Voices in Our Blood by Jon Meacham Page A

was rooted so deeply in me by the whole moral atmosphere of the place that my own ambivalence—which would take mysterious shapes as I grew older—was secondary and of little account.
    One fact I took for granted was that Negro adults, even Negro adults I encountered alone and had never seen before, would treat me with generosity and affection. Another was some vague feeling for a mutual sharing of the town’s past. (I remember going with one of my friends and her parents to take some food to an old Negro woman who lived alone in a cabin in the woods. The old woman told us about growing up in Yazoo, and of the day she saw the Yankee soldiers coming down the road in a cloud of dust. “I looked out the window,” she said, “and there was the War, comin’ at me from down the road.”) Another assumption was that you would never call a Negro woman a “lady” or address her as “ma’am,” or say “sir” to a Negro man. You learned as a matter of course that there were certain negative practices and conditions inherently associated with being a nigger. “Keeping a house like a nigger” was to keep it dirty and unswept. A “nigger car” was an old wreck without brakes and with squirrel tails on the radio aerial. “Behaving like a nigger” was to stay out at all hours and to have several wives or husbands. A “nigger street” was unpaved and littered with garbage. “Nigger talk” was filled with lies and superstitions. A “nigger funeral” meant wailing and shouting and keeping the corpse out of the ground for two weeks. A “white nigger store” was owned by a white man who went after the “nigger trade.” There were “good niggers” and “bad niggers,” and their categories were so formalized and elaborate that you wondered how they could live together in the same town.
    Yet in the midst of all this there was the ineluctable attraction of niggertown, which enclosed the white town on all sides like some other world, and the strange heart-pounding excitement that Negroes in a group generated for me. I knew all about the sexual act, but not until I was twelve years old did I know that it was performed with white women for pleasure; I had thought that only Negro women engaged in the act of love with white men just for fun, because they were the only ones with the animal desire to submit that way. So that Negro girls and women were a source of constant excitement and sexual feeling for me, and filled my day-dreams with delights and wonders.
    Whenever I go back there and drive through niggertown, it is as if I had never left home. Few of the old shabby vistas seem changed, and time has not moved all these years for me: the strong greasy smells are the same, and the dust in the yards swirling around the abandoned cars, and the countless children with their glazed open eyes on the porches and in the trees and in the road. The Negro grocery stores, the ones my dog and I drove past in the summers, are still patched and covered with advertisements, and the little boys still wait in front for a white man with his golf clubs to drive up and shout, “Caddy!” The farther one goes into niggertown, up Brickyard or down nearer the town dump, the more dank and lean-to the structures: at first there will be the scattering of big, almost graceful houses, wholly painted or partially so, suggesting a slightly forbidding affluence as they always had for me—but back along the fringes of the town there remains that dreadful forlorn impoverishment, those dusty and ruined wooden façades which as a child would send me back toward Grand Avenue as fast as I could get there.
    In a small town like this one in the lower South, where the population ran close to half and half, one of the simplest facts of awareness was that Negroes were everywhere: they ambled along the sidewalks in the white neighborhoods, they