Black Ice Read online

  “Well, and good, we have the bash settled, but can we talk about a purpose for the year now? Some goals to achieve? I mean, it’s nice to have the social stuff or whatever. Hey, I like a bash as much as the next guy, but we are a political group.” It was Ed Shockley. Even sitting, he towered over the rest of us. His face was triangular and scowling. “We were, at least. I assume that we still are. Aren’t we?”

  “Well, sure,” Maldonado said. “You got any ideas?”

  “Well, there’s lots of things. I can think of a dozen, but it’s supposed to come from the group. That’s what we’re here for.”

  The banter was playful, but sharp. I could not figure out who was disciplining whom.

  “I think we should continue the kind of things we started with Cash and them,” Ed said. “This community has the feeling that everything’s just fine, and it’s not, and we need to keep saying that, by any means possible.”

  “We could do another play,” said a fat girl named Sharon. (I had already heard the boys making jokes about her size.)

  Addie, who sat next to her, shouted with enthusiasm: “Oh, a play! That was great last year!”

  Some of the boys mimicked her. “A play! A play!”

  “Come on, you guys. The sister’s got an idea. Let’s have some respect. No need to be trifling about it.” Maldonado had the stature to scold and the ability to do it gently.

  Mr. Price cleared his throat and delivered a short lecture. We needed, he said, to put as much energy into our studies as we seemed willing to put into dancing or social reform. Nobody would listen to anything we had to say if our grades weren’t solid. With half as much effort put into math as basketball, we’d find our minds clearer and more able to figure out what we could do to change St. Paul’s. There was a whole host of ideas—not just what others had done before, but new tactics for new challenges—that we were nowhere near to discovering. If we weren’t academically viable, we’d never be politically credible.

  Then he left.

  “Well, damn!”

  “Like, would it kill him to tell us some of these wonderful ideas of his?”

  “He doesn’t have any ideas. He just wants people to feel bad.”

  “The man’s right. I hate the motherfucker’s guts, but he’s right.”

  “If he’s so right, then how come he can’t show some ‘academic excellence’ in his own class?”

  Kenny Williams, another Philadelphian, pulled his face into a scowl to mock Mr. Price: “ ‘Ah, any questions, comments?’ ”

  We laughed uproariously. “Questions, comments.” In a minute everyone was saying it.

  “Nah, really,” said Kenny, who had been quiet, “if Mr. Price came prepared to class, hey, that’d go a long way to improving the black curriculum.”

  “Thing that makes me mad is that when he’s in the mood, the man can deliver the goods.”

  “Get up and walk out. I suppose that’s excellence.”

  “You know that really is unfair.” Carmen spoke up. She was a brown-skinned Hispanic girl who lived on my floor, a devoted dancer who would begin stretching at odd moments. Hers was a bodacious, African body, small at the top and as full and firm as a fertility goddess in the back. She exuded a flamboyant hauteur.

  Carmen snorted a little, as she frequently did, before she continued. “I mean, honestly. Mr. Price may come down hard sometimes, but that’s only because he cares. Who else around this place takes the time to come to our meetings? Who else goes to talk to our teachers when we’re having problems? And lest some of us forget, who else is willing to go to the financial-aid officer when we run out of money? Hmmmm? I mean, honestly.”

  There was humor in the haughty bearing, and the group granted Carmen her point, although not without comment.

  “Right, and who else came into the Afro-Am room and tore the place up? Who else threw a chair at Ed?”

  “C’mon, Carmen, you know that’s your boy.”

  “You’re the only one he likes.”

  “I am not.”

  “If he brought me presents from Boston, I’d be his boy, too.”

  “All right, all right,” Jose said. “I’m inspired. Who’s going to work on coming up with a play?”

  “And we should do a chapel presentation. At least one during the fall.”

  “OK. Who’s going to work on that? You work on it. It was your idea. So, you don’t want to work, keep your mouth shut.

  “Seriously. The first order of business is the chapel presentation. We got the idea from people over here in this corner. Stay after the meeting if you want to work with them. Then what? You guys’ll have a report for us at the next meeting, tell us what the chapel program will be? OK. Done. Great. Come on, you guys, the pizza man cometh.”

  A Concord take-out shop delivered pizzas every night at nine-thirty. It explained why football players passed up seconds of baked fish. I wondered where brothers got the money.

  “And to all of you new people,” someone added, “you don’t have to mess around for a year before you get it right. In fact, it’d be easier to start off right now! Any problems, just grab somebody.”

  When the meeting ended, a boy named Sam introduced himself. “Aw, come on, Oobs,” the boys said as they passed us. “Don’t try to rap. You know you can’t rap, man.”

  “Isn’t it our job to welcome new students?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “So, how did you like your first Third World meeting?”

  I wanted to shout at him, because he seemed safe to shout at, because I didn’t know if this was a rap or merely a friendly greeting, because I thought that somehow he whom the other boys teased so mercilessly, might understand. I did not shout. Instead, my voice in the thin night air sounded peevish.

  “I didn’t expect that there’d be such a big deal about parties. And I certainly didn’t think that there’d have to be a debate about our being political. I mean having parties is fine, but really, don’t people want to do something else?”

