Black Ice

by Lorene Cary

  “You’re to be in at ten,” he said at a house meeting one night after a few of them ran into the doors, late and laughing, clubby, boyish, defiant. “Ten. You got that? Ten.

  “Here. Let me explain it another way. Let me put it so I make myself clear. Ten means ten. Not ten-o-one, not ten-o-two. Ten means ten.”

  He assigned some punishment jobs, implied that there could be more to come, and strolled back down the hall to his door. I shook my head at them and tiptoed up the stairs to my apartment, which sat atop their rooms. I wanted to leave them alone like new orphans, shocked by the power of Gillespie’s censure. Later that term, I used to joke with them, when I was on duty, that “ten means ten.” It was a way to let them know that I knew how much they honored their housemaster, and that I was not so big a fool as to envy him their esteem. (They would have punished me for it, and occasionally checked for signs.) I felt love for them as one does for a darling cousin who lives out of town. It surprised me, the first time I felt it, watching them walk to dinner, their ties tied like lumps of coal at their throats.

  It surprised me when I felt it for the black kids tumbling noisily over each other’s and their own feet, walking close together, joking, teasing, bitching, on their way down the brick path from the Upper, and I could not tell, for a moment, their names, because I was so sure I saw my own schoolmates among them. And then I knew, that the evening sunset at the end of September, the wash of orange on the tall windows of the gray granite library on the pond, was a different sunset, and that I was not in danger of melting into it like a living Dalí painting. I knew that I stood apart from the little crowd wrapping themselves in a cushion of their own voices. I was standing apart, capable of hearing their fear, withstanding their anger, watching the orange sun cling to their smooth cheeks.

  The ambitious fifteen-year-old, the West Philly girl transplanted to Yeadon, rushed out of my memory to join them, so that the fat orange sun and the new English teacher’s smile could splash on her, too. The adolescent I had been peeked out at me from behind the birches and glared from the shadows of the darkened rooms. She was prideful, funny, ashamed, anxious, cocky, and scared. I had left her alone in New Hampshire, hoping to forget her. Instead she had called me back. She demanded compassion, forgiveness, reunification. When I finished my year of teaching at St. Paul’s, I brought the adolescent along.

  Two years later, the trustees asked me to serve with them on the Board of Directors. Two trustees from Philadelphia invited me to drive to New Hampshire with them for my first meeting. One was Ralph Starr, who had hosted the recruitment reception where I first met Mike Russell. The other was Kaighn Smith. It had been his wife, Ann, who had asked my next-door neighbor whether she knew any black girls of high-school age who might want to apply to St. Paul’s School.

  Over the next four years, I traveled to school and to New York for board meetings. During the last two years, I flew to Concord with a board member who chartered a small jet for the purpose. I felt the power of the engine just beyond the gleaming, compact cockpit and its clean-cut pilots. I felt it rise up through the air: smooth air, bumpy air, air with waves and holes and wind like the breath of the God of Israel. I saw New Hampshire miles off, green and russet, red and gold in the fall, green and brown with bursts of pink in spring. And always, the ponds, dark like tea-water, sparkled in the sun and showed the shadows of the clouds. When we dove down toward the earth to land, I felt as fragile as mortality itself.

  Once there, we worked in committees. We heard reports. We were taken on tours of the grounds to see work that needed to be done, work in progress, work completed. We met with students and faculty, taking in deference and hostility, answering pointed questions, asking them.

  Then, we retired to the long parlor of the Rectory. The walls were papered green as the spring woods and glowed brown with old bookshelves. We listened to more reports. We discussed practical matters and philosophy. We debated about relationships—within the school community, between St. Paul’s and other communities; we talked about a new library; we talked about money.

  Ralph Starr became my mentor. John Walker, the bishop from Washington, became my guide. I watched John Walker carefully, the way a desert pilgrim stares at an oasis. I wanted to make sure that the blackness, the confidence, the love—not just those qualities, but the coexistence of the three—were real. I wanted to see if it would wither or waver or waffle. It did not.

