right to own slaves. He called his slaves his ‘family.”’ Well then, who are we to question his definition of that term? Ten pages later, I learned that Jackson fought the Creek Indians to preserve America and save innocent lives, though oddly there was no mention that in order to get an accurate count of the dead they slaughtered at Horseshoe Bend, soldiers in Jackson’s command cut off the tips of Creek noses and sliced strips of flesh from their bodies for use as bridal reins for their horses—surely an accidental editorial oversight.
At the end of the book, after recounting Jackson’s rise to the presidency, Meet Andrew Jackson concludes by noting that when Jackson died, his slaves cried and “sang a sad old song.” To insert such a flourish as this, though it probably struck me as touching at the time, is utterly vulgar, and suggests as well as anything what is wrong with the way children in the United States learn our nation’s history. There is no scholarly record of sad songs being sung by slaves as Jackson lay dying. This kind of detail, even were it true—and it almost certainly is not—has no probative value when it comes to letting us know who Andrew Jackson was. It exists for the same reason the old fairy tale about George Washington cutting down the cherry tree and telling his dad because he “couldn’t tell a lie,” exists—because no fabrication is too extreme in the service of national self-love. Anything that makes us feel proud can be said, facts notwithstanding. Anything that reminds us of the not-sonoble pursuits of our forefathers or national heroes, on the other hand, gets dumped down the memory hole. And if you bring those kinds of things up, you’ll be accused of hating America.
The way in which we place rogues like Andrew Jackson on a pedestal, while telling people of color to “get over it” (meaning the past) whenever slavery or Indian genocide is brought up, has always struck me as the most precious of ironies. We want folks of color to move past the past, even as we very much seek to dwell in that place a while. We dwell there every July 4, every Columbus Day, every time a child is given a book like Meet Andrew Jackson to read. We love the past so long as it venerates us. We want to be stuck there, and many would even like to return. Some say as much, as with the Tea Party folks who not only announce that they “want their country back,” but even dress up in tricorn hats, Revolutionary War costumes, and powdered wigs for their rallies. It is only when those who were the targets for destruction challenge the dominant narrative that the past becomes conveniently irrelevant, a trifle not worth dwelling upon.
GOOD OR BAD, the past is a fact, and it often holds the keys to who we are in the present, and who we’re likely to become in the future. This was certainly the case for me.
By 1971, it was time for me to begin preschool. Although I’m certain there were any number of programs in Green Hills or thereabouts in which I could have been enrolled, my mother made the decision (very much against the objections of certain friends and family) that I should attend the early childhood program at Tennessee State University (TSU), which is Nashville’s historically black land-grant college. Her reasons for the decision were mixed. On the one hand, she knew that upon beginning school I would be in an integrated environment—something she had never had the benefit of experiencing—and she wanted me to know what it was like to occasionally find myself in a space where I might not be the taken-for-granted norm. On the other hand, I’ve long suspected that it was also something she did to tweak her family and mark her own independence from the much more provincial life she had led growing up.
TSU, the name of which had recently been changed from Tennessee A&I, is located in North Nashville, just off the foot of Jefferson Street—the epicenter of Nashville’s black community. Although the Jefferson Street corridor had been recently devastated by the construction of Interstate 40 right through the middle of it—a part of “urban renewal” that occurred nationwide and contributed to the destruction of up to one-fifth of all black housing in the country by 1969—the city’s black residents were rightly proud of the area and constantly fought to return it to its former glory. My grandfather had grown up on Jefferson Street as a teen, since the black community was one of the few places Jews could live unless they were of substantial means. Of course, he hadn’t gone to school there. During the days of segregation, he would be sent to the white school downtown, Hume-Fogg, even though his neighborhood school was Pearl, one of the academic jewels among southern black high schools at the time.
Not to romanticize the days of segregation of course, but under conditions of formal oppression, black business districts like Jefferson Street had often managed to carve out a thriving subculture of black success. Forced to turn inward, African Americans across the nation spent their money with black businesses, and the children in the schools knew that the teachers and administrators loved them—they were, after all, their neighbors. While integration was clearly necessary to open up the opportunity structure that had previously been closed off, it also led to the firing of thousands of black teachers across the South, who were no longer wanted in the newly consolidated schools into which blacks would be placed (but as clear minorities in most cases). Integration would be of limited success because whites had been ill-prepared to open up the gates of access and opportunity wide enough for any but a few to squeeze through. Those few managed to leave the old neighborhoods and take their money with them, but the rest were left behind, access to suburban life limited, their own spaces transformed by interstates, office buildings, and parking lots, in the name of progress.
Just a mile or so from Fisk—the city’s historically black private college—TSU was seen as the university for working class African Americans, and more to the point for local black folks, while Fisk (long associated with alum W.E.B. DuBois’s “talented tenth” concept) attracted more of a national and international student clientele. At the time of my enrollment at TSU, the college was embroiled in a struggle with state officials who had been seeking to establish a branch campus of the University of Tennessee in downtown Nashville. Concerned that such a school would allow whites to avoid the mostly black campus by attending a predominantly white state institution in town, and thereby siphon resources from TSU to the newly-created UT-Nashville, TSU officials were battling valiantly to remain the flagship of public education in the city.
As a student in TSU’s early childhood program, my classmates would be principally the children of faculty or families living in close proximity to the college, which is to say, they would be mostly black. Indeed, I would be one of only three students in the classroom who weren’t black, out of a class of roughly twenty kids. Although several of the teachers who ran the program were white, the ones I remember most vividly were African American women. They seemed quite clearly to own the space. It was their domain and we all respected it.
I can’t remember much about my time at TSU, although I can vividly recall the layout of the class, the playground, and the drive to and from our Green Hills home each morning and afternoon to get back and forth. But despite the vagueness of my TSU memories, I can’t help but think that the experience had a profound impact on my life, especially as I would come to understand and relate to the subject of race. On the one hand, being subordinated to black authority at an early age was a blessing. In a society that has long encouraged whites to disregard black wisdom, for a white child to learn at the age of three to listen to black women and do what they ask of you, and to believe that they know of what they speak, can be more than a minor life lesson. It would mean that a little more than twenty years later, listening to African American women in public housing in New Orleans tell me about their lives and struggles, I would not be the white guy who looked them square in the face and inquired as to whether it might be possible that they had lost their minds. I would not be the white guy who would assume they were exaggerating, making things up, or fabricating the difficulties of their daily routine. I would go back to that early imprinting, and remember that people know their lives better than I do, including those whom the society has ignored for so long.
Attending preschool at TSU also meant that I would be socialized in a non-dominant setting, my peers mostly African American children. Because I had bonded with black kids early on, once I entered elementary school it would be hard not to notice the way that we were so often separated in the classroom, by tracking that placed the white children in more advanced tracks, by unequal discipline, and by a different way in which the teachers would relate to us.