Perfect for Waving

 

PERFECT FOR WAVING

by T. Allyson Jones

When I was a kid, I could hardly wait for Friday night to roll around so I could watch “The Dukes of Hazzard” on TV.  The sight of Luke and Bo Duke hoisting themselves through the windows of their hot rod ignited the closest thing to lust an eight-year-old girl can experience.

From my cross-legged perch on our brown vinyl couch, I belted out the theme song along with Waylon Jennings: “Just the Good Ole Boys.  Never meaning no harm.  Beats all you never saw, been in trouble with the law since the day they was born.” I squealed with delight as the reformed moonshiners sped off to fight small-town corruption in a bright orange, 1969 Dodge Charger.  A large black “01” was painted on the doors of the car they so lovingly called “The General Lee;” the white stars and blue stripes of the Confederate Flag splashed seductively across the roof.  

Every week, the obligatory high-speed chase found the General Lee soaring over a neighbor’s fish pond or over a pasture of terrified cows.  There were countless reasons that the Charger absolutely had to be air born.  When the front tires left the ground, I cupped my tiny fists into a makeshift trumpet and accompanied the General Lee’s horn in the first few bars of “Dixie.”

Once-out of misguided devotion to Bo and Luke-I hastily placed an order from a trading catalog I’d found in our mailbox.  For the bargain price of $2.99, the mail order company would send me a “unit” of the very flag that adorned the roof of the General Lee.  I highlighted the description in neon purple.  

6” plastic, all-weather Confederate flags.

Each on a wooden stick. 

Perfect for waving!

Six weeks later I learned what comprised a unit, and I became the proud owner of seventy-two plastic Confederate flags.  Long after I’d outgrown “The Dukes,” miniature Confederate Flags were still turning up under beds and behind chest of drawers. 

 

Back then, I had no idea that the play item I had ordered in mistaken abundance might offend many of my neighbors and classmates. I was an adult before I understood that the Confederate Flag was not at all “perfect for waving.” 

 

In fact, it would be almost thirty years before I would learn much of anything about the namesake of the building where I learned to read and write.  Yet it was on the playground of Charles B. Aycock Elementary School that my first lesson in racial discrimination would begin.

******

As an eight-year old, my infatuation with “The Dukes of Hazzard” was paralleled only by my love for jumping rope with my classmate, Renee Jordan.  Every day after lunch, Mrs. Elliot lined us up in the hall outside our third-grade classroom.  After commanding our silence for an unbearable thirty seconds, she pushed her small frame against the metal bar of the double doors that led to our freedom.  In an instant, twenty-five screaming kids bounded through the  doorway and spilled onto the playground.  Renee and I veered off from the pack, hands clasped together, and headed for the rhythmic sound of rope smacking the blacktop.

I loved watching Renee in motion, especially when the girls turning the ropes switched to Double-Dutch.   I loved the way she darted in and out of the ropes like a gazelle, stealthy and graceful all at once.  I loved the tight braids secured to the top of her head by ponytail holders, whose colorful beads clicked in harmony with the swishing of the ropes. I loved the wide, gap-toothed smile that stretched across her light brown face as she reached her hand out for me to join her mid-jump. “Allyson, Allyson,” she sang out, “come right over.  Your play days will soon be over.”  

******

Renee and I were constant recess companions that year.  If we weren’t jumping rope, we were sharing secrets in the large concrete draining pipe that had evolved into an unofficial piece of playground equipment.    Renee was worried that her family might have to move to Georgia after the end of the school year. “I heard Mama telling Daddy last night that if he loses his job at the mill, we’ll have to move in with my Granny.”

“Well, at least you wouldn’t have to worry about having mean ol’ Mrs. Brown for fourth grade.”  

  

I giggled before seeing the sad look on her face.

“Hey, don’t worry about it!” I elbowed Renee lightly.  “If y’all end up moving to Georgia -and that’s only a big if right now- you can always come back and visit.”  I shrugged and turned my palms upward.  “You can stay at my house.”  I had it all figured out. “Yeah, and you could go to church with me and hear my daddy preach.”

 “Sure, Allyson, whatever you say.” 

Renee’s tone made my stomach hurt.  I wanted to reassure her, and then I remembered a recent family dinner.

******

“Daddy, “ I had said as he passed me the plate of dinner rolls, “why are there no black people at our church?”

            Daddy didn’t answer me and Mama looked annoyed. We were eating one of those Banquet family-size, frozen entrees with thin slices of turkey floating in a pool of gravy.  My brother finished eating first and began to search for ways to annoy me.  There were several grains of rice left on his plate and he started flicking them at me like they were paper footballs.   Mama told my brother to put his plate in the sink and go to his room. 

