Growing Up Racist

GROWING UP RACIST

I wrote this piece while Barack Obama was President. Now the White House is infested with Donald Trump. Faulkner was right.
-May, 2018

I’m a good ol’ Rebel soldier
And that’s just what I am.
For this fair land of freedom
I do not give a damn.
I hate the Yankee nation
And the uniform of blue,
And I hate the Constitution
And that nasty eagle, too.

I followed ol’ Marse Robert
For four years, nearbout.
Got wounded at Manassas
And starved at Point Lookout.
I caught the rheumatism
From fighting in the snow,
But I kilt me a chanct of Yankees
And I wish I’d ‘a kilt some more.

Thar’s three hunderd thousand Yankees
Lyin’ dead in southern dust.
We got three hunderd thousand
Before they conquered us.
They died of southern fever
And southern steel and shot.
And I wisht we’d ‘a got three million
Instead of what we got.

I cain’t pick up my musket
To fight ‘em any more.
But I ain’t gonna love ‘em,
And that is sartain shore.
And I don’t ask no pardon
For what I did and am,
And I won’t be reconstructed,
And I do not give a damn.

– “The Unreconstructed Rebel”,
by Hoyt Axton, c. 1870 (abridged)

When I was eleven years old, my parents got a divorce. The legal wrangling was lengthy and acrimonious, and to spare my tender feelings and those of my five-year-old brother Mike, the two of us were wafted away from Birmingham, Michigan to spend a year at our paternal grandparents’ winter vacation house in Southern Pines, North Carolina, where our nineteen-year-old Aunt Judy, at temporary loose ends, served as our live-in baby sitter. I’d never paid much attention to the Civil War, or to the issue of slavery. All the history teacher at my Michigan elementary school had to say about either subject was that Abraham Lincoln had saved the United States and freed the slaves. She certainly didn’t mention that the man who assassinated Lincoln was a Confederate sympathizer. Back then, I don’t think I even knew what a Confederate was.
I found out quickly in North Carolina. My school in Southern Pines was very small, almost the archetypal one-room schoolhouse, and although most of my classmates were my own age, a few were well into their teens, tough redneck country boys. During a recess period, one of the older ones, a guy named Lee, who was maybe fourteen, called me a “damnyankee” (always one word in the 1954 South) and waited to see what I would do it. Nothing, as it turned out, because I had no idea what he meant. I just looked baffled, and I guess he must have figured I was too much of a fool to bother with, because he just strutted away smirking. However, in class, Lee was as dumb as a stump, hopeless at math, and barely literate. So a little later on I started helping him, not because I liked him, but because he was slowing down everyone else, and the class was already boring enough to me. He was grateful for the help, and adopted me as a sort of oddball younger brother.
He lived near me, in the tiny hamlet of Manly, which consisted of four or five houses, a couple of barns, and the grocery store his parents ran. The family lived above the store, and in back of their house there was a basketball hoop mounted on the side of the garage. Lee taught me the rudiments of basketball, and we used to play “horse” together. He always won, because he was taller, and that made him fonder of me. After one game, he bragged about “puttin’ it to a high yalla gal,” and said she’d put out for me, too, for a quarter. I asked him what “high yalla” meant, and he said it was a nigger who could almost pass for white. He went on to say that all niggers, even high yalla ones, were ignorant and shiftless.
I’d been taught that “nigger” was a bad word, but I didn’t really have an opinion one way or another about black people, except for the family that worked for my grandparents. Charles Roundtree was the chauffeur, butler, and general handyman; Adela, his wife, was the cook and housekeeper. They were a warm, generous couple with two little girls, Charlie Mae and Louise, who were about Mike’s age, and became his playmates. We both adored the Roundtrees, and I think they were genuinely fond of us, and of our family. Certainly my grandfather paid them well, and their home, just across the back yard from the main house, was commodious, decently appointed, and spotless.
The Roundtrees certainly didn’t seem to be shiftless or ignorant, but I was the damnyankee, the northerner, the outsider, so who was I to question Lee’s opinion? For all I knew, the Roundtrees were exceptional, and most black folks in Southern Pines really were lazy and stupid. Except for Charlie Mae and Louise, I didn’t know any black children, and I don’t think Lee did, either. There were none at our school; integration was decades away.
At first I was uncomfortable with the fact that Charles Roundtree, a lay preacher at his Baptist church and a man of considerable dignity, always called me “Mister Toby,” even though I was just an eleven-year-old kid, whereas, following my grandparents’ and my Aunt Judy’s example, I called him “Charlie.” Adela was less respectful, if that’s the right word: she called me plain Toby, and she thought I was a spoiled brat and a scamp. She said so, too, emphatically, whenever I acted up. She never punished me physically (nor did she ever lay a hand on either of her daughters when they misbehaved), but her disapproval carried great weight, like a leaden cloud covering the sun and threatening hard rain. Adela’s kitchen was the most welcoming room in the house, and when she was angry with me, she banned me from it.
She certainly wasn’t “Mammy” in Gone With The Wind, but then, none of the characters and situations in Margaret Mitchell’s sentimental story have a damn thing to do with the harsh reality of the antebellum South, or with the almost equally grim Reconstruction era, whose ugly aspects, including the Ku Klux Klan and the mob lynchings of “uppity niggers” who dared to look at white women in a suggestive way, persisted through the time in which Mitchell wrote her pack of lies about noble defenders of the Lost Cause.
