by Honor Moore
My mother wrote to Pam Morton that I was “plugging along,” an accurate description. What I remember is anxiety about my body and my mother’s inability to reassure me. The hips that had resisted the skirt in the L.S. Ayres fitting room had continued to swell, as had my breasts, and I got my period at twelve, four years earlier than my mother had. Knowing that I was not the lean, boyish girl my mother was in teenage photographs, I thought I was fat, and so when I had my yearly checkup, my mother told the doctor I ate too much and asked if he could do something about my weight. He had me tested, and when the results came, he prescribed pills for an underactive thyroid. To curb my appetite, he prescribed Dexedrine, which I took in one form or another for the next ten years, unaware until I was in my twenties that it had any effect other than as a diet pill.
My mother wrote Pam Morton that she was “on a campaign to let Honor emote her ill feelings (which were endless).” She had not realized, she explained, that I’d “resented the years in Jersey City” and had felt too guilty to complain. In tears, apparently, I protested the “friendlessness of it, the hectic-ness, etc.” I don’t remember resenting Jersey City or the invitation to spill my feelings—only enraged battles out of earshot of the other children, in the downstairs half bath with its aubergine fixtures, over my body, the hair in my face, my “messy” room. But my real complaint went unidentified by both of us. It was a mother I missed. When would I ever have her to myself? When would we walk together as we had once in Kent when I was eight or nine, down Route 7 having a serious talk, to an antiques shop where she bought me a vase for my collection? “It was very rough,” my mother wrote. My father didn’t intervene, but once when Gagy visited, she brought laundry upstairs after overhearing one of the battles. “Neaten your room, Honor,” she said. “Things will go better for you.”
My mother, of course, had not had the kind of mother I wanted, who drew her out or questioned her: caring had come from Senny, the governess. On principle, my mother had decided to raise her children herself, but our numbers soon outran her idealism, and the constant nanny each of my parents had taken for granted was left out of their adventurous equation. My mother was inventing the wheel as far as her approach to mothering was concerned, and I was the first parenting exhibit. How could she admit that every time she had a new baby, her eldest child suffered? I don’t think it occurred to her. As for my father, he was gone before breakfast; his thorough absence—the church where I could always find him no longer next door—diminished my life. At St. Luke’s, “Honor” had written a novel, painted a mural, and acted in a play. She’d ridden the subway and walked the streets of New York with friends who wore black leotards and danced the mazurka. At 66, the girls wore Peter Pan collars and practiced cheerleading moves, and Honor didn’t know what to do with herself.
It was all my mother could manage to make lives for seven children in this alien place. Mrs. Lee, who was black, came to help each day, and once in a while Adeline Walker, white and single and a secretary at Eli Lilly and Company, who decades later became an Episcopal nun, babysat in the evenings. To give herself more time “with the children and Paul,” my mother experimented by hiring a cook. Mrs. Pendleton, the wife of a Baptist minister, came for a few months, but having a black woman wearing a uniform and serving and clearing made my mother uncomfortable and she soon went back to cooking herself, assigning clearing and washing to one of us, a poster with jobs and days of the week taped above the kitchen sink. The little ones ate early, then my parents had cocktails, and then my father officiated at evening prayer, all of us together in the formal living room, kneeling on Great-granny’s Chinese rug in front of a table with a cross and candles on it. After prayers, everyone under ten went to bed, and then, “Mommy” and “Poppy” at either end of Grandma Kean’s polished mahogany table, we all sat down to supper, Paul telling jokes, me finishing fast so I could have seconds, all of us, my mother in the lead, laughing as we mimicked the way my father ended the Lord’s Prayer: “The POWer and the glowree . . .”
My favorite teacher at 66 was Mr. Walker. My mother joked that I was “in love” with him, but my admiration was not romantic. He was Southern and theatrical in his immaculate pale yellow linen jacket, striped shirts, and bright ties, and he wore his auburn hair in a pompadour. He was older, but perhaps only in his forties, the kind of single man I knew as “a bachelor.” I remember him talking about Lincoln, and the day when everyone brought in clippings about the Russians launching Sputnik. But at 66 most of the classes, compared to St. Luke’s, were like the Indianapolis streets—too wide and flat. What we read in English class came out of a big textbook; when I drew in art class, the subject was prescribed; and when I made a mural it was assigned, a map of Indiana, delineating its counties. Nor was there any discussion in Mr. Walker’s current events class about what we talked about at home. Little Rock, Eisenhower sending in the 101st Airborne to enforce Brown v. Board of Education.
I did not bring those subjects to school: I knew what had happened to my father with his vestry, what Ellen Massey had said about the boy in the school yard at 66, and that no black people lived near us on Washington Boulevard. Evidence was mounting that what had been at the center of things in Jersey City here put us in danger. I just had to look at the paper, grainy pictures of white men and women outside the high school in Little Rock, their mouths distorted by shouting, arms raised to hit or throw rocks; the young soldiers with grim faces; Negro children just my age, their heads bowed, heading into the school. The papers had noted in announcements of our arrival that my father had been vice president of the New Jersey NAACP, and people were learning what the Christ Church dean stood for. It was while researching this book that I learned that my father, to gain trust, purposely kept his sermons apolitical those first Indianapolis years—pastoral and close to scripture. I noticed the difference, but I thought he’d simply changed, the way I believed I had to.
