Common Ground

by J. Anthony Lukas

  Lisa turned, tears glistening in her eyes, and led the class of ’77 up the aisle. She held the rose before her, a splash of magenta against her white gown. Taking her seat in the front row, she listened as Assistant Headmaster Bob Jarvis opened the school’s 129th graduation with a backward glance at the 35th. A brisk young administrator, often critical of Charlestown’s low standards, Jarvis struck a rueful note as he recalled that the 1873 ceremonies had included a Greek declaration entitled “Demosthenes and the Crown,” a Latin dialogue called “Aeneas and the Sibyl,” the song “Wake, Gentle Zephyr,” and a valedictory address on “The Value of Purpose in Life.”

  Pragmatic as ever, Headmaster Bob Murphy recited the cautionary tale of Mary Ellen Barry, a Townie lass who had dropped out of high school in 1913. Now seventy-eight, she deeply regretted her childhood indiscretion. One day her daughter-in-law called to inquire if there was some way Mary Ellen could get her diploma. When the School Committee consented, Murphy and the Superintendent journeyed to her house in Braintree, “where that seventy-eight-year-old lady sat on her porch, enjoying one of the happiest and proudest moments of her life. I mention this to show you the value of a diploma. So when you receive yours today, cherish it and use it to the fullest of your ability.”

  School Committeewoman Pixie Palladino, always the politician, paid handsome tribute to Charlestown’s “great tradition, exemplified by your Bunker Hill Day parade on Sunday next, which I will be pleased to attend.”

  Patti Rooney, the valedictorian, spoke of her class’s tumultuous experience at Charlestown High, marked by “helicopters, newsmen, policemen, and buses, by fear and confusion.”

  Finally it was Lisa’s turn. For more than a week she had labored over her speech, trying to distill the essence of her years at Charlestown High. Now, after Bob Jarvis introduced her as “a fine young lady, a very active young lady, a very responsible president of her class,” she scrambled up the steps toward the stage. Stumbling for a moment over her long rayon gown, she righted herself and lurched on toward the microphone, as applause crashed about her.

  “Mrs. Palladino, Mr. Murphy, faculty, fellow graduates, parents and friends,” she began, her mouth so dry she could hardly get her tongue around the words.

  “Tonight as I stand on this stage, looking out at all of you, memories of our years here seem unavoidable. As sophomores: the memory of coming to a new school, meeting new people, making new plans. As juniors, the memory of junior day, of class rings. Now as seniors, the memory of getting committees going, preparing for college.”

  Lisa could see her mother, Billy, Danny, Kevin, and three of her aunts seated together in the family section. Alice smiled up at her, clearly fighting back her tears, as Lisa plunged on.

  “We were having fun with all our activities—like the yearbook, the prom, the senior banquet. But we were also maturing, learning and growing. Now as graduates we still have far to go. We must take our places in society, and as adults we can no longer rely totally on parents and teachers to make our decisions.

  “High school was more than fun. It was learning about life. It was learning to keep on going in spite of everything that happened. We will always have this knowledge as well as our memories to use as we venture into the world, into society filled with different people, different problems, and the great unknown.”

  27

  Twymon

  In the quiet moments before the first bell, Cassandra felt almost at home at Charlestown High. It was a tranquil time, that quarter hour after the buses arrived but before the Townies rushed up the stairs; a blessed respite in which to marshal her strength for the day ahead.

  Room 415 was a narrow chamber, looking out through a row of cloudy windows toward the docks and cranes of the Mystic River shore. With its drab walls, cracked blackboard, and scarred wooden desks, it was hardly attractive. But in those early-morning hours, as the smoky light filtered off the river, bathing the desk where Jerry Sullivan sat sipping coffee from a chipped mug, it seemed a cozy enclave in a hostile world.

  The only blacks assigned to Jerry’s homeroom, Cassandra and Curt Shepherd took quickly to the shambling teacher in his tweed jackets, button-down shirts, and shiny cordovans. As he swabbed the blackboard, beat clouds of chalky dust from the erasers, and thumbed his index cards, he kept up a stream of chatter with the two youngsters hunched before him. Spinning tales about the Harvard football team or the movie theater he managed in the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, he gentled them into the daily routine. And his rumbling voice, crooked smile, and prodigious bulk were profoundly reassuring to Cassandra.

