When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories

Jasper, Texas Elegy

© 307 Jasper, Texas Elegy Bernestine Singley I. Prologue I am obsessed with race, not by accident, but by design. I blame my mother first, and then the rest of my community, for raising me to be this way. It began when I was born in the middle of the night, in the middle of the year, in the middle of the twentieth century, plopped down into what passed for life beneath the heel of apartheid in the U.S. South. I was many things that were not a cause for celebration—poor, black, female, and fatherless. Even so, I very early became a vessel into which my mother and black others poured their hopes and dreams, a small brown harbinger of the Days of Overcoming. As the baby of our one-parent family, I was acutely aware of the thin line between, on the one hand, a safe, secure, loving home with my mother and sister and, on the other, being left an orphan. I could not imagine life without my mother. Consequently, my earliest prayer was Gary Reaves 308 B e r n e s t i n e S i n g l e y that when my time came to die, I’d be struck dead while sitting next to her in church, thereby killing two birds with one stone: my fear of being left behind and my desire to go to heaven. Be careful what you ask for; someone else might get it. My obsession increased on September 15, 1963, for it was then that adult members of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham , Alabama, were kneeled in prayer, and white men bombed their church and killed their children. Murdered were Denise McNair, eleven; and Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, at the time all fourteen years old—just like me. Two black boys, Johnny Robinson, sixteen, and Virgil Ware, thirteen , neither in church nor in prayer, got it too that day. Grown white men killed Johnny, but it was two sixteen-year-old white boys who shot and killed Virgil. Perhaps because they did not fit into the tidy, reverential descriptive the “Four Little Girls,” both Johnny and Virgil were completely dropped from acres of newsprint and miles of discussion forever after. Anyway, two months after that, white men killed President John F. Kennedy, leaving me wary and wondering about the power of prayer. By this time, I had already been anointed a member of the “Talented Tenth”: W. E. B. DuBois’s name for a mythical, educated, Negro elite he believed would lead the Negro masses in racial uplift. I loathed the concept from the first I heard of it. No matter. Time and circumstance plucked me from my meager beginnings and marked me as one of them. We were quietly but determinedly schooled in our elevated status, prepared to be the ones who would smash the lies of segregation. Meanwhile, Ma continued toiling in two worlds: the completely segregated colored one where we lived in a public housing project, where she sent us to school and took us to church; and the completely segregated white one where she took three busses, each way, every day, to barely earn a living cleaning up behind white folks in their houses. Each evening she returned with dispatches from her domestic psychological battlefield. During dinner, we examined her findings: tales told by food bits in a sink strainer, rumpled sheets on a bed in the wrong room, stained underwear stuffed in a briefcase, a handgun beneath a pillow, a dry cough inserted in an otherwise strained silence. J a s p e r , T e x a s E l e g y 309 All endless intrigue in our home purposely devoid of television—“the stupid box” which we were forbidden to watch, even at a neighbor’s. Under her tutelage, we learned to pick apart the evidence and then wad it back up, the better to understand what we were up against in our escalating demands to be seen as equal, entitled, and fully human. We were experts on the relentless arrogance of white folks and their children , drenched in the rightness and mightiness of their whiteness. Food for thought, as critical for our survival, she said, as food for our bellies. Dissecting white folks was a family pastime and we were damn good at it. Consequently, we harbored no illusions...