Assuming the Position

Transcription

Assuming the Position
~ Southern Born & Southern Bread ~
Volume 1  BEFORE BARACK: My Life among White Folks
Bernestine Singley
Also from BERNESTINE SINGLEY
The Series…
BEFORE BARACK
My Life among White Folks
Volume 1  Assuming the Position
Volume 2  Land of the White People
Volume 3  One Thousand Southern White Men
Volume 4  Stomping on Thin Ice
Volume 5  Playing Chess with Monkeys: 10 Little Race Stories
Volume 6  Blood Work (coming soon)
Available only @ www.BeforeBarack.com
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Dedicated to
Tina & Mama
Sallie Stanback Mayfield
Mrs. Ilda S. Green (“Miss Johnson”)
In memoriam
Charles Sumner Tillman (1949-1993)
Doris Ann Kirk (1949-2011)
As always, for Gary Isaiah Reaves
for enduring love, seamless support, & legendary patience
Very special thanks to Freddie McGriff, Sara Mokuria & Annette Lawrence
for plowing through various versions of this manuscript )when it was five
times longer) and for always giving their honest, encouraging critique
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Before Barack: My Life among White Folks
Volume One
Assuming the Position:
Southern Born & Southern Bread
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Prologue: The Question  5
Wooo!  6
High Anxiety  9
Born with a Broken Heart  11
The Right to Choose  16
The Power of Peas  24
Herman’s Table  29
Cat Eyes and Surplus Food  33
Cub Scouts and Strict Constructions  38
Wife Beater  45
Boycott  48
Sniffing Dirty Laundry  58
Derailment  65
Southern Bell Hell  70
White Girls of Summer  73
The Welcome Fable  83
Epilogue: The Answer  100
Appendix A Letters from the White Girls of Summer  100
End Notes  111
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Prologue
The Question
When I went off to college, Mama was worried that I was too naïve. By the time I
finished law school, she was worried for another reason.
“I just don’t understand why you hate white people so much,” she said to me one day.
“I pray for you because I didn’t teach you to be like that. What did they ever do to you? I
kept you away from them, so you wouldn’t have to deal directly with their mess. So,
what do you have to be so angry about? ”
I could never understand why she wasn't angry with them. She didn't look up to or
bow down to them. They never bent her out of shape. They were white and that was that.
I felt like I needed to be mad for her, pissed off on her behalf, her offspring full of
smoldering resentment, bent on revenge. And I kept feeling like it was my job to be angry
with white folks for all the black folks who couldn't afford to be. It was my calling—
eventually my privilege—to talk up to the white folks, to back them off, stomp them
down, send them skittering into corners. If I didn't, who would?
They say certain physical traits—the good and the bad—skip a generation. Maybe
Grandma Annie’s raging fury skipped Mama and landed on me. I know one thing for sure:
anger has been very, very good for me. It has fueled some of the best my life has
produced. So when I hear folks talking about coming from a place of peace as though
peace is the only legitimate choice for a worthwhile life, I get mad all over again.
Just before I moved away from Boston, my therapist said, "Your Grandma Annie
used a shotgun. Odessa uses religion. Your mouth is your weapon, your words. What
would it cost you to disarm?"
Wooo!
Ma dressed for church (1967)
“Wooo! That white lady yo mama?!”
“Wooo!” Hands muffled a chorus of echoes, the soundtrack for wide eyes.
It was the first day of school and even before I could clear the threshold, already I
was in trouble. Alerted by the one who had bellowed the proclamation, now everybody
was looking at me and the woman holding my hand.
Wooo! The sound of warning, a signal something was wrong.
“Wooo! You in trouble!”
“Woooo! You better gimme some or I’m telling.”
“Woooo! Ahma tell yo mama and you gone git a whuppin!”
“Wooo! That white lady yo mama?!” Indignation silenced me, so Mama spoke
instead.
“What’s your name, honey?” she asked the boy wagging his fingers at us.
“Who me?” He fingered himself as though he hadn’t been the soloist in the choir.
Wooo!
“Yes, I’m talking to you, honey. What’s your name?”
“William.”
“Well, come over here for a minute, William.” She motioned the class crier to
approach.
“Wooo!” Suddenly, they all turned on him and just like that, trouble was wearing
William’s face.
When he came close, Mama reached out for him and squatted between us so we were
all eye-to-eye.
“You look very handsome this morning, William. How old are you?” Her hand
patted the small of his back in syncopation to her inquiry.
If William knew, he wasn’t saying. He was mute, his eyes glued to Mama’s face. I
knew the look. Had seen it many times before from babies, boys, and grown men.
William was smitten.
“This is my baby, Bernestine. She’s six, too. Bernestine, this is William.” I stood
glowering, one hand still clutching hers, the other one balled in a fist at my side. She
gently jiggled the one she held, signaling it was my turn to speak.
“What’re you supposed to say, honey?” I unfurled my fist and shoved my hand
towards my verbal offender. “Hey.” She jiggled me again. “Hey, William.”
Not that it made any difference because speechless William was clearly blind to my
existence, so lost was he in his new love—my mama, mere inches away from him,
stooped to his level. Her hand still at his waist, Mama returned to his question.
“Yes, William, I am Bernestine’s mama, but I am not white. Does she look white to
you?”
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Wooo!
Deaf mute William stood there, lips slightly parted, breathing through his mouth.
Then, as if powered by some separate force, his hand slowly rose, gently headed for her
face. She caught it midway and stood up.
“Answer me, honey. Does Bernestine look white to you?” William nodded no.
“Well, alright then, neither am I. Okay? And we’re not ever going to say anything
like that again. Now scoot back over to your desk and be a good boy for me today.
Alriiight?” William nodded yes. So she leaned over and kissed his head, simultaneously
rewarding his correct answer and scenting our peace treaty with a gust of Avon’s “To a
Wild Rose.” William backed away, beaming.
“I don’t think we’ll be having any more problems from him,” she declared. Then, she
hugged me and planted her lips on my forehead, making it possible for me to parade
around the rest of the day, proudly imprinted by her Dark Cherry Red amulet, my
protection against any further William eruption.
School was out and I was running for the gate when I spied William, waiting. Just
seeing him made me nervous. Then I realized he looked like he wanted to be friends.
“Brenda Steam! Brenda Steam!” He motioned urgently. As I approached, he stared
at the red lips still plastered on my forehead as though he expected her to emerge from
them fully formed.”
She coming to get you?”
“Huh?”
“That white lady. She coming back for you?”
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High Anxiety
In my earliest photos, whether alone or in a group, I am the somber child, the tot
with furrowed brow. Not frightened but perpetually, deeply concerned.
As long as Mama was in sight, I was fine. But when she was gone, I was anxious.
I worried about her safety on her way home from work. When she was on her way to or
from church after dark, I worried about the guys who hung out on the block, drinking,
gambling, fighting, and constantly rearranging their crotches. I knew they could grant her
safe passage…or not. Flat-Top was especially menacing. Monday through Friday, he
walked around with his ‘do rag—a kerchief—tied tightly on his head. But when the
weekend came, he strutted around with his lye-slicked conk glistening. I was terrified of
him.
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High Anxiety
He was the only one who didn’t stop cursing even when Mama spoke to each one
of them by name as she passed by. He was the only one who, as she put it, “talked
suggestively” about how good she looked, licking his lips like she was a freshly fried
pork chop, as he described what he might have to do to her one night if he lost his mind
and lost control.
I worried about what would happen to Tina and me if Flat-Top got Mama. Who
would take care of us? Would they be mean to us? Where would we live? Would they
split us up or keep us together? Where would we go to school, to church? Who would be
our friends? To calm myself, I latched onto Ma and followed her everywhere she went
except to work. I convinced myself that my presence was her protection and believed her
when she said as long as we three stuck together, we would be alright.
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Born with a Broken Heart
Figure 1- Me (L) and Tina
At seven, I learned, from the spot where my ear was plastered to Mama’s thigh, what
it meant to others that we were colored, poor, female, manless. Her twitched muscle
downloaded an encyclopedia of lessons about where I could be, how I could be, if I could
be. My ear against her thigh was where I perfected my ooo-that-child-done-been-herebefore gaze, refusing to give up the incessantly demanded girlbaby smile. Her thigh, the
locus for my indoctrination into the necessity of being relentlessly outstanding, superior,
“better than” while all around us the exact opposite message reverberated.
~ ~ ~
Turns out I hadn’t been worrying needlessly after all. It’s just that Mama wasn’t the
one in peril—I was. I was born with a broken heart. That’s the story doctors handed to
Mama, which she passed on to me. So, just as she was bending me to her will, it seemed
my body was beating me down with its own harsh lessons. The year I learned to diaper a
blue-eyed, ruby-lipped Tiny Tears and plait hair using untwisted rope stuffed in a Nehi
bottle with half a wooden clothespin was the same year I learned I could die. The year I
turned seven was the one that nearly wiped me out.
11
I was ushering in church one Sunday in my blue knife-pleated skirt and white cotton
blouse, passing the collection plate to the first person on the end of the row when I felt
myself going down. When I came to, we were in Rev. Kennedy’s green deuce-and-aquarter rushing to the hospital.
I was in second grade when my condition was medically confirmed: I had “heart
trouble.” From that day forward, I was forbidden to run, jump, skip, skate, ride a bike or
engage in any other “strenuous activity.” If I did, doctors claimed, there was a good
chance I would suddenly drop dead.
Except for the sadness and worry that now draped my mother’s countenance when
she looked at me, the threat of sudden death was incomprehensible. Far worse than the
doctors’ diagnosis was the crushing news I had no trouble understanding: my brand new
bicycle had to go. I had owned it just long enough to ditch the training wheels and if I had
to choose between death and my bike, the bike was staying.
I begged to keep it. I promised Ma I would get well enough to ride it again. The day a
church member wheeled my bike away after buying it for his granddaughter, I watched,
immobilized by grief and disbelief. I prayed for a bike every night for the next five years.
My heart trouble didn’t stop there. In school, I was banned from physical education,
which included all sports. While the rest of my classmates learned the forward roll and
the long jump, tumbled around on gym mats, and chased each other around the school
grounds, I was supposed to sit on the sidelines with the others whose physical defects had
peeled them off from the healthy, rollicking pack. Every week, our p hysical education
teacher dug a new wound when she called my name—which she never bothered to get
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right—and ordered me to “take a seat in the corner” with my similarly afflicted
classmates.
I wanted to just disappear. Instead, I felt like I was outlined in neon and flashing. I sat
as far as possible from the rest of the rejects, pretending that being among them had
nothing to do with being one of them. I became obsessed with all the things I wasn’t
allowed to do.
My constraints challenged Ma’s requirements for raising Refined Young Women.
According to her, properly educated daughters had to love to read, learn to cook, clean,
sew, and master a musical instrument. Grandma Annie, Mama, and my sister were all
naturally gifted musicians who sang beautifully. They taught themselves to play the
accordion extremely well, but I never learned to play a single tune.
My sister had already demonstrated her near prodigy talent in voice and piano, so Ma
decided I should take piano lessons, too. Despite her steady encouragement, though,
mind-over-matter Ma eventually had to concede my soulless pounding on our upright
piano had ground her down. Mrs. Jones, our piano teacher, was my escape route when
she convinced Ma that my high level of frustration and low level of proficiency was a
fruitless combination. We agreed it was time for me to literally try my hand at something
else.
Percussion instruments were out: too much noise for the thin walls of our apartment.
Wind instruments were similarly nixed: my feeble constitution co uldn’t stand up to all
that blowing. So, no sleek, pretty flute for me. No loud, brassy trumpet and absolutely not
the sophisticated looking clarinet. The only stuff left were the instruments for losers: the
triangle, the xylophone, and…the violin, the laughingstock of them all. To persuade me
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otherwise, Ma did what she always did: She tricked me into thinking it was my choice.
By convincing me that the violin was the most difficult of all instruments to master, she
knew I would leap at the chance to prove not only that I could do it, but that I could be
one of the best.
When Gretchen Bost, my next door neighbor and favorite playmate, got a violin, too,
that cemented my resolve. I had competition, someone physically my superior against
whom to measure myself. Instantly, my goal was to play the violin so well, Gretchen
would be sorry she ever picked up the thing. By ninth grade, I was first chair violin in the
James Taylor Williams Junior High orchestra though my interest had already started to
wane. I had a crush on our violin teacher, but he had eyes for a gorgeous substitute
teacher. Gwendolyn Carraway beat me out of first chair and speeded up my slide. After
purposely popping my strings, breaking my bridge, and inventing creative ways to get out
of orchestra practice, I finally persuaded Ma to let me stop playing violin altogether. I
lost interest and then lost my chops. Except for singing in the junior choir one Sunday a
month, that was the end of musical me.
Decades later, at our 30th high school reunion, a classmate will chuckle at the image
he readily recalls: “Such a skinny little girl with such a big violin case knocking against
her knees on her way home from school.” By then, Henry Barrett will be a career
diplomat with the U. S. State Department, a fluent French-speaking Senior Economist
posted in East Africa. Twenty years working across Europe and Africa have clearly given
Barrett many other things to remember. At the moment of our reverie, although I have
not held a violin in nearly 40 years, I am thrilled to be reminded of my glorious stringed
ascent, my skinny knees, that violin, and me.
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If 1956 was the year that opened my ears to my own music, it was also the year that
opened my eyes to the oppressive presence of white folks. In 1956 they moved from
stories on the periphery of my life to flesh-and-blood commandants. My poor health and
Mama’s subsistence wages created their point of entry.
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The Right to Choose
After I was diagnosed with heart trouble, it was further complicated by “low blood.”
So, we made a beeline back and forth to the Health Department where the government
corralled poor sick folks of all colors for the convenience of dispensing whatever medical
attention was our due. These trips pounded home their own lessons for a black child in
1950s Charlotte, NC.
We depended on government assistance—welfare—for about eight years, during
which my life seemed constantly in peril. Time after time, Ma was ordered to deliver me
up to doctors who barely spoke English, which was really beside the point because they
rarely spoke to us. They were doctors. We were poor, black, and female. What could we
tell them—even about ourselves—that was important for them to know?
After riding in the back of the bus to get to the Health Department, we signed in and
then took our seats in the back of a huge hall, the part of the room reserved for coloreds.
And there we sat, waiting for my name to be called for services to be rendered on a firstcome-first-served basis unless you were lucky enough to be white, which meant no
matter how late you arrived, you always came before every single black person. I was
poked and prodded, stuck and pulled by strange always white, always male hands.
The waiting was not wasted. Ma used the time to remind me of her strict rules of
deportment. She repeated them again in our trek through the segregated waiting room and
back to the examining rooms: I was to stand up straight, walk without dragging my feet,
keep my hands away from my mouth, and enunciate clearly when spoken to. As I was
pawed and passed along from one doctor to another, Ma inserted my name every time
they referred to me as “the patient” in my presence.
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The Right to Choose
Unable to cure me of low blood, the doctors surmised they had a better shot at fixing
my heart. The job was to be done with a bit of cutting-edge surgery performed by young
doctors in training. Without it, they warned, I would die before I reached the age of ten.
Without it, I turned ten at which point other doctors determined that I needed eye
surgery to correct a problem they could see, though not explain. But Ma kept getting in
the way of the medical men in stiffly starched green jackets, the ones who never spoke
my name.
Each time they offered a surgical cure, Mama turned to me and said, "Honey, do you
want this operation?" Each time she asked, I surveyed the forces arrayed before me: my
mother who would not allow such an invasion of my body without first consulting me;
the doctors, jaws slackened in disbelief, scowling disapproval. And, each time, I just said,
"No."
The second time I exercised my right to choose, they practically threw us out of the
Health Department. They called Ma crazy. Who but an unfit mother would let her tenyear old daughter's voice be heard above the experts on what was medically required?
Ma’s calm response was always the same: “It’s her body, so she should have something
to say about what happens to it.” They said they would take me and my sister away from
her. At the very least, they said, they would cut off our welfare check. She hadn’t heard
the last of it, they threatened as we vacated the premises. We would see. A crazy nigger
and her crazy nigger child.
Ma was shaken, but resolute: “You are not some guinea pig for them to practice on,”
she promised as she marched me from the building. Thanks to her, I reached majority
with all my original body parts intact.
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The Right to Choose
Missed work meant missed wages, something Ma could not afford. So when we were
lucky enough to get in and out of the Health Department with half the day left, Ma took
me to work with her. On the bus ride to our destination, she laid out more instructions for
conduct expected of her daughter: I was to be neither seen nor heard, nor was I to
interfere with her work in any way, especially since a whole day’s work would now have
to be squeezed into a half.
I was to keep my hands to myself, not use any of her employers’ dishes or silverware
(she would provide paper plates and cups if needed), not accept any food or drink that
was offered (a needless admonition as none ever was), not ask for anything, not speak
unless spoken to and then I was to answer only and exactly what was asked.
The interior of the house was totally off limits except for using the bathroom, in
which case the half bath next to the broom and mop closet in the basement was the only
one permissible. When it was too cold or too rainy to stay on the back porch, Ma stashed
me in the basement. Sometimes I was joined on the back porch for a few minutes by
George, the “yard boy,” an elderly black man who constantly tended the perfectly
manicured lawn and flowerbeds. Stopping to catch his breath or get a drink of water,
George always quizzed me about school. He had heard I was smart and always cheered
me on, often backing up his encouragement with a nickel, which he handed over only
after he sent me to ask Ma if it was alright to accept it.
Ma and I entered by the backdoor and we left by the backdoor. Over the nearly 30
years that she worked for one family, eventually Ma was allowed to enter through the
side door. The first time I saw her enter and leave by the front door of a house she
cleaned, I was in my second year of law school and it was 1973. Her newest customers
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The Right to Choose
were a white couple who had just moved to town. “They just don’t know any better,” Ma
explained.
The main family Ma cleaned for were the Rogers. Ma had come to them through
George, the family patriarch, not by age, but by wallet. He owned a textile mill with
several other partners and he had seen Ma cleaning their offices. Initially, he had offered
her a job on an assembly line in the mill, but she was not interested in menial labor for
low wages, “cooped up all day with a bunch of lying, back-biting women.” When he
asked her to clean his home, she agreed. For the next 26 years, she cleaned the Rogers’
house on Mondays and Fridays. The other three days she cleaned for less well-off
members of the Rogers’ extended family. She worked in solitude, organized her chores
according to her own schedule, and executed them to her perfectionist standards.
