Free How I Shed My Skin by Jim Grimsley Page A

perpetuated this in the raising of their children and in the living of their lives in my part of the South. Or, to be more personal, my purpose here is to examine how, as a child, I learned bias against black people from the good white people around me. For there is no one else from whom I could have taken this lesson.

The Learning
    Maybe the instruction began with nursery rhymes.
    Nigger, nigger, black as tar
    Stuck his head in a molasses jar
    Jar broke, nigger choked
    And went to heaven in a little rowboat
    I learned this rhyme early enough that the memory of its origin escapes me, so that the doggerel appears to exist in my head from birth. The verse was useful for the clapping-hands games that I played with girls, or the jump-rope sessions in which I sometimes participated. Like that of a good pop song, the rhythm of the stanza stuck in the brain so that the words repeated themselves over and over again. I chanted this verse before I knew what a Negro was, late in the 1950s as I woke up to being, three or four years old, suddenly stuck in the world, trying to figure it out.
    We played games around the tobacco farms or near the back doors of houses, our mothers visiting inside, sipping thin coffee in the kitchen, children in the dirt yard kicking aside the sweet-gum balls and saying whatever nursery rhyme or scrap of a country song we knew. We played tag or hide-and-seek or we ran with tobacco sticks between our legs, pretending they were horses and we were the Lone Ranger and other cowboys. I remembered some songs we sang, a Kitty Wells divorce song, Johnny Cash when he heard the train a’coming, a’rolling around the bend near Folsom Prison; I knew “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” and I knew the nigger rhyme.
    Eeny meeny miney moe
    Catch a nigger by the toe
    If he hollers, let him go
    Eeny meeny miney moe
    This rhyme was used for selecting, often to determine who would be “it” in a game of tag or the first seeker in a game of hide-and-seek. We children chanted, pointing from one to the other on each beat of the verse, and the person on the last beat was chosen; a chorus of shrieking greeted the selection. Sometimes a person might say “rabbit” in place of “nigger,” but mostly we said “nigger.”
    Children chanted these verses in play, mixed in with “Pop Goes the Weasel,” “Little Miss Muffet,” and “Ring Around the Rosey.” In such a way the notion of
nigger
entered my brain and stayed, starting likely before I knew language myself, listening to the sounds of other children at play. In chanting these rhymes I was learning a word that would shape my view of the world, and my knowledge of what a nigger was would thereafter organize itself and grow.
    I played with other children at Lee’s Chapel United Methodist Church, in the interval between Sunday School and the main service. This took place once a week. Later, in school in my hometown of Pollocksville, playtime would become a daily routine. I played with cousins at family gatherings in Rocky Mount, where my father’s family originated, or in Princeton, where my mother’s people lived. The rhymes were ubiquitous and, attached to the supposed innocence of play, taught me their lessons through the medium of fun. Learning them in the shadow of the church or in the pine-shaded schoolyard, knowing their acceptance by the adults around me, meant that the word was acceptable, at least to a degree. Women who might have objected to the casual use of
nigger
as a word, on the grounds that it was not nice, nevertheless accepted it in the guise of a child’s rhyme. A child might be corrected for calling someone a nigger at the wrong time or place, or using the word in a sentence in polite company, but adults might not object to the chanting of an old rhyme in the yard during a game of jump rope. The doggerel was a part of play.
    Adults in that era told nigger jokes, in which the