Black Ice Read online

  “OK. Now, how accurate an indicator are these? Well, I’m sure that in some of your courses, there hasn’t been enough work assigned and graded for teachers to evaluate. And in that case, many teachers feel safer grading on the low side, just so that no one gets a false sense of security. So, it is possible that you might be doing better than these grades, and it is extremely unlikely that you’d be doing any worse.”

  He told me that High Passes were not the end of the world. “The other thing that I doubt you are giving yourself credit for,” he said, “is that you’ve just come in, as a new Fifth Former—not many people come in the Fifth Form, as you’ve noticed, and there’s a reason why, many reasons—and you’ve just come straight from your old hometown high. Some of these other students have had a different preparation. I am certain that you’ll catch on fast. Look, you have caught on fast. I’ve got old girls in this house who’d kill for those grades. But the fact is, I don’t see how you can expect much more of yourself right now.”

  Mr. Hawley told me that he’d seen students take a year or two to adjust to St. Paul’s, not just public-school students, but kids from fancy day schools.

  “I’ve only got two years,” I said.

  “You’re doing great.”

  When girls on my hall asked about my grades, I joked: “It’s like when the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come points to the gravestone,” I said. “All I want to know is: Is this what will be or what may be?”

  “Oh, you’ll do fine.”

  I wondered if anyone here had ever expected me to do better than this. White faces of the adults flashed in my head, smiling, encouraging, tilted to one side, asking if I’d like to talk, extending their welcome. “If you need anything …” Early on they’d told me that I’d do fine. I felt betrayed, first by them, then by my own naiveté. HPs were probably what they’d meant by fine—for black scholarship kids. Maybe that’s what they’d been saying all along, only I hadn’t heard it.

  No sooner had the furor of warning grades subsided than the excitement of Parents’ Day began. A few parents appeared on the last Friday afternoon in October, and by Saturday morning they were everywhere, cars clogging the roads, adult voices filling the Schoolhouse, where they waited in long lines for ten-minute talks with our teachers.

  Parents who had no money or no time did not come, but mine did. And so did my grandparents. They surrounded me as we walked slowly along the paths. Seeing them made me know how much I’d missed them. I guided them through the days’ activities as if marching through a dream.

  In the evening, they came to the show we’d prepared for them. I sang in the chorus, and they saw me sing. I showed them my books and my papers. I walked them to each of my favorite places along the paths and pointed out where gardeners had been working all week to spruce up the grounds. My father remembered that dorm proctors at Lincoln University had handed out fresh new blankets on anniversary weekends, just before festivities, and then collected them again when parents went home. We laughed about that. But St. Paul’s was no Lincoln, they kept saying, that tiny black college in rural Pennsylvania where milk from the nearby cows had tasted of onion grass in the spring.

  I recalled the photographs of my father and his classmates, young black men with shiny hair, baring their legs and hamming it up for the camera; the photo of my father and mother, who had married the Saturday before my father graduated. They stood under a huge old tree, grinning broadly, my mother in her pedal-pusher pants, her body curving like an S against his, her arm waving in the air. Every time one of us mentioned Lincoln—and we did, again and again, because it was the only college we knew well—I thought of those photographs. As often as I saw the image in my mind, I heard snatches of what had been their old favorite song:

  … Our day will come

  And we’ll have ev’rything,

  We’ll share the joy

  Falling in love can bring.

  No one can tell me that I’m too young to know

  I love you so,

  And you love me …

  Our day wi-ill come.

  I could not stop thinking of them like that, their arms entwined like the branches of a mulberry, certain that they would do together what their parents had been unable to do. “We decided we were not going to end up divorced. We just decided it,” they always said. I’d wondered how they could have been so sure. “Our dreams have magic because we’ll always stay/In love this way/Our day will come.”

  Lincoln looked green in the pictures, and, as if it were not full enough with their promise, and the promise of so many young men, black Greeks, black gods ready to march out into the world and grab it for their own, it was also home to the prepubescent Julian Bond “just running around the campus like any other little faculty kid,” and, he, of course, was now in government.

