Black Ice Read online

  Three years before, I’d had my hair cut, straightened, and curled into what had seemed a most sophisticated style. My mother had warned me that it would have to be maintained: rolled at night in pink sponge curlers, oiled and brushed and styled, covered like a matron’s in the rain. I agreed happily to a price I’d never paid. After a few days, when my pressed hair began to nap up around the temples, when short and sassy degenerated into short and picky, I tried, one rainy day, to pull my hair back into a ponytail, as I always had before. The cut ends wouldn’t meet, and, five minutes before the bus was due on our corner, I stood before our bathroom mirror sobbing stupidly. What if I had judged that badly again? It was the sort of blunder I wouldn’t know about until too late.

  We turned left off Pleasant Street at the sign for the school. The grounds were green and tidy. At each dormitory house, parked cars were in various stages of unloading. Young people called to each other. They darted across lawns and jogged along the paths; they stood together in groups just as they’d done in the admissions slides.

  My letter said that I was to come directly to the Rectory where I’d be welcomed by the Rector and my old girl, a Sixth Former whose job it was to help a new student through the first confusing days. I remember that we discussed whether to do that or to go first to my dormitory. We had the map out. My father drove slowly, but did not stop, and we had some trouble following the pen-and-ink drawing of the campus. Dad kept rolling, and we couldn’t decide where we were, which to do first. Eventually, we landed at the Rectory for my official welcome.

  The big, gray clapboard Rectory formed a triangle at the center of school with the two red-brick chapels: the homey Old Chapel and the towering Gothic. The brick was repeated in stolid dormitory houses built before the Depression; in low, modern ones that rose in the middle to two-story diamond windows; in the art studios that perched next to a waterfall. White clapboard houses made cheerful spots of light against the grass and trees. An amber-colored system of ponds and streams watered the grounds and enforced a graceful but informal spacing between buildings. From the center greensward to the dining hall or to the meadow behind the Rectory or to the gray granite library, poised like a shrine at the edge of the reflecting pond, we had to cross bridges girded by stone and masonry arches. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, and the most plentiful.

  As we headed up the brick walkway toward the Rectory receiving line, I felt a public family face spreading over our countenances. Someone asked us how we’d come up. How long was the drive? Did we drive straight through? Were we tired? Would we like refreshments?

  A student runner was dispatched to find my old girl. We were guided into the house by a receiving line of older white students and a few unidentified adults. A black student greeted us, too. His name was Wally Talbot, he told us, and he was president of the Sixth Form. He was a few inches taller than I. He had a smile for the adults that was quick and bright, and a wink for me.

  “Did he say that he was president of the School?” my mother whispered.

  “I think that’s what he said,” my father answered, and we all turned around and looked again at the black student who was joking easily with the white students beside him.

  The Rector, Mr. Oates, made us a hearty greeting as we walked toward the parlor. He was a smallish man, compact, robust. He looked straight at me and pronounced my name carefully. He looked evenly at my parents, and with respect. He knew where we had driven from, knew that my father had had to take the day off from school. I did not know whether to be flattered or disturbed that a man who’d never seen me knew so much about me and my folks.

  We passed through the wide foyer of the Rectory, into an outer parlor and then a large, rectangular living room. My mother and I caught each other taking inventory: fireplaces, bay windows, bookshelves, French doors, rear patio, enclosed porch. Sunlight and birdsong drifted in from gardens. In the outer rooms, more new students arrived with their parents, and more old students greeted them.

  I found myself wishing that Mike Russell were there. As Mr. Oates took a moment to exchange some man-talk with my father (they took on the look that men got when they put their hands in their pockets, tilted their heads to one side, and put aside the milder wife-and-kids smiles), I suspected that I had come to this place all on the recommendation of one professionally attentive creature who was now unpacking his bags at Harvard. It was the social ease and gentleness that blew so balmy around me that brought Russell to mind. It had been just that confidence that had seduced me, the poise that passed my understanding and made me think that if I were where he’d come from, I, too, would emerge young, gifted, and black for all to admire.

