Memories of being the last white kid in the West End-Part One

This entry is from a short story I wrote a few months back titled "Last one out, bring the flag" in two parts.

I used to hear it all the time from grown-ups, coaches, teachers, even friends…new friends I had made in the small town we moved to when my family finally moved away from the West End of Atlanta in late 1969.. Douglasville, Georgia was the new end of the world to me. I knew this because the main artery leaving the home of my birth, Atlanta, and I-20 West ended right smack in the middle of nowhere. Also known as Highway 5 and the aforementioned Douglasville. I guessed my Dad and Mom wanted no more than to escape the craziness of the hippy sixties, the militant Black Panthers, the race wars that seemed to be the dust on some as-of-yet reached horizon. These issues were hidden around every turn and enhanced by the still looming but soon to end conflict in Vietnam.

All the social issues that faced a young family whose patriarch was 31 and matriarch was but 29 and their children of eleven, seven, and the then nine-year old middle kid writing this story now at 52, meant that our little tribe was about to see changes. The first time I heard the term, “ya’ll musta brought the flag with ya” and numerous variations on the same theme, I was playing football for the Beulah Bulldogs, the first intramural team I played for after leaving the fighting fields of the fourth and fifth grade. I first thought it must have meant something noble and grandiose, but soon learned it was just a colloquialism for perceived poor white trash, too ignorant to recognize how important it was to “be with your own” meaning good intended Southern Baptist white folks who all thought alike as long as it was Jesus, SEC football, and a dry county. Never mind the “love thy neighbor as you love yourself” part Jesus said was the most important of commandments, it meant “love your neighbors as yourself, and keep the black folk living across the tracks, where they belong”. Add the fact that I saw a few of them (the White Southern Baptists) at the County line, in Cobb County, buying liquor at the “Spirits of 76” liquor store just inside the neighboring counties border, and a ten-year old  then sixth grader learns what a hypocrite is first hand. I'm not picking on Baptists, mind you, just hypocrites.

I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself here. To some degree, I drank the Kool-Aid. But let me make this perfectly clear. I know what it’s like to be discriminated against and I know personally what racial hatred is all about. How do I know? Here it is. I was the only white kid in my school my last year in the West End. I was threatened every day just for being white. I had my butt kicked for being different…a different color. I remember the last days at I.N. Ragsdale elementary school, just off Lee Street and a right on Avon Avenue. Back then, one teacher taught all subjects in the same classroom and I remember my last white teacher, Mrs. Gladfelter, an old-school, stodgy, mean woman who recognized my plight and took pity on me…sometimes. She’d see me with a black eye or a new bruise from scrapping on the playground because I’d have to fight off meaner black kids to keep my lunch money from winding up in the their belly instead of mine. I had been moved from my old school, Arkwright Elementary, located just a scant ¾ of a mile from my home, easy walking for an athletic kid. Segregation and forced bussing meant I had been changed to the aforementioned Ragsdale Elementary, cursed to walk almost three miles straight up Avon Avenue from our small home on Graymont Drive.

Some days I was so tired from walking so far and fighting at recess and being shoved and threatened, Mrs. Gladfelter would give me a ride home in her immaculate 1959 Buick, even letting me ride in the front seat (only after she laid a large towel over the tan leather sofa sized front passenger seat the Buick Motor Company somehow shoe-horned inside the giant green metal beast rolling on four wide-white wall tires), her reminding me that somehow, it would “be alright”. “Alright” as I knew it, had already changed, I just was either to naive or optimistic to realize it right then. It’s hard to convince a nine-year old who is getting the shit kicked out of him and at best, is 50/50 in a dust-up, that anything is ever going to be any different from what it was right then. Even though I was sure Mrs. Gladfelter thought I had cooties or some yet unknown jungle disease I’d contracted from fighting the natives (her take on it) on a daily basis, she was still kind enough to give me the occasional ride home. What I didn’t know at the time, was that the ride was somehow a way for her and I to be connected, like I was her “teacher’s pet”, mainly because I was the only white kid left in that particular part of her world. That meant I was called on for any manner of duties she thought an occasional ride home might warrant. The last “ride home for anything I ask of you” task I was assigned was to read, memorize and recite “Tree” by Joyce Kilmer. Now, if you have ever been trying to cross over into tough guy status from whatever status a fifth grader might have held, this is not the poem that a new-found “Rocky Balboa” type (me) might need to recite in front of a class full of ones short-term playground opponents. It goes:

“Tree”

I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree;

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks to God all day,
And lift its leafy arms to pray;

A tree that in the summer wear
A nest of Robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me;
But only God can make a tree.

Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)

Need I say more? I recited that poem once in front of my fifth grade class and under the hope-filled stare of Mrs. Gladfelter, teary eyed, as I looked to her for mercy. My eyes were begging for her to please spare me the humiliation of what was about to transpire. The respite I desperately sought would not come that day. If you’ve ever had that dream, the one where you find yourself naked in front of your entire class, it was something kinda like that. Her teary eyed stare meant something completely different and I recognized it for what it was. I somehow knew she needed me to close out her long and distinguished teaching career with the satisfaction that she had taught one last heathen child something as lovely as a tree. I guessed right then I was the designated heathen. So I obliged her and recited the poem with gusto, extending my fighting days and assuring myself long walks home there after. After the poem incident, I never agreed to a ride from my teacher again, learning what words like “ulterior motive” and “manipulation” meant. I also learned what an old woman who devoted her life to a task might like to see before she ended her career. I only hoped I wasn’t some de-facto bookend to her life’s work, devoted to educating young people. Maybe I was. All I knew, for sure, was she and I were “square” on the rides for poetry reciting exchange program. It was a life of limericks for me from that point forward.

It should be said, however, that I have never looked upon any tree without thinking of that particular poem. I thought of it when I chopped down a pine tree, or when I saw a giant Sequoia in all its massive splendor. I recited the “Tree” poem once in front of my fifth grade class forty plus years ago and I have been able to recite it, by memory, ever since. I guess that truth is Mrs. Gladfelter’s legacy for me. I have used that poem to surprise folks (mostly wine and cheese types) concerning the legitimacy (or existence) of my greatly doubted cultural standing, and it has served me well.

Ironic isn’t it?


Part two comes tomorrow-check back then.