WHAT DID YOUR PARENTS TELL YOU

When I was in high school, my father became aware of my brother's and my feelings about civil rights. This was around 1964 or 1965 near the height of the movement. So, when he was together with us and a group of his friends from work he would tell nigger jokes and try to get us to laugh. My father was a good storyteller, and aside from the racist themes, the jokes were funny. All his adult friends would be laughing, and it took all the moral disapproval of adolescence to resist them and sit there stony-faced.

My mother's attitudes were more complicated. She was in the hospital for awhile when I was ten, and when she got out the Navy agreed to pay for a maid for a short time to help her out. This was a black woman named Dorothy. There were five of us kids and one hot day when the ice cream truck came round Dorothy asked us if we'd like a popsicle. Of course we agreed and she bought us each one at ten cents apiece. Later, my mother heard about it, and was furious. She told us, "You don't let someone who works for $5 a day buy you popsicles." I don't know what minimum wage was then but in 1964 it was $1.25 an hour.

Later, when I was about 12 or 13, my mother talked to us about the possibility of going to a Catholic school. We had gone briefly to Christ the King when we first came to Virginia but changed to public school because the tuition was too high, and now we were poor because my mother had divorced my stepfather and he wasn't paying child support although he had adopted us. So, the school she was thinking of sending us to was in a poor neighborhood with low tuition and a high enrollment of black kids. She asked us kids if we would mind going to school with the Negro children. We all said that we wouldn't mind. Then she said, "What about if you were playing games with them, and you had to hold their hands. Would you feel alright about touching them?" Again we all answered that it would be fine. But we didn't end up going to the Catholic school. The reason may have been financial, as my mother took home $190 a month from her job as a ward clerk, and even low tuition for the four of us in school may have been too much. Or, maybe she couldn't get beyond her own feelings even to give us a Catholic education. I don't know because she never mentioned it again. (Solla, white woman born in 1951)

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