Andy Duncan
I am here because Alexis Brooks de Vita heard me read from another personal essay in November 2023, as part of the Virtual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. The passage she later discussed with me was this:
He died about a century too soon, but how Poe would have loved the convention circuit!—the myriad opportunities to read one’s work aloud, to pontificate during panels (from the dais and, even more thrillingly, from the audience), to self-promote and/or self-destruct, to noisily join movements and, even more noisily, quit them, or just to plant oneself in the lobby or the bar or the green room or the hospitality suite and jack into the community vibrato, the fleeting thrill that the entire convention—nay, the industry—nay, the cosmos—Eureka!—revolves around you! …
Online conferences have much to recommend them: cheaper, more accessible, more diverse. Poe may not have recognized those as goals, but we certainly do. By we, I mean I. Those in-person conventions, after all, were for many years minefields for aspiring writers less privileged than myself—who were women or Black or queer or otherwise didn’t fit the dominant paradigm or just lacked a patron with deep pockets or someone at home to mind the kids.On the strength of this slender reed, Alexis asked me to write another personal essay, on the theme of inclusion, and to submit it to this journal. For reasons she didn’t know, but that I trust will soon be evident, that was a big ask—but hey, I’ll be 60 soon, and my neo-Confederate brother just died, and it’s time to talk about these things.
It is always time to talk about these things.
I best can start to do that by telling the story of a speech I made in my South Carolina hometown in 2019—but in order to set that up, I have to go back much further, long before my birth, to the Greyhound bus stop at the railroad crossing across from the New Deal post office in Batesburg, the post office from which my father years later would “carry the mail,” the post office where I would grow up, knowing well every room in it, even the big, echoing sorting space that was off limits to the public, because I wasn’t the public, I was Mr. Ed’s boy, and at the Batesburg post office I was always welcome and safe. But already I digress. I call this first section:
A Hometown Atrocity
Here at the Greyhound bus stop, in the deserted downtown streets of Batesburg late one night in February 1946, no one is welcome and safe, I am not yet born, and my father, maimed in the Philippines in the war, is still in the veterans’ hospital in Augusta, Georgia, the very town where scores of other veterans were just discharged a few hours ago.
A number of them, still in uniform, still in their ribbons and medals, are aboard the bus that is just now hissing and sighing and settling to a stop right in front of a parked police car that’s sitting there with the town’s police chief in it, just in case.
One of those uniformed, decorated veterans, a sergeant, is a Black man named Isaac Woodard. Like most long-distance bus riders back then, especially in the middle of the night, he has no idea where he is. He just knows he’s not home, not yet, nowhere near. This town’s only sign of life is the chief now getting out of the police car.
Beckoned over, the chief speaks briefly to the driver, then boards the bus, looking for that uppity Black man who sassed the driver some miles back, whose name neither driver nor chief knows or cares to know. The chief hauls Woodard off the bus, drags him, struggling and protesting, away from the bus that now hisses and pulls away.
Woodard is no longer under the authority of that brand-new, spit-and-polish Pentagon in Washington, or the more well-established Greyhound Corporation of Chicago with its gleaming postwar rolling stock of Silversides. Woodard is now in the callused, practiced hands of the police chief of Batesburg, South Carolina, whose word is law around these parts, and who is yanking him in the general direction of the town jail a couple of streets over, farther from the streetlight, into the soon-to-be-forever darkness.
Woodard continues to struggle, and the police chief starts beating him with his billy club. This may have been the chief’s plan all along, once the bus was gone, once he and his prisoner were around the corner and out of the light. After all, the billy club—which in the history of U.S. law enforcement has gone by countless names: baton, billy stick, nightstick, stick—had another time-honored name that Shull would have known well, would have had ample opportunity to reflect upon, had he been a reflective man. I will not repeat that name, but it ended with “knocker,” and was alliterative.
Anyway, the chief beats Woodard all the way down the street and into the jail and into a cell and keeps on beating him, taking special care to beat Woodard in the face, to punch his eyes with the blunt end of the club.
That was Isaac Woodard’s experience of my hometown of Batesburg, South Carolina. He didn’t initially know which town it was—that took a while to sort out, even for The Associated Press and Truman’s Justice Department—but soon, everyone in the United States knew that my hometown was where Isaac Woodard was blinded for life.
