George Mason University

The way of the transgressor is hard.

This I know because I often had to stay after school to write these words in painful script. My teacher in both the fifth and sixth grades, Miss Cain, seemed to think that the force of the lesson would be diminished by anything less than perfect penmanship. No matter how I labored, my writing wavered, my lines were crooked, my letters were misshapen -- transgression upon transgression.

Miss Cain seemed to have been born to detect and punish transgressions. She was a small, neat person with a sharp nose, a clenched mouth, and iron-gray hair that was trained into tight coils. Everything that came naturally to me and my classmates -- talking, laughing, daydreaming -- she found not only distasteful but sinful. I suppose she saw herself engaged in a losing battle to save us from the scorching fires of Hell, but I know that I preferred the style of the other fifth-grade teacher, Miss Melton, who gave us dancing lessons once a week. After lunch we’d gather in the school auditorium, both girls and boys, and Miss Melton would put “The Skater’s Waltz” on the record player. Then she’d glide around by herself, showing us the steps, until she chose a partner, a boy to clasp to her large, powdery bosom.

Were those my choices? Was the world divided between the Miss Cains and the Miss Meltons, the transgressors and the waltzers? Of course I didn’t really put the question like that, not at that age, but I could certainly see that these teachers, and all grownups, operated in accordance with impossibly complicated rules. And I could see that the world they had created was full of dangers and divisions. Sometimes I think that my chief goal as a child was to steer clear of grownups and their strange convictions.

I grew up in the South. I wasn’t born there and left when I was thirteen, but I will always think of myself as a Southerner. Or, since my father was from New York and my mother from Pennsylvania, as a Southern Yankee. My family was Jewish and Catholic and we went to Pennsylvania every summer, where we still owned a small blue house, but I am from Brewton, Alabama. No doubt the fact that we never really fit in, that we were always outsiders in Brewton, heightened my apprehension of the place and helped sink its hooks deep into my memory and imagination.

I was a toddler when we moved to Alabama shortly after World War II, and one of my earliest memories is of attending Mass in the Escambia County Courthouse. This empty part of south Alabama was mission country, and there was not yet a Catholic church. The priest, Father Horgan, was straight from Ireland and spoke in a rich, thrilling, nearly incomprehensible brogue, even when he spoke in Latin. In the courthouse, he set up the altar on a plain wooden table. The congregation knelt on the bare floor in a room furnished with folding chairs and brass spittoons. This was the very room, my father told me, where the Klu Klux Klan had met the night before.

Of course I believed him, though I know now that he was stretching a point. It suited him to dramatize our situation, conveying to his children -- eventually there were eight of us -- a sense of daring in the practice of our religion. He particularly liked to describe how the ancient Christians, under fear of persecution and death, had worshipped in underground catacombs. He’d been to Rome. He’d seen the catacombs.

So Rome and the catacombs and Ireland had to be factored into my scheme of things, along with chewing tobacco and the Klu Klux Klan, though I never saw a Klansmen in a white sheet. Nevertheless, I was absorbing the lesson that the world had been and always would be structured along the lines of serious conflict, and I was one solemn little altar boy, learning the Latin responses so that I could take part in the mysterious ritual that was performed not only at the courthouse but occasionally in our house, too, on the sideboard in the dining room.

Father Horgan was our holy man. On Sunday mornings he drove a circuit from one town to another, traveling in a black Ford whose trunk was full of the tools of his trade -- the shiny vestments, his chalice, the communion wafers, and a small tabernacle fitted with brass doors and surmounted by an iron crucifix. I revered him, though it puzzled me that he was subject to the same afflictions as ordinary mortals. The shoulders of his black jacket were always dusted with dandruff, and he used Scotch tape to hold the gauze pads on his neck. He had a problem with boils.

