Much of what I was taught as a child was false.
The adults meant well. They wanted me to believe the lies and half-truths they believed. The realities they omitted were mostly ones they did not know or did not want to know. And as a child I missed things I did not want to see or hear.
They were white. So was I, categorically but blindly so, growing up in a suburb where everybody was white except for the garbage men.
The suburb was Arlington, Virginia – home of the Pentagon and rows of white tombstones, across the Potomac River from Washington D C.
Jim Crow law was rigidly enforced on the Virginia side of the river. This was the decade before the U S Supreme Court's 1954 decision declaring racially segregated schools unconstitutional. I attended segregated schools for all twelve grades. Negro kids had their own school somewhere, I didn't know where, and the not knowing where was part of my blindness.
I rarely saw Negros on our side of the Potomac. Jim Crow law kept them from entering any place likely to be used by white people – eating establishments, stores, public libraries, amusement parks, swimming pools, barbershops, beauty parlors, hospitals, churches.
Today it seems bizarre. Yet it was the law of the land, and as a kid I barely noticed the strangeness of it. Even more bizarre is the determination of today's U S Supreme Court to take us back to those times.
Arlington's Jim Crow was different from the heavier-handed variety farther south in rural Virginia, and farther yet in the Deep South, where it was more overt and violent. Our suburban Jim Crow was also less conspicuous than in cities like Detroit and New York, where the color-line was drawn by neighborhoods.
Arlington's Jim Crows was in some ways more insidious – this making Negros disappear from white view – like a magician pulling a tablecloth out from under glasses of wine. Segregation was imposed in Washington D C as well, but 'Chocolate City' had too many Negros to make them disappear – although an attempt was made, after the Civil War.
Segregation in my Arlington worked exactly the way Arlington officials wanted it to – invisibly. The signs saying COLORED ONLY and WHITE ONLY had pretty much disappeared by 1950, but they were imprinted in people's minds, and the lack of signs only added to the seeming obviousness of the inequality. The few contacts I had with Negros were carefully proscribed by custom, to avoid any suggestion of equality.
Outdoors, for instance, at a public park you might look over and see a Negro family eating at a picnic table fifty yards away, at the edge understood to be for colored people, shunned. And on the rare occasions when you did meet a Negro at a bus stop or walking the sidewalk, they always dropped their gaze. I grew up thinking this was just the way of the world. I supposed colored people felt inferior, and maybe were inferior. It was just the way things were.
What other conclusion could I have drawn, without some special adult who could step forward and explain how that submissive lowered gaze was a learned reflex, drilled into Negro children by their parents, for the sake of their survival?
No such adult existed in my childhood. No Negro adult, period. Let alone one so extraordinarily patient and candid as to take a white boy like me aside in that fashion. It almost required a time traveler – a W E B Du Bois, to step forward from the past, or a Henry Louis Gates Jr. to step back from the future – someone, black or white, with a special gift of empathy and patience who could explain to me the cruelty of slavery, and the cruelty around me still, that beyond what I could see with my own eyes and know in my own heart.
I had no such a person in my life. Not then, in that world scrubbed of color, bleached by law.
My parents were not able to step into that role. I'm grateful for what they did give me. They gave my sister and me love, a stable home, economic security, imaginative parenting. They are long gone, but I live with those gifts today. It's from that starting-point that I can see now, what was missing or distorted in our lives under the Jim Crow that existed in Arlington and, across the river, in the nation's capital.
Politically, my mother and father described themselves as 'liberal'. Whatever that label suggests today, it was constrained by the thinking then, and by what they'd grown up with as farm kids in Oklahoma in the early 1920s. My father was part Cherokee, from his maternal grandmother's lineage, but otherwise my parents identified as white liberals from European stock. They evolved politically during my childhood and after. They would join in the huge march on Washington in 1963, when Martin Luther King Jr, would deliver his "I have a dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. But during my growing up, in the 1940s and fifties, they were younger, focused on adapting to suburban life, and did not have the capacity to step forward in that truth-telling role – a role that is more common, I think in black families, where the cruelty is felt in the bones and told as a warning, and blindness is not an option.
