A Southern Line
In reflection, what I remember most about those Saturday matinees is the silence from that dark upper story. Little children are not quiet; they are boisterous; they yell and scream and laugh. It must have been a tedious nightmare to sit in almost total silence, sometimes the whispering between friends or a suppressed snicker at a Stooge drifted down into the first floor melee.
Movies were very cheap in those days; for a while only nine cents for a child. Town children used to stand outside the theater asking for pennies from their friends and neighbors so they could "go to the show." I never saw any of the black kids doing that. And of course there were two sets of bathrooms, one for the whites and one for the "coloreds."
Sometimes I would see a black child going in the special side entrance; It didn't strike me very hard at nine or ten years old. I barely noticed and went back to my chemistry set or astronomy books or rode bikes with my brother around our grandparents' farm.
In growing consciousness by junior year in high school, I had begun reading James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and especially Ralph Ellision. I read Ellison's The Invisible Man, a novel that shows only too well what was going on in those days prior to civil rights movement. That book is far scarier than the most horrible blood sucker or acid-tongued alien because the characters in the novel are us, we who need as a species to grow in the consciousness of our connections at all levels, racial, soul or otherwise.
"I am an invisible man, this classic of the American experience begins. "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." If he registers on white consciousness at all, it is as "a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy."
I never really knew any black children until I was about fourteen, when my father hired
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