Better Than Starbucks!

Prayer Circles

by Terry Barr

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“You can never reinvent yourself completely; at your core you’ll always retain some critical elements of your old self and you won’t get to choose them and won’t even know what they are until they reveal themselves to you, and whoever you happen to be around at the time: coworkers or dinner companions or a couple of ladies leading you on a tour of their town’s old cemetery.” Richard Rubin, Confederacy of Silence (New York: Atria Books, 2002), 387.

 

For me, it was a couple of months after my mother’s death. My wife, brother, and I were sorting the contents of her house: packing, readying antique furniture, Chinese figurines, and wall hangings for the movers who were arriving over that weekend. On this early October evening, as we were deciding what to pack, what to leave, and how we might manage to store all that we now possessed, the front doorbell rang: a caller who obviously didn’t know my mother well, for her friends always came to the kitchen door. When I opened up, there stood a neighbor, Edward, a man I didn’t know well but who had been in the same class with my brother Mike in high school.

 

Mike had spoken with Edward at the funeral, and told us, “He’s such a nice guy, and he really liked Mom.”

 

Edward handed me a package that he had been holding onto for weeks, a book I had ordered that had been delivered to Mom’s house while we were at our own, living with our grief, believing that the forwarding address I had filed at the Besse-mer post office would suffice.

 

I invited Edward in, and soon, we were all telling stories about Mom, how we missed her; how we couldn’t believe two months had already elapsed since her passing.

 

“Your mother was something,” Edward offered. “I really liked her even though I didn’t know her long. You know, the first time I came over and introduced myself after I moved into the neighborhood, she invited me in, served me cake and a Coke, and we talked like old friends!”

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This didn’t surprise me. My mother learned the southern customs of graciousness and hospitality as a little girl. In her day, you just couldn’t turn friend, neighbor, or worker away without feeding them.

 

“Yes, I liked your mother from the very first. She didn’t see color. It didn’t matter to her that I was black. She welcomed me in as if we had known each other forever. She just didn’t see black or white.”

 

It wasn’t exactly that I felt like an imposter at that moment, and it wasn’t exactly like I didn’t know whom Edward was speaking of. I didn’t feign amazement or surprise; didn’t turn around to match eyes with Mike or my wife Nilly or look for the subject of Edward’s praise. Instead, I met his eyes, smiled, and said, simply, “Thank you Edward.”

 

While I didn’t know what else to say then, this is what I want to say now. And it’s not something that I wish I’d said then.

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My mother did see black and white, but not in the nonracist way that Robin Diangelo explores in White Fragility. The distinctions of black and white shaped my mother and often confined her to a view of her society that at worst shamed me, and at best caused me to smile with so-called enlightened pity, intellectual condescension, and political “I-know-it-all” tole-rance. My mother was no Klanswoman, no George Wallace sympathizer. She was not a segregationist, and neither she nor my father ever countenanced the racial epithet “Nigger” being said in our house.

 

But my mother did see color in that way of our people who were born and raised in the 1930’s American South. While saying this about my mother only mildly distresses me now, it was enough to keep me from being honest with our guest that evening.

 

What distresses me more—which is why I have to reconsider this scene and so many others in my life—is that as much as I have learned and as much as I have reinvented myself from that boy who grew up so fearful under the cloud of 1950’s and 60’s Alabama racial hatred, I, too, see black and white. Unlike my mother, I do not say things like “these Blacks” or even “Those poor white trash folks.”

 

But sometimes, in her voice and in mine, I hear them. I think them.

 

Over the years of my adulthood I urged my mother to quit distinguishing between the skin colors of people she considered “no count,” “impolite,” or “lacking proper upbring-ing.” Every time she would say something about the behavior of “Those blacks” who “treated their home like city dumps,” I’d remind her of the white people we knew who said “Fuck” in public.

 

“Yes, there are trashy white people, too,” she’d always say.

 

After such urgings, I’d ask myself “What are you doing? Why are you trying? She’s not going to change. She’s too old to change.”

 

And this is where I went wrong. Was wrong.

 

We’re always changing, whether we can see the changes in ourselves and others, or not. Edward was wrong, too.

 

My mother was racist.

 

Neither one word nor one era should define us, nor can it define the complexity of any individual. There are no “Rose-bud” moments.

 

Yet I have come to realize that while my mother knew who she was and adapted over her life to changes that she might not have wanted or sought, I, on the other hand, have been telling myself a very convincing story of who I am, what I believe, and what my “tolerant” view of our society encompasses.

 

This, then, is my “reveal.”

 

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My high school graduation class in 1974 numbered 273 students. We were a healthy mix of black and white kids—healthy in numbers but not especially in interracial acquaintanceships. By the time I graduated, the threat of a fight between black and white students had become an improbability.

 

The problem is, I have almost no memories of any black student friend or acquaintance from back then. If I had gotten close enough to a black guy to call him out, or had a black guy in my vicinity called a white girl “a bitch,” I can’t say what would have happened, but it would have felt like the impending threat of a funnel-shaped cloud. Something to ward off if I could; something to go inside to escape until it passed; something that if it struck might carry away a piece of my reputation.

 

One day in gym class, a black guy named Donald McCarroll did ask to see my new Christmas watch. I handed it to him, and he put it on.

 

“Thanks for the present,” he said, nodding at me as if he truly appreciated my gesture.

 

To that point, Donald McCarroll and I had never spoken over the three years I had seen him in various classes.

 

“That’s mine,” I said. “You have to give it back. Please.”

 

This went on for a few minutes—his saying “thank you,” my saying “give it back”—and I don’t know why or how, but he finally gave it back. Was he just fuckin’ with me? Was this a statement about our relative comfort levels and privileges? I never took the time to find out, being relieved that nothing further came of this: no fighting; no repercussions from the gym coach or principal, no urging by anyone black or white that we should fight, no need to confess to my parents that I had stupidly handed over my watch to anyone, much less a black guy I barely knew.

 

After this incident, Donald and I never spoke again. We were in the same year, so I assume he walked across the same stage at the football stadium on a pleasant May night with me. I don’t remember his doing so, but his senior picture is in our high school yearbook, so there’s that.

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He didn’t show up at our five-year class reunion at the Ramada Inn, though. Nor did he appear at the ten-year reunion at the Green Springs clubhouse. I didn’t bother looking for him at the fifteen-year reunion, because by then, the classmates who generously used their own time planning these occasions couldn’t agree where to hold our next gathering, or what sort of music should be played, or on any other decision related to the event. There were several white and black people involved in the organizing, and what they decided was to part ways. The black former JLHS students would hold “their” reunion, and the whites would do the same for “ours.”

 

I wasn’t part of the planning, and though I’d like to think differently, even if I had been, and I'd had the courage to speak up, I doubt I would have convinced anyone of anything. So ever since that ten-year gathering, our graduating class has fallen along racial lines again, which actually seems fair given how we all felt about each other.

 

Of course, no one ever said publicly that we split because in our minds we still thought “whitey” and “nigger.” I suppose we all believe today that we don’t still harbor suspicions about or distrust each other. Or maybe I’m wrong and we all do believe that skin color confers familiarity, trust, belonging, and accept-ance. I’m still not part of planning these events, so what do I know about anyone’s heart and mind?