The Voice of History

by darcelle infante

“I’m gonna knock that smiley grin right off ya face,” said Fat Bertha.

 Those words were my introduction to forced integration in the South. That was more than 35 years ago. I was in eighth grade at Workman Middle School in Pensacola, Fla. That first day scared me a little, or maybe it was just culture shock—the kind of culture shock that I had experienced the year before on my first day of Southern school. I had transferred to Workman during the middle of the seventh grade because my family moved from Indianapolis to Pensacola. I’ll never forget my English teacher. On my first day in her class, Miss Stephanie read Annabelle Lee, by Edgar Allen Poe.

The full effect is better spoken, but to my Northern ears, it sounded something like this:

Ah was a chiile and she was a chiile

In this kingdom bah the sea;

But we luved with a luv that was more than luv—

Ah and mah Anabelle Lee. …

And so, all the naight-tade, I lie down bah the side

 Of my darlin’, my darlin’, my life and my braede,

 In the sepulcher there bah the sea,

 In her tomb bah the sounding sea.

By the time schools were integrated, Southern accents were starting to sound familiar to me. But Bertha was still a stranger. I admit I was frightened the next time I saw the girl, whose round, chocolate-brown face leered down from the railing on the third-floor stairwell with spittle dangling precariously from her lips. Surely she won’t spit on me, I thought, if she were a boy—maybe. Bertha moved away from the railing before the saliva had a chance to drop to the second-floor landing where I stood.

My saving’s grace during the first stormy year of integration was C.C. Willis. I met C.C., or maybe it was spelled CeCe, in Science class. C.C. had a smile as wide as Texas; she was a class clown, too. Our teacher was a screamer and one day he kicked a metal trash bin across the room when students refused to quit whispering while he was writing on the chalkboard. C.C. could barely contain her laughter. She would often turn around in her seat and flirt, giving me her full-faced grin. C.C. was a tall, wiry-thin girl with messy hair and big teeth. She was the blackest person I’d ever seen, made more so by the gold on her front tooth that gleamed when she flashed that toothy smile. There was a little star cut into the gold cap of that tooth, which stood out starkly—bright-white against all the gold and black.

Apparently, C.C. and I had one thing in common: purple. During eighth grade I had an entire electric purple outfit made out of crepe (a full-rounded skirt with a short vest and a violet raincoat that came down to about an inch below the knee). I liked to wear purple patent-leather boots with silver heels with that ensemble. One day when I had it on, C.C. turned around to me when the teacher wasn't looking. “I like the way you dress,” she said.

After that day we were rarely apart and the next time a menacing Bertha cornered me in the hall, C.C. Willis was right by my side. “You leave my girlfriend alone, Fat Bertha,” C.C. said, sticking her small body right in Bertha’s face. Taken aback, Bertha moved on. “I’ll get you,” she said over her shoulder.

I asked C.C. why she’d called Bertha fat. “Weren’t you afraid she’d punch you?”

 “That’s her name,” C.C. told me. “Fat Bertha. She’s OK. She’s just trying to scare you, Dar C.,” she said, pronouncing my name just like hers, with a C at the end. “I won’t let her mess witch you.”

Getting used to Southern speech was one of the many adjustments a Yankee girl had to make when moving to the South. Southerners said “Let me switch on the light,” instead of “turn on the light.” I didn’t mind that so much but I could barely stomach the y’alls. The kids at my Hoosier high school said “you guys” and later I would hear the kids in Pittsburgh say “youins.” What kind of word is that? The other thing that really bothered me were sentences like this: “I seen him at the ballpark yesterday.” I wasn't an ace at English grammer but it seemed to me if those kids' parents spoke correctly, they'd know to say that they saw instead of seen someone.

Some people think Southerners are racists but the South is where I became integrated. I was never exposed to black people in Indiana; Hoosiers weren’t prejudiced, it’s just that none of my white friends there knew any blacks. Before integration, I had very little exposure to black people in the South. There were only two blacks at my school; they were sisters and their father was a doctor. I often felt sorry for those two during P.E., where their skin color peppered our lily-white teams.