This was one of scores of racial atrocities committed against men in uniform in the years immediately after World War II, as racists across the land were determined to prove to these so-called heroes who had seen a bit of the world that absolutely nothing had changed back home. But Woodard was luckier than many, having survived, so the NAACP took him on the road and made him a cause célèbre.
Woodard told his story, over and over, to mass meetings in state after state, generating headline after headline. Orson Welles devoted multiple broadcasts to Woodard. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about Woodard. Twenty thousand people attended a Harlem benefit starring Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Joe Louis, on and on, all there because of Woodard.
When a who’s who of civil-rights leaders met with President Truman at the White House to present evidence of a wave of violence against Black veterans, it was the case of Isaac Woodard that especially horrified the president, that he couldn’t stop talking about—was still talking about to interviewers in the 1970s, at the end of his long life.
But Truman’s first action in response to that White House meeting, which ultimately led to his stroke-of-a-pen desegregation of the U.S. armed forces, was to order his attorney general to prosecute that sonofabitch small-town police chief, whoever and wherever he was, on federal civil-rights charges—a first since Reconstruction.
The historic trial duly happened in Columbia, South Carolina, the nearest federal court to Batesburg, and an all-male, all-white jury—the only jury legal in South Carolina at the time—acquitted the police chief in less time than it took the judge to walk around the block to stretch his legs. So incensed and demoralized was the judge in those moments that he walked slowly on purpose, determined to make the jurors wait as long as possible to deliver their foreordained verdict. Even so, they did not wait long.
You may ask what this history lesson has to do with me, other than the coincidence of my hometown. The police chief’s name was Lynwood Shull, a name I would come to know well 30 years later. “Old Shull,” as my father called him, was the gruff but benign old guy, wattled and silver-haired in horn-rimmed glasses, stumping and bowlegged in a three-piece suit, who as head usher of St. John’s United Methodist Church in Batesburg distributed the collection plates every Sunday, including the teens pressed into service on Youth Sunday, including me.
“Just do what Old Shull tells you,” my father instructed. “Old Shull knows what he’s doing. Old Shull has done this forever.”
My father raised me, you see, to respect my elders, all elders—most of all
Our Family Doctor
The testimony that convinced the all-white, all-male, all-legal jury at Shull’s federal trial—or, more accurately, the testimony that handed them their best rationalization, one they could cite later in the unlikely event they were ever challenged—was from a general practitioner in Batesburg, Dr. William Wyman King Sr.
Dr. King told the court under oath that based on his in-the-cell examination the morning after, the injuries that blinded Isaac Woodard were entirely consistent with Shull’s claim of a single wayward wild swing of his billy club that was entirely in self-defense, a swing that regrettably if accidentally connected with both Woodard’s eyeballs, which apparently were protruding on stalks like a wolf’s in a Tex Avery cartoon.
Woodard, incidentally, recalled no medical examination in Batesburg whatsoever, none until he reached the veterans’ hospital in Columbia, to which he had been driven and dumped like unwanted cargo, apparently without any paperwork that would have named the where and when of his beating and blinding.
By now, having learned something of my hometown and my hometown church, you will not be surprised that Dr. King, too, was an upstanding member of St. John’s United Methodist, a solemn yet twinkling figure whom everyone revered, including me. But our personal connection was much closer than that.
Dr. King was also our beloved family physician, had been for generations, was still practicing and still making house calls in the 1970s as he had been in the 1940s. Not long before he may or may not have examined Isaac Woodard, he widely was given credit for saving the life of my parents’ first-born, my older brother, Allen, when in infancy he refused to drink milk. The real hero of that story, as I understood it, was our Aunt Nellene next door, herself childless, who over tireless, patient hours trained the squalling baby to suck on a “sugar tit,” a handkerchief dipped in sweetwater, as prelude to the real thing. Granted, Dr. King may have advised that; who knows?
Certainly his gifts as a folk healer were undeniable. More than once, when I was home from school with a bellyache, Dr. King would be summoned. His visit would not be immediate. He eventually would show up on the front porch, never the back, where the front door would open to admit him before he could knock. My family would have opened his car door, too, had they been quick enough. They would have done anything for Dr. King. He was the emissary of health, of life.
