Separate Pasts: Growing Up White In The Segregated South

Chapter 2 introduces James Robert Fuller, Jr. (aka Bobo), an African American boy a year younger than McLaurin. McLaurin recounts a specific memory of playing pickup basketball with Bobo when he was 13. McLaurin plays with Bobo but looks down on him because of his poverty and race. Bobo’s father, James Robert, drives a truck for the Tart Lumber Company, and his mother, Jeanette, works as a domestic. Unlike poor whites, who were overtly or violently racist, McLaurin is polite to African Americans. His good breeding does not negate his racism. He doesn’t question the widespread belief among whites in the segregated South that African American people were born to be the servants of white people.

McLaurin then turns to the pickup basketball game. The boys have to inflate a basketball that is leaking air. Bobo puts the air compressor into his month and coats it with spit. When another playmate, Howard Lee, is unable to push the valve into the ball, McLaurin intervenes. In his rush to get back to the game, he grabs the air compressor and reinflates the ball himself, sticking the needle of the air compressor into his month. Quickly, McLaurin realizes that he has Bobo’s saliva in his mouth.

Fears that “black germs would ravage my body with unspeakable diseases, diseases from the tropics, Congo illnesses” sweep over McLaurin (37). The threat of germs is not the worst part. Something more insidious—a world of “voodoo chants and tribal drums” (38)— threatens to infect his whiteness. Overwhelmed by his loss of self-control, McLaurin reacts with anger, flinging the ball at Bobo’s stomach to defend his whiteness. Before returning to the game, he washes his mouth with water in a “ritual of purification” (40). McLaurin reflects that at this moment, he feels threatened by the “sinister” power of Bobo’s blackness, understanding how much segregation had shaped his life.