Black Ice Read online

  The Rector appeared in the pulpit, shorter than he had seemed in the Rectory, and businesslike. I heard him, despite the close intimacy of the chapel, as if he were speaking from far away. Yet even from such a distance, his words—the content of them, if only I could take them out of that solid, white voice, but I could not quite—had everything to do with me right then. He talked to us of our fears and our dreams, of our new career, of the challenges of our life together.

  Then he spoke of tradition. Boys had come and gone before us, sitting in these same pews, thinking and feeling these same thoughts and feelings. They had grown into men and gone out into the world prepared, by a St. Paul’s education, to do something worthwhile.

  My own voices were talking back to him, and so long as he spoke, I could not control the dialogue. Part of the tradition, my eye. I was there in spite, despite, to spite it. I was there because of sit-ins and marches and riots. I was there—and this I felt with extraordinary and bitter certainty—as a sort of liberal-minded experiment. And, hey, I did not intend to fail. I remember yawning and yawning, sucking in air with my mouth closed and my face taut.

  Finally, I gave up the effort to pull in his faraway voice. I let myself drift into silence. I watched the old dust settle in the red- and yellow- and blue-tinted sunlight. Above and around the stained-glass windows thick curls of paint peeled away from the walls. Below the windows gold lettering of memorial plaques shone dimly through the dust. A faded semicircle of ornate print above one window reminded us of boys who played in the streets of Jerusalem. In this close, cool chapel, I could not imagine Jerusalem, its noise or its sun. I could not imagine anything. I knew now what they wanted: “No boy shall leave here unimproved.”

  When the doors opened, I pressed through them into a wash of cool orange twilight. I took off my shoes and was surprised by the wet grass and the freedom to run through it. I ran across grass, asphalt, and brick, past the round post office, the art building, over the bridge. It had been selfish of me to ask them to stay. Daddy would have to drive eight hours tonight. Mom would be tired. Carole had had it. I felt a stitch in my side.

  They were waiting at the car. My mother looked at me with dramatic maternity. We were back to baby names, to the familiar fury of the separation I had dreamt of. I heard my sister wail, but I could not see her past my mother. I hugged my mother and my father in the moist air. My cheeks were wet from their kisses. I hugged my sister and felt the panic in her small, perfect body. The soles of my feet throbbed from the bricks.

  “Don’t stay here in this place,” Carole cried. “Aren’t you going to come home? You can’t stay here!”

  My parents got her into the car, and in those days before seat belts, she flailed around in the back seat as I walked my mother to the passenger side. I was sick with my betrayal of Carole and ashamed that I begrudged my parents the thin shreds of devotion I dredged up and flung their way.

  I did what I needed to do. I said the things they needed to hear. I told them that I loved them. I told them that I would miss them. It was true, and it was enough, after all.

  They drove away slowly. My mother looked back and waved. My sister cried and cried. I watched her face and waved to it, until it was no more than a speck, until they turned the corner and were gone.

  Chapter Four

  Still barefoot, I ran into my house to cry. Even when I closed the door to my room, however, I could hear girls. They were talking and laughing. Who could cry? I washed my face and wandered upstairs to Fumiko’s room. It was empty. I took the long route back to my room by making a circle down past the common room and peeked in. Two black students, a boy and a girl, smiled back at me.

  Jimmy Hill, one of the skinniest boys I had ever seen, had arrived that morning from Brooklyn. He had extravagant brown eyes. His black satin jacket, emblazoned on the back with a red-and-yellow dragon, hung open to reveal a fishnet T-shirt that cast tiny shadows on his chest.

  Annette Frazier was a ninth grader (or “Third Former,” as I was learning to say) whose theatrical mannerisms made her seem older than she was. She had an appealing face, rounded, with regular features that she used to great effect. When we met, she pantomimed our wariness with a quick movement of her eyes. She caught precisely our exposure and our collusion.

