Chapter 4:
Transformation
“Never run from the truth,” Pinky told me. She encouraged me to admit to my folks that I had accidentally broken an old porcelain figurine they treasured. “What would Jesus say about that?” she added. I ultimately admitted my transgression to my folks and faced punishment, but I had to admit that it was better to take my medicine than to live a lie.
Our Black housekeeper, Pinky, always gave me advice such as “never run from the truth.” After our return from Holland, she was the closest woman to me other than Mother and my sister, Dotti. My folks hired her to take care of the house and to watch over Dotti and me, but none of us really looked upon her as an employee. When she stayed late, we always insisted that she eat supper with us, and my father expected her to join us at the table. 
Often Mother, with me tagging along, drove her home into one of the blackest parts of New Orleans, the lower Claiborne Avenue area. This was in the late ‘50s, when one could travel such streets safely, before the advent of the “love and brotherhood” brought by the civil-rights movement. 
Pinky had the same authority over me that Mother and Father had. If I didn’t obey her, my folks would punish me just as if I had disobeyed them. Pinky did housework and prepared snacks for me. We had conversations about a thousand and one subjects. She always attempted to derive every opinion from a solid Christian point of view. Scolding me for improper behavior, she would always intone, “What would Jesus say about that?” The words were really in the form of a declaration rather than a question, for the answer was always obvious: “Jesus would not approve.” To Pinky there were no shades of gray to any ethical question, only clear right or wrong. Pinky influenced me to be opinionated — to think an issue over and then take a definite position rather than just sit on the fence. This is a trait that has stayed with me.
Concerning racial issues, Pinky had a traditional southern Black attitude. She insisted on using the toilet in the utility room rather than the main bathroom, and if we picked up some takeout food at a restaurant, she always used the “colored” service area. She was opposed to socializing with White folks other than in her work.
One day I asked Pinky why she had no problem with segregation. She answered simply and eloquently, “‘Cause I want to be with my own kind.” Although she was not of my “own kind,” when she died, and I looked into her open coffin at her kind face, I saw only someone for whom I cared and who cared for me. She was someone who had made me laugh, who punished me when I went wrong, and who had encouraged me when she saw me doing something responsible or creative. 
When Pinky passed away, I felt as though I had lost someone who was more family than friend. The pain of her loss was the worst I had felt since the Grand Canyon plane crash that killed my aunt and uncle and so hurt my mother. Mother and I were the only White people at Pinky’s funeral. 
The music and the preaching at the funeral were elemental and powerful. Pure, unrestrained emotion poured out of the pastor’s mouth, almost as if the meaning of the words were secondary to the way in which he projected them. He cried with pain and sadness, he laughed deeply and warmly, he threatened us with the wrath of God, he cowered before Him, he raged in fury at the Devil, he begged for forgiveness and he passed his state of grace on to his audience as easily as a drunk would pass a bottle of whiskey. I had never experienced anything like it in the Methodist church my family attended. At my own church the emotions were restrained and subtle, while here in the Black church they were laid out raw. I was more fascinated by it all than moved. What touched my heart that day was the thought that Pinky would no longer be near when the service ended. 
The tone of the service seemed out of place with my memories of Pinky. It was hard to associate her with the wild goings on in that Black church. But the way the congregation talked back to the preacher called to my mind the times Pinky would iron clothes while watching a soap opera on television, all the while interjecting dialogue as if she were in it herself. “Good goin’, girl,” Pinky would say, her eyes on the television, as she pressed one of Father’s shirts. “He two-timin’ her, yeah.... Un — huh, that’s right.” When I first saw Gone with the Wind, I knew about Mammy and Miss Scarlett — I had experienced it.
As I grew older the civil-rights movement was maturing as well, and by the time I was 11, the South was in turmoil. A social structure that had existed for hundreds of years was being completely overturned at an astonishing speed. At first I did very little thinking on the race question. I was far more concerned with my love of the outdoors, science, and my escapist world of reading (mostly of scientific books and only a little political material). 
Instinctively, because of my love for the Confederacy, I initially identified with the traditionally conservative position of the South in opposition to racial integration. I saw the civil-rights movement simply as a destruction of our Southern way of life, but I hadn’t thought very deeply about the issue. As civil-rights pushed to the forefront of the news in the early ’60s, I began to read a great deal about the issue in newspapers and magazines, and as I did I grew more sympathetic toward the Negro cause. 
