In 'Throw a Rock and Run,' Pender County native recalls growing up in the segregated South
Retired Superior Court judge Gary E. Trawick has penned volumes of devotionals and a history of Pender County. Now, in "Just Throw a Rock ... and Run: A Son of the South Talks Race," he tackles some of the most troubled parts of his past.
Trawick's new book is a memoir focused through the lens of race. Born in 1944, Trawick was in the last generation of Jim Crow segregation; he wants to show how things were and how they affect the way things are now.
Trawick grew up in Burgaw, a sleepy farm town with a courthouse square and a Confederate monument. (Pender County is named for a Confederate general fatally wounded at Gettysburg.)
In the 1950s and early 1960s, there was a "right" side of the railroad tracks, where most of the whites lived, and a "wrong" side where nearly all Blacks could be found.
There were Black and white restrooms, Black and white water fountains. Doctors' offices had separate Black and white waiting rooms, with separate doors to each. The tiny local movie house, like the theaters in Wilmington, had balconies where Black customers were expected to sit, while white kids watched the Roy Rogers movies downstairs.
Schools were segregated. Theoretically, Blacks could vote, if they passed a literacy test. In practice, none in Pender County did.
In school, little Gary and his friends sang songs by Stephen Foster about contented (if lazy) slaves who mourned when "Massa" died. An uncle loved to show his nieces and nephews his cardboard watermelon − with a Black baby doll sleeping inside. To paraphrase the song from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "South Pacific," you had to be carefully taught.
Gary and his brother could play football with Black kids in the field behind the house but couldn't sit with them in school or go to the picture show with them.
As a paper boy for the old Star-News he won a subscription contest to ride the Atlantic Coast Line train to New York on a chaperoned trip. There, he saw Willie Mays hit a homer at Ebbets Fields, but he was also astonished to see interracial couples sharing tables in local diners.
"Just Throw a Rock" − the title gets explained in Chapter 1 − probes the Southern institution of the Black cooks and housekeepers who worked for nearly all middle-class white families. These ladies were "just like family" and often beloved but they never, ever ate with their employers.
Trawick gradually saw that something was wrong about all this, though most of his family never did. The Trawicks never let Gary use the "N"-word (although he heard it often enough) and were polite to Black people. Yet they accepted the system, and assumed that all this civil rights nonsense was just stirred up by outside agitators and Yankee busybodies.
"Just Throw a Rock" recalls "Separate Pasts," the outstanding segregation memoir by retired University of North Carolina Wilmington history professor Melton McLaurin, who grew up in rural Cumberland County as a near-contemporary of Trawick's. "Separate Pasts" is a more polished book, but Trawick has plenty to say and useful insights.
To add a broader picture, Trawick punctuates his narrative with interview chapters, when he talks to Black acquaintances about how they remember their childhoods.
Trawick's opinions are not all "woke." He dislikes the term "African-American," thinking it implies that Blacks are somehow diluted citizens. He's ambivalent about pulling down Confederate monuments, preferring instead that new monuments be erected to the likes of Alfred Lloyd, a Black man who became Pender County's first state legislator after the county was created in 1875.
And he still loves the South. One of his Black acquaintances moved back to Rocky Point from New York because, she said, people seem to care for each other more down here. Trawick would agree.
BOOK REVIEW
'JUST THROW A ROCK ... AND RUN: A Son of the South Talks Race'
By Gary E. Trawick
Wilmington: SlapDash Publishing, $21.95 paperback
"Just Throw a Rock ... And Run" is not available on Amazon. If you cannot find a copy in stores, check the SlapDash Publishing website at CarolinaBeach.net.
This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Throw a Rock and Run by Gary Trawick recalls the segregated South
