A lady from the church I attend approached me last week and invited me to have lunch with her after the Sunday service. I agreed to it, imagining a quiet afternoon with an elderly widow who would serve me some fried foods followed by tea and cookies on quaint little doilies. Maybe she would invite a few other “young people” over to make things more “comfortable,” etc. I didn’t know her, only recognized her face from one of the pews in the back. I didn’t know that she was married, let alone to one of the wealthier businessmen and community leaders in town.
She drove me to the country club, and there I met her husband for the first time before we sat down to eat, sweet tea and friend chicken being the delicacies of the day. A lovely couple—the people I mean, not the food. They were curious about where I grew up, about where I went to school, about how I ended up in Mississippi—“Oh, you’re not in Teach for America?”—about how I liked Ole Miss, about how many years it would take me to finish my M.A. These are all questions whose answers I knew; this makes it easy to get through them quickly, and easy to lie if the occasion calls for it. I told them about Bath, New York, and St. John’s College in Annapolis—not the university in New York with the basketball team, of course. I told them about finding the Teacher Corps after a brief interest in the Peace Corps. I lied to them about enjoying Ole Miss—“Oh good. You know, we both went to Ole Miss for our undergraduate degrees.” I told them about finishing the degree by May of 2012. Then the conversation turned toward the questions that I don’t know how to handle. They asked about my plans after I will have finished at Ole Miss, and about whether I have enjoyed working at my school. The first question was difficult because I am in ignorance and can only guess that I will stay here a few years after finishing my degree. It took a few minutes to get through that one, but they finally nodded in approval. The second question was difficult; people always decide what my answer will be before I give it.
Then came a question that I had not been asked yet, or rather, that had not been asked in such a way before: “As a Northerner, what do you think of us?” As a Northerner. Us. Most people just ask, “Is the South a lot different from where you grew up?” or “How do you like the South?” I have standard replies, which are not lies: Yes, it is very different from western New York, and I like it very much. Most people are expecting the first answer and pleasantly surprised by the second.
But here at this table, in the country club, I could not bring myself to give the same answer, because the husband asked what I thought of them, “as a Northerner.” It changed everything. It was not making the comparison of before (in New York) and after (in Mississippi); it was making a judgment (New York looking at Mississippi).
As a Northerner, what did I think? I answered that it was a swirl of judgments, no one of them dominating. I mentioned the food, with mixed reviews. I mentioned my suspicions against “southern hospitality”—a general distaste shared, I think, by many visitors from the North. Then—the sweet tea and fried chicken must have been impairing my judgment, and I can’t say why I decided to be so honest—I said that it felt very strange to come in to a country club, with only white members, and be served by an all-black waitstaff. At this the husband perked up. I had brushed something sensitive. This was a thought he was glad to hear.
He told me that he understood exactly what I meant. “We would like to have black families be members here, too.” His voice was strained. “But I think we are not in the majority,” he added.
The conversation from that point was dominated by questions of race, the history of Mississippi, and I dare say a bit of philosophizing. He was genuinely curious about what I thought, and about how I see the “condition” of the South, or at least of the Delta. A very serious conversation, a good one. It took an even more somber turn when he said, “You know, my generation is at fault. We are at fault.”
I looked across the table at this Jew and his Presbyterian wife, who were not espousing racist principles, who were not aligned with the historical prejudices of the area, and who were also not avoiding the questions of race. He was not trying to play it off on other people, or on “the times.” He felt guilty, had felt guilty for years, and it was coming out here at this table. The sweet tea and friend chicken were very good.
The conversation moved on to the past, to the “white flight” and “resegregation” of schools in Mississippi during the 1960s. His generation was at fault, he kept insisting. He went on for some time with so much pathos.
Eventually the conversation turned to the present. I asked, “What about the next generation, the students currently at the Academy in town?” (In the South especially, “academies” are a denomination given to private schools founded as a reaction to desegregation of schools, so as to keep the white children separate.) “Do they have a sense for the past, for what their school used to represent? Do they uphold some of those principles unwittingly?”
He said that he sees this younger generation as very accustomed to diversity, but not necessarily free from the old prejudices, which are only reinforced by going to a separate school, living in a separate part of town, etc. The white kids no longer see the black kids as “inferior,” we speculated, but the poverty of experience on both sides exacerbates a sense of otherness, a distinction, that may be an illusory carryover from that old racism. It was so intriguing to hear it from this older man, from a Jew, no doubt one with sharp and painful experiences of being an other.
[ To be continued...]
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