Tuesday was the day George’s sister-in-law got Ma. She was the most financially
strapped of them all, juggling a full-time job with caring for her ailing father. He was a
viciously racist paraplegic who grew increasingly vile as his health deteriorated. The
caretaker sister-in-law could barely afford Ma’s services even though Ma only did light
housekeeping for her and only did that every other week. The sister-in-law began hinting
that Ma should clean up the drooling old man. “Huh, she couldn’t pay me enough to
touch that old thing. I’ll give him a drink of water and roll him out of my way, but that’s
it. She can barely pay me, so I know she can’t afford to have anybody come in and look
after him.
“But she’ll pinch pennies and eat beans and franks as long as she can if that’s what it
takes to keep me coming back,” Ma explained. “That’s the only way she can feel superior
to ‘her Nigger.’” I was furious she wouldn’t quit working for that poor white trash.
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The Right to Choose
“You think I care about that? When you take that money to Fite’s Grocery next
Friday, you won’t see her face nowhere on a dollar bill. My money spends just like hers
and everybody else’s. I work. She pays. That’s the size of it.”
Wednesday belonged to George’s brother-in-law and his family while a younger first
cousin got shitty Thursday, so named in honor of the cousin’s twin toddlers who had a
habit of crapping their diapers and smearing it on the walls, always it seemed, just as Ma
was about to leave for the day. Their mother—whom we called “Miss Ann”—was always
outdone when Ma refused to extend her workday to backtrack and remove the fresh feces.
“Let her see how she likes cleaning up all that shit herself,” Ma said the day she left a
note behind saying she wasn’t coming back. We had never before heard Ma cuss and we
had never known her to quit a job without giving notice.
In those white folks’ houses, Ma was not “Mrs. Singley” or “Miz Odessa,” but simply
“Odessa” to adults and children alike. As racial tensions mounted, spurred by school
desegregation, lunch counter protests, and bus boycotts, George’s wife circled Ma in
conversation, trying to ease up on Ma’s pledge of allegiance to the status quo. But we had
seen her coming and had already rehearsed with Ma, a whole range of answers. So when
the day came when George’s wife finally got up the nerve to broach the subject of sit-ins
and Civil Rights, Ma was loaded and cocked.
“There are two things I don’t debate: politics and religion.” Turns out Ma had rules
for white folks too and, sooner or later—just like the rest of us—they learned to follow
them.
Even my Sunday School teachers drilled us in the correctness of our oppression. We
were Ham’s children, ordained by God to suffer, doomed to forever remain offal on white
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The Right to Choose
folks’ collective shoe. Whether they were strangers in public places or intimates of the
master-servant type, the lessons were the same. The world was theirs. We were present
only by their invitation and with their permission.
I hated white folks and they were the ones who taught me that.
~ ~ ~
Sometimes the bus ride from the Health Department to one of the houses Ma cleaned
took us past Piedmont Courts, a public housing project south of downtown. Even though
it was the brick and mortar twin to Fairview Homes, the black housing project where we
lived, there was something about Piedmont Courts that looked different. Every time we
rode by it, I studied it carefully. Gradually, the differences slid into view.
In Fairview Homes most of our neighbors had yards of hard packed red dirt,
sometimes interrupted by scraggly tufts of grass, but the yards in Piedmont Courts were a
flowing oasis of neatly mowed green lawns. No curtains flapped from windows missing
screens, no men hung on the block drinking from crumpled brown paper bags. I thought
people who lived there—the white people—were just tidier and took better care of things
unlike the sorry-good-for-nothing-element Ma said was bringing down Fairview Homes.
As disgusted as she was with the motley crew that was steadily ruining it for the rest of us,
though, Ma admitted that our trashy neighbors were only part of the problem.
“White people will never let us have anything as good as what they have. So even
when things should look the same, the white man will make sure he keeps up the place
for him and his kind while he lets our places run down. Otherwise, how can they
convince themselves they’re superior?”
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The Right to Choose
Public housing projects were originally built as transitional housing for families on
their way to more permanent accommodations, including homes they owned. But hard
times and neglect steadily turned the projects into ruts where poor families were despised
for getting stuck. Some had a better shot at piecing together enough resources to move
out. They were the lucky ones with fathers or other income streams. Ma’s wages were
less of a stream and more like faucet drip, small and steady. And even extra money she
earned as a seamstress was did not add up to enough to pave our way out. We were still
poor enough to qualify for welfare.
Known then as Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), our $33 a month welfare check
came with a small white social worker whose job it was to keep tabs on us to ensure we
were living down to the standards set for us by the county Welfare Department. She
routinely showed up unannounced. Sitting on the sofa in our two-story flat with walls so
thin you could smell neighbors’ greens cooking and hear folks having sex, the social
worker questioned Ma to verify information that required constant updating to determine
if we had somehow slipped up and started living beyond our mea ns.
Chief among the issues that most concerned the government, and therefore the social
worker, was the whereabouts of the men who had fathered us. Since ours was a
household where truth reigned supreme, the problem was that the truth about my father
would have disqualified me as a welfare recipient. Not so for my sister, whose father was
my mother’s husband, a man who had so thoroughly vanished so long ago that when we
said he was dead, we meant it. Even though he probably never knew I existed because he
had been gone four years by the time I was born, Ma gave me her husband’s last name.
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The Right to Choose
“I didn’t care if I’d had a dozen children by a dozen men. They were all going to have
the same last name as me and the same last name as each other.” My father might as well
have been dead, too, compared to his presence in my life. Fact was he lived across town.
My father was James Calvin Rivers, a bachelor from a bourgeois half-white family
whose “white blood” made them like millions of other black Americans who descended
from seed of the white folks who once enslaved them. His family had land and means
that gave them a reputation for thinking they were better than most black folks around
them. I am told many black folks around them thought of them that way, too.
My father was nearly twenty years older than my mother. She called him “Mr. Jim,”
so I did, too. He was forty-nine and she was thirty-one when I was born. While it’s not
clear whether he ever had any other children, he never had a wife. He had wanted marry
Ma, but she wasn’t interested. “He was too jealous like old men can be,” she explained,
“and I’d already been down that road before.”
For a while, they tried to make a life together, but it didn’t last. She freed him of any
financial responsibility for me, declaring whatever he offered was worth neither the effort
it took to wring it from him nor the strings it came with.
Ma’s decision to cut loose Mr. Jim was also pragmatic because any whiff of his
contributions, no matter how sporadic, would’ve been enough to get us booted from the
dole. The government demanded we be poor all the time and not just every now and then.
So Ma freeing my father was reciprocal: He was free of me and we were free of him.
Page 23
The Power of Peas
I don’t know what got into Mrs. Frazier the day she decided we had to eat everything
on our lunch plate. Unfortunately for me, the day she stood in the cafeteria and
announced it was also the day the hot lunch menu included green peas. I detested peas.
So, when Mrs. Frazier wasn’t looking, I dumped my peas in my milk carton and sat
waiting for her to approve my clean plate.
I will never know what made her pick up my milk carton and turn it upside down
over my plate. Peas plopped down in a puddle of milk littered with cornbread crumbs and
coleslaw, convicting me.
Figure 2 Double Oaks Elementary School Cafeteria 50 years later:
Original site of the 1959 Peas Confrontation
“Eat it!” She pointed to the mess in my plate as though I might otherwise be confused.
I didn’t move.
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The Power of Peas
“Eat it!” she barked again. I wanted to evaporate. Instead I turned rigid with
humiliation.
“I don’t know whose little princess you think you are,” she boomed loud enough for
the whole cafeteria to hear. “But you will sit there and eat those peas before you leave
here today, Miss Lady.”
I couldn’t move. I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I was a straight “A” student
accustomed to being my teachers’ favorite, always obedient and by-the-book. I didn’t
sass adults or otherwise give lip. I never got in trouble and so had no experience being
called out at all, much less with such palpable wrath.
All around me, my classmates began silently taking their trays up to the counter and
lining up at the cafeteria exit. When everyone but me was there, Mrs. Frazier ordered
them to walk back to our classroom, single file, and assigned a student to take names of
anyone who misbehaved. When they left, Mrs. Frazier returned to my side, glaring down
at me. I stared at my fingers, moist and trembling, twisting in my lap.
Cafeteria workers wiped down the tables, mopped the floors, and piled chairs on the
tables. Finally, they closed the blinds and turned off the lights. Mrs. Frazier pulled down
a chair and sat down directly across the table from me, her hands folded across her large,
pregnant belly. In the dim quiet, the air around us grew still and muggy. Tears slid down
my cheeks as my shame turned to fury.
“I can sit here as long as you can,” she taunted. I was a block of granite with a
heaving chest, choking on sobs. Suddenly without a word, she stalked out of the cafeteria.
I was sure she was going to get the principal who would paddle me or do something even
worse. No teacher or principal had ever laid a hand on me. I was terrified by the thought.
Page 25
The Power of Peas
An eternity later, Mrs. Frazier stuck her head through the door and barked, “Let’s
go.”
Still weeping, I kept my distance as I followed her back across the bridge to our fifth
grade classroom on the edge of campus.
I cried all the way home. When Ma got home from work, I had fallen asleep, but my
face was still swollen and snotty from crying. As I told her what happened, I broke down
again.
She listened, interrupting me a few times to ask questions. “Are you sure you’re
telling me everything exactly the way it happened? You’re sure you’re not leaving
anything out?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Okay, you go do your homework. And, don’t you worry, honey, we’ll get to the
bottom of this in the morning.”
The rest of the night as she worked bent over her sewing machine, I could hear Ma
singing and humming. After a while, there was silence, then murmuring. I tipped
downstairs and stood out of sight in the stairwell to see who she was telling about me
getting in trouble in school.
“I send my young’un to school every day with 25 cents to buy her hot lunch and if
she wants to take her lunch and throw it to the birds, she can do just that because it’s my
hard-earned money and none of Frances Frazier's business what my baby does with it as
long as I give her permission. If she knows what’s good for her, she’d better not mess
with my child because I just might have to put on my spike heels and walk down to
Double Oaks and knock her nose clean off!”
Page 26
The Power of Peas
Alone in the room, soon Ma was back to humming and singing, begging the Lord to
put a bit in her mouth and a bridle on her tongue, to take her by her hand, and lead her on.
The next morning, while I finished washing the breakfast dishes, Ma came downstairs
dressed more for church than for work. She had on her spike-heeled, pointy-toed black
pumps and a suit. “Get a move on, honey. I’m going to school with you today and I don’t
want to be too late getting to work.”
We walked into my classroom hand-in-hand. Mrs. Frazier looked surprised to see Ma,
but greeted her graciously. After directing us to read silently, Mrs. Frazier and Ma
stepped inside her office and closed the door.
It seemed like they were in there for a long time. When the door finally opened, Ma
emerged with her arm wrapped around our sobbing, distraught teacher.
At dinner that night, Ma told my sister and me what had happened. Their
conversation had begun with peas, but had quickly turned into one about a case of hives
Mrs. Frazier couldn’t shake. As was her habit, Ma asked one question after another until
Mrs. Frazier was talking about her father who had died months before. But despite deeply
grieving his death, she said, she “had never shed a tear.” Ma asked Mrs. Frazier if she
thought her hives might be connected to her grief.
“That’s when it was like a dam burst inside her,” Ma reported. “You can’t shove your
emotions down and expect to keep them there while you go on with your life. If you
don’t let them out and deal with them one way, they’ll come out another. And, they’re
likely to come out when you least expect them. That’s what happened to Frances. What
she did to you didn’t have anything to do with you. She was missing her father and she
just used those peas to take out her sadness on you.”
Page 27
The Power of Peas
Figure 3 Site of the 1959 Singley/Frazier Peas Conference (my Double Oaks classroom 50 years later)
The next morning, the principal was in our class when we got there. Next to her was
the substitute teacher who had come to take us through the rest of the school year.
From then on, I loved peas.
Page 28
Herman’s Table
Bam! Bam! Bam! “Miz Sang, I hungry!” The screen door rattled beneath his blows.
My sister busied herself at the stove while I vigorously washed my hands at the kitchen
sink, both of us suddenly seized by deafness.
We had smelled him before we saw him, had heard him coming even before that, his
volley of curses ringing out over our playmates’ shrieking laughter. He was a Pied Piper
reeking of piss and the stench of a spit-slick cigar so frayed it looked like it had exploded
between his crusted lips in a prior decade. They skipped along behind hi m, pelting him
with stones and taunts. Like the moon pulled the tide, he dragged them in his wake, each
of them helpless to break free.
It was a weekend ritual, a call-and-response occasion that unfolded every Saturday
afternoon around four o’clock when Herman appeared decked out in a uniform that
remained consistent despite the sweltering heat of a Carolina summer: an ankle-length,
double-breasted, camel tan overcoat belted in the back, a red wool scarf knotted at his
throat, a worn brown leather bomber cap, flaps pulled down over his ears, strap dangling
beneath his chin. In one hand he dragged a burlap sack and, in the other, a broom with
bristles worn down to an arc from his years of sweeping.
Things rarely changed in this neighborhood drama. If someone along Herman’s route
wanted to heighten the combustion, they would push a half-pint of Sandy Scotch or
Mogen David on him, maybe even arm him with a whole bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple
Wine. Everybody knew Herman couldn’t handle liquor. We had all witnessed booze
transform him from a one-person, docile, volunteer sidewalk-sweeper to a human
ballistic missile, furious and unfocused. His tongue loosened by libation, he would careen
Page 29
Herman’s Table
through the neighborhood spewing invectives so lyrically inventive, you couldn’t help
but laugh. Sufficiently fueled, he was that good.
Herman sputtered curses at the just and the unjust, the mothers, in freshly-pressed
hair and house shoes, who stood snickering on the stoops, and their posse of screaming
children. His torrent trailed off, however, when he headed for our apartment door, one of
five hundred identical portals in a sea of low-slung red brick buildings that made up the
public housing projects called Fairview Homes. Drunk or sober, Herman knew when he
stepped up on our porch, he had to come correct.
If he had tied his burlap bag to his waist in order to free a hand to sip his brew or to
relieve himself against a wall, he would stop at the corner of our yard and rearrange
himself. After depositing his bottle in his bag, he’d stash his stuff behind the hedges to
the right of our front door. His load lightened, he’d straighten up and begin pounding our
door.
Bam! Bam! Bam! “Miz Sang, I hongry!”
The children knew their limits, too. So when Herman peeled off towards us, they
stayed back, hurling only their voices after him. Even the baddest among them was not
tough enough to brave Miz Odessa’s wrath and bring their foolishness across her line of
demarcation.
Mama’s zone was well marked. Ours was the apartment with a perfectly manicured
square carpet of grass, bordered by roses, petunias, oxalis, and chrysanthemums, with a
sugar maple in the middle and a row of hedges that hugged the wall beneath the living
room window. Our yard stood in stark contrast to the packed red dirt that otherwise
spread out around us. Mama had dug every hole, planted every flower, sewn every seed,
Page 30
Herman’s Table
pruned every limb, trimmed every hedge and her presence stood sentry even when she
was nowhere in sight. No one dared cross the woman who could push a brown twig in the
ground in the fall and watch it sag under a profusion of roses the following spring.
Herman and Odessa had an understanding: As long as he wasn’t drunk, he was
welcome inside for something to eat or drink. But when he reeked of booze, he had to
stay on the stoop and wait while we fixed him a plate of food to go. Then, he would
graciously accept his foil-wrapped meal—with the biscuits or cornbread wrapped
separately from the rest at his request—and proceed, penitently, on his tipsy way.
Bam! Bam! Bam! “Miz Sang, I hungry!”
Tina and I sniffed the air for booze and, scenting none, she pulled another plate from
the shelf and handed it to me to set Herman’s place at our table. Roused by his knocking,
Odessa came downstairs, unlatched the screen door, and stepped aside to let him in.
When he was safely inside, she turned on the children whose heckling suddenly ceased.
Shifting from foot to foot, jostling each other in a sheepish silence, they wilted in
anticipation of what we all knew was next.
“Why do you keep messing with him? Every week, it’s the same. You trash this place
and he comes behind you, cleaning it up. Yet, you think you’re better than he is, right?”
She raised her voice in pitch and volume making sure it reached the now glaring, sullen
mothers, who began disappearing from their doorways in a chorus of teeth-sucking.
“Well, think again! This is not where he lives. This is where you live! And here he is
out here picking up your trash in your front yard, doing for free what you’re too sorry to
do and all you can think to do is traipse along behind him, yelling and grinning like
hyenas and acting ignorant??!
Page 31
Herman’s Table
“So, now who’s the fool in that scenario? Instead of laughing and making fun of him,
you need to run home to your mammas and daddies and beg them to teach you some
manners, teach you how to respect your elders.
“Now, git from in front of my door before I take off my shoe and come out there and
knock every one of your noses clean off. Git!!”
The children slowly backed up and then raced off to find someone else to torment.
Mama latched the screen door and joined us at the table where she took Herman’s cap
from his lap and placed it on the buffet.
I winced when he grabbed my hand and bowed his small round, grizzled head. Then,
stealing a sideways glance, the sight of his fragile, wrinkled neck, small, flared nose,
flawless pecan-colored face, and feathery lashes against high cheekbones split my 12year old heart like an axe. Deep creases along each side of his fluttering lips smoothed
and folded as he blessed our table.
Page 32
Cat-Eyes and Surplus Food
Inspired by “Fattening for Gabon,” SAY YOU’RE ONE OF THEM, Uwem Akpan (2009) 1
Imogene Reno was fair-skinded, light-complected—a high yellow in the vocabulary
colored folks created to obsessively slot ourselves along the skin color continuum. On top
of all that, Imogene had eyes just like our cat Puff—a golden yellow/light brown ocean
with a flecked light green island in the center.
Puff’s eyes changed colors depending on the time of day and how the light hit them,
whether or not they were open, half-closed, or blinking. But I never knew if Imogene’s
eyes changed colors because I was afraid of getting too close to her. After all, I knew
there was one thing about her that never changed and that was her sorry ways. I had no
intention of letting them rub off on me.
When Mama called Imogene sorry, she didn’t mean remorseful sorry, but sorry as in
good-for-nothing; the kind of sorry who let her babies roam the streets in pee-soaked,
turd-heavy diapers bumping the backs of their thighs while she laid up with some-nogood-man. Sorry as in too dumb to charge the stream of men who crouched between her
legs, letting them come and go for free instead. Sorry as in stood on the front stoop in her
housecoat, hair sticking up all over her head, puffing on a cigarette she had just bummed
off some guy passing by. Sorry with her gaze cocked on Oaklawn Avenue, scoping the
scene for the next one happy to use her for his doormat.
Sorry as in every time she got locked up in for some petty crime, nine months later,
she had another get-outta-jail baby. Every one of them looked more like the bail
bondsman than any of those his high-falutin wife dressed up and strewed across the
church pews on Sunday morning.
