Jim McFarland (JM)

JM: My grandmother used to take my brother and myself to the south every summer from the age of four till the time I was eleven.  And I know that growing up, when we rode the train coming down from New York, when we got to DC we would get out of an integrated car, and go to an all colored car.  And I thought this was the greatest thing that could ever happen because now I’m in a car with all my people they got the brown paper bag with the greasy chicken and the sandwiches and we havin’ a good time.  When we got off the train my grandmother would always have my brother and I use the bathroom.  The bathrooms were always marked colored and white.  When I was younger I could read a ”C” but I didn’t know the word colored. So she would say, ”use one with the ”C” on it.  You can’t use the one with the ”W.”  When we went to the movies, we had to sit in the balcony.  In New York, as a child growing up, I always wanted to sit in the balcony because the balcony was reserved for adults and people that smoke.   When I used to get back to New York, the majority of the little brothers on the block had never been south, and they would ask me they would say, ”Boy what was the South about?” I used to tell them, ”Man them brothers got it going on in the south, and they say, ”whatchu mean by that?  I say we got our own bathroom, we got out own water fountain.”  And at that particular time my grandmother would never tell us, the children, why she left the south or anything.  Whenever I asked her about this thing called, racism segregation she would always tell me, ”shhhh, don’t talk about that.  That’s something we don’t say.  It wasn’t until I was eleven that I realized what segregation was about that I told my grandmother, ’I don’t want to go South anymore.”