Living Through the Looking-Glass, or, Memories of the Big Lie

I have always told people that there was little of the confederate legacy of race in the western part of Texas I come from, that the main racial slurs and divisions I heard as a child were those between whites and hispanics--anglos, wetbacks, beaners, and the like. It's a fact that I grew up in the segregated South, and yet, throughout my remembered life, it just never seemed that way. I never thought much about the seeming absence of African Americans in the world I lived in. Later, of course, I came to know the intricacies of the "no sell" policy that kept my suburban school district lily white. Only in retrospect do I recognize the odd moment of disorientation, of otherness, when a city-wide basketball tournament pitted me against a black player for the first time.

It's not that race never came up in my family. The first argument I remember ever having with my father at the dinner table started when I brought up Martin Luther King's assassination a day or so after it happened. It was 1968, I was 9, and I'd been listening to the rebellious pseudo-hippie teenager down the street. Though my father seemed clearly to think King's death a sad thing, certainly not to be celebrated, his response lamented King's inability to "keep quiet." I pushed away a half-eaten plate of food and rose without being excused, my angry "He was a great man" hanging over the lapse in manners as I stomped away from the table. I suspect my anger was more pro forma than genuine--somehow I knew that mine was the proper response to signal independence, rebellion. I so wanted to be a child of the 1960s.

I don't remember my mother's response that night at the dinner table (perhaps there wasn't one), but I do have a vivid memory of her facing down some low-rent daughter of the confederacy at a Thornton family reunion years earlier. I couldn't have been more than 5 or 6 and somehow managed to drink from the "wrong" water fountain at the small park in that tiny Texas town a couple of hours back toward East Texas from our home in Abilene. Though it seems odd now for the park to have been integrated at all in the early 1960s, perhaps the smallness of the town made two parks impossible. At any rate this sizable woman came rushing up to snatch me away from the "colored" fountain (the one that didn't say "Whites Only"), screaming at me as if I'd guzzled kerosene. I remember her face, mottled red with righteous anger, her fingers digging into my arm, and my mother pushing her sternly away, saying in her Tennessee drawl that she might best keep her racist trash to herself. By way of apology for my rough treatment at the woman's hands, my mother helped boost me up behind the horseman with the neat hat--a big metal statue in the middle of the park--and took my picture. Only with the onset of adulthood did I begin to see the incongruity between her intercession that day and her silence at other times: when my father would admonish us to lock the car doors as we drove through Abilene's small black neighborhood, for example, or when someone in the grocery store referred to Brazil nuts as "nigger toes."

Perhaps I should have realized I lived through the looking-glass. In 6th grade, during our brief discussion of the Civil War, my teacher handed out a map of the United States and asked us to color the confederate states gray and then she had us carefully label this gray blob--in which our classroom sat--"Occupied Territory." And yet it seemed to me as I entered junior high in 1972 that we lived in an integrated...