The Sisterhood of Lost Souls

Teresa Nicholas
Yazoo City High School
Class of 1972
Yazoo City, Mississippi

When I was growing up, I wanted to be a nun.

I was about ten years old, and along with my classmates at St. Clara’s Academy, ready to receive the sacrament of Confirmation. The girls resembled little brides, in short lacy dresses and long stiff veils. As we stood before the altar at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, in Yazoo City, Mississippi, Bishop Joseph Brunini of the Jackson Diocese anointed us with a consecrated oil. I don’t know which was more exciting to this incipient postulant, the elaborate ritual or the hands-on from the bishop. Or maybe picking out a saint’s name for myself, symbolizing my commitment to my faith. I chose Margaret.

Around that time my teachers, the nuns at St. Clara, invited me and my big sister to a recruiting breakfast. The convent had polished wooden floors and smelled of Pine-Sol. We sat at the formal dining table and ate scrambled eggs off china plates, while our parish priest, Father Charles Hunter, asked about our career plans. Across the hall the convent’s chapel waited, a dark and silent beacon. My sister was not taken with the nuns, but I wanted all they had to offer—mystery and belonging.

The nuns recommended books for me to read. Physician/humanitarian/anti-communist/CIA informant Tom Dooley figured high on their list (Deliver Us from Evil, The Edge of Tomorrow, The Night They Burned the Mountain). He was a complicated man who provided medical aid to refugees in Vietnam and Laos. Later he came under scrutiny for fabricating some of the gory atrocities he wrote about, but that is another story. For me he was a beloved Catholic who battled communism’s evil and died a romantic, early death from cancer. Plus, he was cute.

When I was in about eighth grade the nuns told me about a novel with a curious name, To Kill a Mockingbird. Here was a book that reflected the troubles not of faraway Southeast Asia but of our own Southern town. From his pulpit Father Hunter was preaching in favor of integrating Yazoo’s two Catholic Churches, St. Mary’s and St. Francis’, the African-American parish “up on top of the hill,” as we used to describe it. As Father Hunter neared retirement, the bishop elevated him to monsignor. I believed he’d gotten this honor because of his stand on civil rights.

We all loved Father Hunter. But over this issue, my father broke with him.

And over this issue, I broke with my father.

And then I broke with the Church. I lost all interest in becoming a nun and almost all in remaining a Catholic. I can recall my enraged moment, in 1968 when I was fourteen, when our then-priest, a full-brogued Irishman, pounded his pulpit and blamed the congregation for the destruction of Hurricane Camille. Too much gambling on the Gulf Coast, he said. Our fault, he said.

But my belief in civil rights endured. My childhood convictions had stemmed from my over-religiosity and the romanticism of the Church, with its promise of self-sacrifice. Eventually these convictions would result in a lot of personal alienation and family strife.

I give this preamble to explain why, in the fall of 1969, while standing in front of the television in our living room one Sunday after Mass, I told my father I wouldn’t transfer to Manchester Academy, the whites-only private school forming in the Methodist and First Presbyterian church basements. Thirty public school districts in Mississippi, Yazoo’s included, had been ordered by the Supreme Court to integrate immediately. St. Clara’s high school had closed, and I was now a sophomore at Yazoo High. I would stay there.

My disobedience made my father livid, and he said many cruel things, many of which I’ve forgotten. A non-card-carrying supporter of the White Citizens’ Council, he cited their religious and patriotic rhetoric in our fights. He had a way with awful words. I do remember that he told me he didn’t have the money to send me to Manchester. His first priority was my little brother’s education.

Two years before, my brother had been a fifth-grader at St. Clara’s. One of the nuns, in a bizarre campaign to improve his handwriting, had started using a ruler to beat on what remained of his right index finger, the last joint of which he’d lost in a tug-of-war with a push mower. My father pulled him from St. Clara’s and enrolled him in the public school, where he created more notoriety by asking a Black girl to the school’s annual seventh-grade dance. She was a Freedom of Choice student, lanky like my brother, and she took the invitation as the friendly gesture he intended. “We were just tall people making friends,” she told me recently. Another lanky white boy even planned on tagging along. But when word got out, the school canceled the dance, permanently.