I lay in my bedroom, half-smothered beneath quilts (for my mother believed in “sweating out” all ailments, including broken legs and bullet wounds), and from that fastness I could track Dr. King’s disembodied progress through our house—via the smell of his evil cigars, yes, but mainly through his rumbling voice, delivering a patter as incessant and practiced as a conjuror’s. He conversed at length with each person he encountered, wanting to know how they and their generations were getting along. He asked whether each piece of furniture he passed was new, and as the answer was always no, he then displayed the greatest interest in the convoluted family history of that particular Hoosier cabinet or settee or telephone table. As a last resort, he picked up family photos and asked who those people were, how they all were doing. In the process, he cast a soothing spell over everyone, as if through incantation or hypnosis.
Eventually, inevitably, unable to delay any longer, he achieved the doorway of my room, still wearing his fedora, for he was natty and bald and vain and above mortal etiquette, and his whole face worked fistlike to clench that cigar as he reached behind and wordlessly closed the door in the face of my entire family, shutting out everyone but him and me. I realize as I type this how ominous it sounds, and I cannot now imagine parents acquiescing so meekly today; but don’t worry, that’s not the story I am telling. Still in no hurry, Dr. King scowled at everything in the room but me—the sketch pads and “magic markers,” the scrapbooks of scissored-and-glued newspaper comics, the Freddy the Pig and Sherlock Holmes books from the library, the Star Trek action figures in yellow, blue and red—and not until he had a full psychological profile did he sigh and sit heavily on the edge of my creaking bed. Still he said nothing, instead made a great show of exchanging the tattered, chewed cigar stub in his mouth for an identically tattered, chewed cigar stub in his vest pocket. He finally got the replacement cigar firing on the fifth or sixth click.
Many years later, I would read that Ulysses S. Grant had taken up his fatal cigar smoking as an Army officer, because fiddling with tobacco and matches and their infinite places of concealment bought him time to think when subordinates asked unexpected questions. It also reminded them whose time was more valuable, his or theirs. I knew none of this in my South Carolina childhood, though I knew better than to utter the name of Ulysses S. Grant.
Finally, pocketing the lighter, Dr. King sighed again and growled at Captain Kirk on the shelf: “There’s nothing much wrong with you, is there?”
“No, sir,” I replied brightly, for by then I was cured.
I belabor all this to underscore that Old Shull in the St. John’s vestibule, using tally marks on a folded church bulletin to count the house, was at best a bit player in my young life, a member of the ensemble, part of the scenery. This gave me, I am sorry to say, a bit of distance, of juror-quality rationalization, when I learned, much later, that Young Shull had tortured and maimed a decorated Black veteran in uniform as a matter of routine policing.
I had no such fallback, however, upon learning of Dr. King’s almost-certain perjury. He might as well have been a member of the family—was more welcome in our home, indeed, than any number of blood kin. The merger of all his house calls into one single Platonic house call is one of my happiest childhood memories—and, now, one of my most shameful. I wrote out the story, above, so that I need never tell it again.
Nor am I done with Dr. King’s legacy in my life, in my hometown. It gets worse. I call this next section
My Segregation Academy
The historical epoch I lived through, that indeed my family and I fully participated in, first grade through twelfth, was the wave of segregation academies founded in the 1960s and 1970s by White Southern parents united in their vow never to send their children to public schools alongside Black kids. By Nixon’s second term, Brown v. Board of Education was a generation old, but to segregationists, the outrage was still fresh, as if it had happened the day before, like Pickett’s Charge.
I spent first and second grade at Batesburg’s first “seg,” James Butler Bonham Academy. It was named for a Saluda County martyr still known locally, in one breath, as James-Butler-Bonham-hero-of-the-Alamo. In other words, he was a valiant defender of slavery to the last—for the Alamo’s defenders, like the Confederates a generation later, were committed to the rights and independence of slaveholders first and no one else in particular, certainly not the human beings they regarded as livestock. The people who founded and named segregationist academies, you see, were well aware of the long, rich, disgraceful traditions they sought to honor and perpetuate.
I’m afraid all I remember of first grade is peeing my pants at my desk. All I remember of second grade was much more formative. Miz Asbill began to read aloud to the class The Wind in the Willows, only to stop in mid-sentence, as Mole and Water Rat conversed, to say, “Oh, this is nonsense!” and slam shut the book.
That afternoon, I tagged along with Mama on her nearly daily trip to the public library in Batesburg. That institution, oddly enough, had integrated years before without a whisper of protest, certainly not from my mother—perhaps illustrating Harry Golden’s tongue-in-cheek contention that White Southerners didn’t mind integration as long as no one sat down.
