Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury

On May 27, Bryn Mawr awarded 167 bachelor of arts degrees. Sixty percent of the class was headed straight to graduate or professional school. My friends and teachers had assumed I would go to law school, but I could not imagine devoting myself to the details of torts or civil procedure. If I decided to pursue further education, I knew it would be for graduate work in history. What had always captured me intellectually was the broad sweep of ideas and social forces. And having grown up in a changing and not-changing Virginia, I knew how those assumptions and circumstances exerted their power through time, often creating silences and blindnesses that undermined human possibility. From at least when I had written to Eisenhower as a nine-year-old, I had recognized the force and the burden of history; I understood the words of the white southern poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren: “History is what you can’t / Resign from.”11 Coming to terms with the past would ultimately become an intellectual and professional commitment as well as a personal necessity. I grew up to be a historian. My page in the Bryn Mawr college yearbook, 1968. On my right wrist I am wearing the bracelet my grandmother gave me the night my mother died. But not yet. I had decided I needed to be in the real world for a while. I had loved school since I began kindergarten at the age of four, and at Bryn Mawr I had become caught up not just in learning

Mid-twentieth-century Virginia congratulated itself on having devised the “Virginia Way,” a distinctive form of Jim Crow in which Blacks and whites lived peaceably together in lives of “separation by consent,” in the words of Douglas Southall Freeman, a Richmond newspaper editor and renowned Robert E. Lee biographer. Freeman acknowledged that this was a social order designed to perpetuate “the continued and unchallengeable dominance of Southern whites,” who, he told his readers, would work to provide the assurance of safety and security to Black Virginians in return for their acquiescence in the status quo. “Southern Negroes,” he explained, “have far more to gain by conforming than by rebellion … by deserving rather than demanding more.” Elite white Virginians, he posited, had inherited a legacy of gentility accompanied by the imperatives of noblesse oblige; Virginia’s Black people, in turn, were “inherently of a higher type than those of any other state.” Nowhere else, Freeman insisted, “are the Negroes more encouraged through the influence of friendship for and confidence in them, on the part of whites, to be law abiding and industrious.” But never to claim equality.

There is a clarity about how children see the world that the complexities of adult life often muddy. And there is a fervor children feel when they believe adults have misled them or disguised or hidden the truth (p.89)....Fear and doubt might be mitigated or assuaged, but something even more profound was at risk. And that was trust. If so many things were not as they seemed, who had misled me? Who and what could I believe. (p. 105)

In an increasingly serious world, these young women had never been asked or expected to be serious. (p. 13)

We live our lives in accordance with the stories we tell ourselves about what those lives ought to be.

Martin Luther King, Jr., had closed his speech at Groton—with words he told us he’d heard from an old Black preacher: “Lord we ain’t what we want to be; we ain’t what we ought to be; we ain’t what we gonna be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.

I knew I had had no choice. I had had to fight with my mother in order to survive.

I was attracted, rather, to the logic of Christian ethics, to the fundamental fairness of the Golden Rule.