My Crucible
When I was 16, I found myself one Sunday afternoon facing what was, for me, the greatest moral dilemma I had ever been forced to face. I was in a moral crucible, one of those scalding moments of testing that come to us all and from which we can emerge better or lesser, but no matter what…we emerge changed.
It began for me with a paper I had written for Colonel Schanz, a retired military officer teaching English that year at my high school. He was thin and frail-looking, but worldly in a way not typical of our school. This was signaled by the ascots he wore instead of ties, and used an amber cigarette holder to smoke in class. He was an exotic, if not weird, outlier in a herd of conformity.
The assigned subject was segregation, another sign of Colonel Schantz’s bizarre nature as this was a subject best left alone in 1963 at my Virginia boarding school. It wasn’t controversial, just indelicate.
The lack of controversy was because we were of one mind. We had been taught that segregation of the races was both normal and right. Morally right. Practically right. Best for both races. The best way to avoid conflict and racial mixing, which was declared bad for both races. They didn’t want to be with us. We didn’t want to be with them. It was best we lived in separate-but-equal worlds.
No doubt there were apostates who thought differently, but the subject was so charged that they kept their views very quiet.
I was part of the majority in my thinking about race. I had come from a world of genteel racism. There was no name calling in my family. But the established view that segregation was best for both races was simply assumed.
And so I wrote what I had always been taught in my English composition for Colonel Schantz.
To my horror, to my shock, to my outrage he returned it to me with a failing grade. And scrawled across the top were words I’ve never forgotten. He had written, “You have been the victim of some vicious propaganda.”
I was appalled and affronted and insulted. And oddly enough, and I think to my credit, I was jolted into finally starting to think about this indelicate subject for myself.
I had grown up in a segregated world and considered it utterly normal that black children would enter the local movie theater by a side door and sit in the balcony. That there were bathrooms and water fountains labeled “white” and “colored” was in no way shocking. I didn’t notice that black people didn’t sit at lunch counters or eat in the same restaurants as whites. I was oblivious.
My grandmother’s African-American cook, Mary Belle, was probably the leading citizen of her community and several Sundays each year my family would go to her church in the Black part of town for a wonderful lunch – a fundraiser for the AME Zion congregation. I loved those lunches because the food was superb and the welcome always warm and sincere.
And I simply went along, like most other Southern Whites who were not haters, but also not mindful, not conscious. And didn’t question whether it was right and fair for the Black community to have to live with such inequality, because we certainly knew that separate-but-equal wasn’t the case. The Black high school was much inferior. There was no Black swimming pool. Reality stared us in the face, but we were able to ignore it. And so we did.
I certainly did, until Colonel Schantz essentially slapped me in the face, and yelled, “Wake up!!”
And I did. I thought, finally, and changed my mind about integration and racial equality and what was right and what was wrong.
But like others – the few others at the school who felt the same – I kept my head down and my mouth shut, because this was apostasy, this was heresy, this was betrayal of class and race, this was – in that environment – dynamite.
I was, in high school, a small figure. Not a leader or a scholar or an athlete. It could be a cruel place and I had learned that my best path to survival – and I don’t use that word lightly – was not to do anything that would attract attention.
I knew what could happen. One boy, who collected laundry as a way to make a bit of extra money, was taunted as “Scaley Don Adams,” and when he would come to the dorm, the hallway would shake with voices singing “Poison Ivy,” but with the words, “Scaly Don.” There was a boy labeled “Greasy-Goobsy” and one who was “The Toad” Then there were Feeble Phil and many others who had to endure daily humiliation. It was a dangerous place.
And in that environment, I had to make a speech.
I was in a literary society and each of us, at some point, had to make a speech. It could be on any subject. It was my turn.
The faculty member who oversaw this organization was an elderly German teacher known as Herr Whittle. He was a mole-like little man with a bald head and he put red pepper on virtually everything he ate. He was clearly long past his sell-by date, but he nominally presided over this literary society. I had rarely exchanged a word with him.
The speech was to be on Sunday night and I was desperate. My dilemma was that of all the things in the world I did not want to do, number one was to make a speech championing racial equality and integration.
But my conscience was torturing me. This was the subject, I knew in my soul, that I SHOULD speak about. But my God, I didn’t want to step out in front of a group of ravening, cruel school boys – my fellow literary society members – and expose myself as one who had gone over to the other side. A traitor.
I vividly remember trying that afternoon to think of any other topic I could address that would preserve some fig leaf of moral pride. I shared my misery with my friend Norman, who understood why I really, really, really didn’t want to do it.
It was a little dilemma in a small, cloistered school about a speech that would not really matter to anyone. But it mattered to me. It was desperately important to me. I was afraid. Profoundly afraid. And so, to me, the stakes could not have been higher.
In the end, I sucked it up and spoke my heart. I was quaking and I have no real recollection about what I said, but I remember that it was a declaration of my belief about what was right and what was wrong and why. It was hardly a stemwinder or a call to arms. It was, I’m sure, lame and tentative. But it took something that was, for me, courage. And I was proud of that.
The response was tepid indifference. It simply didn’t matter what I thought. And that was a relief as I had feared massive retaliation.
There was only one person in the room who offered a word of praise. Little Herr Whittle came shuffling over to me and gently patted me on the back. “Well done,” he said.