Truth was out there: books by black authors, few in number, but powerful. Richard Wright. Laurence Dunbar. Langston Hughes. Music too, if you lived in New York City, where the young Billie Holiday was singing "Strange Fruit."
I doubt my parents had heard of any of them. Mom was reading Elizabeth Barret Browning; Dad had memorized some tendentious lines from "Thanatopsis." They'd adapted some lines from Kahlil Gibran for their wedding vows. But mostly they looked to literature and the arts for affirmation, not challenge.
I'm pretty sure they knew nothing about the demand for change that was rising among black soldiers returning from World War Two, who having fought for freedom abroad, were confronting its absence at home, and whose voices were resonating in the black churches of the South. I know now that in Arlington, when my family arrived in 1946, the rumblings of change had already started – in the churches and barbershops hidden away in the parts of Arlington we couldn't see.
In short, I spent my childhood inside a white cocoon.
It was two cocoons, actually: the large cocoon of American mainstream whiteness, and the smaller personal cocoon of obliviousness I was learning to spin around myself to stay innocent of the larger cocoon that enwrapped us all.
My parents did the best they could within their own limitations. The first in their respective families to go to college, they were aware of global affairs. My mother deeply lamented the suffering in war-torn Europe, Japan, and Ethiopia. My dad had traveled to Europe and Asia on government business. But I don't think Mom or Dad either one realized the weight of the indignities and hardships that bore down on our unseen neighbors.
If you've ever tried to pull apart the fibrous cocoon of a Luna or some other large moth, or the chrysalis of a butterfly, you know how tough that encasement they can be. The membrane surrounding me stayed intact for all my twelve grades in the segregated schools of Arlington, in the 1940s and fifties.
That span of twelve years is the focus of this memoir.
But it lasted for years beyond, enough to squelch right off any involvement l might have had in the Civil Rights movement, when it surfaced on the University of Iowa campus in the early 1960s. I remained a bystander, whatever the cautious admiration I felt for my white classmates who joined sit-ins at the local Woolworth's lunch counter. I remained stupefied well into adulthood. For decades I supposed the struggle for Civil Rights was led by white people. That's how stubbornly resistant the walls of my individual cocoon remained.
And the larger, societal cocoon conveyed an aggressive white male conquistadorial worldview that assumed Europeans were bringing 'civilization' to indigenous peoples everywhere, that guns were a measure of cultural superiority and conferred the right to plunder Africa and the New World. The same assumption of white male dominance permeated art, literature, philosophy, and economics.
The result of all this was that in 1964 I emerged from the University of Iowa with an MAT, glowing recommendations, my pick of schools to begin my teaching career, and utterly unprepared to teach.
Then something happened to slash my white cocoon wide open.
This took place when I was teaching English in the small industrial city of Norwich, in rural eastern Connecticut, a town had outlived its glory days, when the textile mills and factories were humming.
Norwich was overwhelmingly white, its working-class population descended from European and French-Canadian immigrants who'd come to work in the mills. Local Indian tribes made up a minority, many living on the Mohegan or Pequot reservations to the immediate south. African Americans made up a smaller minority. Norwich had not gained population in a hundred years.
Norwich Free Academy, where I taught, was an artifact of those halcyon times. The gift of a wealthy nineteenth-century mill-owner, NFA continued functioning as the town's public high school. NFA had been my first choice in starting my teaching career. I was drawn by a good salary, but even more by the beauty of the campus and the charm of New England, with its quaint old architecture, its ancient slate tombstones with winged skulls – death's head reminders of the Puritan past – so different, in its reserve, from the glad-handing South.
New England seemed a fit place for me, as a young husband and father, to start anew. So this was my second year. I'd discovered I that I loved teaching. Never mind the veteran teachers got the college-bound kids, in the tracked system. I liked my 'general' kids, tracked for the blue-collar tor pink-collar trades.
On this particular afternoon I was standing just outside my classroom, the heavy oak door with its small leaded-pane window propped open. The bell had just rung to signal the change in classes. I remember my eleventh graders were brushing past in both directions.