  Instead, I stood awkward and ridiculous, cloaked in a makeshift composure so brittle that I seemed fairly to rattle inside it like seeds in a gourd. Instead of Mike Russell, the dashing Wally with his uptilted eyes and sidelong glances implied a camaraderie I did not feel. Lanky white students made coffee-table conversation. The omniscient Rector, plain-spoken and gray-haired, welcomed us into my new “community.” And from where we stood in the Rectory, the green-and-brown grounds spread out around us, pushing the world away, holding me in as if I had been caught in a slide-projector show.

  How was I to know (since I could not read Wally’s dashing eyes) that other black students had felt the same way? Not until years later was I able to ask them outright and resurrect the strangeness of it all. Ed Shockley, who graduated in my class, can still remember standing outside the Rectory looking at the grounds and wondering whether his white classmates would jump him in the woods.

  Lee Bouton, one of the first nineteen girls to arrive at St. Paul’s in 1971, came to the Rectory without any family at all. As a tenth-grader, she flew from Washington, D.C., to Boston, caught a bus from Boston to Concord, and then a taxi from Concord to St. Paul’s. She carried her own luggage from one transport to the next. It was January when she and the other girls arrived to begin coeducation at St. Paul’s. The driver let Lee out in the snow in front of an administration building. The switchboard operator inside called Jeremy Price to come pick up his charge.

  Mr. Price “took me to the Rectory, where the welcoming tea was going on. There were parents there, and other students, and I walked through the door with Jeremy Price, feeling very intimidated. He’d taken my bag. I didn’t know where my room was. I didn’t know anything. And I walked in, and you know how when you walk into that [outer parlor] there’s a couch facing the doorway? Well, Loretta [the other black girl] was sitting right in the middle of the couch, and she jumped up and said: ‘Oooooooooh! Here’s another one!’ And she came over and gave me this big hug. And right behind her was Mike Russell with this big, beautiful smile. I felt like, maybe it’s going to be all right, you know?”

  My family and I stood in the Rectory just a year and a half after Lee’s first tea. Unlike her, I was armed with the experience of a proper, on-campus interview, and I was escorted by attractive young parents and a cuddly kid sister. Unlike Ed Shockley, I was not afraid that the white boys were going to catch me alone in the woods one night and beat me up. But for the first time, I had a whiff, as subtle as the scent of the old books that lined the wall, of my utter aloneness in this new world. I reached into myself for the head-to-the-side, hands-on-hips cockiness that had brought me here and found just enough of it to keep me going.

  My dormitory was around the corner from the Rectory, over a bridge and across the road from the library. Inside, just off the common room, steps led to the open doorway of the housemaster. He, too, was on hand to greet us.

  I wasn’t sure about Mr. Hawley. He had a round face whose top half was nearly bald and whose bottom half was covered over with a full, tweed-colored beard. Between the top and bottom halves a pair of glasses perched on a small nose and caught the light. He made a funny face when he spied my sister: “And look what you brought along! We’ve got a couple of those creatures running around somewhere. I’ll see if they’ve been run over yet by some station wa
gon gone berserk.”

  I was later to learn that all the intelligence and will, all the imagination and mischief in that face was revealed in the pale eyes behind the glasses, but on this first meeting, I could only bring myself to concentrate on the beard and the Kriss Kringle mouth.

  Mr. Hawley, it turned out, had family in Philadelphia, so we talked about the city, and my parents described for him just exactly where we lived.

  Like other St. Paul’s buildings, the Hawleys’ house had alcoves, staircases, and a courtyard, that presented to me a facade of impenetrable, almost European, privacy. The housemaster’s home was directly accessible from the dormitory, but only by going from the vestibule into the common room, then up stairs, through a heavy wooden door, into a hallway, and another, inner door. Once in the living room, I could see through the windows that we were across the street from the gray granite library, but I would not have known it had the drapes been pulled. The architecture that I so admired from the outside did not yield itself up to me from within as I had expected. I now felt disconcerted, as I had in the Rectory. Mr. Hawley wanted to know just how far one would drive along Baltimore Pike to get to Yeadon, and I, standing in his living room, had no idea where his kitchen might be.