Page 33
Imogene was so sorry, she never bothered to finish putting on her shoes, so she’d go
dragging her feet down the sidewalk—swissssh…swissssh—the back of her shoes
scrunched down beneath her heels, turning a perfectly good pair of shoes into “slides.”
“How sorry is that?” Ma would hiss, eyes narrowed, jaw set for another screen door
indictment. “Too sorry to pick up one foot and put it in front of the other, that’s how
sorry.”
One day I stayed home from school sick with a sore throat. It was pouring rain and I
was reading a book when a noise broke my attention. “Unnnnh! Unnnnh! Unnnnh!” Like
the metronome we used to set our pace in violin practice, the sound outside kept a steady
beat at the same volume. “Unnnnh! Unnnnh! Unnnnh!”
I cleared a small circle in the steam on Mama’s bedroom window and pressed my eye
there, holding my breath to keep back the fog long enough to see the source of the sound.
It was Larry, Imogene Reno’s oldest boy and 2nd oldest child.
He was in white cotton panties, chest bare, and shoeless. His head hung backwards as
he staggered up and down the sidewalk, wailing in the driving rain. “Unnnnh! Unnnnh!
Unnnnh!” When he reached the edge of our backyard, I rapped hard on the window, but
he couldn’t hear me. So I loosened the lock and pushed against the rickety wooden frame
swollen by the dampness, raising it just enough to press my lips against the space and
shout down to him.
“Larry! Boy, what’re you doing out there? You better go home!” He staggered on,
deaf to my yelling. “Unnnnh! Unnnnh! Unnnnh!” I slammed the window and raced
downstairs to the back door to wait for him to come back around. When he got close
again, I stuck my head out the screen door and yelled as loud as my sore throat allowed,
Page 34
“Larry, come here! What’s wrong with you, boy? COME HERE!” He paused, turned in
my direction, and then stood there swaying like he wasn’t sure who I was, like we didn’t
see each other every day, like he hadn’t been living a few apartment doors down from me
all his life. I called him again. “Larry!” He lurched in my direction, mooing, “Unnnnh!
Unnnnh! Unnnnh!”
When he reached the stoop, I snatched him inside and locked the door. “Stay there!
Don’t. You. Move.” I returned with a towel and one of the dresses Ma wore to work in
her flowerbed. I was probably going to get in trouble anyway for having Larry in our
apartment without her permission, so I wasn’t going to make bad matters worse by
putting any good clothes on him.
He was standing where I left him, smearing snot across his face with the back of his
hand. Except for sniffing, he was quiet but tremors rolled up and down his skinny, fatbellied little body like he was being worked head to toe by an invisible rolling pin. Then
his teeth began chattering as he started up again, but only in a low moan. “Unnnnh!
Unnnnh! Unnnnh!” Green snot streaming from his nose choked off his breathing, coursed
over his top lip, and disappeared into his mouth. “C’mon, boy.”
I pushed him upstairs with one hand in the small of his back and the other one
holding Ma’s dress tail high above his head to keep him from tripping over it. I made him
sit on the floor next to the tub while I filled it with water, adding laundry powder to make
suds. I found a quilt top Grandma had never finished turning into a quilt and wrapped that
round him, too. His face glistened where the slime had dried and crusted over and his
teeth had finally ceased chattering. Slumped against the wall, with his knees to his chest
Page 35
and his toes curled under, he looked small and worn out. I bathed him in a silence
punctuated by short gusts from his slightly parted lips. “Unh. Unh. Unh.”
When I lifted Larry from the tub and stood him on the rug, he felt no heavier than a
big empty box. That didn’t seem right for a seven-year old. He wanted to dry off himself
and then stood still while I pulled one of my t-shirts over his head and wrapped his waist
with rope to hold up a pair of my shorts I had pinned up on him. I stooped down and
motioned for him to climb up on my back because our stairs were hard and cold like the
linoleum on the kitchen floor and his bare feet were still damp. I deposited him in a chair
at the kitchen table.
He took slow, tiny sips from a glass of orange Kool Aid while I found something in
the fridge to feed him: a thick slab of canned meat and a huge hunk of bright orange
cheese, both part of our ration from the federal government’s surplus food program. I
fried the meat, melted the cheese on top of it and piled the combo between a sliced biscuit
left over from breakfast. For a moment after I placed it in front of him, Larry just stared
at the saucer with the sandwich. Then he began nibbling silently and steadily.
He ate the second sandwich just like the first: slowly and neatly without losing a
crumb. When he finished, he sagged forward, resting his head on the table as if it were
nap time. The bridge of his nose and the rust-colored fuzz on his head framed his cat eyes,
following me from the table to the sink as I cleaned up the kitchen.
I made a pallet of cushions and blankets for him near the stove and then stretched out
the sofa across the room from him. That’s how Mama found both of us when she got
home from work. She shook me awake, eyeing me sternly. “Bunny, wake up! You have
some explaining to do.”
Page 36
As I told her what happened, she scooped up Larry’s panties with a plastic cleaners
bag, then kneeled down to gently shake him awake. With him the drowsy, barefoot boy
hoisted on her hip like a bag of groceries, she carried him back down to his apartment.
His head rested on her shoulder and his legs were wrapped around her waist. Ma stood on
their stoop knocking for a long time, louder and louder, until she was banging the door
with her fist. She thought she saw a curtain flutter, but no one ever opened the door.
Finally, she deposited Larry on his porch. It had stopped raining and his big sister and
younger siblings had appeared from somewhere.
When Mama came back home, she was humming “Jesus Paid It All.” She could see I
was upset. I had made my argument for why we should keep Larry for good and I had
lost.
“I’m thoroughly disgusted with that sorry, poor excuse for a woman,” she began,
locking the screen door behind her. “She’s not fit to be called a mother. Just wait til I see
her again. She’s definitely gonna get a piece of my mind. Those children have a hard row
to hoe and I suspect they still haven’t seen the worst of it.” I wanted her to shut up
because as far as I was concerned, she could’ve made it easy for one of them. Instead, we
had left Larry on the porch like he was the morning newspaper.
Barely a week had passed since Ma had admonished us about surplus food. “You can
turn up your nose if you want to. Just remember food is food. And just because they
canned this swill to feed us what they won’t even feed their animals doesn’t mean there
won’t come a day when you’ll be glad to see it.”
Page 37
Cub Scouts and Strict Constructions
Say What You Mean and Mean What You Say
Most adults who knew my mother were afraid of her. Even though we weren’t adults,
that included my sister and me.
She wasn’t mean as much as she was stern, upright, extremely strict. She said what
she meant and meant what she said, which was an unnerving quality in a world where
few people ever said what they meant and fewer still stood by what they said.
Ma was not a violent person though she often threatened violence, like saying she
would knock somebody’s nose off or maybe hit them upside their bald head so hard their
shoes would fly off. Turning 70 didn’t slow her flow. And even though I never saw her
throw a punch, I didn’t doubt she’d win any fight she was in.
Trying to avoid the withering volley of disapproval streaming from her tongue went a
long way towards keeping my sister and me in line. Sometimes when we knew we were
going to be punished, we would ask if she’d just whip us and get it over with instead of
making us stand mute and respectful for her interminable verbal strip searches. Being
uncovered, tried, sentenced, and punished by her one-woman tribunal had its impact. I’m
convinced that growing up with Ma in my ear and in my head had a lot to do with me
becoming a lawyer. I learned a lot long before I realized what I had learned.
For instance, Ma proved that a judicial temperament was not something only men
could have. I learned that the best evidence in the world wasn’t worth squat if you
couldn’t get a word in edgewise. And even though a good defense required logic and
reason, I learned that sometimes the smartest thing to do was just shut up.
Page 38
I also learned that using an authority figure’s own words to defeat them was as good
as it got. More importantly, perhaps, I learned that was a trick that required great courage,
perfect timing, and tons of deference.
Our harshest prosecutor, Ma was also our most fierce defender. She didn’t hesitate to
back us up against an unfair teacher, an ignorant preacher, an arrogant doctor, or anybody
else attempting to snuff her children’s spirit. When she stepped up to verbally bail us out,
though, she always said the same thing.
“I’m showing you how to do this so you’ll know how to take care of yourself because
I won’t always be around for you to come running to. So, you’ve gotta learn how to stand
on our own two feet.
Even when they had just done us wrong, elders were still people we had to respect.
We still had to say “Yes ma’am” and “No, ma’am” to them like we did to everyone else,
but that did not mean we had to mutely accept what we felt was unfair, unjust, or just
plain wrong.
“After all,” Ma would tell us, “the Bible tells us not to be a respecter of persons. So,
just because somebody calls himself a teacher or has a piece of paper on the wall that
says he has a degree does not mean he has more sense than you. Most people with book
sense don’t have common sense anyway.
Despite being devoutly religious, Ma saved her most scathing assessment for men of
the cloth.“Just because somebody calls himself a preacher don’t mean he got called by
God. Some of these folks standing in the pulpit today got called by the almighty dollar. A
lot of other ones just got called for supper and they heard it wrong.”
~ ~ ~
Page 39
We feared Ma for good reason. She could look right through you or, worse, walk
around in your thoughts and tell you—not ask you—but tell you what you were thinking.
She earned folks’ fear.
Ma’s powers of discernment were awesome. Decades before anybody had ever heard
of date-stamping food, she could hear a flea sneeze in the dark part of Fite’s Grocery
Store while she was back there smell-testing every canned good before dropping it in our
basket. For her, arriving early was being on time and she disdained alarm clocks as
crutches for lazy people. She would announce she was taking a 15-minute nap, promptly
doze off, and wake up exactly 15 minutes later without any external prompt.
Ma’s speed slumber separated the part of the day she spent with the white folks from
the evenings she spent with us. As soon as she came home from work, she’d drop her
things inside the front door, change her clothes, and head back outside. She remained out
there bent over among her flower beds until dusk, humming, weeding, pruning, and
patting.
When we first moved to the projects, row after row of two-story tenement buildings
sat grimly atop an oasis of red clay dirt. Then as Ma began busting up clumps of sod and
daily performed her laying-on-of-hands, our perfectly manicured yard slowly emerged.
The small plot she worked stretched only ten feet in one direction and twenty feet in the
other, but it was a towering testament to her determination “to have something.” She
coaxed beauty from nothing, using her sweat, patience, and purchases from a local
nursery and plant clippings from our church members.
The Ladies-with-Husbands were Ma’s screen door critics. We nicknamed them that
because they got to stay at home while their husbands worked. They were glued to the
Page 40
“stupid box” watching soap operas during the week and Saturday afternoons found them
drinking beer and yelling encouragement to the Great Bolo or Two Ton Terry, their
favorite TV wrestlers. Sundays they slept in because unlike us born again Christians,
those heathens only went to church at Christmas and Easter.
Occasionally, they tore themselves away from the TV screen to stand in their screen
doors, and make fun of Ma for being “so country” she was always digging in dirt. There
was more to their derision than that, though.
Ma was quite pale with long, naturally straight hair that hung in soft curls, which she
always wore pinned up close to her head as though she had a short cropped bob. She
considered it flaunting her “good hair” to wear it loose and hanging down and she didn’t
believe in that. Her combination of hair and complexion was equally revered and resented
by many black folks. Those folks included the Ladies with Husbands who didn’t want
their men even speaking to Ma. In response, Ma kept to herself in an effort to not stoke
their ire. But her remove was twisted into accusations that she was “stuck up” and
thought we were better than everybody else.
Ma never denied her skin color gave her a certain advantage. Yet, we were equally
clear about the flip side of that privilege when the Ladies with Husbands hissed about Ma
—and her daughters—“tryin to be white.”
Den Mother
Ma was big on controlling our environment. Her job, as she constantly described it,
was getting us through high school and into college on scholarship. To ensure our success,
she controlled our speech, dress, and behavior with no apparent concern about whether it
might stifle our creative development. “Whatever I don’t get right,” she said, “you can fix
Page 41
when you’re out on your own.” Key to her control was refusing to own—or even allow
us to watch—the stupid box.
Sometimes controlling our environment required Ma to expand her sphere of
influence to others who were nearby, but who really should have been beyond her
reach—like other people’s children. That’s how she started her Cub Scout troop.
When Ma decided to turn our house into a Cub Scout den on Saturday mornings, my
sister and I were not happy. But she didn’t ask us what we thought about it, so we had no
choice but to accept it.
The first Saturday morning a small horde of boys crowded into our kitchen, I was too
through. It was bad enough they were there, but Ma had decided I should also be
responsible for helping out with them. I thought not, but was smart enough not to say so.
Instead, I signaled my displeasure by being short-tempered and marginally cooperative
until Ma pulled me aside.
“You better straighten up and fly right,” she warned. “And you ought to be ashamed
of yourself. These children have no one to give them half the attention you get, so it's not
going to kill you to share your Mama with them. They will be here every Saturday
morning from now on and you will be polite to them, do whatever I tell you to do, and
you will do it without an attitude. Now, I don’t want to hear another word about it." And
that was that.
For months, they came and went. There was always a moment of quiet when they
opened with the pledge of allegiance and then the Cub Scout pledge, but that swiftly gave
way to a writhing wad of sweat, dirt, and noise. They built model planes and flew them in
Page 42
the backyard after smearing glue on every surface they could reach. Construction paper,
wood, nails, and string littered the floor. The one good thing they did was gobble up our
Government surplus food.
Ma had seen the boys—from seven to ten years old—ripping and running the streets
and creating havoc out of boredom and lack of supervision. Like me, they had daddies,
but no fathers. And come Saturday, after working hard all week, their mothers snatched
time for themselves by sleeping late, getting their hair done, or simply locking their doors
against their children’s screams and sighs. That vacuum was Ma’s opportunity.
Since they weren’t being properly raised by her measure, Ma stepped in to correct the
situation by starting a Cub Scout troop and making herself their Den Mother. She went
door to door to explain to their mothers what she had in mind and to get them to sign up
their sons. Then she who was raised most of her life without a father; who had no man
around to legitimize her existence as a woman or a mother; and who had no sons of her
own, brought her neighbors’ sons into our home and made them her own.
Saturday was Ma’s only day off, too, since she spent Sundays working as hard for the
Lord as she worked for other white men the rest of the week. But she decided it was a
small sacrifice to make for the results she was sure she could achieve. So she did it. She
didn't go to a foundation, a church, or even the boys' mothers to ask for money. She used
her own money to buy supplies from S. H. Kress, the five-and-dime downtown. Friday
night, my sister sat down at the piano and played the Cub Scout songs until Ma learned
them well enough to teach them to the boys the next day. Saturday morning we rose early
to prepare for the onslaught.
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Somehow, eventually, each boy and Ma had uniforms. She would line them up and
strut them through the neighborhood just so they could be seen, proud little guys with
their chests puffed out, sporting brown uniforms with yellow kerchiefs knotted at the
neck and finished off with brown beanies. They were WEBOS, flashing the sign of God
and country long before we ever heard of flashing the sign of the Crips and Bloods.
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Wife Beater
“I think you better stop right there,” Ma cautioned from her seat on the sofa. She
didn’t even bother to look up from what she was doing.
“’Course, you can step foot over this doorsill if you want to, but I’d really give that
another thought if I were you. Cuz you might come in here walking upright, but I can
pretty much guarantee it’ll take two men to git you outta here and that’s assuming they
can find enough of you to pick up.”
The wife beater stood with his face pressed against our screen door. The latch hung
loose beside the hook, not even a moment’s deterrence should he suddenly decide to
resume his pursuit and join us inside.
The screen smashed his forehead, nose and chin flat, reducing them to three whitened
spots on an otherwise ruddy brown face. His eyes closed from the effort of weighing the
options Ma had placed before him.
“She my wife!” he protested, searching for a new toehold in the discussion.
“And this is my house,” Ma answered. “My domain. Don’t nuthin’ happen here
except what I allow to happen here. You can beat her in her house, you can beat her in
yours, but you can’t lay a finger on her in mine.” She spoke calmly as though every
Saturday dinner ended with a whimpering woman in the sewing closet and her raging
man on the front porch.
Miss Vivian stirred out of sight behind the faded green curtain that served as the
closet door. Tina and I listened as we finished cleaning up the kitchen. Women ruled the
roost in our house and the whiskey stench from a muscled assailant, however fearsome
and disconcerting, did not change that fundamental. So, Tina and I set aside the butcher
knife and the ancient black cast iron skillet, handy tools for redressing the potential threat
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Wife Beater
to our household balance of power. Children were to be seen and not heard, but we knew
better than to be caught defenseless.
Mama’s humming was barely audible. She had finished filing her nails into perfectly
shaped ovals and was applying the first coat of clear polish.
“Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee. Like the waters from the
flood….” Miss Vivian stirred. I glared at the curtain’s flutter.
“She walk right by and don’t even speak to us,” I pouted. “Why momma let her run in
here anyway, puttin’ our life in danger?” I was unforgiving and melodramatic.
Tina put her finger to her lips to shush me.
“He oughta beat her up wit’ her stuck up self. Next time maybe she’ll speak to people,
‘specially if she gone need to be runnin’ in they house.”
“Ernestine! Bunny! Y’all through in the kitchen?”
“Yes, ma’am,” we replied in unison.
“Well go on upstairs.” Upstairs out of grown folks’ business, out of earshot, out of
harm’s way.
Tina slid the butcher knife under the waistband of her shorts and pulled her shirt
down over it. Then with me firmly in hand, she marched me through the living room,
right past the wife beater, up the stairs, and into our bedroom.
I perched on the foot of my bed and leaned against the screen to see what he was
doing down on the stoop one story below. He sat grinning at his audience.
A small crowd had gathered when Miss Vivian came tearing down the sidewalk,
barefoot, hair standing all over her head, wearing only a blood-spattered bra and shorts.
Dodging his blows, she had run right past all the other apartments in the projects and had
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Wife Beater
made a howling beeline for our front door. Now the women had retired to their porches
where they huddled and smirked openly at her demise. Sensing that no further blows
would be exchanged among the warring adults, children resumed their routine torture and
battering of each other.
“Now maybe she knows what it feels like when she beats up Iris and Charlene,” I said.
Visions of our classmates, her angry, mean daughters, slunk past, heavily scarred from
belt buckles, electrical cords, mop handles, whatever weapon was within Miss Vivian’s
reach. “If you don’t shut up, you’re gonna get a whipping yourself,” Tina warned. The
butcher knife now lay on our dresser.
I tipped to the top of the stairs and peered down. The abuser had vanished from our
stoop, perhaps aided by my mama’s warning. I crept downstairs and peeked around the
corner.