A student from a morning class came up to me unexpectedly – a quiet boy, unremarkable, with a slight build and sandy brown hair; a boy not given to bravado or calling attention to himself. I was surprised to see him show up like that unannounced.
He was holding something, which he presented to me somberly. It was a black-and-white photographic postcard.
"Have you ever seen anything like this, Mister Morse?"
I looked. My breath caught in my throat. I held the card in both hands and stared. The image was too grotesquely real to have been faked.
"No." Shaking my head.
The photo I'm seeing is of three black men hanging by their necks from a big tree branch, their hands tied, one of their necks distorted horribly. White people are looking on, many with picnic hampers and blankets spread on a lawn. A young blond woman has her head tipped back in laughter.
"No," I say again, my shock mounting to outrage. The lynching appears to have just happened. The photographer must have positioned himself, waiting. The three dark bodies are probably still warm, a heart perhaps still beating. The picnickers on their spread blankets are still laughing.
My emotions gather high in my stomach. My eyes keep going to the man whose neck is distorted past the separation of vertebrae, hanging by flesh alone. I think of the pain that must be spreading through families; news spreading over fences and back porches and telephones, like ripples widening in a pond.
The young blond woman with her head tipped back. What in God's name can she be thinking? I hear the cascading laughter.
Nothing had prepared me for this.
I had scarcely heard the word 'lynching' in genteel Arlington.
In the moment, my scalp tightens with the memory of my old classroom at Stonewall Jack
son Elementary School, its portraits of George Washington at the left end of the blackboard and Stonewall Jackson at the right end; the morning pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, the Bible reading; the iron rows of desks. I feel exposed. Exposed in ways I am too naked at this moment to comprehend.
The boy is waiting.
Waiting for something I can't give.
I hand the postcard back to him with a muttered thanks. No words beyond my racing heart. I meet his eyes with only a glance, turn away. He means no harm, I know. He wanted to share his own –- his own what? Dismay? Anger? Confusion? I will never know. This is a teaching moment. But I am not the teacher. He is the teacher. I am the child, alone at the blackboard, my face burning with shame.
What happened the rest of the afternoon is telescoped into vagueness. I must have handed back student papers, answered questions, led discussion of whatever book we were reading. The truth is, I have no actual memory: only that postcard floating to the surface again and again, and my pushing it back.
I don't remember how much I communicated to my wife, Ginny.
My anger, surely. My anguish was unspeakable, along with the slowly mounting outrage I felt at being so betrayed by my twelve years of public schooling Arlington – by Washington-Lee High School, with its National Merit scholars and rows of trophies glittering in the foyer.
The question that banged around in my head for days afterward:
If this was missing from my education – the picnic baskets and laughter at the death of those three men; the viciousness I never suspected from within my carefully constructed innocence – what else was missing?
Now, at the other end of my life, as I go through a process of inquiry that I've chosen, and which has chosen me, I pursue these questions and more.
What price did I pay, or ask others to pay, for my innocence?
Nothing approaching the terrible price paid by those three men. And their families. And the community beyond, forced to suffer terrorism. But segregation had a cost to me and other whites that we are taught to overlook – whether back then, under Jim Crow, or today in a white-dominated society – a price we think we can avoid paying because no one is chasing us out the door of a fashionable shop waving a cash register receipt.
I struggle now to understand the cost of my innocence, as I peel back the layers surrounding me, that reached all the way forward in time to what happened in 2020 in Minneapolis, when police murdered George Floyd outside a convenience store. The cellphone video of that murder took me back decades to that moment when as a young teacher I stood at my classroom door, and, in the days that followed, did not know what to do with my fury. After several days, it sank into the busyness of my life, my new adult role as provider, husband, father of two young sons. It was lost in the demands of teaching, my ambitions for the future, my innocence.
For that brief interval, the cocoon had been torn open. But I was not ready to emerge. The breach was repaired, stitched closed again, from within. I was a pupa gone back to dormancy, a chrysalis not ready to split open and become whatever it was supposed to become.
Now I can tell the story of my discoveries, on the way to breaking free and emerging whole.