We had both accompanied our fathers and learned about their worlds in ways our younger siblings didn’t share. Both fathers took their families on long unusual trips. He told me about how in 1955, when he was two, they had traveled on the Queen Elizabeth to Europe and returned home on the Queen Mary. “It was the first time our people had money to travel.” In Italy everyone thought he was so cute. “But seriously, who would take their family with small children around Europe right after the war?”
We kept saying, “This is so weird.”
I explained how my dad took us all over Mexico before the Olympics in ’68. “We were there a couple months before the police used tanks to fire on student protestors. We were going to Guatemala until the guy at the Embassy who said it was safe to travel got killed.” So weird. But we were both proud of our dads. His father took him by the hand when they walked around the neighborhood and everyone called out, “Hey, Bruce,” and waved. I told him about walking on construction jobs and everyone saying, “You must be Woodie’s daughter.”
I’d found someone who had a similar class and family background. We felt so similar that, to us, being black and white didn’t seem a big deal. We had no idea how serious a problem it would be for other people.
Alvin had grown up in a mixed neighborhood with white, black and Jewish professionals in Walnut Hills, near Woodburn Avenue. He started Walnut Hills College Prep in sixth grade. He had just started high school when the riots came. He joked, “You haven’t lived until you’ve seen military jeeps with mounted loaded fifty-caliber machine guns cruising down your street.” He and his friends spent days and nights watching from windows, smelling smoke, on lockdown by their mothers. But then his voice dropped, sober. “People burned out businesses in our own neighborhood.” I heard the sadness, as he continued. “Ever hear of Redlining? No one could get insurance on their houses any more. Suddenly people were doing drugs, serious drugs. The neighborhood was never the same.” Then his parents moved to suburbia.
After years of talking and joking with the smartest, coolest kids in the city, he felt trapped in a strange segregated wasteland at Princeton High School in suburbia. When he walked through the black neighborhood in Glendale, nobody talked to him, or guys at the corner murmured “Oreo” after he passed by. He hadn’t made a good friend since he left Walnut Hills.
At school I found the smart kids boring, doing what the teachers said, and no one seemed to be saying anything real. I wrote an impassioned essay for English class about a storm building up into such a fury that the skies burst forth with freezing rain. Lightning split a towering oak, splintering its grasping arms, which fell, crushing a small child huddled below. The teacher commented in red ink: “Liz: There was one problem. I sense strong emotion; however, making analogies of your emotions to the natural landscape and elements is very hard to do.” I growled to myself, hasn’t she ever heard of Wuthering Heights?
Sometimes the only time I felt happy and understood was when I was reading. One lonely weekend a year before, I had found a faded old book, I Capture the Castle, in our bookcase. By the end of the first page, I was enraptured. The awkward, witty Cassandra wrote constantly in her journal about her eccentric family. She had a brilliant depressed father with a beautiful unusual young wife and they lived in a dilapidated old castle. Reading Cassandra was like finding another me. I kept the book next to my bed and didn’t share it with anyone until I met Alvin. Perhaps I knew I was falling in love with him when I decided to loan him the book.
He took it home over a weekend and read it all. He biked over to return it. He handed me the book, nodding. “Cassandra is just like you.” Someone finally knew me, the real me.
Alvin and I started going to a social action youth group and became friends with a private school student named Peter, whose house became the hangout for kids wanting to talk about politics, race, and the war in Vietnam. Peter, Alvin, and I began to call ourselves the Mod Squad, like the trio on television. I was growing my hair long. Peter was the mop-headed white guy and Alvin, the cool black guy.
Soon after Alvin’s first study date at my house, my father set down rules. “Not that I’m racist, but...” Like a sermon he’d been practicing or a legal argument, he built his points about the dangers of inter-racial relationships. Yes, it was fine to be friends, but we had to know the dangers. He laid down the first rule. “I never want the two of you out as a couple, only in odd numbered groups. It’s for your own safety.”
When I told Alvin the next day at school, we rolled our eyes, thinking the same thing: I mean really, this is 1970! We continued as we had, doing homework together at my house after school before my dad got home or staying late at the library. We were still just friends.
