In 1919: You Had to Be Taught

If you were Caucasian and lived in the South c. 1919, you were probably a white supremacist.  How could you not be? From your birth, you would’ve absorbed the messages, played out in the very routine of daily life, that you were better for the accident of being born a particular race, one assigned a mythic claim to higher intelligence, heroism, and all-around Best in Show.  (Mythic applying as well to categories of “race” itself, proven by the very racially-complex results of my own DNA test.)

Popular song from 1899,  capitalizing on the longstanding “humor” of black children  as “alligator bait.”

Now that I’m writing the novel only from Leola’s POV, I’ve realized this story can’t be told unless bigotry plays a major role. It certainly did in the lives of all four of my grandparents, and their parents before them.

As an adolescent, my father’s father attended a famous lynching in Paris, Texas, during which white people cheered and ate popcorn. Like at a movie.  It was a scene he carried with him the rest of his life.

Crowd gathered to watch the lynching of Jesse Washington, Waco, TX,  1916.

My grandmother, the model for my main character, Leola, was a devout Baptist who worked herself to the bone from a young age, nursed her paralyzed husband to health after WWII,  and triumphed over all kinds of adversity. Known as someone who never said a “bad word behind anyone’s back,” she did use bad words to refer to others of different races.  As a child, I heard her speak with some contempt of “Darkies,” and I’m not sure she fully knew what to make of the civil rights movement. (Never mind her daughter, my mom, married a man who worked for LBJ. )

Once, when I was about 8 years old, I used the n-word to refer to our live-in housekeeper, Priscella Mitchell.  I’d heard my revered grandparents use it plenty by then.  (To this day, I feel a wrenching pain whenever I think of this incident.) Soon afterwards, my Mom and Dad sat down with their parents and asked them not to use such epithets anymore.  (This was, of course, after making sure I understood the brutality of such language.) And my grandparents did, in fact, respect their wishes.

Whites during a race riot, pulling black man off trolley.

Writing of this period now, I try to imagine what it was like to grow up marinated in the “values” of white supremacy.  I’m convinced there were many people during that time who felt deep conflict over the casual acts of degradation they observed.  Felt it, but couldn’t express it.  And young people like Leola (and my grandmother), getting ready to join society as adults, must have questioned it most of all. They were starting to separate emotionally from their families, yet were still strongly pulled by the culture they belonged to and were familiar with, during a time when conformity was the rule.

Racial violence might have grabbed headlines, but racial degradation was too customary to warrant such attention (unless, perhaps, you were the victim of it). That degradation was expressed in a deeply-ingrained code of etiquette designed to keep everyone in their places.  Whites called blacks of every age by their first names (and under no circumstances, vice-verse); black people were expected to step off the sidewalks for whites, be served after white folk, no matter their place in line, sit in the movie theater balcony even if the theater was empty.

At one point in the novel, witnessing a small but humiliating act of racial aggression against a family friend who is black, Leola hears a voice in her mind: Is not right. IS NOT RIGHT. She’s been nudged by her conscience often in the past, of course. It guides her daily interactions, as such mores tend to do. But she’s never heard that little voice in this sort of scenario. Or if she has, she’s never had reason or encouragement to listen to it.  She isn’t sure what to do about this feeling, either. And she’s afraid. The few white folk standing up for blacks during this time could expect repercussions: a burned cross in the yard, tarring and feathering, being marked out.

It wasn’t just the South:  Whites hunting African-Americans,  Chicago, 1919

So Leola does not speak out for that friend, who has shown only kindness to her in the past.  Her failure to do so bothers her, but ultimately, that nagging voice–Is not right–gets drowned out by the clamor of everyday life.  It isn’t really Leola’s problem, after all.

Not yet, at least.