SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT
When I was twelve years old, my brother Mike and I were handed off to our paternal grandparents so that our mother and father could claw their way through a divorce without having to fret about bruising our tender sensibilities. For the most part, said sensibilities went unscathed at our grandparents’ elegant little brick house just outside Southern Pines, North Carolina. The house even had a name: Paddock Junior. There had been an earlier Paddock, a larger place in nearby Pinehurst, but after our father and our aunts Sis and Joan had grown up and married, our thrifty banker grandfather decided that it was more house than the family needed, and sold it.
Paddock Junior was in horse country, studded with luxurious stables for Thoroughbred hunter-jumpers and equally cushy kennels for pampered English fox-hounds. While Grandpa Tommy and Grandma Ellie were in residence, they were generous and loving toward us, and when Grandpa Tommy’s Wall Street affairs called them back to New York, we were positively coddled by Charlie and Adela Roundtree, the black couple who worked for them, and spoiled rotten by our Aunt Judy.
She was our grandparents’ last child, her arrival having come as a surprise to both of them, and she was only nine years older than I was. She had chosen not to go to college, but to attend the Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School instead. Being a secretary was one of the few job options open to young, white, middle-class women in the patriarchal 1950s; they were expected to put their skills at taking dictation, typing, and filing at the disposal of lordly male corporate executives (who often presumed that their secretaries’ bodies were at their disposal as well) while awaiting the arrival of Mister Right. However, the family crisis preempted Aunt Judy’s training for secretarial servitude, and she was dispatched to Paddock Junior for the year, to help the Roundtrees take care of me and my brother.
In fact, she needed to be taken care of as much as we did. At twenty, she was a wild child, crazy about horses and men, not necessarily in that order, with the beginning of a drinking habit that would last for the rest of her too-short life. But she was sweet, smart, pretty, and funny, and Mike and I adored her. To me, she was a big sister without the bullying part; to Mike, she stood in for the mother who had so inexplicably vanished. What she lacked in emotional maturity and steadiness was more than made up for by Adela Roundtree’s strict sense of order: everything in its place, and everything has a place. That went for the people in her charge as well as the contents of the house and its kitchen. She took Judy, Mike, and me in hand as firmly as she regulated the behavior of her two young daughters, Charlie Mae and Louise, who became Mike’s best friends and playmates.
Southern Pines had only one school (for white kids only, needless to say), and it had to serve students of all ages. Mike learned to read and write in its kindergarten. He’s a lefty, and his teacher tried to make him to use his right hand, as if the poor guy weren’t coping with enough confusion. He rebelled, bless him, but he’s had crabbed, almost illegible handwriting ever since. I was in the sixth grade, pretty far along in the three R’s thanks to good elementary schools up north. But some of my classmates were barely-literate farm boys already in their early teens. They’d been doing hard manual labor since they were old enough to walk, and their parents had taught them that the wrong side had won the Civil War. The only people they hated worse than blacks were damnyankees (always one word), and the only thing they hated worse than farm labor, which at least they were good at, was being shut up in a classroom and forced to study stuff that didn’t interest them.
My first day of school began badly. The moment the bus stopped at the end of our long driveway and I got on, the redneck kids began making nasty remarks. Judy and Adela had insisted that I put on a crisp white shirt, a striped tie, ironed khaki pants, and lace-up Oxfords. But the dress code for the boys ran more toward blue jeans, T-shirts, and heavy work boots. Somebody tripped me as I walked down the aisle looking for a seat. I flailed my arms trying not to fall over backwards as the bus jolted into motion, and one of my hands latched onto the shoulder of a pretty, black-haired girl in a fluffy pink sweater and a flared blue skirt with a white felt poodle appliquéd to it. The boy sitting on the other side of her shouted, “Git your got-damn hand offa my girl!”