When we biked over to his mom’s two-story ranch at of the end of Annadale Lane, she said, “Call me Jewel.” A handsome woman, she dressed more stylishly than my mother. When we drank a Coke at her kitchen table, Alvin softened his accent a little, from ‘yes’ to ‘yeah,’ but mostly he spoke like me. His mom spoke in a harsher black accent than the softer inflection of the black women I knew in Glendale.
She said, “Aren’t you two so cute,” fussing over us, making us blush, but then she turned on his little brother J-J. “Hold that lip in before I knock it in. Don’t want anyone thinking you’re a dumb nigger.” J-J and Alvin instantly sucked in their full lips into a thin straight line.
Alvin said, “We’re going down to the den to listen to music now.”
I thanked Jewel for the Coke and followed him.
He whispered, “I learned to keep my lips tucked in.” He explained that growing up black you tried to make yourself look and act white, even making your lips not look so different. I kept looking at his lips, so soft and textured, a little pink showing at the center. I touched my thin lips.
He was reading the liner notes on the record cover for Wheels of Fire, by his favorite band, Cream. As the song began, “In a white room with black curtains,” I leaned back into the couch feeling breathless, watching Alvin as he read, running his tongue over his lips and tucking them in without thinking. What his mother said that really shocked me was the word ‘Nigger.’ I’d never known someone black would say that word.
THAT LATE WINTER in Cincinnati was dreary without a single day of sunshine, but at school we were all abuzz. On March 26, there was going to be a twelve-hour rock concert at the huge arena in town, The Cincinnati Gardens, where they had basketball games and the Ice Follies. Joe Cocker was coming, plus a lot of other bands. Everyone got the poster. We’d all seen the Woodstock movie, and now we had our chance for a concert, close to home, without mud. For twelve hours we could step into the outrageous world of rock and roll. It was too good to be true. We all calculated how to get our parents to let us go and how to pay for the $10 ticket.
Everyone counted up their savings, the lucky ones their allowance. I had my babysitting stash of coins and dollars. Amazingly enough, Alvin’s mom said “Yes.” Even more amazingly, my parents said “Yes” when I explained, “My youth group is going.”
We were ecstatic, comparing notes on the bands. What time should we get there? Secretly imagining being together all that time out of our parents’ grasp. Ten Years After was lined up for 10 p.m., followed by Joe Cocker. Our transistor radios pounded out blues and rock every morning. It was hard to study or concentrate; all we could think about was twelve hours of rock and roll, together.
A few days before the concert, Jewel changed her mind. He couldn’t go. Money was tight. If she wasn’t giving him the money for a lock on his locker at school, then he couldn’t expect her to buy a ticket to this concert. “Even if you had a ticket,” she declared, “you can’t go.” Period. End of conversation. She’d made up her mind. We were devastated. Each day we hoped something would change. I called right before I got my ride and we almost cried. “I’m so sad you won’t be there.” He went back downstairs, put on his headphones and tried to bury himself in Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce. A few hours later she call
ed downstairs, “You can go to that concert. Maybe you can still catch a ride with someone.” He dashed out the door.
My sixteen-year-old-girl’s excitement over the idea of a concert was quickly overwhelmed by miles of traffic backed up on the highway, and crowds billowing and surging around the entrance. Long hair, afros, tight leather pants, embroidered jeans, and more people than I’d ever seen. I was a naïve, scared girl staying close to friends caught in a crowd pushing forward. A band I didn’t know filled the vast hall with pounding pressure in my ears; a haze of smoke swirled blue, red, yellow from spot lights overhead. I felt scared and small. We climbed up level after level of steep narrow steps, finding a row of empty seats. My friends went off to look around but I crouched on the edge of my fold-down seat, mesmerized by the jostling crowds. Rivers of hippies and rednecks streamed up and down the aisles. I felt impossibly young and lost. I guessed the smoky smell was pot.
