Secrets

Everybody has secrets: husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, even best friends. Hi, I’m Jess Morgan. I’ve had this secret all my life. Well, not all my life. I guess I’ve had it, let me see, since I was at least eleven years old. It just seems like all my life, considering I’m on the far side of collecting my Social Security benefits.

Two years before my big secret, I had a best friend in third grade named Greg. He was a black kid. I guess you call them African American now. He was pretty well dressed for neighborhood. Maybe his dad worked on the street department for the city or something. Heck, he dressed better than me, but that was okay. Anyway, he and I got into competition to see who could count to million the fastest.

I shared some of my scrap paper I got from the print shop down from our house. The people down there would give us bricks of paper all glued together. Well, every spare minute we would pull out our stacks of paper and start counting again: after reading, before class, after lunch. We even began staying in from recess, but then the teacher came back in and made us go outside. However, after recess, we’d rush back into class to be first ones there, pick up our pencils and papers and started counting again.

Our teacher, old Miss Henson, encouraged us. It was two less boys she had to contend with; I guess. We would take turns going up to her desk and asking what came next after 150,599, etc. We had a rule that, if we made a mistake, we had to go back and correct it. I went back more than Greg, but I managed to keep up with him some how.

One day Greg was looking over my shoulder, and Miss Henson said, “You know, boys, there is more to numbers than just counting.” She knew we were fascinated by the big numbers. We paid special attention to what she showed us on the board about adding and subtracting.

Then one day my sister bought herself and me a pencil holder. This wasn’t just any pencil holder. This pencil holder you could multiply numbers with it. I was playing with it, sliding the little white thing back and forth on the little red box. I asked Miss Henson what it was for. She showed me how it worked. “Wow, that’s great! I can multiply!”

I showed Greg how it worked. He was intrigued by it too. However, he was still playing with it when class started and he put it in his desk. When recess came I didn’t go out because I wanted my pencil holder back. I went over to Greg’s desk and asked for it back. He grabbed it out of his desk and nearly threw it at me. He said, “You act like I’m going to steal it, like some nigger.”

“You are a nigger,” I said. He hit me so hard. It knocked the breath out of me. I went down on the floor, but I was the biggest kid in the class, and he wasn’t going to get away with this. I came back up, but every time he hit me harder. There was pure hatred in every punch. It hurt, but his rebuff hurt more.

The teacher came back in and broke it up. She sat us down in our seats and asked what happened. “He called me a nigger,” Greg said.

“He is a nigger,” I said. Greg jumped out of his desk and was coming at me again.

“Sit down! Sit…down! No talking or anything, just sit there!” she yelled. Then she went and sat at her desk. In a few minutes the other kids came in, and Miss Henson got up and wrote two words on the black board: Negro, and nigger.

Can anyone tell me what the difference is between these two words? Everyone looked around, but no one said a word, not even Greg. She went on to explain that Negro was a race of people with little darker skin. It is a good word, but that nigger was a bad word, meaning slave, underling, less than human and was never to be used in her classroom, ever.

I went home that evening and asked my mom, “Do you know the difference between Negro and nigger?”

She continued putting supper on the table and said in passing, “Well, some think there is a difference, but they’re all niggers in my book.”

I didn’t answer her, but I had lost my best friend because of it. Greg never spoke to me after that day. He threw all his counting in the trash. I kept mine until the end of third grade. Miss Henson saw what I did when I went to the trash can. She pulled me over to her desk. “Jess, do we understand the difference now.” She didn’t have to explain. I knew what she meant. I looked over at Greg.

“Yeah,” I said.

Two years later I was in Mrs. Stockton’s class. She began to read about the "Underground Railroad," and how the run-away slaves would come right through our area and people would feed them and hide them in their basements. There were even tunnels to the river. If they could make it to Canada they would be free! We were all excited, and she had us begin painting a mural for our classroom wall. Everyday Mrs. Stockton would read to us and then we would work on our mural.

One day I asked my mother if she had ever heard of the "Underground Railroad." Then came the secret which I have kept all these years. She said, “Your great grandfather was a bounty hunter and took run-away slaves back to their owners.” I was crushed. I knew from what the teacher had read to us that some of the slaves didn’t make it back alive, and some were beaten to death by their owners for an example to other slaves, letting them know what would happen to them if they got the idea to run away. But, these were people!

Steve was supposed to paint the bounty hunter taking two slaves back to their owners, but the other kids gave him such a hard time he wouldn’t work on the mural at all. I was happy the teacher didn’t ask me to paint the bounty hunter. The bounty hunter in our young minds was the devil himself. Steve was the best artist in the class, and that’s probably why the teacher asked him to paint bounty hunter.

Finally, the teacher had Steve paint the steamboat. And it was the greatest steamboat ever. The teacher finally painted the bounty hunter herself with the two slaves with chains around their necks.

The teacher wanted the mural done for the open house when our parents came to the school. I didn’t have to worry. My mother never came to those things. I was glad too. In my mind, I didn’t want her to see my great grandfather, the bounty hunter.

I never told anyone my great grandfather was a bounty hunter, returning slaves back to their owners. If I had, I had visions of being killed out on the playground. I joined in when all the other kids called the bounty hunter every name they could think of: swine, dog, Satan, waste material.

Everyday I had to walk by that mural. The bounty hunter became my great grandfather, and I was so ashamed. Finally, Mrs. Stockton took it down, and asked if anyone wanted to take it home. No one volunteered to take it. Peggy, a little prissy thing, said, “I don’t want that evil man in my house!”

Of the whole mural, which was maybe ten feet long and three feet high, the bounty hunter took up only a space of four by four inches. But it had all of our attention. I was happy when it gone.

The secret was becoming unbearable. I dreaded going to school to face it everyday. But, sixty years later it still hangs over my head. In the Bible it says: “… visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation…” I understand that first hand.