding areas provided work in house construction, roofing, plumbing, bricklaying, and truck driving. These employment opportunities, however, were scarce, and jobs were precious.