A Life Wasted

Learning to Fight

- 1970 - The year that formed me.
In the next year mom got a home loan designed for working single mothers, so she bought a new house in Bath, South Carolina, a small rural community just east of Augusta and an easy drive to her parents home in Aiken, SC. I was fourteen. Though our home was new and finished, the acre of land that it sat on was a mess. To build the house the developer had pushed trees and dirt out of the way which remained that way when we moved in. With no money for landscaping, I spent the summer trying to clear the land with an axe, shovel, and wheel barrow. It was an ongoing job that I never finished.

It is ironic that mom moved to the country to get us away from the racial violence of Augusta. Though I'd been close to the mob of rioters there, I'd never actually felt the pain of the South's racial violence until my first day of school in our new home. I was entering seventh grade. It's always a big step to go from elementary to middle school, but in a new community where I knew no one it was a bit intimidating. My first view of Jefferson Junior High School was through the window of the school bus. Everyone on the bus was white, which I had expected since where I had come from there were no black kids in our school. Ever kid on my bus had the same story. Though they were all locals, not even the eighth and ninth graders on the bus had attended a school with a black kid. Like me, they were seeing Jefferson Junior High for the first time because prior to this year, Jefferson had always been an all black school. A proud all black school with a storied history.
I had never heard the term "desegregation", nor was I aware that this was the year it had reached South Carolina. In the south this was known as "bussing", which I had heard mentioned, though I thought it meant I would have a longer bus ride, which was the case. What I didn't understand was that I would be "bussed" to a school that had never had a white student. It was clear from my first view of Jefferson that the school's 80% majority black students didn't want us there. The parking lot and bus loading area was pandemonium. There were hundreds of angry black students screaming with their fist in the air, using the well known "Black Power" symbol. One bus load of white students had already been flipped on its side.

There were police cars everywhere, but they were no match for the mob. I figured the white man driving the bus would back up and get us out of there, but instead he stopped well short of the mob and opened the door and said, "End of the line kids, you'll have to make a run for it from here." One of the older kids said something to the affect of we can't go into that mess, but the driver insisted. He said if we didn't like it we'd have to take it up with the "Yankee Supreme Court".

At historically white schools, bus loads of black kids were having a similar experience all over the state.
Having no choice I got off the bus and headed towards the school. Most of the white kids ran towards the police and a knot of teachers, but for reasons I'll never understand I walked at a steady pace through the mob towards the school. No one touched me nor even said anything to me. I didn't know anyone there and had no idea where I was suppose to go so I walked down a mostly empty main hallway until I found a bathroom. I had just finished up and was leaving when three older black kids walked in, clearly surprised to see me there. I smiled and said "Hi". I didn't see the first punch, but it was a good one. It was the only punch in my long life that knocked me down. I have a vague memory of all three of them punching and kicking me while I laid on the filthy floor before I lost consciousness.

I woke to a large white man lifting me off the floor and holding me in a recovery position so I could get my breath back. It wasn't until I could stand on my own that I realized my rescuer wasn't a man, but a ninth grader who was larger than most men. His name was Robert Schrader. He was new to the area too, but not new to violence. Bob was from Philadelphia, the first Yankee I had ever met. His dad had been a Philadelphia city cop who had been forced to leave because of his mistreatment of organized crime figures. Bob senior hated crime and violence and believed the only way to defeat bad guys was to be the meanest SOB in the room. Senior passed his attitude to his son. He also trained him to fight.

Bob's first words to me was to ask if I could identify my attackers. When I nodded and said I could he grabbed my arm and said, lets go. When I asked where, Bob's voice became animated. "We're going hunting." The way he said it sent a chill of fear through me. We found my three assailants in the gym, where Bob knew they would be, bragging about their "fight". There were a mixture of boys and girls in the gym, all black except for us, yet Bob dragged me across the gym to confront my attackers. As we walked he whispered to me, "If you don't fight I will give you the worst ass kicking you've ever had. You don't have to win, but you have to fight." He released me when we reached the three guys, and without a word of preamble he attacked. I followed as best I could. The fight was a blur, but I do recall getting overwhelmed and held down by several guys only to have them dragged off by Bob. When I looked around there were at least a dozen guys and two girls on the gym floor. Everyone else had backed away. Bob was a terror. Other than the warning he had whispered to me, Bob had not said a single word in the gym. When we got outside where the real fighting was going on, Bob said to me, "That was lesson number one. Do you want more." "Yes," I said through my pain. I wanted more.

I later learned that Bob had watched me calmly walk alone through the crowd of angry black students and into the school. He mistook my ignorance for courage, so he worked his way around the crowd to follow me. By the time he found me I was unconscious on the restroom floor. My ignorance and Bob's misinterpretation of it for courage which brought about our friendship was the critical turning point of my life. There is no doubt in my mind that I became who I am because of our meeting this day.

I'm too ashamed of what happened to recount the details of seventh grade. But I will say that every day was spent with Bob, who lived two blocks from me, and every day involved either training to fight or actually fighting. Seventh grade was war. White against black. Bob was the leader of the whites and I was his trusted side-kick. The part that is hard to believe is that neither Bob nor his rather colorful dad were racist. Both hated bullies. Both believed in protecting those who couldn't protect themselves. In another area Bob would have fought to protect minority blacks from aggressive whites. But where we lived the blacks were the aggressors, so it was them that we fought.

A part of me became a racist during this period of my life, but it didn't last long. It was never in my heart to hate. What did stick with me was Bob's other lesson. Bob didn't drink or do drugs. He hated both as much as he hated bullies. But what he did like to do was steal. Bob believed that there were people in the world with too much money and he felt an obligation to correct the imbalance. So Bob taught me it was okay to steal as long as it was from those who had "too much". He also taught me how. Like the ability to fight, this is a lesson that would stick with me throughout my life.

*Thanks for reading and voting! Dad was surprised when I told him that more than just family members were interested in reading his story. He reminded me that he never wanted to write but was grateful that I encouraged him to do so.  Turns out, he is enjoying this!