A Matter of Black and White in a Small School

When I was in the fourth grade at Central School, about 1959, I was asked to learn a song for an upcoming musical. It had two verses, the first of which went

"I'z a little pickaninny, blacker dan a crow
I'z as sweet a 'lasses candy, mammy told me so
She calls me tiny bit of sunshine
Calls me precious lamb.
Calls me tiny bit of sugar
Cause dat's what I am."

By the way, my fourth grade musical was a minstrel show done in black face. Central, which then had fewer than 250 students in grades 1 through 12, was just north of Madison, Ind., which is probably 80 or 90 miles south of the Mason-Dixon line.

After learning the song, I refused the part, not because of the racial message, but I thought it was sissy and I still remember watching from the wings as a classmate sang it to approving parents at the performance. The whole thing was vintage complete with "Mister Interlocutor", a standard minstrel show character who was essentially an emcee, The only other thing I remember was him telling the audience it would now see a dance by the Central Fifth and Sixth graders.

The reason I remember this has nothing to do with the theme. It was the age at which everything we learn sticks with us. I can still recite Longfellow's "Ship of State" which is from a longer poem. But somehow I'm glad I did because it's a part of history that needs to be told.

I didn't know any blacks. There none in our school and the only one I remember seeing in elementary school was a gentleman who worked at the Kroger Supermarket and whom my Dad was friendly with. About the only kind words I heard from relatives and friends say concerning blacks were about "cute little nigger kids." I think when they got bigger, they must have seemed less cute and I have relatives who never liked any black that showed leadership or decried the system. The "N" word got used a lot.

We are all born with innocence. It is things like minstrel shows, which treated a minority as cartoon characters, that soured it for many and as a friend of mine who taught in Madison in this decade said, there were many students he taught who showed unbelievable racism.

It is this innocence that led me not to recognize how segregated Madison, Ind., was during the 1950s. Of course, living in the country, I didn't see it every day. I had heard much later from a friend how when his family moved into the area, members were urged to join the now defunct country club so they wouldn't have to swim with the black kids at Crystal Beach, the municipal pool.

The real lesson came when I read excerpts of "All We Had Was Each Other," an account of the Madison black community published in 1998 by Don Wallis Jr., son of the editor of the Madison Courier. Even the country club/Crystal Beach issue apparently was an improvement as Wallis wrote that blacks once had to swim in Crooked Creek, which runs through town.

In one chapter, a trio of women born in 1948, a year before my birth, recounted segregation during their childhood, including the fact blacks had to sit in the balcony of the theater. In fact, I'm not sure from the book how much of the strict segregation, blacks not eating in white restaurants or being able to join white organizations, still operated during the late 1950s. My research tells me that school segregation and segregation of public facilities were outlawed in Indiana in 1957. One of the women recounted hostility when the elementary schools were integrated.

And there was a flash when I suspected I now knew why my parents never gave in to my request to sit in the balcony, which always seemed like a cool thing to do.

There are other stories that defy my memory of a quiet little town. The town wouldn't run sewer lines to black homes and Crooked Creek was full of sewage. Black women couldn't have their babies at the hospital.

There are some tremendous ironies here. Jefferson County, Ind., was a leader in the abolition movement in the 1800s and coincidentally had more than its share of residents who caught escaped slaves for the reward. One community built the Eleutherian College, an integrated, co-education college in Lancaster Township, which opened 1848. And there were those who burned down buildings students were to live in.

Even more ironic was the role of Central School (now Ryker's Ridge Elementary), which sits between the Ryker's Ridge Baptist Church and its cemetery. The church has always been proud of its role in aiding slaves to escape via the Underground Railroad and the story is they were hidden in the church. The caveat is that the blacks buried in the graveyard are buried in a corner far away from all the other graves.

Oh, yeah, the other public high school in Jefferson County is still called "The Rebels" with the requisite Confederate flag as the symbol. Unless things have changed recently.

I suppose the good news was that in the musical when I was in the fifth grade (chosen by the same teacher), I got to play a seal who rescued the hero. And the villain and I dueled it out vocally in a song that I realized years later was based on the quartet from "Rigoletto".

We had some class, after all.