Black Ice Read online

  Lorene Cary’s

  BLACK ICE

  “The African-American author typically publishes as a first book his or her autobiography.… This is as true for such contemporary figures as Claude Brown, Maya Angelou, and, more recently, Itabari Njeri as it was for such historical figures as Frederick Douglass.

  “In her own debut, Lorene Gary takes her place in that remarkable procession. Clear and glittering as a New Hampshire lake in winter, Black Ice is an education in itself.”

  —Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  “Ripe with meaning … this work is honest and eloquent and ultimately optimistic.”

  —Ellen Goodman, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Black Ice is a gift, a meaningful coming-of-age story told with remarkable candor and insight.… [It] is engrossing from page one, and is, in many ways, a paean to the human spirit.”

  —Detroit News

  “Black Ice is written in a unique style that is beautiful, brisk and laden with keen insight.… Cary has touched the white world and broken it into a prism of color.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “A true and beautiful writer … Black Ice, like Frank Conroy’s Stoptime or Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception, is one of the classic modern memoirs of growing up in America.”

  —Boston Globe

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 1992

  Copyright © 1991 by Lorene Cary

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1991.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  IRVING BERLIN MUSIC COMPANY: Excerpt from “Anything You Can Do” by Irving Berlin. Copyright © 1946 by Irving Berlin. Copyright renewed.

  Used by permission. International copyright secured. All rights reserved

  BUCK KILLETTE, SUNCOAST MUSIC (BMI): Excerpt from “Girl Watcher” by Buck Killette. Copyright © 1968. Reprinted by permission MCA MUSIC PUBLISHING AND BOURNE CO MUSIC PUBLISHERS: Excerpt from “Our Day Will Come,” words by Bob Hilliard and music by Mort Garson. Copyright © 1963 (renewed), 1976 by MCA Music Publishing, a division of MCA Inc., New York, NY 10019, and Better Half Music Co. All rights reserved.

  Used by permission of the copyright owners

  THE PUTNAM BERKLEY GROUP INC: “I think I can, I think I can” from The Little Engine That Could is a trademark of Platt & Munk and is reprinted by permission of The Putnam Berkley Group Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cary, Lorene.

  Black ice/Lorene Cary.—1st Vintage Books ed.

  p cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77847-5

  1. Cary, Lorene. 2 Afro-American women—New Hampshire—Concord—Biography. 3. Afro-Americans—New Hampshire—Concord—Biography. 4. Concord (N.H)—Biography. 5. Afro-Americans—Education (Secondary)—New Hampshire—Concord. 6. St. Paul’s School (Concord, N.H.) I. Title.

  [F44.C7C44 1992]

  373 18’296073-dc20 91-50489

  v3.1

  To Laura Hagans Smith

  Shall it any longer be said of the daughters of Africa, they have no ambition …?

  Maria W. Stewart in The Liberator, 1831

  … There is a grace in life. Otherwise we could not live.

  Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations

  “Skin, skin, ya na know me?”

  West Indian folktale

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  June 1989

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  June 1989

  About the Author

  June 1989

  I could see them from the dais: families and friends sitting on the risers, young students spilling out onto the grass, black-robed faculty members standing in front of their seats—all watching for the first graduates to begin their march down the grassy aisle between the folding chairs on the green. Someone let out a whoop as they appeared, the girls in their white dresses and the boys in their jackets and ties.

  Fifteen years before I had walked down the same aisle as a graduate, and nine years later as a teacher. Now I was ending my term as a trustee.

  I watched the black and Hispanic students, “my kids,” come to the podium to receive their diplomas and awards from the Rector. One young man named Harlem winked at me as he passed. His shoulders still rocked a little, just a little, like the shoulders of black men in cities, and he held himself up on the balls of his feet like the ballet dancer he had become while at St. Paul’s School. I remembered him as a Fourth Former, his head cocked to one side, asking, “I’d like to know: would you send your daughter to St. Paul’s?”

  The other students had laughed in that way that teenagers do when an adult is forced to reveal herself. But we also laughed together as black people alone, safe for the moment within the group, the collective tensions and harmonic humor of it, relieved for an hour or so from our headlong rush toward individual achievement.

  “My daughter will have to decide that for herself,” I said. “Don’t you roll your eyes. I mean it. My parents did not make me come here. I was bound and determined. They let me, and it was not an easy thing to do.

  “It won’t be the same for my daughter. Neither my parents nor I really knew what we were getting into. Once you’ve made the journey, you can’t pretend it didn’t happen, that everything’s like it was before except now you play lacrosse.”

  I had pretended, myself; many of us had. I had acknowledged my academic debt to the boarding school I’d attended on scholarship for two years. But I would not admit how profoundly St. Paul’s had shaken me, or how damaged and fraudulent and traitorous I felt when I graduated. In fact, I pretended for so long that by the time I was twenty-six years old, I was able to convince myself that going back to school to teach would be the career equivalent of summering with distant, rich relatives.

  Instead, I found my own adolescence, in all its hormonal excess, waiting for me at St. Paul’s: old rage and fear, ambition, self-consciousness, love, curiosity, energy, hate, envy, compulsion, fatigue. I saw my adolescence in my students, and I felt it burbling inside me, grown powerful by long silence. I lost control of it one night when a black boy came to me nearly weeping because a group of white friends had told a racist joke in his presence. He hated himself, he said, because he hadn’t known how to react. “It was like I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything,” he said.

