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  My Aunt Rachel today says about Aunt Littie, “We just adored her. She was definitely one of the family. She had her own little house to live in and helped Momma do the cooking and cleaning and all the taking care of kids. We loved her like one of our own.”

  I do not doubt this. This is a refrain I’ve heard all my life in the South. People who hate blacks as a group but genuinely love specific blacks they know.

  It is easier to hate the enemy you do not know than the one you do.

  * * *

  Not long ago, I discovered in my parents’ effects a photograph of the Graves family, slightly faded and out of focus enough to make me think this must have been taken with an early Brownie camera. My grandfather, John Graves, the patriarch, stands in the middle of his brood, and my grandmother, Mattie, stands solemnly beside him. My grandfather is wearing an open-necked shirt with a suit and a hat that is tilted at a stylish angle. My Uncle Richard, the eldest child, is wearing a tie. The other children are lined-up in front of their parents. A nice tricycle is in the foreground, testimony to a good job and a good salary. Standing proudly behind my Uncle Richard is Aunt Littie, who appears to be in her fifties or sixties, wearing a polka dot dress that comes nearly to her ankles and a head wrap. She is of stout physique.

  According to family lore, when she got too old to care for the children any longer, she was placed back in town with her kinfolk. What I’d bet really happened is that the Graves family was left penniless by the Great Depression and could not afford even the small salary Aunt Littie was undoubtedly paid. John Graves lost his job at the lumber mill when it burned down in the 1930s and never again in his lifetime was to find steady work. He was offered at least one other lumber mill job in the Pacific Northwest and for reasons I do not know or understand refused it. Perhaps he simply did not want to give up his homestead in Pine Bluff, which in my estimation was a poor decision.

  So John Graves and his family languished in poverty—often dire poverty—for the entire next decade, truck farming, scraping by, until World War II took every one of his sons away to war except the youngest, Norman, who was not of draft age. A rule in effect during the War was that at least one son would be left behind on family farms. The Pine Bluff draft board dismissed my father’s protestations that he was the last son to help out on the family farm, probably thinking a leached-out patch of dirt in Sulphur Springs didn’t amount to any kind of real farm, and shipped him off to the Pacific Theater, where he fought in the battles of Leyte and Mindanao in the Philippines, horror shows both. Dad was bitter the rest of his life and at times sounded scarily like the cynical, half-demented character Sgt. Welsh in James Jones’ The Thin Red Line.

  My dad harbored yet another grudge against blacks because he heard a couple of them grousing about receiving combat duty as punishment. They had been kitchen workers, but due to some kind of infractions were sent to the front, which to them was like a death sentence. My father felt that if it was his duty to fight, why wasn’t it theirs? How did they have a right to complain and he didn’t? Because he didn’t like what these two men had to say, he transposed it to all black men. They all became shirkers. They all became draft dodgers.

  The Graves Brothers in uniform right after World War II. From left, my father, Raymond Lee Graves, Harry Graves, Roland Graves, Harold Graves, and Richard Graves. You wouldn’t want to mess with them.

  The Graves family had a reputation in the Pine Bluff area for very tough men who countenanced no insult or wrong, and who were vain and prideful. They accepted no charity and woe be unto anyone who treated them as if they were poor, which they most certainly were. People like the Graves were often denegrated by higher-ups as “white niggers.” There is no doubt in my mind that in the corners of the schoolyard they heard that epithet leveled at them. They were as poor as the destitute blacks who populated the Deep South during the Depression and they knew it. When you are down that low and you feel the scorn of others, you seek to find somebody lower, someone you can cast your own hatreds on.

  The Graves family was Methodist. Once a month, the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, who were a power throughout much of the nation in the 1920s, would file onto the back row of the Methodist Church in Watson Chapel in full hoods and sheets, their faces hidden. No one knew who the Klansmen were, supposedly, but you can bet a lot of guesswork was going on. The Graves boys looked at all the Klansmen’s hands and knew by the set of strong, callused, scarred hands that their father was sitting among them. I had been told that my grandfather occasionally “rode” with the Klan, but only recently did I learn he was in fact a sheet-wearing, cross-burning, night-riding Klansman. Which explains a lot about why the Graves family was so much more racist than my Mom’s Rogers side of the family.

  The Klan’s stranglehold in Pine Bluff lasted well into the 1970s when I was to actually witness a Ku Klux Klan rally. Circa 1972 I was riding in a car with my cousin Richard Graves, who I will always call Rick. Rick this past year retired as a Lutheran chaplain and major in the U.S. Army. In those days, however, Rick had shoulder-length auburn hair and played bass guitar in a succession of rock bands. His bandmates were with us during this night and we passed a baseball field I had seen many, many times in my family’s frequent visits to Pine Bluff. I was beyond shocked to see a flock of white-sheeted Klansmen in the field gathering around an electric, not a burning, cross. The lightbulbs were red. Also the Klansmen did not have their face masks down to cover their faces.