          “Well?” I said again, as I stuffed an overcooked roll in my mouth.  “Why don’t any black people go to our church?” 
 

            “Black people have their own churches, Allyson.  If they wanted to come to our church, they could.  But they don’t want to.”

            I squinted at my father, who sat to my left.  “Maybe they do want to come to our church, Daddy.  Have you ever asked them?  You’re always talking about how we need our membership to grow and that we should invite new folks to come.”

            Daddy didn’t look at me.  He finished the last bite on his plate and got up from the table. “Eat your dinner, baby, and quit asking so many questions.”

******

As my ninth birthday drew near, my mother and I sat down at the kitchen table to prepare invitations to my party.  After printing all of the names on the tiny envelopes, I flipped through them and discovered one glaring omission.

I hopped up and grabbed for a small wastebasket that just happened to be in reach of my mother’s chair.  I fished out half of an envelope with the letters “R-e-n” spelled out in my handwriting. 

“MA-MA!” I yelled, as I dug for the rest of the envelope.

“I’m sorry, Allyson.”  Mama didn’t look at me.  She was suddenly fixated on an article in The Daily Independent, which she had retrieved from the other end of the table.

“But Mama, why?”  I pushed back the edge of the newspaper page, forcing her to look at me.  I sidled into the chair next to her and waited for an answer.

I knew that Renee in particular would enjoy the party games we had planned, like jumping rope in the front yard of the parsonage where we lived on Cardinal Lane.  Mama would tie one end of a jump rope to a dogwood tree and turn the other for my friends and me.  This way, she had explained, none of my friends would have to hold the other end.  It was brilliant!

“Mama!” I demanded as I jumped to my feet again, “Tell me why Renee can’t come to my party!  And stop pretending to read the paper.  You hate baseball, Mama!”

She wet the tip of her right thumb and peeled through the pages of the newspaper.  “Because,” she said softly, eyes still cast down, but now focused on the national news section. “If you start spending time in the homes of black girls, you might end up dating their brothers.”

I sat back down in my seat and folded my arms over my chest.

Dating their brothers?

 Neither of us spoke or even looked up for what felt like hours. 

“But, Mama,” I said finally, rolling my eyes toward the ceiling, “Renee doesn’t have any brothers!”

******

A few years ago, my mother presented me with a large brown box marked in her letter perfect pen, “Allyson’s stuff.” I loaded it into my car and then transferred it into a closet, where it remained untouched until the time came for me to move to a new apartment. When I finally opened the box, I discovered a treasure trove. Amongst tattered copies of S.E. Hinton paperbacks and Fisher Price Little People, I came across a bundle of 6” plastic Confederate Flags. I removed the rubber band securing the roll and took out one of the flags.

I walked over to the mirror in the hallway and stared at myself as I waved the musty, miniature flag in the air and found myself performing a kind of march. As I saluted my reflection a song came to mind: “You’re a grand ole flag, you’re a high flyin’ flag and forever in peace may you wave…”

Just then my tuxedo kitty, Barnabas, sounded a loud meow. It startled me.

“I know, Barney,” I said and squatted down to wave the flag in his face. “I’m singing about the wrong flag. There’s not a damn thing grand about this one.”

After gathering up the rest of the flags, I went into the kitchen and opened the cabinet under the sink. I pulled out the white trashcan and ceremoniously flung each flag into its mouth. By this time, Barnabas had joined me in the kitchen and I resumed our conversation, “And there’s nothing grand about this one, or this one. And certainly not with this one!” I threw in the last of the bunch and put the trashcan back under the sink.

I headed back into the living room and continued sifting through the box. Buried in the very bottom of the box I found my elementary school yearbooks. The thin booklets were printed in cheap black and white, with no attempt to conceal the staples in the spine. I found the one from 1981, my third grade year, and pulled it out for inspection. In the top right hand corner of the cover, my name appeared in large, loopy, cursive. “Charles B. Aycock Elementary” was centered over a snapshot of the front of the school, whose puny, leaf barren trees only enhanced the dullness of the antiquated building.

I flipped to the page of smiling 3rd graders in Mrs. Elliot’s class. I examined the faces of my classmates, recognizing only a handful of them. When I came to Renee Jordan, I paused and studied her picture. Her hair is piled up in two small fountains on each side of her head. She is smiling broadly but her lips are closed, hiding the pronounced gap I had fixed in my memory. She is content, but not jubilant like I remember her on the blacktop. But not sad, like that day in the lunchroom, when she pretended not to notice as I doled out party invitations to little white girls.

Copyright © 2012 by T. Allyson Jones