I pulled my hand away as if it had touched a hot stove, and finally found a place at the back of the bus. I envied Mike. Charlie Roundtree drove him every morning to the kindergarten in Paddock Junior’s all-purpose vehicle, a wooden-sided station wagon built on the chassis of a World War Two Army ambulance, which Grandpa Tommy had bought for next to nothing from the motor pool at nearby Fort Bragg. Charlie himself had added the wood panels; later on, in the sixties, when the Beach Boys rhapsodized about their woody wagon, I knew exactly what they meant.
When we arrived at school, the boy who had yelled at me for touching his girl told me he was “gonna whup” me during recess, and I spent the morning in terror, because he was older than I was, two inches taller, and much more muscular. I barely paid attention to what the teacher, a plump, pleasant-faced woman about the same age as my mother, was trying to get across to her thoroughly mixed bag of pupils. But all at once I felt a surge of anger that canceled my fear. I realized that I had been angry for a long time, ever since Mother and Dad’s drunken, screaming fights back at our house in Michigan woke Mike and me up every night. And although we couldn’t have better treated by our grandparents and the Roundtrees, I still resented being shipped off to them like a package, and having to leave my friends behind. Now this bully wanted to beat me up, probably in front of all his buddies and the black-haired girl.
I’d already had a few playground scuffles. Dad was a rising executive at a company that reassigned him almost yearly to its branches in different cities, so I had always been the new kid in school. But I was sick and tired of being picked on, and my temper flared. So when the bell for recess rang, I went to the playground determined at least to get a few licks in before the bully clobbered me. When he and his pals arrived, before he had time to say a word I hit him in the face as hard as I could. The blow rocked his head back and blood spurted from his nose. But he just swiped the blood away with his thumb like a prize-fighter before getting to work on me. His first punch caught me on the jaw and dazed me. His second went to my belly, and literally took my breath away. That was that. I doubled over and fell on my ass, where I remained, trying to remember how to breathe.
He moved in to finish me off, drawing back one of his boots to kick me in the side of the head, but the burly male history teacher serving that day as the playground monitor broke up the fight. He cuffed the back of the bully’s head hard with his open palm and said, “Get away from him, Jimmy Jones. I’ve warned you before about fighting. You’d best start behaving yourself, or I’ll call your Pa in, and he won’t be one bit happy about leaving the farm just as the corn’s coming in.”
Jimmy Jones mumbled what might have been an apology, and walked away. The teacher helped me to my feet and asked me if I needed to see the school nurse. I was breathing normally by then, and I thanked him and said no. My jaw hurt, and there was a little ringing in my ears, but otherwise I felt all right. He told me to return to the classroom, and I did, wiping tears and snot from my face with the sleeve of my shirt. I took my tie off and jammed it in a front pocket of my khakis. Expecting more trouble from the bully, I took a place in the first row, right in front of the teacher’s desk, knowing that Jimmy and his pals always lounged around in the rear of the classroom, where they ignored the lessons, played grab-ass, threw spitballs, and generally demonstrated their contempt for book-learning.
But something amazing happened that afternoon. The teacher – I’ll call her Mrs. Doe, because she was as gentle as one, and I can’t remember her real name – pulled down the window shades and turned off the overhead lights, so that the only illumination was provided by the small lamp on her desk. She sat back down, picked up a book, and waited a moment. The room went completely silent. Even the rowdies shut up.
The book was Walter Farley’s The Black Stallion, about an English boy named Alec Ramsay and a magnificent horse. It begins as Alec, the son of an official of the British Raj, is on his way back to England to be properly educated. His ship stops at an Arabian port, where an unruly black horse is loaded aboard, not without considerable difficulty. Partway through the voyage, the ship catches fire and sinks, but Alec and the stallion manage to swim to a desert island, where they form a bond as they struggle for survival. By the time they are rescued, the Black is letting Alec ride him, and when they get back to England and the Black’s breathtaking speed is discovered, he’s entered in a match race against the best horse in Britain. But the stallion bucks off his professional jockey, allowing only his boon companion on his back. So it’s Alec who rides him to victory.
