A Flick of the Ear

“A Flick of the Ear”

In 1972, after mom left dad for good and moved us from Hanover County to Louisa County, she decided not to enroll her four children in the Louisa County Public School System, so I missed much of my 5th grade year. The idea of not returning to school and starting my summer vacation early was appealing – at first.  After a few weeks though, the novelty quickly faded. As bad as it was living with my abusive father, I almost wished we were back in Hanover so I could hang out with my Pearson’s Corner Elementary School friends. Almost…  I missed the intellectual stimulation, the social interaction, and the routine associated with school, but I did not miss the sheer hell we went through with our dad, and not knowing when that hell would reoccur. 

Our new dwelling didn’t help.  A two-room shack with no running water is not an ideal habitat for eight people, especially with four hyper-active kids with nothing to do, a stressed-out mom, her stressed-out younger sister, and her sister’s two young children.  That spring was very difficult with lots of upheaval, creating uncertainty and stress in our lives.  We also knew deep in our bones that a lot of hardship lay in front of us.

While our family was struggling with our own issues, our country was having its own problems. Many parts of our country’s culture, including our public education system, was experiencing tremendous upheaval and change.  Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King had both been recently assassinated, Vietnam War protests were the norm, and desegregation of many of the United States public school systems was underway.  The Louisa County Public School System was one of the last hold outs and had finally become desegregated in September 1969, but only after the threat of Federal Funds being withheld if it did not do so.  Three years later, I enrolled in the Louisa County Public School System as a sixth grader. 

When the County of Louisa was created in 1742, it was legal to educate both slaves and free blacks. However, like many southern states, fears of slave uprisings lead Virginia to pass laws in the 1830s making it illegal to teach blacks, slave or free, to read or write.  Knowledge is power.  Therefore, by 1860, when sixty percent of the county’s residents were black, it was forbidden for those blacks to be educated.  That changed after the Civil War. The post-war Virginia constitution of 1869 mandated free public education for all, black or white.  However, that same constitution also directed that “white and colored persons shall not be taught in the same school but in separate schools under the same general regulations.”  Surprisingly, some equalities did exist in Louisa County.  For example, teachers, whether they be black, white, male or female, or whether they taught at a black school or a white school, were paid the same wage.  

However, larger social movements in the early 1900s reversed the progress towards equal education achieved in the late 1800s. By the 1920s and 30s, there were large discrepancies in funding for white and black schools. As a poor rural county with little economic activity, the discrepancy in Louisa County was worse than most.  For example, in the 1920’s and 1930’s, the black community was constantly petitioning the Louisa County School Board to provide busing for black children.  The discrepancy in funding and in teaching conditions worsened in the county in the 1940s.  In an effort to save money, Louisa County began consolidating its white schools into better buildings and left the decaying older buildings to be used by black students.  

And then, in May of 1954 the historic Brown versus Topeka Board of Education Supreme Court Ruling made racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional. This was supposed to change everything. However, like many school systems in the south, the Louisa County School Board continued to find ways to thwart desegregation of its schools.

A 1954 Louisa County Board of Supervisors resolution makes this clear. “It is believed that integration of white and Negro students in the public schools of the Commonwealth of Virginia is against the best interest and contrary to the wishes of the great majority of both races….  Be it further resolved, that the compulsory attendance law should be amended to exempt from its operation any child whose parents or legal guardian objects to integration in the public schools.”

In 1954, one of ten children, my mom was an eleven-year old in Louisa County. She quit school three years later never to return.  Weakening the compulsory attendance law just made it easier for my mom to quit school with an eighth-grade education.  That said, it was common during that era for people not to finish high school, especially in rural areas like Louisa County.  In fact, my aunt Mary, who was four years older than my mom, was the only one of my mom’s 10 siblings to finish high school. And most likely, that was because she lived with another family as a housekeeper/nanny from the age of twelve on.  She could have been categorized as an indentured servant.

