Black Ice (26 page)

They wanted to get to their motel rooms, unpack, settle in, eat, pour a round of drinks. Several scenarios were offered and rejected. Finally, we did the only sensible thing. We broke into groups and made plans to rendezvous.

Inside North Upper was chaos. Having faced the fact that we were leaving, we seniors were packing like mad, returning items, giving others away, distributing mementoes to our friends like the dying. I stopped every twelve feet for introductions.

“This is my sister, Carole, and my cousins, Dana and Kim.”

“Oh, they are so
cute!
Do you like it here? Are you going to come to St. Paul’s one day?”

They squirmed under the attention, too well trained to cut and run until they got the signal. They loved the confusion. They picked through the piles of debris in the hallway, and I shushed them when they screeched at a find. We were experienced
trash-pickers, conditioned by my mother to cast a gimlet eye over every heap of junk we saw. (“That table? Do you like that table? You know where I got it? …”) They stood wide-eyed in my room as Alma fussed over them. I could see their eyes scanning the bare walls for a trace of me. They fingered my clothes and blankets and records as if to make real for themselves my presence in this place that had swallowed me up two years before.

Alma’s mother arrived, and a general whooping of co-mingled siblings ensued. Alma’s mother sat down—she was tired from the trip—like a woman accustomed to relaxing amid uproar. How different from my mother, who emerged from the car like a Slavonic dance in progress, whirling faster and faster toward evening.

The weekend had that momentum, too. Once the folks had arrived, I was no longer in charge. I was running and running everywhere, trying to stay with them and get to commitments, being driven to the motel and trying to hurry someone to drive me back. I sped like a bicycle down a hill. There was tension between my parents, the same tension I’d always known, but I did not stay still to feel it.

The caravan barely lumbered onto campus for one event before that one finished and another began. By the time we all sat down for the lunch, the caterers were gathering half-eaten trays of cold-cuts. I do not remember whether or not I marched in the parade. I don’t think that we went out to the docks for the boat races. My memories of the weekend blur together like a slide show, all colors and no sound, no smells. I do not trust these memories. They are fossils, perfectly laid strata of adolescent fear and anger undisturbed by layers of forgiveness above. My family burst into my School world as if it were theirs. They took over. They set the pace. They were here for a party, and they were having it.

I spent Saturday night at the motel in one of the rooms they had rented. My grandparents went to bed early, but the rest of the entourage stayed up later. They hugged and kissed and celebrated me. I endured the attention I had sought, and I felt like an ingrate.

Church service for the graduating class and family and alumni was to be held the next morning. We talked about attending: who would go, who wanted to sleep late, how early we’d have to arrive to get seats. Finally I told them that I did not want to go. I was tired of St. Paul’s School.

“You’re on your way,” they said.

“You’ve made connections here that black people have never made before.”

“Are you kidding? We never even knew they were there to make!”

“But you’re in now, sweetheart. Once you’ve been kids together, why it’s like being in the army. Those are the kinds of contacts you’ll call on in later life. You mark my words.”

“These people are going back to their own lives after graduation,” I said. “I made a few friends, but I do not have any ‘contacts,’ ” I said. My family’s fantasies were getting out of hand. What, I wondered, were they expecting of me? How could I ever be grand enough to fit? “What I got is an education.”

They listened with expressions of indulgence. Sure, I was tired and grumpy, what with the excitement and all. If I wanted to sleep late on the day of my graduation, well, why not? Hey, they weren’t so crazy about dressing up and hustling onto campus, anyway. Whatever I wanted, they said. I’d earned a sleep-in, and they figured I’d attended a mighty lot of Chapel in two years. The party was really going now. Outside in the parking lot came the sounds of merry-making from other Paulie-related lodgers. “Boy, they think they own the joint,” somebody said.
“Didn’t they rent rooms, too? Don’t they have someplace to go?”

