A Southern Line
We were always sad when James or "Benny" were no longer around after the harvest in late summer, and in fact, we became friends. I lost contact with the pair after I went off to college, but I understand that Benjamin went on to finish college, and James had stayed around Liberty and eventually had a fine family of which he was very proud.
Let's be clear about something here. I certainly do not pretend to understand the black experience in the United States. I am just offering some memories and reflections about growing up in a segregated town in in the South where the people were neither good nor bad any more than people in any other place in any direction of the compass--just people caught up in a vicious, negative pattern that had existed for centuries.
With the innocence of growing up in the country in those times, my brother and I were only dimly aware of the poverty of the black people who lived in the shanties in that special section of town that began with the "N" word. We knew the children went to one of those "separate but equal" schools, but we never had any contact. Every now and then at high school basketball or football games, it ran though my mind that maybe we should play the other Liberty High School.
I don't go back to Liberty very much though it is not a reflection particularly of the people who live there; they are like people eveywhere. There's just too much past in those parts for me, though white attitudes toward African-Americans have changed somewhat as far as I can tell.
Since the civil rights movement the schools are now successfully integrated. White people complained for a while, but in the end things worked out. The adults had the problems, not the children. From my sparse visits I saw for a couple of decades that blacks and white worked side by side in the furniture factories and sewing mills that used to predominate the area. Not
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