Ma pulled Miss Vivian from the closet and, with her, a large fabric remnant. She
draped it first around Miss Vivian’s neck and then around her waist, knotting it in back to
form a halter top.
Mama straightened up to check her stitchless fashion, “As long as you keep running,
he’ll keep you running. One day, sooner or later, you’re gonna hafta stand up to him.”
“Git you a hammer,” she advised. “Show it to him and tell him the next time he
messes with you, you gone hit him on his head so hard, his shoes’ll fly off. Tell him
you’ll do it even if you hafta wait until he goes to sleep. Tell him that even if you don’t
mean it.”
Miss Vivian was still patting her hair down when she walked up the hill and
disappeared behind the red brick buildings.
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Sniffing Dirty Laundry
(Why I Rarely Trust White People of a Certain Age)
Ma had indeed kept me away from white folks. She did such a good job of it that,
until I reached junior high school, everything I knew about them had come mostly from
listening to her. Well, from her and from being dragged from one place to another for
medical treatment while reading newspapers and magazines like Life, Redbook, Ladies
Home and Garden, Good Housekeeping and occasionally Ingenue. Since Ma had
brainwashed us into voting unanimously not to have a television, she was my primary
reference on White People.
Ma’s knowledge of white folks was encyclopedic and she instructed us in nuanced
details with remarkable detachment. She approached it much like she taught us to cook
biscuits from scratch, hand wash clothes, clean up, sew, fix our hair, and memorize long
speeches. The ways of white folks lined up alongside her coaching me in violin and my
sister in piano and voice even though the only instrument Ma played was the accordion.
Her relationships with her employers were contractual exchanges that just happened to
also provided her with a vantage point for close observation. She cleaned their houses to
earn a living. And while she was never angry or bitter about that, watching and listening
to her, I learned to hate them on my own.
Many days, Ma came home exhausted—not from the physical labor, but from the
mental toil of constantly deflecting the arrogance of adults and children drenched in the
mightiness of their relentless whiteness. The women of the house were always “Mrs.
Rembert” or “Mrs. Hice,” but she was always “Odessa,” even to toddlers who could
barely talk. As far as Ma was concerned, the daily slights were simply the way things
were: white folks lifting themselves up the only way they knew how—by looking down
on us.
Boycott
Widespread resistance to our push for civil rights was making it clear that the white
folks Ma worked for weren’t the only ones we needed to worry about. It was White
People generally who were ganging up to keep stomping us down.
Fortunately, though, as Ma explained it at the dinner table night after night, Charlotte
didn’t want to look like one of those race viper pits further south where high-powered
water hoses flushed people down the street after snarling dogs had a go at them first. So,
a few reasonably prudent white leaders struck a deal with Charlotte’s middle-class black
leaders and began inching us towards desegregation of the public schools.
To make it work, black leaders offered up their own progeny, believing them to be
the best representatives of our race: colored children with two college-educated parents,
members of Greek letter societies, owners of a mortgage and two car payments, regular
church-going, paid up members of the NAACP. Children who came from something and
were, therefore, best qualified to go penetrate the “whites only” preserves. But there
weren’t enough of the original chosen few to spread around, so the black intelligentsia
reached deeper into the pool and came up with the rest of us. Swept into this widened
circle of the Deserving Students with Potential, I became one of our colored best,
brightest, and most well behaved. Perched atop our little pedestals, we were groomed and
offered up, a tithe of talent to be scattered upon a vast sea of white mediocrity. White
leaders showed their support by simply refraining from unnecessary talking.
I was flattered to be tethered to the children of the black bourgeoisie, to become, like
them, a treasured guinea pig for the Cause. But then we had a family meeting to explore
my options as a Race Warrior in the Fight for Racial Justice and Equality and when Ma
explained that I was part of the second line of assault and not the first, I was indignant.
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Boycott
But I quickly got over it, lured past my initial dismay by the thought that I would soon be
strutting my stuff among the White Folks. I had several choices for just how I could do
that.
The easiest option was to remain with my old classmates in our segregated school on
the west side of town; the hardest was to become “one of those Dorothy Counts girls” and
dive headfirst into a sea of white hostility. Ours was a family of readers and talkers and
we read and talked incessantly about what happened at school, at work, and in the news.
So I was acutely aware of the treatment waiting for the sole black kid in a classroom:
being assigned to the back of the class, never called on to participate, graded unfairly,
harassed by classmates and teachers alike, called names, shoved, spit on, threatened, or
shunned. I figured I could put up a good fight in that situation, but why should I? I had
too much to lose.
I was college-bound and I could not afford to have racist children and teachers
throw me off-track by pulling down my grades. Ma had drilled into us that the only way
we could afford college was to get scholarships. If I couldn’t count on being graded fairly,
my entire future would be jeopardized. Why should I sacrifice myself simply for the
chance to sit among a bunch of mean-assed white kids just to prove I was as smart as they
were? Perhaps that was a job best left to the Negro kids whose parents could afford to
send them to college, scholarship or not. Still, though, despite the low-down tactics of
my prospective white nemeses, I wasn’t entirely convinced that I couldn’t beat the odds
no matter how high they were stacked against me.
Then came Ma’s final question. “What if someone hits or spits on you? What would
you do?“
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Boycott
“Ball up my fist and try to knock their nose off.”
“Well, that being the case, I think the wisest choice is for you to stay right here and
go to school with the children and teachers you know and who know you.”
The school integration war reached our front porch anyway that summer of 1961. It
arrived as the pupil assignment notice sentencing me to seventh grade at Irwin Avenue
Junior High and smashing the future I had already planned for myself even though I had
just turned twelve. A pre-teen still new to stockings and pumps with “Princess heels,” I
had been headed for Northwest Junior High, like my sister before me, until the
devastating notice appeared. Northwest was the intermediate portal before crossing the
ultimate threshold: West Charlotte Senior High. The thought that I might never make it to
West Charlotte, but might instead end up in some hostile high school’s race war zone was
devastating.
Then, too, no one we knew had ever heard of “Irwin Avenue Junior High School.”
That was because it was a new name slapped on an old school that had been all white
when it closed for the summer three months earlier. If the name change was supposed to
fool us into ditching the vaunted Northwest for some “white trash” leftovers in a rundown
white neighborhood, it didn’t work.
So, when the propertied white leaders decided to send poor, working class black kids
to sit in classes beside the dirt poor white kids, the poor white folks boycotted the school.
So we did too. Consequently, of the 800 children assigned to Irwin Avenue, about 200
actually showed up, not one white face among them. Neither was mine.
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Boycott
Outside the school, the Charlotte Observer reported, “the Negroes were picketing and
demanding desegregation.” The white families, who could afford to, had fled before
school opened. Ma had decided that the safest place for me was at home.
Eventually, things calmed down and classes started. The white folks who fled and
took their children with them left us mostly poor black students and solidly middle-class
black teachers to our completely black selves.
~ ~ ~
I already knew my teachers favored me because I was smart and well-behaved and
soared spectacularly in reading and writing. My first real inkling had come in the fourth
grade, when my California Achievement Test scores showed reading comprehension was
that of an eleventh grader in her ninth month of school. My teachers wanted to
immediately take me out of fourth grade and skip me to the sixth, but Mama wasn’t
having it. Convinced I was physically too fragile and emotionally too immature, she was
not moved either my pouting or by others’ efforts to persuade her. Irwin Avenue,
however, introduced me to a new kind of peeling away, showing me that I was being
judged and set apart from my classmates not simply for my ability, but also for the way I
looked, dressed, talked, and behaved.
One night after attending the first monthly parent-teachers’ meeting of the year,
Mama came home steaming. My English teacher, technically black but even whiter
looking than Mama, had beamed her approval despite unearthing my true origins.
“We were so surprised to find out that Bernestine is a recipient.” In Mama’s telling,
her fury turned the word into “ree-SIP-yunt.”
“Recipient?” Mama didn’t understand.
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Boycott
“Yes…on welfare!” The English teacher whispered sympathetically. “Bernestine
is so well-dressed, so well-mannered. She speaks so beautifully and carries herself with
such class. We just never would’ve thought….You can imagine our surprise….” Her
voice trailed off. Mama inhaled the insult, shoved it down inside her gut, and finished
listening to the glowing reports from the English teacher and all of my other teachers.
And then she came home fit to be tied.
“This is precisely what I’ve been trying to teach you. From here on out, people are
going to be judging you by how you speak, how you dress, how you behave. These
colored ones who think they’re better than we are because they have a piece of paper
called a college degree, think we’re poor because we’re stupid, because we don’t want to
do better. They think we don’t have any class. Look at what that woman said to my face
tonight. ‘We were so surprised!’
“What kind of fool do you have to be to believe that jus t because I’m struggling, my
children shouldn’t know how to speak properly or shouldn’t show up in school wellrested and well-fed? You better take note because this is what you’ll be up against for the
rest of your life. People looking at you and deciding on the spot whether they’re going to
let you in or try to keep you out. That doesn’t mean you have to change who you are or
get your ass on your shoulders and act like them. What it does mean is you’d better keep
your nose clean, your head high, and your shoulder to the grindstone.”
Within a year of Mama making our reality plain, Tina and I got summer jobs. At
thirteen, I earned the same $30 weekly salary as Mama who, at forty-four, had been in the
workforce for thirty-four years. Because she refused to let me or my sister clean white
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Boycott
folks houses (“I do it so you won’t have to do it”), I had found an office job doing typing
and filing.
At our next family meeting, we conducted a Welfare cost-benefit analysis, weighing
the pros and cons of continuing to receive benefits against going it on our own. We
decided that the $30/month welfare check was not enough to make up for the stigma, the
invasions, the assaults that came with it. Plus, now that my weekly salary matched our
monthly subsidy, the law required that we report our new financial status. To fail to
report it would have been lying and breaking the law, both of which were completely
beyond the pale. The family vote to part ways with the dole was unanimous.
In the daily to and fro of the working world, I left my neighborhood every day, which
meant I saw more White People than ever: on the bus, downtown on the Square, in retail
establishments, on the street. And the more I saw them, the more I loathed them. Our
pooled income and the taste of independence my first real salary brought coincided with
the growing push for equal rights throughout Charlotte’s Negro communities. I was
incapable of ignoring how determined white folks pushed back against our quest for
justice and equality. Evidence was everywhere of how everything was set up to benefit
them. Evidence was everywhere that they would kill us if that’s what it took to keep
themselves on top. As Ma watched my fury rise, she was increasingly disturbed by my
clear lack of Godly love. A fervent believer with impeccable Christian credentials, she
felt I was her Saul who needed to be placed on the road to Damascus.
If I had no love for White People, Ma was similarly disinclined to appreciate the civil
rights work of lawyers and political others she routinely maligned as “self-serving rabble
rousers.” No matter her lack of appreciation, a sentiment I shared at the time with many
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Boycott
wary friends and neighbors, our leaders had been busy wrenching a deal from CCS that it
would take me forty years to unearth. Meanwhile, their efforts gave us two new
schools—Druid Hills Elementary and John Taylor (J. T.) Williams Junior High—in
Negro neighborhoods; community control over the selection of the J. T. Williams
principal; and gave J. T. Williams’ principal the power to select of his faculty. 2
So, after serving my one-year sentence at Irwin Avenue, I waved bye-bye to that
dreadful place and transferred to the brand new, solidly black J. T. Williams Junior High,
school in a black community surrounded by a mix of poor, working class, middle class,
and even upper middle class black neighborhoods. And there, in our gem built atop a city
dump, we Children of the Dream managed to get an excellent education as we endlessly
created, refined, dismantled, and reconstructed hierarchies of class, skin color, and hair
texture that would scar us forever after. And middle class black people began more
clearly emerging as the new face of my oppression.
Principal Alexander H. Byers greeted 7 th, 8th, and 9th graders with stern warnings
when we arrived at a sparkling, state-of-the-art J. T. Williams in the fall of 1962. A
highly respected, impeccably trained eduRenor and strict disciplinarian who ruled with
compassion and integrity, Byers brooked no foolishness. I had no way of knowing that
the superb faculty backing up Byers was one he had handpicked from the cream of the
crop. Systematically shut out of jobs in CCS, many of Charlotte’s best and brightest
young black teachers had dispersed to other counties to find work, some even forced into
commutes across state lines.
One by one, they had returned at Byers’ behest. And then, graciously ignored by the
white folks, Byers and his staff poured themselves into us and created the crown jewel
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Boycott
that was John Taylor Williams Junior High School. We were in every respect the J. T.
“Panthers.”
I had entered 9th grade like I owned it and I did: I was President of the freshman class
and of the National Junior Honor Society, a reporter for the school newspaper, a teaching
assistant in the Adult Education Classes held on campus, and a violinist —occasionally
managing to unseat Gwendolyn Carraway from first chair, though never for long—in the
school orchestra. I was aglow with the hope that cloaks only the young and the foolish.
Dr. King and President Kennedy were the soundtrack for my budding consciousness.
On November 22, 1963, an unseasonably warm, sunny day, we had just finished
inducting the eighth graders into the National Junior Honor Society. As president, I led
the procession from the cool interior into the bright sunshine where my two favorite
teachers stood just outside the doorway, waiting to congratulate us. As we drew closer,
Ilda S. Johnson, my English teacher, stared grimly above my head, her arm around
Cyphese Redfern, our typing teacher, who was weeping. As we drew near her, she pulled
Sallie and me over to her and sobbed, “They shot the President!” Nobody needed to tell
me who “they” were.
Sallie, Victoria, and I stumbled home from school that day, suddenly ancient at
fourteen. Silence roped us, three abreast, circled the tear damp collars of our white cotton
blouses, dropped down past our navy blue box-pleated skirts, and wrapped our hope and
innocence like shackles around our feet. We trudged the distance, bent forward like worn
out migrant workers at sundown.
Overcoming had always been deadly. Southern born-and-bred and black, we inhaled
that lesson with our first breath and relearned it with every breath afterwards. Kennedy
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Boycott
and King had promised a reprieve. Now Kennedy’s murder smashed that nascent truce
and signaled anew…It ain’t over yet.
Page 57
(Why I Rarely Trust White People of a Certain Age)
Flash forward. A white girl, all grown up, zooms through cyberspace and finds me at
my desk at the end of summer in 2006. It seems she has a wedding dress encased in glass
hanging on her wall and she thinks the framed frock has something to do with me. Mama
is the link to this white woman’s object of iconic revelry. Fact is I’m not feeling very
friendly towards my caller. It’s not her fault, and yet…
When my caller was very young, my mother, Odessa Singley, was her
Grandmommy’s maid. On this nostalgic call, though, my Mama comes out of the caller’s
mouth as “Odessa” just like it did back when the caller was seven and Mama was fortyseven.
“Odessa” was her “best friend,” she says, her anchor in a storm of sequential parents,
relocations, and other family mayhem. “Odessa was” her harbinger of summers that
began with packed bags and eagerly awaited trips to Grandmommy’s. And, forty years
ago, “Odessa” made the wedding dress hanging on the caller’s wall. Instantl y, my caller
becomes “the Wedding Princess” to me even though she never really was a bride because
at seven, while she qualified for the pretend wedding getup, she did not qualify for the
wedding man.
“I loved Odessa and she loved me,” she declares, whipping me back to the present.
Her declaration of my mother’s affection for her stops me cold because I know “Odessa”
was many steps removed from thoughts of love so busy was she slinging suds, pushing a
mop, vacuuming the drapes, ironing and starching load after load of laundry. I know that
because that’s what Mama told us when she, my sister, and I reported on our day over
dinner each night. Not once did Mama’s love for the Wedding Princess find its way into
those conversations: She cleaned up behind, but she did not love those white children.
Page 58
But here I am: the phone pressed against my ear and the disembodied voice of the
grown up Wedding Princess on the other end. I make a mental note: This is how being
white, female, Southern, and coming of age in 1960 can frame a conversation. Instead of
pinning myself to the wall of Princess’ lovely memory, I gear up to pin Princess to the
truth. In our imminent war of dueling narratives, mine is bout to kick some princess ass.
It’s so unfair, possibly cruel, this verbal beat down I’m preparing for Wedding
Princess. I mean she didn’t do anything to deserve this. Mama wasn’t her washerwoman
after all. Still, I’m seized with a desire to unroll Princess like I would a sleeping bag
packed away damp in the attic and left there to ripen season after season. I’ll hold my
nose with one hand and give her a thorough shaking with the other, maybe hang her out
to dry before sending her and her dogwood-scented memories back to the attic.
By the time she has my full attention, Wedding Princess has waded heart deep into
her revelries of the day “Odessa” presented her with the Wedding Dress.
It was exquisite. She was such a perfectionist with her sewing, you know. The
finished seams, the hemming tape. It fit me perfectly because she had measured me for it,
but then I realized didn’t have the right shoes to wear with it, so she took me shopping. It
was the happiest day of my life, me and my best friend. Grandmommy had to practically
peel that dress off me. I never wanted to take it off. That’s why it’s hanging on my wall.
Every time I look at it, I think of Odessa and that day.
I throw my first punch.
“Have you ever thought about the fact that the woman you call ‘Odessa’ was the
same woman my friends called ‘Mrs. Singley’? That she supported a family on the six
dollars and bus fare (fifty cents roundtrip) your Grandmommy was paying her? That the
Page 59
woman you call your ‘best friend’ was forty years your senior and had another whole life
of dignity, hopes, and dreams that had nothing to do with being in service to you and
Grandmommy? That maybe “Odessa” didn’t like you as much as felt sorry for you
because you were the baby of the family, the one your brother and sister slapped around,
the one they were always leaving behind? You ever thought of that?”
Wedding Princess is silent, so I continue.
“I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just telling the truth. I could let your pretty story
stand about who ‘Odessa’ was to you, but you called me”—which was a very brave thing
for her to do. So, I felt like she deserved to know my story.
“And as for Grandmommy whose home was such a wonderful respite for you every
summer, since we’re sharing stories, let me tell you exactly who Grandmommy was to
me.”
I was fourteen when Congress was debating what they would pass the next year as
the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I was sure what they were talking about had something
specifically and personally to do with me because we were discussing the same thing in
school, too. So, our black segregated classroom conversation became the nail on which I
hung the one thing that I knew definitely had to do—very specifically and very
personally—with me. I was fed up with Grandmommy and the shitty way she treated
Mama, most especially the six dollars and car fare slave wage (pardon the oxymoron)
Grandmommy dispensed for an entire day of work she was too sorry to do for her own
damn self much less for her own family.
In my junior high class one day, we talked about how white folks insisted on being
called “Mr. This” or “Mrs. That” while refusing to call black folks by anything except
Page 60
their first names. I brought that conversation home to our dinner table that night because
that’s where we discussed the ways of white folks generally and specifically the ones
whose houses Mama cleaned, those who, as she put it, were constantly trying to find new
ways to wipe their ass in her face.