There were white and black girls in lacey tops or tie-dyed tees or long dresses with their arms around guys with long blond hair, or wavy curls gone crazy, or with black guys in dashikis or tees with a raised fist. Couples hugging and kissing, bare-chested guys in leather vests, and bra-less breasts, poking out of shirts, nipples in tight tees. Bodies were wrapped around each other, arms crossed and stuck into back pockets, bodies in tight clothes, sweaty leaping dancing bodies all around me, couples making out. Blurs of long hair flashing, heads bobbing with the music, and bodies of all colors, dancing with arms stretched out into the smoky purple spot-lit sky under the metal roof. And I was alone and scared, perched on my seat. Friends came, sat, left. Hours passed watching the spotlit cube of erupting drummers and writhing guitarists. I was tired, reeling, wanting to go home, when a friend shouted about the din, “Somebody saw Alvin. He’s here, somewhere. He’s looking for you.”
I leapt up, heart pounding, and raced down into the endless rumpled river of long hair and matted clothes, scanning in every direction, pushed along, until I pulled myself out of the current to stand a few steps above to look. Then I saw him emerge from the crowd, fresh, beautiful brown face, pink-edged full lips smiling, impossibly handsome, calling my name. No longer the shy kids who hadn’t even held hands, we poured into each other’s arms in a full body hug.
Nearly crying with relief, I kept saying, “I can’t believe you are here.”
He whispered in my ear, “I found you, I found you.”
I led him back to my narrow shelf of seats above the mayhem. We sat holding hands and laughing, with tears on our cheeks. The music picked us up and carried our torsos swaying and turning in our seats, my head tilting and rolling across his shoulder. As Ten Years After chanted “Goin’ home, with my baby,” the guitar glinted and whirled on the writhing stage. “Gonna see my baby, see my baby fine.” The drummer’s arms hurtled and that smoky voice drove us all like a train down the track. “Take my baby, take my baby mine.” Drum sticks hurtling. “I’m goin’ home” repeated, pounded, chanted “home” for ever, and his arms were around me, “goin’ home,” and then it was just our lips, delicious soft lips dissolving into each other, our bodies filled with a roaring, chanting, cheering crowd, a driving guitar, and a smoking voice, “I’m goin’ home, see my baby.” Hazy electric air charged with dancing, and bodies wrapped around each other, and I was kissing the endless, impossible sweetness of his lips.
Everything got complicated after that. As I leaned on Alvin’s shoulder, gazing into the crowd, people stared at us with harsh faces, frowns. We’d entered a new territory. We were the first and only interracial couple at our high school that year. Every day there were glances, double takes, people looking us up and down. Black girls I didn’t know murmured “Stay away from our men” when I walked to the school bus. The people who knew us didn’t give us any grief. We studied together, grinning as we competed to answer questions in class, passed longer and longer notes, and we tried to find places where we could keep kissing.
Alvin worked out three hours after school for gymnastics, going off to weekend tournaments. I worked on my father’s endless landscaping projects on weekends, planting trees, digging trenches, placing granite stones in the spiral terrace we’d been building for years. We talked on the phone until our parents or siblings yelled at us to get off. If we were lucky we were able to sneak to my house after school when no one was home. We were good kids, no drinking, no pot, and no hands below the waist. We had no idea my father wouldn’t give up until he’d separated us.
Sander Hall’s Solarban mirror glass panels
MIRROR GLASS
Suppose the walls rise towards heaven in such a way that I am moved.
—LE CORBUSIER, TOWARDS A NEW ARCHITECTURE
“ABSOLUTELY EXTRAORDINARY.” OUR DAD GLOWED with enthusiasm, pointing to the mirrored wall rising to the sky above us, reflecting the double church spires and wisps of clouds slipping across the surface. The mirrored glass panels were being set into place, floor by floor, working their way to the top of the dormitory. “I’ve been waiting for this ever since I first envisioned Sander Hall.”
Late afternoon on a spring weekend in 1970, my brothers, mother and I, all in bell-bottomed jeans, leaned against the VW bus on a hill overlooking the muddy construction site. The building loomed high above the campus while, in the valley below and leading off into the distance, lush spring green leaves glowed as they punctuated the campus and neighborhoods and parks beyond.
