The sophomore survey of African American literature was the most popular literature course in the English Department at Texas Southern University, and this semester it was so over-enrolled that it needed to be split into two sections. The black woman professor who regularly taught it was one of the most popular on campus. I had long wanted to teach the course, but as a young white professor at a historically black university, it was unlikely that I would ever get to. Other faculty had produced more scholarship on African American literature and had life experience I couldn’t claim. But ever since I had read Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and on and on, I had longed to teach these writers. In 1968 as a graduate student at the University of Houston, I had submitted a proposal to write a master’s thesis on Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man only to be turned down with the response, “He will never last.” So much for the predictions of the Chair of Graduate Studies in English.
So when I learned that English 244 was going to be split into two sections, I went to the chair of the department and requested a chance to teach it. After all, there was nothing to lose. Surprisingly, she said yes. So the next day I walked into a room full of students disappointed that they had been placed in the section taught by someone other than their beloved Professor Pyle. I knew that what I said and did in the next minutes would determine whether they and I spent the next three and a half months in pleasure or in pain. I decided I had to face my whiteness and their disappointment head-on. The door to the classroom was toward the back of the room, and as heads with disappointed, skeptical faces turned toward me, I walked in talking: “I know I am white, I know I do not have your experience, But here is what I can do: I can teach you to read and to write about great books and do it well.” By the time I reached the front, the room was hushed. All eyes were on me, perhaps astonished at my directness and clearly curious about this white woman who presumed to enter their literary world. Without another word I simply opened Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God and began to read, and the power of the words began to work their magic. I felt the students forgetting about me and even themselves as they listened. The magic of some of the most powerful and beautiful writing in the English language continued all semester. I saw students with varying interests and abilities, each with a story worth telling and hearing, and they accepted me as a white woman who could teach them to read great books and write about them.
I tell this incident now because it comes back to me as I see in the current cultural moment yet another opportunity for white people to give up our fear and to acknowledge our complicity in the suffering of black people. Above all, the present moment is an opportunity to realize what we whites are missing out on, a connection with people who have a lot to offer us and to teach us. That statement could be said of all people, in fact. Here is another incident about the grace of connection I think of now: My husband Thorpe (a fellow English professor) and I both happened to be attending a conference on African American literature in Charleston, South Carolina. We were among the few white people there. One day we signed up for a conference tour of historic Charleston, and were the only white people in the group. I was astonished at the friendly welcome we received from the group of professors who were all strangers to us. Before long, as we walked the streets, joked, and exchanged stories about incompetent administrators on our home campuses, I was struck by how deeply satisfying it felt to be a part of their group, if only for a little while. It may sound like stereotyping, but just let me say that white academic groups felt dull and sterile in comparison. That afternoon was a gift.
Such an experience would have been unlikely for me in the segregated Texas I grew up in. Until my late teens I never gave a thought as to why my world was white. White schools, neighborhoods, friends, and shops seemed “normal,” just the way things were. I do remember a moment of budding consciousness, however, at four or five years old, the first time I saw “whites only” and “colored” drinking fountains in a department store. In more inchoate words then, the question struck me, “If the store lets ‘them’ in, why do they make them use separate water fountains?” Even my little brain saw contradiction and hypocrisy in the store’s taking their money and treating people badly.
Another incident involving my four-year-old self, which I don’t remember but which my father told me a few years before he died, reveals how deep seated racism was in mid-century Texas. I was walking on a sidewalk in downtown Waco with my father. Coming toward us he saw an old friend from his childhood years in Rogers, a tiny town in central Texas. This friend, however, lived on the other side of the tracks then, in the black section of town. Part of my father’s walk to school went through this neighborhood, and somehow he and the black boy, who was walking to his black school at the same time, became friends. I don’t remember his name, so let’s call the boy Sam. My dad was about eight and Sam about twelve when this incident occurred. White boys my dad’s age sometimes came along and would bully my dad. Sam would shoo them away. But one day Sam said to my dad, “If you don’t fight them, you will have to fight me.” So my dad screwed up his courage and began to attack. The bullies ran away, and my dad never forgot Sam’s lesson. So, when he saw Sam walking toward him that day in downtown Waco, he must have been delighted, and the two men must have continued talking for some time. Apparently, after they parted I pulled on my dad’s coat and said, “Daddy, daddy, do you know he is a nigger?” When my father told me that story about my four-year-old self, I was appalled but not surprised that I had absorbed racism from the world around me, even though I never remember hearing racist attitudes at home. I never even remember hearing the word nigger at home, but I had heard it somewhere—and absorbed its meaning—even at four years old.
