| | MontgomeryIt’s Alabama, 1973, and I’m eight-years-old. My recently acquired stepfather was in the Air Force and had been re-stationed from East St. Louis to Montgomery. He, my mother, and I moved into an apartment on the white suburban outskirts and I was immediately assigned to an inner-city grade school in the disgruntled black ghetto – an assignment I would later understand to be the result of the federally mandated desegregation/forced busing program of the civil rights era. One bus-load of lower-income white kids were to be bussed in daily to a large, dilapidated brick structure in the middle of hell, but, at the tender age of eight, I hadn’t had the opportunity to form any cognitions about the distressing scenario I was being forced into. So, on my first day, I arrived as innocently as one would expect at the doorsteps of a socio-educational abomination. As we filed off of the bus on a cold and dreary Monday morning I took notice of a towering, leafless tree arching menacingly toward my new alma mater ejecting flocks of blackbirds that would circle near the top of the school building then reassemble along the power lines and ledges chirping excitedly in a sadistic celebration my new enslavement. No one took much notice of us as this tiny influx of white children had been routine for a couple of years prior. No national guard had been required nor had there ever been protests or blockades of angry black citizens demanding that “whitey go home” presumably because this side of the forced desegregation formula was perceived to be a great potential boon to the educational and economic status of southern blacks – and perhaps it would prove to be just that but only through the involuntary sacrifice of lower income white children from the low rent burbs. We were absorbed into a river of several hundred black youth. My white entourage didn’t seem very concerned about what, to me, looked like a fairly serious predicament. But then again my previous peers in other grade schools always seemed much more excited about being warehoused like appliances all day than I did so the added stressors of a 50-1 ratio of black to white students, the conspicuous urban decay, and the badly neglected building in front of us bursting at its seems with gloom didn’t seem to impinge upon their delight. And apparently I was the only one among them who was seeing all of this for the first time. Still I remember becoming deeply suspicious of all of them even before we stepped through the cracked, graffiti covered, glass front doors propped open with what I imagined were the maggoty skulls of last year’s Caucasian imports. I tensed up as we funneled inside and were directed down badly lit corridors to our assigned homerooms. Plaster hung from the walls and ceiling in places where pipes had burst or storms had blown rain in. It seemed everywhere that you looked you saw corroded plumbing, wiring, heating ducts or some other unsightly internals that you’d expect to be tastefully hidden from view for aesthetic reasons alone if not for the safety of occupants. What few windows there were started at about eye level, stretch up toward the vaulted ceilings, and were embedded with some sort of wire mesh. Between their sill height, the mesh, and the decades of soot, grime and bird feces that appeared to taint both sides of each pane it seemed implausible that anyone ever actually used them to see outside, not that there was probably anything pleasant outside to be seen. Cleaning them may have served only to expose the even deeper shame of what was occurring inside, and the funds for doing so were probably diverted to other commodities like chalk and pencils. Color was completely absent except for the few pathetic art paper projects tacked onto to a few cork boards or whatever they could be made to adhere to – a terribly feeble attempt to generate some sense of creative pride and accomplishment amongst a population of youth that almost certainly couldn’t have cared less. ----------------------------------- I was one of two or three whites in my homeroom, a statistical stroke of luck as far as I could tell from the general population, but this wouldn’t amount to much because there seemed to be an unspoken collective understanding that we (the very small white minority) were not there to intermingle with each other lest we risk the creation of yet another privileged subclass of crackers and once again disenfranched the black student body. Too many white people hanging out with too many other white people had been deemed as the root of all evil by unseen powers in Washington DC. The conscious intent behind this would become more apparent when we were broken into groups for various games and exercises but you’d never see the only two white kids in the class assigned to the same group. Eventually, what was supposed to indirectly make black children feel better about being black mostly served only to make white children feel bad about being white, but it would be a long time before I was mature enough to make such an analysis. To me, at the time, I was just an eight-year-old trying to lay low in a volatile environment in which I clearly did not belong, not that anyone else – black or white – belonged there either. Children generally assume that adults know what the hell they are doing and we all understood, at some level, that we were all there together at the behest of adults including my own presumably pro-desegregation, liberal parents. I sat idle and cautious, waiting for order to beset the classroom and trying to repress the ever-encroaching sense