The school system in the South was supposed to be “separate but equal,” but if they had been equal, "forced" integration wouldn't have been necessary. I saw that the first day at Booker T. Washington High School, where I was bused. The school was at the end of a dirt road in an area I had only passed by on the way to a nearby shopping center. The first week the work crews were still trying to clean up the school but it looked old and worn down compared to the new junior high school that I'd attended the year before in a white neighborhood. The lockers were painted dark brown to try to cover up years of multi-colored graffiti and dirt but most of them were still dented and broken and couldn't be closed all the way. The atmosphere was chaotic and the white kids wouldn't listen to many of the black teachers.

I had only two black teachers that first year. One of them was an old man who called all the girls sugar foot and he was as nice as he could be. He was a cheerful pixie kind of man, about 4 feet tall and looked very dapper in the suits he wore every day. The boys were unruly but not nasty because we didn't do much work in his class; it was easy. He seemed to think he was social chairman of the halls, flirting with the girls and yelling at the boys who raced through the halls, "slow down you rascals" (rascal was his favorite nickname for most of the boys). I felt sorry for my other black teacher because she could never quiet the class down. She had dentures that fit poorly so she hissed and spat when she tried to talk. She never completed a full sentence before someone was mocking her. She didn't seem very smart but it was hard to tell because of all the interruptions. In both classes it was obvious that these teachers were used to coasting through the day.

Private high schools started springing up, too, after integration was mandated. The public school system lost many of its high-income white kids, at least in Pensacola. I even switched over to a private high school one year because it was called “Liberal Arts High School” and my favorite Science teacher (the mean screamer) had transferred to that school. I can’t remember his name now but I do remember that he gave me a book to read called “The Cross and the Switchblade.” You see, he was a mean Christian man who didn’t like working in shabby schools with black students.
I liked him because he was strict and screamed, which kind of made me feel at home, I guess. He also had a way of making me understand the mysteries of science, which wasn’t a subject that I was immediately drawn to—it took a lot of work.

That educator was a great science teacher because science was his passion, but after a week or two at the private school he was removed from the academic department because the rich kids complained that he yelled at them. He wasn’t civilized enough to teach science at “Liberal Arts,” so they made him a Physical Education teacher. I never thought he was quite the same after that. He still yelled on the basketball court but a part of his honor had been chipped away —now he had a chink in his armor. That teacher had a family to support so he swallowed his pride and stayed there in whatever capacity the city’s upper crust would allow. I didn’t and transferred back to Washington High.

I think I fit in better at Washington High. We had more soul than “Liberal Arts” and my father was neither a doctor nor lawyer. Things weren’t always smooth at Washington but that was part of the fun. Every other week, it seemed, we’d tell our parents that there was a rumor of race riots and they'd make us stay home from school. I probably didn’t get a very well rounded educational experience in high school but I did get a lesson in equality, citizenship and conflict mediation. I also got to hang around with one of the happiest girls I’d ever met: C.C. Willis.

C.C. would unexpectedly turn up in my life many times over the years. She usually appeared when I was in a new situation or was having some kind of a problem, like the time I decided that I didn’t want to go to college and got a job cleaning pipes at the Monsanto Paper Mill. During the lunch break at Monsanto I was sure that I must be in the middle of a nightmare. Did people really go to lunch and be called back to work by the deafening moan of an industrial whistle? At the Monsanto plant they did. Luckily, C.C. was the first person I saw on my first day at the plant. She’d been there for a while and knew the drill. Even though I lasted only a week, she and I worked as a team and that made it fun.

Since moving away from Pensacola, I’ve lived in Pittsburgh, Tampa, San Francisco and Los Angeles but I’ve never lost my affection for Southern accents. Whenever I meet someone raised in Texas or Louisiana, I remember my past by the slow honeyed words that drip from their lips and I often wonder if C.C. Willis is still living in Pensacola and whom she’s smiling at today. I used to think C.C. was my own personal angel and I wouldn’t be surprised if I ran into her here on the street one day. That’s the kind of girl C.C. was, totally unpredictable; a little like the South.