The Black Stallion is a ripping yarn if ever there was one, and it worked its magic even on the bullies. I learned the following week that Mrs. Doe read a chapter from it every Tuesday afternoon, figuring, maybe, that if she got the redneck boys hooked on a good book by reading it aloud to them, they might pick up the habit of reading other ones. I doubt if her scheme worked: Jimmy Jones, for one, barely knew how to read or write his own name. But he was as enthralled as I was by the story. In Mrs. Doe’s soft Carolina accent, “Alec” became “Elleck,” and to this day I think all the characters speak the way she did, not in clipped, upper-class British English.
After class was dismissed, I rode the bus home without any further trouble. In fact, the pretty brunette refused to sit next to Jimmy Jones, and went to the back of the bus with her auburn-haired girlfriend. They sat next to me, and told me their names. The brunette was Margot Campbell, and the redhead, just as pretty, introduced herself as Diana Pearson.
I gave them my name, and Margot, who had no trace of a southern accent, asked me if I was from New York City, because she lived there part of the year. Hoping to impress her, I told her that my grandparents had a penthouse on Park Avenue. She said snootily that her family lived on Beekman Place, and seemed put out when I looked blank. She got up and went back up the aisle to join Jimmy Jones, and even at twelve, I realized she’d been flirting with me just to make him jealous. Sexual politics starts earlier in girls than it does in boys.
But Diana stayed with me, and the first thing she asked me – and she did have the south in her mouth – was whether I liked horses. My grandparents had given me a grumpy old Welsh cob named Ladybug to soften the blow of the divorce, and I was taking riding lessons with a superb horsewoman named Ginny Moss, who, with her husband Ozell, owned the stable right across the pasture from Paddock Junior. So I told Diana about Ladybug and my lessons. She had a rather more elegant mount, a black Morgan mare named Sarah, and we talked horses until she got off at the stop just before mine. She knew a lot more about horses than I did, but she wasn’t snooty about my Welsh cob, assuring me that the breed was smart, sturdy and strong. By the time she left the bus, I was hopelessly in love with her.
I was just as in love with horses, despite Ladybug’s mulishness and her habit of dumping me off whenever my attention wandered. After a week, Ginny Moss decided that the old girl had taught me enough, and sent me to a livery stable. Its owner was a ruddy-faced, great-bellied man I knew only as Mr. Alex, who looked like John Bull, the personification of the bluff, hearty Englishman, but with a good ol’ boy accent. He put me up on a full-sized horse, a bay gelding named Jack. The goddess who smiles on puppy-love had made sure that Diana kept her mare at the same stable, and almost every afternoon after school as well as most Saturdays and Sundays, we rode together through the piney woods of the enormous Fort Bragg Army base. I’d learned to post to a trot and tuck my butt under to rock along to a canter, but Diana was a better rider, and one day she took off at a full gallop, as if daring me to catch her. I was scared, but I would rather have died than turn down a girl’s dare, so I crouched forward, jockey-style, along Jack’s neck, and yelled “Hah!” Jack must have had some quarterhorse blood, for he took off like a rocket.
We chased Diana and Sarah up one of the sandy fire-lanes, and passed them. Then we turned onto a branching trail that ran along the top of a ridge, and they began to make up the distance. By the time we came to a downward path, she was ahead of me, and she reined in her Morgan. I checked Jack, and Diana told me that you should never make a horse gallop down a steep hill. If it tripped on something, it would tumble head first and maybe break a leg, or even its neck. She didn’t have to describe what would happen to its rider.
So we walked our horses carefully down to the bottom of the ridge and back to the stable, where Diana showed me how to remove their bridles and replace them with soft woolen halters before turning them into their stalls. We took off their saddles and placed them on the wooden frames of the tack room; the bridles went on hooks that were labeled with the names of our horses. Then she filled a bucket with cool water from the faucet halfway down the aisle that separated the double rank of stalls, and we used a couple of big sponges to wash off their sweat. There were old gunney-sacks for wiping them dry, and finally we picked up rubber curry-combs to sleeken their coats. Both horses gurgled with pleasure, and after making sure the iron water basins mounted in the corners of their stalls were full and each of them had a fresh flake of hay, we left the stable. I had enjoyed the work, but I asked Diana why the stable didn’t have a groom, like the one at the Moss’s place. She laughed and told me it did have one, but today was his payday, and the old nigger was busy getting drunk.
