Light Leaving the Sky
Light leaving the Sky—photo by William E Evans © 2021
Light leaving the sky, and the trees hung in snow are the only white colors left in the evening.
Six or seven geese are flying overhead, working against the storm and heading for the bird preserve a mile or so west on the lake. All I want is to watch them, flying through sleet, turning to snow and back again.
Only a few weeks ago the geese were squawking over who’d get the cove for nesting, one pair with lowered heads pursuing two others, like it was courting time, the cove was small and spring was arriving shortly.
The forsythia has already tried to bloom, and the bulb flowers are poking up all their heads. So the past weekend’s weather came as a surprise.
I can’t speak goose–I don’t have the neck for it. But someone who’s smarter needs to explain to those innocents how messed up the weather’s behaving only depends on which political party you belong to–which pledge of allegiance.
I’d feel better about this year’s lean days of snow–my husky even more–if I thought the present aberration was only that. I don’t know what Layla thinks, not to mention the geese. Right wingers are saying, ‘see, it’s snowing; nothing’s wrong!’ and the left wingers are saying ‘go figure’ —the geese I mean.
Our neighbor up the hill promised D that he’d bring his snowblower down to blow off the driveway. They have this long, steep grade to reach their house; I could do hill repeats on that hill to make me wanna cry if I were still up to doing them, so I understand why they bought the snowblower–one snowstorm would suffice if I lived up there.
But the brand new machine wouldn’t crank, so he was shoveling our driveway by hand. When I came back from walking the wee beasty, there he was, flinging snow right and left. Said he thought my last week’s story, Her World Dumped Upside Down, was good, and we talked while Layla rolled about on her back in the snow. He had his own story to tell about family disfunction, and he empathized with our neighbor’s sadness. He’s a reader, so I recommended Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides novel about a tyrannical father ruining his own family–Conroy was writing from experience.
I shoveled off the bridge and was thinking about what we talked about. Our neighbor is no more a crazy, far left person than I believe in Trump’s election claims. OK, not a hard lift for either of us, but here’s the deal, as Biden likes to say: someone looking down must have wondered, ‘what are these Americans doing? They done gone crazy? Lemme dump some white stuff on them and bring them to their senses.’
So now we have this old new President trying to bring peace between the tribes. And there was my neighbor shoveling my damn driveway.
Class of ’67, Edmunds High
I served one year of kindergarten and eight hard ones under the nuns’ stern eyebrows at Saint Ann’s elementary school, served my ninth year at McLaurin Junior High, and at fifteen I hit high school at Edmunds in 1965. Edmunds High is now Sumter High–renamed five years later when it was combined with Lincoln High, the Black high school across town.
I arrived at Edmunds just in time to join the first year the Sumter School District 17–reluctantly but without court order–let a handful of Blacks integrate the high school. We had one incident I witnessed midyear–in the gym when a handful of rough boys, Blacks and Whites, tangled. There were probably a few other fights after school that I didn’t hear about, but no town-wide demonstrations. Not like that stuff would ever have been widely reported in The Sumter Daily Item, and I would know, since I delivered the afternoon daily newspapers.
One thing does stand out about integration as I lived it; it had to do with the gifted Black students in the class of ’67, go Gamecocks. Black leaders in Sumter had chosen them with care. Lucy Reubens graduated our class’ valedictorian, to no one’s surprise. She later got her doctorate at Michigan, I think. Her parents both held doctorates, and her older sister, Wilhelmina, had gone on to attend Duke University, getting her own doctorate. Wilhelmina had been one of the first Blacks at Duke. My sister was at Duke at the time, but says she didn’t know her.
My dear sister ruined it for me at Edmunds. She may have received a solitary B in her entire high school experience. National Merit Scholar, she got a free ride to Duke. A classmate and good friend of hers, Dina, tried teaching me French to her eternal frustration. I wish I’d learned French back then, but I was a serious slacker. I was interested in History enough so I didn’t sleep, and English—we’ll get to that.
