I grew up in the segregated South. The very first words I learned to read were, "Colored Only". It was a time preceding color television, seat belts, safety glass, and central air conditioning. You used to beg to go to the store with your mom just so you could cool off. They had this delicious stuff they advertised as, "Refrigerated Air". I still recall the day I spent wondering when death would come and claim my young life because I had staggered into the Rice Food Market out of the sweltering heat and mistakenly sipped at the "Colored Only" drinking fountain.
My Great Grandfather, the father of my maternal Grandfather was a merchant turned hotel owner. He brought his family to Winters Texas after the Ku Klux Klan burned down his mercantile store in Rome Georgia. His crime was two-fold. He hired colored people and, adding insult to injury, he paid them the same wage the white folks were getting...two inexcusable indiscretions in the Georgia of 1905. So one evening several men in white hoods came to my Great Grandfather's store in the dead of night, and set fire to the establishment. He escaped the blaze with little more than his life and brought his family to Texas.
The relative enlightenment of my fore-bearers notwithstanding, they still referred to black people as "Nigra" using a hybrid between the word, "Negro" and the dreaded "n-word"...a word that I was taught was only used by white trash folks. Apparently, all my playmates and their families were white trash because that's the word they used and, ashamedly, the word I used when in their company.
It's interesting how little difference there was between the word my family used around the dinner table and the word I used on the playground with my friends but that little phonetic nuance was sufficient to provide a chasm of social distinction between a person of culture and someone you wouldn't want dating your sister.
I attended Elementary School at Montgomery Elementary in south Houston. I remember every one of my teachers: There was Miss Buzzbee, my Kindergarten teacher (isn't Buzzbee the perfect name for a Kindergarten teacher?) One day she told us we were going to have some special visitors in class that day....they never came. I felt ripped-off until I was thirty and I realized that the "special visitors" she spoke of were named "Dick" and "Jane" and had a dog named "Spot".
There was Mrs Harris, my first grade teacher, who was a stickler for manners. It was her task to prepare us for eating in the cafeteria. With a precision that would make any Field Marshall proud, she drilled us on the etiquette of standing in line with a tray, our silverware to the right and our quarter for lunch in the top left hand corner. If you brought an extra nickle with you, you could get cookies and milk. (Although the milk came with a paper straw that was only good for two sips before it became impregnated with milk and collapsed, and the cookies weren't really cookies. They were rectangular and chocolate and dotted with holes. They looked suspiciously like ice cream sandwiches without the ice cream) I never used the straw, I just unfolded the milk carton and dunked in my ersatz cookies.
One day, Charlotte Stinson, the girl who sat directly in front of me at the lunch table ordered me to stop. (I should insert an editorial note here. Charlie Brown had his Lucy, Dennis the Menace had his Margaret, and I had Charlotte Stinson)
"Stop", ordered Charlotte.
I looked up with a mouthful of milk sodden faux cookie and asked, "Stop What?" (although it sounded more like "Top Wah?")
"Stop being gross", said Charlotte.
Although I was no stranger to an accusing finger being leveled in my direction, with the charge of "being gross" following right behind, I couldn't for the life me figure out what Charlotte was going on about. I looked to Pat Ellis at my right who eyed me up and down checking for wanton grossness and finally just shrugged as if to say, "Women!"
I looked to my left at Johnny Tait who had forgotten his lunch and was eating paste. He was similarly baffled as to what I was doing that would set Charlotte off like that. Finally, I just shrugged and picked up my next cookie. Charlotte jumped to her feet and went over to the table where the teachers were eating.
For a kid in the cafeteria to approach the teachers' lunch table was akin to a WWII prisoner of war crossing the warning wire in his prison camp. All eyes in the cafeteria were on Charlotte Stinson as she approached Mrs. Harris. I couldn't make out what she was saying from that distance but, when she finished, she turned with a smug expression and pointed at me.
Mrs Harris leapt to her feet and dragged me out of the cafeteria by my ear proclaiming loudly that if I could not mind my manners, I could eat outside with the other animals. I was accused, tried, and condemned faster than a French Aristocrat on Bastille Day. I didn't even get to finish my second cookie (For which Johnny Tait was grateful)
Mrs. Harris brought me to Mrs Nesbit, our school's principle who was, early in my academic career, on a first name basis with my mother. She was a behemoth of a woman whose massive backside rolled like thunderclouds beneath her perpetual black dress as she strolled the halls of Montgomery Elementary. Whether she was always dressed in black because she was in mourning for a lost husband or her youthful figure, I do not know. What I do know is that one day Kevin McCreary showed me a picture of Sophia Loren dressed in black lingerie and black seamed hose and I was for a long time, put off of pin-up pictures because black seamed hose happened to be Mrs Nesbit's stocking of choice.