One of the ways they accomplished such a scatological result was they always got to
be “Mr.” and “Mrs.” while Mama only got to be “Odessa.”
Our classroom conversation had left me on low boil and rising because there was
never any talk about how I could do something, how I could have a hand—or even just a
little toe—in upsetting that balance of power. So by the time I got home, I had hatched a
plan. I knew I was going to snatch my mama some of the respect that was long overdue
from Grandmommy.
I had to call Mama at work every day as soon as I got home from school so she
would know I had made it home safely and could be sure I wasn’t hanging out on the
corner somewhere with a dude in a ‘do rag holding his crotch and tonguing a toothpick.
Anyway, I dialed Edith Rembert’s house.
“May I speak with Mrs. Singley, please?”
“ Whooooo?!” Startled indignation dragged that one word out of Grandmommy’s
mouth and stretched it into seconds. Such a long silence followed that, for a minute, Edith
had me convinced she really didn’t know who “Mrs. Singley” was even though she had
been making out a check to ‘Odessa Singley’ twice a week for fourteen years.
Click. Edith hung up on me.
Seven or eight times more we repeated this routine, each call taking less time than
the one before as Edith got quicker on the disconnect. (In the days before caller ID and
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answering machines, she had no choice but to keep answering in case I turned out to be
somebody she actually wanted to talk to.) By my final try, I was the vanquished. Edith
had cut me down to size and twisted my tongue back to its original position of
supplication: “May I speak with Odessa, please?”
This is the story I tell the Wedding Princess about her revered and recently departed
Grandmommy.
“But that’s the way things were with everybody back then. That’s just the way it was.
That reminds me of…”
She stops, catching herself, suddenly self-conscious. But I’m not having it.
“No, that’s the story I want to hear,” I goad her. “That one right there, the one you
just stopped in mid-sentence. Tell me that story.” Bravely, she complies.
Seems she and Grandmommy were standing on the screened sun porch one day, a
space I instantly recall because it starred in my fantasies of curling up with a book among
the wicker rockers and chaise lounges with plump pillows covered in a summery floral
print.
The Wedding Princess continues: “I don’t know why, but I had a quarter and I put it
in my mouth. And Grandmommy became so short with me. She said, ‘Take that nasty
thing out of your mouth right this minute! You have no idea where it’s been. For all you
know, it could’ve been in some Negra woman’s bosom!’”
“And you’re sure she said Negra?”
“Oh, yes! We never said that other word.”
“Uh huh. So, don’t you think that’s fascinating that the worse thing Grandmommy
could think to say about that quarter was that it might’ve been ‘in some Negra woman’s
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bosom’? I mean, not in the gutter, not in the street, not passing through a thousand filthy
hands, but in some Negra woman’s bosom.
“Mind you, that same bosom would’ve been attached to other body parts that made
up a Negra woman who was cleaning Grandmommy’s house; wiping her invalid father’s
shitty ass; and even cooking and serving Grandmommy her food. A Negra woman who
had fed, burped, bathed, changed, and comforted Grandmommy’s babies. Yet and still,
the…absolutely… worst… place for your quarter to have been was in some Negra
woman’s bosom.”
Surprise! Seems Wedding Princess can take a punch because she’s still on the line.
So I keep going.
“You know what? Thank you for sharing this story. Really. Because it reminds me of
something I’ve wanted to tell you throughout this conversation, but I keep forgetting and
that is this: I want you to know exactly who Grandmommy was to me.
“Remember how you said your grandfather Googled me and how he said wasn’t
surprised at where I was or what I was doing because he always knew ‘that one was gone
be somebody’?
“Well, I owe it all to Grandmommy. She’s the one I’ve lived my total life in
opposition to. Without her, I probably would’ve never made it this far. Grandmommy is
the one who put a face to what I was up against as a poor, black Southern girl determined
to make it in the world.
“If it hadn’t been for your Grandmommy, a mother who made it clear how far she
was willing to go to step in the face of a black child to show me exactly what I could
never hope to be; if it hadn’t been for that day she used the phone to pound me into
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submission, to show me where she intended to keep me and my kind forever; I might
have lost sight of what I had to do to finally put Grandmommy in her place.
“So, the next time you visit Grandmommy’s grave, give her a message for me: Tell
her Dr. Singley said, ‘Thank you.’”
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Derailment
Smart girls
Clockwise from left: Sallie Stanback, Doris Covington, Janet Rivers,
Eleanor Ervin, Mary Brown, and Shirley Belk.
Thanks to the Grandmommies, their spouses, and their friends all over town, by 1964
the Charlotte School System (CSS) had still assigned only a handful of Negro students to
white schools.iii Even so, the revolution was palpable. Centuries of laws that kept white
folks in control and black folks in misery were cracking open. Ma had been right after all:
They couldn’t keep their foot on our throat forever. They couldn’t ban us for eternity
from all things white—clean water fountains, clean restrooms, the best theatre seats,
swanky churches, hotels, front doors, even decent graveyards.
What’s more, I was part of the demolition mind-crew being trained to help mow
down the old ways and usher in the new. We would out-strategize, out-maneuver, just
plain old outsmart them. So, saturated with promise, I entered tenth grade at West
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Derailment
Charlotte Senior High in the fall of 1964. Two years later, it was the two men Ma didn’t
warn me about who convinced me to ditch my plans to enter Duke University and head to
the Midwest instead: one was a short black school counselor I adored and the other was a
tall white stranger. They should have been impossible to miss, but together they were so
slick, I never saw them coming.
All across the country in the mid-1960s, thousands of smart Negro high school
seniors were being drained away from historically black colleges and universities
(HCBUs) and lured to white college campuses. Charlotte’s approach was perfectly in step
with how our bourgeois town put a lid on potentially messy problems like desegregation:
white leaders struck a deal with middle-class black leaders to siphon off the highestachieving Negro students and sent them to serve as terrorist fodder in aggressively—
often violently—racist white schools.
Meanwhile, wily white segregationists soon figured out if they simply paid lip
service to desegregation, they could indefinitely stall real integration. Consequently,
racist intransigence across the south slowed school desegregation to the speed of
molasses. Trickling uphill. In the snow.
In our last year of high school, we Chosen Ones had reached our nadir as
repositories for the best educations our segregated public schools could offer and we
were poised for lift-off. Everybody understood—and we the Chosen understood it best of
all—that we were the ones headed for white college campuses across the country to
smash the lies of black folks’ inherent inferiority. We were game in more ways than one.
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Derailment
The first time I laid eyes on Edward B. Wall, it was the spring of 1967, a few
months before graduation. He stood before a small group of West Charlotte seniors I had
rounded up.
Wall stuck out. He was very tall, big, and Wisconsin winter white. Even though a
few white teachers had joined our faculty the previous year, white folks on our campus
were still oddities. Wall’s presence was even more pronounced because of his proximity
to the person at his side, Joseph C. Champion, Jr., our dapper, nut brown, high school
counselor: Mr. Champion barely cleared Wall’s waist. Despite being such visible
polarities, however, Mr. Champion and Ed Wall were joined in a common pursuit:
persuading one or two of us to attend Wall’s white university.
“Bernestine is going to Duke,” Mr. Champion said, introducing me to Mr. Wall.
“She’s president of the National Honor Society, on the yearbook and newspaper staff,
one of our stars.”
It was true. I had chosen Duke from among Howard University in Washington,
DC, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Oberlin College, and a host of other
colleges and universities that had wooed me with various offers of financial aid packages.
And while Mr. Champion was proud of every West Charlotte student, he held me in
especially high esteem as he was quick to tell me. Raised by my mother in a public
housing slum, for a while needing welfare and both of Mama’s jobs to make ends meet, I
was a poster child for Overcoming, the gleaming product of a determined parent, a
Christian home, my hard work, and Mr. Champion’s long-term investment. I was a solid
chunk of his reflected glory.
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Derailment
Most of the small audience Ed Wall was pitching to was one I had known and been
part of since kindergarten: National Achievement and National Merit scholars, my
classmates from Honors English and Creative Writing, the ones who took Physics,
Calculus, Trigonometry, played chess, and spoke foreign languages fluently: Charles
Tillman, Bernice Wallace, Sallie Stanback, Arnold Sanders, Terri Simmons, Patricia
Springs, Shirley Belk, Doris Kirk, Donnie Hoover, Betty Martin, Trinitia Nichols, Jack
Massey, and Isaac Heard among them.
We had been steered onto the college prep track so early in our lives we didn’t even
know we were being herded. A few months before graduation, there was no discussion
about whether we would go to college, but where. It was assumed. We were worthy and,
therefore, entitled. It would take thirty years and my first high school reunion for me to
realize what our privileged status had cost other equally gifted classmates who had been
shut off from the same advantages. So, on the day Ed Wall painted the picture of the
historic opportunities awaiting us, I was preening and oblivious.
Wall got straight to the point. He had met Mr. Champion a few weeks earlier at a
conference in California where they had discussed desegregating white college campuses.
Ed Wall was looking for some eligible Negro students and Joe Champion claimed to have
some. Wall was there to see.
Wall described what awaited the privileged few who would grace Lawrence
University where he was Dean of Admissions. Occasionally, he’d interrupt himself,
saying, “But I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this because it’s a tough school to
get into and…” Then, he’d lapse back into his enthusiastic spiel: the beautiful campus on
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Derailment
the banks of the Fox River, a student-teacher ratio of eight to one, the rigorous
curriculum, the high grade point average of the entering freshman class, the off-campus
programs, the modern living facilities, the extra-curricular activities, the close knit
campus life. Then there was that full scholarship.
Full scholarship—two words that carried tremendous weight. Our total household
income for 1966 had been $1,500 and while Duke was providing a substantial financial
aid package, a lot of it was a loan. It was definitely not a full scholarship.
I could barely find Wisconsin on a map. Out of 1,300 students, Wall confessed
Lawrence had only three black ones. But, there was that full scholarship. By the third
time Wall suggested he was wasting our time telling us about his college, I was hooked.
Arnold Sanders, an arch rival since elementary school, was also headed to Duke. He
had already pissed me off by beating me out of the Angier Biddle Duke scholarship
which would’ve put me closer to a debt-free college education. While I was still
extremely proud to be a Duke admit, I was nursing a wounded ego because Duke clearly
wasn’t as impressed with me as I thought they should be and certainly not as impressed
with me as they were with Arnold.
Well, Arnold could have Duke! I was headed to Lawrence, somewhere way on the
other side of another world. I had never been over the state line except to visit relatives in
SC, so going to Wisconsin was like going to Mars.
Years later, Mr. Champion confessed that things had worked out pretty much as he
and Ed Wall had planned them. They had entered the room that day fairly certain at least
one of us would take the bait. Two of us—Charles Tillman and I—did.
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White Girls of Summer
Before I could get to Appleton, Wisconsin, I had to survive the summer from hell.
Eyelids fluttered in disbelief at the sight of me: a Negro, who, at seventeen, dared
come to share their breath. Seconds earlier, the supervisor and I had climbed the steps to
laughing chatter on the other side of the door of the small prefabricated office. The
sounds of people in a good mood had loosened the muscle along the bottom of my
stomach as I followed my guide inside. Now, across the threshold, everything had
stopped.
It was my first day on a job in an office where Negroes had never worked before. Mr.
Champion and Mama had already warned me that drama was likely and my armpits were
soggy from the sweat of anticipation. Furious white faces turned up faucets of fear until I
was so rank I could smell myself. Sweat pellets pooled at my waist, their icy slide stayed
by my best belt. With my arms pressed tight against my sides to mask terror’s musk, I felt
like the Empire State building plopped down in the Sahara desert.
“This here is Bernice. You sit over there.” The supervisor pointed to a tall stool at a
shelf facing the wall. Our eyes followed his arm and then his back as he whirled and
made a beeline for the door. After he left, they looked at each other and I looked around
the room. There was no sign of the glamorous corporate environment I had imagined the
white folks and I would share.
The telephone switchboard was a large rectangular console that took up half the room.
Waist high, it was long enough to accommodate three tall stools at operator stations
stretched out side-by-side. The freeze-frame white folks huddled around two desks
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pushed against the wall opposite the door and gazed silently at each other. I sat down on
the stool, with my back to them, and waited for further instructions.
Not even a month had passed since my high school graduation and there I was,
Southern Bell’s caramel belle, the new face of equal opportunity. Around the city, others
like me were being scattered, one by one, in white segregated workplaces like the
Charlotte Transit Authority, Duke Power, the post office, Belk’s and Ivey’s department
stores.
Mama had worked all my life for white folks who seemed dedicated to the
proposition that the only place for us was subordinate to them. But there was no chance
these white folks could think that because I had been hired to do the same job some of
them were being paid to do. Of course, they’d watch me and judge the entire race by
everything I did. Of course, I would be so damn impressive they wouldn’t even
remember why they thought Negroes were such a problem in the first place. Anyway,
whatever they did, I would not let them get in my way.
The only desks belonged to the men who traipsed in and out throughout the day
responding to complaints we women logged from phone calls. Usually the men stayed
just long enough to feel up the women and tell dirty jokes while all of them pretended I
wasn’t there. I avoided looking directly at them and they returned the favor.
In the men’s absence, the women climbed down from their perches, sank into the
swivel cushioned desk chairs, and fired up cigarettes. With the men gone, the women
treated me different. Sometimes they even slipped up and said a few words to me about
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how to perform some job-related task. But never once did they say anything that
suggested I could be one of them.
When the men were present, though, the chairs belonged only to them and the women
draped themselves over the men and there they all lingered in a pale blue swirl of
cigarette smoke and sexual banter. I went back to being invisible or became the butt of
their jokes.
Things spiraled downward and by the end of the week, the cracker-mean congregants
circling me made it clear they intended to have nothing to do with me. So I stumbled
through my first days rigid and numb with disbelief. How could grown people who knew
nothing about me be so hateful? I had left home on Monday scared, but still confident
and hopeful. When Friday rolled around, though, I realized I had been sentenced to race
war boot camp and was working overtime in the summer from hell.
Day after day, I unglued myself from my stool to pee, eat, or go home. Determined to
prove I was not the mythical lazy nigger and anxious not to do anything to draw attention,
I worked through every break and refused to ask for assistance even when I needed it. I
figured out things on my own. Gratefully, the work was mind-numbing—sorting,
recording, and filing stack after stack of multi-copy repair requests. The only time we
heard my voice was when I relieved one of the repair operators on break or at lunch.
Page 72
Epilogue: The Answer
At home, Lawrence propaganda began papering the path to my parallel universe. My
first letter was from Ed Wall, announcing my roommate assignment:
(June 20, 1967) Dear Bernestine: We have assigned you to a room in
Colman Hall with Kolleen Egan, an incoming white freshman from Merrill,
Wisconsin. Lawrence does not dwell on the fact of race, either in admissions
or in the general conduct of the college, but we do recognize the fact, and we
recognize also that not all of our incoming freshmen are ready to accept a
member of another race as a roommate. We trust that you, however, will
accept this assignment as routine. With kindest regards, I am sincerely yours,
Ed Wall.
And sure enough, the very next day, there was Kolleen’s first letter, a warm, chatty
handwritten note with her picture enclosed. After volunteering her height, weight, and
birthday, she told me she was a lifeguard at the beach which led to a confession: she was
“not too fond” of her “extremely naturally curly” hair, which turned “quite blonde in the
summer.” Then, came bombshell #1: She said she was “dark complected” because in the
summer, she got “really dark.”
Dark complected? Extremely naturally curly? What the hell was she talking about?
The girl in the photo was cute, white, and blonde with straight hair. She was also a
cheerleader, Girl Scout, senior play lead, and homecoming queen. Damn! I was going to
be rooming with Barbie!
I was light brown. Coffee with several dollops of cream. Caramel, medium toast,
mid-range in the line of beige edibles. Just light enough for it to be an advantage, but not
so light it created problems for me. My friends and I were skin color experts, obsessed
with the tiniest gradations in Negro complexions, which ranged from blue-black to
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onionskin.. I assumed everybody was as proficient as we were at discerning milligrams of
melanin.
Light brown on the Negro color chart, I was black compared to Kolleen and that was
without any solar assistance. And, by the time she saw me, my “extremely naturally
curly”—i.e., genuinely nappy—hair would be as straight as hers and smoothed into a
shoulder-length flip, thanks to a hot straightening comb. Already, I could see that I would
be teaching my new roommate—my white roommate —a thing or two about color.
But bombshell #2 was the one that sent me flying off to find Ma, waving Kolleen’s
letter: She wanted me to come visit her the week before school started and then arrive on
campus together. Better than just being my cool roommate, Barbie was fast becoming my
new best friend!
Exactly a week later, Kolleen’s second letter arrived. After warning me about
Wisconsin winters that–“sometimes it drops to as low as 40 below zero”—she renewed
her invitation and laid out all the reasons she thought it was a great idea.
I sincerely hope you can come up the week prior to school next fall. You’d
be able to meet my family and get accustomed to the life around here. I feel
that such a week would do us both a world of good. We could more or less
discover each other so that when we do go to Lawrence the adjustment,
initially that is, won’t be as difficult…You know—this may sound stupid but—
before you wrote I was really afraid we wouldn’t get along. I’m considered to
be sort of out going; I’ve never even had troubles getting along with anyone.
But since you wrote all doubts have completely vanished.
…HAPPY BIRTHDAY!…You mentioned that you were “brown skinned” and
that when I saw your picture I’d understand. That’s okay. I understand
without the picture.
I was so excited! Still, there was one drawback. My “full scholarship” did not
include things like textbooks, school supplies, or travel expenses. Budgeting so we
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could afford my plane ticket to Appleton was already a financial strain on us. So if
visiting Kolleen was going to cost even more, we’d just have to meet for the first time
on campus. Ma knew how much I wanted to go, but I also knew how much it was
already costing to pay for all the other necessities my “full scholarship” didn’t cover:
suitcases, trunk, new eyeglasses, sheets, towels, pillows, curtains, shoes, boots,
toiletries, and an entire wardrobe (including my first part of long johns) chosen for its
promise to protect me from Wisconsin’s bitter blasts. My warm winter coat ended up
costing the same as three months of rent. Everyday we ticked off a new expense,
Kolleen’s lovely offer fell lower on the list of possibilities.
I turned Kolleen into the newest member of our household. I dropped her name as
casually as though we talked on the phone every night like Sallie and me. And I
waited for her letters that were showing up like clockwork. Meanwhile, back at the
phone company, my officemates were steadily painting a completely different picture
of race relations.