I stood on tiptoe at the front desk and asked the librarians whether they had a copy of The Wind in the Willows, and as I already was an over-explainer, I further told them what had happened at school and said I wanted to find out about Mole and Water Rat for myself.
I am pleased to report that they all responded with a most satisfying flurry of attention, one that bewildered me at the time. They fetched that Kenneth Grahame book and other talking-animal books, including Freddy the Detective, and reverently laid them before me as if I were a child foretold in legend. From that moment, those librarians, all female, became my second formative matriarchy. The women of Batesburg’s public library fostered my reading life, and the women of my family—Mama, my teenage sister, Nellene and the many other aunts—took care of everything else, sheltered me in ways I am still coming to realize. In other words, Bonham Academy was my formative experience of censorship and how to respond to it, and though I moved away from Batesburg for good in 1986, I will never leave that library behind.
But my real cascade of school-age memories begins in third grade, when I was one of the inaugural students at the brand-new rival of Bonham Academy. The dozens of angry White segregationist families that founded Bonham had immediately done what White Southern Protestants traditionally do, namely quarrel among themselves and break into sects, and a number of them, my parents included, had abruptly seceded from their fellow secessionists and had raised their own two-wing, tin-sided, cinderblock school in a donated cow pasture nine miles away.
We Duncans helped build that school. My vivid memories of summer 1972 are of 8-year-old me devotedly toting paint cans and rinsing brushes day after day for the dozen gorgeous moms in Capri pants and Rosie the Riveter bandanas who had volunteered to paint the new school’s new walls the new school color, the light blue of a cloudless sky.
The oldest and, if I may be forgiven, most gorgeous of the moms was my own, Frances Marian Cato Duncan, universally called “Mally,” then a lithe and ageless 49. I was an almost-too-late, wholly unexpected afterthought child, product of a midlife spasm of marital romance that, in hindsight, helps explain the bubble of wonderment in which my parents and I floated around town, back then. Younger women would greet my mother, then look down at me, look back up at her and repeat, “Hello!” with a new lilt, a new light in their eyes. Old men at the hardware store asked my father, “Is this your grandson?” and when he replied by smiling and sticking out his chest and tapping himself with a thumb, they all said, “Well, now!” and rushed to offer him nails and screws.
That summer of servitude to my mother and her admirers is another of my happiest childhood memories, and another I am ashamed to speak of now. It would be easier, I suppose, if the school we helped build had gone the way of Bonham Academy: institution long closed, building abandoned and graffitied and pissed upon and rotted away, its footprint retaken by forest.
But W. Wyman King Academy—living tribute to my family doctor, my parents, my younger self, me—still exists. To drive out there, as I do very occasionally, is to revisit 1972. The school looks just the same. It’s still on the rural mail route that once was my father’s, still grudgingly accepts checks backed by the Federal Reserve in its U.S. Postal Service mailbox. It still siphons students, volunteers, funding and political power from the surrounding school districts by opposing everything that public schools stand for—indeed, I would argue, everything that a diverse, secular government stands for.
Oh, to be sure, King is also still chronically underfunded; its desks are still occupied by the descendants of the same dozen families I grew up with; some of its teachers and staffers still put up with low or no pay because their kids or grandkids get a tuition break.
Really, the only thing new is the cloying religiosity. Today, the King people are quick to tell anyone who asks that at least one school in the county needs to mandate prayer, enforce Scriptural traditions, acknowledge the supremacy of by-God Jesus, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. I recall next to none of that in the founding generation. Indeed, my parents privately had nothing but scorn for Christians who trumpeted their Christianity publicly; that, they agreed, was no one’s business—or, my father would emphasize, no one’s damn business. Once he was accosted at an intersection by a street-corner evangelist who thrust a flier into the driver’s-side window and asked: “Sir, are you going to Heaven or Hell?” My father replied, “Right now I’m going to Columbia,” and floored the gas to escape the guy. “Good job,” I said from the passenger seat, and meant it.
The tonal shift at King, I suspect, was prompted less by harps and angels than by optics, and by inconvenient IRS policies regarding nonprofit private schools. But my generation still remembers that King Academy was not named for that King. Moreover, just as its founders intended, and just as you might expect, the place is still as White as its boosters can legally make it—and thanks to the Strom Thurmond mindset that has governed South Carolina politics all my life, that is very damn White indeed.