Because of actions like those undertaken by Louisa County, it was obvious that many parts of the country were not taking the 1954 Supreme Court decision seriously.  Therefore, in 1965 President Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which withheld federal funding for schools who did not comply with federally ordered desegregation.   As a result, the Louisa County Public School System finally became fully integrated in 1969.  

Back in 1953, in an effort to appease the black community, the school board had built a brand new black high school known as A.G. Richardson.  Sixteen years later in 1969, it became the new desegregated middle school for both blacks and whites.  Beginning in 1972, that building became my academic home for the next three years. 

When desegregation began in the county of Louisa in the fall of 1969, all high schoolers in the county, both black and white, attended the old white high school, and the old black high school, A.G. Richardson, became the middle school for all.  However, because of financial constraints and the county’s size, which was 511 square miles, the middle school kids and the high school kids had to ride the same school buses. With the two schools located five miles apart serving a county that covered over five hundred square miles, one can only imagine the logistical nightmare of coordinating the bussing routes.  Yet, they made it work.  

One problem was that some kids literally spent an hour and a half on the school bus each day.  I was one of those kids.  One skill I developed from those long and noisy bus rides was how to tune out distractions to concentrate. I would do some of my best studying on the school bus. And later in life, people would be amazed at how I could tune out background noise and focus on any particular task.  However, this also became a problem later in my life, especially in my marriage when Elizabeth thought I was listening, when in fact, I was totally focused on something else. Anyway, that was my excuse to her.

In the late summer of 1972, I had a lot of anxiety entering a brand-new school system, especially after missing a large portion of my 5th grade year. I knew no one.  Would I be able to keep up academically?  What are the kids like here? How will I find my way around?  

It was a warm September morning for my first day of middle school.  Even with my hand-me-down polyester pants and a hand-me-down short sleeve cotton shirt, I was a cute kid – a freckle faced, blond-haired and brown-eyed eleven-year old boy.  I can remember being anxious and nervous, and very self-conscious with my hand-me-down clothes – So I stood alone on the edge of that gravel dirt road waiting for a yellow school bus that would take me to my new school, to a place unknown.  Little did I know that the school bus itself would be the setting where I faced my greatest challenges that year.  School itself was a walk in the park compared to the environment I encountered on the bus.

One big problem on those school buses was discipline. Think about it. Take a bunch of teenagers and put them in a rolling metal canister for 45 minutes with teenagers they hate or fear.   By 1972, the demographics of Louisa County had changed little since 1860.  In 1860, the County was sixty percent black. In 1972, it was fifty percent black, which was about the same mix of students attending the middle school and high school.  However, the percentage of black kids versus white kids riding the school bus was much higher.  

Because desegregation was still new and many white parents did not want their kids riding a school bus with black kids, many of those parents drove their kids (usually middle school age) to school and dropped them off.  Also, because most of the older white kids had cars, not many 11th and 12th grade white kids rode the school bus.   This meant that most of the kids on the school bus were black.  It also meant that most of the older kids on the school bus were black.  And they had a chip on their shoulder when it came to racism, and deservedly so.

Up until 6th grade I had never given race much thought. Why should I? The elementary school I attended in Mechanicsville, Virginia was almost all white.  Before living in Louisa County, I had had little contact with blacks, with most of my interaction limited to the few black kids in my almost all white elementary school. That changed my very first day on the school bus.  

When the school bus finally arrived in a cloud of dust, I got in with the few other kids that lived nearby, including two black kids who lived two hundred yards down the road.  After we got on and took our seats, the bus did its turnaround, and headed back the way it had come, towards the end of our dirt road, where it would resume its journey on black pavement to places unknown to me.

I chose a seat and sat down.  As the bus picked up more kids, I realized that most were black, and some were significantly older.  I began to feel even more out of place.  Already nervous, I became more nervous and felt perspiration gathering on my neck and under my armpits.  I also noticed that I was surrounded by a bunch of older black kids who did not seem to like me very much.  I didn’t know why.  Did they know that I was poor white trash?  How would they know that?  Although they were worn, I thought my polyester pants and freshly ironed cotton shirt were presentable enough. In fact, many of the black kids were dressed no better.  Although I could see that some were wearing new clothes. 

