Black Ice (2 page)

Later that night, despite my adolescent defiance, I could not help but think about what Mrs. Evans had said. This education was more than knowledge; it could mean credentials, self-confidence, power. I imagined living away from home, making a precocious launch into the wide world of competition.

On Monday after school, I hurried home to call the judge, but when I got there, all I could do was stand next to the telephone preparing statements. My mother watched me as she cooked dinner. “Did Mrs. Evans give you the number to his home or his chambers?” she asked.

I hadn’t thought about “chambers.” Did “chambers” have telephones? I imagined a Dickensian suite of rooms, wood-paneled and dark, and in the middle a big, florid man draped in black robes, pondering important papers, a man who was not used to being interrupted by phone calls from strange fourteen-year-old black girls who wanted to go to his alma mater.

My mother laughed at me as I stood by the telephone in the kitchen staring at the number. “Just call him,” she said.

Wherever I rang, the judge did not answer. A woman took the message and said that he would get back to me. We got on with dinner preparation. Our TV blared. Pots crackled, and dishes clattered; my parents talked over the TV; my eight-year-old sister talked over my parents; I talked over my sister. Then the telephone rang.

By the time I had motioned wildly for silence, the conversation was nearly finished. The judge said that he was pleased to hear of my interest. Then he gave me the name and address of another alumnus who would be hosting a meeting, and urged me to attend.

The meeting took place within a couple weeks. We drove through West Philadelphia, past the squat row houses where I had been raised, past the city center and then north where Wissahickon Creek falls away from the road, and woods rise up behind it. We were headed toward Chestnut Hill, more a place name than a place for me until then, a symbol of money and social exclusiveness. My father steered us through Germantown, where wet leaves lay in treacherous layers over trolley tracks and cobblestones. Cars slipped on and off the rails and then swerved to avoid each other, making rubbery squeals and muffled thuds.

By the time we pulled into the stone driveway, I felt as if we were a long way away from our home in the west end of Yeadon, an enclave of black professionals, paraprofessionals, wish-they-was-, look-like-, and might-as-well-be professionals, as we called ourselves. We were far away from the black suburb that, as a West Philly transplant, I disliked for its self-satisfied smugness. When we’d moved from our city apartment—from the living room with a convertible couch where my parents slept, from the bedroom where my sister and I slept (which was transformed into a dining room at Christmas), and from the kitchen where we normally ate, and where my mother pressed and curled women’s hair in the evenings—Yeadon had impressed
me with its leafy green grandeur and insularity. But now, as we stood in the Chestnut Hill driveway, I saw how modest our Tudors were, our semidetached Dutch colonials, our muddy driveways and the cyclone fences that held in our dogs. I saw it then, with eyes made keen by years of witnessing our merciless self-criticism: “What’s wrong with the colored race? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the colored race. We don’t
think
. That’s what. And we do not stick together. And money? Forget it. Invest? Get outta here. Now you take a look at the Jews. Or you take the Chinese.…” I saw how consumed we’d been with ambition, and how modest had been our goals.

Inside the stone house, in a large living room, we joined a few other black people who had also come to learn about the School. A boy who was younger than I sat next to his mother. When I said hello, he did not turn his head to look at me, but only peeped out of the corner of his eyes and nodded, as if we might bolt out of the house together and go howling into the Chestnut Hill woods if we were to look too hard at each other. His mother, her hair done up like Coretta Scott King’s, sat still like her son. She looked as dignified as a picture on the back of a church fan, and just as inanimate. If she kept any unauthorized verb forms from flying out from between her lips, she also held in any sign of life.

Jeremy Price (this name and a few others have been changed), a black teacher from St. Paul’s, tried a few times to make small talk, but he was a Brahmin from another planet: cool, ironic, aloof. He was in his thirties, tweed-jacketed and bearded, with a round belly. He touched his body lightly with his fingers, as if he were not used to his own girth. In every other way he appeared absolutely smooth and easy to my adolescent eye, and assured to the point of arrogance.