For all my kvetching now, the fact remains that I attended King Academy with no hint of rebellion, nor even dissatisfaction, from third grade through my high-school graduation in 1982. I cannot honorably explain why. Eight-year-old me knew no better, but what about seventeen-year-old me? Whenever my many church friends who attended Batesburg-Leesville High, the public school, asked, reasonably enough, “How come you go to King?” I just shrugged. “It’s where I’ve always gone,” I’d tell the B&L folks, and that was that.
Granted, those brief conversations at Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings were complicated by the fact that St. John’s was itself as all-White as any segregation academy could hope to be. Old Shull was, after all, the head usher. A solitary Black man attended a St. John’s service in my youth, sitting alone. The pastor earnestly welcomed him from the pulpit, though not by name (no one knew his name, and I don’t know it yet), and everyone took the unexpected integration of our 11 a.m. service reasonably well until, in the middle of the sermon, the Black man shouted, “Amen!” The congregation spasmed as if cattle-prodded, and the Frozen Chosen talked about the faux pas in hushed tones for decades. The visitor never returned.
The fact is, however verbally precocious I may have been, however much a know-it-all, and however omnivorous my reading, I was a fundamentally naïve, solitary, shy teen, terrified even to speak on the telephone until age 15, and my ever-expanding library-fueled realization that South Carolina’s borders did not delimit the world, not even my world, was counterweighted by a defining and deadening passivity.
My mother always bragged about how “good” I was as a toddler—meaning well-behaved, meaning no trouble at all. “We just put all his toys all around him, and he played all day! He never moved!” Placed in a segregation academy when I was small, with friends and supportive teachers and straight A’s all around, I never moved, not until graduation—on the eve of which I cried piteously, convinced my life was over. Fortunately, I was right. I was headed to a big public university, to the staff of a student newspaper, and gradually but inexorably headed away from
A Confederacy of Dunces
To illustrate Faulkner’s line “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” I generally tell a Civil War story from 1995.
One Saturday afternoon, during a weekend visit to my parents, the charms of Batesburg wore thin. I abruptly drove 30 miles even farther south, to a commemoration of the Battle of Aiken that I read about in the paper. This remains the only Civil War re-enactment I ever attended, and I cannot explain that day’s impulse, beyond boredom. My parapsychologist friends would see evidence of precognition.
At the gate, a smiling woman in Aunt Pittypat hoops and petticoats handed me a glossy program, on the cover of which was a period studio photo of a young man in uniform who was identified, in the caption below, as Lovett Jordan, a local who fought for the Confederacy that day.
The last name caught my eye. My mother’s side of the family included a lot of Jordans—some of whom pronounced their name Jurden—and I now had another whim, to mail a copy of this program to my mother’s oldest sister, my Aunt Willa May, the family genealogist and the senior member of my family matriarchy.
This I did, once I got home. Having always wondered what life was like up North, you see, I had moved to North Carolina. “Thought you’d like to see this,” I scrawled on a Post-it, then posted it and forgot about it.
A week later, I received a thank-you from Aunt Willa May, then in her 80s, in a fine-grained envelope so heavy and creamy I could taste it through my fingertips. On the equally fine cardstock inside, beneath the embossed initials, in a beautiful finishing-school hand, Aunt Willa May had written: “So good to hear from you, and so nice to see this photo of Uncle Love. I knew him well. He came to our wedding. He never talked much about the war, though …”
Uncle Love and Aunt Willa May, I thus learned, had lives that overlapped just as fully as Aunt Willa May’s had with mine. I was holding a letter from another century that was postmarked 1995. MC Hammer was on the radio. The past is never dead, folks.
It is certainly still alive for the Sons of Confederate Veterans, South Carolina Division, whose 2024 website says this:
The citizen-soldiers who fought for the Confederacy personified the best qualities of America. The preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South’s decision to fight the Second American Revolution. The tenacity with which Confederate soldiers fought underscored their belief in the rights guaranteed by the Constitution.
Need I go on? Any American reading this, whatever their background or politics, can recite the rest of the neo-Confederate scripture, having heard it during so many political campaigns and school-board meetings and other 21st-century gatherings of angry White folks, where it tends to be associated with U.S. flag lapel pins and bumper stickers that spell out “Fuck Biden” in letters formed of stylized automatic rifles. It’s everyday stuff, in part because of the successful messaging of generations of Sons of Confederate Veterans, Libertarians, Republicans, Trumpists, Sovereign Citizens, on and on. Old Shull knows what he’s doing. Old Shull has done this forever.