In elementary school I first learned about slavery in the South and remember being horrified that slavery could happen to anyone. But I didn’t know enough history to understand how the whiteness of my world was a consequence of history. In high school, with a group of other students, I took a Christmas basket to a black family in the housing projects. I thought of my family as poorer than most others around me, but what I saw in the projects was beyond anything I knew. My father had grown up on a hard-scrabble farm sometimes not knowing whether there was enough food for breakfast, but as a white man, he went to college on the GI Bill after World War II, when blacks had largely been excluded from military service. My father and mother were able to buy a little tract house in the suburbs of San Antonio that were no doubt closed to blacks by redlining if not by deed restrictions. They acquired equity and bought a bigger house years later in a better neighborhood from which blacks were probably also excluded. At least none lived there. As a white man, my dad rose in the ranks at his job, promotions that might well have been closed in the 1950’s to a black person at his government agency.
In 1961, a book came out that was to open my eyes, John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me. Under the supervision of a doctor, Griffin had darkened his skin with drugs and dyes and toured the South as a black man. He described the daily insults and even dangers experienced each day from white people as he went about his travels. I was horrified and shocked and shaken out of my ignorance. So when the Civil Rights Movement came in the mid 1960’s I supported it. When I began teaching in 1976 at Texas Southern University, I naively thought state-sanctioned racism to be a thing of the past. I remember saying one day in class that the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act had ended racism. After class that day, one by one, students politely lined up to tell me their stories about being bullied by the police, being paid less than co-workers doing the same job, being followed in stores as if they were expected to steal. I learned that our dean, a black woman, one day was pulled over by the police and slammed against her car as they searched her for non-existent drugs. I realized that I knew nothing about world black people lived in.
In spite of an adulthood spent reading and thinking about racism, marching and organizing, I still have to acknowledge that I am a relatively naïve product of history. But I have learned that when opportunities occur to transcend history, to experience freedom from unconscious, conditioned responses to black people, moments of grace are possible. May we be open to that grace.
That last line was supposed to end this essay. But something happened this morning, a Sunday, that needs to be stated. Setting out to do an errand with my gas tank almost empty, I pulled into a Shell station that was closed. No cars were there, no one in the office. But gasoline pumps usually work anyway, so I sidled up next to one. As I turned off the engine, I noticed a black man on a bicycle coming toward me into the station. He looked middle-aged, in jeans and a shirt, but the first thing I noticed was his skin color. There were none of the signals that trigger white people’s fear, nor any that might assuage their fear—in other words, no hoodie and no suit and tie. He rode slowly toward the office, stopped, and sat on his bike. I wondered for a second what he might be doing there and whether I should get out of the car and pump my gas or just drive away to look for another station. Then, ashamed of myself, I got out and walked to the other side of the car to open the gas tank, and by then he was fixing something on his bike. A couple of other cars pulled in, the drivers oblivious to the embarrassing drama that had just occurred in my head. Would I have even noticed a man on a bike coming toward me in an empty gas station if he had been white? I will never know. This incident shows me how much power dark-skinned men have, and how much conditioning even a woman who should know better has to overcome. No wonder black men have been lynched, shot in the back, held down with a knee on the neck, and all the rest of it; they are perceived as so powerful they have to be eliminated to quell white fear.
So what to make of this little episode? My conditioning reared its ugly head, but years of work to overcome it let me get out of the car and pump my gas. I did not give in to fear as I might have fifty years ago. That is progress. And that is what I mean by the ongoing possibility for grace.
Houston Writers' Group 