Voices in Our Blood by Jon Meacham Page B

mowed the grass and clipped the hedges in the broad green lawns, they rode down the streets in their horse-drawn wagons, they were the janitors and cleaning-women in the churches and schools and the laundry-women coming to the back doors for the week’s wash. On the main street especially, on Saturdays, the town was filled with them, talking in great animated clusters on the corners, or spilling out of the drugstores and cafés at the far end of the narrow street. Their shouts and gestures, and the loud blare of their music, were so much a part of those Saturdays that if all of them had suddenly disappeared the town would have seemed unbearably ghostly and bereft. The different shades of color were extraordinary, for they ranged from the whitest white to the darkest black, with shades in between as various and distinct as yellows and browns could be. One woman in particular, whom we saw walking through the crowds on Main Street on Saturday nights, could have passed for a member of the women’s choir in the white Baptist church. “There’s that white nigger again,” someone would say. “I wonder what the
others
think of her?” Not until I was fourteen or fifteen did it begin to occur to me to ask myself, “Are we
related?
” And it was about then that I began hearing the story of the two white men who had Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner every year with three Negroes, who were the white men’s half-brothers.
    There was a stage, when we were about thirteen, in which we “went Negro.” We tried to broaden our accents to sound like Negroes, as if there were not enough similarity already. We consciously walked like young Negroes, mocking their swinging gait, moving our arms the way they did, cracking our knuckles and whistling between our teeth. We tried to use some of the same expressions, as closely as possible to the way they said them, like: “Hey,
ma-a-a-n,
whut you
do
in’ theah!,” the sounds rolled out and clipped sharply at the end for the hell of it.
    My father and I, on Sundays now and then, would go to their baseball games, sitting way out along the right field line; usually we were the only white people there. There was no condescension on our part, though the condescension might come later, if someone asked us where we had been. I would say, “Oh, we been to see the nigger game over at Number Two.”
    â€œNumber Two” was the Negro school, officially called “Yazoo High Number Two” as opposed to the white high school, which was “Yazoo High Number One.” We would walk up to a Negro our age and ask, “Say, buddy, where you go to school?” so we could hear the way he said, “Number
Two!
” Number Two was behind my house a block or so, a strange eclectic collection of old ramshackle wooden buildings and bright new concrete ones, sprawled out across four or five acres. When the new buildings went up, some of the white people would say, “Well, they won’t be pretty very
long.
”
    Sometimes we would run across a group of Negro boys our age, walking in a pack through the white section, and there would be bantering, half-affectionate exchanges: “Hey, Robert, what you
do
in’ theah!” and we would give them the first names of the boys they didn’t know, and they would do the same. We would mill around in a hopping, jumping mass, talking baseball or football, showing off for each other, and sounding for all the world, with our accentuated expressions and our way of saying them, like much the same race. Some days we organized football games in Lintonia Park, first black against white, then intermingled, strutting out of huddles with our limbs swinging, shaking our heads rhythmically, until one afternoon the cops came cruising by in their patrol car and ordered us to break it up.
    On Friday afternoons in the fall, we would go to see “the Black Panthers” of Number Two play football.