White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

Singing “Dixie”

105 Every summer from 1971 through 1974, my mother sent me away to Camp Mountain Laurel in the mountains of North Carolina, near Asheville. When she was growing up, she had gone up north to a camp in Maine every summer. She believed that camp was just as much a part of my basic education as the public schools. I bunked with five other girls in a cement-floored cabin with screens for windows. Many of them were the descendants of Confederate leaders in Atlanta, Savannah, New Orleans, and other southern cities. Some were the daughters and granddaughters of governors and senators. Everyone at the camp was white. None seemed to be affected by desegregation, even if they lived in cities like New Orleans or Little Rock. They went to suburban or private schools, dismissing their public schools as terrible. I didn’t know how to explain my school in Richmond. If I just talked about my teachers and my friends without mentioning the reason I rode the school bus, or the white table in the cafeteria, or the fact that I couldn’t even think of dating most of the boys I knew from my classes, then I could pretend I was like everyone else. It was hard enough being Jewish at Mountain Laurel. There were only a dozen Jews out of about 250 campers and counselors. All of us had to go to chapel every Sunday, dressed in white. The chapel was in the woods next to the Green River, with pews made out of split logs and a wooden cross made from logs nailed together. We had to sing “The Church in Wildwood” as we walked in and “Onward, Christian Soldiers” as we walked out. I was surprised the first time I heard the Lord’s Prayer, the initial “Our Father” followed by the rush of mumbling and bowed heads. My desire to look like everyone else won out over the pang that I was being a traitor to my own religion . I learned every word, though I never recited too loudly from beneath my bowed head. One day in the dining hall, I was interrupted by a windy “Awayyyy , a-wayyyy” from the other side of the room. I looked up to see a group of older girls standing up, singing “Dixie.” They raised Singing “Dixie” 106 their fists each time they came around to singing, “In Dixieland, I’ll take my stand to live and die in Dixie!” In order to fit in, I stood up, sang along, and even raised my fist at the right time. After that, I regularly joined in the singing several times each week at meals or in the morning assembly. I split myself in two, the way my mother did between being a daughter of the South and a liberal teacher. When I was at camp, I raised my fist and sang the Rebel anthem. When I was at school, I would never admit to even knowing the words to “Dixie,” much less to having sung it all summer. I kept my head down, fearful of being punched for saying or doing the wrong thing. I couldn’t fully identify with either place. I didn’t feel that “Dixie” was a proud part of my heritage to claim, no matter how loudly I learned to sing. Then again, I didn’t take pride in being one of the few white girls at school, either. The safest thing to do at camp was distract myself with the new things to learn: how to build a campfire and start it with a single match, how to sit in a canoe, how to rig a sailboat. I liked backpacking and camping best of all. What I lacked in size compared to the older teenage girls, I learned to make up for in endurance. It rained the first time I went on an overnight hike to a wilderness area called Cantrell Creek. I tramped along a dirt road, my boots soaked, my shoulder-length hair plastered to my head. I had never thought of the true meaning of shelter before. That night, we stayed at a cabin and dried our socks by the fire. The next day, we hiked along the creek and pitched tents for the night. I woke up and looked out the tent flap at the maple leaves overhead and the mist coming off the ground. I smelled the damp rhododendron. I didn’t care that my fingernails were still...