  My mother lit a cigarette in my room, and my father made a face. I could not take my eyes off the pack. My mother had changed brands. So absorbed had I been with my own changes, that I had not expected any from them, and my mother least of all. It was a small thing, the brand of cigarettes, but it occurred to me for the first time that in leaving home, I gave up the right to know the details of their daily life. Things might be the same when I got back for the next vacation, or they might not. I had no way of knowing, because I wasn’t there.

  Whatever I had planned to tell them—about how I did not feel like myself here, how I was worried that the recruiters expected little more than survival from us, how I was beginning to doubt that they could see excellence in us, because it might pop out through thick lips and eyes or walk on flat feet or sit on big, bodacious behinds—I kept to myself. I showed off my familiarity with my new school. Why, I was fitting in fine. My teachers said so. My new friends said so—Hey, girls, come meet my folks.…

  Soon they had to leave. Because it was more convenient, St. Paul’s School did not switch to Standard Time until Sunday night when the parents were gone. My family was amused by the custom; I was not. “It’s just like St. Paul’s. It’s practically a metaphor,” I said (“metaphor” having become one of my favorite new words), “for the arrogance of this place. Isn’t that the most arrogant thing you’ve ever seen, just changing time!”

  “Well, honey,” said my grandmother, “it’s just for a little while. It’s not as if they were going to keep it that way.”

  “When you think about it, it’s an arbitrary change anyway,” my father said. “And now that we need to save energy, who knows whether they might just change it some more to take better advantage of the daylight.”

  Everyone smiled mildly at me as if I were being unreasonable. I let the subject drop.

  I fell asleep that night listening to the country sounds that replaced the parents’ festive noise. In the branches, dead limbs creaked like old doors. Every hour until midnight the Chapel tower’s metallic throat pealed out the wrong time, sharp and bright and sure.

  November set in cold and damp. The work of the school chugged along: I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. The chipper refrain from childhood came chugging through my mind as I ran through the rain between classes. I did not have a raincoat that fall. I think I can I think I can I think I can. I slogged around the muddy field and hurled myself through wind sprints. Browner mud, grayer skies, blacker water. The wind penetrated the fiber of my clothing. The sun did not. But the engine of the school chugged on. Work and more work, with no way to get out. People and more people, with no way to get away from them, the same people day after day, becoming more familiar, their walks, their accents, their quirks and behavior. They said the same things, cracked the same jokes. So did I. I bored myself. We bored each other. Our teasing grew less witty and meaner.

  It was in November that my soccer team played one of the boys’ club teams. Our coach urged us to play aggressively. The ball flew up and down the field. I cursed its every reversal, knowing that I’d have to turn around and run back down the same field I’d just run up. Back and forth and back and forth, meaninglessly,
mercilessly. The ball zinged, and I ran parallel to it, out on the edge of the field, in wing position, just like I didn’t have any better sense. The drudgery was punctuated now and then by panic when a ball popped toward me. “Close up the hole! Close up the hole! Take it down. You’re free, you’re free!” and then I’d see the expanse of field between me and the goal, and I’d know that I could not tag along, but would have to run fast, faster than the mob coming at me. I wheezed and ran and wheezed. I opened my mouth wide, but I felt as if I were sucking air through a straw.

  I think I can I think I can I think I can. Up jumped the good little girl inside, ever hopeful, she who believed that all she needed was one more win. Up she jumped as if this were a fifth-grade penmanship contest, the tie-breaker in a spelling bee, an audition for Annie Get Your Gun: “Anything you can do I can do better, I can do anything better than you.” I knew this little girl. She looked like the freckled six-year-old in my mother’s wallet. She felt like Pollyanna.

  The ball came at me. The crazy little girl inside tore after it. Girls who had beaten me in wind sprints were unable to catch me. My arms pumped up and down as I ran. They helped push me forward. Maybe this was it, I thought, maybe. I almost cried with gratitude. Asthma came to clamp round my chest, but this time I was not afraid of suffocating. I huffed puffs of steam into the cold air.

