Black Ice Read online

  I learned to think of misbehavior as symptom rather than disease. A girl who was caught with a boy in her room might be an indiscreet friend or girlfriend. She might be testing the rules. She might just have been self-absorbed, as we all were so many times, wanting a private place to console a friend after a family death. But she might also have created a string of disturbances in the house, escalating in importance. In that case the committee argued, after the defendant and company had left the room, in hopes of finding responses that would not just punish, but teach the wrongdoer—and the rest of us.

  This was new-style discipline to me. I didn’t know if I approved, but I looked forward to each session. I saw big, tough boys’ eyes fill with tears when they realized how they’d jeopardized their place at school—or betrayed a friend. I listened as perfectly put-together girls lied to us, and walked out certain that they’d pulled it off. I looked forward to the inexplicable feeling of forgiveness that came over me at the end of a session. That, too, was a secret.

  Chapter Eleven

  During the winter term Bruce Chan, who had drafted me to look after Fumiko on the first day of my Fifth Form, suggested that we begin tutoring some of the younger students in English. He also delegated me to write a letter of protest to the English department for what we thought was prejudice against the incoming students of color. (One teacher, by way of correcting a young student’s paper, commented on the pattern of grammatical errors and warned the boy that he’d have to work to overcome his black English. We suspected, after reading several papers, that our teachers judged typically black “errors” more harshly than others, and that once obsessed by idiom they lost sight of black students’ ideas.) A few days later I gritted my teeth as Bruce edited my letter in red pen. I remember delivering the rewritten version to the department chairman, who responded that he and the other teachers worked hard to be as sensitive as possible to the needs of all the students, but that he would urge his teachers, as he had been doing, to even greater consideration.

  The tutoring was equally frustrating. Students brought us their papers during free periods before class. They wanted us to tidy things up, plug in big words. They did not come with a rough draft, as we asked, prepared to rethink and rewrite.

  The best I could do, I decided, was to try to build their confidence rather than tear it down. I tried to pick out their original ideas and show them that these, the scary ones, were worth writing about.

  “Forget your notes; put them away until exams. The papers are yours. It’s how you read the same old story that that man has been teaching for twenty years. He’s waiting for you to see it fresh. And you can. You’ve brought a whole bunch of new ideas that haven’t been here until now.”

  When the girl left, I heard my own words. I had never said them before, never even thought them. I sat in my room grinning. More than anything I had said while I stood nervously trying to solicit discussion on blues lyrics, a half-hour with that girl and her no-thesis, no-introduction, no-proper-conclusion paper had shown me that I, too, had something to give to St. Paul’s. I had come not just with my hat in my hand, a poorly shod scholarship girl, but as a sojourner bearing gifts, which were mine to give or withhold.

  No doubt, the appearance of Miss Clinton that year gave me strength. The new black Spanish teacher was in her early twenties. She was dark and thin with high pockets and a high bark of a laugh if you caught her in a funny mood outside of class. In class was a different matter. She would step outside the classroom, kick the doorstop with one sensible shoe, and say clearly over her shoulder: “¡Listos, ya!”

  Her mouth with its pointed top lip was beautiful when she spoke, and the language came out bright and precise: “Ready, now!” Those of us who were not in her class stood in the sunny hallway in the modern-languages wing of the Schoolhouse on purpose to hear her. We yelped when she said it—not ahora, meaning now, but ¡ya! Immediately! She was tough.

  “Hell, no, they’re not ready,” we’d say as we walked back to the Reading Room across the hall.

  “They’re not even ready.”

  “They will never be ready.”

  “They better get ready.”

  “Forget it. Those guys are smoked. Smoked!”

  The other teachers did not treat Miss Clinton with condescending politeness (as many did another young black teacher). I could not tell whether they offered her friendship, but I could see that they gave her respect.

  And no mistaking she was black. Now and then Miss Clinton drove into town to buy greens—fresh greens in Concord—and she’d boil a big pot. It stunk up her tiny dormitory; it seeped into the Indian tapestries on students’ walls. On Saturday evening I watched her dance to her new Marvin Gaye album, and I realized how lonely she might be, this energetic young woman, for a companion. But she neither hid it from us nor slopped it onto us to carry.