Whether because of the money or because he knew couldn’t convince me, Daddy dropped the idea of my going to Manchester. Yazoo public schools, after the 1969 holiday break, finally integrated. National reporters were there on that bitter-cold January morning, staked out across from the high school entrance. Native son Willie Morris was also there, and in March he would publish a cover piece for Harper’s magazine that would later become the book Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town.

There were two urgent questions in the minds of the journalists, and in the minds of Yazooans, that morning: Would there be violence? And how much white flight would take place? Some of the town’s leaders—the pastor at First Baptist, the president of the fertilizer plant, the editor of the local paper—had spoken out in favor of integration. But would that be enough?
As the Black students from N.D. Taylor High slowly filed up Yazoo High’s entrance ramp, past the stone plaque with the Ten Commandments and into the auditorium, my best friend and I stood at the window and silently cheered. For months we’d been excited that finally something big was going to happen. We saw that the adults were unsettled by integration, but we were in favor, though we didn’t know what it might mean. Bob Dylan was telling us, “The times they are a-changin’,” and we hoped for nothing less than a transformation of our insular world.

At the end of that cold day, Yazoo City’s public schools had integrated peacefully and in roughly the same proportion as the population. That is, about sixty-forty, Black to white. I couldn’t imagine how the Black students must have felt about being uprooted and delivered over to an unfamiliar school where they were largely unwanted. For many white students, the new status quo probably felt like being cleaved in half, losing to Manchester the classmates they’d played and studied with since kindergarten.

Ironically, I was now attending a “successfully” integrated high school that was still effectively segregated in its homerooms and classrooms. This would begin to change the next semester, but in the meantime about the only contact we whites had with the Black students was passing them in the crowded halls during class changes. For a while, I can’t remember how long, we elected two of everything based on skin color, including two sets of class officers and two homecoming queens and courts. In a letter to the school newspaper, which was one of the few remaining extracurricular activities, a white student bemoaned the lack of dances and proms, homecoming bonfires, student assemblies, and even “Latin banquets.”

My response to integration: to embrace it as if I were Yazoo’s answer to Tom Dooley.

In the school paper, my co-editor and I put Black students and teachers in photos and articles. We wrote about Black slang. About an Afro hairstyle called the “puffball.” About Black athletes (future Mr. Ole Miss and Buffalo Bills draftee “Gentle” Ben Williams became co-captain of the Yazoo Indians). Getting to know Black kids still wasn’t easy. Senior year I made friends with a girl who sat behind me in homeroom. (She liked the boy who sat in front of me. I became their go-between note-passer.) After school I would spend hours with her on the phone gossiping about our crushes, until my father got home. Also senior year, one afternoon while in study hall, in the dark front rows of the auditorium, I allowed the Black boy one seat away from me to try on my junior class ring and briefly to hold my hand, while I marveled at his dark palm.

I corresponded with one former St. Clara nun, whom my father monikered “Sister JoBanana.” She’d moved to Fayette, Mississippi, and was active in civil rights. (“Mafia,” Daddy labeled her. “A communist.”) She campaigned for Fayette Mayor Charles Evers in his 1971 bid for governor. When our school paper printed profiles of Evers (the first Black gubernatorial candidate since Reconstruction) and Bill Waller (the unsuccessful prosecutor of the murderer of Charles’ brother Medgar), an adult mentor of mine, a benefactor of the paper, and someone I babysat for, pulled me aside in his front yard and said, “This time you’ve gone too far.”

He wasn’t complaining just about the article. I’d been helping to organize a campaign rally for Mayor Evers at the Yazoo County courthouse with Michigan Congressman Charles Diggs. But I’d also attended voter registration rallies at St. Francis’, and I’d even driven an hour to Jackson to hear visiting New York City mayor John Lindsay speak in support of Mayor Evers.