  But once the clock struck eight and a dozen Townies tumbled through the door, the climate in Room 415 changed markedly. Under other circumstances, some of those very whites made cautious overtures across the racial gulf, but together in a classroom, under the appraising eyes of their colleagues, none dared such a gesture. Only the most outgoing blacks could thaw that icy front, and neither Curt nor Cassandra boasted the necessary self-assurance. Even Jerry Sullivan’s bluff geniality couldn’t crack the rigid demarcation which kept the whites massed on one side of the room, the two blacks sheltered in the lee of the teacher’s desk.

  Curt and Cassandra barely knew each other, rarely exchanging more than perfunctory greetings, but they found solace in each other’s presence. Sometimes, as the whites gibed at them from across the room, Curt turned in the second row to give Cassandra a sardonic little grin, to which she responded with a barely perceptible nod. But Curt was there only three hours a day. When the bell rang at 11:06, he gathered up his books and headed for the Occupational Resource Center across town, where he took vocational courses. For the next twenty minutes, as the students downed box lunches at their desks, Cassandra was the only black left in the room. With a dozen Townies whooping around her, she bowed her head and concentrated on her baloney sandwich. Sometimes when she finished eating, Jerry Sullivan stopped by to ask how she was doing, but that did little to relieve her loneliness. As the weeks passed, Cassandra felt acutely uncomfortable in Room 415.

  Increasingly, she sought out her one true friend at the school, a lively, high-strung girl named Desiree Johnson. Cassandra and Desiree shared a first-floor locker, where they met every morning to deposit their coats, pick up their books, and exchange the latest gossip before walking arm in arm to their homerooms. As Cassandra grew more disturbed by her isolation, she implored Jerry Sullivan to let her eat lunch, at least occasionally, in Desiree’s room. That was strictly against the rules, but realizing how lonely Cassandra was, Jerry reluctantly acceded.

  Others proved less sympathetic. Exasperated by Cassandra and Desiree, civil service instructor Dick Glennon dubbed them “Frick and Frack,” a phrase the girls found vaguely insulting (“If we called him something like that,” Cassandra complained, “we’d be in trouble”). One morning, when she and Desiree lingered in the corridor through the opening minutes of his class, Glennon ordered Cassandra to stay half an hour after school. Afraid of staying in Charlestown after the other blacks had gone home, she refused. Punished with a one-day suspension, Cassandra conceived a burning resentment of Glennon, whom she labeled a “prejudiced person.”

  Uncomfortable in most classes, she was sometimes careless in attendance. When the librarian complained that Richard Wright’s Native Son was two weeks overdue, Cassandra insisted that she’d returned the book. Their dispute dragged on through Cassandra’s third-period class, earning her another one-day suspension.

  Her favorite subject was English, partly because her teacher, Maryann Mathews, took special pains to involve blacks in the class. Most Charlestown teachers regarded Shakespeare as too complex for their students but Maryann refused to believe that. That fall she had her students read Othello—with Joe Strickland as the noble Moor. At first, Joe mouthed his lines with little apparent comprehension. “Ay,” he mumbled, “let her rot and perish, and be damned tonight; for she shall not live: no, my heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand.”


  “Joe,” Maryann interrupted, “do you know what this is all about?”

  “I’m not sure,” he conceded.

  So Maryann translated Iago’s treachery into sporting terms. Suppose, she suggested, that Clarence Jefferson had tried to grab Strickland’s place on the basketball team by arousing jealousy in Maryann’s husband, basketball coach Larry Mathews.

  Joe began to read his lines with new conviction. “O monstrous, monstrous!” he cried.

  Even Maryann hesitated when, working their way through a new anthology, they came on a story called “The Boy Who Painted Christ Black,” about a Georgia youth who stirred a furor by depicting the Savior as a black man. “There’ll be a lot of fuss in this world,” says one character, “if you start people thinking that Christ was a nigger!”