Practically everything written about the subject in books, newspaper and magazine articles, as well as everything on television — led me to believe that the civil-rights movement was based on lofty principles of justice and human rights. The media proclaimed that these policies would lead America to racial harmony and material progress. 
I read articles proclaiming that there is no significant genetic difference between Whites and Blacks other than skin color. Racial differences in poverty, illegitimacy, crime rates, drug addiction, educational failure, were said to be caused purely by environmental differences among the races. The media blamed Black failure and dysfunction on segregation and White racism. Ultimately, the poor circumstances of Black people were blamed squarely on White evil.
Some leading academics even maintained that there is no such thing as race; that race is an arbitrary and therefore meaningless way of classifying mankind. Other scientists went so far as to argue that the Black race is in fact not inferior, but really the progenitor of mankind — perhaps even superior to Whites. One account I read purported that the fact that Blacks have less body hair than Caucasians is a sign of evolutionary advancement and superiority.
Some stories were about the suppression of Blacks in slavery and about discrimination and brutality against Blacks since emancipation. The heart-rending accounts would provoke sympathy and outrage in any person sensitive to human suffering. At the same time I came across articles about the “great Black civilizations of Africa” and the “great Blacks in American history.” 
I found lessons in our nationally distributed lesson books at my Sunday school that claimed God opposed the concept of racial differences and discrimination. For the first time in the 2,000-year history of Christianity, it seemed, a new sin had been invented: racism. Many church leaders of all denominations began to speak out forcefully in opposition to racism and segregation, and they were rewarded with extravagant praise in the national media.
Even my patriotic values were enlisted in the cause of racial integration. I read articles in major magazines that maintained that racial equality is proclaimed in the Constitution of the United States. And frequently quoted were the well-known words of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. . .” 
In addition to Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence, the following line was used repeatedly in articles: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people (the Negroes) are to be free.” One summer I traveled with Father to Washington, D.C., and saw those very words inscribed in magnificent foot-tall letters on the inspiring Jefferson Memorial on the Potomac.
In the Gettysburg Address, which was quoted almost as often as the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln seemingly paid homage to the concept of racial equality: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” 
For a fiercely patriotic young man who idolized men like Davy Crockett, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, these quotations were very persuasive. My belief that America’s greatest heroes had endorsed racial equality, helped influence my own attitudes. 
Integration of public schools was a major issue at this time, and the media portrayed as good thing for America. Judging by what I saw on television, integration simply meant one or two little Black girls seeking to attend a formerly all White school. On the opposite hand Whites were shown unchivalrously screaming racist invectives — and attacking the quiet and well-dressed Negro children being escorted into school. 
Over the years I saw on TV and read hundreds of dramatic portrayals of Blacks being hurt, oppressed, enslaved, discriminated against, falsely accused, whipped, lynched, spat upon, raped and ridiculed. Because I was idealistic and aspired to be fair and generous and chivalrous — and because I was under the influence of the media — I came to believe that racial integration would elevate the Black people to their true ability and thereby guarantee justice for them and progress for all. 
There is no exaggerating the impact of television during the ’50s and ’60s on the issue of integration. The newness of live television coming into the home, sanctified the media newscaster and made him seem bigger than life. In awe of the technology, many people uncritically accepted what they were fed through their televisions. I was no exception. 
As always, I found great enjoyment in my books and science magazines. Sometimes, under the covers with a flashlight, I would read long after Father called for lights out. I also enjoyed my chemistry set and continued to collect wild pets. When my family moved to Jefferson Parish, far away from the swamps, I had to give up the menagerie of pets that I kept in our garage and large yard in Gentilly Woods. I set free the reptiles and amphibians and carefully adopted out the other creatures among my friends. At school I played for the junior varsity basketball team, and I began to discover the beauty and mystery of the opposite sex. 
It was an exciting time for me: I was throwing off my childhood and beginning to question the accepted dogmas of the world around me. I was rebelling, challenging and questioning everything. Without knowing it, I was about to undergo a drastic change in my viewpoints.