  We shouted with laughter and touched hands. Had anyone told me two hours before that I would be engaging in such high-decibel, bare-naked black bonding, I would have rolled my eyes with scorn. We sat in our small circle until Annette decided that it was time for her to get back to unpacking her things. I wondered if she was as organized and as self-assured as she looked. Neither Jimmy nor I could face our rooms, so we left together in search of a place to smoke.

  We found one next to the squash courts. It was marked by a sand-filled stone urn and a few butts. We liked the place, because we could smoke there, and because we had a solid wall to lean on and buildings with which to swaddle ourselves against the open sky.

  I was not afraid to go to St. Paul’s School, although it was becoming clear to me from the solicitous white faces that people thought I was—or ought to be. I had no idea that wealth and privilege could confer real advantages beyond the obvious ones sprawled before us. Instead, I believed that rich white people were like poodles: overbred, inbred, degenerate. All the coddling and permissiveness would have a bad effect, I figured, now that they were up against those of us who’d lived a real life in the real world.

  I knew that from a black perspective Yeadon had been plenty cushy, but after all, I had been a transplant. West Philly had spawned me, and I was loyal to it. Jimmy felt just as unafraid, just as certain as Darwin that we would overcome. Jimmy had grown up in the projects, the son of a steadfast father and a mother who was a doer, a mover who led tenant-action and community groups. Together, his parents had raised a boy who had a job to do.

  “Listen to me, darling,” he said. “We are going to turn this motherfucker out!”

  And why not? I, too, had been raised for it. My mother and her mother, who had worked in a factory, and her mother, who had cleaned apartments in Manhattan, had been studying these people all their lives in preparation for this moment. And I had studied them. I had studied my mother as she turned out elementary schools and department stores.

  I always saw it coming. Some white department-store manager would look at my mother and see no more than a modestly dressed young black woman making a tiresome complaint. He’d use that tone of voice they used when they had important work elsewhere. Uh-oh. Then he’d dismiss her with his eyes. I’d feel her body stiffen next to me, and I’d know that he’d set her off.

  “Excuse me,” she’d say. “I don’t think you understand what I’m trying to say to you …”

  And then it began in earnest, the turning out. She never moved back. It didn’t matter how many people were in line. It didn’t matter how many telephones were ringing. She never moved back, only forward, her body leaning over counters and desk tops, her fingers wrapped around the offending item or document, her face getting closer and closer. Sometimes she’d talk through her teeth, her lips moving double time to bite out the consonants. Then she’d get personal. “How dare you,” would figure in. “How dare you sit there and tell me …” Finally, when she’d made the offense clear, clearer even than the original billing error or the shoddy seam, she’d screw up her eyes: “Do you hear me? Do you hear what I’m saying to you?”

  They’d eventually, inevitably, take back the faulty item or credit her charge or offer her some higher-priced substitute (“like they should’ve done in the first place,” she’d say, and say to them). They would do it because she had made up her mind that they would. Turning out, I learned, was not a matter of style; cold indignation worked as well as hot fury. Turning out had to do with will. I came to regard my mother’s will as a force of nature, an example of and a metaphor for black power and black duty. My duty was to compete in St. Paul’s classrooms. I had no option but to succeed and no doubt that I could will my success
.

  Jimmy understood. He knew the desperate mandate, the uncompromising demands, and the wild, perfect, greedy hope of it. If we could succeed here—earn high marks, respect, awards; learn these people, study them, be in their world but not of it—we would fulfill the prayers of our ancestors. Jimmy knew as I did that we could give no rational answer to white schoolmates and parents who asked how we had managed to get to St. Paul’s School. How we got there, how we found our way to their secret hideout, was not the point. The point was that we had been bred for it just as surely as they. The point was that we were there to turn it out.

  When I got back to my house, I concentrated on learning names. Alison, Ruthie, Sara. Those were the first I picked up, because they were the old girls, the most assured and welcoming. They told me where the storeroom was, how many coins the washer and dryer required. They told me that there was an iron and ironing board upstairs, and a hot plate. They told me that another master—a woman—lived just above me in a tiny apartment.