Mr. Price made quick judgments of us; they showed in his eyes. Clearly, the pillar-of-the-church lady with the Southern coif (and Southern diffidence in the presence of white folks)
wasn’t his type. Mr. Price seemed about to say something brutal to her. My father stepped in to ask if he could join them. The look she gave Daddy went beyond grateful to adoring.

Women looked at my father that way. Their attention seemed to affect him as naturally as sunshine—and he never talked too much. “Still water runs deep,” my great-grandmother had said about him when he came courting; she said so until she died. Men saw more ripples on the pond, which those of us who lived with him knew positively were caused by undertows.

For one thing, when men exchanged the inevitable sports conversation they discovered, as Mr. Price did, that my father was a student of judo. He’d spent three nights a week since his twenty-eighth birthday at the dojo. He had progressed from white belt to brown to black. We’d gone to competitions throughout the mid-Atlantic region, and I’d watched three-minute dramas on the mat. Each time he had to beat or be beaten. In contest after contest he was a light-middleweight whose feet made the sound of rushing as they swept the dry mat and whose face turned purple when the last man, the one he finally could not beat, held him down, cutting into his windpipe with his bleached white
gi
. In those moments, when I prayed that he would not be killed in some fluke throw, I saw in his eyes a concentration and force that made life with us in the sparkling three-room apartment seem like some errant choice. He was, above all, a physical being, a wiry man who once tied our deluxe-size refrigerator to his back to move it, and would probably not object to being remembered that way. We three, two girls and a woman, surrounded him with doll babies and crisscross curtains. It was like watching a carnivore sit down to porridge each night.

Dad had first seen judo practiced in a 1945 film,
Blood on the Sun
, with James Cagney. Intended as anti-Japanese propaganda, the film showed an expansionist culture, arrogant and absolute. Daddy loved it. Judo: there was a vision of power—
mental, physical, spiritual—beneath a placid exterior. It was nearly twenty years before my father stepped onto a mat. Now, he only needed to mention the word. People looked at him as if he had jumped out of a Samurai movie. Even Mr. Price lost his frost when the subject came up. As I watched the two of them chat, my fear of Mr. Price dissipated, but not my wariness. He did not quite seem one of us.

Mike Russell did. He was a St. Paul’s School senior recruiting black candidates as an independent-study project, and he had more poise than I’d ever seen in a teenager. His skin was chocolatey and fine-pored, and his bottom lip pouted like Sidney Poitier’s. He was sleek and articulate. He paid attention to me.

I crossed my legs with what I hoped was lithe grace and stretched my neck until I nearly pitched forward onto the floor. I wanted to know the things he must know: about science and literature and language, living away from home, New England, white people, money, power, himself. I supposed that the other black students at St. Paul’s must have had Russell’s sophistication and charm, his commitment to black progress.

I had to be part of that. With the force of religious conversion, the great God of education moved within me, an African Methodist God with a voice that boomed like thunder. It took all my strength to hold myself inside my skin. This school—why, this was what I had been raised for, only I hadn’t known it. They closed the curtains and turned off the lights for the slide show. I hoped that my face had not betrayed me.

Russell narrated the slide show. He told us about the Old Chapel, a steepled red-brick church, and towering behind it on the green lawn, the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul, built in 1886 to accommodate a larger student body, and enlarged in 1927. The New Chapel was massive. Its brick and stone walls were heavy and stolid; and yet its stained-glass windows seemed infinitely light, as if they could almost float up to the heavens.

We saw other buildings as well: the Schoolhouse, student houses (in keeping with the school’s family-centered lexicon, they were not to be called dormitories), the Rectory, the funny circular post office, and special academic buildings for science, math, and art. The gray granite library with its white columns had been built by somebody famous. It sat at the edge of yet another pond, casting a wavering, silvery reflection on the water.

Over and over again we saw these buildings, draped with scenic young people, alone or in small groups, talking, laughing, bending their heads toward one another or running together on a green field in some pantomime of benevolent competition. I saw black boys. I saw girls, a few of them black, too. And I saw them all in a brilliant medley of New Hampshire seasons. At one point in the slide show, Russell flashed through the carousel to find a misplaced slide, creating an intoxicating display of colors—autumn red and gold, winter snowy blue-white, spring green and pink and blue—so sharp and bright that they seemed to originate not on the screen, but from deep inside my head, like music.

