In Jimmy Carter’s boyhood autobiography, An Hour Before Daylight, he recounts two incidents that have profound implications for our lives today. In one, he and his childhood playmate, A.D. (for Alonzo Davis), flagged down the train that came by the hamlet of Archery, Georgia and rode into Americus to see a movie, something they often did when they were not needed around the farm and when Jimmy’s daddy said it was okay.
On the way, they separated, Jimmy sitting in a designated “white” seat, and A.D. sitting in a “colored” seat. They walked down the street to the Rylander Theater together but separated again when Jimmy entered the front entrance to sit downstairs while A. D. entered the back door and sat in the third level. After the show, reunited, they walked to the train station only to separate again, repairing to their separate “colored” and “white” sections. Looking back years later, Carter said, “I don’t remember ever questioning the mandatory racial separation, which we accepted like breathing” (p. 96).
Until he was about fourteen, Jimmy’s closest friends were the black boys who lived on the family farm in Archery, children of the tenant families who worked the place. Though he lived in the “big house,” and they lived in tenant shacks; though his parents had a car, and they went to different schools and churches, “there were no acknowledged differences of rank or status when [they] were together in the fields, on the creek banks, or playing in our yard or theirs.” Then one day, something happened. Jimmy, A.D., and another friend, “approached the gate leading from our barn to the pasture. To my surprise,” wrote Carter, “they opened it and stepped back to let me go through first. . . . It was a small act, but a deeply symbolic one. After that,” Carter reflected, “they often treated me with some deference. . . . a precious sense of equality had gone out of our personal relationships, and things were never again the same between them and me.”
What power unwritten, unstated rules hold over us! They are “accepted like breathing.” We obey them faithfully because they operate below the level of awareness. They are invisible and often create robot-like routines.
A good example is spoken language. When my wife and I encountered friends at lunch after church last Sunday, as we greeted them and met others at their table, we weren’t thinking about subject-verb agreement, for example, or reminding ourselves to put adjectives before and not after nouns (normal for English). We were focused on the content of our speech. We speakers of English generally speak perfectly recognizable English without thinking about the English language. We simply do it.
Those silent yet powerful rules, such as language rules, also exercise vast control over our behavior. That’s not all bad. Thankfully we are able to form deep ruts in our minds that allow us to operate on autopilot much of the time. We walk without thinking through the mechanics of walking. We lock and unlock doors relying on routines. Much of our driving is guided by habit.
The white bus drivers whom I often saw moving the “white only” signs closer to the back of the bus, to make more “white only” seats, were probably not thinking about white supremacy at the time. They were just doing their job. It was normal, taken-for-granted, that the races sat separately on those buses in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950s, buses I rode home from high school or rode downtown to the dentist’s office. It was accepted--like breathing--as Carter said.
It was “normal” for Jimmy and A.D. to sit separately on the train to Americus and to sit separately in the Rylander Theater; it was “normal,” taken-for-granted, for A. D. to step back and let Jimmy go through the gate first in 1938 in the hamlet of Archery, Georgia. But all that changed when enough people questioned what was normal.
So I wonder what things are “normal” for us now that will cause future generations to gasp—and ask, “How could they?” Equally important, I wonder how we can discover those things now and begin to change them?
Dr. Conville is a professor of communication studies (ret.) and long-time resident of Hattiesburg. He can be reached at rlconville@yahoo.com.