He’d been uprooted and dislodged, but so had we. We’d moved to Alabama because my grandfather, a textile manufacturer, was looking to relocate his mills in a place where he could cut his operating costs. His name was Horace Levy, and he was a sweetheart of a man who loved the New York Yankees, the songs of Jimmy Durante, and movies of Abbot and Costello. As a child I equated his Jewishness with his affection for vaudeville and New York City, where we went every summer to visit his sisters, Winnie and Jewel, and ate foods -- tongue, gefullte fish, brisket -- that were never served in Alabama. I had no grasp at all of the chain of events that had driven him first to Pennsylvania, where he met and married my Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother, and then to Alabama, where he named one of his mills after me. Stephen Spinners was the dye plant. Here the narrow fabrics -- heavy ribbons, mostly, used for seam binding and hemming -- were brought to be finished. They arrived in large, loose coils, hanging from wooden battens that were placed on a wooden contraption like a mill wheel. As it revolved, the ribbon was dipped repeatedly in the dye vat. The fumes were powerful and scalding. After they’d taken their color, the ribbons were left to dry on large metal racks, then spun onto spools by black women who spoke and sang over the clatter of machinery. Their hands moved at blur speed and I couldn’t understand a word they said.

My father worked for my grandfather, and they disliked one another, but I can say this for both of them: they were fair, and they imparted to me a sense of respect for the people who worked at the mills, every one of them. It wasn’t until later that I learned how my grandfather had defied local custom by hiring so many black workers, but I most certainly got the message than I was not to speak slightingly of them or interfere with their work.

This was the South of the 1950’s, the separate-but-equal South, and there were rules within rules. Too many of them, frankly, and the local rules didn’t always line up with the rules of our household. Some of my school friends said nigger, a word that was banned in our household. Nevertheless, I was aware of the high tension when one of the black women who worked for us, Iva Lee, decided that she wanted to attend Mass. By that time our church had been built, and Iva Lee and her family showed up in their Sunday clothes. This was surely one of the first times that black and white people worshipped together in Brewton, and I still carry the image of that solemn family at church, an image that was fixed in memory because the occasion felt so momentous.

I have to add that Iva Lee did not become a Catholic, and in fact stopped working for us suddenly. She was a drinker, and one day she simply announced that she was leaving and never came back. The circumstances of her departure were not clear to me then, but I knew that as much as we prided ourselves on our open-mindedness and efforts to be fair, there was a great gap between our lives and those of the black people with whom we came in contact.

There was Ruth, for instance, who took care of me and my brothers and sisters, and liked to scare the bejesus out of us. What was she thinking when she took it upon herself to cure my mumps with sardine oil? She was the black woman who took care of all us kids. I was seven or eight years old, lying quietly in my bed, when she came into the room with a bottle and spoon. “This sardine oil,” she told me, “will keep your nuts from dropping.”

And then there was Lamar, the one-legged janitor at the elementary school who liked to mess with our minds. “Everyone have eat some shit,” he’d tell us kids when we had to stay after school and he got a few of us alone. If we argued, he grew agitated and threatening and came up with ingenious scenarios to illustrate the many ways in which this shit-eating could have occurred.

Where did grownups get these ideas? When you got right down to it, there wasn’t really all that much difference between the punitive attitude of Miss Cain and the spooky ramblings of Lamar and the teachings of Father Horgan, who told me that my soul was like milk in a bottle, all white until contaminated with sin, which was black, and while a venial sin only tainted the milk a mortal sin turned it all black as coal. How was a kid to make sense of all this?

I couldn’t. No one could, really, and perhaps it is not fair to lump all the growups together. Yet they did seem -- all of them, black or white, male or female, priest or janitor, parent or teacher -- to be driven by necessities that even to my child’s mind seemed like distortions.

Now, decades later, they still seem like distortions, and I think I can make out more clearly the way that the distortions are wrapped around fears and lies and hatred and intolerance. My real education has been mostly a process of trying to squeeze out, drop by drop, the lessons that so many adults taught me -- not maliciously, I know, but because they believed that they had my best interests at heart. Nobody ever deliberately taught me to hate, or to fear, or to lie, or to be intolerant, but those messages were coded into every lesson that set people apart and above one another -- whites above blacks, Catholics above Protestants, Yankees above Southerners, rich above poor, and so forth and so on forever and ever.

My real education, in other words, has been the effort to recover the purity of heart and mind in which all those invidious grownup distinctions are once again as bizarre and meaningless as they were to me as a child.