Black Ice Page 2

  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 ti
me 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.

  Well, my mother marched me and my armload of buoyant materials right back into school and caught the teacher before she left. The box was the only problem? Just the box? Nothing wrong with the experiment? An excited eight-year-old had forgotten a lousy, stinking box that you get from the supermarket, and for that, she was out of the running? The teacher said I had to learn to follow directions. My mother argued that I had followed directions by doing the experiment by myself, which was more than you could say for third graders who’d brought in dry-cell batteries that lit light bulbs and papier-mâche volcanoes that belched colored lava.

  “Don’t you ever put me in a position like that again,” Mama said when we were out of earshot of the classroom. “You never know who is just waiting for an excuse to shut us out.”

  We got the box; my experiment went into the fair; I won the prize at school. I won third prize for my age group in the city.

  My ears began to burn. I could not help but believe that they would see through this transparent plug, and before I had even laid hands on an application. They’d think we were forward and pushy. I forgot, for the moment, how relieved I’d felt when Mama had stood in front of that teacher defending me with a blinding righteousness, letting the teacher know that I was not as small and black and alone as I seemed, that I came from somewhere, and where I came from, she’d better believe, somebody was home.

  The other mothers nodded approvingly. My father gave me a wide, clever-girl smile. Mr. Price and Russell looked at me deadpan. They seemed amused by my embarrassment.

  The story was an answer, part rebuke and part condolence, to Mike Russell’s stories, where no parents figured at all. It was a message to Mr. Price about her maternal concerns, and a way to prove that racism was not some vanquished enemy, but a real, live person, up in your face, ready, for no apparent reason, to mess with your kid. When I was in third grade, and her marriage to my father had looked like forever, when Martin Luther King was alive preaching love, and white flight had not yet sunk the real-estate values in West Philly, Mama could do her maternal duty, and face down a white teacher who would have deprived me of my award. Who at St. Paul’s School would stand up for her child in her stead?

  Mr. Price did not answer my mother’s story. Instead he invited a few more questions. The Mama’s boy asked about food and mosquitoes and telephones. He looked appalled to hear that there were no phones in the rooms, only public phone booths outside, and only a handful at that. I doubted that I’d see that child again.

  If we wanted to be considered for candidacy, we were to write for an application, our own letters, composed in our own hand, and register to take standardized tests. In addition, Mr. Price said, it would be worth our while to visit the school in person.

  Our host, Ralph Starr, who had slipped out of the room during the discussion, had slipped back in. Mr. Price thanked him for the use of his house. Mr. Starr took exception. He was glad to be able to help in the good work that Mr. Price and Mike were doing. In fact he thanked us for coming. The adults appeared pleased. They chatted with each other; I talked to Mike, and the session ended.

  As we drove away, my mother could not get over how Mrs. Starr had given her barefoot toddler a spoonful of peanut butter to lick before she was spirited upstairs. Mama didn’t feed us peanut butter. It wasn’t proper good food, she said. It was what PWTs—poor white trash—gave their kids. For my lunch, Mom packed baked chicken on toast with lettuce and mayonnaise, ham, tuna, sliced tongue, or cheese.

  I was as jolted by the sight as my mother, and not just the peanut butter, but the whole family scene. I had thought that rich white people would have been quieter, their children more tidy, their mothers less vibrant. I didn’t like it that my mother, too, had been surprised. It made me nervous.

  A week later, however, I did not think of the background kid-babble in Chestnut Hill, but of the wide drawing room and the slides. Mr. Price wrote promptly to inform us that he had indeed scheduled the visit we’d said we wanted to make to the school.

  “They don’t play, do they?” My parents took turns asking each other and answering back.

  “Those people do not play.”

  Chapter Two

  From inside my grandparents’ vestibule, with two fingers hooked loosely over her bottom teeth, Carole watched us drive off for New Hampshire. I saw my grandmother whisper in her ear, and I knew that her voice would be full of indulgent promise.

