BEAUTY IN THE LAND OF BEASTS(L DOUGLAS ST OURS) BEAUTY IN THE LAND OF BEASTS


I assumed she was a snob.
She certainly acted stuck up.
So what was the point in me
mustering up the gumption
to approach her when
she'd probably just put me down.

Poor pitiful me all too soon
and at an age too young
I got caught and nearly crushed
in the clamp of Virginia's mass resistance,
me becoming the convenient target strawman,
the unsuspecting face and by unwitting default
the designated fall guy for the federal government's
imposition of social change and justice,
and I was only thirteen.

I got a sense of what I was in for, when near the end
our long drive from Ohio, about an hour south of D.C.
around a blind curve appeared a garish trading post gas station
under the biggest billboard possible instructing every white person to
"Save your Confederate money for the South shall rise again."

Within days of settling into our new home, my new peers shoved me around
and taunted me with a fresh new moniker, I was a "damn yankee."
That wasn't too bad, I mean they did let me play ball.
That summer of 1963 I turned teen more boy than man,
a clueless virgin when it came to the mysteries of sex.
Up till then the word virgin meant Mary Mother of Jesus as in the virgin birth,
but anyway back to the girl.

So even though I wrote her off as an unapproachable snob,
I couldn't help, when she wasn't looking, furtively glancing even gazing at this pretty standoffish, silent, studious girl with a visage as sobering as a stone.
Thanks to roll call I picked up her name, Juanita.
She sat two desks over from me in sixth period social studies.

Our teacher was also young and attractive which led me to mistakenly think she was a liberal
especially since she allowed us to chew gum in class as long as we chewed with our mouths closed. She didn't bear graciously the sound of smacking lips.

The dads of most of the boys in my new crowd,
organized, chartered and joined a white citizens council,
a sort of shadow government, a suit and tie version of the klan.
These fathers taught their sons to refer to black people
as "niggers, coons, burrheads, darkies, and apes."
For after dark it was common practice for the boys to cruise "colored town"
and throw firecrackers at blacks enjoying a pleasant stroll.

A whites only private academy was set up virtually over night so the children of the "superior race" could be protected from the "jungle bunny" influences of the "give them an inch they'll take a mile" savages. In the face of this ignorance and cruelty and craziness, I got stupid, I couldn't keep my mouth shut.

I made the miscalculation of suggesting that blacks be given a chance
before rushing to prejudgment
like my mom had taught me about how to treat others. Speaking honestly made me feel good for all of two seconds when my bigoted mates shot back "Damn! You're worse than a yankee!
You're a goddamn niggerlover!"

But nothing could've been further from the truth, because how could I love someone whom until then I never encountered. I grew up in a world just as segregated as theirs. As a boy in Baltimore city and later the suburbs, my primary image of blacks was as babbling extras in Tarzan movies or as the servants I'd see when passing through a wealthy neighborhood, black nannys pushing strollers holding white babys.

When I was eleven, to my amazement, I actually happened to see a black maid step out of a neighbor's back door to shake a dust mop.I got so excited you'd have thought I had seen a Martian. I dashed in, slamming the door shouting "Mom! Mom! I just saw a colored person!" Mom gave me a stern look and retorted "she's no more colored than you are. The proper term is negro.

On another occasion about 1958 we chauffeured my beloved Nana to the train depot and she noticed a couple of blacks loitering near the station and muttered"niggers." That was the first time I ever heard that ugly word. Right away mom as diplomatically as possible said to my paternal grandmother "please watch your language around the children" while my father found a place to pull over and park the car.

When dad bought our rowhouse in 1953, one condition of him taking title was to sign a binding contract not to rent or sell the property to persons of "Hebrew ancestry" or "the Negro race." So until I was twelve, discrimination was universal, but out of sight and out of mind, like dust on the floor, unless
of course you happened to be the dust, then it was always on your mind and never out of sight.

Initially my parents viewed living in the south with such apprehension that in 1960 my father declined a promotion and transfer to Arkansas because as he stated "I didn't want to expose my kids to all that hate." Unfortunately and mostly because he spurned that relocation, he became marked as a man who was not a team player which contributed to his 1962 layoff.

Fast forward a year and a messed up move to Ohio and seven mouths to feed, dad gave in and accepted an offer to go south to a university town in the Virginia piedmont with a tradition of more enlightened Thomas Jefferson style slavery.

Within weeks of our arrival during that spring as I previously described, I felt like an intruding alien mired in the antebellum, impoverished, bigoted, Jim Crow, Simon Legree whiplash, Uncle Tom submission, reconstruction scalawag, carpet bagging night rider funk over losing what the locals bitterly dubbed "The war between the states"...instead of Abraham Lincoln's...they celebrated Robert E. Lee's birthday.

All this leads me back to that social studies class. That fall the teacher gave us an assignment to select a current event then research, write, and report to class. The early sixties were awash in newsworthy
crises and achievements. One boy volunteered to focus on Project Mercury and America's first astronauts, then another raised his hand to do the Berlin Wall, other classmates picked Castro, the Cuban missile crisis, atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, and the India China border war, but none of us knew or ever heard of Vietnam, that was nothing then.

I chose to do Birmingham, the snarling dogs and the pounding of people against walls encapsulated the struggle between good and evil, darkness and light, Dr.King and Bull Connor. To my surprise the teacher immediately vetoed my topic selection. I got up the nerve to ask why, which only drew an agitated warning from her not to push my luck with such impertinence.

But stubbornly I persisted in my questioning and she punished me by ordering me to stay after school.
Her class was the last of the day so I stayed put when the dismissal bell rang. The room emptied and she was still fuming. Her anger only intensified my bewiderment at not being permitted to broach the subject of civil rights in a social studies class.

"Don't get smart with me!" "Huh?" "Knock it off! Don't play dumb with me!"
I wanted this detention to end
but I was still befuddled at what she was getting at. "What?" "Open your eyes! You know we have a civil rights case in this class!" And then she pointed to the desk of the serene and lovely Juanita. That instant the real world smacked into me like a mack truck.

Juanita wasn't a snob. She was being ostracized. She was a victim, a specimen, a test case, a sacrificial lamb, a guinea pig in a lab experiment, a brave and innocent child thrown and locked in an invisible cage.

In a cynical move, the local power structure, in sham compliance with the supreme court decision and to ease the shock and burden on white children, cherry picked the lightest skin people of color and only females not males to avoid the horror of young "black bucks" among impressionable white girls, integration was a one way street, no white child would have to suffer any thing like the pain and humiliation Juanita faced alone.

After my snarling teacher's stunning revelation,
I relented on Birmingham and changed my subject to the Peace Corps.
I didn't so much believe as hope
that my knuckling under would spare
the heroic and stoic Juanita
yet one more cruel indignity.
That was something I would never know for sure.



by L DOUGLAS ST OURS
March 2010

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