I mutely accepted their shunning. I only learned their names by hearing them talk
to each other. I always did more than my share of the work. And I nearly made it
through the second week without asking a question. When the day finally rolled
around and I was faced with a task I could not figure out on my own, though, they
finally had me cornered.
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I had guessed that Edith was the closest to my age, so I thought that made her the
most likely to be helpful and the least mean. Of the three women, once or twice in my
presence, she had flashed signs of her humanity, so I chose to ask her my question.
“Excuse me, Edith, but there’s too much information missing for me to figure out
how this stack should be filed. Can you tell me what should I do with these?” I carried
the repair tickets over to show her. Her nails drummed the countertop, sounding like a
herd of tiny horses on the run. She looked at her buddies. I looked at her. Nobody said
anything.
“What?” she said finally, shuddering and rolling her eyes as though she were fighting
off a fit. “I don’t know where to put these,” I repeated, now facing the side of her head.
“Oh…I…can…tell…you…where…to…put…those…all…right.” She swiveled her
seat in syncopation to the long pauses between each word, her eyes still locked on her
cohorts. Her words came out muffled because she had clapped her hand across her nose
and mouth as if she were trying to avoid a stench. When she folded from the waist in an
explosion of laughter, our office mates joined in. From that point on, the pattern was set
for all our interactions. All weekend, I cried and begged Ma to let me quit. She was
resolute.
“If you’re ready to throw in the towel now, what’re you going to do when you get to
college? This is only the beginning, honey. You haven’t seen nothing yet.
“They’re not laughing at you because they’re tickled. They’re laughing because they
don’t know what else to do. All their lives they believed they were better than us just
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because they were white, but now here you are sitting up there in the middle of them,
dressed better, talking better, smarter, and half their age.
“You got a job right out of high school that they probably waited all their life to get
and now they think you stole something that belongs to them. It’s killing them, so it’s
their job to drive you out. Right? Well, just remember that it’s your job to stay.”
So every day I went to work and every day I checked the mail for Kolleen’s letters
that described my deliverance, the life I would soon be entering, far away among wellmannered, white people who were eager to meet me and who would be absolutely
nothing like the vile crackers who tormented me daily for sport. Finally, her third letter
arrived. They were planning a party, which prompted her description of the teen social
scene in her town: “Believe me, the kids up here drink like fish. I just turned 18 but my
lifeguard friends are whales. Last night there was a guard vodka party.” And she ended
as she always did with something that made me happy: “Really, just hearing from you
made my weekend perfect…When are you coming. How about a weekend? Say, the 10 th
or there about.”
Kolleen and I divided up responsibility for our list of dorm room necessities. We kept
up a constant stream of letter chatter, consulting each other about a range of decisions to
be made: sororities were out (too expensive); hand shavers (one each, neither electric).
She would bring the radio, hi-fi, and the hair dryer. I would bring the Temptations’
“What Becomes of the Brokenhearted?” and Aretha Franklin’s “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”
The girl—I had stopped calling her Barbie after her second letter—had a sense of
humor, a flair for the dramatic, and, like me, wanted to put her best foot forward.
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We can hire the Merrill City Band to play in front of us as we enter Appleton.
Oh, how joyful. Listen kid, you & me, we’re going to have to stick together at
school. I’m going to hate feeling like a new little freshman, but I guess everyone
goes through that.
When you mentioned getting a permanent for your hair are you speaking of
straightening your hair? I hope so—cause I am very seriously thinking about
straightening my hair and then letting it grow. I haven’t even had half-way long
hair for 7 or 8 years.
In my letters to Kolleen, I tried to be as truthful as I could about the way I was even
when the truth wasn’t flattering. In response, she told me more about the girl “who never
had any trouble getting along with anyone.”
Really now, I don’t look like my picture. As far as personality is concerned, I’m
not really very nice. I try to make people think I’m terribly sweet, but I’m not. I
try to be sincere, but it doesn’t always end up that way.
I’m terrible when it comes to arguing. I love to! But sometimes I just don’t feel
like talking to anyone. Next year, since we’ll live together, you will be my
confidant. I will most certainly need one for the first few weeks; getting used to
no Pete may be a bit of a bind. I give some people the idea that I’m a prude. I’m
not I don’t think. Many times I say things without thinking—things that hurt
people. And I run my parents down a lot. I don’t appreciate whey they do for me
and we fight all the time. Oh, well! I’m just telling you what to expect of me.
(you lucky --?)
Can’t wait to meet you! I think we will get along really well.
PS When are you coming? Soon I hope.Oh, I’m learning how to play the guitar.
If I get pretty good we should be able to sing together a lot next year. Right now
my fingers are so sore from pressing the strings that I can’t even play my piano.
She played piano—just like my sister. It was an omen, a sign that everything really
was going to be fine. So, I started my third week on the job shielded from the telephone
repair crew’s hatefulness by a new vision of my bright future temporarily intersecting
with their dead end lives. Somehow word spread that I was only there for the summer and
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would leave for college in the fall. Having sniffed out my new resolve, they stitched it to
this new piece of information and adjusted their attitudes accordingly.
No matter what they said or did, I pretended to be a deaf mute. In that disconnected
space, my hands took over and created fanciful doodles full of curlicues, blocks, and
angles on notepads, in the margins of magazines and newspapers, endlessly inventive
renditions of the same three letters: PWT. Where I came from, we had a name for these
rat droppings posing as people: PWT--poor white trash.
Back on the college front, by mid-July, I was learning about a different kind of
clique—Lawrence sororities. This time the bearer of news was a chirrupy co-ed assigned
to help clue me in on life outside the classroom. Jody was clearly a cosmopolitan chick, a
junior who grew up in a wealthy Chicago suburb and who had graduated from a high
school that “bristled with competition.”With 4,300 students, Jody’s high school was three
times the size of mine and bigger than Kolleen’s entire town.
Jody loved Lawrence. Lawrence is where she had “discovered that academic life is
centered around the individual. And it’s exciting to find yourself challenged, really
challenged.” Her mission was to explain “aspects of Greek life…the opportunity to ‘go
Greek’ or be an ‘independent.’” Jody was a student who had chosen to “go Greek.” 4
There were six fraternities and six sororities and while fraternity guys had their own
frat houses where they ate, slept, and lived together, sorority girls did not have the same
privileges. Instead, each sorority had its own large room in Colman Hall, the dorm where
Kolleen and I would be living. That’s where they hung out together and did whatever else
it was that sororities did. Jody approved of that setup because, in her opinion, “Too many
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of the girls in a sorority can be isolated from the rest of the campus.” This cured that,
Jody said, because “Greek women and independents have an opportunity to live together
and share experiences, which is so important.” From what I had seen of the social club
scene in high school, going Greek was not for me.
Social clubs at West Charlotte were training camps for my college-bound classmates.
That was where they formed early alliances to position themselves to improve their
chances of being selected by fraternities and sororities they already knew they wanted to
join once they got to college. There were three or four clubs for girls and as many for
guys. Admitted by invitation only, their members strutted around in cardigans with club
names stitched in cursive across the back, signaling their worthiness as measured by
whatever rubric defined their club. While the male clubs seemed to use a wider range of
qualifications that gave them a diverse group of members, the girls’ clubs, by comparison,
were fairly inflexible in judging who was acceptable.
For example, the top-of-the-heap girls club was proud of its rigid hierarchy of social
class and color. To win entry to their posse, you had to be light-skinned, bourgeois
(actual, apparent, or striving), and/or have long or “good” hair. The ideal candidate, of
course, could check all of these boxes. Because color was the most important criterion,
though, no matter how unattractive you were—physically or temperamentally—if you
were lab rat light and snotty, you were a shoo in.
The girl who lacked social class standing, however, could compensate with porcelain
skin and really long hair and by being way smarter than the ones doing the choosing. If,
however, a candidate were not quite light enough and her parents were working class, it
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took a bit more for her to still have a shot. Then, she had to be pretty with a sweet
disposition, have long, good hair, and be popular with the light-skinned, older, bourgeois
boys.
There was one slot for a poor, dark-skinned girl, but she had to be exceptional on
every other level: really cute, really popular, smart, a good dresser and dancer, and the
girlfriend of a popular not-dark athlete. Nor was all lost for girls who represented the full
range of the browner side of the complexion spectrum. They had social clubs of their own
where they, too, imposed admission standards.
I was an academic merit snob. So, I turned my nose up at classmates who revered
each other for privileges based on accident of birth instead of for something they had
personally accomplished. By my standards, I was queen bee; by theirs, I couldn’t even
begin to compete. That made social clubs serious grit in my craw. I ridiculed them before
they could reject me. For all of these reasons, I was pretty damn certain I would not be
going Greek.
Still, Jody’s words of assurance rang through: “Bernestine, you will be trying to
understand and know the different sororities—and they will be trying to get to know
you.” We would see. In closing, Jody returned to her upbeat message of inclusion and
diversity:
I imagine you’ll be hearing a lot of people ask you why you came to Lawrence
when they learn you’re from North Carolina. It’s surprising, but Lawrence
draws from nearly every state in the United States, as well as foreign
countries…Again—welcome!
At the end of the month, the Southern Bell supervisor circulated a new schedule.
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“I can’t work nights and weekends,” I explained to him over the phone. “It’s too
dangerous to take the bus after dark and we go to church on Sunday.”
Violent crime in the Greenville section where I lived was a major marker of
Charlotte’s rise as one of the nation’s murder capitals. Three months later, the Charlotte
Observer would report that the per capita crime rate for my neighborhood outstripped
New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. My supervisor was not sympathetic.
“You can show up for work like I scheduled you or don’t bother to come back.” Click.
I never went back. And so my first job with the white folks was over. Cold-cocked on
arrival, I had never quite made it up off the floor.
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July 24, 1967 – Dear Bernestine, I imagine this is about the millionth letter
you’ve gotten welcoming you to Lawrence, so I won’t say welcome. What I
guess I want to say is—hi, I’d like to get to know you.
Lisa, 5 the third girl Lawrence sent to me, was a welcome distraction from the panic
and depression that had descended with my sudden job loss. My “full scholarship” had
turned out to be a financial aid “package”—a scholarship for tuition, room and board; a
work/study job on campus; and the balance of my expenses would be covered by a
student loan. Before I could take advantage of my “package,” though, I had to make it to
campus. To do that, I had to find another summer job to help pay for my plane ticket.
Lisa’s letter spurred me on, encouraging me to do whatever I could to make sure I
showed up to assume the mantle of college co-ed.
Lisa’s task was to lay out even more details of campus life, like what the “Freshman
Friends” program was, how women’s student government worked (it was separate from
student senate which governed the overall campus and there was no such thing as men’s
student government), and other things I’d need to know to get ready for school.
My name is Lisa and I’ll be a sophomore next year…I live in a small resort town
and work as a waitress in a restaurant. I’m spending my summer working,
playing clarinet in a summer band, conducting a…recreation program for the
kids living in our local Indian village, and meeting people at our local coffee
house. I like all outdoor sports, talking to people, music, reading dancing, and
peanut butter.
I don’t know how much alike we are, but if you are a hopeless optimist, as I am,
you are probably expecting great things of Lawrence.
Even though Indians were a known part of our family line, nobody talked much about
them and I had never been anywhere near a reservation. Lisa sounded as cool as Kolleen
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and Jody and Liz, a Lawrence senior who lived in Charlotte and who had invited me to
lunch in handwritten note on beautifully embossed personal stationery. Already I could
tell Ma might’ve been wise about the ways of the white folks she knew, but I was
collecting a whole different breed. I was freeing myself from the corset of Southern black
life and stepping off into one occupied by white folks who already liked the idea of me
and were eager to meet me in person. I lapped up Lisa’s assurances of what lay ahead.
Like the other Lawrence emissaries, Lisa was open and helpful. She talked about
college being the place she began learning for the sake of learning, how she felt less
pressure for grades. She even admitted being less than thrilled at the outset.
I didn’t like Lawrence at first, but the longer I stayed there, and the more involved I
became in campus life and my studies, the more I liked it. I know it sounds trite, but
I think that what you get out of Lawrence all depends on what you put into it. So the
most important advice I think I can give you as a “wise” sophomore, is to study
hard, but to take time to get to know a lot of people. This includes teachers.
From dress up clothing –“to go to dinner on Sundays, to church, or to a concert”—to
grubs—“sloppy comfortable clothes to wear in the dorm”—to sweater storage boxes, to
plastic pails for transporting toiletries back and forth to the bathroom, Lisa covered it all.
And to make sure I didn’t think the onus was on me to show up with everything she
mentioned, she had advice for handling that, too.
Have you found out who your roommate is or which dorm you’ll be living in? If
you have, write to her to find out about things like coffee pots, radios, record
players, and hair dryers.
Judging from Lisa’s response two weeks later, I must’ve had a lot to say. I certainly
would’ve had plenty of time to say it.
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August 9 – Dear Bernie, Thanks for such a long letter! Wow. I’m so glad you
asked all those questions, because they’ve given me some idea of what to tell
you about Lawrence.6
You sound tactfully apprehensive—just a little—about being one of the very few
Negroes at Lawrence. I like your philosophy about maturing by experiencing
prejudice on the part of both Negroes and whites. I’ll tell you what little I know
of the Negroes at school last year. I can think of four.
One was “very handsome and a terrific dancer.” Another had been president of
Lawrence Women’s Association and had “pushed through many needed reforms in the
social code.” A third was an officer in the student senate and a fourth was a “guy from
Africa who was a manager on the football team and took 4 courses per term.” Lisa held
them all in high esteem as did the other students, reporting that “they were all very wellliked and respected as individuals.”
I really think that Lawrence shows most of its prejudice towards the “lowerclass” fraternities and sororities than it does to Negroes or Jews or any other
minority groups. The town of Appleton, however, is a different matter.
There are very few Negroes, if any, living there. McCarthy was born there and
the John Birch society is very strong. They frown a lot if you even look to the left.
But Lawrence is relatively isolated from Appleton, even though it’s located right
in the heart of town. This is true mostly because no one is allowed to have cars
except seniors who aren’t on financial aid...
Colman is about the best dorm you could get…The rooms are spacious and well
lighted…And are you ready—you have your very own sink, right in the room!
You will eat in Colman too, which has the best dining room with all kinds of
windows overlooking the Fox River...the most polluted river in Wisconsin
because of the paper mills in and around Appleton. (By the way, if you have
never smelled a paper mill on a damp day, you’ll be happy to know that this
aspect of your education will be quite adequately covered.)…The food is
delicious, by the way.
Lisa emphasized the necessity for warm clothes: “You’ll need a heavy winter coat
and several pairs of wool slacks, shorts, and skirts and sweaters. When the temperature is
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low enough you wear slacks to classes and meals.” She told me the school colors (blue
and white), the sports teams’ name (Vikings), and our arch sports rival (Ripon College).
She broke down the dress code and “freshman hours.”
You can wear anything to breakfast, anything except sweatshirts and cut-offs to
lunch, and you must wear a skirt to dinner at night. For Sunday dinner at noon,
you’re supposed to dress up.
Hours are pretty liberal after a lot of drastic changes. I think that freshman
women will have 11 o’clock hours Sunday-Thursday, 12 o’clock Friday, and 1
on Saturday for the first term, after which they are extended one hour. The only
thing I know for sure is that senior women have no hours at all! Don’t
worry…I’m sure you’ll be getting your handbooks pretty soon, which explain all
of the rules in detail.
After commending me on my scholarship, she added,
You’ll be even happier to know that you don’t have to get all A’s to keep it. As
long as you don’t flunk out of Lawrence, they’ll give you as much money as you
need to go there. So you can get all C’s and still retain your scholarship if you
need it.
“Bernie?” Where had that come from? Nobody except my family had ever called me
anything except Bernestine. What kind of person just changed people’s names when they
didn’t even know them? And what kind of dummy did she think she was talking to,
telling me I could keep my scholarship as long as my GPA was at least a “C”? I was still
figuring out how insulted I should be when Mr. Champion called me about a new job
opportunity.
West Charlotte Senior High had no further obligation to me after I graduated. Yet, Mr.
Champion was there for me on the receiving end of my sobbing phone call, assuring me
that I had not disappointed or embarrassed him by getting fired from the phone company.
He promised to help me find another job. And he did.
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Dallas Cowboys star Pettis Norman, 7 a 1957 West Charlotte alumnus who went on to
fame and fortune, has perfectly captured Mr. Champion’s response to me. As Pettis put it
during my chat with him, the depth of the care many West Charlotte teachers and
counselors bestowed on us students was proof that, “We were not just in their classrooms.
They were in our lives.” And because Mr. Champion was in my life, I soon landed a job
with the Insurance Company of North America and Canada (INA).
An office building that seemed a tower of glass and angles, INA was easy to see from
far away. Pushing past revolving glass doors each morning, I entered a massive room that
covered the entire first floor of the building. There were no individual offices, no
cubbyholes, no room dividers, no personal space beyond the hundreds of individual desks
that flowed into a sea of industrial green metal above which bobbed hundreds of white
women and a few white male supervisors. The only other things that interrupted the flow
were thick concrete support pillars evenly spaced throughout the room—and me, standing
out like a raisin in pot of rice.
I was a secretary in the crop-hail division with my own desk, phone, and other office
accoutrements more closely approximating what I had fantasized my work life would be.
When hailstorms damaged the farm crops INA insured, claims adjusters trekked through
cotton, tobacco and peanut fields, examining damaged leaves. These damage estimates
fed a formula that calculated crop loss and, consequently, the insurance payment due the
farmers.
In the late pre-computer 1960s, much of this divining and accounting was done by
hand. So, the claims adjusters, all white men, trooped back into our office several times a
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week, armed with their computation sheets. I checked their figures for accuracy, then fed
my information into a system of carbon copies and other calculating white folks.
Armed only with a ten-key adding machine, most days I worked through lunch,
poring over reams of pencil-smudged crop-hail calculation sheets, still paying homage to
the “Do More Than Is Required” First-Negro-in-this-Job work ethic.
Lisa was as prolific a writer as Kolleen and her third letter arrived right on time. I
already liked her for the same reasons I liked Kolleen: both were opinionated and frank
like me. Whatever else happened my first year, I knew I’d be friends with them.
Meanwhile, in other college communications, I had learned that sororities and
fraternities were under fire for being racially segregated. As Lawrence’s first group of
black students—11 total—headed to campus, the Greeks had to make a choice: either
integrate or move off-campus. So, after stressing how much time she spent studying, Lisa
returned to the subject of going Greek, apparently responding to more of my questions
about that situation.
