Black Ice Read online

  Jimmy asked her to call a black family he knew in town. It was characteristic of him to have found these people and made the effort to get to know them. They were not home, however, when she called. While Jimmy was sitting outside the manager’s office, she telephoned the school and was referred to Jimmy’s groupmaster, Mr. Price.

  Mr. Price came to the store, thanked the manager, and assured her that the incident would not be repeated. When they got into the car, Jimmy said, Mr. Price slammed the door. “He started screaming and cursing at me,” Jimmy told me. “He was like: ‘You are screwed, Jimmy Hill.’

  “It was like he had been waiting on this, like he was really going to get off on seeing me screwed. I know that’s not my imagination.

  “I know what I did was wrong. Hey, look, I’m willing to do anything I can to make up. I don’t know what made me pick up those cigarettes! It was like, I wanted them, and I didn’t have enough money, and it’s a great, big store.…”

  “You could have asked me,” I moaned. “I got some money this week.”

  “I know that. I know. That’s what makes this whole thing so stupid. I could have asked Dorien. Dorien’s loaded. I could have got it off any of the white kids. They’ll give you money in a minute. Why not?

  “I just did it. Like, they’re not going to miss this one little carton of smokes. I know it’s wrong. I know it. I’m not trying to make excuses. But Mr. Price is out to get me. It’s like no matter what the school decides, he wants me screwed. Personally. And I can’t figure out why. I never did the man any harm.” He smiled wanly. “You got a cigarette? Obviously, I didn’t get any this afternoon.”

  We went outside to stand in the butt-littered snow and smoke. Jimmy asked me about the disciplinary process. It gave me chills to describe it to him. I had sat on the committee half a year. I never thought I’d have to sit across from the boy who was so close to me that I no longer knew where he began and I ended.

  “So what are my chances?”

  I did not know. Jimmy’s academic record was acceptable; his participation in sports reluctant. He had energy, spunk, talent in the arts, and charisma. The committee might just come down harder on him than they would on some kid who had fewer personal resources.

  “All I can tell you,” I said, “is to write your statement honestly. Write everything, just like you told me tonight. You’ve got to promise not to try to outslick the committee.”

  “Are you kidding? I have learned my lesson.”

  “And don’t say that. Everybody says that.”

  I sat in on Jimmy’s D.C. Although he’d never been to the committee before, this was not his first offense. He’d been caught out of the house after hours the year before (headed for my room across the quad). He was known to be flip and sarcastic, to miss commitments. He was black satin in an all-cotton world. I spoke for Jimmy. I tried to show the love and loyalty I knew in him that I suspected the committee might not see for the showmanship.

  In a few days Mr. Oates decided that Jimmy would be suspended for a few days, but not expelled. When he returned he was enjoined from leaving the grounds (“Good,” he said. “I can’t be trusted.”), and he was to come up with a plan to make amends to the community. He set to work on a weekend extravaganza of music, dance, and theater. He and I practiced duets together for a chapel program of gospel music, and he even stopped complaining about sports. Jimmy was a changed man, and only occasionally did he liken himself to Winston Smith, the brainwashed main character in 1984, one of our assigned novels. By spring, his irreverence was back, but so, too, was a new caution. He had come close to leaving St. Paul’s, and both of us had been shaken.

  Chapter Twelve

  I had chosen to apply only to Penn and Princeton, because the recommended five colleges seemed like an admission of doubt or greed; I picked large universities in reaction to St. Paul’s intimacy, which was beginning to stifle; Ivy Leagues to satisfy what I thought my advisers expected and to give me career credentials; and mid-Atlantic locations so I’d be close to home if my mother took sick again. I designated Princeton as my first choice, because it seemed to have more prestige, but I had no real preference. I trusted that the fate that had carried me to St. Paul’s School would see me on to college.

  During spring break, before we received our acceptance letters, fate, in the person of Wally Talbot, rang the phone. I was in the kitchen polishing cabinets. The connection was bad. Wally’s voice—familiar at once even though I hadn’t heard it since he’d graduated the year before—sounded urgent and far away.

  “Listen,” he said with little preamble. “I’m working in the admissions department here at Princeton, and I came across your application. From what I can see, it looks like you’re in.”

  “Oh!”

  “Don’t come. Listen, Libby, whatever you do, don’t come. It’s like St. Paul’s, only worse. And all the good things about St. Paul’s, it doesn’t have. I’m telling you: don’t come.”

  In addition to Wally’s oracular call, I saw, when I received my acceptance letters, that Penn was offering me fifty dollars more financial aid. I took it as an omen.

  Besides, Anthony was going to Penn, too. We fantasized about the college years ahead. One afternoon he asked jokingly whether I intended to “pull a St. Paul’s” in college. In other words, did I hope to become a big woman on campus at Penn, and if so, had I thought about the toll it took on relationships—including ours?

  I felt the constriction in my chest. It forced the air out of my lungs in little bursts, none of them strong enough to carry the words I wanted to say: I thought I had been paying attention to our relationship. I thought that he didn’t mind what I did. I thought he liked me for it. As if I’d discovered a brand-new tactic, I decided that for the moment, I’d let things ride. September was a long way off.

  I concentrated instead on our time together. As the term wore on, it was true that more students began to act out, and more Disciplinary Committee meetings filled the evenings. But we did spend each afternoon together. Out in Pillsbury Field behind the track, Anthony introduced me to the shot put. After two years of sports training, I could begin to feel the simple happiness of exertion. Field gave me the exhilaration of dance, the wordless joy of translating ideas into movement—but without the complication of an audience. Inside the circle, from the crouch through the exploding sweep of the pivot, shot put felt more simple than I’d ever remembered childhood, and as powerful as I had hoped adulthood might be. For a while, it seemed as if the buggy, blue afternoons would stretch out indefinitely, as if in spring term of Sixth-Form year time acquired a half-life that kept graduation always coming, but never there.

  • • •

  Then it came. New beds of annuals appeared, the banners were hoisted and the gates swung open to admit the crowds. My family arrived in a caravan of cars: my parents and sister, my grandparents, my aunt Evie and my cousin Dana, friends of the family, and friends of mine, five carloads in all.

  My attention swung from my school friends to my family, and then to introducing the two groups. We talked arrangements. Moving so large a group was a complicated operation. The children needed to run and older folks to rest. Those who had not seen the school before wanted to tour. My mother, who was nearly well, wanted to talk. My father craved peace and quiet.

  I vacillated between wanting to march them through the rituals—Friday night’s dance, chorus and drama performances; Saturday’s speeches; the alumni parade; lunch in the Cage next to the gym; crew races; the athletic-award ceremony—and wanting to avoid the rituals myself.

  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 fe
et 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:

  Ye watchers and ye holy ones,

  Bright seraphs, cherubim, and thrones,

  Raise the glad strain, Alleluia!

  Cry out, dominions, princedoms, powers,

  Virtues, archangels, angels’ choirs,

  Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

  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 “bri
ght”? 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.