Free How I Shed My Skin by Jim Grimsley Page B

theme of inferiority played out in many ways, generally involving the dumbness of Negroes, who often mistook one word for another, or one process for another. I would hear my father tell these jokes to my uncles when they were out of hearing of their wives, or else I might hear them at a country store or a service station, places where men talked to other men. The jokes usually involved the nigger getting instructed to do something simple and making such an obvious mistake that the result was hilarious and embarrassing, and the joke served as proof that niggers were never very smart and got even the simplest facts mixed up. When we laughed at the joke, we accepted the premise.
    Learning about blacks shaped my expectations. What I observed about black people was meant to fit the frame this word created inside me, so that I would see what I was supposed to see. The space of
nigger,
once prepared in my head, would resemble that same space in the heads of all the other children who played with me, and the other children with whom they played. It was a word that organized the world, and we began to learn it at the same time that we learned to speak and walk.
    The word was used in many ways, always for the same purpose, to reinforce the association between
nigger
and anything bad. When my father was angry at my mother, he would accuse her of being part nigger. People who danced with too much hip movement were doing nigger dances. Something that smelled bad smelled like a nigger. Clothing that was too loud or colorful was like something a nigger would wear. Putting on deodorant rather than bathing was a nigger bath. A house where a black family lived was a nigger shack. A white person with thick lips had nigger lips, and a person with kinky hair had nigger hair. An unruly child might be called wild as a nigger, while a slothful adult was as common as a nigger, or as sorry as one. Certain kinds of flamboyance, like a penchant for lawn ornaments or a taste for bright colors, were described as niggerish. If a house fell into bad repair it was a place not even fit for a nigger to live in, a truly terrible abode. If food was particularly poor in quality, it was something even a nigger wouldn’t eat. A stopgap or sloppy solution to a repair problem was a nigger rigging. In all its uses the word had a nasty, bitter edge, and, as a child, I heard the scorn and placed these feelings alongside the word, till in its final form it embodied a little of everything bad. Information and nothing more, as far as I knew. A child of three or four is not apt to question what is observed. The warp and woof of the adult world must be understood before it can be examined.
    How would I have seen black people without these voices speaking in my ear? Is there were a way to know?
    In the same way, by the same methods, I was taught about the weakness of girls, their place in the home, all that embodied what I was supposed to think about the opposite sex. But in the case of girls, I had access to real ones, and the evidence of what I saw and learned directly, to counterbalance what I was told. Even then, with the contradiction of real examples, some of the false information would win out over observation, and I would grow up with ideas about the weakness and inferiority of women that would later prove to be false. In the case of black people, I had only the whisperings and no direct experience, until years after my first ideas were formed.

The Fight in the Yard
    I climbed down from the school bus to see my younger brother fighting a black boy in the driveway that led through a field to our house. We lived in a plain frame structure set up on cinderblocks, one grade better than a shack. It had a kitchen sink only after my father put one in. We were living in a part of the county where lower-class white people had settled, Riggstown Road, inhabited by a goodly number of Riggses and a smattering of people with other surnames.
    My mother was ashamed of our house