Before I went to Lawrence, I was dead set against them, because they were
snobbish and expensive and I hate secret rituals…But I learned a lot about
Lawrence’s sororities that has changed many of my opinions.
I didn’t join a sorority because I couldn’t afford it, it takes a lot of time, and I
don’t like secret rituals. Most of my friends pledged, however, and they love it.
Whether you join or not is a very personal decision, and you’ll really have to
wait and see for yourself how the Greeks operate at Lawrence.
Judging from the rest of Lisa’s letter, it seems I had confessed specific fears
about how I would adjust.
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You sound like you have an interesting personality and a good sense of humor
and nothing to be shy about. I think you realize your problem, though, and that
you are the only one who can do something about it. I guess your pride plays a
big part in your defense against being snubbed... Freshman Week is the best
time to try to do something about your problem. No one knows anyone and
everyone is very friendly, so all you have to do is get up your nerve and be
friendly right back… I really don’t think people will snub you nearly as much as
they’ll want to be your friend.
I liked the sound of that. Plus, it was what everybody was saying. So, I was eager to
give it a try.
~ ~ ~
Poor people spend a lot of time waiting—for buses to come and then to eventually
deposit you near your destination; in line to receive this or that; waiting for your name to
be called so you can give an accounting that will either entitle you to some service you
seek or send you back to start all over again. Having been taught to read very early by my
mother and my sister, I traveled with a book, a pencil and paper. Ma considered it my
blessing and my bane that my head was always stuck in a book. The summer at INA, that
book was THE GRAPES OF WRATH.
Compared to the Southern Bell telephone repair office, INA’s crop-hail division was
Nirvana. Where Southern Bell had felt and smelled like working in a dark brown ashtray,
INA’s ground floor was filled with fluorescent fixtures and windowed walls of natural
light. Where I had loomed gargantuan in the stuffy tomb of the telephone company trailer,
at INA I was merely a raisin in a pot of rice.
Occasionally, two secretaries about my age invited me to join them for lunch and I
did. I was grateful for their kindness and shocked one day when I realized how easily the
white girls and I talked and laughed on the walk back to the office.
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One day during my afternoon break, I was reading at my desk. I scratched the back
of my neck and then my shoulder. Suddenly, I couldn’t scratch hard, fast or far enough. I
rushed to the restroom and practically tore off my clothes, scratching furiously from my
scalp, down my arms, across my back, over my thighs and legs. My nails scraped trails of
large red welts that left me looking like I had been whipped. Wherever I had skin, I
itched. I couldn’t stop scratching, but the more I scratched, the more I itched.
My break was nearly over and I had no choice but to get back to work. There were
several women who tracked and reported my comings and goings and I did not want to
give them fodder for their cannons. So, I smoothed my clothes over my lacerated flesh
and returned to my desk. I could barely sit still with my skin on fire. I twitched and
squirmed for the rest of the afternoon, acutely aware that I of seeming diseased or
unclean in front of white people.
I couldn’t wait to get home to turn over my itching self for Ma’s inspection and to see
which of my Lawrence friends had written me. By the time I got home, though, I had
nothing to show. All evidence of my scratching frenzy had disappeared except for faint
scratches. No itching, no welts. All week the pattern repeated: furious itching that
magically disappeared in the two hours it took me to reach home. Ma took me to see Dr.
Joseph Butler.
Dr. Butler, a very handsome, tall slim gentleman, was the first Negro doctor we had
ever known. A few years earlier, Dr. Butler had freed me from the Public Health
Department’s lifelong grip. As public records now confirm, on more than one occasion,
crossing those portals reduced poor people and prison inmates to medical guinea pigs in
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exchange for receiving whatever publicly subsidized medical attention someone felt we
were due. Consequently, our knowledgeable consent was sought with the same frequency
as that accorded other laboratory rats. Fortunately, Odessa had not been confused.
Black doctors were in extremely short supply all over the US and Charlotte, NC was
no exception. That Dr. Butler should emerge at this point in our life was a source of
happy amazement. After examining me and asking me a few questions about how my
summer was going, he told me to get dressed and meet him and Mama. Their murmuring
conversation stopped when I entered the room and sat down across from him.
“Bernestine…”
“Yes, sir.”
“I was just telling your mother there’s nothing wrong with you that can’t be cured.
You have hives, what old folks used to call ‘a case of the nerves.’ I understand you’ve
been working pretty hard this summer with that first job at the phone company and now
this new one.
“Maybe you need to take off the rest of the summer, take it easy, get with your
friends, have a little fun before you go off to college. Maybe you’ve just been working
too hard. It had to take a lot for you to graduate with all of those honors, to earn all of
those scholarships. Maybe it’s time for you to just slow down, relax.”
He knew and she was the one who had betrayed me. She had told him everything and
now he was telling me to quit my job, go home, and give up because they didn’t think I
could hack it. I gripped both arms of the chair to stay the slide of my suddenly spineless
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self, the self who couldn’t even keep a summer job, who was so weak I let the white folks
make me crazy. I nodded my head in wordless disagreement with his prescription.
“Honey, talk to him. Tell him what’s going on with you.”
“I need the money,” I whispered. “I have to work.” We all sat quietly for a while
with him studying me. Then, he stood, signaling our visit was over.
“Well, if you’re going to stay there, I’m going to give you something to help stop the
itching and scratching,” he said. “And, Bernestine…”
“Yes, sir.”
“You have nothing to prove to these people. While they’re stuck back here, your
world is becoming so much bigger. You’ll be back to visit us from time to time, but
things will never be the same for you again. What you have up here,” he tapped his
temple with his finger, “they cannot take away from you. They can’t win because you
won’t let them.”
I stared wide-eyed, determined not to cry. It was wasted effort. Tears rolled down the
sides of my nose, met under my chin, and splashed off my knotted fingers. When I wiped
my face with the back of my hand, Dr. Butler nudged a box of tissue towards me.
“Blow your nose,” Ma said, smoothing the front of her skirt. “Pull yourself together
so we can go.”
“We’ll go on outside and wait for you,” Dr. Butler said, crossing the room to the door.
“When you’re ready, come on out. Take your time.” I didn’t lift my head until long after
they had left the room.
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Ma and I walked the rest of the way downtown. As the big orange drugstore sign
towered on the horizon a half-mile away, she began talking.
“Honey, Dr. Butler gave you a prescription for some tranquilizers. We can get it filled
at Rexall’s and you can start taking them tonight. Or….” We waited at the crosswalk for
the light to change.
“Or,” she continued, “you can decide right now that you are not going to let the Devil
prevail and that you don’t need drugs to handle this situation. It’s up to you.”
“Honey… Ma caught my arm.
“Ma’am?”
“You say your prayers every night. Right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, start saying them every morning too and keep saying them all day long.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well now, I think that’s the end of that,” she announced, brushing her palms lightly
against each other as though she were shedding crumbs. The drugstore disappeared
behind us. My hives vanished forever.
My Lawrence mail kept coming, providing respite from the grinding burden of my
second job that didn’t pay me a dime—being a constantly observed Exemplary Negro
every day from nine-to-five. If I was having a hard time making friends on the job,
though, I was making up for it among my new Lawrence pen pals: Dean Ed Wall, Liz the
Charlotte debutante who was a senior, Jody the junior, Lisa, a sophomore, and Kolleen
who would be green like me.
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Fortunately for me, Lawrence girls had an eye for detail and were happy to share their
college knowledge. I wrote them long letters full of questions and they answered in kind.
The picture they painted of my first year was amazingly consistent, one to which Jody
added her brush strokes at the end of August.
She loved writing and adventure—“find them, make them, read them, fake them!”—
and had entered Lawrence thinking she’d major in English. Landing a role in a campus
production, however, had her hooked on theater.
Theater was one of the main reasons I chose Lawrence anyway, and I’ve always
loved acting. My funny parents are very hesitant about it all—even though I
keep assuring them that I’m not going to become a hippie! Theatre is not that.
Jody, like Lisa, made short shrift of my concern about how I, a Negro, would be
received on and off-campus: “Anyway, about these people. Don’t worry. Just be your
usual happy, strong out-going self that I see in your letter!”
I was so thrilled to be awarded a scholarship, I had told her about it, too. In
congratulating me, Jody noted needing financial assistance did not set me apart. “It’s
truly amazing the number of students on scholarship and loan. It seems like at least 50%!
And it makes me proud. Because at Lawrence kids really work for it and appreciate it!”
I had been a leader in student government and on the staff of the school newspapers
and yearbook since junior high, so I wanted to know more about those groups on campus.
Jody described the Lawrentian, the college paper, Student Senate (it was coming back to
life), the Speakers Bureau (it “brought controversial speakers to campus”), and various
other aspects of the college social scene.
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Everybody was telling me the same thing, so it began seeping in: Lawrence was
academically rigorous, but still a place where I’d make lifelong friends and have fun. As
Jody put it, “Not much else to tell that you won’t soon see and feel for yourself!”
As my summer roiled on, Kolleen and I fired letters back and forth as though we were
best friends recently forced apart. She had become the beacon lighting the way to my new
world in faraway Wisconsin where a white girl was eager to be my friend. So eager, in
fact, she had invited me to visit her before classes started and we would travel to
Lawrence together. I had accepted her invitation.
I’m really glad you can come. Should be really really great. I think I’ll be
working right up until school starts at an A&W root beer stand.
Will you be coming by plane, train, car, or what? You can come anytime from
the 14th until the 20th. It doesn’t make any difference—but the sooner the better.
Sure is great that you can come. My entire family and I are looking forward to
meeting you…
I’ll be 18 on August 6 which is a Sunday. Well, my sister and parents are leaving
town for the entire weekend. I shall be home cause I have to work. But that
weekend should be fun!
Can’t wait to meet you! You should see my tan. It’s really dark. My friends keep
teasing me that we’ll have to put a “segregated” sign on the door of our room.
But there is one problem; as my skin gets darker my hair gets lighter.
Speaking of hair, Milt saw your picture and he loves your hair. In fact I got a 30
minute lecture on “Why doesn’t Kolleen Egan let her hair grow.” He really
thinks you’re neat looking and I agree completely...
Some crazy kids just came down to go swimming. Can you imagine! I have to
watch them, so bye for now & be good.
Love, Kolleen
Kolleen’s fifth letter was the last one to arrive before I headed for Wisconsin.
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September 2, 1967 – Bernie, did anyone ever tell you that you’ve got the
absolutely neatest sounding voice in the world. And I love your accent. To you, I
s’pose it sounds like I’ve got one. But really, you could talk for a million years
and I’d be transfixed. I was really shaken about talking to you. I’m extremely
glad you called.
Milt left for school and football Wednesday; my best friend (sort of) left today
for college. The rest leave the 8th to 10th. Most everyone will be gone by the time
you come. And are they MAD!
You and I have been invited over for dinner at the home of (now get this) the
superintendent of schools of Merrill…I know you’ll like them.
I hope you’re not expecting great things when you arrive here. My home is
rather dumpy—to put it mildly. But it’s comfortable and to me it’s home. The
outside looks about early 1900s and the inside is mostly early attic…My room is
pink and white with a touch of junk here and there.
Guess what? My tan is gone! Sob----.
I have to stop playing my guitar also. My fingers are getting too hard and sore
and I can’t play my piano the way I should.
I’ll be at the airport to meet you when you come the 14th. I’ll probably be alone.
I’ll be wearing slacks most likely and a gold jacket. My hair is about the same
length as my picture only not quite as blonde. Our car is a ’64 Dodge. Can’t
wait ‘til you come. I’m so looking forward to meeting you. Rooming together
next year should be quite an experience for both of us. I’m very frank and open
and at times blunt but we should get along just fine.
So until I see you on the 14th, good trip & hurry—Love Kolleen
I—Bernie, College Girl—set out for Merrill, Wisconsin. Armed with all the things
ticked off on my and Kolleen’s checklists and a whole summer’s worth of
correspondence, I felt like I was as prepared as I could be. And why not? From as
early as I could remember, everything had pointed me in the direction I was headed.
It was true I was already a budding scholar who loved learning for the sake of
learning. I was a critical thinker committed to becoming the best human being
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possible. Yet it was also true that running alongside those noble goals was another
extremely important, though arguably less noble goal: outshining white folks.
I was a leader in a posse of intellectuals—part samurai, part ninja—groomed in
mental warfare. It was my job to clear a path by leaping hurdles, breaking down
barriers, and smashing through doors for black folks coming behind me.
I had learned all the lessons Ma and all my teachers had shoveled into me. I knew
how to speak up and stand up for myself and others. I recognized injustice when I
saw it and I had no problems fighting against it no matter its source. I had learned
early that sometimes oppression wore my face, but that the people who controlled
everything that kept us all in place rarely, if ever, looked like me. Not only could I
speak and write about it, I did both fearlessly. I was ready for war.
Best of all, I wouldn’t be fighting alone. Wisconsin promised me allies, a new
generation of young white people who thought like me and wanted what I wanted.
We had spent the summer peeking into each other’s lives and I liked what I had seen.
We were going to create the world of inclusion, justice and equality for all that Dr.
King so eloquently dreamed. By the time we finished college, everything would be
different and we were the ones who would’ve made it that way. Ma could relax now.
I had found some white folks I didn’t hate.
But Ma had found something else to worry about and she let me know it with her
final directive: “Don’t come bringing no white boys back here.”
What was she talking about?! White boys were the furthest thing from my mind. I
was infatuated with my white girls of summer who were nothing like those white
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women who had worked Ma all her life, but Ma couldn’t see that. It didn’t matter,
though, because I was already imagining my life far away. In the final days before I
left, the lure that pulled me forward was matched by the push of what I was leaving
behind.
When we first moved into the projects, Gretchen and I were kindergarteners who
made pallets from old quilts and lay in the backyard watching the stars, lulled by our
mamas murmuring on the back stoop a few feet away. By elementary school when we
first learned to cook, Gretchen taught me to make French fries in our cast iron skillet
filled to the brim with Crisco and “government surplus” butter. She liked her fries
white, limp, and barely done, but I preferred mine cooked crunchy golden on the
outside, but still moist on the inside. When we got bored playing jacks and paper
dolls, I convinced her she could see deejays jive-talking inside the hot bright tubes in
the back of our Zenith radio.
By junior high, Gretchen was snapping her fingers and trying hard to teach me the
latest dances. In turn, I helped her practice vibrato and pizzicato on the violin. High
school found us mostly going our separate ways though I wasn’t going anywhere at
all after sundown. Shot-out street lights, heroin junkies folded at the waist, muggings,
gang rapes, and random gunshots penned me and Ma inside our apartment. My sister
had escaped through marriage and lived in a nice neighborhood that was nothing like
ours. The projects had become too dangerous to open the door for any reason after
dark.
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Even cops kept an eye on us from a distance. “Snoopy,” the police helicopter,
turned us into a flyover zone and aimed its searchlight into the otherwise dark corners
of our lives. When I left for college, all of that was staying home.
Come! Said the white girls and Ed Wall. We’re waiting. We’re ready.
Go! Said Ma, Miss Johnson, and Mr. Champion. See that river roaring with
opportunity? Don’t be afraid. Make us proud. Just jump.
So, I did.
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I am Croatan, a direct descendant of the people native to this place. Centuries before
the British listed into Cape Hatteras sand bars on July 4, 1584 and stabbed the land in the
name of Queen Elizabeth, we were here. Despite the pirates’ murderous moves upon
arrival, my people did not run them off. This land is mine.
When ignorance and laziness condemned the English “settlers” to starvation
somewhere between the summers of 1587 and 1590, my people fed them, sheltered them,
and showed them how to survive. Just because John White couldn’t find Virginia Dare
and the others when he returned to Jamestown didn’t make them a “Lost Colony” to us.
Oh, no, we saved their wretched asses. In return, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, and their
fellow European scavengers blanketed us with smallpox, theft, and murder. Minor details
overwritten by “American” history. How else to explain Thanksgiving?
Great-grandma Mahalia and her husband, “Blind Joe,” brought the full blood of
Croatans to our line, traced through Elizabeth Chavis Jacobs, to Mahalia Jacobs Jackson,
then to Harriet Anna Elizabeth Jackson Roberts (“Grandma Annie”), to Odessa Roberts
Singley, and on to me. Alice, allegedly an enslaved African somewhere up the line, is
said to have been the slave-owning white man’s point of entry into our blood on my
mother’s father’s side: Alice begat Randolph Jackson who, with Grandma Annie, begat
Odessa, who begat me.
Can these ancient infections explain why my race fever clings?
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Groomed and primed to battle the heirs of this legacy of grand theft and misery, by
1967 I was ready. I set out to reclaim memories of belonging, of knowing solidly rooted
in two continents, of fierce entitlement, of being fully present, recorded, loud, and free.
Unfortunately, I too carry compassion and tolerance, markers for annihilation as time
has incessantly proved. So I offer not one disclaimer about what my story represents.
Everything here is about me, about everyone I have ever met, and many I have not.
All similarities to persons dead or alive are intentional. I speak for myself as well as
every other similarly situated black/red/white person regardless of gender, number of
limbs, or consumption preferences.
I speak for myself as well as all women, all Southerners, all American girls who
grew up poor, flat-chested, and towering above all the boys and the teachers from seventh
grade on. If, therefore, you think you recognize folks or situations described here, you
might be onto something. On the other hand, if you swear this is the first time you have
ever heard of any of this, you are in denial, amnesiac, or just plain ignorant. No matter.
Herein lies the cure.
In my lifetime, dumb white men and their princess pawn (Condoleeza) used smart
bombs to murder, maim, and torture innocents, ravage nations to win the peace, and rape
foreign shores to make them safe for democracy. Meanwhile, back at the ranches—from
Crawford to Niggerhead—venal idiots muscled mediocrity to steal elections, starve
babies, imprison children, and set our elders out to rot. Now busted banks and stolen
homesteads choke hope with fear.
Page 101
When frothing fools gather in the street clamoring for “their” country back, I beg of
them: Just try and take it. Please. This time around, survivor-coded stories churn my
blood memory and keep me free. Because I am descended from the ones who survived
the voyage and the tortures, you would be wise to be afraid of me. This is the only
warning you will get. This land is mine.
~ ~ ~
A quarter century ago, my found-sister stood in our living room, her body rigid with
fury, face twitching in disgust: How can you be friends with them? Them, the white folks.
Now, I have an answer: Don’t ask me. Ask your children who integrated elite spaces,
all white spaces, but for the premium price you paid (and they did, too, but that’s another
story) to install them in those outposts.
Ask yourself why you thought it wise to turn your children over to be educated and
socialized by those you could never even fathom calling friend.
Was it worth the price yall paid?