  “Sure, and we will. You should have been here when Cash was here.”

  “I hate to say it, but I’m really tired of hearing about Cash.”

  “He was amazing. It’s probably hard for you, because you never knew him, but he was … well, you had to be there. I know that sounds crazy, but the man was really something. He had charisma. He was powerful. I mean, white people listened to him, to us.”

  I had heard from one of the girls that three guys had once stolen into Sam’s room and urinated into his bureau drawer. I wondered if it was true. I wondered if Cash had been one of them.

  How was I to know then, as I learned years later, that Cash, too, felt alone behind his shades? How could I have guessed that that loneliness seared him inside his own skin like salt, and the rest of us, too?

  “I was as isolated from Negroes as I was from whites,” James Baldwin wrote (in a book lent to me by Mr. Lederer, a Jewish teacher at St. Paul’s), “which is what happens when a Negro begins, at bottom, to believe what white people say about him.”

  What did these white people say in a hundred ways but that we were somehow different from the common run of black people out there in America? What did they say but that we were special, picked out for a special destiny? I was ashamed even to consider the possibility, but it was hard not to believe sometimes. How could I know that my special aloneness united me with my peers more surely than the wary, competitive fraternity I tried to create in my own heart?

  How could I guess that Bernard Cash had once been, as he calls himself, a black nerd, like the rest of us, stalking through the projects of White Plains with big feet and thick glasses, trying to escape drug-dealers who littered the landscape like broken wine bottles, self-hatred as seamless as skin? How was I to suspect that he was the baby of his family; or that his mother mailed boxes of peanut butter and bread to him in Concord, because she was used to leaving a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper for him to comfort himself with when he awoke, as he always did, in the middle of the
night?

  I had learned from repetition:

  Just like a nigger.

  Nothin’ worse than a sorry nigger.

  Problem is, we don’t strive for nothing. We satisfied with any old thing.

  I don’t know why them Muslims need to wear them rags on their heads; don’t we look bad enough already?

  We don’t take care of our own.

  We don’t learn.

  We don’t apply ourselves.

  That’s some sure enough niggershit going on there.

  I hate to say it, but you know these niggers ain’t shit. Don’t you grow up like these do-nothing Negroes around here.

  What is wrong with us? What is wrong with us? What is wrong with us? Can you tell me what is wrong with my people?

  I just don’t know why we can’t do right.…

  I learned through repetition, and I carried with me what I learned.

  Niggers and flies I do despise;

  The more I see niggers,

  The more I like flies.

  It jangled as noisily in my head as the hormones in my body. And what with all the racket, how could I have hoped to listen to the longings of my peers and know they were my own? How could I have imagined the crinkling of Cash’s waxed paper in the dark?

  Chapter Five

  Early in my first term at St. Paul’s I began to dream old dreams. They were childhood dreams that I had thought I’d done with, like bed-wetting. In one dream, I was encircled by bears, friendly, round-faced teddies as big as I. The bears were animated, sepia-colored versions of pen-and-ink drawings in one of my books. In the dream I was a child again, joyfully naked. The bears held paws and danced around me in a circle. We sang together. They protected and adored me. Then—as I knew would happen, the foreknowledge lending betrayal to their song—they began to leer and sneer. Their eyes shone with malice. They closed in about me. I was naked, and their teeth gleamed sharp and white against the sepia.

  I ran from them, ducking under their interlocked paws, pricking my skin on hairs as sharp as the pen that had drawn them. I ran and ran and ran to the edge of a precipice and awakened just as they were about to catch me.

  The first time I dreamt this dream at St. Paul’s, I expected to wake up on Addison Street in West Philadelphia. But there were no city noises to comfort me, and no headlights sweeping like searchlights across the blinds.

  I dreamt that I was watching my own funeral. I was a small, grayish corpse in a short coffin. From the back of the church I could see the tips of my feet and my folded hands above the polished mahogany. I observed the mourning with self-absorbed satisfaction.

  In another dream, I was walking on the sidewalk on Addison Street toward my friend Siboney to ask if she wanted to play. Under my feet the sidewalk shimmered with broken glass. Then the shimmering became movement. The cement squares began to shift. They had been shifting, in fact, from the beginning of time. The solidity had been an illusion. So, too, had been the unbroken surface. Holes yawned between the squares, small ones, then bigger and bigger. They emitted radiant heat and the sounds of souls in despair. An anthropomorphic sea of magma howled and gurgled fire. I had to walk. I had to walk the walk, but at every step, the holes swirled around. If I made one wrong step, I would tumble into hell.

  I did not talk about my nightmare vision in religion class, but I thought about it. I did not speak to the girls in my room about the bears, but I thought of them, too, while I laughed and listened for betrayal. The bears warned me to beware of slipping into friendship.

  Girls came and went in my room. I liked it that way. I wanted the company—and the prosperous appearance of company. They taught me about tollhouse cookies; Switzerland; the names of automobiles, shampoos, rock groups, Connecticut cities; casual shoes and outdoor-equipment catalogues. I learned that other girls, too, tired during sports, that their calf muscles, like mine, screamed out pain when they walked down the stairs. I learned about brands of tampons. I learned that these girls thought their hair dirty when they did not wash it daily.