  We headed toward the New Jersey Turnpike, the beginning, for Philadelphians, of every trip north. The turnpike’s smooth black asphalt whirred under our tires. I settled into my seat. Although there was no longer the old intimacy among the three of us, there was the same symmetry—Dad driving; Mama next to him, her hand flung over his headrest and flicking occasionally like the tail of a cat; me, alone, in the back. Suburbs gave way to small farms covered with the frozen stubble of cornstalks and bare fruit trees. It was December. We laughed about how much colder New Hampshire would be. Excitement spread inside me, hot and frightening, like dye injected into a vein.

  “You’re going to be mighty glad you packed those knee socks,” my mother said with feigned neutrality.

  The sock contest had started simply enough. I had been packing when my mother came into my room and saw my stockings folded on the bed next to the suitcase. Those would have to stay home, she said, picking them up and moving them back to the bureau. Knee socks were the thing to wear to this kind of place, she said; knee socks were “classic.” Then she laid a look on me: indulgent, ready to get mad, amused, annoyed, threatening.

  Every mother I knew had that look. It had been the first one I can remember mocking. Later my friends and I all did it together. “Don’t start with me,” we’d tell each other.

  “Don’t you start.”

  “Don’t even try it.”

  Womanish among ourselves, we were silent before the women themselves. We used a tame version of our bored eyes (which were their eyes as we saw them, bored with us and the childishness of our antics) against them, but we obeyed.

  I packed the knee socks, and I packed the stockings, too. They were mine. I’d bought them with my money, the money I made at the five-and-ten where I watched the fountain supervisor trim bitten ends off half-eaten hot dogs, rinse and then plop them into the Coney Island soup. I’d earned those stockings, and I wanted them with me.

  Near Elizabeth a clingy stink seeped in through the heating vents. Sulphurous and sweet, filthy and dense, the pollution poured from the landscape: refineries burned oil and coal; a slaughterhouse dumped bloody spoilage doused with formaldehyde; landfills oozed bilge into a river named Kill. When the heating system seemed about to choke us, we had no choice but to open the windows, and let the air, laden with its cold, moist stink, wash over us.

  “Money,” my mother said, motioning toward the wasteland around us. “What America will do for a buck.”

  We drove through New York City, past the projects of the south Bronx, where people hung their laundry to
be dried by the exhaust fumes, and past the north Bronx, with its boxy coops and the clean-block neighborhoods where my cousins lived.

  The sun dropped off the edge of the earth just behind us and to the left. Within moments, it had snatched the last friendly glow from the sky. Around us, headlights of passing cars carved cylindrical plugs out of the darkness, each separate, apart, lighting only enough road to see its own way through.

  “This is a wide state.” So my parents told each other as we drove through Connecticut. Massachusetts came and went. After nearly eight hours on the road, we crossed the state line into New Hampshire. Well-maintained highways cut through granite cliffs and black woods. Small mountains of bulldozed snow lined the shoulders. Nashua and then Manchester erupted out of the land, little citylets whose worn factories hulked along the Merrimack River. We could not tell which were abandoned, and which, when daylight broke, would be alive with workers.

  Concord, New Hampshire, had no such industrial district. Its Main Street swept us into a three- and four-story-tall town center. Pleasant Street took us out again, west, toward the school. To our left we saw a simple white sign with black letters. It said: St. Paul’s School.

  Once onto the grounds, our car bucked and lurched across the rutty ice to Scudder House, a white clapboard cottage with brick chimneys and dark green shutters. The front door was unlocked. We opened it and stepped in. A spectacled gentleman with a handlebar mustache regarded us from the far wall.

  “Who is he?” asked my mother.

  I read the brass nameplate: “Willard Scudder.”

  “Well, who else would he be?”

  We walked into a light green bedroom with twin beds, where my father deposited their bags, and past the tiny kitchen to a peach-colored bedroom, same beds, where I put mine. A note in the kitchen invited us to help ourselves to soft drinks. More notes in the bedrooms explained how to turn on the electric blankets. I was afraid to sleep underneath live electric wires, but the guesthouse, charming and well appointed, was cold. I turned the dial. Warmth spread over me. I drifted off into a luxurious, and yet disconcerted, sleep.