  Knowing the Church’s importance in Charlestown, Maryann feared that the story might offend some Townies, but eager to give her black students a sense of belonging, she decided to take the chance. After they’d read it aloud, one girl from a devout Bunker Hill family exclaimed, “Miss, I’m surprised you’d teach something like that!” But Cassandra was quietly pleased. She’d always pictured Christ as brown—like the gaunt and bearded beggar who panhandled on Columbus Avenue.

  Maryann spotted unrealized potential in Cassandra—a lively intelligence, a quick if caustic wit, a vivid flair for self-expression, tools which were rarely put to work. (Tests that year showed that Cassandra read at a tenth-grade level, spelled at a ninth-grade level, calculated as a sixth-grader.) Maryann was particularly dismayed by Cassandra’s reluctance to read, her dismissal of book after book as “boring,” “stupid,” or “dumb.” When Maryann assigned her Julius Caesar, Cassandra called it “a lot of ‘Thou are beautiful, Juliet’ or some mess like that”; The Glass Menagerie was “a bunch of dumb little animals”; Seven Days in May, a “stupid war story.” Every time Cassandra picked up a book, she went to sleep after ten pages or so. “They’re all so boring,” she complained. Once, in a counseling session, Maryann told her, “I’d like to punch you in the nose. You think so well, Cassandra; you write wonderfully. If you’d just do a little work, you’d be getting an A. But you get C’s. I want to grab you by the shoulders and shake you.” Cassandra shrugged.

  Larry Mathews, who had her in his economics class, found Cassandra even more exasperating. She was clearly brighter than most of his students, but sometimes she didn’t bring the most basic materials to school. “I need a pencil,” she’d tell him. “Do you have any paper?” And frequently she simply put her head down on the desk and closed her eyes.

  “Are you ill, Cassandra?” he’d ask. “Do you want to go to the nurse?”

  “No,” she’d say. “I’m okay. I’m just tired.”

  Much of that fall, Cassandra was simply exhausted, worn out by her nightly rounds. For she and her sister Rachel had ripened into handsome young women, captivating the dudes who hung out at the bars and nightclubs near the corner of Massachusetts and Columbus avenues.

  Ever since Little Rachel became pregnant at age thirteen, her mother had known the girls were “messing around.” At first she sought to restrain their sexuality with strict pronouncements about where they could hang out, whom they could see, what they could do. But the girls displayed a knack for threading their way through their mother’s most elaborate obstacle course. Just when Rachel thought she had them hemmed in, they found some loophole through which to crawl. If she dispatched them to the corner for ribs and fries, they’d return hours later with Kentucky Fried Chicken, saying they’d misunderstood her and gone all the way to Shawmut Avenue. One night a neighbor spotted them at the Venice, a dark, noisy tavern just up the avenue from Methunion Manor. In months to come, whenever the girls disappeared for a couple of hours, Rachel could invariably find them around the pinball machines at the rear of that dusky bar. She never caught them with a drink in their hands—they were clearly underage—but she always suspected that the men they met there slipped them drinks or drugs under the table.

  When she taxed them with their transgressions, they were flatly unrepentant. At fifteen and sixteen, they regarded themselves as emancipated young women, ready to taste forbidden pleasures. Their bravado only drove Rachel to new strictures: before they left the house at night or on weekends, they had to clean their rooms, wash the dishes, scrub the bathtub. When the girls protested that none of their friends did such onerous housework, Rachel would fly into a rage. “What am I?” she’d cry. “The jolly black mammy who cleans up after everyone around here?” Sometimes after the girls did their chores, Rachel would find some small deficiency and order them to spend the rest of the night correcting it.

  Their arguments grew louder and angrier, mother and daughters confronting each other in a pitiless test of wills, neither side about to back off. Sometimes the scenes ended with one or both girls stomping out of the apartment while their mother stood in the hallway shouting after them, “If you go this time, you don’t need to come back!”

  Aware that the girls were fooling around with men, Rachel urged them to be careful—to choose their sexual partners with some discretion, use birth control devices, make regular visits to the gynecologist. As in other matters, the girls often ignored these warnings.

