Raleigh-born Robert Hinton grew up black in Raleigh’s “projects.” Today, he teaches Africana Studies at New York University. In 2003, he was drawn back to his early life in Raleigh after he met New York City-based film critic Godfrey Cheshire. Cheshire contacted Hinton in response to a letter Hinton wrote to The New York Times about Southern blacks moving from the plantation to the farm. Cheshire, also from Raleigh — but from the white affluent suburbs — was intrigued that Hinton’s name was the same as his mother’s maiden name — and the family name of the owners of Midway Plantation near Knightdale, NC, where Hinton’s ancestors worked as slaves.
Cheshire informed Hinton that the owner of Midway — Cheshire’s cousin Charlie Silver — was planning to move the house. What happened next is now the highly acclaimed documentary film Moving Midway (www.movingmidway.com).
In this special personal essay, Hinton remembers Raleigh from a unique perspective: Southeast by Northwest.
— EDITOR
I was 12 years old when the Supreme Court handed down the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Once I accepted the fact that it was not a joke, I began to question my life and my circumstances. I became obsessed with the question: “Why did God choose me to be a colored boy in North Carolina?”
It was “revealed” to me that I was actually an Ethiopian prince and that I had been sent to North Carolina to make sure that I would be tough enough to be king. I began to prepare myself for my responsibilities.
When I was growing up, each Sunday The News & Observer ran a drawing and floor plan for a new house. Living in the projects, one of my most sustaining fantasies was that somehow, someday, my father would pull it together and build us a house. By my junior year, I had decided to become an architect so I could build my own.
In 1958, when I was a junior at Ligon, the “colored” high school, I caddied at Carolina Country Club. I had two regular clients who always played together. I was going through a religious crisis that led me to read everything I could find about religion in the Richard B. Harrison Library — Raleigh’s “colored” library. I decided that one of my regulars was Jewish and the other Greek Orthodox. They stuck in my mind because they were the only white people I knew who didn’t seem to notice that I was “colored.”
I must have told the men that I wanted to be an architect. The “Jewish” guy informed me that he was the dean of the School of Design at NC State. He told me to come out to see him so that we could talk about my future. At that point in my life I didn’t know about making appointments, so I just showed up one day, but he was out of town.
The dean’s receptionist gave me a copy of the catalog and all the application materials. The catalog listed the courses students needed to take in high school to qualify for admission to the School of Design. I was on track to meet all the requirements, but I needed a one-semester course in Solid Geometry and Trigonometry. I signed up for the course in the fall of my senior year, but I was the only student and it was not offered. I thought this was the end of my dream. About this time, we got kicked out of the projects, my family fell apart and college became a moot question.
Old White Guys In Golf Shoes
One day at Carolina Country Club, I was caddying for two of a foursome. One of my golfers made a reasonably good drive from the 10th tee. He asked my advice on the club to use to reach the green but rejected my recommendation and proceeded to drive his ball deep into a clump of woods to the right. As soon as he saw where the ball was headed, he cursed and flung his club across the fairway. There was a thunderous five seconds of silence before he noticed that I was still standing a respectful distance behind him.
“Go get it,” he said.
“Shheee,” I replied. “You threw it. You go get it.”
He called me names and said that he would see to it that I never caddied at the county club again. I informed him that I had been fired from better places.
The instant the club left his hand I knew how the whole scenario would play itself out. I knew what he had to do as a “white” man in front of his friends. And I knew what I had to do as a young “black” man in the early days of the Civil Rights Movement. My only concern was that the four men might get violent. But I was confident that I could outrun four “old white guys” in golf shoes.
Much to my surprise, the other golfers were embarrassed by their friend’s behavior. My other client paid me and gave me a generous tip. This was my first indication that even Southern white folk were more complicated than I had been led to believe. As soon as I graduated from high school in 1959, I joined the Army to get out of North Carolina. I planned never to return.
I was reminded of my experiences at Carolina Country Club a couple of years ago when Katie and Bernie Reeves invited me to their home — on the golf course — for bourbon and vigorous debate. (Bernie is almost as charming as he thinks he is).
I met Bernie and Katie after I was contacted by Godfrey Cheshire, who worked with Bernie at the old Spectator. Now the film critic for The Independent, Cheshire asked me to work with him on a documentary film about Midway Plantation near Knightdale where his great-grandfather, David Hinton, was the last slave master of my father’s family, and where my grandfather, Dempsey, was born — a slave — about 1860. The film, Moving Midway, had its world premiere at the 2007 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival April 14 and was well received.
Southeast By Northwest
I grew up in the ’40s and ’50s, looking up at Raleigh from the Southeast. In the past three years, through Cheshire and his friends from the planter class, I have been re-introduced to Raleigh, looking down, from the Northwest.
I now approach Raleigh with a weird form of cultural and historical schizophrenia — and I mean schizophrenia in its clinical sense. My feelings about Raleigh are “inappropriate” and almost “delusional.” I avoid all the people and places that are connected to my childhood, for reasons that have little to do with white folks and everything to do with the way I was treated by my family. You will have to buy my book, Mingo Creek, in a few years if you want the details. At the same time, I find myself unreasonably comfortable with the descendants of the people who enslaved my ancestors. I shouldn’t care about these people, but I do.
But then again, I am psychologically predisposed toward an elitist, conservative way of looking at the world. I am as much of a male chauvinist as my wife and daughter will let me get away with. I am an arrogant cultural and intellectual snob. Even black people think I’m uppity. Had the post-bellum ruling class had the good sense to de-emphasize race and set up a truly meritocratic elite, as some old Whigs recommended, they could very easily have co-opted me. But my life experience in Jim Crow North Carolina did not allow me the degree of denial necessary to become an ideological conservative. Instead, in the 1960s, I became “an angry black militant.” I returned to Raleigh, after the Army, with plans to start a revolution on the Algerian model. All white folks would be encouraged to go back to Europe. Luckily, my friends all laughed. One said, “Rabbit, you still crazy,” and walked away.
Angry Black Men
Over the years, I have mellowed into a secular Marxist with Surrealist tendencies. But I’m still angry. Any black man of my generation who is not angry is crazy. Colin Powell is angry. Clarence Thomas is angrier than Louis Farrakhan.
Among other things, I am angry that my family spent 150 years enriching the Hinton family because they were “white” and we were “black.” I am angry that the Hintons haven’t made very good use of the economic and social privileges that my family’s labor created for them. One reason I enjoyed working with Cheshire was that he has made the most of the advantages into which he was born. His intellect and the quality of his cultural work appeal to the snob in me.
Some conservatives say that I shouldn’t still be angry about things that happened so long ago. But, to misappropriate William Faulkner, slavery and segregation are not in the past. I live every day with the consequences of the narrow world in which I was forced to grow up. Slavery and segregation still affect both my mental and physical health. For example, I don’t remember seeing a doctor until I was in the Army. Perhaps, if I had seen a doctor during my adolescence, I might not have to walk with a cane today.
Because of slavery and segregation, my father never learned to read or write. Because segregation isolated me from mainstream culture, I was 40 years old before I understood I was a strong candidate for graduate school. And at Yale University I learned that I could hold my own with the smartest people on the face of the earth.
I earned my doctorate at the age of 51. Slavery and segregation robbed me of at least 10, if not 20, years. I had to leave North Carolina to become myself. It makes me wonder how much brain power North Carolina is wasting today because the brains are in the wrong bodies.
Robert Hinton teaches Africana Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. He lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with his wife, the artist and choreographer Annie Sailer. Their daughter, Phoebe, will be a member of the Class of 2011 at Yale College.