Separate Pasts: Growing Up White In The Segregated South

At the age of 12 or 13, McLaurin participates in a race-baiting incident. In this chapter, McLaurin reflects on how guilt over the racial inequality of segregation affected people in the South. We meet Sam McNeil, a slow man who does manual labor around the town. Sam is friendly, hardworking, and eager to please. He spent some time in “the colored insane asylum,” and he becomes a “mysterious and threatening” figure whom McLaurin is warned to stay away from (99).

One summer night, McLaurin is killing time with some friends. Bored, the boys go to Noah Bullock’s store. The store is the site of “one of the most spectacular murders in village history” (104), as an African American resident, Martin Adams, shot his wife, Mary Lou Adams, inside. The boys are disappointed that the store is not morbid or dangerous. Bored, the boys recount the murder. The oldest boys of the group, Dennis and Harold, have an “imaginative mean streak” (104). To alleviate their boredom, the boys bait Sam, who is inside the store, by chanting the n-word.

The boys open the door of the store and shout, “Nigger, nigger black as tar / Stuck his head in a molasses jar / Jar broke, cut his throat, / Went to hell on a billy goat” (107-08).