  My cousin and his bandmates were used to Klan rallies and didn’t think much of it. It certainly got my attention, however. I later learned that a billboard in Pine Bluff that had been up for years that showed a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. in a classroom with the bold headline “Martin Luther King Jr. in Communist Training Class” was funded by both the Klan and the White Citizens’ Council of Pine Bluff. My paternal grandmother’s brother, Uncle Don, was president of that chapter of the White Citizens’ Council. For much of my young life I couldn’t understand how black people could lionize a man who was a known Communist. By the time I was 14 and Dr. King was assassinated on the streets of Memphis, I had learned what racist propaganda was.

  This same cousin, Rick, has always been the family member most interested in the Graves’ genealogy. We had always heard and believed that our family was Scots-Irish and that certainly seemed to fit the history of that region of Arkansas. Most of the working class Southerners in that part of the state were Scots-Irish, fiercely protestant, fiercely supremacist, and fiercely loyal to whatever the cause. Most Klansmen in the South were of Scots-Irish ancestry. The plantation class, such as those who owned the rich, alluvial farmland in the Mississippi Delta, was nearly always of British descent and looked down on the white trash who were the Scots-Irish.

  Rick sent off his DNA to be analyzed and to trace back our family tree. What he found out was startling to the whole family. We weren’t Scots-Irish after all. We were Brits. Our lineage goes directly back to the Jamestown Colony and to a Captain Thomas Graves, a “gentleman” who arrived on the second supply to Jamestown in 1608. Thomas Graves was a fortune hunter who wanted to see what financial opportunities might await him in the New World. After seeing where the money was to be made, Graves returned to England to secure financing. During this time much of the Jamestown Colony was decimated due to mass starvation. Upon the return of Graves and other new settlers, he was eventually appointed captain and lived out the remainder of his life in Virginia.

  For 200 years the Graves family gained wealth and prominence according to historical record. Apparently the Graveses owned plantations and it is almost certain that they owned slaves. Then the record is obscured. We aren’t certain what happened, but it seems that the Civil War ruined the fortunes of the Graves family, who did not recover in any appreciable way until after the Second World War. With a decline in fortunes, when one people is set free and another brought to its knees, you are almost certain to have an irrational, burning, reason-retardant hatred that brews through family and years.

  The Graveses, a proud family of British gentlemen, were reduced to ashes and white sheets in the aftermath of their undoing.

  For the first part of my life I seldom questioned my racist upbringing even as I squirmed when Dad would spit out the N-word in mixed company. After all, just about everyone else did the same thing.

  Then something strange and terrible happened. I actually got to know some black people. And my world turned.

  Ophelia (A Memory)

  MY EARLIEST MEMORY TOOK eleven years to come to me. It happened when I was in the sixth grade, about eleven years old. That was the year my grade school, Bethel Grove, integrated a significantly large group of black students. The previous year the school hesitantly dipped their toes into those troubled racial waters by bringing precisely one little black girl to Bethel Grove. Her name was Andrea.

  I discovered that Bethel Grove had been silently integrated that school year when, on the first day of class, I walked past the classroom windows and glancing inside noticed a solitary, tidy, well-groomed black child sitting erect at her desk, perfect posture, wearing a pair of cat’s eye glasses. My first thought was one of shock. They are in our school! I dreaded telling my father because I knew he would fume and make our lives at home miserable at the dinner table. His favorite topic for the remainder of his life was how black people were ruining things for us whites.

  My second and more lingering thought was that this little black girl had to be the loneliest person in the whole world, sitting there all by herself. No friends her own color to laugh and play with.

  The sky did not fall. The ground did not shake.

  Dad grumbled and said, “I knew this was going to happen,” and left to fume about something else.

&n
bsp; Only a handful of parents transferred their children to other schools, where they were faced with the same dilemma all over again. After a few days no one much mentioned Andrea any longer. Life had moved on. The only difference was less use of the N-word on the playground and no use of it at all in the classroom, where formerly the word had been quietly tolerated.

  Obviously the stealth integration of one black child at Bethel Grove had been well orchestrated by the school board to minimize white panic and over-reaction. The following year, 1965, the real integration began, with at least 30 percent of the Bethel Grove student population black, the kids coming from the southern portion of the notorious Orange Mound neighborhood, which was located on the other side of Lamar Avenue that for decades had served as a line of demarcation separating blacks and whites.

  By 1965 everyone had seen this coming. The only escape for whites so inclined was to send their kids to a private school, which cost money, much more than the average blue collar family from the Bethel Grove neighborhood could afford. So everyone bit down hard and swallowed integration. There were no fights between blacks and whites in the schoolyard. The black kids did not bring switchblade knives and razors as we had feared. And about the reports of uncleanliness and poor hygiene, those kids were better groomed than we were.

  The principal, Miss Pittman, had one little trick left up her sleeve. I have no way of proving this was a calculated maneuver on her part, but my gut feeling is that it was. She created a split-level class, half fifth graders, half sixth graders. This was an accelerated class, reserved for the best and brightest students. My belief is that Miss Pittman did this both to protect the smarter white kids from the perceived coarsening effect of lower class black students and to give the brighter black students a chance at higher achievement.

