Rainbow Pie. A Memoir of Redneck America by Joe Bageant

Author:Joe Bageant [Bageant, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846274084
Publisher: Granta Publications
Published: 2011-10-05T22:00:00+00:00

WE MAY HAVE COME TO SETTLE IN WINCHESTER, but we never came to settle in any one particular place. There was North Kent Street, Cameron Street, Boscawen Street, a different rented house or apartment every year or less, on a street named for some lord in England, always in the part of town nearest the railroad tracks. I can’t remember a time in Winchester when the late-night trains’ whistles didn’t blow near our home, and it got so I would wake up at 11.10 p.m. if the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad engine didn’t blow its long, mournful airhorn. To this day, the sound is comforting to me.

Always these residences adjoined one of the two black neighbourhoods. The line between lily-white and black was clear to us because we were on the line — the redneck mongrels along a single street dividing white and black. We were usually next door to other once-rural families similarly displaced after two centuries out on the farms … the McKees and Brannons, the Braithwaites and Caves, the Campbells, Yosts, Luttrells, and McIlweees. And since we didn’t much fit into the world of our neighbours on either side — blacks didn’t even walk on the white streets in our neighbourhood, and white people on ‘the right side of the railroad tracks’ stayed out of our neighbourhoods — the very closest neighbours’ children constituted our friendship groups. We had no trouble recognising each other on sight, or recognising new arrivals in town or at school, with their plaid-flannel Sears mail-order shirts and work shoes.

Another way that kids from the sticks knew one another was our special status in the school system. In what would now be called middle school, many of us were put in what was openly called ‘the dumbbell room’, a special classroom for sub-intelligent and back-country kids. I arrived in the sixth grade reading well above my pay grade — popular authors such as Pearl Buck, Bennett Cerf, and no few classics, simply because I couldn’t differentiate as to types or levels of literature. All of it was marvellous stuff to me, whether Moby-Dick or Betty Macdonald’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. Yet here I was in the dumbbell room with so-called retards, fist fighters, and drooling crayon-eaters. The usual stated reason was ‘behavioural problems’; although, given my timidity, I can’t imagine having acted up in class. After a few weeks, I was back with the ‘normal kids’. Ultimately, we little crackers came to see being in the dumbbell room simply as pulling your time in this new, citified system. According to Beaky Anders, so named for his prominent nose, ‘Aw, they’re just seeing if they can crack ya.’

When a kid would make parole from the dumbbell room to regular class, there would be a hearty round of congratulations from the parolee’s friends. Not all made it, though. I remember some who, despite the truancy laws, just disappeared — simply never showed up in school again. The official story was that they had moved.

Here we were, poor kids from poor families.

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