Yankees with Deep Fried Southern Roots

By David J. Ross

The past is something that defines us. It determines who we are and what values we hold. It is our history. Too often, especially today, we take our history and toss it aside as “old fashioned” and “unnecessary” — scraping it from ourselves like chewed gum from a shoe sole. Yet we fail to realize how much our past affects the future and how we are shaped by it.

My parents experienced events I have only observed in the worn, yellowed, and dusty pages of history books. The differences between today and yesterday are often the subject of heated debates over what has changed in America and what is still the same. Sometimes I vehemently disagree with them, and other times I find myself compelled to agree, much to my chagrin. Not until interviewing both of my parents over a weekend and getting into a disagreement did I realize how much I still have to learn about history and how my parents experienced it.

Southern Roots

As my parents talked that lazy Sunday afternoon, I realized that I did not truly recognize my family’s deep fried Southern roots. For instance, I saw for the first time how Southern our household is, yet I also observed how little attention I have paid to my family’s history. Sure, I had heard the stories about our family’s past during my youth. But as I grew older I heard them so much that I began to half-listen and the stories became like wallpaper, just a part of the home I knew existed but paid little attention to. Having to take note of events my parents encountered made me wish to record every scrap of my family’s history — from a passed-down family recipe to an ancient family story — and preserve them from the ravages of wayward young minds and give them to my children to pass on to theirs.

Both of my parents were born in the state of Massachusetts. As a result, my parents’ first experience with Southern culture was not in the South but the North. The neighborhood of Maynard Street in Springfield, MA, was predominately populated by Southern Blacks, who had move more north to live near Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, a subsection of Springfield, to escape the depressed economy and vehement racism of the Jim Crow South.

One Parent: Rooted in New Orleans

My mother’s parents, Webster “Lucky” Carroll Jr. and Mercedes “Joyce” Carroll nee Harper, moved north because they had experienced racist New Orleans during the 1930s and ‘40s. Although they left the South behind, they did not leave their culture on Bourbon Street. Instead, like many of the people in the area, they brought New Orleans with them. Because of my grandparents’ efforts my mother was constantly immersed in the sights and sounds of Black culture which ranged from eating savory New Orleans dishes such as gumbo and jambalaya to listening to classic jazz music from the likes of Louis Armstrong and Jelly Roll Morton.

Mrs. Rosemund, one of the neighborhood moms and an Arkansas native, would serve cornbread­ — which apparently tasted horrible and had the consistency of sand — during house visits that helped to distinguish her Southern roots from a Northern family. As my dad explained, a Northern Black family would invite someone over and offer something to drink — and nothing else. In contrast, Southern Black families would invite a person over, offer food and drink, and demand that their guest sit down and relax. Southerners tended to be warmer, were insulted if you did not say good mornin’ or good evenin’ to them, and always had good food cooking in a pot to serve alongside pleasant conversation.

Another Parent: Urban Boston Meets Rural Alabama

In contrast to my mother’s story, my father’s was different. His family was originally from Boston. They uprooted to Springfield when my grandmother, Eloyse Barnhart nee Johnson, purchased a house on Maynard Street in 1962, when my father first met my mother. She was two and he was four. Dad’s full-blown introduction to the Southern region came at the age of fifteen when my grandmother married James Napoleon “Boo” Barnhart, my step-grandfather who is originally from Fairfield, Alabama. “Papa,” as we call him, had a strange upbringing. He was born the oldest of sixteen children, all of whom were packed like sardines into a two-room shack (apparently they were sharecroppers). When he was as child, one of his close friends was a white boy. This friendship was risky considering they were living in the Jim Crow era. To exacerbate matters the attitude of the boy’s family seamlessly fit the times like a jigsaw puzzle piece. They wanted him to stop associating with Papa because he was black. However, the boy defied his parent’s wishes and refused to neglect his friend, and later he would even teach “Boo” how to drive.

Papa was also very intelligent and strong. He often told stories of hitching the family mule to the plow to till the earth. Because of such hard manual labor his muscles felt like steel ropes. Even today, after he was forced to enter the Veterans Administration Hospital, his muscles remain hard from the intense manual labor he endured in the past. His intelligence earned him an opportunity to enter college. Unfortunately he could not accept because his family was experiencing hardship due to his father’s death. Instead he enlisted in the United States Air Force and eventually became a jet mechanic performing maintenance on the new B-52 Stratofortress jets. Through years of hard work, discipline, and focus he worked his way up to chief master sergeant, the highest rank an enlisted man can attain in the Air Force. His military occupation would take him to Westover Air Force Base in Springfield, MA, where he would meet and marry my grandmother.

Less Than Subtle Racism in the North

Although many Blacks were fleeing the Jim Crow South, my parents stressed to me that all too often they found the same racism up North that they thought had been left behind in Dixie. The only difference was it did not wear a white sheet and lacked that distinct Southern twang. The area my parents lived in up north was highly segregated between Black, Hispanic, White Protestant, Polish, Irish, and Italian neighborhoods. Because of strained racial tension the parents restricted their children from going to certain neighborhoods for fear of the child’s life. In the mid-1960s my parents were among the first children to be bussed from their local predominately Black school to a middle class suburban white school. The government often used economic means to force people to integrate. For example, in my parents’ neighborhood people who wanted their children to go to the local neighborhood schools had to pay an extra tax that was not affordable. However, many parents, including my grandparents, pulled their children out of the predominately white schools due to vitriolic racism from both students and faculty.

