“He’s the reason black folks go over there now,” Tucker says, perfecting Williams’s hairline. “Before that, we didn’t touch the place. It was always just ‘that racist school.’ ”
Not everyone at the shop is convinced.
School Days 2011-12
“For a lot of them, it’s still painful,” says Quincy Jones, 71.
“They’re still living in the past,” Williams interjects. “They don’t want to just learn from it and move on.”
Back in the car, Williams sighs. He feels alone as he straddles two worlds.
“Got this whole city on my shoulders,” he says.
Sometimes, it’s worth the burden. Like when Tucker started showing up at the Fuqua stadium. Or when his grades improved thanks to coaching from a few attentive teachers. (He has a B average and recently took the SAT in preparation for college.) Or after a solid game under the lights, when the team of undersize white kids coheres around Williams, playing beyond their abilities.
But success is rarely simple. History keeps creeping up.
When Farmville recently renovated a civil rights museum, Williams was invited as a special guest. He met black residents who lost years of education when public schools closed. They call themselves, Williams learned, the “crippled generation.”
Some of his football coaches, hired to lead an all-white team decades ago, expressed little regret about the school’s past.
“Things changed. Not for the better. Not for the worse. They just changed,” says Walter Addleman, who has coached the team for more than 30 years.
In the back seat of the car Williams is driving, there’s a bag of candy and a glittery piece of construction paper with his name and jersey number, made by an apple-cheeked cheerleader named Peyton Wall.
One of Wall’s great-grandfathers was an architect of Fuqua — a man deeply committed to the school’s racist foundation.
“We were defending people’s right to educate the races differently,” J. Barrye Wall told a historian in 1979. “We lost in court — the South lost — but it’s still not settled.”
Fuqua officials in that era shared his vision.
“We’re goddamned if we’re going to tell everyone that we were hypocrites all those years,” Fuqua’s attorney, George Leonard, said at a federal court hearing in 1978. “Fundamentally, we believe blacks deserve a different type of education than whites.”
In 1981, school headmaster Robert T. Redd told a historian: “Most blacks simply do not have the ability to do quality schoolwork.”
Thirty years later, Peyton Wall calls such views shameful and archaic. “Our school got over all that,” she said.
Williams looks at the candy, the glittery good luck charm. Ghosts everywhere.
Bridging a divide
The drive from the barber shop to teammate Carter Cunningham’s palatial home takes about 10 minutes. Williams announces the moment his car passes the threshold between Farmville’s two worlds.
The houses get bigger. The driveways leading to old plantations get longer.
“This is where kids from school live,” Williams says.
It’s time for his second pre-game ritual. This one is pool and foosball and video games on a flat-screen television. It’s fart jokes and jabs about girlfriends. It’s Williams slumped on the couch, looking at his cellphone while his buddies take turns locking each other in the basement bathroom.
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