Not one thought entered my head that did not seem disloyal. I was ashamed, seeing their pride close up, as if for the first time, at how little I had accomplished, how much I had failed to do at St. Paul’s. Somewhere in the last two years I had forgotten my mission. What had I done, I kept thinking, that was worthy of their faith? How had I helped my race? How had I prepared myself for a meaningful future? What plan did I have to make lots of money and be of service? They were right: only a handful of us got this break. I wanted to shout at them that I had squandered it. Now that it’s all over, hey, I’m not your girl! I couldn’t do it.

I had a spiel about the School’s expectations of its students. The School ideal was a perfect being, bright of mind, sound of body, and pure of spirit. None of us made it, I said, that was the con, but we thought we were supposed to. The distance between where we were and the ideal kept us all in a painful reaching, jumping, leaping at the sky. The con was that once in a generation, some freak of nature actually did it, and they put his name on a plaque on the wall so that the rest of us could not claim it was impossible.

I tried the spiel on my family. I tried to lay a bridge of words from my bitterness to their jubilation so that I would not stand so grotesquely alone in their midst. They told me to go to sleep. No wonder I was peevish. It had been a long haul. They’d celebrate for me, as Nana Hamilton once said, until I learned to celebrate myself.

The day of graduation dawned sunny with clouds. We glared at the clouds every half-hour to hold them back. We arrived onto the grounds just before the Chapel service ended. Chapel
Road was lined with expensive cars. My school did not look like itself. I went into the Chapel with my mother. It was packed. We stood in the entryway with other latecomers. I remembered running to Chapel and sitting in the entry, where everyone could see that I was late. I remembered Mr. Tolliver, whom we called Toad, because of his solid body and bad posture, putting his finger into my shoulder. “Girl,” he said. “You were late to Chapel.”

I was late again, and ashamed, now that I’d stepped through the doors, that I had not had the sense to get there on time. I remembered how the last services of the term had never failed to move me, to help me pass from one phase of my life at St. Paul’s to the next. Already, the Rector’s voice was intoning the closing prayer. I knew it by heart:

“O God, who through the love and labor of many hast built us here a goodly heritage in the name of thy servant St. Paul, and hast crowned our school with honor and length of days: For these thy gifts, and for thyself, we thank thee, and for past achievements and future hopes; beseeching thee that both we and all who follow after us may learn those things on earth, of which the knowledge continues in thy Heaven.…

“Bless the work of this School undertaken for thy glory and continued in thy fear. Make this to be in deed and in truth a Christian school, that none who come here may go away unimproved, that none may be afraid or ashamed to be thy faithful servants.”

We sang the
Salve Mater
, which we pulled out only on graduation day, and the traditional closing hymn. The Chapel rang with music. Mr. Wood at the organ, the choir filing out past the throng, singing the song I had sung, dressed in the robes I had worn, the acolytes and the priests, the banners and standards. They filed out smiling, nodding at old students, parents, friends, and singing:

It was high-church at its best, and I knew it as well as I knew my mother’s voice. I ached with the sound and the sight of it. Distant gobbledegook at first, the seraphs, cherubim, and thrones resonated deeply now. How many times had I argued with that song? Why was it that this rich, rich school had to get dominions, princedoms, and powers to praise their God? Why were our worshippers “disconsolate” while theirs were “gracious” and “bright”? Who had told them that God was pleased with them? Was it the “goodly heritage”? Was that the proof of God’s love? Well, what about the rest of the world, whom they asked God not to forget? What about them? What about the dirty, ragged, cramped, stupid, ugly motherfuckers? When would they be crowned with honor and length of days? What made St. Paul’s so cocksure? What about the rest of us? What about me?

I cried then because the music was so beautiful and I loved it so, because loving it was treachery, because I had scribbled the words on scraps of paper and looked them up in the dictionary to learn them, because I could not bear to be so far away from a God who smiled on such exquisite praise. I have read the word of the Lord our God until my eyes burned like the very fires of hell. And still you have not found grace? Still not made Tillich’s “leap of faith”?

