White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

You Talk like a Yankee

16 On my first day at Mary Munford, my new public elementary school in Richmond, Mom walked me to the front entrance and snapped my photo. The two-story, brick building sprawled across an entire city block. An enormous field—something we didn’t have in Chicago, where space around the school was paved over—muffled the sound of traffic whizzing along Cary Street. The windows overlooked a blacktop playground painted with four-square courts and a dodge ball ring. The few trees on the grounds were spindly and gave no shade. I felt the hot prickle of tears behind my eyelashes. Dad had taken our first-day-of-school photos every year before that. It was September 1968, a few weeks before my eighth birthday. Mom had just taken a job teaching preschool at Grace House, a community center where her class would become as racially mixed as it had been at the Neighborhood Club in Chicago. The kids in my new third-grade class, who were all white except for one boy, teased me for talking “like a Yankee.” I didn’t know why this was supposed to be an insult. All I knew about Yankees was the song “Yankee Doodle.” I soon discovered that the remnants of the Confederacy cast long shadows through its former capital, even one hundred years after the Civil War had ended. Gray-haired Mrs. Roland flitted around the perimeter of the room like a bird, arms folded behind her back, as she taught Richmond history. She told us that the site for the city was discovered in 1607 by explorers who came up the James River from Jamestown (“the first permanent English settlement in the U.S., older than Plymouth in Massachusetts!” she proclaimed with arm-swinging pride). Richmond became the capital of Virginia in 1780, taking the title away from Williamsburg. She called the North-South conflict The War Between the States instead of the Civil War. This, I learned, was a southern custom. To call it the Civil War made the Union seem too important. Southerners believed they were fighting for the right of each state to make its own laws. The slaves, she said, were happy in their homespun clothes, You Talk like a Yankee 17 singing spirituals as they planted tobacco. She never mentioned that they were the only Richmonders who cheered when the Yankee troops marched into the fallen city in 1865. Nor did she point out the city’s former slave market near Fifteenth Street. It wasn’t far from a place she made sure to emphasize: St. John’s Church, where Patrick Henry, on the eve of the American Revolution, shouted, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Outside of school, I saw the Confederate flag all around the city: in restaurants, on T-shirts and caps, flying from brick mansions on Cary Street and from trendy row houses in the Fan District. Statues of Confederate heroes lined Monument Avenue, a cobblestoned boulevard that passed within a block of my grandmother Hanna’s house. My teacher made us memorize the name of every statue: General J. E. B. Stuart (who rode his bronze horse into eternity right across from the hospital where my mother was born), General Robert E. Lee, and General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson; President Jefferson Davis; and Naval strategist Matthew Fontaine Maury. These were the famous Virginians we learned about, along with seven U.S. presidents born in Virginia, including George Washington. We never heard that soft-shoe legend Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and tennis star Arthur Ashe (whose statue, after tremendous controversy, now graces the western end of Monument Avenue) were also Richmond natives. My mother was the one who identified Arthur Ashe to me as a Richmonder. She added, shaking her head ruefully, that the Country Club of Virginia wouldn’t let him play in tournaments on its courts because no blacks were allowed. Some of my classmates were the descendants of Confederate soldiers, with relics like minié balls, tattered flags, and Confederate dollars on display in their dens. It surprised me to learn that I am a descendant, too. My great-great-grandfather on my father’s side, Timothy Harding, fought in a North Carolina regiment. Yet Rebel pride never seemed to interest my grandmother Bertie, who had grown up in the tiny town of Washington, North Carolina. She never petitioned to join the Daughters of the American Confederacy, a group that met to study and glorify the past—not...