  I too had known that terrible paralysis, and when the boy left, I wept with remembering. I could no longer forget, not with Westminster chimes ringing out the quarter hours, the piney mist that rolled off the pond in the morning, and the squeaking boards under our feet as we crossed Upper Common Room to the dining hall. I remembered the self-loathing, made worse by a poised bravado, as close as my own skin, that I wore over it. I remembered duty and obligation—to my family, to the memory of dead relatives, to my people. And I remembered confusion: was it true that these teachers expected less of me than of my white peers? Or had I mistaken kindness for condescension? Were we black kids a social experiment? If we failed (or succeeded too well) would they call us off? Were we imported to help
round out the white kids’ education? Did it make any difference if we were?

  In the aftermath of Black Is Beautiful, I began to feel black and blue, big and black, black and ugly. Had they done that to me? Had somebody else? Had I let them? Could I stop the feelings? Or hide them?

  I knew that I was to emerge from St. Paul’s School changed, but I did not know how, and I did not trust my white teachers and guardians to guide me. What would this education do to me? And what was I to do with it?

  A couple years after I taught at St. Paul’s, I was asked to serve as a trustee. During my term, I visited the school for board meetings, and I talked with the students. I could feel their attention one fall evening when I told them to try to think of St. Paul’s as their school, too, not as a white place where they were trespassing. The next fall a boy told me: “I had been thinking of it as their school. It was like I had forgotten that this is my life.”

  Two years later that boy’s formmates elected him class president. At his graduation, Eric smiled broadly at me as he walked to the podium to receive the President’s Medal. So did a girl, an excellent and feisty writer, who was awarded the Rector’s Medal. I wondered if they knew, or if they would learn, that just as St. Paul’s was theirs, because they had attended the school and contributed to it, so, too, was American life and culture theirs, because they were black people in America.

  Sitting on the dais, I recalled how wary I’d been of John Walker, the first black teacher at St. Paul’s, its first black trustee, and the first black Bishop of the Washington, D.C. diocese of the Episcopal Church. I remembered watching him walk with other board members and trying to deduce from his gait and the way he inclined his head whether the small man with the tiny eyes was traitor or advocate.

  He was still on the board during my tenure, a quiet-spoken man who affected people deeply by his presence. John Walker spoke wisely and from experience, but more than that, he emanated both judgment and compassion. I saw him affect my colleagues. I felt him. He filled me with hope for my own racial and spiritual healing, and courage to look back. (John Walker died in September, 1989.)

  I began writing about St. Paul’s School when I stopped thinking of my prep-school experience as an aberration from the common run of black life in America. The isolation I’d felt was an illusion, and it can take time and, as they say at St. Paul’s, “the love and labor of many,” to get free of illusions. The narratives that helped me, that kept me company, along with the living, breathing people in my life, were those that talked honestly about growing up black in America. They burst into my silence, and in my head, they shouted and chattered and whispered and sang together. I am writing this book to become part of that unruly conversation, and to bring my experience back to the community of minds that made it possible.

  “You must really love the school to be on the board.” The students wanted to know each time I visited. Each time I answered yes.

  “Did you like it when you were here?”

  I made a sour face. They looked relieved.

  Chapter One

  I had never heard of St. Paul’s School until Mrs. Evans rang to tell me about it one fall night in 1971. I had just come home from Woolworth’s, where I worked at the cheap-and-greasy fountain on Friday nights and Saturdays in a town my friends and I called “Tacky” Darby. I smelled as if I had scrubbed the grill with my uniform. My face shone with hamburger fat, and my Earth Shoes were spattered. At fourteen years old, I felt irritable and entitled to it, as adults seemed to be when they finished their work for the day.

  Mrs. Evans’s voice brimmed with excitement and fun. She was our next-door neighbor, a retired kindergarten teacher married to a newspaper reporter who had been the first black man on staff at the Philadelphia Bulletin. Three years before, when I was eleven, he had given me my first typewriter, a straight-back, black Underwood. Mrs. Evans was witty and down-to-earth, firm but easygoing with children. Her eyesight was poor; she had a recurring tickle that caused her to clear her throat nearly to gagging; under her shiny skin her knuckles were gnarled—yet she glowed with health. My father said that she had better legs than most thirty-year-olds, and my mother asked her advice. My sister, Carole, ran away to the brick house where a plaster Venus arose from her seashell and dolphins leapt at half-moons in the cream-colored ceiling molding. It was a fairy-tale house, and Mrs. Evans was a fairy godmother to us, distant and charming. I forgot that at first. Instead, I cradled the receiver on my shoulder and counted my tips while she talked, laying the coins silently on the kitchen counter.

  Mrs. Evans had been told about St. Paul’s School by a “lovely woman”—I took that to mean someone white, but trustworthy. This “very exclusive boarding school” had recently gone coed, and they were interested in finding black girls, too, so they’d put out the word with alumni and friends. Mrs. Evans had never visited the school, but she knew that the campus would be beautiful, that there would be music and languages and the arts. She also knew that scholarships—generous scholarships—were available. Mrs. Evans gave me the phone number of an alumnus, a judge, to call for more information. I wrote it down, thanked her for thinking of me, and went upstairs. I didn’t need another school, I thought. I needed a bath.

  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.