38 pages • 1 hour read •
Separate Pasts: Growing Up White In The Segregated South
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Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Sam”
At the age of 12 or 13, McLaurin participates in a race-baiting incident. In this chapter, McLaurin reflects on how guilt over the racial inequality of segregation affected people in the South. We meet Sam McNeil, a slow man who does manual labor around the town. Sam is friendly, hardworking, and eager to please. He spent some time in “the colored insane asylum,” and he becomes a “mysterious and threatening” figure whom McLaurin is warned to stay away from (99).
One summer night, McLaurin is killing time with some friends. Bored, the boys go to Noah Bullock’s store. The store is the site of “one of the most spectacular murders in village history” (104), as an African American resident, Martin Adams, shot his wife, Mary Lou Adams, inside. The boys are disappointed that the store is not morbid or dangerous. Bored, the boys recount the murder. The oldest boys of the group, Dennis and Harold, have an “imaginative mean streak” (104). To alleviate their boredom, the boys bait Sam, who is inside the store, by chanting the n-word.
The boys open the door of the store and shout, “Nigger, nigger black as tar / Stuck his head in a molasses jar / Jar broke, cut his throat, / Went to hell on a billy goat” (107-08). Terrified, the boys run like their lives depend on it. Contrary to their expectations, Sam does not chase after them in a rage.
McLaurin is filled with shame over his behavior. McLaurin is one of Wade’s “best whites,” and politeness toward African Americans is expected because of his family’s social status in the community. Segregation, however, assaulted the human dignity of individual African Americans.
Chapter 5 Analysis Analysis
McLaurin situates his guilt over his taunting of Sam within the larger structure of segregation. The chapter considers the moral implications of a system that produced extreme inequality and dehumanized individual African American people. As a teenager, McLaurin is unsettled by the stark poverty of African American families and troubled by the deference of African Americans to whites. Despite these observations, he is mostly unquestioning of the social hierarchies that structure interactions along the lines of class, gender, and especially race. Like many white people in the segregated South, the teenage McLaurin feels guilt over his treatment of individual African American people but believes that as a group, whites are superior to African Americans.
His guilt from the incident with Sam connects to the larger legacy of segregation. He writes that guilt was “a legacy of my region that I would put into perspective only after years of internal conflict and the emotionally tumultuous years of the civil rights revolution” (110). His race-baiting of Sam, a mentally ill man, is cruel, but McLaurin draws a connection between this act of extreme cruelty and the smaller, more common forms of cruelty under segregation. McLaurin returns to the theme introduced in Chapter 2 that good breeding and kindness do not negate the insidiousness of racism.
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