I picked the South Carolina Division of the SCV because my older brother, Allen, whom you will remember suckling at Aunt Nellene’s sugar tit, grew up to become a pillar of that particular fraternal organization. In his heyday he did a lot of marker-raising and monument-polishing, through the SCV and through the Saluda County Historical Society. He helped restore Flat Grove, a circa 1780 dogtrot house that’s also the birthplace of James-Butler-Bonham-hero-of-the-Alamo.
You may wonder whether I, myself, was ever an SCV member. After all, I have the same lines of descent as my brother, both paternal and maternal; I am just as eligible. Indeed, for years I was on their postal mailing list—my brother’s doing, I’m sure—so I had the pleasure of throwing away dozens of SCV membership offers, fund-raising appeals, and pleas to join campaigns against the carpetbaggers and scalawags who opposed Reagan.
One day, in a strong or weak moment—you decide—I phoned SCV headquarters, worked my way up the phone tree and delivered a blistering tirade enumerating all the reasons I would never join their blankety-blank organization, until the guy on the front line said, “Thank you for calling” and hung up. The ensuing cosmic-background beeeeeeeeep is the last I’ve heard from that organization.
So fuck the SCV, is what I’m basically saying, but that doesn’t matter. My family history—my history—is what it is, and I can only get so far away. At least
It’s All Material
John Kessel, my Nebula Award-winning mentor in the North Carolina State University fiction-writing program, used to tell us all, “You write about what bothers you.”
I came to realize that was why I kept writing about racism, especially the racism against Black people that I had grown up with—indeed, as I have tried to show here, had grown up witnessing, aiding, and abetting.
My early stories were full of characters of Color confronting racism, such as the truth-telling, adamantly un-magical condemned prisoner in “The Executioners’ Guild” and the heavyweight champion who fights free of a stultifying timeline in “The Pottawatomie Giant.” Most of all, I see everywhere the influence of Zora Neale Hurston, whose fiction and nonfiction I belatedly discovered in graduate school. When the bluesman John defies a peckerwood Devil in “Beluthahatchie,” when representatives of all-Black towns recount the tallest of tales in “Lincoln in Frogmore” and “Slow as a Bullet,” when larger-than-life folkloric beings outwit one another in “Daddy Mention and the Monday Skull,” I’m trying over and over to pay tribute to Hurston. When Ellen Klages and I were researching “Wakulla Springs” in the Tallahassee archives, I reverently held Hurston’s own typewritten notes from the New Deal era and vowed to wedge as much as that material into the novella as I could. (Richard Butner, one of my wisest first readers, likes to X out whole pages of my manuscripts and write in the margin, “NAKED RESEARCH”; as he’s always right, I chuckle and remove, oh, 20 percent of the N.R., just to humor him.)
Most glaringly, I presumed to make Hurston herself the protagonist of “Zora and the Zombie,” something of a secret history of her real-life research trip to Haiti. I cannot imagine getting away with this today. Times have changed, and rightly so. I am unsure whether I should have gotten away with it even then. I do know that I was horrified, upon that story’s initial publication, to stumble upon an online reader comment—I was still, in my innocence, reading online reader comments—words to the effect of, “Hey, gang! I just found out that there really was a person named Zora Neale Hurston, and she really went to Haiti! Check out these links.” I thought, Oh My God! Had I realized that my story might be someone’s introduction to Hurston, I never could have written the thing! That may have been my first lesson in the perils of appropriation.
As I look back on my published corpus, I am most troubled by my cavalier use of racial slurs, including the racial slur, which I put into the mouths of racist characters whenever I wanted to show that, duh, they were racists. That embarrasses me now, and I’m giving serious consideration to deleting those slurs in future printings—assuming my stories have any future printings, a concern I will discuss at another time.
Still, I don’t know, though. Among the countless things to admire about Ursula K. Le Guin is that through the decades, as she kept re-thinking her pronoun choices and so forth in her groundbreaking novel The Left Hand of Darkness, she chose not to tinker with the text of the novel but instead wrote new essays discussing what she might do differently now. She wrote several of these, and editor Brian Attebery includes them all in the Library of America editions. I’m no Le Guin, and I will never write anything half as good as The Left Hand of Darkness, but how I love her example of a writer who keeps living and evolving long enough to engage in respectful, constructive yet critical conversations with their own early work.