  I didn’t see the little guy who came to steal the ball. I didn’t see him at all until he was right in front of me like a sudden insult. I was stunned. The ball was mine. The goal was in sight. I could see the goal tender’s fear, his awkward alarm. I loved how he called out to his fullbacks—as if they could stop me. But who was this little guy who would not be moved?

  He put out his foot to snag the ball. He got it, and pulled it just to the side of me. I scooped the ball back with the inside of my foot, and knew I had to move it again, but could not, because he was there, the little guy again, his cleat coming, slender and tenacious. Then I charged. There was screaming around us, coming closer. I had to have the ball. I had to drive it in. I didn’t realize I had fallen until the impact of the hard ground went up through my hip and reverberated inside my head. The ball rolled away. The whistle blew, and they stopped the game for us. His face contorted to hold back his tears. Clouds drifted overhead, wispy and beautiful.

  I saw him a couple days later. He swung himself gingerly between his crutches as if his armpits were sore. He smiled bravely at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to him, trying to feel more intensely the throbbing in the purplish lump that had appeared on the side of my own leg.

  “That’s all right,” he said, shrugging his shoulders above the crutches. “You couldn’t help it. Are you all right?”

  “Sure. Got a bruise or two.” I felt like a brutish distortion of those big, black women I so admired, like Sojourner Truth as the actresses portrayed her: “Ah kin push a plow as far as a man—And ain’t I a voman?!”

  I worked harder the rest of the term than I had ever known I could work. I looked up more vocabulary words and wrote papers and practiced grammar. I worked and reworked trigonometry equations. I took to paraphrasing an old nun I’d once seen in a movie. She croaks at the girl whom the Virgin Mary has visited: “I have read the words of our Lord God until my eyes burned like the very fires of hell. Why should God choose you?”

  No longer convinced of the special brilliance I had once expected to discover in myself, no longer certain that my blackness gave me precocious wisdom, or that I could outslick these folks, I held onto that crazy old nun. They might be smarter than I or better prepared or more athletic. They might know the rules better, whatever the unspoken rules were for leaping to the top of this world and staying there. But I could work. I could read until my eyes burned like the very fires of hell! I could outwork them all. (Ain’t I a voman?) Will, it seemed to me, was the only quality I had in greater abundance than my fellows, and I would will myself to work.

  Examinations were the test of my resolve. During exams there were no more classes and no more sports, only studying, and for big stakes—exams were worth large fractions of our final grades. I felt the rush of pure competition. Studying distracted me from other people, thoughts, worries.

  At the appointed hour we walked to the gymnasium, where folding tables and chairs were arranged in rows on white mats that muffled the noise of our footsteps. Blue books were stacked, fresh and clean, on the front desks. Teachers handed out their questions and smiled encouragement. Our religion exam asked one question in its final section: “Who is Jesus?”

  I was unprepared for the question—and for the gusher of feelings it released. Suddenly it mattered to me that in His name the red-bearded men, missionaries, soldiers, capitalists, adventurists all, clambered over the earth as if it were a woman’s body; that in Jesus’ name they triumphed and we suffered, and in Jesus’ name, too—for Christ’s sake—we both claimed justice, oh, and looked for the faith to unite:

  Join hands, then, brothers of the faith

  Whate’er your race may be!

  Who serves my Father as a son

  Is surely kin to me.

  (We sang it in chapel, John Oxenham’s words—he had a name—set to the generic “Negro melody” in the hymnal.)

  It mattered to me to get it right about Him: the lamb-shepherd-bridegroom-buffoon, the Way and the Light, the dreamy boy on the calendars tacked onto the wall over my great-grandmother’s side of the bed. It mattered, though I could not write it, and there was no place for it, that she criticized and judged, that she told us, with reference to the color of the man we should marry: Don’t darken your bread. It mattered that when she died she took with her any hope of her approval, so long withheld, but so close that at times we nearly had it. She’d snatched it back into the grave with her like a setting sun pulling the last streaks of light from the sky.

