What Changes, What Remains the Same

1970

“Didn’t you know what Rev. Shipp believed when you hired him?” the reporter asked. “Didn’t he preach about it?”  

“Yes,” she replied without giving her name, “but we thought that was just preaching. We didn’t think he was gonna do anything about it.”

2021

Ridgecrest Baptist Church sits beside NC State Highway 98, its tiny steeple pointing sharply into the sky as if to pin it in place. Next to the two-lane 55-mph road that connects Wake Forest and Durham, it looks exactly as it did in 1969 when my father was pastor there for nine months. Before he was dismissed for practicing what he preached. 

In the summer of 2021, I am on my way into Wake Forest on Highway 98. The twists and turns of the road I knew now lie buried deep beneath the waters of Falls Lake, formed in the 1980s when the Neuse River was dammed. The old highway dead-ends into a white metal gate, beyond which is a gravel-covered trail. Here and there, the gray pavement emerges from beneath the gravel, but the yellow and white center lines, almost transparent, now lead to where the road disappears beneath the water.

The country road that coiled around old homesteads and farms, has been superseded by a streamlined two-lane highway straight into town, level as far as the eye can see. The farms and fields that I remember have been replaced by housing developments. Clusters of oversized houses with tiny yards have sprung up like mushrooms behind manicured hedges and black iron railings, a reminder that what was a cozy seminary town of 4,000 when we lived here, is now home to 55,000 people. A lot has changed. 

But Ridgecrest Baptist Church looks exactly the same as it did more than fifty years ago.

I drive past the church and turn left onto Stony Hill Road, looking for a modest red brick ranch-style house that no longer exists, but that nevertheless still stands at an intersection in my memory between innocence and experience. The carefully curated innocence of Whiteness. The bitter experience of racist violence.

That house was the parsonage of Ridgecrest Baptist Church and, for two months in 1969, my family’s home. Its absence haunts the shoulder of Stony Hill Road.

1969

I was 15 going on 16 when my father, a student at the seminary in Wake Forest, was installed as the pastor of Ridgecrest. About six miles west of town, the church, having split from another well-established church about seven years before, was struggling. Under my dad’s leadership, attendance went up, offerings increased. The church was so pleased that they pulled out the plans for a new parsonage, previously shelved for lack of funds, and began building it that summer. 

They surprised my parents by installing a heat pump to regulate automatically the temperature in the house, at extra cost. In the family room, they included a fireplace. And custom-made wood paneling.

“It can’t be matched,” they said. “If the paneling gets damaged, the whole thing will have to be ripped out and replaced.”

They were extremely proud of that paneling.

By September, the house was finished, and we moved in.

A month later, my mother pulled me into the kitchen. It was late afternoon, I was just home from school. The days were getting shorter, and the sun was already moving behind the trees. She sat me down at the table to talk to me about a party I was planning.

“Some people are going to be upset,” she said, “that you are inviting Bettie and Jean, William, Mike and Silas, and Marjorie.” The names of some of my Black friends.

“Are you sure you want to invite them?”

Every year since I’d entered high school, I had thrown a party for my friends. Anywhere from 10 to 15 of them would show up. Usually the party was planned for the fall, when we could still get outside and play badminton or volleyball. We would set up nets in the wide yard next to the small seminary duplex where we lived before. Dad grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, and Mom spread a long table with condiments and buns, paper plates and plastic utensils. 

Of course, since the Wake County school system was still largely segregated even as late as 1968, all of my friends were White.

That changed in the fall of 1969, the beginning of my junior year. About nine Black students, also juniors, elected to transfer from the all-Black W.E.B. DuBois School to the predominantly White Wake Forest High School.  

For a number of years, my Christian parents had been teaching me and my brothers that, as the children of one God, we were all siblings—“brothers and sisters,” as they said—regardless of our race or color. That we were equal in the eyes of God. Equally beloved of God. Both of them were born in southeastern Virginia and raised in the Jim Crow South of the 1930s and 40s, but they found it impossible to ignore the civil rights movement, and particularly the powerful preaching and example of Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Slowly, and not easily, they had come to believe that segregation was morally wrong. And that’s what they taught us.

I found it easy to make friends among the Black students. I wanted them to feel welcomed, and, since we were all juniors, we were in many of the same classes. We were just beginning to get to know each other when I decided to throw another party, this one in the much larger family room of the parsonage. Naturally my new friends were on the guest list.

Now my mother sat across the table from me, asking me if I was sure I wanted to include them.

“Mom!” I said, “If I can’t have a party with all my friends, I don’t want to have a party at all!”

“Yes, that’s what your father and I thought you would say, and we agree with you. We just want it to be your decision.”

