How great literature can change your life

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Friday

Today’s weekly installment of My Life in Lit focuses on growing up in the segregated south and how my views of race came into being. As a result, I cover some of the same years that I touched on in last week’s essay.

My earliest memory of racism actually involves myself. I was chanting a rhyme I had undoubtedly picked up in school—“Teacher, teacher don’t hit me, hit that [N-word] behind that tree”—and John Mayfield, the son of the seminarian who lived upstairs, vociferously objected. (Although John was three years younger than I was, he had been well schooled.) Seeing that I had gotten a rise out of him, I kept at it and he kept getting angrier until we settled on a compromise. We agreed that I would substitute the word “tiger.” (Better to scapegoat tigers than people of color.)

I remember being amazed that a word could have such power but also feeling good at how compromise had brought us into agreement. Perhaps “tiger” reminded me also of the book Little Black Sambo, which I had loved when I was younger. In any case, I didn’t associate the N-word with actual people.

That didn’t last. I heard the N-word a lot growing up, although not from my parents and their friends. (Nor would those racists in the administration and on the faculty, of whom there a number, have publicly used it—upper class racism differs from lower class racism in the language used, although it has its own toxicity.) As a result, the word almost felt natural when my father read me Huckleberry Finn at ten or eleven. By that time, however, I knew that racism was bad and felt aligned with the progressives in our community.

I have a vivid memory, at age ten, of visiting the two-room Black schoolhouse (four grades in each room) to drop off some books. The local NAACP, which my parents belonged to, had purchased biographies of George Washington Carver and Harriet Tubman, both of which I read before we handed them over. It was summer so no one was in the building, but I remember seeing worn copies of Dick, Jane, and Sally. They had undoubtedly been passed on after Sewanee Public School was through with them, and I was aware of the contrast between the world they depicted and the shabby classroom I was standing in. I could see why it would be more important for the kids to read about Carver and Tubman. In other words, thanks to my parents, I was beginning to step into another perspective.

It helped that my father had read us Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and I had seen the movie as well. Because of a civil rights lawsuit that we were involved in—more on that in a moment–I remember particularly well the discussion Atticus has with Scout about the appellation “N-word lover.” I was called that at least once in my childhood so Atticus’s calm discussion of it was meaningful. The novel helped me formulate a self apart from the community I was part of.  

So did Huckleberry Finn. To appreciate its importance, some background is necessary.

In 1962 four Black Sewanee families and four white brought a suit against our county school board for depriving their children of the right to attend integrated schools, as decreed by the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. I was one of the plaintiffs in the case. It was one of the few instances in the south of a multiracial lawsuit, and it happened in Sewanee because of the proximity of Highlander Folk School, an integrated conference center nearby where civil rights activists came together to hold workshops. Rosa Parks had attended one of these workshops shortly before she set off the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King had also been there. Septima Clark, an amazing African American woman and Highlander’s director of education, had helped set up a local NAACP, and the lawsuit grew out of that organization.

Although the KKK was active in the valley, Sewanee is unusual in that the college owns all the land that everyone lives on (some 10,000 acres in all). This meant that the Black families, most of whom worked for the college, were somewhat protected. The top of the plateau was not entirely Klan-free, however, and I went to school with a number of poor, rural whites who resembled the Cunninghams and Ewells in Mockingbird. Indeed, I remember that we, as kids, saw ourselves as fitting into one of three categories: town kids (associated with the college and professional people, most of whom walked or bicycled to school), theolog kids (children of seminarians, who were there for three years), and “bus kids,” who were bused in from neighboring hamlets. Some in this last category lived in tar paper shacks and some relied on the school lunch for their only meal of the day. (I remember witnessing real hunger for the first time in my life.) The bus kids were the most openly racist although I witnessed some racism in the town and theolog kids as well.

Even though Sewanee cushioned the Black families against the Klan, however, they were still courageous for signing on to the suit, as was our African American lawyer, Avon Williams, who was never sure if he would make it safely back to Nashville at the end of a day in court. The NAACP financed the case and was proud, as were we all, when we won. Ronnie Staten was the only Black child in my 7^th grade class as integration included only a sprinkling of African American students the first year before full integration in 1964-65.

I remember reaching out to Ronnie during recess on that first day in school. And while I did so because of the lawsuit, I also had in mind the scene where Huck determines to rescue Jim from captivity, even though white society is against it. It’s the most memorable scene in the novel—Huck follows his heart and honors his friendship, even though he believes he’ll go to hell for it—and it bolstered my own values. Although Ronnie would ultimately choose to play basketball with the other boys rather than play outside with me (which was good), it was an important moment for me and hopefully for him.

May Justus, an Appalachian writer who had developed a friendship with Highlander and had become a good friend of our family, would write a book about that encounter, called New Boy in School (Hastings House, 1963). It was groundbreaking in its day and is dedicated to me and my brothers.

I missed full integration the following year because my father had a sabbatical in Paris. Then, when we returned to Sewanee, it was as though segregation still reigned because I attended all-white Sewanee Military Academy. (Kids who wanted to attend a good college generally went to one of the three prep schools on the mountain because the local public high school was so bad.) While I loathed the military, I got a superb education (more on that in a future post). Still, it was sad how I continued to be cut off from Sewanee’s Black children. Although we all lived together in the same small town, it’s as though we were in separate worlds.

Because of the ugliness of southern racism, I wanted to get as far away from the south as I could. I applied to Swarthmore in Pennsylvania, Colby College in Maine, and Carleton College in Minnesota. I ended up at Carleton.

As a child, I assumed that segregation would always be the way things were. As a result, whenever I walk into a classroom and see white and Black students sitting together as though it is the most natural thing in the world, to this day I experience a momentary thrill. They take for granted what once seemed impossible.

It gives me hope.

One other work: Speaking of fiction that gave me some outside perspective, there were also Herman and Verman, the Black brothers in Booth Tarkington’s Tom Sawyer-like Penrod books. At one point, seeing the tangles and follow-up punishments that Penrod and his friends get into, Herman shakes his head and says, “Man, man! Glad I ain’ no white boy!” (from “Georgie Becomes a Member” in Penrod and Sam).