that some well intended adults had made a terrible mistake. I let my ears take in the din of twenty or thirty dirt poor, inner-city, southern black 3rd graders and realized that I couldn’t understand more than a third of what they were saying. Phonetically it sounded more akin to Swahili than English and was pocked with vulgarities. I wasn’t raised by the Rockefellers either but how the hell do you get a trash mouth like that by the age of eight or nine, was my only thought as I worried that the teachers, whom were all black as well, wouldn’t be any more decipherable. Fortunately that was not the case and I would come to give and receive substantial sympathy and respect with these woefully underpaid public baby-sitters of what were probably the most hopeless youth in the nation. Suddenly there was an explosion of rage near the grimy windows in the back of the room. A desk had been flipped over; its contents strewn across the floor and two black students had each other by the throat and hair with one hand and were smashing each other in the face with the other. The slightly smaller one, “Charles”, was screaming a blue streak of obscenities while delivering the preponderance of blows. The other kids barely flinched, some of them not even bothering to pause their conversations or turn to investigate the melee behind them. Our teacher, Mrs. Hill, leaped from her desk where she had been studying a roster or something, sprinted to the back of the room, jumped in between the two aggressors who were still exchanging blows, threw one to the floor, grabbed the other, Charles, by both arms, and shook him mightily until he went limp. Charles was crying so hard, generous rivulets of tears streaming down both sides of his face and soaking his shirt, I thought he might drown. Mrs. Hill held him firmly in place and delivered a harsh scolding. Once both pupils were reassigned seats on opposite sides of the room the day could finally begin. Fights like these were a daily occurrence either in the halls, in the classrooms, at lunch or at recess. Fortunately they would never involve myself; it seemed I, and the scant few other white students, were too inconsequential or passive (or both) to elicit such altercations. Eventually, though, I would be targeted for considerable harassment as my cloak of invisibility wore thin and my innate differences became more apparent. In the mean time however, no one seemed to be hated by angry little black kids more than other angry little black kids. The teaching staff, as stern and seasoned as they were, seemed overwhelmed at times from breaking up fight after fight routinely filling up the stained and cracked, plastic time-out chairs in the principal’s office. ----------------------------------- I’ve always firmly maintained that American public schools, in general, are colossal wastes of money at best and, at worst, government indoctrination centers invented exclusively for the control and repression of the many and the enrichment of a small few. But never would this be clearer to me than in the slums of 1973 Montgomery, Alabamastan. The concepts of “learning” or “teaching”, in the end, were little more than shadowy movements on the very periphery of everyone’s mind, students and teachers alike. Lunch and recess were all anyone seemed to care about and, indeed, at least these two periods were providing some tangible benefits through food and exercise - even if the food was tasteless and the exercise prone to arguments, fights, and chaos. I’m sure the teachers in particular enjoyed the simple act of eating as well as the relatively little oversight that kickball required and then, afterwards, the relief of whatever humble abodes they retreated to in the evening. Any “education” came in the form of rote exercises such as single digit multiplication tables or practicing penmanship with the twenty six letters of the alphabet, routines that the suburban white schools I had attended, with their superior funding I suppose, had exhausted by the first or second grade. Nevertheless participation in even these simplest of tasks seemed completely voluntary. I would always hungrily digest whatever was put in front of me simply to forget about my dismal surroundings and certainly not because I enjoyed performing the same mindless activities over and over again. What half of the other students were doing was anyone’s guess but it certainly wasn’t what I was doing, but I cared not unless a fight broke out and disturbed my serenity. Aside from this there were occasional assignments that required more intellectual engagement and focus but would prove to be only sources of humiliation for most of the students. Our geography teacher, for example, instructed us to select a region of the earth, read about it, then present a one page report to the class – an assignment I already knew would be well beyond most of my classmates whom had demonstrated almost complete illiteracy on several occasions. When the reports were due hardly anyone had even attempted to prepare. Students were called forth to the front of the classroom one at a time with nothing written at all and our excessively patient teacher would simply ask them a few softball questions about Africa, Canada, the Gulf of Mexico, the Brazilian rain forest, etc. many of which were answered incorrectly – if at all – with heads bowed humbly to the floor until each student was compassionately dismissed back to their seat with a gentle recommendation to “try harder next time”. A more tragic waste of public funds I would not witness until the US invasion of Iraq