The n-word was never uttered at Paddock Junior. I couldn’t remember my grandparents even using the word “Negro.” The Roundtrees were “the help,” also a degrading term, but one that at least lacks the toxic venom of racism. They were very well paid, and later on, Grandpa Tommy loaned them the money to put their daughters through college. By the time they had left the segregated south and settled in a town on Long Island, they had paid back every cent. Charlie Roundtree, a lay preacher and the leader of his church’s choir, attended my grandfather’s funeral, and sang the haunting spiritual “Peace In The Valley.” I like to believe that he sang it at least as much for himself and his family as for his benefactor, for I hope the Roundtrees had found a measure of peace in their new home, despite the north’s subtler form of racial prejudice.
It was one thing to hear redneck oafs like Jimmy Jones spit out the ugly word, but hearing it drop so casually from the delicate lips of a girl came as a profound shock to me. I wish I could say that I had objected to her use of the term, but I was twelve, and I had a crush on her. She’d been my guide during the ride, and she’d showed me how to take care of our horses after it. Also, I’d been hustled around from place to place, and like any kid, all I’d ever wanted to do was fit in. Aunt Judy and my grandparents had taught me to respect the Roundtrees, but in fact they weren’t treated as equals. Adela and Charlie didn’t sit down at the table with us to eat the meals she cooked and he served. Charlie Mae and Louise played with Mike, but they didn’t go to kindergarten with him. And the Roundtrees always called my grandfather “sir” and my grandmother “ma’am;” Judy was “Miss Judy,” and I was “Mister Toby.” Their Carolina accents were thicker and heavier than the light drawls of Mrs. Doe and Diana Pearson, and they often spoke ungrammatically.
So I said nothing to Diana. I had thought that only ignorant rednecks called black people niggers, but she proved me wrong. Maybe my grandparents and my aunt – damnyankees, after all, who spent most of their time in New York City – didn’t understand the way things really were in North Carolina. I didn’t either, but I wanted to learn. And Diana wasn’t my only teacher. During history lessons at school, we’d jumped from the Revolution to the Civil War, which sweet Mrs. Doe always called the War Between The States (and, occasionally, the War of Northern Aggression). In her view, the founders of the Confederacy were no different from the patriots who rose up against British tyranny in 1776. George Washington – a slave-owning Virginian – was the Continental Army’s Robert E. Lee, and after he was elected President, he became the equivalent of Jefferson Davis. Mrs. Doe insisted that Abraham Lincoln started the war only to preserve Federal control over the states, and didn’t mention freeing the slaves until his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, when the South was still winning, and he hoped to recruit freed blacks into the Union Army to bolster its numbers.
She was right about that, I learned later, but the main thing I took away from her history segment on the Civil War was that the southern states had had a Constitutional right to secede from a union whose government was trying to destroy their way of life. Aunt Judy was dating a guy named Bob, a senior at Duke University, and he believed fervently in the Lost Cause. He won me over, because Judy loved him, and I became an Unreconstructed Rebel. He gave me a Confederate forage cap for my thirteenth birthday, and I wore it proudly to school. The redneck kids began to make friends with me. I never did use the n-word, even when I was shooting baskets in the playground with Jimmy Jones and his pals, but I stopped wincing when they did, and by the time Mike and I were shipped back north that June, I had acquired a southern accent.