A building this size lives in the architect’s mind for years before it finally stands on the landscape, open to everyone else’s comments. It was the vision of the building, a glass tower reflecting the sky that my father waited for expectantly, little knowing that the worst battle for Sander Hall would come from the color of Cincinnati’s atmosphere. He had researched and educated the board, “selling” them on the mirror glass panels, documenting their remarkable energy savings for heating and cooling. The reflective beauty allowed both incredible views and privacy for students.
Our father waited with excited anticipation for the panels to go up. The color of each city’s sky is distinct. Boston’s Hancock Tower would glow a crisp blue. Glass cubed buildings were lighting up the sky in L.A., Houston, and Louisville, each a distinctive shade, from deep blue to silvered grey. He wondered, what color would these panels reflect at the university on a hill above the city of Cincinnati? They wouldn’t know until they were installed.
Barrel-chested and stocky, wearing a plaid shirt and khaki pants, Woodie stood in front of us, gazing up at his tower. “Look how the mirror glass reflects a golden rose. I’ve never seen anything like it in any other city.”
We clustered close to our mother as we watched clouds float across the surface.
“You won’t believe the sunset against this surface.” As if he were describing a fantastic wine, or painting, he was radiant with enthusiasm. He paced back and forth, gazing up from different angles. “Simply sensational.” His bald head and face glowed with the early evening light as he glanced at us to make sure we fully appreciated this moment.
We heard voices of students on a Saturday night on Calhoun Street behind us, the rhythmic thudding of a drum as a rock band started playing in one of the bars. The air cooled and the mirrored wall stretching high above us streaked orange and red with the sunset.
My brothers and I watched the sunset play across the twenty-seven story projection screen, looked at each other, raised our eyebrows, nodding. I said, “Yeah, it’s outta sight, Woodie. I mean, it’s really cool.”
“You’re damn right it’s cool!” His big voice laughed. “That glass will keep them cool all summer.” He had explained it before, but we were patient as he explained again. The glass panels were called SolarBan II, produced by Pittsburgh Plate Glass. Double glazed, they were constructed with two quarter-inch pieces of glass separated by a half-inch airspace.
He looked at us, and we nodded before he continued. “There’s a coating on the inner surface that gives the building its reflective qualities. It will save thousand
s and thousands of dollars in heating and, more importantly, cooling costs over the lifetime of the building. And it will give the students privacy at night so you can’t see right in. They won’t need curtains.”
He stopped lecturing to gaze up at the wall of glass as the sunset dulled and faded, enchanted by the reflection. “It’s breathtaking.”
We grew restless and still he stood there. We nudged our mother, hinting that maybe we could walk up to Calhoun, but she shook her head. We knew better than to disturb his reverie. We were a private audience to his triumph. The mirrored wall darkened to a midnight blue. The dew chilled us as we watched him become a dark shadow in front of his tower.
A few nights later he arrived at the dinner table in a rage. “Pink. This god-damned woman on the Board of the University says her mother made her wear pink when she was a girl, and she hates pink. She says this mirrored glass has to go.” We were glad he was yelling about someone else and not us.
Countless meetings followed. He took board members on field trips to Columbus and Louisville to see how the same glass performed. He reported on the energy savings of this glass. But nothing would change this woman’s mind. The contractors were furious. Delays held up the project, put them behind on the deadline for completion, costing the project thousands of dollars a day. Tempers flared on the job.
Someone noticed that one of the panes of glass had been installed the wrong way. The dean insisted that the color was better that way. He ordered three more panes on the completed northern facade to be turned in order to determine whether there was a noticeable difference. The contractors turned the panes. Woodie and his office team of architects, draftsmen, and co-op students gathered with the head contractor and the maintenance crew from the university and looked at the tower. Woodie paced, eyeing the building furiously. “Who can tell which panes have been changed?” Even though they scanned the building, trying to see if they could tell a difference, no one could say which were the reversed panels.
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