thirty years later, or perhaps the notoriously useless “war on drugs” initiated in the Reagan era. Finally one courageous black student stepped forward with a crumpled sheet of notebook paper he had been scrawling on titled “The South Pole” from which we learned that the South Pole was “all hot and deserty”. The teacher mercifully stopped his reading before he could finish the third sentence, briefly explained Antarctica to him, congratulated him for trying, and then sent him back to his desk more shamed than informed. I can’t remember what region my report was on but I can assure you that it was Nobel Prize winning material by comparison. I wasn’t even asked to come forward and read it because of the humiliating contrast it would present between what white kids from white schools in whitey-land were getting and what black kids from black schools in the urban ghetto were getting. Excluding me from participation was a face-saving trend that started in my math class when the teacher thought it would be fun and instructive to play a math game. She divided the class into two teams. Both teams stood in a single file line in front of her while she held up cards with simple arithmetic problems on them. Whichever student at the head of each line said the correct answer first went to the back of their line while the loser from the other line took a seat. Then the next two students would face off with another flash card. This process of elimination was to continue until one team ran out of players and the other team was declared the winner. My team ended up being so weak that there was no one left but me at one point while the other team still had most of their players standing. So there I stood, one lone, undefeated, white yankee to be faced off against a line of eleven or twelve black southerners who, to put it simply, did not stand a chance in hell. The teacher paused, wide-eyed, nervously looking for an out - some way to end this diplomatically and without causing a scene. She reluctantly flashed a card turning it slightly more to the opposing team for clearer viewing. 13+9. “Twenty two,” I said with zero hesitation. My opponent took a seat and the queue next to me shuffled forward. 8x7. “Fifty six,” I blurted out just as soon as the photons from the card hit my retina. The line shortened again. After the third card it was crystal clear how this was going to end. The teacher stopped, gazed in despair at the floor for a moment then looked up at me and said, as sweet and apologetically as she could muster, “Corby honey, I think we just gonna call dis one fo da otha team. There is jus too many of’m for you to win. Mmkay, sweety?” For a second I felt indignant and wanted to say no. I just wanted to win something; I didn’t give a damn what color anyone was. Flash the next card, god damn it. Flash it! But the look in her eyes……I’ll never forget that look. It was a deep, quiet desperation, completely vulnerable, and full of shame. She wasn’t telling me the game was over nor was she just asking me either. She was begging me to end it. Begging. Her eyes glazed over. My need for ego gratification was suddenly replaced with a deep empathy. If she was afraid to continue then I should be too. I nodded humbly in agreement and bowed my head feeling bad that I had taken more than a second or two to respond. I was no longer looking directly at her anymore but I could feel her showering me with gratitude in my mind. I’d spend the rest of my life looking into those sad, frightened, black math teacher eyes, pleading me for mercy. Years later I would conjure this event in an attempt to assess the injustice of getting gypped out of a decisve victory, but then those eyes would appear again and I'd realize that I had been victorious ........ that through compassion and humility lay much greater rewards that perhaps only the soul could fully appreciate. ----------------------------------- Lunch was usually insufferable, at least for me. The cafeteria smelled bad, looked bad, and sounded like a zoo. The food sucked even by public school standards which are barely on par with those of prisons, but this didn’t stop the students from woofing down every last crumb like it was the only meal they would see all day (and it may very well have been for some of them). They would eat so fast that they’d clear their trays, get bored, and start picking fights with each other before I had even finished half of what was in front of me. Every meal was served with starchy cornbread which I couldn’t stand. It didn’t take long for some of the hungrier patrons to notice that I wasn’t eating my dry, yellow square. By my third or fourth day several of them started simultaneously demanding that I hand it over to them (even though they could have just asked and I would have gladly obliged). Before I could decide what to do they would start fighting over who would be the lucky recipient. While they were distracted with battle I’d break my square in half and give the halves to two much less aggressive candidates, an act of pure instinct in the spirit of natural selection, survival of the fittest being equated with survival of the most congenial. When the fighting ended – sometimes on its own, sometimes through adult intervention – the participants couldn’t seem to remember what they were fighting over in the first place. They’d just sit there looking confused and unsated until the bell rang signaling the end of lunch. Other favorite lunch room pastimes included contests to see who could empty their milk carton the quickest by pouring the milk directly down their throats