Finally, one of the black kids behind me flicked my ear with his finger. It really hurt, but I pretended not to feel it.  He did it again.  The second time the pain increased, and I could feel my ear burning.  I felt like I had no choice.  I turned around and said as politely as I could “Please don’t do that. It hurts.”  You would have thought I had just told the funniest joke in the world.  They laughed and continued to humiliate me by calling me “poor white trash” and making derogatory remarks about my family and my mother.  The words they strung together with such hate and animosity hurt more than the pain in my ears. That morning was one of the worst mornings of my life.  I dreaded getting on that bus that afternoon and almost every day that year.

As the lyrics suggest in the country song “Streets of Bakersfield”, written in 1973 by Homer Joy and made popular by Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam as a hit single in 1988, there has been a universal theme throughout human history of one people making another people feel “less than”.

         “You don’t know me, but you don’t like me. 

           You say you care less how I feel.

           But how many of you that sit and judge me.

           Ever walk the streets of Bakersfield?”

I was so ashamed.  I felt like fighting but knew I would get my ass kicked and would get suspended in the process.  As they continued to flick my ears and spew hateful banter, I felt humiliated.  Why did they hate me?  Although the tears welled up, I did not cry.  I knew that was what they wanted – to make me cry.  It was their way of exercising control over me.  And if I would only cry, they would stop.  What they didn’t know is that I had suffered worse pain and humiliation from the hands of my own father, and that I could take it.  I was not going to cry.  By not crying I maintained some control and I could keep some of my dignity.  I gritted my teeth, clenched my jaw, and closed my eyes and went to another world – the same world I went to when I was being beaten by dad or when I would hear him beat mom.

I wish I could say that it got much better after that first day, but it didn’t.  My ears would get flicked again on numerous occasions.  Eventually, it did get better. Over the course of the next several years, I would occasionally get picked on again, especially if some older black kid got bored and wanted to have a little fun at a younger kid’s expense, but it was never as bad as that first year.  As the years passed and I became older, I continued to ride the school bus.  And as race relations improved, I and the other kids on the bus slowly got to know each other.  Eventually, when the black kids realized that I was poorer and lived in conditions that were worse than most of them, we developed a truce.  I kept mostly to myself and read and studied on those long bus rides, and the other kids usually left me alone.

Years later, I would occasionally see a renegade black kid pick on a younger white kid, but usually the other black kids would shame the offender into not doing it again. We eventually self-policed that kind of behavior.  This did not mean that everything was peaceful.  Fights still broke out, but they would just as likely be between two white kids or two black kids.  

I survived my 6th grade year riding that damn school bus, but I will never forget being shamed and humiliated by a group who tried to make me feel “less than” because they made assumptions about who I was due to the color of my skin.  Later, when I became more aware of how blacks and other minorities had been treated that same way by whites over centuries, it did become easier for me to understand the frustration and hate. However, I would discover on multiple occasions later in my life that discrimination is not limited to race. 

Being treated as “less than” with no power or agency to change the situation can make you angry and bitter.  I was one of those people for a long time.  After my adolescence, I missed many opportunities for a deeper connection with others because of my own anger and bitterness. I was alone and wanted it that way, believing the myth of the self-made man. And I was determined to make that myth my guide in my own life.  Because of others who looked out for me, I somehow evolved and changed, but it was not an easy or smooth transition.

To this day, when I see or read of a situation where someone is being treated wrongly because of race, class or sex, I get that same awful feeling in my gut and in my chest that I had on that first day on the school bus in Louisa County when my ears were being flicked.  Being on the receiving end of bigotry or shaming is difficult to absorb, and I admire those who stand up against discrimination or social injustice. They are my heroes, as are those who help damaged people like me learn the importance of interdependence and the power of community.