Summer in the South

That Little Voice 

The boat bounced across the waves, saturating our spray-netted hair with icky salt water.

We laughed, ducking, trying to save ourselves from the forceful cascades.

I kept looking for land ahead, but all I saw was more blue-green ocean blending into a blue-green sky.

This was my first time on the Gulf of Mexico, having arrived only a few weeks before at the southern finishing school my mother hoped would smooth the edges of my rough social skills. Or, that’s at least what she said. She really wanted to put 800 miles between me and my current boyfriend fearful I would get pregnant by this guy whose mother reportedly was the madam at the local house of ill repute.

So there I was, bouncing around with a boatload of girls heading to some island for a day of playing in the sand and surf.

It was the end of the summer of my 17th year, about to start my senior year in high school, way away from my friends, my expectations, and my freedom as I had known it.

A southern girls school in 1959 existed on strict rules led by adults determined to make southern belles of their charge when there was no demand for such creatures.

Keep them safe, keep them unblemished, keep them innocent, keep them priviledged was the motto the girls paid no attention to as they smoked cigarettes, crawled out their second storied windows to rendezvous with airmen from the nearby base, and feared unwanted pregnancies.

I was used to dragging main street nightly with no adult supervision, meeting friends at the Dairy Queen, and hoping a carload of boys would invite our carload of girls to join them as we went from the courthouse to the train station at the other end of the five-block street.

I was a small town West Texas girl struggling to find a place in a southern culture of charm, proper manners, exclusivity, and deep seated discrimination. Our school back in the Lone Star state was integrated, so I did not understand black folks sitting at the back of the bus, not able to use public water fountains, and having black only schools.

Of course, I knew blacks, Mexicans, and whites didn’t mix socially, even in our town, and I knew some folks didn’t want them to be mixed. Maybe I was lucky to have missed how deep that division was. It didn’t take me long to find the wide and unfair dividing line was alive and well in the Deep South.

But on this day in the sun, baby oil slathered on my body, giggling as only teenage girls can do, the differences between races wasn’t a topic of discussion. After all, we were all young white women, watched over by old white adults, and waited on by black men and women.

We had a black woman who cleaned and cooked for our family, but she and my mother were close. My two sisters and I didn’t interact with her much because she came and went during the day while we were in school. I knew Ersa-Belle was kind, quiet, and a good cook. She didn’t come often, and I don’t even remember her last name, but I remember taking pictures at a funeral of one of her relatives when I was 15. I had never been to a black person’s funeral, and it wasn’t anything like the funerals I had been to of my friends and family members.

It was rowdy, chaotic, and scary. It happened to be the first time I had stood on a table grappling with a heavy, cumbersome and awkward Graphic camera attempting to take meaningful pictures of the crowd surrounding an open casket. It must have been my parents’ way of teaching me how to be a reporter for the family newspaper.

It was not the last time I went to a funeral of someone of another race, another religious belief, another political party, another age. It may have been my initiation into knowing we are all the same, just living differently.

But spending a year in southern Mississippi was my first time to be kicked off a public bus because I offered my seat to an old black man. It was the first time I was told at a Sunday church service blacks were inferior just days after two had been killed for being at a public beach just a mile from our exclusive girls school. Nor has it been the last time I have heard shouts of ugly prejudice and hate.

Sixty-six years later I am no longer that teenage girl blissfully sunning my white body on an ocean beach, refusing to own the reality of discrimination. Rather I am an 82-year-old white woman, wrinkled, bent, but determined to face bigotry, fear and unfairness.

I hope I am brave enough, smart enough, determined enough and young enough to tackle the task.