  In the evening, when I met with the black students for a talk and dessert, I would take John Walker’s confidence with me. I held onto it, and it steadied me as I met the hungry eyes of the young people who draped themselves defiantly over red leather chairs. I could see fear in their eyes as surely as John must have seen it in mine. Who was this person who walked about in the white world? And at what price? What did it mean to be black in America if it did not mean handicap, shame, or denial?

  “Did you like it here?”

  “How’d you get on the board?”

  “Why did you come back to teach?”

  “If you had it to do over, would you come here again?”

  “Would you send your daughter to St. Paul’s School?”

  For a while at the reunion, I simply stopped talking. I ate dinner. I smiled. I braved the mosquitoes to walk around the porch. It seemed as if I’d been explaining half my life. Weren’t we trying to understand each other fifteen years before? Hadn’t we been standing on the same cliffs, screaming at each other across the same divide? Suddenly it felt pointless to keep talking, naive. Under the canopy, mosquitoes, thick as smoke, made a black cloud over the steaks like some moral to an African folktale I dimly knew.

  I could not begin to explain how I had felt that afternoon on Cliff and Alina Gillespie’s screen porch as I sat next to Rafa Fuster, who was retiring. I could not explain the sincerity of Cliff Gillespie’s interest in the news about my schoolmates: José Maldonado, a special narcotics prosecutor for the City of New York; Ed Shockley, a playwright; Grace Tung, a hospital administrator; Annette Frazier, an investigator of human-rights violations for the State of Illinois; Kenny Williams, a gas-company manager in Philadelphia; Michael Russell, an advertising executive; Janie Saunders, a New York banker; Peter Starr, a professor of comparative literature in California; India Bridgeman, a Los Angeles dance critic; Alma Howard, an attorney with a health-maintenance organization in Watts; Jimmy Hill, a New York restaurant manager; Anthony Wade, a program officer in a private foundation. Lee Bouton, who graduated ahead of me, dropped out of her university to work, then enrolled in college in her thirties and was thriving. Bernard Cash, who returned to St. Paul’s to teach after ten successful years in White Plains, New York, classrooms, left SPS suddenly, for “personal reasons,” as the administration explained after he was gone, in the winter term of his first year.

  At the reunion the interest in each other’s news took on a more competitive edge, a shorter perspective.

  In the course of the evening, we met each other’s spouses, those who had come. Some had connections to St. Paul’s or other prep schools. Some did not, but were curious. Anthony’s wife told him that she’d rather not stand around all evening playing “thirtysomething,” a reference to a current yuppie-style television series. My husband joked that he wanted me to be free to “work the crowd.” He took our daughter to a new, deluxe, yellow-plastic playground outside a local fast-food restaurant and went back to the Gillespies’ to put her to bed.

  Wayne Gilreath and his wife had brought their baby, a bright-eyed little man whom I danced with, holding him high in my arms. Wayne had been an even-tempered president of the Third World Coalition during our Sixth-Form year, and was now a TV news director in Baltimore. The baby looked very much like his outgoing wife. I stuck my name tag on the baby’s chest and took it back. He retrieved it from me and wore it. An hour later I came back in from the porch to find his tiny chest plastered with names. He was all of us at once.

  One woman talked earnestly about how her decision to buy an automob
ile had become a political act, a watershed in her friendship with an ethnic woman. “ ‘When you have children,’ I told her, ‘you look around for the most crash-worthy car.’ ” To the friend, however, a Volvo station wagon meant more. We probed delicately around a discussion of how what we own tells who we are.

  Another woman told me she’d just returned from visiting a friend whose daughter had died suddenly. We talked about grief and love.

  Anthony described his work in philanthropy. He was on a one-man mission to reform public education, and he was doing it with private money. “So what about you?”

  I said I was writing a book about our time at St. Paul’s.

  “Are you exposing any secrets?”

  “You better hope the hell not,” someone leaned over and shouted at Anthony.

  Several classmates asked why I’d returned to teach. I responded several ways, all more or less true: that I’d needed a breather between marriages—and the spiritual healing of service; that I’d wanted to revisit the place that had so disturbed me in my overserious youth; to encourage kids who might feel similarly; and to learn from them.

