VCC Magazine Spring 2019

“Don’t go into the colored section” By Bonnie Atwood

We pretended to be Davy Crockett pretty much every day. And we had to go into the woods for that, because that was the frontier. We had to look for “bars.” And because it was the 50s, we felt safe. And our parents felt safe.We were all over those woods. They were so thick, we could not see out, once we were in there. All we had to think about was getting back for dinnertime. We spent hours and hours in those woods. There was one more thing the grown-ups always said to us before we disappeared into the woods. “Don’t go into the colored section.” The “colored section” was the section of Arlington then known as “Hall’s Hill.” See  https://www.amazon.com/My-Halls-Hill- Family-Neighborhood/dp/1732830207 Hall’s Hill was the oldest enclave in Northern Virginia that was settled by newly freed slaves. I remember vividly the brown shingled church, the Langston school, the houses, the old store, and the firehouse. I never went down any of the side streets—we weren’t supposed to—  but with curiosity I would peek down and see houses, not so new. It seemed a dignified community. I was never aware of any crime there. On our own street, which was very safe, we did have a few police cars in and out when somebody got drunk and fought with his wife or her husband. I knew about that, because the children would come over to our house for the night. We didn’t have such terms then, but now I know that our house was a “safe house.” “Don’t go into the colored section,” the grown-ups would say. They didn’t say it in a mean tone. I am positive that the colored kids were told the same thing, that is, “Don’t go into the white section.” There was never any interaction between us. Integration was talked about on television, but it was not part of our lives at all. Not until I got to high school. That’s when the county decided to integrate public schools. That meant we had, I think, three black kids

That sentence may sound shocking or offensive to you. That’s why I put it in quotation marks. I feel like younger folks need to know how people talked. They now live in a sanitized, pristine world, in which every utterance is scrubbed and swiped clean with a cloth of p.c. micro-fiber. The sentence under discussion was said many times when I was a child. It was said by my white parents. It was said by my white neighbors. And, with one word changed, it was said by all the black adults, too. It has been coming to my attention that Millennials don’t know what people talked like, not so long ago. Really, I am hearing more and more confusion about this. Confusion about what is now called “growing up in the segregated South.” I read these little biographical blurbs, sometimes the “bio” at the end of an author’s work, and it says, “He grew up in the segregated South.” I’m always startled by that. They said it like it was a long time ago. In a distant place. An almost exotic place. In my head, it was just yesterday. “Growing up the segregated South.” I mean, who didn’t? Oh. I guess a lot of people didn’t. But I did. We had a woods in back of our house. A lot of woods. There were hills, trees, bushes, even a cliff and a creek. It was thick with vegetation. That’s where I first got poison ivy, and learned to recognize the three-leafed devilish plant thereafter. It was the 1950s.

She never came to my house. I never went to hers. “ ”

in our whole school. There was only one girl. I don’t remember her name, but she lived in Hall’s Hill, so we used to walk home together. She was nice. We talked about girl things. Not really fun girl things. More like serious girl things. Cramps, and things like that. She never came to my house. I never went to hers. We never talked about doing that. This year, I have begun the detective work of finding her again. I want to tell her that I regret not saying, “Let’s go over to my house and listen to records and have a coke.” I felt like integration was not really

a good thing for her, because there were so few blacks. All the white kids felt that way. I mean that’s the honest way we saw it back then. Yesterday I shared barbecue with an old classmate. He confirmed my thoughts. He said that one of the black students had said to him, “Man, I wish I was with my people.” I could talk about the separate water fountains, and the separate bathrooms, and swimming pools, and hate. I could tell you some very bad things that happened close to where I lived. I could tell even worse stories that my mother told about her childhood in Alabama. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to write those down. But my story is about the woods. I’m glad to say that at the end of high school I had NCCJ camp. That’s what set me on the human rights values that I try to live today. Everything changed, when I was finally allowed to go into “the colored section.” Epilog: Since writing this piece years ago, I have found that there was a wall behind those woods. Children would not have been able to mingle, even if they had wanted to. And very recently, Wilma Jones, who has lived her whole life in Hall’s Hill, published a wonderful book, “My Hall’s Hill Family: More Than a Neighborhood.” Bonnie Atwood “grew up in the segregated South.”

B ENNETT F UNERAL H OME

Charles D. Morehead, Sr. Funeral Director & General Manager

3215 Cutshaw Avenue Richmond, Virginia 23221

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(804) 359-4481

V irginia C apitol C onnections , S pring 2019

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