  In mid-September 1976, Cassandra got sick. The doctor prescribed daily medication, but she often forgot to take it. One evening, Rachel entered her daughter’s room to ask if she had taken the medicine. “I ain’t taking those stupid pills,” said Cassandra. “Oh, yes, you are!” “No, I ain’t. Now get off my case!” Something in Cassandra’s response ignited the flashpan of Rachel’s anger. In a moment, mother and daughter were flailing at each other with fists and nails. The squall was over in thirty seconds, but it left Rachel spent with rage. Later that night, when her friend Daisy Voigt called from New York, she poured out the story of her recalcitrant daughters.

  Daisy had grown up on Hammond Street, just a block from the Walkers’ house on Ball Street. Leaving Boston at the age of nineteen, she had gone to New York, where she raised two children, entered public relations, and made something of a name for herself in Harlem’s cultural and political worlds. But for nearly two decades she had stayed in touch with the Walker clan, especially with Rachel. A curious blend of sophistication and earthiness, Daisy provided a perfect sounding board for Rachel’s mounting desperation.

  So affected was she that evening by Rachel’s tears that the next morning she wrote the girls a seven-page letter.

  Dear Cassandra and Rachel [she said in part]. Your mom is one of my dearest friends and she is a person for whom I’d put my hand in the fire. I don’t play letting nobody mess with my friends and there’s plenty of hurt niggers around Boston and New York to prove my point. I’m writing to tell you that if you continue to fuck with my personal friend, Rachel, I will kick your asses….

  You think that there is some kind of dumb generation gap, that your mom is out of touch with what’s going on, that if she was in touch she wouldn’t be able to get over and hang out anyway cause she’s too old. You think just cause she don’t smoke pot she’s square. Well let me tell you something about your mother that you don’t know and that she probably won’t tell you and may not thank me for telling you. When I met your mom she was hanging out, raising all sorts of hell…. Your mom had two children before she got married which don’t seem to me to indicate that she curled up nights with a good book. My understanding of that scenario was that the gentleman dug your mother and wanted to give her the Great American Dream—2.2 children, a little bungalow, and one husband all her own. She objected to the kind of personal freedom that she would have to give up and declined. In other words, she could have if she had wanted to, but elected not to. Subsequently she married your Pops, who was a real drag. Your mother takes a long time to move but when she does it is with great finality. You see I would have put the tired nigger out long before either of you came along. But your mother is basically a softy, but she ain’t no fool and she ain’t no square.<
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  I myself do not agree with all the things your mother believes in and we have great long-distance and face-to-face arguments to prove it…. I don’t have to go for her shit cause I’m not dependent on her, but you are and as long as you are dependent on somebody you got to go for their shit no matter how bad the shit…. She got the power over you cause she got the money. If your momma got as cold and as icy as she could you all would be in a trick, but she ain’t ready to do that yet. Unfortunately—cause if I was her I’d move and let you little monsters go for yourselves…. I am icy and I am going to encourage your mom to be the same. Forewarned is forearmed….

  But your momma is a poor black woman, the most oppressed animal in this society. We, you, me, her are way down at the bottom of the totem pole and ain’t nobody gonna give us any slack…. And this is the whole point of the letter I think. You all is out in the street chasing the Great American Dream—a big dick—just like I was, just like your mom was, just like most American women are. And there ain’t no soothing big dick out there—it don’t exist—the dick that can take away all the pain of being poor, black, ugly and a woman in this society….

  Look, ladies, I love you both. Shit, I dangled you on my knees and changed your funky diapers and I know what I’m talking about. You all are getting ready to fuck up in a grand manner. You all going to be out there barefoot in the snow if you don’t check yourselves. There is no American dream for poor black girls from Boston. Only nightmares. The folks you are running with now cannot take care of you. They can barely take care of themselves…. Look around you again and look at the numbers of women you can see that have children by themselves that they are taking care of and look at how many of the women have any kind of positive relationship going on. The men in Boston is jive and you all let them get away with it. Remember it takes two. You broads up there are very trifling. Why don’t you decide to break out of that dumb pattern and get some real power for yourselves. Cause pussy power ain’t shit. The only power that matters is money power….