My father often took his car to Gary’s Super Service, a small Black-owned garage in a Black area just on the western periphery of the New Orleans’ central business district. Like most pre-teen boys, I was fascinated with automobiles, and I was pleased when Gary offered to teach me about cars if I would do some work around the place. For months, twice a week or so, I would ride the streetcar down to his shop after school and work on cars. 
I met many Black people during my after-school stays at Gary’s Super Service. I often ate supper in a tiny Black restaurant three doors from the garage and talked for hours with everyday Black residents of New Orleans. It was a rewarding experience. I not only learned about automobiles; I met interesting people. And I discovered a great deal about the Black race. 
What I learned about them, I liked. But it also seemed that the liberal line was not entirely correct, for it was obvious that racial differences went far beyond skin color. It would be difficult to categorize all the distinctions I noticed. In fact, I made no effort to catalogue them at the time, but their differences ranged all the way from physical characteristics to more subtle differences such as extreme aversion for work in cold weather. On cold days, when I felt invigorated, my Black co-workers seemed lethargic. 
When I helped Father in his small construction firm, I had often worked side-by-side with White laborers and sometimes Blacks as well. Many of the men were needed only for some day work, so Father literally hired them off the street near the charity missions in the central city. Some of these men were good workers, some poor. But the White ones were decidedly less excitable and animated than my co-workers at Gary’s Super Service. 
At the garage the Blacks I encountered were very elemental, almost child-like in their dramatic emotional swings. They were quick to laugh, easy to anger, prone to cry at small disappointments or troubles, moody and temperamental — although their moods were usually felicitous rather than threatening. At risk of sounding like a narrator of The Tales of Uncle Remus, I vividly recall the singing, whistling, and humming that often filled the shop, and how they occasionally semi-danced as they jauntily walked from one spot to another or swayed rhythmically to their own inaudible tune right where they stood. It was no myth, they really could sing, and in Gary’s shop they all did. I enjoyed their company, but I didn’t sing.
A few months after Gary’s shop closed, I saw the British anthropologist Ashley Montagu on a television talk show and immediately read his book, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. The subject interested me enough that I read Black Like Me, an autobiography about a White man who tinted his skin and frizzed his hair and chronicled his unjust treatment across the South, and To Kill a Mockingbird.  I sympathized with the plight of the Negro. The event that most appalled me and reinforced my egalitarian attitudes was the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham Black church where four little Black girls had been killed. For weeks the news and other media were filled with horrific descriptions of the event and the sounds and scenes of the suffering of the victims’ relatives. I had become convinced that the cause of integration was a noble one and that its opponents, as evidenced by the strained faces and crude words of the protesters outside the schools and by the church bombing, represented everything ignoble, ignorant, intolerant and uncivilized. 
I found it easy to be a racial egalitarian. Judging by the books, newspapers and magazines I read, all the most prominent and admired actors, singers, scientists and politicians believed in racial equality. I was proud to share the sentiments of these people of fame and accomplishment who were working to get us into the bright new age ahead. I was also aware enough to know as well that White racism may have been popular in the Deep South, but holding such views could be quite damaging to a young man who wanted to be an astronaut.
In my 13th year, I was shy and bookish and idealistic on one hand, and physically hard from my time in the outdoors on the other. I had no doubt that the civil-rights movement and integration would prevail and that when racial discrimination ended, that everything in America would work out just as wonderfully as the egalitarians predicted. The barriers were falling across the South; the Supreme Court continued to strike down Jim Crow, and Black political registration and power were growing dramatically. One thing was for sure, politics had no great interest for me. 
In an eighth-grade civics class at Ganus Junior High School, the teacher gave her students an interesting assignment. We were to choose a topic dealing with current events and take a polemical position on it, then research that topic and defend it rationally in class. I chose as my topic “The Case for Racial Integration of Education.” After each of us had chosen and taken a position, she told us that we had probably taken a topic we probably agreed with. So our assignment now became to research and take the opposite point of view from what we had originally chosen. The assignment set my mind in turmoil. 
I went to the school library that afternoon to research “The Case Against Racial Integration of Education.” In the card file I found listed many books on the subjects of racial equality and integration of education. I had, evidently, chosen a topic that would be easily researched. But as I examined the books, I found that one after another argued in favor of integration. Even in this small church-school library, there were at least a dozen books promoting the civil-rights movement and its heroes, but no books on the other side. Why? It was obvious that there was a lot of popular opposition to integration. I had seen the newsreels of its White opponents, and segregationists were being elected all over the South. Whites rioted in New Orleans to prevent integration of the schools and almost every major politician of the time opposed it in principle. Yet, amazingly, I couldn’t find a book against it.