  They also asked questions. Where was I from? Who did I know? Had we driven? Take long? What Form was I in? What classes? Everyone asked and answered the same queries as if there were nothing else in the world to talk about. And, yet, I had nothing else to say, either. Helplessly, I answered their questions and asked the same questions back.

  So it went while I unpacked until Pam Hudson moved into the room adjoining mine. She was a new Fifth Former, too. She used her husky voice to curse liberally as she shoved handfuls of clothes into drawers. She was more delicate in her handling of her stereo and guitar.

  Pam wanted to know whether I felt as “weird” in this new place as she did. She wanted to know if I was scared, whether I smoked, what I liked to eat.

  She looked in a few times while I cleaned. I washed and waxed my linoleum floor, re-creating in myself the anxious thrill of my mother’s housecleaning. I hummed to myself as I scrubbed the tiny space. What can wash me white as snow? Nothin’ but the blood of Jesus.

  I closed my door so that the girls would not see me on my knees or hear me hum. Pam Hudson saw, but I didn’t mind. It calmed me to hear her on the other side of the half-open door just as it calmed me to rub a rag in circles across the floor.

  “I can’t believe you’re doing that,” Pam said.

  “Shhh,” I said to her when I finished. “Now I am going to sit here in the middle of the bed and let my nice, clean room seep into me.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  I laughed with her as if I had been joking. But when she closed the door, I waited for the onset of the brittle serenity I had sought. The Westminster chimes pealed and crickets chirped, but peace did not descend, and time did not slow down. I had not wiped away fear and the chaos it could bring. I went upstairs to find Fumiko to see if I couldn’t be of some use and find a friend to bind to me.

  I awoke the next morning to birdsong from the meadow. The bathroom was a different story. Fluorescent light splashed off the mirrors; metal stall doors banged, toilets flushed, showers sprayed full blast. A window was open to clear the steamy air. In rushed the roar of the waterfall below.

  Having grown up with bathtubs, I hated showers, but I took one. When I opened the curtain to reach for my towel, I saw that a girl was waiting to take my place. She started for the stall as I stepped out for my towel, effectively barring my path back to where I had intended to dry myself. A geyser of anger shot up inside me and subsided. Next time I would not leave my towel so far from the stall.

  The ablutions were not complete. I had yet to brush my teeth, but I’d left the toothbrush and toothpaste in my room. I had to comb my hair, but those implements, too, were in my room. I started out of the bathroom for the toothbrush, but had not finished drying, and before I could dry, I had to put my soap down. By now, the sinks were crowded with spitting, face-washing, hair-combing girls, some groggy, some chatty and refreshed. I tried to find space to rest my soap. It slipped. When I picked it up it was fuzzy with dust and hair.

  By the time I dressed I felt as if I had been awake a long time. I trucked to the Upper with girls from Simpson. In the dining room, a group of black students motioned me to join them. A boy was describing school dances:

  “First they turn the music up as high as it will go. It’s blaring and blasting and some white boy calls himself singing, and he’s screaming and hollering. Then they all come in and start jumping up and down—” he jerked his body around in his seat, “and they’re just it. ‘Oh, wow, isn’t this neat? Oh, man, this is so fun! Oh, super!’

  “It’s terrible. No, really, don’t laugh, it’s a shame. Naw, I’m serious. I feel sorry to see people carrying on like that.” He opened his mouth wide and threw his head back. We, his audience, laughed with him.

  Alma, the girl who had talked to us on the path last winter, bounced out of her seat to take her plate to the kitchen for second helpings. Alma had arrived late from Memphis the day before. She’d come into the cafeteria wearing dark pants and a white sailor’s blouse. The night before, as at breakfast, she had been back for more. I envied her the unashamed gusto that only the slender could bring to a meal.