We wound up in Wayland, a suburb of Boston, on an estate belonging to an old-money family that had lost most of its wealth, but retained its snobbism. On the rebound from the divorce, Mother had married George Kirchwey, who had dated her before my dashing father appeared and swept her off her feet. Goerge worked for a Boston-based chemical company, and the snobs had to rent us one of its houses because they needed the income. Dad, meanwhile, had made an honest woman out of the blonde he’d been screwing, and was living in her fancy home on Long Island, commuting to New York City, where he worked for a real estate developer who was almost as venal, crass, and crooked as today’s Donald Trump. He despised his boss, not because he was a crook, but because he was Jewish, for dear old Dad was racist to the core (in addition to his antisemitism, he liked to tell Rastus and Mandy jokes). It was a trait he certainly hadn’t inherited from his own father, who dealt fair and square with black folks, and counted Jews among his closest business associates and friends.
My southern affectations didn’t last long up north. Because my time at the Southern Pines school had taught me nothing except how to be a redneck, I was hustled into an all-boys pre-prep school (my grandfather paid the steep tuition). Fessenden had its little foibles – some of its “masters” preyed sexually on their students – but its courses were rigorous and demanding. I made up for the year I’d lost down south, lost my Carolina accent, and stopped wearing my Confederate képi. I graduated, and went on to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. Again, my grandfather paid my fees, because George Kirchwey couldn’t afford them, and Dad had lost his job when the real estate maggot sold the firm to a British conglomorate.
After a rough first year, I did well at Andover. My American History teachers quickly disabused me of all romantic notions concerning the south’s “Peculiar Institution,” by explaining exactly how the Triangular Trade profited the north. And I learned more about my own southern ancestry from my maternal grandmother, who lived with Mother and George after her husband drank himself to death. Grandmère (she insisted on the French term) was a South Carolina Boykin, and very proud of her ancestry. The Boykin plantation, Mulberry Hill, in Camden, began as an indigo farm in the 18th century, and later shifted to cotton. It depended upon slave labor, of course. But Grandmère always insisted that the “darkies” had been well-treated there. Once I asked her how she knew. She responded, “Why, darlin’, because none of them ever tried to run off, of course!” I thought that might have been more a testament to the vigilance of the overseers than to the happiness of the slaves, but I never mentioned that to the dear, silly lady.
I was a boarding student at Andover, and I began to cut my ties with Mother and Dad. During Christmas, spring, and summer vacations, I split my time with them, in accordance with the terms of the divorce. But my real home was the school, and for the first time in my life I realized that I didn’t need them emotionally. Nor did they need me. George had a daughter by his previous marriage, and he and Mother quickly produced two sons. Dad’s new wife also came with a daughter, and in truth, he had never really known what to do with Mike and me. Our existence cramped what he thought of as his devil-may-care, rakish style – or, to put it plainly, his womanizing, alcoholism, and compulsive gambling. I’m not one to judge him for those faults, since I have bad habits of my own (at least Dad never smoked).
But racism isn’t just a personal fault or a bad habit. It’s a cancer of the soul that destroys the basic human decency of those it infects, and it’s as hard to cure as the physical disease. Those who recognize that they have it, and want to get rid of it, can only hope for remission, not cure, by constantly monitoring themselves, and silencing ugly thoughts about people of color before they can be uttered. I do my best to stay vigilant, but there are times when the watch I keep on myself fails to suppress an upwelling of rancor against people who don’t look, behave, or act the way I do. However, I’m 74, and will soon leave the physical plane of existence, taking my ugly stain of racism with me. And most of the white members of the rising generations are color-blind and embrace multiculturalism. The bigots who voted for Trump because they’d hated the very notion of a black man occupying the White House for eight years are beginning to realize, however dimly, that The Donald is as nutty as a fruit-cake. And the Russian connection, despite the Republicans’ attempts to dismiss it, isn’t going away. Impeachment rumors are blowing in the wind, and there’s hope that the Bawling Baby will soon be wafted out of the Oval Office to spend the rest of his days at Mar-Al-Lago wearing adult nappies and posting tweets to his imaginary friends.
So despite our brief flirtation with racist fascism, there’s reason to hope that this nation, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, will not perish from the earth.” After all, even Honest Abe needed to expunge his own ingrained prejudice against black people before writing the Emancipation Proclamation.