Some thoughts after reading How I Shed My Skin, by Jim Grimsley

How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood by Jim Grimsley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Full disclosure first: I know Jim Grimsley and have met him a handful of times. We have friends in common and we are contemporaries. I am little older, but we both graduated from high school in North Carolina in 1973. We both grew up in a South in transformation, he in Jones County, which is Down East, and I, in the Piedmont, Orange County, Chapel Hill. We both attended UNC-Chapel Hill at the same time, although we didn't meet until many years later, I think at a science fiction convention.

I have a great deal of respect for Jim as a writer and as a fine human being. As he wrote in my copy of Dream Boy, it's always nice when we run into each other. That book, by the way, was an important of my own coming out, but that is another story.

I applaud the courage it took Jim to write this memoir, a frank and candid exploration of, as he describes it, "unlearning the racist lessons of a Southern childhood." I think of my own experiences in those years. While Chapel Hill is, in some ways, another world from Jones County, even so it has its own history of race and discrimination and turmoil and change and growth. Jones County Schools integrated in 1966. I attended Chapel Hill City Public Schools, and when I began first grade in 1961, I was in the second integrated class. That meant that there was one black child in my first grade class. I have not forgotten him, Odell Moses, a small child, even for a first grader.

The number of African American children in my classes, of course, increased and relatively quickly. The black high school, Lincoln, was eventually closed, as was the white downtown high school, and a new one built out of town. My older brother went to the new high school. When I was in sixth grade, 1967-68, all sixth graders were sent to Lincoln, which was, for a year, the sixth grade center. The library had to be upgraded to meet 6th grade standards. I had my first African American teacher that year, Miss Bowser. Junior high saw racial unrest and protest and in the high school, what were called riots. Now I wonder if that was too strong a term, given what was happening nationally in those years, including the anguish and pain of Vietnam (both another story and an inescapable part of the history of race and racism in the US).

I went to my 40th reunion, as Jim did and writes about here, in 2013. He describes a banquet where a former teacher talks of those years of integration and reminds the students that they were "part of the group that ended segregation, that [they] were part of something important in the world" (269). Jim was the only white person from his class in the room. That wasn't how it was at my 40th at the Time Out Restaurant, but like in the high school cafeteria, whites and blacks tended to sit separately from each other. That there were many integrated conversations and groups does validate the truth of how Jim ends this memoir: "Lawyers, judges, adults declared that the days of separate schools were over, but we were the ones who took the next step. History gave us a piece of itself. We made of it what we could" (275).

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Things are not as they were, there has been progress, slow and painful and times, even bloody. Racism stained American history, it still does. It's not over, it's not finished. But such honest and frank accounts as this book are helping us on our journey out of our past.



View all my reviews