Nor had things changed much by the ‘50s, at least in North Carolina. My thoroughly northern grandfather, born in New Jersey, grew up to marry my New York City grandmother, and became a Wall Street tycoon who actually made money during the Depression. Grandpa Tommy treated the Roundtrees with courtesy, but he certainly didn’t regard them – or any black people – as his equals. Aunt Judy was dating a student at Duke who actively despised blacks, and she picked up his attitude, with exceptions made for her father’s servants, whom she adored as much as my little brother and I did. Naturally her opinions shaped mine, and by the end of my year in Southern Pines, I was a thoroughgoing racist.
My mother’s side of the family, directly and indirectly, exascerbated my racism. They were from South Carolina, and my maternal grandmother, whom I was taught to call “Grandmère” (with the proper French accent, bien sûr) was a Boykin, born on Mulberry Plantation, in Greenville. Of course the black men and women who grew cotton and indigo there weren’t slaves by the time Grandmère was born, but they were minimally paid, housed in crude cabins, and utterly dependent on the white family in the Big House for their basic necessities. Grandmère called black people “darkies,” and maintained, in her soft southern accent, that they were “just like children, bless them, not a thought in their wooly heads.”
And her husband, my grandfather Bob Allen, also from South Carolina, though from a less exalted family (during the Civil War, people like the Boykins were officers in the Confederate Army and those like the Allens were the rank and file) was equally nostalgic about the Lost Cause. Bob taught me the song that begins this essay. He had no idea that it was originally intended as a satire on southerners who wouldn’t admit the cause really was hopelessly lost because it had been hopelessly bad to begin with.
So I grew up with white supremacy and the nobility of the “Lost Cause” cause imprinted on my brain. When I came back north after my parents’ divorce was finally settled, I brought a gift from Bob with me: a Confederate kepi with an authentic leather squared-off bill. I wore it proudly for a couple of years, even though my classmates in the public schools I attended before I was shipped off to prep school thought it was stupid. It wasn’t that they recognized the cap for what it was, it was just that baseball caps were considered cooler.
As readers must realize by now, this piece was prompted by the news of the murders of nine members (including a State Representatve) of Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, while they were attending a Bible study class. The murderer, Dylann Roof, was besotted by twisted notions about the antebellum south and the inherent inferiority of black people. As everyone knows, he took selfies showing himself with a small Confederate battle flag, carrying the pistol he used in the shootings. According to testimony by survivors of the massacre, Roof had been welcomed to the class, for the A.M.E. church has always been open to everyone, regardless of race. He actually apologized before he pulled out his gun and began shooting, saying that he had to do it because blacks were taking over the country.
Roof isn’t alone in that opinion, to be sure. The election of the country’s first black President, and his subsequent reelection, reawakened the disease of racism that had never been completely eradicated in this country. The Ku Klux Klan is recruiting more members; battles in Congress continue over the display of the Stars and Bars and other Confederate memorabilia (although the flag outside the South Carolina State House was finally taken down); and bigoted politicians from northern as well as southern states go on bloviating about states’ rights, free speech, and our country’s historical heritage.
William Faulkner, who knew a thing or two about racism and false memories, wrote “The past isn’t over. It isn’t even past.” This country was founded by men who either owned slaves or profited in various ways by their labor. And although black people are legally recognized today as entirely equal to whites, that recognition doesn’t seem to have sunk in very deeply among white law enforcement officers in all parts of the U.S.A., who go on arresting blacks for the crimes of driving or even walking while black, and occasionally shooting them to death if they talk back.
It took close to twenty years before I finally came to grips with my racism, and I’m not sure I ever completely defeated it. Racial discrimination is as engrained into my brain as dirt is under my fingernails after I’ve picked vegetables in my wife’s little New Hampshire garden, and unlike that benign soil, it doesn’t wash out. Dylann Roof would have envied my Confederate cap, and when I see him in my mind’s eye, I am looking into a mirror. Any whites who feel superior to him because they don’t actually shoot black people are deluding themselves. The best we can do is to recognize that we have a chronic mental disease, and try to overcome it by calling upon our better natures.
But why should blacks – or Hispanics, Asians, or Native Americans – wait for white folks to finally listen to their consciences? Their numbers are growing by leaps and bounds, and despite the desperate, demented rants of the current cracked slate of Republican Presidential candidates, this country hasn’t been a white hegemony for some time. We whites still cling to a small majority in most states, but that majority is dwindling. And all the right wing howling in the world about closing borders to Hispanics can’t alter the changing population demographics. Fortunately, the younger generation of whites (except for crazies like Roof) understand that, and are adapting to current reality, instead of living in the benighted past. For that reason, there’s some hope for the country, once simple actuarial attrition has eliminated the racists, both those who don’t believe they have a disease, and those, like me, who know they do, and have tried to cure it. In twenty years, barring some unforeseen catastrophe, perhaps the United States of America will truly be united at last.