Maybe I’ll do that one day with my own stories. In the meantime, I need to wrap up this essay with what I promised at the beginning, namely
My Words for Isaac Woodard
On February 9, 2019, a historical marker commemorating the blinding of Isaac Woodard was dedicated in downtown Batesburg, near the spot where Old Shull’s jail once stood. It’s across the street from St. John’s United Methodist, center of my young religious life, where Woodard’s torturer handed out the collection plates every Sunday.
Hundreds attended the event, and there was a parade of speakers, led by the Black commandant of Fort Jackson in Columbia, where the U.S. Army does basic training. (Its motto: “We make American soldiers.”) Least and almost last of the speakers was the only one who was a native of Batesburg: me.
Here’s what I said into the microphone that day. I put it on social media at the time but haven’t otherwise published it until now.
At Shealy’s Bar-B-Q yesterday, the cashier saw my brother’s “Vietnam Era Veteran” cap and said, “Thank you for your service.”
“I appreciate it,” he said.
So I thank Isaac Woodard for his service, and I thank everyone who honors him today. I’m grateful to be here.
I am here today as authentic local content. I grew up in Batesburg, on Saluda Street. It was understood that whenever I left our driveway, I was to turn right, because a left turn would take me into a neighborhood where Black people lived.
My parents were good people, who wanted only to protect me. I was so well-protected, by my all-White family, my all-White church [here I pointed to the imposing columns of St. John’s], my all-White school, and my then-all-White town government, that I never had a conversation with a Black person until my first year at university. He was from Nigeria.
“Nice shirt,” I told him.
“It’s a dashiki,” he said. “But thank you.”
I knew Lynwood Shull, a villain of our piece, as the gruff head usher who counted heads at every service and distributed collection plates. I found him no more intimidating than any other old man in a three-piece suit. I did not know his history, because my parents, church, school, and town protected me from that, too.
Not until the 21st century, in the Library of America anthology Reporting Civil Rights (a two-volume set, which I highly recommend to each of you) did I see Batesburg in the index—I don’t know why I looked for my hometown in the index, but I did—and therefore learn, moments later, the name Isaac Woodard.
This is terrible, but I’ll say it anyway. Last night, a friend told me that one reason no one mentioned Woodard to us, growing up, was that it was all too routine to mention—that the woods and fields and ditches all around Batesburg were the sites of worse things, things that Harry Truman never heard about. There may be some truth in that.
I wish that racism, and intolerance, and injustice, were purely the stuff of historical markers, but they systematically continue through the daily work of good people, acting for what they think are the best reasons. My parents taught me that. Batesburg taught me that.
I am glad this marker exists. I hope the good people do not protect their children from it, and from its implications. What 21st-century injustices are not being talked about, in our schools and churches and families?
The blinding of Isaac Woodard was a crime, but a far graver crime would be to continue to blind our children, and ourselves.Hundreds of people stood in the blocked-off street to hear this, mostly because they were waiting for the marker behind me to be unveiled. I knew some of them—classmates, teachers, youth leaders, all much older than I envisioned. I was not surprised to see them, nor to see my brother in the crowd, his white-mustached face stoic in the winter breeze. I was family, and he always showed for family, assuming he didn’t have to leave South Carolina to do it.
Besides, as you know by now, Allen was always up for a historical marker.
No, what surprised me was that in the February chill, he wore a windbreaker. For most of his life, Allen hated coats and jackets, indeed hated sleeves, and his arms were bare in all winters. That moment was an early sign, for me, that my then-74-year-old brother’s health was failing.
Allen also had professed a lifelong hatred of being touched, so I was further surprised when, after the ceremony, he walked up and shook my hand.
“Good job,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”
And that was that. I said the same things to fifty strangers that day.
This may seem an anticlimactic ending, but I disagree. I believe it’s no ending at all, but a beginning, of a lot more writing I need to do. Thanks to you all for being here, at the beginning.
Looking back over what I have written so far, I realize that I never really got to the topic of inclusion, which is what I sat down to write about in the first place. Maybe now I can address inclusion more freely, having begun to address publicly my personal history of exclusion. Because anything I say on inclusion or any other progressive topic needs to be forever asterisked by the fact that I graduated from the segregationist King Academy, in its eleven-White-person Class of 1982.
I will add only that for whatever reason, this essay turned out to be easier to write than I had feared. Of course, by the time I finally sat down in my campus office to deal with the thing, in April 2024, I already had been thinking about it for six months—or for 40 years, give or take. I need to think about it some more.