  Mrs. Hawley, a short, soft-spoken woman, appeared from the rear hallway. Like her husband, she said ironic things, but more gently. Startlingly blond children came with her, one peeking from behind her skirt.

  Mr. Hawley directed us to my room and showed my father where to park by the back door so that we could unload more handily. We carried my things up from a basement entrance. Doors whooshed open and closed as other girls and their families came and went, and the halls echoed with the sounds of mothers’ heels.

  My room faced east. In the afternoon it seemed dull and empty and dark.

  “This’ll be lovely when you get it all fixed up,” my mother said, by which I assumed that it looked dull to her, too.

  Fine dust had settled contentedly over the sturdy oak bureau and cloudy mirror, over the charming, squat little oak desk and chair and in the corners of the closet. White people, as we said, were not personally fastidious (any black woman who’d ever been a maid could tell you that, and some did, in appalling detail, so I’d heard stories). I was determined to give the place a good wash.

  The casement windows matched those elsewhere on campus. My father opened one, tightened the wing nut to hold the sash in place, and stood looking out into the meadow. Then he peeked into the room next door, which was still empty, and recalled how, at Lincoln University, the first students to arrive scavenged the best furniture in the dormitory. “If there’s any furniture you don’t like, better speak now,” he joked. “I guess you wouldn’t want to do that here.”

  I checked the room next door, and pronounced, with laughter but not conviction, that I’d gotten a fair bargain.

  The room seemed crowded with all of us about. I found myself chattering on, very gaily, about where I would put my things. What with the windows at one end, the narrow bed against one wall, the bureau, the desk, the radiator, the closet, the door leading into the next room, the door leading in, and the economy of my possessions, there were few options, realistically, for interior design.

  Still, I could not stop buzzing. So long as we stood crowded together in the room, my sister jumping on the naked mattress, my mother wondering about smoking a cigarette, my father by the open window clenching his jaw and rubbing the back of his neck, and me burbling and babbling as if words were British soldiers marching in pointless columns, bright and gay, with flags and bright brass buttons on crimson-colored breasts, on and on and on into battle; so long as we had nothing to do except to wait for the next thing to do; so long as the intolerable closeness remained and the intolerable separation loomed to be made, so long would this adrenaline rush through me, anarchic, atavistic, compelling.

  Outside the move-in continued. Convinced that I was missing yet another ritual of initiation, I ran down the hall to check the bulletin board. As I stood reading, an Asian boy propelled himself into the vestibule. He introduced himself without smiling and asked me my name. Then, addressing me by the name I gave, he asked whether or not I lived in Simpson House.

  “Listen,” he said. “There’s a girl upstairs. She’s just moved in. Her name is Fumiko, and she’s from Japan. She can hardly speak any English at all. She understands a lot, but she really needs someone to go and make her feel welcome.”

  “Do you speak Japanese?”

  “Of course not.” (He was Chinese-American.) He appeared to be reevaluating me. “Look, is anyone else around?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve just arrived myself.”

  “Well, welcome! Look, we’ve been helping her, but she needs a girl in her own house, and guys can’t come in. Maybe you can tell some of the other girls. Really, she’s only just come to the country.”

  Reluctantly, I agreed. I went to the room on the second floor that the boy had described, and found her. I introduced myself. We tried hard to pronounce each other’s names, and we laughed at our mistakes. Fumiko was taller than I. She kept suppressing bows. We agreed to meet again later.

  I returned to my family much calmer than I’d left, and I told them about my new friend. Now my mother seemed agitated. Just before we left for dinner, she began to tell me what items of clothing should go into which drawer.

