Racism and My Childhood in Mississippi: Inspired by The Help by Kathryn Stockett

I just finished reading The Help by Kathryn Stockett (a novel about the relationships between black maids and their white employers set in Jackson in the mid 60s), and I enjoyed it very much. But this post is not a book review. After reading Kathryn's afterward about growing up in Mississippi and about writing the book, I feel inspired to write a few memories about racism from my childhood.

I am 32 years old, so I grew up in the 80s and 90s. That sounds all modern when you write it out like that, but it's not quite that simple. We were integrated, of course--sort of. Black children went to school with me; my Girl Scout troop had black and white girls; and black people could go into all the public places.

But we weren't really all that integrated, except legally. There were (and are) black and white churches, black and white neighborhoods. I hardly ever saw interracial couples until I came to Atlanta, and when I did it was a shock. Only white trash girls dated black boys, and I cannot remember ever seeing a white boy with a black girl.

At school, black and white kids segregated themselves completely by middle school. You could be friendly with kids of the other race, but you weren't really friends. I had a black girl that I called my friend (and I wish we realy could have been), but when my mom and I drove her home from school, we had to drop her off two blocks away from her house so that her daddy wouldn't see her get out of the car with a white lady. I remember once when she went to church with me. That's literally all I remember; it was a shocking enough thing to do that such a little nothing event still stands out after all these years.

I remember that the word "nigger" was used in ways that were so commonplace that it almost lost the power of a racial slur, like calling a wimpy boy "pussy" or calling a disappointing event "gay." My parents were very progressive, and I would never have said such a nasty, racist word, but I frequently heard a game called "nigger-ball" or a kind of firecracker called a "nigger-chaser." I knew that it was wrong to use that word, but it was only years later that I really understood how built-in the racism is when little children use names like that completely nonchalantly.

When I was learning to drive, my mom took me to a cemetary to practice. We stopped when we saw a very newly and terribly defaced grave. It was James Cheney, a young black man who was killed along with two other civil rights activists in Philadelphia, not far from my hometown, in 1964. It was still being defaced, apparently, in 1995.

One of the murderers, Edgar Ray Killen, a local preacher, was acquitted at the first trial, but he was retried and convicted in 2005. It was a big freaking deal then. I was so proud because I had heard the story of how my mother had driven one of my relatives to a homecoming in a church where Edgar Ray Killen was going to preach, and she wouldn't go in. She just sat in the car. Thank god Mississippi finally did what my mother had known all along was right.

I was slapped once in a racially-motivated incident. A little friend of mine, a truly sweet girl, won our class's citizenship award. Another girl in the class said to me that she only got it because she was white. I replied, "She won because she is way nicer than you." She slapped me across the face, hard. Of course, I just tattled on her because I was Hermione Granger all the way. I wish I could tell you that I slapped her right back. That would make a better story.

When I was in about the 7th grade, I entered an essay contest for Martin Luther King's birthday. It was good. I remember nothing about it but that it was really good. I always won everything. That's bragging, I know, but you have to understand that I was a far better writer than any child in school. I didn't win the essay contest, and I was pretty sad. But when I found out who won, a girl that I knew could not have written an essay better than mine, I was furious. I remember my dad explaining to me that they were not going to pick a white child, that would look bad for publicity. I cried and cried and yelled Martin Luther King quotes about the content of someone's character (and essay) being the important thing. And I remember my dad saying, "You're right. MLK would be horrified. But this is the way things are."

I don't know what to say about all these things. They are wrong, all of them, though some much more horrible than others. I just wanted to get them down, to share them with people who may not have grown up with that kind of thing. I just wanted to say that it's not as over as some people think it is.