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

Spelling Lesson

© Larry Coyne 303 Spelling Lesson Carlton Winfrey Johnny Copeland was my first white friend—or at least I think he was. We went to elementary school together in Nashville. We didn’t do things together after school like my kids and their white friends do today. Johnny was my friend at school only, because we lived miles apart, physically and figuratively. You see, I’m a product of forced busing. In first grade, I walked to school in my neighborhood, a part of town where Fisk and Tennessee State University professors lived; where Meharry doctors, dentists, and business owners built their own homes. But by second grade, everything about school had changed dramatically. It was in the early 1970s when my siblings, our neighbors, and I became part of the great desegregation experiment. Consequently, we rode a school bus nearly an hour each way to the far corners of the county. We still came home to the same upscale black community, but we went to a rural, predominantly white school with white kids from the backwoods, some of whom lived in trailers tucked in valleys or shanties hidden in the hills of Tennessee. I was forced to sit next to, associate 304 C a r lt o n W i n f r e y with, and befriend these white boys and girls. That’s how I met Johnny Copeland and how he came to give me my first quick lesson on race. We were in line that day, waiting our turn for the school’s annual physical. When I took off my shirt, Johnny Copeland was so stunned, he just blurted it out. “I didn’t know you were black all over!” I will never forget how sad he was, practically in tears. I was shocked too, but for a different reason. Of course, my parents had taught me and my siblings about the social realities of race— you must be better, smarter in order to get the same job; we’re the last hired, first fired. But they had also sheltered us from many of the cruelties of race. Part of my naïveté—my “Huh?”—in response to Johnny Copeland’s spontaneous utterance was because I had never before experienced a person who saw me as different in any way. If Johnny Copeland was the first to strike a tiny nerve, there would be many others after him. (Imagine two homecoming queens, one black, one white!) Perhaps it is my memory of that racial initiation and of my parents’ efforts to hold it at bay as long as possible that makes me the way I am with my children today. I remember how my parents would spell certain words rather than say them in my presence. They were probably people’s names and things about them that they didn’t want us to know about and therefore repeat. Now, some thirty-plus years, a wife, and two children later, I find myself doing the same thing. The funny thing about it is my wife and I spell the words “black” and “white.” We don’t do it because we use the words in some profane way. We do it, I think, because we don’t want Reed, who’s five, and Karli, three, to notice race as the most important thing about a person and the only thing that matters. We want them to believe that what really matters in life is the person and the relationship they have with that person. We don’t want them to preface every reference to their friends with “my white friend so-and-so” or to point to a stranger at the grocery store saying, “Look at that white lady.” So we spell “black” and “white” because, like my parents, we, too, want to shield our children as long as possible from some of the negative realities of race in America. S p e l l i n g L e s s o n 305 Of course, Reed and Karli know a black person from a white person . They even know the differences in skin tones within the same race, sad reminders of the racial realities in America that thrive generation after generation. Sort of like generation after generation spelling out words. No matter what we do, though, inevitably Reed’s and Karli’s perception of race will change, much like the perception others have of them...