Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [21]
All around me people seemed to speak in hushed tones perhaps due to the fact that my father needed rest and quiet. I had never been a noisy child but I was even more quiet now, believing that it was the only way to save my father’s life. The strain hit us all. My mother was tired and not altogether healed. Each of us carried with us the stress of the injuries and recovery period. Remnants of the stresses remained for months. We could have each retreated into our own hurt, and left alone, perhaps I would have. However, our circumstances did not allow it. We were so accustomed to functioning as a unit that we continued, even in our healing, to do so. Work, church, and school continued. In particular, farmwork had to be done regardless of sickness or death. We continued to attend church. Our neighbors and our community expected it. And Ray, JoAnn, and I continued with school. Our parents’ misfortune and the death of our aunt were no excuse for irresponsibility.
By 1968 my world and the world outside my home and family were changing dramatically. The county school board closed Eram as integration began to happen throughout the school system. I would transfer to Morris for junior high school. Even aside from the integration, going to school in Morris represented major change in my early life. Morris was a town—albeit a small town—with paved streets. It had a bank, a feed store, a hardware store, and a drugstore where, if I were lucky, I could buy ice cream while my mother shopped for groceries at Gale’s Market. Eram was just a school, standing alone, surrounded by fields of hay.
Though Ray started at the segregated Grayson High School, by 1967 he was attending the newly integrated Morris High School, along with JoAnn. Ray’s negative experiences with integration included having to be escorted out of Glenpool, Oklahoma, by local police because the fans there objected to his playing on the Morris High School football team. Amid the racist taunts and jeers his bus was led out of town after his team had won the game.
In my own transfer to Morris, I saw new opportunities—opportunities that were never realized. What I did realize was the signficance of race. My first experience with the tensions of integration occurred in Morris, which, despite the integration of its schools, remained an all-white town. Though not a “sundown” town in the purest sense, no blacks resided in Morris. We bought our groceries there, and went to the post office there, but we did not live there. Even as late as 1983, when a black family started building a home on the outskirts of town, arsonists destroyed it before it could be completed.
But even though the social structure set very real lines of demarcation between blacks and whites, my parents insulated us from extreme forms of racism. I often wonder at how they were able to do so, in a society not unlike the Deep South, where so much racial division still remained. By the time I was born my parents had many years, even generations, of experience living and raising children in a segregated society.
Despite the early Supreme Court challenges to Oklahoma’s racial separatism and despite the fact that the very first lunch counter sit-in took place in Oklahoma City in 1962, much of the civil unrest experienced in the South escaped Oklahoma. Those of us living in rural areas of Oklahoma watched the movement on television and read about it in the newspapers. As a family we watched and waited in silence,