How I Shed My Skin: Unlearning the Racist Lessons of a Southern Childhood - Hardcover

Grimsley, Jim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1616203765 ISBN 13: 9781616203764

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 2015

Synopsis

"White people declared that the South would rise again. Black people raised one fist and chanted for black power. Somehow we negotiated a space between those poles and learned to sit in classrooms together . . . Lawyers, judges, adults declared that the days of separate schools were over, but we were the ones who took the next step. History gave us a piece of itself. We made of it what we could." —Jim Grimsley

More than sixty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that America’s schools could no longer be segregated by race.

Critically acclaimed novelist Jim Grimsley was eleven years old in 1966 when federally mandated integration of schools went into effect in the state and the school in his small eastern North Carolina town was first integrated. Until then, blacks and whites didn’t sit next to one another in a public space or eat in the same restaurants, and they certainly didn’t go to school together.

Going to one of the private schools that almost immediately sprang up was not an option for Jim: his family was too poor to pay tuition, and while they shared the community’s dismay over the mixing of the races, they had no choice but to be on the front lines of his school’s desegregation.

What he did not realize until he began to meet these new students was just how deeply ingrained his own prejudices were and how those prejudices had developed in him despite the fact that prior to starting sixth grade, he had actually never known any black people.

Now, more than forty years later, Grimsley looks back at that school and those times--remembering his own first real encounters with black children and their culture. The result is a narrative both true and deeply moving. Jim takes readers into those classrooms and onto the playing fields as, ever so tentatively, alliances were forged and friendships established. And looking back from today’s perspective, he examines how far we have really come.

“Does more to explain the South than anything I’ve read in a long, long time . . . Simply put, a brilliant book. While I was reading, I kept thinking two things. One, this is totally shocking. Two, it’s not at all shocking but a familiar part of my life and memory. Grimsley’s narrative is straightforward and plain spoken while at the same time achingly moving and intimately honest.” —Josephine Humphreys, author of No Where Else on Earth

“I not only believed this account but was grateful to see it on the record . . . The boy in this narrative is becoming a man in a time of enormous change, and his point of view is like a razor cutting through a callus. Painful and healing. Forthright and enormously engaging. This is a book to collect and share and treasure." —Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina

“Jim Grimsley’s unflinching self-examination of his own boyhood racial prejudices during the era of school desegregation is one of the most compelling memoirs of recent years. Vivid, precise, and utterly honest, ?How I Shed My Skin is a time machine of sorts, a reminder that our past is every bit as complex as our present, and that broad cultural changes are often intimate, personal, and idiosyncratic.” —Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic and Desire

“In all his beautiful works, Jim Grimsley has told hard, hidden truths in luminous, subtle prose . . . Here, he renders history not on the grand, sociological scale where it is usually written, but on very personal terms, where it is lived. This is an exquisite, careful story of a white boy of simple background and great innocence.” —Moira Crone, author of The Not Yet

“Grimsley probes the past to discover what and how he learned about race, equality, and democracy . . . in this revelatory memoir.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Acclaimed writer Grimsley offers a beautifully written coming-of-age recollection from the era of racial desegregation.” —Booklist, starred review

 

About this title

About the Author

Jim Grimsley is the author of four previous novels, among them Winter Birds, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award; Dream Boy, winner of the GLBTF Book Award for literature; My Drowning, a Lila-Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award winner; and Comfort and Joy. He lives in Atlanta and teaches at Emory University.

From the Back Cover

. . . Good people taught and still teach racism to their children without a second thought. This was true in the South of my birth and remains so to the present . . . We teach that God created the races to be separate from one another for a purpose, and we preach that this purpose cannot be to mix, because why then would He have created the separation in the first place? We teach that when people are different from each other, one is better and the other worse . . . We teach that black and white are not simply different but opposite. —from How I Shed My Skin

“Race has been at the forefront of the national conversation . . . The country is discussing how far we still have to go. How I Shed My Skin, by Jim Grimsley, is a white writer’s story of that journey—where we’ve come from and how we move forward.” —The Washington Post

“Grimsley says, ‘I was a good little racist’ . . . It’s the defining moment in Grimsley’s new memoir about desegregation, a day when he sensed that everything he’d been taught about black people was wrong.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“Powerful . . . Grimsley’s brave self-examination of his own childhood prejudices makes this book personal; his struggle to reconcile and overcome those prejudices makes it universal.” —Birmingham magazine

“Grimsley impersonates his younger self with great skill and delicacy . . . He doesn’t pretend that simply sitting next to black classmates suddenly changed his way of looking at the world . . . The process occurred over many years and much searching.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Eloquent, moving . . . A welcome addition to our constant, ever-evolving conversation on race.” —Atlanta magazine

Edition details

• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1616203765
• ISBN 13: 9781616203764
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288