The C.L.R. James Institute: Texts: "The Haunting" by W.L. Mills (3)

The Haunting

W. L. Mills

Part Three

The Saved

I grew up inside the vestigial organs of the Old South's Dixieland hierarchy. In terms of my parents, I have no experience of their particular apartheid nor their remembered/retained humiliations. I do remember the concrete rigidness of my parents sitting in the middle of a Vanderbilt faculty luncheon, complete with potent rumballs, immaculate porcelain, white table cloths and black servants. In the bright spacious dining hall the smell of the “civilized” rose from the plates, saturating our clothes and reeking of the tongue-in-chic humor of my father's fellow Bourbon South scientists and intellectuals. I do remember standing in the line of a department store as my maternal grandmother talked loudly of my father's appointments, honors and accomplishments. Her proper articulation engulfed the ears of the surrounding white housewives as they glanced at me and my grandmother with patronizing smirks and half-bitten tongues flaming with class difference. Maybe they needed a second glance to see the Agner change purse or the Polo insignia on my shirt? Meanwhile, Dear Dear's proper articulation of the Queen's English did not fluctuate nor quiver. Her lungs continued to blow well contoured vowels from her lips which rounded each syllable in the same fashion my father

blew rings of smoke from his pipe.

These things, situations, signifiers and behaviors are part of a process that gravitated our individual “self” to the center of a monolithic collective soul devoid of Caliban's vices and emulating Ariel's mass appeal. In the post Civil Rights South we were not a threat, just winged.

Our African blood was visibly diluted as my family's various hues gleamed from restaurant tables and market lines. In my family as well as in others, the solvent selected as the solution to differentiating our diluted American Black blood from the Africans on National Geographic was our Indian ancestor. Admitting white blood was a problem, it conjured up rape, slavery and abuse; nothing noble everything savage. Besides, who would believe you as your hairpick cracked and popped with each upward stroke from your flat top. Indian blood offered you more than an alternative, it was truth that didn't have the back bite of the overseer's slave whip. It offered true lineage and the possibility of normalcy because it can be conceived that Jake Red Feather really loved sista Mary Jenkins in a way massa never would have or could have in our collective myths and splintered histories.

My post-colonial education began in the desegregated South as I was bused from an affluent all-black suburb in Nashville to the outskirts of the rural working class white community of Ashland City. In class we talked about the Indians in two modes: as American culture

dictated and as our individual worlds demanded. Our culture only made them flat one sided self sacrificing characters. The settlers seemed to wonder upon them like Snow White tripping on an elf. Yet, when we sat down and talked about our own third grade world, comparing notes on what Benny's father said about black people and what my mother thought about Republicans, the Native American world sometimes emerged. Benny announced that his grandfather was part Indian as his red hair, freckles and green eyes made him much more of a spectacle than my skin ever would in a desegregated school. I told him that my grandmother's people were also. With this shared knowledge of a shared ancestor, somehow race had a new meaning. Looking back, I can now articulate what I lacked the words to express. This new meaning was grounded in the knowledge that there were other things to be besides black and white.

Due to desegregation and the need to keep the races in a “perceived” balance, I attended six schools by the time I entered the ninth grade. My high school was located in Whites Creek, Tennessee on Old Hickory Boulevard. The road was named after President Andrew Jackson, who enslaved Indians and fugitive slaves in the Florida territory and initiated the Trail of Tears which left a fourth of the Cherokee Nation dead after marching from the Appalachian Mountains to reservations in the Oklahoma territory. Andy Jackson is Tennessee's proud example of leadership and

statesmanship. His tenacity and strength was as hard as a hickory stick, so our textbook world dictated. Despite this rhetoric the demands of our real world called.

Each year we received a new homeroom teacher. Homeroom had no other purpose but paper work and group discussions. During my senior year I received my third and final homeroom teacher. I have forgotten his name but not his crass haughty ego that superimposed upon everyone around him the redneck machismo so prevalent in the outbacks of Davidson County, Tennessee. One day, with a fellow faculty member standing at the open doorway he asked all the whites in class how many of them had “Indian blood” in their family. A couple raised their hands. He then repeated the questions to the black students. About two thirds raised their hands.

As my hand waved towards the ceiling, I imagined a marble mantle supporting old black and white photographs and Victorian figurines. In the middle of this display is a crystal vial with gold flake oak leaves at the top and frosted asterisks arranged in a random pattern progressively collecting on the bottom fifth of the container forming a solid frosted tip. In the vial was a viscous dark red liquid. On the brass stand that keeps the vile erect is a small engraved sign that says “Indian Blood.” Well, it is in the family, of course.

After the hands were tallied the teacher looked at his guest and said, “See?”

This white man's specific taste of the exotic, his

exalting of our difference and proving of points is how I became aware of this Indian mystique about “us.” This fine mist was always hovering around us. Indian blood was just that, blood. The true nature and story of Native America was not of any relevance. It was nonexistent. The Indian mystique that grew around me was evidence of my place in the American melting pot; but, this never evolved into a coherent conversation, just assumptions, direct questions, and careless affirmations. None of the inquiries about my Indian ancestor had any thought behind them and neither did my responses. This is what I remember. This is colonialism.

Title & Contents

Part One
The Wounded
(page 1)

Part Two
The Bereaved
(page 13)

Jim Murray, Director (make inquiries here)
Ralph Dumain, Librarian/Archivist & Webmaster

Uploaded 4 July 2001