I wanted to leap right then. I wanted to leap into a big, big faith: big as the sky on a black night, big enough to hold Ward A.M.E. and the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul within it. I wanted an infinity inside me that could hold it all. I wanted to
fly out of my skin, to leave it draped over the chair by the window and fly up into the welcoming night.

I had come to St. Paul’s to fly, and I had failed. What had I become that was worthy of so much effort and money?

We went to lunch at the Upper for the traditional poached salmon on red-and-white school plates. At two o’clock I ran to the green behind the Chapel to get in line for graduation.

No music plays as the paired lines move down the hill behind the Chapel and onto the green. The faculty in their caps and gowns proceeded first, and at the end of the faculty file, the Vice-Rectors, the trustees, and the Rector. Then the students. We walked in pairs alphabetically. The clapping rose to a roar as we entered between bleachers arranged in a U facing the dais. We four officers walked at the end of line. My relatives had been waiting, watching for me while more than a hundred students walked past, and they rushed to hoist their cameras to their faces.

The brass ensemble played the
Salve Mater
. We sang it for the second time that day. The Rector and then a guest speaker made speeches. The sun was hot on the top of my head. Prizes and awards lined the long table on the dais. The Rector read the dedication of each before he awarded it to a student. Then, the Vice-Rector stepped to a microphone on the side of the dais opposite the Rector and began calling names of graduating Sixth Formers in flights of four. I was called early, because my last name begins with C. I did not graduate with Honors, not even in English, and I sat stupidly for a moment waiting. There was nothing more. I had simply graduated: no honors.

The Vice-Rector read the diplomas awarded cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude. I sat still. The sun and my shame made me sweat.

Finally the Rector announced the final awards, those that are given only to graduates. It seemed as if this would never end. I would never get out of the sun and away from the long, long list of students who had done what I had claimed I had come to St. Paul’s to do.

“The Rector’s Award,” said Mr. Oates, “is made at the discretion of the Rector to graduating Sixth Formers whose selfless devotion to School activities has enhanced all our lives and improved the community we share here at St. Paul’s School.

“The two students to whom the Rector’s Awards are made this afternoon represent a wide variety of characteristics. To be a moment merry, I am going to combine and deliberately mix up comments on their skills and qualities in such a way that I may possibly obscure from you who these students are. Of course, if you care to, you may sort these out as I go, and readily ascertain who they are.”

I pursed my lips. “To be a moment merry” indeed. Typical graduation humor. Ha, ha.

“Poised and attractive, determined and responsible, these students have established superior records academically, been an officer of the Sixth Form, become skilled in karate, been outstanding in athletics, sung in the chorus, written for
The Pelican
, been a member of the Missionary Society, joined the Astronomy Club.”

My ears perked up at “officer of the Sixth Form.” That was one of us four sitting in pairs on either side of the aisle in the front row. I had written articles for
The Pelican
. I shushed the greedy girl within. Starved for some special notice, she stood inside my skin jumping up and down. In the seconds while Mr. Oates read the list, I heard her clamor. I heard how deeply she had been hurt to receive nothing, nothing at all but a diploma. No honors, no cum laude, nothing. Nothing for me,
nothing for my work? Not a farthing for my trouble? Nothing for the family who had traveled so far? Nothing to compensate for what they don’t even know they have lost—my confidence, my trust? Not one little gift to give the people who have given up a daughter? “I’ve given her to God,” my mother sometimes said. I didn’t believe it, because it felt as if she were holding on tighter than ever, but she’d lost me. No matter how dutifully I hid it, it was true.

“… joined the Astronomy Club.”

That was it. None of the other three had ever come out to the observatory. The Astronomy Club was a tiny club. Some of my friends had begun to smile at me. They sought out my eyes. Peter tossed me a happy look. I could not face their eyes. The girl inside was too immodest, too grasping and loud. I looked down into my lap as if folded hands could save me from the discomfiting need within.