  I took courage from her, as much as I dared, and yet I feared her, too. I feared judgment that never came.

  “You should stop by more often,” she said as I stirred her pot and moistened my face in the steam.

  Buoyed up by Miss Clinton, my head crammed with the literature I was teaching under Mr. Lederer, who spent his sabbatical year teaching in a North Philadelphia high school, I began to feel more confident in the inevitable racial discussions in classes, at Seated Meal, after visitors’ talks. I took the offensive and bore my gifts proudly. What the discussions concerned specifically, who was there, where they took place, I do not remember. I do recall hearing the same old Greek-centered, European-centered assumptions of superiority. Might made right. I had my stories about Chaka Zulu from my Harvard evening course (and I knew they worshipped Harvard!). Nothing mattered. I was like a child again, trying to argue that I was still somebody—I am Somebody! as we shouted back to Jesse Jackson on the television—even though black people had been slaves, even though we hadn’t had the dignity to jump off the boats en masse or die from tuberculosis like the Indians. More facts. I wanted more facts to show that it wasn’t all fair now, that the resources that kept them here, ruddy and well-tutored, as healthy as horses, had been grabbed up in some greedy, obscene, unfair competition years before.

  “Even if my great-grandfather did own slaves, it’s not fair to hold me responsible.”

  Fair. Fair. Fair. They shouted fair, as if fair had anything to do with it, and I had no facts to wipe their words away. I had no words for their trust funds, capital gains, patrimonies, legacies, bequests. My mind screamed profanities. I had no other words. They had taken them and made them into lies.

  That’s how I felt the night I left a racial discussion with a girl named India Bridgeman. A group of black girls had once asked her to take the role of plantation overseer in a student-choreographed dance. I’d kept in my head the image of her as she danced around the slaves with a whip, her classical ballet training showing in every movement. She’d visited England as a member of St. Paul’s varsity field hockey team. She was an acolyte who knew the rituals of high mass: where to walk, what to carry. I knew her through Janie, but mostly I envied her from a distance as a symbol, a collection of accomplishments that I did not possess.

  We continued the debate into the Upper and then up the stairs to her room. She turned toward me, and I saw India the dancer. She pivoted on the balls of her feet, calf muscles bunched, sternum up. On her forehead was a light brown spot that I had thought she penciled on as an affected beauty mark. (It was a mole.) She had clear eyes, kissy lips, and big, dramatic movements. “Wait, wait a minute! Wait, wait, wait, wait!” India talked like that.

  “I get it,” she said. “I get it. You know how when you get something that you’ve never been able to know before?”

  I nodded, but I resisted her enthusiasm, and the spontaneous humility of this sudden expansiveness. India translated what I had been saying into different words, and I listened, dumbfounded to hear them. It was clear that she, too, knew how it felt to be an outsider. I had never suspected it. India told me about her life growing up
in Manhattan, and her own estrangement from many of our schoolmates. We talked until we grew hungry.

  “Isn’t there anything to eat, anywhere?” India jumped up from the floor, where we’d been sitting, and walked across the room to her stash. “All I’ve got is mayonnaise,” she said as if the world would end. “Hold everything! I know I had some crackers, too. Do you think that’s gross, just putting mayonnaise on crackers?”

  “Are you kidding? I was raised on mayonnaise. And mayonnaise, not that cheap-ass salad dressing.” I cut my eyes to the little jar in her hand. She whooped with laughter.

  “What would you have done if I’d been holding some cheap-ass salad dressing’?”

  “I would have died. But really, that stuff—”

  “I know, I know, it’s awful,” she agreed.

  “My mother makes mayonnaise sandwiches. My whole family does. And my grandmother! God forbid she should have a few drinks. You should see what she does. That’s awful.”

  I had not talked to other girls at St. Paul’s about my grandmother. India laughed with me, but solicitously, watchfully, as if to judge how much I could take, or how far beneath the surface of humor lay the shame.

