NONFICTION
“How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Lessons of a Racist Childhood”
by Jim Grimsley
Algonquin, 272 pages, $23.95
In late August 1966, when Atlanta novelist and playwright Jim Grimsley, now 58, was beginning the sixth grade, federal law determined that three African-American girls could attend his segregated elementary school in rural Jones County, North Carolina.
Grimsley, who had never been in a classroom with a black child, was 11 years old.
For the “good white people” of Grimsley’s sleepy Southern backwater, the company of blacks was almost unimaginable. Yet Violet, Rhonda and Ursula, introduced by the teacher like any other new students, sat down among “thirty-odd white children” with poise and confidence.
Like most of his classmates, Grimsley says, “I was a good little racist.” At the first opportunity, he turned to Violet and called her a name guaranteed to “put her in her place.” The other kids laughed, and Grimsley expected Violet to cower; instead, she “hardly even blinked.”
‘‘‘You white cracker [expletive],’ she said back to me, without hesitation.”
It’s the defining moment in Grimsley’s new memoir about desegregation, “How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Lessons of a Racist Childhood,” a day when he sensed that everything he’d been taught about black people was wrong.
Grimsley was no bully, nor even especially brave. Before that day, he had barely even cussed. His hemophilia left him out of sports and boys’ rough play. His best friend was a girl his age named Marianne — inseparable, they discussed TV shows, pop bands and read Tiger Beat together—and by his own account, he was “a sissy from an early age, with a slightly effeminate way of speaking and moving.” In fact, it worried him that “people had started to move beyond calling me a sissy to hint that I might be something worse.”
So what had led him to treat Violet so cruelly? Tracking his development from sixth through 12th grade, Grimsley asks questions of the boy he was back then: Why was his first impulse to shame Violet, thinking she couldn’t defend herself? Why did he assume that blacks were inferior? In what ways did he learn “bias against black people from the good white people around me?”
The memoir, divided into three sections — Bias, Origins and Change — attempts to answer those questions by deconstructing his education point by point, studying the blueprint behind the growth of “a functioning bigot.”
A chilling chapter called “The Learning” catalogs counting rhymes, jokes and countless uses of the idea of blackness and the “n” word “to reinforce the association between [them] and anything bad” — many of which Grimsley learned before he “knew what a Negro was.” He examines the “social hierarchy” that requires whites to “keep black people in their place,” and the black versus white “training in goodness” of his Baptist church.
It’s no surprise that the adults responsible for those lessons, along with the school itself, “made no effort to teach us how to see past our differences,” leaving the students to work out their differences as best they could.
Their exchanges — funny, brash, clueless and sweet — testify to Grimsley’s power as a novelist (He is the author of the acclaimed “Winter Birds,” “Dream Boy” and “My Drowning.”), especially in a scene where 13-year-old Ursula schools Jim and Marianne on the Black Panthers and their slogan, “Power to the People.”
Jim, with “only a vague idea of what a Black Panther was,” keeps quiet. “James Brown sings about it,” Ursula adds. “Who is James Brown?” asks Marianne. “Is he a singer?” “He has soul,” Ursula says. “He makes soul music.” Marianne pauses: “What’s soul?”
In 1968, forced integration replaced the state’s “freedom of choice” plan, and Jones County whites wealthier than Grimsley’s family moved their children into private schools, leaving the remaining white students outnumbered in the public system. From eighth grade through high school, Grimsley discovered “what it was like to be part of a minority.”
The cost of that victory for the black students was steep, however. Without “black teachers who served as role models [and] saw them as human beings of equal status with all the rest,” they had “become second-class citizens in their own schools.”
The sweeping changes in the schools held another advantage, Grimsley recalls. By junior high, integration provided welcome camouflage for his carefully concealed homosexuality, a “life of hiding” — glimpsed in many scenes in the memoir — that also enabled him to shed a deeply embedded racial bias.
“I never connected my isolation from other people, my queerness, with the change I underwent in the way I saw my black schoolmates. Only later would I understand the influence of one on the other. I had never entirely accepted the social messages I received from my parents, my peers and my surroundings, because I was different and I knew it. The white narrative of the world excluded people with desires like mine, and this prevented my believing that their ideas applied to me.”
Forty years later, how far have we come? At his 2013 high school reunion, Grimsley finds himself one of only two white alumni. “Much is different between the races in the South of the third millennium,” he notes, “but the old ways remain side by side with the new.” Once again, as “How I Shed My Skin” so poignantly proves, it may fall to the next generation of children to be the face of a better future.
