The story we were told
In southeastern Virginia, history was never far away. At least, history as told by Whiteness.
When I was growing up in southeastern Virginia, history was never far away. At least, history as told by Whiteness. The schools in both Norfolk and Richmond took us on regular field trips to Jamestown, Yorktown, and Williamsburg. I especially remember the fragrance of boxwood that hedged the cottage yards and lined the streets in Colonial Williamsburg. That, and the White actors in period costume who demonstrated what life was like in colonial times. For White people, that is. If slavery was mentioned, it made no impression on me.
During the summer, when we were on vacation, our parents and grandparents took us to see a couple of popular outdoor plays, tourist attractions. When we went to Nags Head, they took us to Manteo, NC, to see “The Lost Colony,” about the early English settlers who mysteriously disappeared from Roanoke Island and left a single cryptic clue, the word Croatoan scratched into one of the palisades of the wooden fort. I remember wondering if the White people had been saved, captured, or massacred.
When Dad took us on camping trips to the Blue Ridge Mountains, we saw “Unto These Hills.” In an outdoor amphitheater, we sat on benches under a darkening sky. The play was advertised as a truthful depiction of the tragic uprooting of the Cherokees from their homes, before the deadly march along the Trail of Tears. The story was tragic, it is no wonder that I wept.
In the town of Cherokee, gift shops carried souvenirs. Feathered headdresses that engulfed our heads and tomahawks with beaded handles. Made in China. Out front, many stores set up a plastic tipi. Standing in front of it was an old man dressed in a “warbonnet” like the ones depicted in movie Westerns and TV shows. For a tip, he would pose for a photo. My grandmother made my brother John and me stand in front of the tipi, while she took a home movie of the man dancing around us, shaking a rattle and singing, “Hey ah ho, Hey ah ho.” John and I were awkward and uncomfortable. It was many decades later that I learned that Cherokee people did not wear headdresses of that kind. Nor did they live in tipis.
Tragedy was the final word in the stories we were told about the people who were all lumped together as “Indians.” We were taught that they were extinct, relics of the past. Or they lived far away, like the Indians at “Custer’s Last Stand.” Indigenous history was presented as no more than a marker on the timeline of White progress.
Our parents took us on weekend day trips to sites of famous Civil War battles: the two Battles of Bull Run, or Manassas. Chancellorsville. Fredericksburg. We walked the rolling green hills in peaceful parks that I worked desperately to picture as the scenes of bloody battles. I got goosebumps as Dad read with dramatic flourish the markers recounting heroic stories of Confederate generals. The stories I remember best were about Stonewall Jackson. How Jackson got his nickname (“There’s Jackson, standing like a stone wall.”) How he was killed in the Battle of Chancellorsville, the victim of what was called “friendly fire.” How Robert E. Lee likened his death to “the loss of my right arm.”
In Richmond, we were surrounded by Confederate iconography. After all, Richmond was the “Capitol of the Confederacy,” even a century after the Civil War. On the way to piano lessons in downtown Richmond, or an appointment with the eye doctor, we drove along Monument Avenue, a broad boulevard with medians large enough to picnic on. We passed monument after monument to the fallen “heroes of the Confederacy.” In the center was the grandest monument of all, General Robert E. Lee seated commandingly on a proud stallion.
All this we absorbed like the air we breathed.
“Well, you know, it was a long process,” my dad answers, when I ask him how he finally came to let go of his segregationist beliefs.
“To be honest, when I was in Richmond and King began to march in the late 50s, at first I went to the Bible trying to — ” He interrupts himself. Laughs, ducking his head to the side. “Because he upset me! You know? I grew up in a segregated culture.” His tone becomes reflective. “And he did upset me —
“I was going to the Bible first of all to prove that he was wrong on some of his assumptions. And then when I realized that wasn’t gonna happen” — he laughs again, shaking his head — “I was trying to figure how I could limit some of what he was advocating.”
All of my dad’s attempts to discredit or limit King finally came to a dead end. “And I remember — I was on the campus of the University of Richmond, when I remember one night saying, ‘You know what? What is making me angry here is that Martin Luther King is just a better Christian than I am.’”
Dad looks me in the eye. “And that night I said, you know, I’m either gonna have to give up being a minister — and maybe even give up being a Christian — or I’m gonna have to try to follow what I understand the gospel of Christ to be really saying.
“I’m either gonna have to give it up, or I’m gonna have to try to follow it.”
Between 1962 and 1965, while Dad was coming to terms with King’s message, he was associate pastor at Park View Chapel in Richmond. The Chapel was the offshoot of a venerable old downtown church, Park View Baptist, which everyone called “the mother church.”
My dad tells me, “The Chapel was built because the mother church was at that time in a changing neighborhood.”
Changing neighborhood. Code-speak for Black people moving in and White people moving out. The mother church had been established when the community around it was all White. When the neighborhood demographics began to change, the Chapel was built in a White suburb far from the mother church. Safely out of the reach of integration.
As associate pastor, Dad had the primary responsibility for pastoring the Chapel. The senior pastor, affectionately known as “Doc,” presided over both Chapel and mother church, but he was primarily at the mother church.
Dad began to lead discussions at the Chapel about racism, civil rights, integration. These drew the attention of the entire church.
“I think I scared Doc with those discussions,” he chuckles.
I was 10 years old in 1963. I remember my father took me with him to one of those gatherings. I couldn’t properly follow what the adults were talking about. I knew only that it was about something important, because their faces were serious.
Little by little, the voices got louder. The tone became heated.
One White man (everyone there was White) jumped up and pointed at me sitting over to the side. “Well! What would you do if your daughter wanted to marry one of ‘them’!” he shouted at my father.
Dad took a breath, then spoke quietly and clearly. “I would rather she marry a Black Christian than a White Communist.”
On the short drive home, my dad and I sat beside each other on the front seat of the car. I may have asked him what he meant, I don’t remember. But I won’t ever forget what he said.
“What I mean is, I am more concerned about the character of the man you marry than I am about the color of his skin.”
At the end of another of those discussions at the Chapel, a White man rose noisily and stomped out of the church, intending never to come back. It is a tribute to his honesty — and my father’s innate ability to be pastor as well as prophet — that the man returned.
“Damn it!” he said. “I may not like it. I don’t like it! But it’s right, ain’t it.”
(Excerpt from Walking to the Edge: Break with Whiteness, by Karen Bryant Lucas)
