Laws Written, Laws Unwritten

Like many blogs, this is a catharsis of sorts. The decision to bare my own heritage of racism was sparked by two events:  The August dedication of the Washington, D.C. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Monument, sculpted by Chinese artist Lei Yixin; and watching the movie “The Help.”   

The memories both events generated refuse to be ignored. My journey to this point began in Norfolk in the 1950s when I was still in elementary school.  I was white and as I grew up I learned there were written laws for segregation and there were the unwritten laws. 

I grew up in the house my grandfather built and my grandmother dominated.  After his death, our family moved into that house and the die was cast.  The lessons my grandmother tried to teach me were painful ones, ones that left me with anger and confusion. Grandmother would never join the Klan, but for the wrong reason. She knew who the Klan members were and she considered them white trash.

Grandmother was a difficult woman to live with in the best of times.  She was quick to anger and punish, debase and humiliate.  In a way this was to my benefit.  When she spoke, I instinctively felt that what she was saying was most probably wrong, hurtful and unfair. 

And she spoke often of the unwritten laws of segregation.

“You will never, never refer to a Negro woman as a lady.  Negro women can never be ladies.  Only white women can be ladies.”

“If you come in to eat lunch and Mary (our help) is eating at the kitchen table, you are to go eat in the dining room.”

“No Negro ever comes to the front door, ever!”

“If you see a Negro man coming down the street, you cross to the other side!”

“Negroes better know their place if they know what’s good for them.  I won’t tolerate any disobedience or disrespect from any of them.”

I came up close and personal with the written laws of segregation during a bus ride on a particularly hot and humid day in those pre-air conditioning days.  It was my first ride on public transportation and I was about 8 years old. There were several empty seats in the front of the bus.  However, behind this thick yellow line, there was standing room only and many were, indeed standing.  I motioned to a woman to come sit in the empty seat beside me, but she shook her head no and looked down, clearly embarrassed.  I was confused.  I started to ask the woman again and my mother squeezed my arm until it hurt and angrily whispered. “Be quiet.”  I asked her why. “I will tell you when we get off the bus.”

I knew she was angry and I felt somehow I had done something wrong and now it was my turn to be embarrassed.  I stared at the floor until we got off at our stop.  She pulled me away from the crowd and into the recesses of a church. 

“It is against the law for Negroes to sit in the front of the bus.  That is why that woman wouldn’t take the seat when you offered it to her,” she explained.

“Why is it against the law,” I asked.

“It’s just the way things are and you keep quiet about it,” she said, ending the discussion.

But it didn’t end it for me.  While I couldn’t talk about the fact that I thought the law was mean and hateful, the injustice of it ate at me all the time.

When desegregation became mandatory, Norfolk closed its schools.  This did not affect me directly as I attended an integrated Catholic high school. Indirectly, I seethed.  I was mortified.  As I watched the nightly news and saw the violence, the dogs, the hoses and the beatings, the lynchings the realization of just how horrible racism was became permanently etched in my psyche.

Then came college and Martin Luther King.  I was separating gradually from my family as all young adults do in college.  I went the hippie route and have never regretted it.  For me, most of being a hippie was supporting Dr. King and the Civil Rights movement to the fullest, protesting the Vietnam war to the fullest, and working for peace to the fullest. I sang, marched and demonstrated and even today, will replay repeatedly a video of King’s “I have a dream” speech. I look back on that time when I brooked no compromise as the time when I was at my best.

As I watched President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, dancing at one of the inaugural balls, my one wish was that my grandmother was still alive so I could turn to her and say, “Not only a lady, grandmother, but the First Lady.”