My mother knew Lucy’s father, Dr. Reubens, then President of Morris College–the small Black college in Sumter. A best guess is he served on the Sumter Red Cross Board at some point; my mother was the chapter director (and for many years its sole paid staff). Social welfare in South Carolina of that time was an oxymoron, and education wasn’t too far off from that, born of a very poor state—and still recovering from the Civil War, both materially and spiritually.
The stain from that conflict seemed like it poisoned the ground worse than the poisons used on tobacco. I’m not saying the state’s White population was evil; there were plenty who strove for good lives, but the poison remained and continued to kill like the kepone sprayed on the tobacco. Like kepone and DDT, it has degraded only slowly.
“The college’s first president, Dr. Edward M. Brawley, declared that the college stood for three things, ‘loyalty to Christ at all times… sound scholarship, and devotion to the Negro race.’
“The presidency of Dr. Odell Reubens (1948–1970) oversaw the implementation of education initiatives, including the establishment of a remedial program for incoming freshmen to offset the deficiencies in public school education available to most African Americans. In 1961 enrollment was 898 and the college charter removed the word “Negro,” opening the college to all ethnic groups.
from The South Carolina Encyclopedia article on Morris College
No way can I brag about being a good friend of Lucy’s, and we didn’t move in the same circle of friends. Fellow travelers at best. The few times in high school we did talk, she seemed reserved but friendly. Later in college, when I ran into her at the Columbia Airport, we spoke briefly. She was coming home for the Christmas break. She’d grown her hair into a serious afro, and she seemed more withdrawn, aloof, as if she wasn’t altogether thrilled to be speaking to a White boy, long haired hippy or not.
In high school, Frank Matthews sat in my home room, so we actually spoke a good bit. I remember wanting to convey friendship, since he was mostly surrounded by Whites who ignored him. But Frank made it easy. He was comfortable in his own skin (pun intended). He was a hell of a sprinter and carried Edmunds to the state track championship our senior year. But what he may have felt about being among those first integrating Edmunds, we didn’t talk about that.
I was only close with a few people in those days, not a large social circle, mostly proto-hippies still living with their parents. I had no idea what Frank or Lucy did after school. Me, I delivered newspapers.
Later at Clemson, I ran across Frank by accident my sophomore or junior year–I’m not sure I even knew he was there. I was going door to door through the infamous ‘Tin Cans,’ campaigning for Student Senate. I’d gotten elected the first time because no one knew who I was, but I’d been busy since upsetting the Clemson norm, so I needed to campaign.
At the door to one dorm room in looking in, I recognized Frank in a midst of other students, four or five in a bull session, and I brightened to see someone I knew from Sumter. I remember one or two of the brothers eying me–and admittedly I was intruding on their session, so I said a brief piece, asked how he was doing, asked them all for their votes, and left. Not a great welcome, and I moved on.
Black Power was a thing–the Civil Rights movement was in full session, as was the Anti-War movement. So, fellow traveler was the best I expect he viewed me. That may have been the last time we ever talked, which is sadder.
Frank was someone I’d have enjoyed hanging out with.
It’s probable Frank and Lucy stayed in touch after college. On her resume, among a long list of credits and honors are several years in the 80s when she taught at George Mason University, a few miles down the road from here. And Frank retired law school dean at George Mason not too long ago. So there you go.
Three years after we graduated from Edmunds, the NY Times ran an article, Year of Desegregation A Trying One in South, on the Sumter School District 17. One point it makes is that Dixie and the Confederate flag were finally banned from the school pep rallies by 1971. That was progress. Our class was the first to have White students radical enough to refuse to stand for Dixie. I wasn’t the first–Harry Smithson was and caught crap for it–but I agreed he was right.
“Two years ago at this time, [1969] according to the Federal Government, 18 per cent of all black pupils in the South were attending integrated schools; today, 38 per cent are. In the North and West during the same period, the figures remained almost static at around 27 per cent.