Mr. Price’s voice, clear and insouciant, brought me back to myself. He was asking for someone to open the drapes.

My mother began with a question about the progress of coeducation. First there were tea dances, Mr. Price said, begun in the nineteenth century and carried forward into the 1960s as dance weekends. Girls were bused in, talked to, danced with, and then bused out again. He looked at Mike Russell and asked ironically, “How were they?”

Russell shook his head and laughed. “They were awful!”

Mr. Price went on. In 1969 and 1970, girls came, like foreigners, to participate in a winter-term exchange. The next winter, the first nineteen came to stay.

What was a tea dance? I wondered. Tea meant little girls with clean hands and faces sipping out of china cups, eating
butter cookies with raspberry jam. Teas belonged in church or in childhood. A dance, to the contrary, meant teenagers in a basement: black lights, red bulbs, music jamming its way through our shoes and up into our feet. It meant arms in the air, whistles, a soul train down the middle of the room, whipping out new steps nice and casual as if we hadn’t spent all week practicing. It meant sweat steaming out of the tops of our heads, shrinking Afros worthy of Angela Davis down to dreaded TWAs (teeny weeny Afros). A dance meant watching sharp so that no amorous brother spoiled our hot pants.

Tea had nothing to do with it.

Mr. Price acted as cultural interpreter for us, as if a bank of white and black computers stood on either side of him, bleeping away in incompatible languages. When my mother asked about the grading system, I heard her asking whether white teachers four hundred miles away would give her kid a fair grade. Hanging in the air was our fear that they’d let us survive, but never excel. Mr. Price answered by describing the system: High Honors for work that was truly outstanding; Honors for work that was very, very good; High Pass—he laughed and shook his head—was a great, gray, muddy area between the very good and the OK; Pass was just acceptable; and Unsatisfactory was “self-explanatory.” Then he estimated how many students received which grades, and quite directly—said it right out in this white alumnus’s house with the costly furnishings—told us how the black students were doing. He said most of them were working hard, but some were not, frankly, getting what the school had to offer. He did not answer the black mothers’ fear of their children’s powerlessness, their vulnerability to white adults who might equate sharpness of the mind with sharpness of features.

Mr. Price encouraged Russell to comment. Mike told a few stories about himself, portraying St. Paul’s as a place where well-meaning, well-trained teachers tried hard to live up to their
calling. Some, he added meaningfully, were more sensitive than others.

Then my mother told a story about a science award I had won in third grade. She started with the winning—the long, white staircase in the auditorium of the Franklin Institute, and how the announcer called my name twice because we were way at the back and it took me so long to get down those steps.

Mama’s eyes glowed. She was a born raconteur, able to increase the intensity of her own presence and fill the room. She was also a woman who seldom found new audiences for her anecdotes, so she made herself happy, she insisted, with us children, her mother, her sisters, her grandparents—an entire clan of storytellers competing for a turn on the family stage. This time all eyes were on my mother. Her body, brown and plump and smooth, was shot through with energy. This time the story had a purpose.

She told them how my science experiment almost did not get considered in the citywide competition. My third-grade teacher, angry that I’d forgotten to bring a large box for displaying and storing the experiment, made me pack it up to take home. (Our teacher had told us that the boxes were needed to carry the experiments from our class to the exhibition room, and she’d emphasized that she would not be responsible for finding thirty boxes on the day of the fair. Without a box, the experiment would have to go home. Other kids, white kids, had forgotten boxes during the week. They’d brought boxes the next day. I asked for the same dispensation, but was denied. The next day was the fair, she said. That was different.)

I came out of school carrying the pieces of the experiment my father had picked out for me from a textbook. This was a simple buoyancy experiment where I weighed each object in the air and then in water, to prove that they weighed less in water. I had with me the scale, a brick, a piece of wood, a bucket, and a carefully lettered poster.