  I went to the kitchen for coffee, and asked, having already learned the lunchroom etiquette, if anyone wanted me to bring something back for them. For the first time, someone made a request. It was my second meal on my own, and that request felt like belonging.

  We walked to chapel in a bunch, five abreast on the pathway. We talked and laughed loudly and wrapped ourselves in the sound of our own voices and the mass of bodies in the group. Some of the boys wrestled as we went. By the time our unruly company mounted the steps to the Chapel terrace, the three-minute bell rang above our heads. I had just enough time to find my assigned seat.

  When the organist concluded the prelude, a voice directing us to rise and sing the appointed hymn emerged from speakers above our heads. For twenty minutes students and teachers coughed and sneezed, listened, and daydreamed together as the Rector spoke. We sang another hymn, and the organ erupted into life again. Students sprang out of their seats only to shuffle in the press for the door. Older masters laid their heads back against the wall and listened to the organ. Outside we formed a semicircle around the Chapel door. The Rector stood above us on the top step and, when we had assembled, read the day’s announcements:

  The day’s classes would be held according to a special, shortened schedule: consult your computer-printed class rosters. Students who had not received their rosters should report to the Registrar’s office immediately. Post-office-box combinations would be given out at the following times. Athletic schedules would be posted on the athletic bulletin board on the first floor in the Schoolhouse. Lockers would be assigned that afternoon.

  There were times and places given for changing classes, directions for questioning room assignments, lists posted for assigned tables at Seated Meal, to which boys were told to wear jackets and ties and girls to wear dresses, appropriate skirts and blouses, or pants suits. (The pants-suits directive, one that brought to mind the polyester knits that were all the rage with my mother’s and grandmother’s friends, had been a small victory for girls the year before. Originally, they had been allowed to wear only dresses. They had been very cold that first winter.)

  Teenage intuition told me that it would be uncool to take notes during announcements, but halfway through, I gave in and began scribbling. Mr. Oates finished reading and dismissed us with a smile. The student body turned and snaked its way toward the Schoolhouse. We “newbs,” as new boys were called (and new girls, too, for the time being), clutched our schedules. The lower formers, little seventh- and eighth-grade boys, bobbed about in clumps, no taller than my shoulder, of three to five. Older students strolled by us displaying their self-assurance ostentatiously.

  My teachers were all men. There was Sr. Fuster, who spoke in Spanish to old and new students alike. He even cracked Spanish jokes, and punctuated them with sight gags for those of us who couldn’t follow the language fast enough to catch the
humor. Mr. Buxton, our athletic English teacher, gave us a syllabus and outlined our course. He was clear, blunt, organized. In an effort to keep from gawking, I frowned a lot as he spoke. Our math teacher, Mr. Clark, was a tall, lanky man whose age I could not determine. He seemed to have been at St. Paul’s during “The War,” but I wasn’t sure which one. He liked to laugh and made a yuk-yuk sound in his throat that bobbed his Adam’s apple.

  Now the maleness of the school impressed itself on me. In each class of ten or twelve only three or four of us were girls. Men’s and boys’ voices reverberated in the buildings. Their shoulders bumped against me coming into class. Their legs and feet stretched out as if by divine right under the table, and their big arms and fingers on top. Some talked over us as a matter of course; others were pointedly deferential. I remember being glad that I wasn’t one of the white girls. Boys stared at them. I watched them looking from one to the other and then back again to one particular girl or some part of her: her hair, her arm, the nape of her neck.

  That morning I also attended my first religion class. I resented the requirement. The African Methodist Episcopal Church had given me an “Introduction to Christianity.” Besides, Intro was a year-long course, and, as a Fifth Former, I had little enough time to sample the good courses listed in the catalog: modern dance, Southeast Asia, black American literature and history, woodworking, astronomy … In fact, as we settled into our chairs around the big table, I laughed inwardly, recalling how, the day before, I had told a master, whose name I could not remember, just what I’d thought about force-fed sacred studies. Not much.