The Black and White Story: That's the Way Things Were

It’s the cold winter’s night in the winter of my life, and I am getting old. I’ve seen the day pickaninnies, as my grandmother called them, picked cotton with their mamas and daddies on the farm. They’d ask my grandmother for soap powder to wash their clothes for school, and my grandmother said no. After they left, she’d say in a whisper to me, “I don’t know why they wait until it’s time to go to school to wash their clothes.” And I said nothing. I never said anything; I just listened and accepted things the way they were. I knew very young that I was better than the colored kids on the farm because we lived in the farmhouse, and Granddaddy owned the farm. They lived in the shacks, and Grandmother said that they always tear up the floor in winter for firewood so there’s no point fixing up the shacks, or as they were then known, the shanties. I knew that wasn’t true, but I told myself Grandmother knew about those kinds of things.

I was a fifth grader in North Chicago in 1953-1954 when the schools were integrated for the first time. Somebody flooded the restrooms at school and put chewing gum in the encyclopedias of the library. I was told the Negroes did it or as my mother said politely, the colored kids did it. My parents took me out of the public schools in North Chicago the next year because my sister was starting first grade. They told me they didn’t want Beth to ride that far on the bus. No would ever actually said it was so we’d be in an elite all white private school in Lake Forest away from the violence of the public schools because of integration.

We never discussed lots of things, and I never asked about it or even noticed most of the time. White only restaurants, white only stores, white only at the movie theatre! It would have been like me asking why was Lake Michigan blue or why did the ice cream shops close in the winter in Chicago area. Why were there ships in the harbor, why did the soldiers drill on Saturday mornings on the Naval Base? These things were all just part of my life. I didn’t even know what my daddy did in the military, and I never thought to ask him about it till years later. He then told me after I asked him several times that he worked in codes and ciphers and on weekends was officer on duty at the Great Lakes Naval Base. He would notify parents of casualties from the Korean War and make provisions for funerals.

I played “Good Little Eva” and “Good Little Topsy” in my technique book. My piano teacher never mentioned Uncle Tom’s Cabin nor did I know anything about the 19th century novel and that they were characters from the book. To me it was just my music book. Eva taught Topsy, showed her how to hold her thumbs just so, slightly curved, contacting the key at the side tip where the nail meets the flesh. Then Topsy practiced her lesson as I was to do. Eva was “gentle and good,” “pretty and dainty,” “flow’ry and quainty.” Topsy was “her dear little maid with her hair all a braid.” No one ever mentioned that Eva was white and Topsy was black--not me, my teacher nor my parents. But the pictures told the story. Eva was white, and Topsy was black; and they were in a flower garden. Eva was picking tulips, and Topsy was sitting at the base of the birdfeeder watching Eva pick flowers. When I finished learning the song, I gave both girls in the picture stars. I put a small gold star on Eva’s bonnet and a big gold star in Topsy’s hand. The only other black children illustrating the technique book was a picture of two little children in the dessert pointing to an Ostrich with his head buried in the sand. This was to illustrate a lesson to practice playing the 3rd finger while keeping the other fingers and thumb inactive.

We played jazz and Dixieland in the high school stage band, but we didn’t mention that it was Negro music. My only thought was I really wanted to play the piano instead of the French Horn for the stage band. But my playing was too much in the classical tradition to be spontaneous enough to play the piano for a stage band. A girl with no formal piano training but training as a drummer got the position because she had better rhythm and could read the chords better than I could. Yet as I grew older I always loved Dixieland, Scott Joplin, and ragtime right along with Beethoven, Chopin, Bach, and Mozart.

Even as a young girl, I always thought how fun it would be to play the piano for the USO (United Service Organization) and entertain the soldiers with ragtime on the piano. Sometimes on the base or TV we would see programs with various bands such as Spike Lee and his City Slicker orchestra, Guy Lombardo, Benny Goodman, or military bands and singers. So I guess that’s where I got the idea. The celebrities came out for the USO: Milton Berle, Bing Crosby, Glen Miller, Jack Benny, Mickey Rooney, Marilyn Monroe, Debbie Reynolds.

Now I’m getting old and I know because the memories are like reruns of “I Love Lucy”, “Howdy Doody,” or “Person to Person” with Edward R. Morrow. The movie stars and dignitaries of my youth are dying or already passed away. Many of the presidents have been buried, assassinated, impeached, slandered, reelected, forced to resign . . . some of all of this. I watched it on TV. I heard the live radio broadcast of the Kennedy death in the hospital and saw the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby on TV. I watched Watergate on TV as a young mother with my second baby, wondering if this wasn’t the worst thing that could ever happen to our country.

It was far different from the days of childhood when my Republican parents went to the Republican Convention in Chicago and Eisenhower was the nominee. They brought home scatter pins from the convention for me and my sister, an elephant and a donkey with little rhinestones for their body and eyes. I listened to the military bands play “Stars and Stripes Forever” and Kate Smith sing “America the Beautiful.” I watched Ronald Reagan, host of the General Electric Theatre in the 50s, become President of the United States and the first Catholic elected president. That was monumental as I grew up being taught that a Protestant should never marry a Catholic or Jew because they didn’t go to heaven. By the time Kennedy was elected I had change my point of views in many ways except that I still never dated a Catholic, Jew, or black person. I was strictly WASP, White Anglo Saxon Protestant.

My brain is a history book of the south and integration, and yet most of the archives in my brain I really never saw as they were. I didn’t ride public buses so that was not part of my experience. I expected black waiters when we ate out at Johnny Rebs, Aunt Fanny’s Cabin or Mammy’s Shanty in Atlanta. It was as normal that the patrons were white only as it was to have fried chicken and pecan pie. The young black boys at Aunt Fanny’s Cabin who entertained with buck dancing then walked around the room jingling a jar for tips was a highlight of the evening, right up there with homemade biscuits and cornbread. Yes, I went to the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, but I didn’t particularly notice that the blacks all sat in the upper balcony. Yet I knew it was all wrong though I seldom mentioned it to anyone. I’d heard of marches and integration in the news, but it was always somewhere else. I never participated in any of the marches and often just heard about it along with the other news on TV.

My high school was all white except for a few Mexicans. My college at Baylor was all white. The trouble in Little Rock, Selma, and Birmingham was always on a distant front, sort of like the Korean War. I had learned early as a child of a naval officer that the things over there didn’t affect my well being at home. I had quickly learned how to compartmentalize. The soldiers were graduating from boot camp to soon be shipped to Korea, but the marching and music was inspiring and patriotic. I remember thinking as a little girl that I’d even like to go to war myself. Usually though my fantasy was only to entertain the soldiers, like Bob Hope or the moviestars.

1/14/2009