bypassing the lips and mouth altogether, chewing their food into a moist paste then holding their mouths wide open to see who had produced the most disgusting looking concoction, and a bizarre ritual that involved amusing each other by turning their eyelids inside out, a feat that nearly a third of them seemed to have mastered. When all else failed though there was always another student (or even a teacher) that needed to be punched, kicked, or spat on. Then there were the restrooms, often the least pleasant part of a public or commercial building, these were no exception. My only objective was to get in and out of them as fast as I could, and god help me if I needed to take a crap. The toilets were missing seats, the stalls were doorless, and everything from the floor to the sinks to the toilet paper seemed to be splattered with urine or some other substance. Custodial services must have been sacrificed for more chalk, pencils and colored art paper. The urinals were large, foul smelling tubs that hung off the walls where seven or eight of us were expected to pee at the same time. I’ll leave it to your imagination to transpose the standard cafeteria antics to what passed for entertainment in the restrooms. I learned within the first couple of days to wait, whenever possible, for everyone else to get done with their business before I proceeded with mine. And not just because of the vulgar and dangerously unsanitary things that were occurring but because the first time I participated in a group urination one of the boys pointed down at my groin laughing and yelling “look at dat boyz dick!!” I was the only one who was circumcised and apparently none of them had ever seen this before. It was way too much novelty for me to be associated with; I instinctively knew that this difference in genitalia, if not kept discrete, would lead to something bad. So I tried to urinate alone or, when nature was too insistent, I would share the urinal and simply cover my alleged deformity with my hand. Later I became an outlet for the frustrations of these kids; I was the smart honkey from a privileged and alien white world they would probably never see and who didn’t like cornbread and had a deformed penis. “Sick’m!” And so begun the bullying, the threats, the constant intimidation, the name calling, etc. They didn’t want me there and I sure as hell didn’t want to be there so what was the point? Desegregation was a joke. In the end it had virtually none of it’s intended consequences unless the intended consequence were increased levels of poverty for urban blacks, increased animosity and distrust between whites and blacks and more money pouring into government coffers to execute this agenda and to be embezzled – like most tax dollars – into other questionable projects and private bank accounts. ----------------------------------- We had lived in Montgomery less than a year before my mother and stepfather, Tom, got divorced. I left with my mother to the low rent suburbs of Atlanta where I would attend two schools that were fully “racially integrated” and just as violent. I would encounter black and white kids who seemed capable of just about anything. One had beaten a teacher with a baseball bat (why he was still allowed to attend school was a mystery). Another had, with the help of a couple friends, tied some poor kid to a fence and beat him into unconsciousness, was sent to a state bording school for a while then returned in presumably worse shape than when he had left. I’m sure if you asked anyone attending public schools in the poorer neighborhoods of the deep south around this time period you’d hear plenty of similar stories. It’s just how things were down there. At any rate, these subsequent schools just reinforced what I somehow, in the innocence and clarity of youth, already understood: Violence, depravity, illiteracy, and rage were not exclusively the products of black people; they were the highly predictable results of chronic poverty, repression, and stress. I came to see blacks and whites being pitted against each other by higher forces that I would eventually trace back to Washington DC and even to the world elite. I would read and observe much about the divide and conquer strategies of the ruling class, the artificial creation of resource scarcity, the corruption and hijacking of government by ultra-rich private corporate and banking interests, and how all of this and more translated into racism, America’s most underrated, dirty little secret. I’d be asked by whomever I shared my Montgomery experience with how it was that I didn’t become jaded and racist myself. I’d be asked to explain the irony of having spent more than half of my adulthood in and out of relationships with two black women. The answer was, and still is, that there is no irony involved. I simply never made the simplistic and ignorant assumption that bad behavior from blacks was innate to their racial genetics anymore than bad behavior from whites was innate to their genetics. I suppose, if I must proffer up an even deeper explanation, that I was simply blessed with enough mental discipline to not blindly accept the cues I was constantly being given to adopt a racist paradigm. And as I began to see these queues as part of something much more sinister and deliberate: the domination of all people, of all racial backgrounds, by the world’s ruling elite (whom also come in many skin tones) I slowly came to believe that there was no war to be fought, no conflict to be settled, no sustainable resolution to made other than that between the rich and the poor. |
