AS PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED, I was in an accelerated sixth grade class that had two African-American girls who I distinctly remember today. Their names were Joyce and Sharon. Unlike Joyce, Sharon was not one bit shy and was quite a talker. She was not intimidated by being in a nearly all-white class. Including me, there were six boys in this class, all of whom were white.
One day one of the boys said to me, “I dare you to ask Sharon if she’s an Ethiopian.”
I was quick to take a dare and my fellow student knew it. I would have never taunted either Joyce or Sharon with those racist words we all know. I am not a cruel person and by nature I do not enjoy hurting people’s feelings. However, I knew that Ethiopia was an African nation and I knew that this would be a mild slight against Sharon, but in my arrogance and ignorance I truly thought that Sharon would be too dim to know what Ethiopia was.
“Hey Sharon, are you an Ethiopian?” I asked deadpan.
She fixed a look on me that could have guided missiles.
“Ha-ha Tommy Graves. Very funny.”
And she kept on staring.
In a very, very low voice I croaked out, “I’m sorry. Just kidding.”
I could feel the crimson heat in my face. I slunk down in my chair and hoped to God she wouldn’t tell on me.
Another day in my sixth grade class I asked the other students if they had seen a mule-driven wagon the previous day that rolled down my street. This was in the 1965-66 school year and these were the last years in which on rare occasion some older black farmers from South Memphis would hitch up their mule-driven old wagons and drive them down our street on the way to a farmers’ market about a mile away. We could hear the cloppity-clop of the mules and the driver loudly calling out to them from blocks away and it was a novel enough occurrence that we would stop our play and wait to greet the old farmers as they passed and wave at them.
No one else happened to have seen this particular farmer and his mules, but the conversation steered onto farms and farm animals. My grandfather on my mother’s side, Clarence Rogers, kept a small farmyard when I was a youth so I was used to cows, chickens, pigs, and other farm animals. I knew enough not to ever cross a fence where there was a bull, and to stay far away from a sow with her piglets. I wasn’t so fortunate when I tangled with what I had been warned was a “bad” rooster. My whole young life I had chased chickens just for the fun of it—all boys do—and it was inconceivable to me that a rooster was capable of any kind of violence toward me at all.
So I caught that rooster unawares and chased him into a culvert where he was cornered. “Ha-ha, I won,” I congratulated myself and turned to walk away.
All of a sudden I felt claws digging into my back and wings flapping about my head. I tore out of that culvert screaming to high heaven in full view of my Granddad and my uncle, the rooster beating my back half to death with his wings. I ran at least a hundred yards at warp speed before the rooster decided he had taught me my lesson and went back to his hens. Until the day he died, Granddaddy never tired of telling anyone who would listen how I had met my match with his rooster.
I told the story of my showdown with the rooster which provoked great laughter among my classmates. Joyce, the quieter of the two black girls in my sixth grade section, mentioned that she had never seen a chicken. Not in real life, anyway. This absolutely stunned me. I could not imagine anyone having not seen a chicken.
I asked her, “You’ve never been to a farm before?”
“Nope.”
“You never went to the Fair where they have the chickens and cows?”
“Nope.”
This both perplexed and saddened me. This just wasn’t right, I thought to myself. Everybody needs to know what a doggone chicken looks like. This made me realize just how homebound and neighborhood-bound many of these black children were. Many of them had never traveled more than a few miles from their neighborhoods. There were many Mississippi transplants among black Memphians. The blues songs so familiar to those in the Mid-South were filled with barnyard references (“The Little Red Rooster,” for instance.) But there were just as many who hadn’t left Memphis for several generations.
Right then I decided I needed to hatch a plan for Joyce and any others in our class who hadn’t ever visited the country to go with our family to Arkansas to my grandparents’ place out in the country where they could see real farm animals. I thought of how we could all cram into the backseat of my parents’ ’58 Buick and how we could all sleep on the floor in my grandparents’ living room. And my Grandmama could fix us all a whopping great big country breakfast with the best biscuits in the whole world.
I am a hatcher of plans. I’ve been like Mickey Rooney as Andy Hardy my whole life. Full of ideas and enthusiasm. “Let’s put on a show!” But the other shoe always drops. On my way home from school I began to think of the social logistics of getting Dad and my grandparents to host black kids on such an excursion. Eating together? That was a maybe. Sleeping together in one or even two rooms? No way. Plus getting permission from Joyce’s parents to take her 160 miles into the Jim Crow South with white folks. No, that might not work either.
As we sat down to our family dinner that evening, my brain was racing. How could I make this work? Finally, I spoke up.
“Daddy, guess what? The colored girl in my class, Joyce, said she’d never seen a real chicken before. What do you think of that?”
“Ain’t that somethin’?”
“I wish she could see some of Granddaddy’s chickens.”
“Yeah, that’d be nice. I guess she’s never done any traveling out of Memphis.”
“Nossir, I guess not.”
And that’s precisely where we left it. I couldn’t count the times in the 50-plus years since that day that I haven’t thought about Joyce and wanting to take her with us to Arkansas. After that school year we moved to the all-white suburbs of Parkway Village. I never saw Joyce again nor did I ever hear another word about her. Joyce, and Sharon too, are now lost to time.
Maybe it was the thought that counted.