Peace/war, love/hate, anger/calm, obsession/oblivion, revenge/forgiveness,
control/release. These are not zero sum concepts. They exist in the same moment, crowd
into the same spaces, minefields that must be negotiated lest they blow your mind.
I always thought compromise and making peace were signs of weakness, so I battled
against ending this book on some wispy note about love and forgiveness, blowing some
played out tune pushing healing and release.
Yet, here I am face-to-face with a tender reckoning: hope is the new way to wage
war. In the end, hope is the only way to win.
Page 102
APPENDIX A
Letters from the White Girls of Summer
Jody
(July 13, 1967) Dear Bernestine, I would like to be among the first of many to welcome
you to Lawrence.
Being a small school, Lawrence offers many advantages. I came from a rather large high
school (4,300) which bristled with competition. I suppose that’s all right for large
schools, but at Lawrence I discovered that the academic life is centered around the
individual. And it’s exciting to find yourself challenged, really challenged…
Everyone is friendly. Every day and every weekend opportunities for meeting people and
having fun that relieve the work tension are offered.
The first term is when the freshman is also introduced to aspects of Greek life. The
campus is small and close, and one is given equal opportunity to “go Greek” or be an
“independent.” I chose to “go Greek.”
There are six sororities on the Lawrence campus. We differ from the six fraternities on
campus because sororities are not allowed houses in which to live and eat together. (In
my opinion this is an advantage. Too many of the girls in a sorority can become isolated
from the rest of the campus.) But at Lawrence Greek women and independents have the
opportunity to live together and to share experiences, which is so important. Instead of
houses, each sorority is assigned a large room in the new girls’ dorm, Colman Hall.
There, in that room, is where the sorority has its meetings.
When not having meetings, the sorority can be involved with service projects for its
national chapter’s chosen cause—or with practicing for Lawrence’s annual Greek Sing,
or its folk dance contest. There are many, many projects constantly going on within the
Greek world on campus…the girls in the sorority working together as sisters.
Along with the many other activities that you’ll find yourself involved in when you arrive
at Lawrence during the first term, Bernestine, you will be trying to understand and know
the different sororities—and they will be trying to get to know you.
I imagine you’ll be hearing a lot of people ask you why you came to Lawrence when they
learn you’re from North Carolina. It’s surprising, but Lawrence draws from nearly every
state in the United States, as well as foreign countries. I hope to hear a little from you,
and when school starts I’ll know you a little better. Again—welcome!
Lisa
(July 1967) Since you’re probably wondering what this is all about, I’ll try to explain.
The Downer Women’s Association of which you are automatically a member, sponsors
Page 103
the Freshman Friend program, which has as its purpose helping freshman women get
acquainted with Lawrence by knowing upperclass “women.” Anyway, you are my
freshman friend. So I’ll tell you a little about myself and Lawrence and hope I can help
you to get ready for school.
My name is Lisa and I’ll be a sophomore next year. I’m not sure about my major yet,
but it will be either English, anthropology, sociology, or psychology. I live in a small
resort town and work as a waitress in a restaurant. I’m spending my summer working,
playing clarinet in a summer band, conducting a sort of recreation program for the kids
living in our local Indian village, and meeting people at our local coffee house. I like all
outdoor sports, talking to people, music, reading dancing, and peanut butter.
I don’t know how much alike we are, but if you are a hopeless optimist, as I am, you are
probably expecting great things of Lawrence.
My classes are not all small and personal, because most of the courses one takes as a
freshman are introductory courses and need to be large.
There is still pressure for grades, but I found it greatly reduced from the pressure I felt in
high school. For a few weeks at the beginning of the second and third terms I could study
just for the sake of learning and I loved it. I matured a lot during my freshman year, and
made a lot of very close friends. I went out for only the extracurricular activities I
thought I’d really enjoy—band and choral society, and I really didn’t have much time for
anything else.
I didn’t like Lawrence at first, but the longer I stayed there, and the more involved I
became in campus life and my studies, the more I liked it. I know it sounds trite, but I
think that what you get out of Lawrence all depends on what you put into it. So the most
important advice I think I can give you as a “wise” sophomore, is to study hard, but to
take time to get to know a lot of people. This includes teachers.
Well, let’s see, what practical advice can I give you? Bring mostly skirts and sweaters.
The only time you ever dress up at Lawrence is to go to dinner on Sundays, to church, or
to a concert. Bring sloppy comfortable clothes to wear in the dorm.
A lot of people use small plastic buckets to carry their soap & toothpaste, etc. back and
forth from the bathroom. And if you have a lot of sweaters, bring a sweater box to store
under your bed.
Have you found out who your roommate is or which dorm you’ll be living in? If you have,
write to her to find out about things like coffee pots, radios, record players, and hair
dryers.
Page 104
Well I could write a small book about life at Lawrence, but why don’t you write me and
ask a lot of questions? Tell me about yourself too. I’m anxious to hear from you!
~ ~ ~
Lisa
August 9 – Dear Bernie, Thanks for such a long letter! Wow. I’m so glad you asked all
those questions, because they’ve given me some idea of what to tell you about Lawrence.
You sound tactfully apprehensive—just a little—about being one of the very few Negroes
at Lawrence. I like your philosophy about maturing by experiencing prejudice on the part
of both Negroes and whites. I’ll tell you what little I know of the Negroes at school last
year. I can think of four. One, Joe something, is very handsome and a terrific dancer.
Nora Bailey, a senior, was president of Lawrence Women’s Association and in this
position, she pushed through many needed reforms in the social codes as well as in that
organization. Jerry Nightengale was treasurer of student senate and there’s one other
guy from Africa who was a manager on the football team and took 4 courses per term.
Anyway, they were all very well-liked and respected as individuals. I really think that
Lawrence shows most of its prejudice towards the “lower-class” fraternities and
sororities than it does to Negroes or Jews or any other minority groups. The town of
Appleton, however, is a different matter. There are very few Negroes, if any, living there.
McCarthy was born there and the John Birch society is very strong. They frown a lot if
you even look to the left. But Lawrence is relatively isolated from Appleton, even though
it’s located right in the heart of town. This is true mostly because no one is allowed to
have cars except seniors who aren’t on financial aid.
Well I’ll try to answer some of your questions. Colman is the second newest dorm. Kohler
Hall is opening next fall for senior women. It’s octagonal, like your glasses, and has
seven floors—I think. Anyway Colman is about the best dorm you could get. …The rooms
are spacious and well lighted with windows which cover the width of one end of the room.
You’ll have two each of beds, desks, lamps, closets, and dressers. And are you ready—
you have your very own sink, right in the room! … You’ll have drapes already provided,
so it’s probably a good idea for you and Kolleen to wait till you see the room before your
buy bedspreads and rugs.
You will eat in Colman too, which has the best dining room with all kinds of windows
overlooking the Fox River. (The beauty of the Fox is debatable(?) as it is the most
polluted river in Wisconsin because of the paper mills in and around Appleton. By the
way, if you have never smelled a paper mill on a damp day, you’ll be happy to know that
this aspect of your education will be quite adequately covered) Colman is also near the
largest freshman boys dorm—Brokaw…The food is delicious, by the way. …Because the
Lawrence campus is so small, you don’t have to walk very far to get to any of your
classes or the library.
Page 105
About clothes—I really think it would be a good idea to buy most of them at home,
because prices in Appleton are pretty high. ...You’ll need a heavy winter coat and several
pairs of wool slacks, shorts, and skirts and sweaters. When the temperature is low
enough you wear slacks to classes and meals.
I’ll tell you a little about the rules. You can wear anything to breakfast, anything except
sweatshirts and cut-offs to lunch, and you must wear a skirt to dinner at night. For
Sunday dinner at noon, you’re supposed to dress up. Hours are pretty liberal after a lot
of drastic changes. I think that freshman women will have 11 o’clock hours SundayThursday, 12 o’clock Friday, and 1 on Saturday for the first term, after which they are
extended one hour. The only thing I know for sure is that senior women have no hours at
all! You are allowed a certain number of late permissions per term. This means that you
can stay out an hour after the dorm closes. Don’t worry someone will be up to let you
in—I’m sure you’ll be getting your handbooks pretty soon, which explain all of the rules
in detail.
The social life is what you make it. For me it was lousy. The only advice I can give is be
very friendly for the first few weeks at least. If you end up spending weekends alone,
come on over and visit me! There are a lot of parties for freshman and many
opportunities to make friends. I’m not sure about the number of kids at school, but it was
about 1200 and there are about as many boys as girls. The school colors are blue and
white, and we are the Vikings, and our arch rival in sports is Ripon.
No, I haven’t read Passage to India. We probably had a different reading list. I have a
different favorite song every day. Yes, I’ve seen and loved “Doctor Zhivago.” How about
“Blow Up”? Well, I think I’ve written enough. Please ask me more questions. I love to
hear from you! Debbie
P.S. Congratulations on your scholarship! You’ll be even happier to know that you don’t
have to get all A’s to keep it. As long as you don’t flunk out of Lawrence, they’ll give you
as much money as you need to go there. So you can get all C’s and still retain your
scholarship if you need it.
Page 106
~ ~ ~
Lisa
August 18, 1967 – Dear Bernie, Man, when you say you like to write—you really
mean it! Please keep writing your long letters. Even though my answers may not
break your length records, I still love to hear from you, and I’m so glad I seem
to be answering your questions. I may be misinforming you with my opinions. I
guess you’ll have to wait till this fall to find out for yourself whether or not our
outlooks are the same.
No, Bernie, I didn’t have much spare time last year. It sounds like three subjects
will leave a lot of extra time, but you’d be amazed at how much time you spend
studying. But I made spare time for fun—Every day when I woke up, I knew
exactly what I had to do every minute of the day. This doesn’t necessarily mean
that I follow the plan exactly, but I tried. Unless you’re some kind of a genius—
I’m not—you’ll spend lots of time studying, especially with biology projects.
About sororities, it’s hard for me to be very objective in my answer. Actually I
still haven’t made up my mind about them yet. Before I went to Lawrence, I was
dead set against them, because they were snobbish and expensive and I hate
secret rituals. (I belonged to the Rainbow Girls for 6 years—it’s associated with
the Masons and Eastern Stars, and didn’t enjoy it too much.) But I learned a lot
about Lawrence’s sororities that has changed many of my opinions. Sorority
rush takes place at the beginning of 2 nd term. I went through it, and it’s really a
great way to meet upper-class women. The Lawrence system is really unique.
There are no sorority houses, so your circle of friends is in no way limited…
I didn’t join a sorority because I couldn’t afford it, it takes a lot of time, and I
don’t like secret rituals. Most of my friends pledged, however, and they love it.
Whether you join or not is a very personal decision, and you’ll really have to
wait and see for yourself how the Greeks operate at Lawrence.
Boy, your letters certainly don’t sound shy. You sound like you have an
interesting personality and a good sense of humor and nothing to be shy about. I
think you realize your problem, though, and that you are the only one who can
do something about it. I guess your pride plays a big part in your defense
against being snubbed. Someone told me once that pride is the worst enemy of
love that you have to open yourself up to people and show them how they can
hurt you and then let them practice loving on you. Freshman Week is the best
time to try to do something about your problem. No one knows anyone and
everyone is very friendly, so all your have to do is get up your nerve and be
friendly right back. All my best friends are at Lawrence now—not at home.
Page 107
You’ll develop some great relationships, and I really don’t think people will
snub you nearly as much as they’ll want to be your friend.
~ ~ ~
Jody
Thursday the 31st (August 1967) – Dear Bernestine…dear Bernie!!!…My first letter was
mainly to acquaint you with the sorority system and what the freshman faces at Lawrence.
But now perhaps I can just give you a special hello because I can’t wait to meet you and
show you everything up there that has become so special for me.
When you arrive that first week the campus is mainly you freshmen and it’ll probably
remain in your memory as the best week. It has in mine. There will be certain
upperclassmen around on the orientation committee. I won’t be there because, sadly, I
missed the sign-ups last spring.
Anyway, about these people. Don’t worry. Just be your usual happy, strong out-going self
that I see in your letter!
I was really pleased to learn of your scholarship. It’s truly amazing the number of
students on scholarship and loan. It seems like at least 50%! And it makes me proud.
Because at Lawrence kids really work for it and appreciate it!
Now about your questions---Wow! I’ll try to begin somewhere.
#1.) “What are the major social functions on the campus?” People! I realize that’s not a
very specific answer, so I’ll attempt more. The Student Senate has really been coming to
life and prodding the faculty into thought and action. I have a lot of respect for our
faculty and President [Curtis] Tarr in the way they’ve handled themselves. They’re good
people & didn’t personally become involved in the Senate. (One of my activities was
being an 8th grade girls YMCA club counselor.) There is a club for just about every
subject because the professors are so interested in you. Every weekend there are dances
and they are good mixers. A lot of controversial speakers have been brought in by the
Speakers Committee.
#3.) The newspaper, The Lawrentian, has a very good and active staff, always using lots
of people on campus to help them. But I guess you’ll find all this information in the
handbook about Lawrence.
#2.) About the town of Appleton. Lots of shopping is done in its stores. We are right next
to the downtown area. There are no regulations as to when to leave campus—it’s a
comparatively free-moving campus. There are those curfew regulations. They’ve just
been changed and offhand I don’t remember exactly. They’re in the handbook too.
Page 108
#4.) Sororities names: Kappa Alpha Theta, Alpha Chi Omega, Pi Beta Phi, Delta Gamma,
Alpha Delta Pi, Kappa Delta
Actually, I’m not allowed to say which I’m in yet. According to authorities, that would be
“dirty rush.” But all will be divulged soon! How silly.
Nor much else to tell that you won’t soon see and feel for yourself! As for me, I came to
Larry U. thinking seriously of an English major. Well, I haven’t been able to squeeze in
even one English course because of having to get required subjects out of the way. In
spring’s third term last year I got in the 3 rd term play and am now on the verge of a
theatre major. Theater was one of the main reasons I chose Lawrence anyway, and I’ve
always loved acting. My funny parents are very hesitant about it all—even though I keep
assuring them that I’m not going to become a hippie! Theatre is not that. I also love to
write prose---poetry—(letters when I have time!)---and can never resist an
adventure…find them, make them, read them, fake them!
O, yes! I’m home from camp…to see our puppy for the first time! She’s a Springer
spaniel, 10 weeks, female---squirmy with the sharpest little teeth and so much energy! So
much for me! See you soon, Bernie. Sincerely, Jody.
~ ~ ~
Kolleen
Hi, Bernie, you would not believe it. I’m here at the beach—supposedly working—and
it’s only 54 degrees out. Honestly, I’m not kidding. It’s really cold here. This weather is
getting to be a joke up in this country. Last summer was so warm; most of the time it was
90 degrees or above, but this year is really weird. 54 degrees in the middle of July—I
mean really!
Last night a friend of mine totaled out his car a block away from my house. Both legs are
broken, and one is actually crushed. He can’t feel a thing in them and he won’t be able to
walk for about a year. Poor guy!
Don’t forget to bring your yearbook to school. Knowing me, I will probably forget.
You’ll have to bring warm clothes, but lightweight things are necessary also. It does get
warm. Bring shorts and things like that. You’ll need warm slacks too for football games
and any other romping around you and I may do.
I’m really glad you can come. Should be really really great. I think I’ll be working right
up until school starts at an A&W root beer stand.
Will you be coming by plane, train, car, or what? You can come anytime from the 14 th
until the 20th. It doesn’t make any difference—but the sooner the better. Sure is great that
you can come. My entire family and I are looking forward to meeting you.
Page 109
As far as the furniture or rather the rugs and bed spreads for our room—we’ll have to get
those while you’re up here. …I’m getting a bulletin board. The hi-fi (small one) I can
take for sure.
Please pardon my sloppy letter, but I’m shaking I’m so cold and I’m using my leg as a
table again.
I usually go to bed (in the summer) around 12:15 to 1:00am. I get up between 7:00 &
8:00AM. Sometimes on very rare occasions, I go to bed at 10:30. During school I
stumble to bed between 11:00PM and 3:00AM. I get up at 6:00 and practice. Fun, fun
fun.
“Didn’t you love “Dr. Zhivago.” My aunt’s father-in-law went thru that in Russia & has
told me about it. That movie was realistic beyond belief. I’m going to see “Up the Down
Staircase” next week. I love movies, too. (Hint.)
I crave “Alfie.” Did you see the movie? I did last winter. Do I like most records? Yes, I
do. I like music---period. I don’t buy many records at all. Yet I want to join a record club
for a while next year. [Joe—a lifeguard here—says “Hi!”] I’ll be on a strict budget, but
I’d like to try it anyway. Would you like to help or try it with me? I haven’t heard “What
Becomes of the Brokenhearted.” Bring it with you, okay?
Why did you break up with your boyfriend? (I hope you don’t mind if I ask.)
Homecoming in Merrill is about the second week in October and I’ll come home for it.
Milt will be home too, so it should be great.
I’ll be 18 on August 6 which is a Sunday. Well, my sister and parents are leaving town for
the entire weekend. I shall be home cause I have to work. But that weekend should be fun!
Can’t wait to meet you! You should see my tan. It’s really dark. My friends keep teasing
me that we’ll have to put a “segregated” sign on the door of our room. But there is one
problem; as my skin gets darker my hair gets lighter.
Speaking of hair, Milt saw your picture and he loves your hair. In fact I got a 30 minute
lecture on “Why doesn’t Kolleen Egan let her hair grow.” He really thinks you’re neat
looking and I agree completely.
In my city band uniform I look like a boy—but I guess that’s minor (really!). That’s why
I’m supposed to let my hair grown.
Some crazy kids just came down to go swimming. Can you imagine! I have to watch them,
so bye for now & be good. Love, Kolleen
Page 110
End Notes
1
Uwem Akpan, “Fattening for Gabon,” Say You’re One of Them (New York, NY: Back
Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company 2009), 39-172.
2
Conversation with Ilda S. Johnson Green, 6 June 2004, Charlotte, NC, retired from
teaching after 43(?) years with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools. After my
mother, Mrs. Greene has been the most influential woman in my life.
iii
Out of more than 20,000 black students, less than two dozen had been assigned to white
schools in the fall of 1964. Id. at 1362.
4
Letters from the White Girls of Summer,” p. 103, below.
5
Not her real name. See Letters from the White Girls of Summer, Appendix A, p. 95.
above.
6
Letters from the White Girls of Summer, App. A, p. 76.
7
Pettis Norman, now a Dallas-based businessman, played in the NFL from 1962-1973.
He was a tight end for the Dallas Cowboys and the San Diego Chargers. http://www.profootball-reference.com/players/N/NormPe00.htm
Page 111

Assuming the Position

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