Free Cybill Disobedience by Cybill Shepherd Page A

their representative in 1968, a commission that could not be refused, whatever my disdain for pageantry. I had to make an appointment with the “modiste” who was making the princess costumes, after receiving a mimeographed sheet of instructions: “You are to bring sixteen (16) button white fabric gloves for evening and ‘shortie’white gloves for day costume. You are to bring small button pearl earrings (no loops or “dangles” please).... A rhinestone tiara is to be worn with your nighttime costume. A deposit of $5 will be required.... You will be responsible for furnishing two pairs of shoes—plain, closed heel (opera), closed toe pumps. NO FLATS OR BALLETS, PLEASE . Hose for your daytime costume will be furnished.... MOST IMPORTANT : Wear the foundation garment you plan to wear with your costumes when taking your measurements and for fittings.”
    There were no blacks represented in the Carnival--they had their own separate Cotton Makers Jubilee--and the only black people I knew were domestics or warehouse workers at Shobe, Inc. Memphis was still cleft along rigid color lines, with segregated barbershops and libraries, and there were COLORED ONLY signs with figurative hands painted in dark colors pointing to different drinking fountains and rest rooms. The local movie house had a colored box office and seating up in the nosebleed section of the balcony, a brutal sauna on humid summer nights. In 1965, when a maverick theater operator at the Poplar Plaza Shopping Center screened A Patch of Blue and Sidney Poitier actually kissed a white woman, the audience reacted with an audible “Whoooa.” Blacks were admitted on a different day at the Mid-South Fairgrounds every fall and attended the Negro school a mile away from my own. There is still, in a public park across from the University of Tennessee Medical School, a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, founded in rural Tennessee. Despite an ongoing controversy, it’s allowed to stand because he was a famous Civil War general. Once, when I was very young, my grandfather and I saw the hurried scattering of spectral white gowns and pointed hoods, illuminated by the glow from a burning cross, as we drove through the “other” part of town. The sight of the Klan in full regalia strikes fear in the heart of even a little white girl and an old white man.
    “Da-Dee, who are the ghosts?” I asked. “Don’t bother your pretty head,” he answered, but he put his foot to the gas pedal.
    Like most of the people in that time and place, my family had a tacit code of “benevolent” racism: my grandparents treated their black housekeepers with familial fondness and support, dispensing hand-me-down clothes and leftover food with the fraudulent magnanimity of the times. Waiters and bellhops were addressed by their first names, whatever their age, and I shelled peas on the back porch of the lake house with a kind and dignified elderly lady named Annie who had to call me Miss Cybill. It would have been unthinkable for me to challenge the views and vernacular of the older generations. Even though I was enlightened by the climate of civil rights activity, I did nothing. There were black kids in my high school class, unknown to me and my circle of friends. Our connection to black culture was through the music of the times, Jr. Walker and the All-stars spoke to us in a different way from how our parents had related to the Ink Spots or the Mills Brothers, although I hardly examined the societal ramifications of the soulful sounds.
    In the spring of 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. brought his Poor People’s Campaign to Memphis in support of the mostly black striking sanitation workers. Hundreds of men who hauled garbage and dug sewers gathered at a rally to hear him say “It is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages,” and strikers wearing sandwich boards that read I AM A MAN were maced and tear-gassed on