Patriotism and religion were two sides of the same coin in my mind. Perhaps it was Lent, with its mite boxes, or the Lenten contests our church would have, or the romantic discipline of giving up candy, ice cream, or whatever my particular Lenten vow was for that year. Perhaps it was the gentle love of my church-school kindergarten teacher, a woman named Estelle Darrow. I do not really know wherein its attraction lay, but I do know that I looked forward to it on most Sundays. As a matter of fact, that willingness made things easier, since I do not recall that I was given any choice in the matter.

I am certain that I began to gain in Sunday school not only a knowledge of, but also a love for, the biblical stories. Yet I cannot bring to mind any specific learning experience involving any biblical content. My knowledge of the Bible was helped perhaps by the fact that it permeated the culture. I also must have been affected by those times I went to church, for I remember while being alone at home actually playing church games. My moments of "Let's Pretend" included sermons I preached with much fervor, hymns I sang, prayers I offered, and communion elements I gave out. I do not remember what I used for wine. I am confident the real thing was not available to me. Since at that time I had never received communion, I am not sure I even knew that wine was the appropriate beverage.

When I try now to recall specific moments in my Sunday-school life, only two come to mind. I recall being slapped for misbehavior by my fourth-grade teacher. I do not remember what my misbehavior was; I only remember the shock and the embarrassment of her slap. I do not even remember that teacher's name, but I thought of her as a pretty young woman, and somehow that made her hostile action more distressing. Perhaps I had already equated attractiveness with niceness.

The other episode occurred in the fifth grade. My teacher was Herbert Darrow, Estelle's husband, and a man of some girth with a booming singing voice. The subject matter for that fifth-year was the Ten Commandments. It was pretty tedious going through those Sundays in which we dealt with idols, graven images, the sacred name of God, and the Sabbath day observance. Then we journeyed through the honoring of our parents and the prohibition against murder, by which time more than half of the year had elapsed. Next, to my surprise and with no explanation whatsoever, we leaped over commandment number seven and started dealing with number eight and the meaning of stealing.

Whatever adultery was, it was clearly the worst of all sins. That, too, was part of the code of the South.

I was a precocious but uninformed lad, and so I raised my hand. "But Mr. Darrow," I protested, "we skipped the seventh commandment. What does it mean to commit adultery?" I had not the slightest idea that this would prove to be an embarrassing or difficult question, but it soon became obvious that my query had caused Mr. Darrow great distress. He sputtered, looked away, mopped his brow, and then blurted out, "You'll learn about that when you get older." What he communicated to me was that whatever adultery was, it was clearly the worst of all sins. That, too, was part of the code of the South. I would learn that Southerners committed adultery as much as anyone else, but they did not seem to enjoy it. Sex was something that was not to be enjoyed. It was a kind of duty of married life and a prohibition outside of it. I had disturbed that uneasy repression.

This was also an all-white church, which meant that neither sex nor race was allowed to be discussed. These realities would come together, however, in the racist jargon used in the social order as the reductio ad absurdum of all race conversations, at least as I began to hear those conversations in my teenage years, "Do you want your sister or daughter to marry a Negro?" The answer was assumed to be so obviously "no" that the argument for justice or equal opportunity was supposed to be stopped in its tracks.

I did not understand at that time this strange intersection between sexual attraction and racial fear.

I did not understand at that time this strange intersection between sexual attraction and racial fear. I was not then aware of how frequently in the days of both slavery and segregation in the South black women had been sexually violated by white men. That is why there are so many shades of black people in the United States to this day. Nor did I understand that the emotional castration of black men was a prerequisite to this violent sexual behavior. So black men were whipped, physically castrated, or even hanged for looking at a white woman in a way that might express desire, and keeping black people uneducated, dependent, servile, and powerless was necessary to enable this sexual pattern to continue to exist. It also meant that the deepest subliminal racial fear that white males had was that if black men ever got real power and escaped the intimidation of fear, they might well do to white women the same thing that white men had done to black women for generations.

When that [Sunday-school] class talked about murder, neither the dehumanization of blacks nor the activity of lynching ever came up... Never were sex and race allowed to meet in a religious setting.

There was also in this Southern white male shibboleth the not so subtle implication and dread that if white women ever had a choice, they might actually choose the sexually virile black male over the sexually sedate white male. This was an expression of what I would later call the "Othello factor." But the fact remains that I did not at that time know any more about sex than I knew about race or segregation. I was simply picking up the vibrations of a way of life that even then was doomed, although its adherents did not yet know it. Racism was and is an omnipresent irrational force. So were the sexual fears that were deeply entwined with that racism. So deep were these fears that even my fifth-grade Sunday-school teacher felt he had to skip over the commandment on adultery. It is also a fact that when that class talked about murder, neither the dehumanization of blacks nor the activity of lynching ever came up. Nor did we talk about how we stole the labor of the black people by conspiring to keep wages at rock bottom when we discussed the prohibition about stealing. Never were sex and race allowed to meet in a religious setting.