The next day I went to the Doubleday bookstore on Canal Street hoping to search out some books opposed to forced integration of public education. I found dozens of books promoting integration, and some even touting Black supremacy. But again, I found nothing opposed to integration. Even the books that supposedly offered a balanced analysis of the issue were decidedly one-sided in their presentation. Finally, to make some progress on my assignment, I resorted to gleaning the anti-integration arguments from pro-integration books. 
Those arguments were uneven. The liberal civil-rights books made the arguments of segregationists seem stupid and banal. I read that Whites are opposed to integration because of sexual insecurity; that Whites want to oppress Blacks so they can keep them economically subjugated and exploited (The Marxist interpretation); that segregationists hate Blacks simply because of their color. A few of the books suggested that some segregationists thought that Blacks were less intelligent and more violent than Whites — a distinction that they argued would lead to a marked decline in American education. The liberals curtly dismissed such arguments by saying that “no scientific evidence supports the contention that Whites are smarter than Blacks,” and they repeated in a litany, “The only difference is the color of skin.”
I was in a quandary. I had to defend a position that had no supporting evidence and one that I morally opposed. When I opened the morning paper a few days before my school assignment was due, I saw something that gave me a glimmer of hope. The Times-Picayune reported a meeting held at the Municipal Auditorium by the New Orleans chapter of the White Citizens Council. It quoted Judge Leander Perez of Plaquemines Parish as saying that racial integration would ultimately destroy the quality of the New Orleans public school system.
There was little of substance in the news article, but learning about the existence of the Citizens Council heightened my hopes of finding information from the segregationist viewpoint. After school I rode the old Canal Street streetcar downtown to the Citizen’s Council offices on Carondolet Street, expecting only to find a few obscure and discredited sources for the segregationist position. 
A middle-aged woman, Mrs. Singleton, with bleached-out freckles and bifocals greeted me with a deep Southern accent more characteristic of neighboring Mississippi than of New Orleans. She was busy with a mailing, so I hurriedly asked if she had any books that opposed the integration of education. With a slightly exasperated manner, she pointed to bookshelves that were ten feet tall and stretched across an entire wall 15 feet across. “Take a look, “ she snapped. 
What I saw amazed me. They had hundreds of volumes that supported the idea that racial differences go far beyond skin color; that heredity rather than environment are the keys shapers of intelligence and personality; and that there is a historical record of racial integration and intermarriage in many nations that indicates racial mixing retards progress and leads to lowering standards. 
I looked over books by prominent geneticists, psychologists, anthropologists, historians, sociologists and educators. They took the point of view that no matter how we might wish it otherwise, race does matter. A book by Audrey Shuey, The Testing of Negro Intelligence, assembled 384 separate scientific studies on intelligence and race, all of them showing a marked difference between the races. Another book that caught my eye was Race, Riots and Revolution by Teddy Roosevelt, a president whom I idolized for his conservationism and patriotism. 
All of this came as a shock to me. I found an opposing viewpoint on racial integration that is literate, reasoned and intelligent — even supported by famous Americans — not simply the ranting of backwoods White supremacists. It is a viewpoint on race the popular media in America would not even acknowledge. 
I didn’t have much money — it was 1963 and I was 13 years old — so I asked the lady at the desk which book she would recommend. She picked up a paperback copy of Race and Reason: A Yankee View by Carleton Putnam and put it in a bag for me with a handwritten receipt. 
The voice of Pinky crept into my mind as I walked to the Canal Street streetcar, and I wondered, if I betrayed her memory by even reading such material. Was I doing her some wrong even to consider the idea that the races differ? 
But then Pinky’s admonishment never to run from the truth came back to me as if she had been right there speaking those words again from her own mouth. If I should not run from the truth, then I sure should not be afraid to confront a falsehood either. I imagined Race and Reason would be an easily refutable, shallow exposition of race prejudice. All the same, I had an uneasy feeling about it. 
I had no inkling, when I walked out of the drab little office on Carondolet Street, that I was about to read a book that would change my life.