Rainy Night in Georgia Repost

Lord, I believe it's rainin' all over the world

I was the basketball statistician. It's all about the math for me. I did full stats--shot position, assists, fouls, score--and called them into the local paper when it was said and done. I might have been dating the wrong center, but the guys always wanted to check their math against my stats to see if we matched. It was a fun little job.

Except the night we went to Lumber City. White trash white flight school if there ever was one. Like I said before, we were the only integrated private school in our district, and Lumber City was just on the outskirts. There's an egg processing factory there--if you buy eggs in bulk, I mean in BULK, they might have a Lumber City address. And that was about it when we pulled into town in our chartered bus to play their basketball team.

Our coach was black. About half the team, or more, was too. Half the cheerleaders. And this was the night every year everyone worried about. Playing the snotty schools back in town, they pretty much ignored the race issue. But down here, it was the only issue. Across the court in the home-side bleachers sat 30 or 40 men in camouflage, paper bags over their heads. They chanted and stomped their feet and were terrifying. I could see Coach down on the floor sweating. Never mind the boyfriend and even those little "southern gentlemen" on our team who had their pecking order back at home, but out here in the wild, we were all in the same damned boat--those men in the bleachers weren't wearing white robes and hoods but probably only because their wives didn't know how to sew.

We beat their team. I remember the score--102 to 81. It was the first time that year we'd broken 100. Coach didn't even have the players change clothes. We left the gym en masse and got on the bus. We were "escorted" out of town by honkies in pick up trucks yelling racial slurs at us.

The year? 1990.