My father called it “playing with fire.”

Was it playing? Some sort of dangerous diversion, meant to forestall what we termed “death by boredom” in Yazoo City? Or did I harbor real convictions about racial equality?

That same fall, the fall of my senior year, I learned how far I’d gone. During class elections– by then we were not electing dual officers–Blacks won handily for president and vice-president. After I voted for the Black candidate for president—my girlfriend’s homeroom crush—a Black student put my name forward for secretary. Every Black, and not one white, not even my friends, voted for me. I know, because the ballots were cast by standing.

Afterward I felt hurt, alone, but most of all, surprised. Later in homeroom, my girlfriend passed up a note, this time intended for me. In her flowery script she’d penned: “I have heard some terrible things about what people are saying about you…I had intended to tell you that I appreciated your vote and to let you know that we (the Black people) showed our appreciation by voting for you.” (Yes, I still have her note, and practically everything written to me from that epistolary era.)

I already had one foot out Mississippi’s door. Encouraged by my mentor, the one I babysat for, I’d applied to colleges in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. That spring, accepted by both, given financial aid by both, I chose the college farthest away. The one above the Mason-Dixon Line.
Mayor Evers, in a personal letter of recommendation, called me “an example of the ‘new’ thinking, innovative, white student of the South.” Sister JoAnn said I was a “liberated southerner.” (A true Tom Dooley, JoAnn Kaelin left the sisterhood but remained active in civil rights causes. In 2011, when she died, a tribute from her former order read, “At a time when others were uncertain where to stand on the racial question, JoAnn was clear and caring.”)

Instead of a liberated Southerner, I wondered if I was a racist. Toward the end of my senior year, I wrote a tell-all letter that I never sent, to a friend who’d already escaped the South, summing up those grim years by concluding that I was “tired of bigotry” but also “tired of integration.” In study hall I may have marveled at that Black boy’s palm, but I’d drawn back from touching it. I suppose this was also an act too far; perhaps it was playing with fire. I’d behaved the way I did not because I was liberated but because I suffered from a surfeit of curiosity and teenage hormones, and besides, I hadn’t known how to refuse him. When he wrote me a love letter, I didn’t mention it to anyone, including him.

No, not liberated. I felt like another of those lost souls the South is so good at serving up.

After those town leaders, the original supporters of integration, retired and moved away from Yazoo, others did not step forward. Gradually the racial balance of the public schools shifted. Finally, about two decades ago, a tipping point was reached, when white parents were no longer willing to send their children to the overwhelmingly Black, re-segregated public schools.

Where did the whites go? Not to Manchester, whose enrollment dropped from 800 students right after integration to about 400 today. The whites moved into Yazoo County and to adjacent (and whiter and tonier) Madison County. In 2018, the Mississippi Board of Education took control of the failing Yazoo City public schools, dissolving the school board and firing the superintendent.

Today Manchester’s homepage reads: “Manchester, an independent school, does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national, or ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admissions policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other school-administered programs.”

My brother stayed at Manchester briefly, maybe a semester, before returning to the public schools and graduating. Twenty years ago, when his daughter enrolled at Manchester, her best friend was a Black girl. The only Black student, she wrote an essay about Philadelphia that won the Willie Morris Writers’ Prize. Today she owns a popular food truck and sells Mississippi hot tamales in South Philly.

In my mind, in that place where thoughts come uncensored, I still wonder if I’m a racist. Are those young hoodied boys on bicycles in my leafy downtown Jackson neighborhood just having fun, or are they potentially menacing? What about that young man driving fast and playing rap music?

Am I racist, or is this Tom Dooley-inspired Catholic self-flagellation?
Am I racist? Mississippi asks this question of us every day.
The nation asks this question of us every day.

Teresa Nicholas is a writer who lives in Jackson, Mississippi, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She has also worked for the Crown Publishing Group and was on the faculty of the Columbia Publishing Course at the Columbia University School of Journalism.