  The blue-eyed boy over the bed, talking to the elders at the temple, holding His hands out to the children: Only He would love those unworthy of love. He was the bridegroom, the resurrection, and the light. I wanted so to believe, to make what Tillich called “the leap of faith.” I imagined myself jumping at a brick wall, naked, bruised, leaping at a garden beyond. My head filled with noise and pictures, scraps of music from Hollywood Bible epics, the remembered tastes of the papery African Methodist Episcopal wafer and grape juice, and the comfort of sucking my own fleshy thumb at night. Take, eat. God only knows what I actually wrote.

  By the time the exams were collected, I arose, stiff and tremulous. I had no idea how I would face studying for the next, or sitting to write it, letting loose in my head so much noise and chaos in the quiet, orderly gym.

  But I did. We all did, again and again until it was over.

  Just three months after my parents had delivered me to St. Paul’s I was on my way home again. Fumiko came with me. On the bus to the station, I buzzed with exhaustion and anticipation. One student in the back of the bus pulled out a joint; a couple of others passed bottles in brown paper bags.

  “Have some?”

  As we drove through the Merrimack River valley, I thought of the winos’ street-corner toast:

  If wine was a river and I was a duck

  I’d dive to the bottom and never come up,

  But since wine ain’t no river, and I ain’t no duck,

  I’ma drink this wine ‘til I’m fucked up.

  “No, thanks,” I said. I used an off-handed voice and lit a cigarette to show my cool. My mother would have killed me had I arrived with liquor on my breath. I could smell it even as Fumiko and I dozed.

  I thought and then dreamt about the wet necks of bottles everywhere, and about a glamorous adulthood, when I would drink, not out of a bottle, but from thin glasses clinking ice cubes. I loved ice. I thought about a girl at school who made piña coladas, and in a blender, no less, before Seated Meal—the very drink my grandmother and her friends sipped (“Oh, no, my dear, just one for me; these things sneak up on you!”) at their club dinners. I thought about my
other grandmother, who drank until cheap Scotch released the rage within her and the insatiable hunger: for more life, more beauty, more men, more food, more love, more money, more luck. I thought of her asleep on the toilet and awake the next morning, the smell of Scotch excreting from the fine pores of her velvety skin, of her toothless shame and the guilty, secretive search for her teeth. I thought of her soprano voice, that was cracked and pitted now by alcohol and tobacco. How could you have a voice like that and destroy it? I wondered. How could you live with yourself?

  When I could bear my own homecoming thoughts no longer, I turned to Fumiko. We made excited eyes and talk together. She was an excellent traveling companion and, when we arrived home, a perfect houseguest. Fumiko’s exquisite Japanese manners delighted my family. She brought gifts: pink-and-white-faced dolls with embroidered kimonos and silky black hair. My mother installed them in the china closet where they still reign. After a trans-Pacific phone call, her parents shipped us a five-gallon keg of Japan’s best soy sauce.

  Whenever my family seemed in danger of confusing Fumiko and her dolls, I warned them pedantically: they were not to make geisha-girl cracks; they were not to treat her as if she did not speak English; they were not to pull out their five facts about Japan for her confirmation and agreement.

  In fact, my mother recognized without any help from me that Fumiko was a teenager, mischievous, full of hormones, and in need of maternal guidance. When Fumiko announced that she had given our telephone number to a Philly-born boy she’d met at another prep school, my mother set strict visitation rules.

  “If that child thinks that I’m letting her waltz out of this house with some Puerto Rican from North Philly, she’d better think again.”

  “Oh, Mom, he’s not ‘some Puerto Rican,’ ” I said archly. (More and more often, I found myself mortified by my family’s lack of Third World unity.) “He’s a guy who goes to a prep school … just like we do.”