  “Wasn’t it weird going back?”

  “What’s weird is how the times shuffle in my mind,” I said. It was hard to keep talking over the noise. I made a soft, chopping motion with my hand to try to convey the folding of cards in a deck. I was thinking about a quieter discussion I’d had that afternoon with Bruce Chan on the Gillespies’ screen porch.

  Bruce talked about his work for the district attorney’s office. “My girlfriend’s an ophthalmologist,” he said. “It’s great. People come to see her, and they go away happy. I see my clients right in the middle of the worst possible times of their lives. No matter what happens, they’re enraged when they come to see me, and just about the best I can hope for is that they are merely angry by the time it’s over. Helluva way to make a living.”

  He thought it was good that one of us ethnic alumni had made the commitment to work with St. Paul’s, but the fact of the matter was that he did not know if it was worth it. “I mean, there’s so much here, it seems almost like a waste to come back here and give more. It’s good for the minority kids, I’m sure. I would have loved to know that there was an alumna, somebody who knew the score, speaking for me on the board, or coming to visit. But there’s so much to do outside this … bubble. I wonder if we aren’t practically obliged to give it back elsewhere, to people who never got it in the first place.”

  “I do give it back elsewhere,” I said. I was glad that I felt no anger. I had heard the argument in my mind so many times. Now there was no anger, and I could smile. “But I don’t feel that there’s anything wrong in giving it here, too. It is like admitting who I am. I came here, and I went away changed. I’ve been fighting that for a long time, to no purpose. I am a crossover artist, you know, like those jazz musicians who do pop albums, too.”

  My mind had drifted for a moment as I thought of my white husband, a man raised in a small town in Iowa.

  “I used to hate those musicians for that. I wouldn’t buy any more of their records because they were no longer pure. Well, I didn’t leave here pure. This is who I am.”

  I wondered whether “crossover” was the word I wanted. Did it convey enough tension? Or did it sound like dying a cultural death into a choir of black preppies standing on a riverbank, beige corduroy wings to match their trousers, singing: My heart looks back and wonders how I got oooo-over.… Wrong image. I wanted an image of wholeness, inclusion: moving circles that come together, overlap, drift apart. Why else were we, like married women, so concerned to find the right compounds and hyphenates? Black American (big B, small b), Afro-American, Afric-American, people of color, Afro-Caribbean, Anglo-African, people of the diaspora, African-American.

  I went at it another way.

  “I make the choices every day—to live where my kid grows up with black people like the black people I grew up with, and to hope that she doesn’t get burned up by the shame.”

  (Could Bruce know what I meant by shame? The shame that made us unable to look upon our own children: “You seen her baby?”

  “Uh-huh. Thought I was at the zoo.”

  “When I looked in that stroller, baby all dolled up in lace and all, all I could say is: ‘Sure is clean.’ ”

  Could Bruce know that while black intellectuals debate the impact of the 1960s on black self-image, people on my street still say a baby looks like a monkey if she’s too dark? Could he hear little girls cry out to God in the dark for good hair? Were there Chinese-American equivalents?)

  That’s what I thought about when I looked at my formmates across the table. It had been hard enough to try to communicate with Bruce, who cared, passionately, about the morals of ethnicity. I couldn’t summon the words to explain again just to make conversation. My mind continued idly shuffling still photos of the past. I chopped at the air with my hand.

  Anthony motioned me to come outside. We sprayed each other with repellent. We sprayed the air. Anthony asked what I was drinking. “Bottled water,” I said. “That’s the extent of it.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “I don’t drink,” I said.

  “Not at all?”

  I laughed. “Under any and all circumstances I don’t drink.” It felt good to talk simply after a day of complicated explaining. We had done what people do at fifteenth reunions: spread out selected highlights of our lives for our classmates to admire or share. Now the night came down around us. The party changed. We began to tell each other about our divorces, our disillusionments, our fears.

  “It means what it sounds like. I don’t drink anymore. It’s OK, really, once you know.”