As I look back now...maybe she wasn't always dressed in black after all. Perhaps she was so dense that light couldn't escape from her. I often wondered if I threw a chalkboard eraser at her if it would hit her or just go into orbit....but I digress.
Mrs Nesbit grilled me on what I was doing that was gross. I steadfastly maintained that I was doing nothing more than dunking my cookies in my milk. Mrs. Nesbit looked at Mrs Harris and asked, "what did he do?" Mrs. Harris just looked back as if to say, "What? it was the Boyce kid accused of being gross...you do the math" Finally, they decided to bring in Charlotte to clear up the mystery. When Charlotte corroborated my version of the events there was a moment of embarrassed silence. Finally they excused Charlotte and a much nicer Mrs Nesbit said, "Tom, you can go back to class now".
Montgomery Elementary was an all white school. There were only two black faces in the place, our janitor, and the balding black man in dungarees whose oil painted portrait hung in Mrs. Nesbit's office. The polished brass plate under the portrait declared that the black man's name was "James Arle Montgomery" On the way out of her office, I stopped and pointed at the portrait and asked, "Mrs. Nesbit, why is our school named after a n____r?"
Mrs Nesbit rose from her desk and, with a speed and agility that belied her bulk, closed the door and ushered me back to my chair.
"You must never use that word", she said.
"Why not?" It was a legitimate question at the time. Practically every one I knew used it.
"Because", said my principle, "it is an evil word".
Mrs Nesbit then told me a story of something that had happened a few years before I was born, at another elementary school in Houston named Edgar Allen Poe. Like Montgomery Elementary, Poe was also an all white school whose only black face was a janitor named James Arle Montgomery. One day a man named Orgeron came to the school. He had been in arguments with the school the day before trying to enroll his son, Dusty, but without the proper documents. He angrily vowed to return the next day with the proper papers.
When he did return, it was with a suitcase full of dynamite. He walked onto the playground and gave a note to a teacher threatening to explode his bomb. The teacher called over one of the students and sent them to get the school principle and the janitor, who was the only male adult in the place. Montgomery was able to get most of the children away from the madman and went back to try and get the rest.
It was while Mr Montgomery tried to reason with Orgeron that the bomb exploded and six people, including Montgomery and Orgeron were killed.
"I want you to sit here for a while and look at that picture and think about that word you said and what I just told you", said Mrs Nesbit. Then she rose and left her office, closing the door behind her.
I sat there for a while and stared at the picture and then I began to understand. Montgomery was a black man in a school just like mine; an all-white school whose students probably called him the name I had just called him.
For the first time in my life, I placed myself in someone else's shoes. I imagined being someone who was constantly made fun of and called names and had to watch what he said or did, where he lived, ate, slept, drank, sat on the bus or even waited for the bus..for all of these things he had to carefully be sure he was within the limits, for fear of violent reprisal.
There was a line drawn between us but even at that tender age, I could see that, if I crossed that line and drank at a fountain I wasn't supposed to, the worst that would happen to me was some chuckling or rolling of the eye from the people in charge.
For Montgomery to cross that very same line would mean being arrested or, perhaps, taken from his home in the dead of night and hung from the nearest tree.
I thought of being a man who was hired by the very people who had drawn that line and demanded that he stay on his side of it...who was hired to clean toilets he was forbidden to use and polish drinking fountains he was forbidden to drink from.
I wondered, if I were such a man and was called upon to come to the aid of the children of my oppressors, would my feet be as swift and my actions as daring? I thought about how much like Christ a man had to be in order to willingly lay down his life for the very people who mistreated him
I stared at the picture of Montgomery as I remembered how Mrs Nesbit related to me that, after the explosion, the police called the families of the victims to the school to help identify the remains. Tears rolled down my face as I thought of Montgomery's own son having to wait off of the campus until all of the white people had finished their business.
Mrs Nesbit stayed outside while, for the better part of an hour, I wept as I thought of all these things in her office. Then I stood up, wiped my eyes and nose on my sleeve and left.
In the early sixties John Glenn orbited the earth in his Mercury Space Capsule, and Mickey Mantle chased Babe Ruth's record for the most home runs hit in a single season.
When I went into Mrs Nesbit's office, my heroes were John Glenn and Mickey Mantle, when I left, my hero was a black janitor named James Arle Montgomery.