  “You always put underwear in the top. See, it’s the shallowest one. Big, bulky things like sweaters and jeans go down at the bottom. But, now, please don’t just jam your things in. I don’t want you walking around here with stuff that’s all jerked up.”

  “I know where things go.”

  “Listen. Skirts, your good pants, all that stuff needs to be hung up. Let’s see how this is packed.” My mother unzipped one of the suitcases on the bed. “You know, maybe you might want us to take this big one home. I can’t see where you have room to store it.”

  I watched my mother lift layers of underwear delicately from their berths. Her hands, precise, familiar, called up in me a frenzy of possession. “I’ve got all night to unpack,” I said. “Please don’t. I should do that.”

  “I’ll just help you get started. Lord, I hope you don’t start putting together any of those crazy outfits you concoct at home. I know you think that stuff looks cute, but it doesn’t. You didn’t pack any of those fishnet stockings, I hope.” Mama selected a drawer for panties and one for bras and slips. I’d brought a girdle—hers, of course—that was hidden in the next layer.

  “I really want to do that myself.”

  “I’m not taking anything away from you.” Her voice rose with maternal indignation.

  “Let the child do it herself,” my father said.

  I knew that they were going to fight. It would be a silent fight, because we were, even in this room, in public, so long as we were on school grounds. I did not see how we would avoid it. We’d been cooped up together, as my parents called it, all day.

  Then my mother laughed. “All right, all right. I was just getting you started,” she said. “You’d think I was doing something wrong.”

  We left for dinner, and I closed my door.

  “No locks,” my father commented. “I wonder if they ever have any problems.”

  Outside old students lounged in groups, throwing Frisbees and tossing balls with lacrosse sticks. They halloed one another across the green and complimented new haircuts and tans.

  Even the parents knew each other. Mothers in A-line skirts bent their heads together, and the pastel-colored sleeves of the cardigans they’d thrown over their shoulders flattened against one another like clothes on a rack. Fathers shook hands and laughed in loud voices. At first, they all looked the same to me. People whom we had passed a couple times nodded at us like old acquaintances, and we nodded back with well-prepared poise, although I had no idea whether or not I had spoken to or even seen them before.

  As my eyes grew accustomed to the landscape, I noticed different varieties of families
. There were fancy white people in big foreign sedans, the women emitting, as I passed near them, a complex cosmetic aroma; there were plain, sturdy people whose hair and nails alike were cut in blunt, straight lines and whose feet were shod in brown leather sandals. Less exotic families emerged from chrome-and-wood station wagons; they wore baggy beige shorts. Almost no one was fat. I could only make out these few gradations, and it unhinged me to know that just a few hours before I had not noticed a one. We ascended the brick pathway to the Upper School building, where meals were served, and we remembered how perilous the walk had been in winter. “Get ready,” my parents teased.

  After dinner chapel bells announced the First Night Service. Everywhere around us parents were climbing into empty cars and driving away. The air had grown cool. I did not know how to say good-bye to my family. I wanted the leave-taking to be over and my part done right. I wished them gone and was ashamed at the thought. “Please stay,” I begged. “Just until chapel’s over.”

  The First Night Service took place, according to tradition, on the first day of each term since the nineteenth century, in the Old Chapel. The Old Chapel was built in the shape of a cross, with smooth rows of wooden pews in the three lower segments and high-backed seats along the walls. The pulpit stood where Christ’s head would have hung if he in his gaunt passion had been nailed to this most charming symbol of suffering. Unlike the grand New Chapel this church was small and homey. It did not dwarf or intimidate us.

  In the Old Chapel my mind flipped through its familiar images of pious devotion: the Jesus, blond and bland, wispy beard and wistful eyes, who had smiled at me from over my great-grandparents’ bed, from the Sunday-school room at Ward A.M.E., from the illuminated cross over the pulpit, and from cardboard fans and free calendars produced by black funeral parlors; the brunet Jesus who stretched his arms out toward his disciples at the Last Supper in my laminated reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s oil. Take, eat.