  He went inside and came back with two bottles of water.

  “So what else did you find out writing this book?”

  “Life is like a leaf!”

  He coughed out that big laugh of his. “Don’t start! I can’t take it.”

  “No, listen. Seriously. It’s a whole book of life is like a leaf. That’s what got me through St. Paul’s. It was stored up like a present from a willful, ambition-driven girl to the woman she would become. Do you remember how much I hated Mr. Shipman?”

  “Do I?”

  “When I went back to teach—you know how it is. There’s the opening-night party in the Gates Room. Mr. Shipman came over to me and welcomed me back, just as nice. And I thought: ‘Doesn’t this man know how much I hated him? Doesn’t he remember that he failed me? Coming up to me like an old friend.’

  “Then he said he was going to give me one piece of advice—that you know you’ve been at St. Paul’s too long when the stuff that sixteen-year-olds say starts to make sense. And he laughed. I’d never seen the man laugh.”

  Anthony put his head back. He liked a story, always had. “What you’re talking about is grace,” he said.

  “Is it?”

  I like the simplicity of the word. Old ladies in church use it. Old drunks who don’t drink anymore use it. Grace, Tillich says, is accepting that you are accepted. Children say grace at table. Bosomy blond Baptists and tweedy Episcopalians use it. Teenagers are the only ones who shun the word, as if it might snatch from them the magic of their power.

  Later that night, another friend asked me what the hardest thing was about writing about St. Paul’s. “The hardest part is writing about my family,” I said.

  “Really? Not St. Paul’s?”

  “St. Paul’s is the setting. It’s the place, not the main character.”

  The music was going by then, loud, loud, loud like the old days, the same undanceable rock. People danced to it, torsos bolt upright, knees kicking, legs jumping, hippity-hoppity like an Appalachian buck dance.

  It was cool outside. Woozy mosquitoes floated through a haze of insect repellent and cigar smoke. The porch emitted a corona of light into the darkness, beyond which the ponds spread out smooth and black.

  I recalled my great-grandfather’s stories that I had used for comfort that
night when I’d sat out on the ice. “Jump, Izzy, jump. Papa’ll catch you.…” The white dog in the cane field; the witch outside the door; “Skin, skin, ya na know me?” Those were as easy to write as to tell, but not the rest of it, not the betrayal. The hard part is to find the words to say it outright: that Pap was wrong. His stories taught me fear and shame and secrecy. “Trust no man.” But I cannot throw them out. I cannot escape into some other history of my own choosing, one where the African princess is carried out of slavery at a young age by the gentle Seminoles, where she learns to hunt and fish and bear beautiful brown babies under the Spanish moss. Get serious. I’ve been given my stories, and in them, people who try to fly are burned out of their own skins.

  What my stories do is tell me why—why the old people looked at us with such unforgiving eyes, why they pushed us away, but wouldn’t let go. Without the stories, I’d have nothing to explain the cacophony in my head in the indigo New Hampshire night. I’d be back to fifteen years old, sitting in the Art Building’s common room, feeling the crazy panic again, hearing the white kids telling me to buck up because slavery’s past, Jim Crow’s dead and gone without a trace. Jump, Izzy.

  Nowhere else will I get the rhythm of these stories, the ghosts and their magic. That’s hard to write, too. It’s hard to write about a community of souls, living and dead, white dogs that scream like women, barracudas that follow swimmers like angels to keep them safe. It’s hard to tell it in mixed company without beginning the old explanations again, the old defensiveness and inarticulate rage. Take away the ooga-booga stuff, and Toni Morrison would be fine, a girl once whispered to me in college. Without the stories and the songs, I am mute. A white American education will never give them to me; but it can—if I am graced, if I do not go blind in the white light of self-consciousness, if I have guides before me and the sense to heed them—it can help me to see the stories, growing like a vine out of the cane fields, up out of unmarked graves, around my soul. It can help me search out the very history it did not teach me. “Let us learn those things here on earth,” proclaims the school motto, “the knowledge of which will continue into the heavens.”