Being Stupid or Pride and Prejudice

Growing up in the the deep south before even Lyndon Johnson thought about civil rights was a very interesting social experience. Two actions of mine still haunt me to this day. There was very little opportunity for me to be exposed to black families on a social level, although they lived all around us. Paul Greene, a journalist for the Raleigh News and Observer, and creator of the Lost Colony Pageant at Roanoke Island wrote that no matter how down in the gutter a white man was, there was always somebody who had to call him Mister. My family existed clearly as Poor Whites, or as some have described as Proud Poor, a step above. We were never on welfare, but it was a stark existence in most respects.

In second grade we moved to a farm next door to a black family with a daughter about my age. Going to meet the bus, I always saw her in the yard. I stopped one day to talk to her. We didn't talk about school. It was just understood that blacks did not go to school. Her name was Charity. She invited me into the house to see her picture. It was not just a picture of Charity in the 8 by 10 frame, but a picture of three girls who looked exactly alike, same dressses, same poses, standing side by side. Her mother explained that Charity was born with identical sisters, Faith and Hope, who died in infancy. The mother cried and told me how each year they had a new picture taken to honor her lost sisters. The family's home was as clean as mine, and the parents' bed, and in addition to being nicer and fluffier than my parents had a satin spread. The beds in my house were only covered with homemade quilts.

I went home that day with a new reference point, and was excited to tell my parents of the experience. Not all blacks were dirty and smelled bad. Mama didn't chastise me for going in the house, but had me understand that I must come straight home after that. I still think about Charity, and wonder if she ever got a chance to learn to read.

By the time I was out of college and was on the other side of the desk, there were black schools. I had an occasion to visit one when I was teaching in Southern Pines. It was a new red brick school, and as I slowly passed the boy's locker room, I detected not just a stronger smell than the one in my school, but a different smell altogether. I got to know the black administrators and cooperated with them on occasion. They had to fight for everything they got. Truthfully, as I have taught many black students since that year, many of which became favorites of mine, I have never had any who did not appear clean.

The year that I taught in Southern Pines was 1954, the year the US Supreme Court favored Brown over The Board of Education. People immediately could see a new confidence on the faces of all the blacks in the community. There was much talk of desegregation, but in our last faculty meeting, where it was the hot topic for two hours, our superintendent assured us that we would never have to assimilate black students in our schools. He had the right to regulate districts, and if he had to put each house of black people in a different school districts, he could do it, even if his county had several hundred districts with one house in each. Later, they not only integrated, but had to spend a lot of money busing students all over to make sure the color was balanced in each school. It gave rise to more prejudice than ever, and the establishment of great numbers of small elite private schools without the financial backing to support programs like music, arts and others the larger public schools offerred.

We occasionally hired black women to help pick cotton, but during our hardest season we "swapped work" with four other families to harvest the tobacco, a very labor intensive work lasting six or seven weeks in July and August. One summer Uncle Jim hired a young black fellow to live with them, sleeping in a shed, and eating after all the white people had finished.

He was a jovial, very talented guy we discovered when he asked permission to play the piano in their living room. He played by ear, ragtime, and anything you could hum. One day we finished early, and Uncle Jim asked all the men if any would like to go into town to see a wild west movie. Only two men accepted, so Uncle Jim asked Joe if he wanted to go. He quickly accepted. The other men left to clean up, but Joe only washed his hands and was ready. When asked if he was going to take a bath, he answered that he had powdered.

I thought about Joe fifty years later when I was teaching at a university in China and one of my students asked me why westerners smell so bad. She had encountered an American athlete after a soccer game. I discovered that Chinese people not only have very litttle body hair, but no sweat glands at all, and that deodorant is not even sold in China. Should they choose not to bathe for a week or so, they may have the same odor of dead skin that all humans have, especially old people who think that since they sit around all the time and don't feel dirty there is no need to bathe.

The stigma of immorality was the worst image of blacks. We felt justified in sending them to "de backa de bus". One weekend during WW ll my cousin Helen and another friend and I took a bus trip. I was left behind them with an empty seat beside mine. A man entered with his wife and asked me if I would move to the seat behind mine, beside a black woman, so he and his wife
might sit beside each other. I simply said "No" and turned toward the window.

I had never heard anything like the scolding that man gave me, but I continued to sit there looking out the window, afraid he would try to remove me bodily.

My next act of defiance came many years later when I was a staff dietitian at Duke University Hospital. There I was in constant close contact with many black people, since most of the workers in the kitchen and the wards were from the black community and colleges. I had to watch those who operated dangerous machinery in case they came to work slightly inebriated and sliced off a finger. Charles came a little tipsy occasionally and juiced two crates of oranges for the private patients. Should he not show up at all, I had to juice them myself. The black nurses, maids, and all other workers ate in the basement together where their rest rooms were located. One day I saw a lovely black registered nurse in the upstairs bathroom and reminded her that she was to use the one downstairs. She met my stare, but remained aloof and calmly walked out.

I felt justified because each month all medical staff and food handlers had blood drawn to test for venereal diseases. We always had to fire a few blacks who had syphilis, but never a white person. I had a fear of a toilet seat that could be contaminated. The prejudices stayed with me a long time, I am ashamed to say, even after I came out west with my husband to go to school. That summer I found myself with a large group of students playing a game where we all held hands in a circle. There was a black boy in the group, and when it became necessary for me to hold hands with the black student, I dropped out of the game.

I feel so embarrassed to admit these things. I hope I have been forgiven. One of my dear friends, Ana Claudia, a beautiful Nigerian girl who worked with me in the Madrid Temple, has probably the darkest skin of anyone I have seen, but is the most beautiful. If she ever comes to this country, I sincerely hope she will find it a welcoming place every where she goes.