The South Shall Rise Again

My grandmother was an unreconstructed Southerner. At the beginning of the Civil War, her father and two of his brothers rode their horses to Dallas and enlisted. Bill Wade said, “The only lie I ever told was when I lied about my age to join the Confederate cavalry. I lived to regret it.”

My grandmother was proud to be the daughter of a Confederate veteran. On Sunday afternoons she took me to the Court House. In Texas in the 1930's a big room in the basement was devoted to Confederate memorabilia. I remember a horrific picture of ladies in hooped skirts fleeing a mansion being burned by Damn Yankees. Among the large group of old people were three actual Confederate veterans, white-haired old men with beards. As we all stood up to sing “Dixie”, the old men threw their caps up in the air. Afterwords we ate ice cream, and I liked that.

Like all children, I accepted my parents’ prejudices. All my family used the “N” word, frequently and unselfconsciously. We thought we knew Negroes. They lived in my grandmother’s backyard in a little room attached to the garage.

A photo shows me and my brother Lyle as toddlers in the hands of big, black Will. Later, when I was a teenager and my grandmother was alone in the big house, she felt safe with the little room occupied by Robert Fisher, an elderly black man, a preacher with an incomprehensible stutter. (He must have had one of those congregations where they speak in tongues.) The final tenant was a fat old woman who looked like a movie Mammy. She ironed my dresses for a pittance. She called me, “Miss Ilene”, and I called her “Stella”.

When I went to the door of the “servant’s quarters”, the place smelled of sweat. We thought all Negroes smelled that way. The room had a toilet but no shower or tub for bathing. Our servants lived there for 50 years.

In 1952, I became engaged. A little woman came up to me after church and said sorrowfully, “Ilene, I heard you were marrying a Yankee.”

In Chicago I was shocked by my mother-in-law’s hatred of Negroes. She feared them as rapists and murderers. She did not know any black people. I loved Will and Robert and Stella. I knew Negroes, or thought I did.

People everywhere want the same things: a good life for themselves and their children. But we are all victims of our heritage. We inherit our prejudices, and it is difficult, almost impossible, to look at things from the point of view of another person or group.

My family moved from Detroit to Dallas in 1966. My nine-year-old daughter enrolled in Brandenburg Elementary School in Irving. When I went to parents’ night, I met Ronnie in the hallway. Ronnie, a friend from church and Girl Scouts and wife of the head of anesthesiology at Southwestern Medical School, said, “I choose Mrs. Kerwin as Susie’s teacher. She’s the best teacher in this school.”

I went into the classroom. My daughter’s new teacher was black.

The next night I looked across the supper table and asked my daughter, “Martha, why didn’t you tell me that Mrs. Kerwin was black?”

The nine-year-old looked up from eating tuna casserole and said, “Why? Is that important?”

I was proud of her. And proud of myself. I had not passed on my prejudices to my children.