“Thus the South has moved ahead of the rest of the country in school desegregation, and the experience of being “out front” in a historic rearrangement of social forces—of possibly setting a pattern that will stand up for years—has been for many communities like Sumter one of the most trying in memory.”
from Year of Desegregation A Trying One in South by Roy Reed and Paul Delaney in NY Times
By 1971, my future wife was attending the private, all white Thomas Sumter Academy at her extremely conservative parents’ insistence. Given one great grandfather had served as a commissary officer for the rebels while he ran his plantation, it was hard-coded in her family tree. She graduated as their Valedictorian. Home for the weekend, I first met her at a church sponsored coffee club where the sons and daughters of conservative South Carolinians were introduced to long haired pinko faggot communists such as myself–or at least that was how her parents saw me. She paid them back by marrying me.
“In spite of all the problems, the town seems generally hopeful. The optimists point to several signs.
“The younger teachers of both races seem to be working harder than the older ones to make desegregation succeed. The system has a large number of younger teachers.
“Grady Locklear, chairman of the English department at Edmunds, says the five black and seven white teachers in his department are ‘just like that,’ and he holds two fingers close together. Most of them are young.”
from Year of Desegregation A Trying One in South by Roy Reed and Paul Delaney in NY Times
I had to smile reading Grady Locklear had made it to department chairman–my senior year was his first year at Edmunds. He’d let me read Lord of the Rings in class as long as I could keep up with the class discussions. It was Janet, my sister’s fault since she’d sent me the paperbacks from Duke.
It’s a bare bones story, mainly because I crossed paths with Lucy and Frank so briefly.
But in that corner of South Carolina, in a town named after General Thomas Sumter, a Revolutionary War hero, we received enough of a high school education to get into college. My mother didn’t have a doctorate, but she was well enough educated by reading, so she might as well have. Lucy came from educated parents–I don’t know about Frank–but both went on to represent Sumter mighty fine in the world.
Black Church in America
Morris College was founded as a Baptist college in 1908. Given his position as President, Dr. Reuben (and possibly his wife) held doctorates in divinity.
Blacks first began converting to Christianity in slave times. Less than a hundred years since the Civil War, these people whose families, not too many generations back, had come to America in chains, embraced the White slaveholders’ Christianity with more moral clarity.
In God’s Shadow, Alan Mikhail writes about the widespread Muslim population in Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the struggle between the Catholics of Spain and the Muslims of the Ottoman and Mamluk Empires. The former pressed into southern Europe from Anatolia, and the later spread from modern day Libya through Egypt, Arabia and modern day Lebanon and Syria. Selim, the seventh Ottoman sultan conquered the Mamluk Empire in 1517.
Mikhail argues Europe’s antipathy toward the Ottomans drove them to the Americas. That the Spanish under Isabella drove the last of the Moors from Spain, we all could recite from elementary school–and of course that Isabella funded Columbus. What wasn’t made so clear was how enslavement of both Blacks and Native Americans played a part in the Spanish Empire.
Slavery was a common practice in 16th and 17th centuries. Both Christian and Muslim rulers used it as a tool of statecraft, subjugating their enemies and justifying it by pointing to the heavens above. Along with small pox and syphilis, the Spanish brought their war against the infidels to America in the form of slavery. As did the Portuguese, English and Dutch.
Just as Jews in Spain converted during the long, dark years of Inquisition, so did Black slaves convert to Protestantism in the shadow of the Southern plantations.
“While estimates vary, Muslims might have constituted up to a tenth of the African slave population of North America between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.”
From God’s Shadow by Alan Mikhail
Louis Gates’ new program on The Black Church (airing next month on PBS) focuses how much the church has served as an anchor in the Black community. But in truth, some number of those early slaves converts were Muslim.
I’ll be interested to hear if Gates makes the connection, or if he has anything to say about forced conversions from Islam. Did the slaves abandon Islam or were they forced to convert?
First we are human, and all other descriptors such as black and white are secondary, too often carrying sad tonnage from the past. If we would only learn from that baggage.