I knew, even as an idealistic and innocent 16-year-old, that many White people, including church members and some of our friends, disapproved of our hosting an interracial party. One by one, my White friends told me they weren’t coming. Stopping me in the hallway between classes, hit and run: “I’m so sorry, but I’m not going to be able to come to your party after all. We’re going out-of-town that weekend.” “I have to go Christmas shopping with my aunt.” “Our relatives are coming to visit that weekend, and I need to be at home.” The list of excuses was wide, but shallow. The real reason lay clearly visible at bottom: they refused to attend a party where there would be what they called “mixin’.”

Some of my Black friends also decided not to come. For notably different reasons. The father of one said to her, “An integrated party? In the Harricans?” End of discussion.

The Harricans (pronounced HAIR-k’ns) was an area of indeterminate latitude and longitude. As one Wake County sheriff famously said, if you ask where the Harricans is, the answer is always “a few miles up the road.” It got its name after a hurricane devastated the hardscrabble farming community trying to eke a living out of ungracious soil. Many folks gave up on farming and turned to the manufacture of moonshine. White lightnin’, corn licker. In a dry county, like Wake County at the time, the Harricans’ claim to fame was that you could always be sure to find a Mason jar of something from a still out in the woods that would take the edge off your pain and the lining off your innards.

When my father accepted the call to pastor Ridgecrest Baptist Church early in 1969, he was not naive. Most, if not all, of the people who lived in the tight-knit community were White, the descendants of Confederate soldiers, and proud of it. Some of them gave their children the names of Confederate generals, like Nathan Bedford Forrest. Or Stonewall, for Stonewall Jackson. 

And they were dyed-in-the-wool segregationists. He heard tell of one person who had said that, if his daughter were to date a “n****r,” he would “shoot them both down in the road like dogs.” And there was another church right up the road from the parsonage, established 20 years after the end of the Civil War, whose constitution clearly stated that “if a n****r steps foot on our property, we will throw him off.” 

The week before the party, the deacons of Ridgecrest called a special meeting. Only one item was on the agenda: to convince the pastor to cancel his children’s “integrated” party.

“If you allow this party to go on,” they said, “we will ask for your resignation.”

My father argued that he was not trying to force the church to integrate, and that we were not insisting that church members plan interracial parties in their homes.

“I have been teaching my children to judge people on the content of their character, not on the color of their skin,” he said.  “How can I tell them now that their friends are not welcome in our home because they are Black?”

But as news of the party circulated, the anger roiling in the White community began to alarm the deacons. These were people they had known and lived beside for years, decades. They were afraid that the church would lose respect and influence among their White neighbors.

And they were anxious about possible damage to the brand-new parsonage. At least one mentioned the custom wood paneling. “It can’t be matched,” he reminded my father.

The discussion went round and round for two, three, four hours. 

Finally, one of them piped up, “Well! If you allow this party to go on as planned, one thing’s for sure: we will ask for your resignation.”

“Well, I’m gonna have to do what I have to do,” my father said, “and I guess y’all are just gonna have to do what you have to do.”

The meeting ended in a stalemate. At least two of the deacons reportedly went door-to-door in the Harricans over the next few days, fanning the flames of outrage.

2021

I am staying with old friends, White friends in Wake Forest. When I tell them I’m writing a book about what happened to my family, and to the town, in the late 60s, their response is less than encouraging. “This place has changed so much since you lived here.” “It’s not the same town anymore, so many new people have moved in.” They inform me that Wake Forest has become less a separate town and more a bedroom community for people who work in the Research Triangle, in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. 

“No one remembers what happened that long ago.” 

While I am in town, one of my Black classmates from back in the day invites me to a cookout at her house. Everyone there is Black, except for me and one other White friend. 

After eating ourselves silly, we gather in the family room and plop down into comfy chairs. The mother of one of my Black former classmates points at me and says, “Oh! Is this the girl that had that party?” Everyone nods. 

“Do people still remember the party?” I ask. 

“Oh, yes,” a Black friend answers, “they remember. They act like they don’t, but they remember.”

“Just preaching,” the anonymous woman said.

Like preaching, writing is words. But words can be action, if they interrogate the past. If they reveal what has been hidden or erased, pushed aside or willfully forgotten. Words are action, if a lived life stands behind them or inhabits them. Like the house that bore silent witness to a story many would like, perhaps, to forget.  

I begin with NC Highway 98. A road I used to know, but that I no longer recognize. Partly because the road has changed, and partly because I am no longer the same.

I begin with a church frozen in time, and a house whose absence haunts me. I begin with the telling of this story.

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This posting is the Prologue to the book I am writing about my family’s experiences in North Carolina in the late 60s and early 70s. The working title is “I Shall Get Home.” Stay tuned for more information as things progress. And thanks for reading.