I’m a Native Texan and usually when you hear people say that around here, it’s a statement of pride. I, however, have a much more complicated relationship with my home state. Texas is too vast and diverse a place to really write one article about living in the state. Truly, you would need an entire series of articles and even then I’m not sure you could do Texas justice. I choose to live in Dallas, more specifically a northern suburb of Dallas, not because I grew up here, but because I grew up in rural East Texas. I love the suburb that I’ve lived in for sixteen years because it’s close enough to where I grew up to feel like home, but not so close that it suffers from the small town issues I felt I needed to get away from. I have, however, made peace with it and have come to appreciate that a lot of who I am today is because I grew up in place I did not enjoy. For me, finding out who I am, came from seeing, for the first half of my life, who I did not want to be.
East Texas is not all bad and once I set the scene for why I knew from an early age I could never spend my life there, I will let you know a few of the things I experienced growing up that I do have a great deal of sadness my own children will never experience.
For all the progress blacks have made in this country, my hometown was still segregated when, the day after graduation, I packed my car and left in May of 1985. 1985? Segregation? Yes … it’s not a typo. While it’s true the schools and town were not “officially” segregated, for all practical purposes they were. White kids and black kids did not play together on the playground, sit by each other in the cafeteria, or live in the same neighborhoods. The “N” word was freely spoken in my house and in my mother and step-father’s circle of friends and our extended family. It was spoken among the white kids at school and used to describe that certain part of town where the majority of the black families lived. There were two neighborhoods in my town of 10,000 souls that were nicer than the one in which my family lived. No black families lived in those two neighborhoods or mine. There were “black” churches and “white” churches, although only the “black” churches were described according to race. It was well understood that white girls did not date black boys and I vividly remember with great sadness the one mixed race child in my high school. I still wonder if she knew, surely she must have, that neither the white kids or the black kids liked her because, as everyone said, “She thinks she’s white.” Of course, no one minded at all, when black students excelled on the playing field and took my high school football team to the district playoffs my sophomore year.
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