  “My other grandmother,” I said, having risked as much as I dared just then, “sends me care packages, and I think I have some juice. Do you like pear nectar?”

  “Not really.”

  “I used to love it. I don’t have the heart to tell her I’m not so crazy about it now.”

  “I know. It’s like they get one thing that they know makes you happy, and they’ll buy it for you for the rest of your life.” She stopped eating a cracker. “Oh, that’s so dear. That’s so beautiful that your grandmother does that. Do you have any more?”

  “Sure. It’s hot, though.”

  “Oh, let’s get it. Let’s drink to—what do you call her?”

  “Nana.”

  “Let’s drink to Nana.”

  We tiptoed to my room, and I pulled my pantry box out from underneath my bed. “Do you like sardines?” I whispered.

  “Why not?”

  India and I talked often and late into the night after that. We raged together at St. Paul’s School—at its cliques and competitiveness; its ambivalence toward its new female members; its smugness and certainty and power. We talked about families and boyfriends, girls we liked and girls we didn’t. We laughed at how we had appeared to each other the year before. Our talk was therapeutic, private, and as intense as romance. It was for me the first triumph of love over race.

  Outside my personal circle, the school that term seemed to buzz, buzz. Class officers, it seemed, were often called upon to talk. We talked day and evening, in club activities and rehearsals, in the houses, in the hallways, in our rooms, in the bathrooms, and in meetings after meetings. We gossiped. We criticized. We whined. We analyzed. We talked trash. We talked race relations, spiritual life, male-female relations, teacher-student trust. We talked confidentially. We broke confidences and talked about the results. We talked discipline and community. We talked Watergate and social-fabric stuff.

  I did not follow the Watergate hearings. I did not rush to the third floor of the Schoolhouse for the ten-thirty New York Times delivery to read about it; nor did I crowd around the common-room TV to watch the proceedings. I could not bother to worry about which rich and powerful white people had hoodwinked which other rich and powerful white people. It seemed of a piece with their obsession with fairness.

  I was unprepared, therefore, to dine at the Rectory with Mr. Archibald Cox, the St. Paul’s alumnus whom President Nixon had fired when, as U.S. Special Prosecutor, Mr. Cox began to reveal the Watergate break-in and cover-up. Seated around him were the Rector and a handful of faculty members and student leaders. I said as little as possible in order to conceal my ignorance. Mr. Cox was acute. He referred to the Watergate players and the major events in witty shorthand. I couldn’t quite follow, so I ate and smiled and made periodic conversation noises.

  Then he wanted to hear about St. Paul’s School. There had been so many changes since his time. I found myself saying, in answer to his question, or the Rector’s signal, that I was more aware of being black at St. Paul’s than I was of being a girl. I used a clever phrase that I stole from somewhere and hoped he hadn’t already heard: “Actually, we’re still more like … a boys’ school with girls in it. But black people’s concerns—diversifying the curriculum and that sort of thing—the truth is that that’s more important to me than whether the boys have the better locker room.”

  Pompous it was, and I knew it, but better to be pompous in the company of educated and well-off white folk, better even to be stone wrong, than to have no opinion at all.

  Mr. Cox thought a moment. God forbid he should go for the cross-examination. I added more. “Black concerns here at school may look different, but are not really, from the concerns that my parents have taught me all my life at home.” I put that one in just so he’d know that I had a family. “And believe me, sir, my mama and daddy did not put President Nixon into the White House. We didn’t do that!”

  Mr. Cox wrinkled his lean, Yankee face into a mischievous smile. His voice whispered mock conspiracy. He leaned toward me. “Do you know who Nixon hates worst of all?”

  I shook my head no. I had no idea.

  “Our kind of people.”

  My ears felt hot. I wanted to jump on the table. I wanted to go back home and forget that I’d ever come. I wanted to take him to West Philly, and drop him off at the corner of Fifty-second and Locust, outside Foo-Foo’s steak emporium, right by the drug dealers, and leave him there without a map or a bow tie. Then tell me about our kind of people.

  The Rector gave me a look that urged caution. I fixed my face. “What kind of people are those?” I asked.