  I was selected for the sixth grade side of the classroom, one of 12 sixth graders. Two black students, Joyce and Sharon, were in my sixth grade section. Two were in the fifth grade section as well: Andrea, the little girl who all by herself had integrated Bethel Grove the previous year, and Catherine, a skinny little thing in pigtails whose backwoods accent was so impenetrable that we often couldn’t understand a word she was saying. Catherine’s accent was so bad that our teacher, Miss Dinkins, sent her to the school’s speech therapist. My memory of Andrea and Catherine is that they rarely uttered a word. Sharon and Joyce, on the other hand, were much more loquacious, especially Sharon, who loved to braid the white girls’ hair.

  The first grade teachers at Bethel Grove, including my beloved first grade teacher, Mrs. Stevens, were getting up in age and were finding teaching calisthenics to the children during recess too taxing. Also, one of the teachers was pregnant and most certainly not capable of jumping jacks and push-ups. The solution was to get the boys from the accelerated sixth grade class to lead the first graders in their exercises.

  This meant we would have to give up our own recess period, but duty called and I was assigned to Mrs. Stevens’ class, reuniting me with the teacher I loved the most. I wasn’t prepared for the reception we got from the first graders. They were overjoyed to have us among them.

  Children that age do not see color. They do not see race. They would practically fight each other over who would get to hold our hands as we formed a circle or a line for Red Rover games. My first memory came to me when a happy, giggling, precious little black girl pushed her way to be first to hold my hand. As soon as she touched me an alarm bell clanged in my head: you are touching a nigger! I had never touched a black person in my life. Or so I thought at that particular moment. I’m happy to report that as soon as that thought whistled into my brain it vanished as soon as I saw the look of utter joy on that little girl’s face. Never again would I quail at the touch of a black person or have a moment’s hesitation holding a black child’s hand or giving one a needed hug. This one act on this one day broke a thousand taboos I had been pinioned with during my first eleven years of life.

  And it gave me my earliest memory back. When that little girl touched my hand the most wonderful memory of Ophelia came sailing back to me. Ophelia was the older black woman who tended babies in the nursery at Charjean Baptist Church where my parents were members. My parents were not social people as such, and what little social world they had typically revolved around the church. Soon after birth, I was bottle fed, coddled, and soothed by Ophelia on Sundays. I remembered her calming voice, her pleasing smell, her starched nurse’s uniform, and most of all the comfort of her touch. That little girl holding my hand brought me back to Ophelia.

  As I had grown, even while in the sixth grade, I would stop and say hello to Ophelia and her husband, Ed, who was the church janitor and was well-liked enough that he was permitted to smoke his cigars—which he always put in a cigar holder when he smoked them that I always thought was a touch of class—in the back of the church away from the sanctuary. My mom told me that Ophelia took a special shine to my brother Norris when he was a baby, telling people “that one’s mine.” The very mention of Ophelia’s name brings back not so much a flood of memories, but a flood of feelings. All of them warm and good and a balm for my spirit.

  Through the magic of Facebook I put out some inquiries about Ophelia. No one could tell me what had happened to her. Surely she would now be dead and it bothers me that I can’t visit her gravesite or know who her folks are so I could call them to reminisce. One person who is my exact same age, Buster Sterling, remembered Ophelia babysitting him. His mother was the secretary for Charjean Baptist Church and hired Ophelia often to babysit and to do small household chores. Buster remembered her ironing clothes and humming as she worked.

  All it took was the touch of one little girl to remind me of Ophelia. That touch meant everything.

  And then there is the kind of touch that can cause you trouble. As I mentioned, I was in an accelerated split-level class—one half was fifth grade, the other sixth grade. I was sheltered from the greater mass of incoming black students that year. This was the first time that most of us white kids ever interacted in any substantial way with fellow blacks. Going from an all-white social structure to one in which we were expected to learn together, play together, eat together, and socialize together was a giant leap considering that these were a people we had been taught from birth to look down on as inferiors.

  Considering the social gamble involved, the strategy succeeded surprisingly well. As stated, there weren’t fistfights or shivs secreted in boots to cut us with, and the simple truth is a lot of these black kids were loads of fun. But leave it to me to discover the kink in the armor.

  As I was exiting the boys’ restroom one school day a black boy from the fifth grade who I didn’t know stopped me and said, “Boy, did you touch that bathroom do’ on your way out?”

  This confused me. “Sure, yeah, I touched the door. What’s the matter?”

  “Boy, don’t you touch that bathroom do’ no mo’,” he commanded with menace. “If I catch you touching that bathroom do’ ag’in I’m gonna whup yo’ ass.”

  And then he walked off like he owned the building.

  This shocked me to my core. To me he looked tough enough to carry out his threat. Even though he was in a lower grade he was my size and everyone knew the Negro race were nothing but walking death squads. I was terrified.

  What to do? I certainly wasn’t going to challenge him. I had enough chicken in my DNA to prevent that from happening. I didn’t dare tell my teacher or go to the principal because, as you will read later, I had learned my lesson about telling on people. And if I got him in trouble he might tell his gang and they’d cut my throat after school.

  I knew better than tell my Dad. My family protected Dad from himself, because when he lost his temper he lost his good sense. I had no idea what he might do if he thought I were being picked on by a black bully. So I kept mum on the subject and held my fear inside.