  “I hear what you’re saying, but I just don’t see it. I’m looking at your hair, but I don’t see grease.”

  “Oh, my God, it’s, like, hanging down in clumps!” One girl pulled a few strands from her scalp to display the offending sheen. “Look.”

  I learned that their romanticized lusts sounded like mine felt, as did their ambivalent homesickness, and their guarded, girlish competitiveness.

  As they came to sit and stay, however, differences emerged between us. Taken together, these girls seemed more certain than I that they deserved our good fortune. They were sorry for people who were poorer than they, but they did not feel guilty to think of the resources we were sucking up—forests, meadows and ponds, the erudition of well-educated teachers, water for roaring showers, heat that blew out of opened windows everywhere, food not eaten but mixed together for disgusting fun after lunch. They took it as their due. It was boot-camp preparation for America’s leaders, which we were told we would one day be. They gave no indication that they worried that others, smarter or more worthy, might, at that very moment, be giving up hope of getting what we had.

  I did not, however, tell the girls what I was thinking. We did not talk about how differently we saw the world. Indeed my black and their white heritage was not a starting point for our relationship, but rather was the outer boundary. I could not cross it, because there sprang up a hard wall of denial impervious to my inexperienced and insecure assault. “Well, as far as I’m concerned,” one girl after another would say, “it doesn’t matter to me if somebody’s white or black or green or purple. I mean people are just people.”

  The motion, having been made, would invariably be seconded.

  “Really. I mean, it’s the person that counts.”

  Having castigated whites’ widespread inability to see individuals for the skin in which they were wrapped, I could hardly argue with “it’s the person that counts.” I didn’t know why they always chose green and purple to dramatize their indifference, but my ethnicity seemed diminished when the talk turned to Muppets. It was like they were taking something from me.

  “I’m not purple.” What else could you say?

  “The truth is,” somebody said, “I … this is so silly … I’m really embarrassed, but, it’s like, there are some things you, God, you just feel ashamed to admit that you think about this stuff, but I always kind of wondered if, like, black guys and white guys were, like, different …”

  They shrieked with laughter. Sitting on the afghan my mother had crocheted for me in the school colors of red and white, their rusty-dusty feet all over my good afghan, they laughed and had themselves a ball.

  “Now, see, that’s why people don’t want to say anything,” one girl said. “Look, you’re getting all mad.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “You look it.”

  “I’m not mad. I don’t even know about any differences between white guys and black guys,” I said deliberately avoiding the word boys. (Black manhood seemed at stake. Everything seemed at stake.) Then I added as archly as possible: “I don’t mess around with white boys.”

  The party broke up soon after. I sat still, the better to control my righteous anger. It always came down to this, I thought, the old song of the South. I wanted something more meaningful. I wanted it to mean something that I had come four hundred miles from home, and sat day after day with them in Chapel, in class. I wanted it to mean something that after Martin Luther King’s and Malcolm X’s assassinations, we kids sweated together in sports, ate together at Seated Meal, studied and talked together at night. It couldn’t be just that I was to become like them or hang onto what I’d been. It couldn’t be that lonely and pointless.

  I looked across the quad to Jimmy’s window, and waved. He was not in his room, but the mere sight of his lighted window brought me back to my purpose. It was not to run my ass ragged trying to wrench some honesty out of this most disingenuous of God’s people. I had come to St.
Paul’s to turn it out. How had I lost sight of the simple fact?

  In a few days “inside” grades for the Fall Term caught me by surprise. I had barely settled in. During reports the Rector said that interim grades were merely to give us an idea of our progress. Students called them “warning” grades. Groupmasters handed them to each student in the evening.

  I churned with anticipation all day. At one moment it seemed to me that I’d been doing brilliantly. I was understanding Sr. Fuster’s musical Spanish, speaking glibly in religion about “systems of belief,” hiding from Mr. Buxton the crush I was developing, trooping good-naturedly through the inanity of trigonometry, drawing and redrawing the folds of a draped cloth in art.

  One wrong answer, however, would change my perspective completely. Sure, I was understanding Sr. Fuster better, but my essays were grammatical disasters. In religion, I skittered over the surface of the language, never quite knowing what I meant to say until the moment I opened my mouth. I only thought Mr. Buxton hadn’t noticed my crush. I had fallen asleep during eighth-period trig. In art class, my colors were timid; my perspective was off.

  Mr. Hawley handed me the thin piece of paper on which the computer in the Schoolhouse basement had recorded my warning grades. On my sheet were five grades, two Honors and three High Passes. What I saw when I looked at my warning grades were two Bs and three Cs. The school had made it quite clear in the catalog and elsewhere that St. Paul’s grades were not letter-grade equivalents. They’d told us that High Honors were rare as A-pluses, and that Honors meant just that. No matter. I saw average. I saw failure. And what I saw on that paper, Mr. Hawley saw in my face.

  “There are several things about these warning grades you should keep in mind,” he said. “The first is that although they may look like real grades and feel like real grades, they are not real grades.