St. Matthew’s, South Carolina: summer, 1974. I was riding in a mini-van with a group of kids from the Northeast on a four-week trip through some of the American States that map south of the Mason Dixon Line.
I walked into a local grocery store in St. Matthew’s. I picked up some snacks and got in line at one of the two check-out stations. All the people waiting in front of me moved out of the way and allowed me to go before them. Thanking them, I assumed it was one of two local customs. 1. I had very few items. 2. They could tell by my northern accent I was a visitor and thus, were being courteous.
As I left the grocer, I came to a sickening realization. They let the white boy go first.
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Our traveling band consisted of 12 white kids (six boys and six girls) and two white, male adults in their early 20’s, taking on the multiple roles of leaders, drivers, counselors and confidants.
On our escapade south, we visited the mountains of Appalachia in West Virginia. We drove up a steep, single truck-wide road, lined with evergreens climbing up one hillside and often, on the driver’s side, a cliff vertically falling off into a ravine. We arrived at a cleared plateau where a wooden floor had been set down for dancing. The music was local and live. I can’t recall what instrument set the beat, but there was someone clapping spoons between his free hand and his thigh, and there was a man playing fiddle. Having been classically taught viola, I was acutely aware that he was holding his instrument in a manner to which I wasn’t familiar. Rather than placing the base of the violin under his neck, he leaned it loosely on his hip, holding the bow in his fist. I’d never heard or seen this method of playing. I’d known that sometimes country and blue grass fiddlers press the instrument against their chest. And I had seen a fiddler on television seated, holding the fiddle upright, (like a cello), with the base of the instrument resting on his leg.
Local men and women, all white, began to informally dance on the wooden floor, the way the characters of Jack and Rose had free-styled in the movie, “Titanic.” On this mountain field, it was a weekend tradition, when weather permitted. Everyone was warm and welcoming to our group of northern teens. One beer bellied local man, donning a thick, dark brown beard and smiling hazel eyes began talking with me. Asking where I was from, he teased about Yankees being in Confederate country. If we mysteriously disappeared, no one would be the wiser. He then slapped the side of his thigh and with a Santa Claus laugh said, “only kidding, son!” I nervously laughed. I wasn’t afraid, but I was a nervous kid in an unfamiliar world.
He asked what church I belonged to. When I told him I was Jewish, he stared at me. He looked at the top of my head. “I’ve never met a Jew before. Where are your horns,” he asked? He was serious.
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When in southern Virginia, we visited a woman who made quilts by hand. When I got back home to New Jersey, I asked my mother if we could buy one. We contacted the woman. She sent me a patchwork quilt at a cost of $60. Wrapped in plastic from cleaning, I still have it.
We went to Nashville’s Opryland, where I threw up after riding the spinning tea cups one too many times. And we visited what was then, the new home for the Grand Ole Opry.
The farthest south we traveled was Georgia, canoeing for four days through the Okefenokee Swamp, which stagnantly rests on the northern border of Florida. There were alligators everywhere, quietly moving through the murky waters. Two days in, we spent the night on a lean-to in the middle of the swamp whose roof housed an enormous, foreboding hive of bees. We left them alone, they left us alone. On the fourth and final day, I was stung on the tongue by a wasp. I immediately drank an ice cold can of root beer, which stopped any swelling. Though my father, a doctor, later told me that he thought it was the cold that allayed the sting, I firmly defend that it was the root beer itself that did the trick. Not that I’m willing to test that theory again.
While in Georgia, we also went to St. Simon’s Island and visited with a local gospel singer, Bessie Jones. At night, we stayed in the town of Brunswick, with an African American family that one of our adult leaders knew personally. My main memory of St. Simon’s Island was the bath-warm, clear ocean and the large turtles on the white sands.
But South Carolina left the strongest Confederate impressions on me. While staying in St. Matthew’s, we were invited to set up our tents on the front lawn of a local black family’s home.
On a hot and humid afternoon, they took us to a resort lake so we could cool off in the calm water. As we found an empty spot on the beach, we looked around us. We were the only white people at the lake. This was still the segregated south of the 1970’s. After hours of swimming and relaxing in the sun, we got back in our mini-van. We discussed that for all of us, it had been the first time we were somewhere where we were not only the minority, but the only white people in sight. It was my first experience of having an inkling of understanding what it must be like for a lot of black and brown people who live, attend school, and/or work every day in a primarily white society.
When we got back to our tents, they had been sliced open and ransacked.
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This all happened 50 years ago. Most of my life is behind me now, obviously. It’s not that I need to idle in my past. Memories good and not so, I see as worthy of investigating and uncovering. There are places in my unconscious past I haven’t revisited in years. I believe, like therapy, writing about them helps me to understand certain parts of the world in which I live and to see more clearly what may have influenced who I have become as an adult.