My parents ended up in a Catholic school where they encountered all the social groups in one setting. One memory they recount vividly is when a race riot broke out among high school students. Although the origins of the fight were subject to debate, apparently a Black male teenager was dating a white girl and earned the simmering ire of white males at the school. After fighting broke out between the Black student and a fellow white student, it quickly spread like wildfire throughout the high school reaching the local colleges. My mother remembers my grandmother saying, “They ain’t taking it no more! They ain’t takin’ it like we took it!” Mostly what my parents remember is being told to run straight home without stopping anywhere. The aftermath was devastating. Places were trashed and vandalized; the unstable racial tension exploded like nitroglycerin.

Experiences in the South: New Orleans and the Paper Bag Rule

My parents’ first experiences in the South differed slightly but in many ways were the same. My mother's first experience occurred at the age of four during a family trip from Springfield to New Orleans. There were no interstates so back roads were used to get to their destination. While stopped at a local Mississippi gas station my mother saw something she was not familiar with -- a sign that said, “Whites Only.” Because Black people were not allowed upfront, my grandfather had to use the back entrance to pay for his gas. While he was away my mother overheard a white woman in a conversation. My mother had never heard a white southern accent before and because she thought it sounded funny began to mimic it like most four-year-olds would. My grandmother quickly grabbed her, told her to shut up, and put her in the car. It was then that Mom noticed that my grandmother was afraid. After getting back on the road and driving into the night, everyone was exhausted so they pulled over to rest. My grandmother awoke to discover they were in the same area where three civil rights workers named Andrew Goodman, James E. Chaney, and Michael Schwerner had been murdered in 1964 by Klu Klux Klan members in cooperation with Neshoba County Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price. Realizing where they were my grandmother awoke my grandfather who floored it out of the area.

My mother later moved to New Orleans in 1970 at the age of ten. While she had visited there before, this time she got the chance to see firsthand just how ingrained Jim Crow and slavery-era racism still were in post-civil rights New Orleans. She encountered racism in many forms, but the most surprising for her was among her own culture about skin tone — the paper bag rule. The rule was, and still is, a major issue in the Black community. The rule states that people with lighter skin complexions are more desirable because they can pass for another race. People with darker complexions are less desirable because they cannot as easily. A lot of mixed people/Creoles in New Orleans, formerly called mulattos, would only marry individuals who were either equal to or lighter than the color of a paper bag. They engaged in this practice in order to keep the “good genes” in their families. The mixed people in New Orleans segregated themselves in their own ward, the seventh ward.

My mom provided me an example of this practice. One of her childhood schoolmates was a boy named Dwight, wholooked white, which is what my mother thought he was. One day he told her that he was Black, much to her confusion. My grandmother had to explain to her that Dwight’s parents were the descendants of Creoles, peoples of mixed African, European, and in some cases Native American ancestry. Dwight’s parents had kept the “socially desirable genes” in their family. Because my mother was about the color of a paper bag, she was able to associate with the light-skinned and dark-skinned Blacks without incident.

Related Experience: Texas Communities and Racial Bigotry

My father’s first experience down South was one of both Southern and military cultures. In 1974 he moved with my grandmother and step-grandfather to Texas, where he lived in two cities at different times. The first was Ft. Worth and the second was San Antonio; both cities had a strong military presence. According to him they were not really the typical South because people from all over the globe were living in the area. The difference between the local and military cultures was more clearly obvious when my father visited Como, a predominately Black neighborhood of Ft. Worth. Life on a military base was different from being in the general population and constantly revolved around base activities. In contrast, in Como everything was centered around the church where Papa was a Sunday school teacher.

After moving to San Antonio to attend college my father encountered a completely different society. Blacks and Whites were the minority because San Antonio was predominately populated by individuals of Latino descent. The communities of the city were quite segregated. The Blacks lived on the eastside, Whites in the north and northwest sections, and Hispanics everywhere else.

Dad’s first experience with racism in the South was while he was living in Ft. Worth. It involved a local white couple, Jud and Jerry, who were friends of the family. Jerry, the wife, helped my father and his step-brother, James, get a job at a restaurant called The Farmer’s Daughter. Jud, the husband, was from out of state. One night Jud drove to Cowtown to pick up Jerry from her job, and my father and James tagged along with him. After arriving at the bar where Jerry worked, they waited inside for her while Jud kept the car running. The manager of the place came and viciously asked who the two “niggers” were. When Jerry indignantly responded they were her friends, the manager venomously spat out that he did not want to see “them niggers” in his establishment again — Jerry promptly quit her job.

My parents’ description of their lives made me think about my own experiences. I have encountered some of the issues they describe. I have been called a “nigger.” People have eloquently told me of my “inferiority” scientifically, socially, and religiously. The hard truth is that for all the progress we seem to have made, more needs to be make. Yet I saw a silver lining. I have never experienced a race riot. I have not felt the fear of knowing I was in an area where three men were shot based upon their support of civil rights. I am able to sit in a classroom with classmates from other races, ethnicities, and culture without fear of violence. My teachers are able to look past skin color and see an individual’s personal value. In some ways we have not changed and need to progress further, but in other ways we have progressed substantially. It takes more than flour to make an apple pie, and it will take more than forty years of political correctness to rid America of it racism. Through it all I discovered my connection to a culture I never felt I was related to, and I saw how much I still must learn from those who treaded the gnarled and twisted path of life before me.

Works Cited

Ross, Loren. Personal interview. 11 Sep. 2011.

Ross, Patricia. Personal interview. 11 Sep. 2011.


Note: David Ross, who is from Southern Pines, NC, is a university transfer student at Sandhills Community College where he is pursuing an associate in arts degree.