  “Why, the educated Northeastern establishment,” he said.

  The Rector smiled as if relieved.

  Soon after, I received a note to meet another visitor: Mr. Vernon Jordan, president of the National Urban League. During his talk to students, Mr. Jordan referred to incidents in the history and current affairs of black and white racial relations that I had never heard. I felt the relief of a child after she has walked a very long way trying to be brave. Afterward I could not think of one intelligent question to ask him. It felt good simply to ride awhile. The next morning Alma and I met him at Scudder. Mr. Jordan was finishing breakfast when we arrived. He asked us about ourselves and the school. Alma described my involvement in Student Council and teased me about my reluctance to talk. “She’s usually a big talker,” she said.

  I told him about Alma’s athletic achievements, her varsity letters in basketball and lacrosse. We mentioned our Third World Coalition, and admitted our squabbles, our struggles, how at times we felt constricted, but could not figure out what to do.

  He understood us. He caught up our words and showed us what we meant. “This is a new phase of civil rights,” he said. “Just a few years ago, it was a lot clearer. You could point to outrageously racist laws. Now it’s more subtle. You kids here are feeling the effects. I mean you’re here—” he motioned his hand in the air to take in the graceful room. We could hear Mrs. Burrows washing dishes in the kitchen. “And it’s hard not to become a part of all this. It’s hard not to forget where we came from.”

  How could I tell him: forgetting wasn’t the problem, it was finding a new way to fight. If we couldn’t fight, we’d implode. I tried to say that. I tried to ask him what we should do now, in this new phase. It was time for him to go to Mem Hall, but he hadn’t told us how to go on. I wanted to beg, to demand that he show us the way. “The most important thing,” he said, “is to get everything you can here. You kids are getting a view of white America that we never even got close to.” He shook his head. “We couldn’t even dream of it.”

  I thought of the scene in Native Son—I’d have to teach it soon to the Fourth Formers—where the two boys stand on the sidewalk looking at an airplane. Only white boys could fly, they sai
d.

  “You’ve got to get as much as you can here, be the best that you can, so that when you come out, you’ll be ready. But you cannot forget where you’ve come from.”

  When I had been eleven years old, the year before Martin Luther King was shot, I had written to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference headquarters in Atlanta asking them what I could do to help the struggle. They had said the same thing. Stay in school. Prepare yourself. Then what?

  “The fact is,” he said, “there’s no blueprint for what we’re doing now. It’s all uncharted water. We’re going to need you. We’re going to need every one of you.”

  I wolfed down Mr. Jordan’s visit like every other experience at St. Paul’s. I had no time to digest it. Mr. Cox came and went. Mr. Jordan came and went. Over Long Winter Weekend, we students who were staying at school slept late and lingered lazily over our meals. Valentine’s Day arrived. Anthony put a card in my mailbox, and my grandmother Jackson sent me a card, with “a little paper money,” as she said, tucked in. I took it to town to buy toiletries. That night, I found that Jimmy had been in town, too.

  “Jimmy’s looking for you,” his roommate told me. “He needs to talk to you. Now.”

  “What is it?” Jimmy never sent messages.

  “I think he should tell you.”

  “I got to get out of this dorm,” Jimmy said when I arrived. We went to the skatehouse, but on Saturday night it was full of people. So we went to the squash courts, picked a court, and closed the door. The court was white and empty. Someone in another court was practicing. We heard the balls hit and zing off the walls. In a week, the student work squad would be assigned to wash the black strike marks.

  It had begun at the supermarket in town. Jimmy had taken a carton of cigarettes and was stopped on his way out by a security guard who hustled him to the manager. The manager listened to Jimmy’s apology. “I was begging her, please. I told her that I didn’t know why I had done it, that I’d never do it again. I’d never come into the store again! I’m blurting all this out to her about how I was from St. Paul’s School and there was all this pressure, and I must have lost my mind. I offered to do anything I could to make up for it. She must have seen what a state I was in, because she told me that she was willing to let me go without pressing charges if I could find an adult who was willing to come get me.”