I didn’t know then that my father had once been a racist and anti-Semitic, as was accepted both by the class into which he had been born and by the era in which he lived: the starkness of his bigotry still shocks me. From the Marine Corps, he wrote to my mother, baldly, that he hated Jews—he had a bunkmate who was Jewish. Of course there were no black people in his marine unit; the military wouldn’t be integrated until 1947. My mother’s attitudes changed earlier than my father’s. During the war, she read Strange Fruit, the book about lynching by Lillian Smith, and wrote my father: “I know you feel differently than I do about such things. We have to discuss it.” The change in my father, from being a racist and anti-Semite to being an antiracist, came with the same simplicity as his original conversion. He grew to know and, to his surprise, to love the Jewish marine. The end of his racism came later. “I saw Jesus Christ in the faces of the poor,” he once explained. When he worked with neighborhood people at St. Peter’s Chelsea, their faces were black and brown. Everything flowed from that:
. . . You couldn’t go next door to visit a little kid who came to your Sunday-school class, find him living in one room with eight brothers and sisters—to say nothing of rats—and just pat him on the head and say, “Jesus loves you.” You had to do something about the conditions you saw. And when you started doing something about the rats, then you got to the landlord; you tried to organize a rent strike, as we did. A family got kicked out, and lived with you for several months, until they found another home. Why was it so hard for them to find another home? Because the public housing project discriminated against blacks, and let only a few of them in. What did you do about the public housing project? You went to City Hall. There you got a lot of promises but no action. What did you do next? You went to Washington. And sooner or later you got involved in wider politics—all starting with that little boy. That is literally the way it happened to me. And shortly after I went to Jersey City I became a Democrat—having been a Republican through my childhood, and not having thought through social issues at all when I was at Yale.
Change for my father was simple; it happened to him, and it was irreversible. He expected no less of the men on the Christ Church vestry, and I was his daughter. I turned aside my fear and set about making friends.
Andra lived two blocks away, and I went to her house to spend the night and watch television—my parents objected to television and we didn’t have one. Andra was an only child, and her parents went out or to bed early, leaving us by ourselves. She was tall and quiet, and studious like I was. Her father was a doctor who was bald and wore wire-rimmed glasses, and her mother, who fastened her auburn hair in a chignon on top of her head, wore flaring ankle-length skirts. When I arrived after supper, we’d make pizza from a mix in a box; after you’d blended in water and flattened the dough, you opened the tiny can of tomato sauce, spread it across the pie, and sprinkled on cheese from a packet of cheese. As it baked, we’d settle on the sofa in the glassed-in porch where the TV was.
During the second or third commercial, the pizza would be ready to eat. The movie began at eleven-thirty and was introduced by Frances Farmer, dressed in a stiff evening gown, and sponsored by Flanner & Buchanan, the funeral home. A long time later reading her autobiography, I’d learn that “Frances Farmer” had been Frances Farmer the movie star, and that her bland affect, which I thought Hoosier courtesy, was the consequence of a lobotomy. Still later, I would learn that the New Yorker writer Genêt, as Janet Flanner, had been the daughter of an Indianapolis undertaker. Late, late late, and even late late late, we watched old black-and-white dreams of the night—Greta Garbo in Camille and Ninotchka, the sad face and awkwardness of Lon Chaney Jr. as Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula with Bela Lugosi in a black cape, pale face, dark-penciled eyes. As he lifted his arms, his body dissolved, leaving a bat tilting off into the night sky. Andra and I had long serious talks, and one year, for Christmas, she gave me my first book of modern poetry, Selected Poems of Ezra Pound, a skinny paperback, the stark black-and-white of the poet on the cover. In my parents’ bookshelves, I’d found Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote and The Ways of White Folks by Langston Hughes, but I’d never read a poem that didn’t rhyme, or that had only two lines, or whose title seemed to have nothing to do with what it said. A poem I liked in my new book was called “The Tea Shop,” but it was about a woman getting older. She does not get up the stairs so eagerly; / Yes, she also will turn middle aged.
Shortridge, the high school, was even closer to our house than 66 and “integrated,” but in the cafeteria, where you slid a brown tray along a steel rail to get lunch—chili or hot dogs or burgers, fish sandwiches on Fridays—what you saw was not what I had lived in Jersey City or at St. Luke’s. The Negro students sat together in one part of the huge room, the white students elsewhere; you and the Negro girl sang together in A Cappella Choir, but you didn’t seek each other out at lunch. The presence of Negro students was a “percentage” broadcast in whispers; the figures as I remember them were 30 percent when I was a freshman in 1959, more than 40 percent when I graduated. The black population of the city was growing, Negroes were moving further uptown, their neighborhoods breaching the Crispus Attucks boundaries and spreading into the district served by Shortridge. (Attucks, named for the black man who was the first American casualty of the American Revolution, was a historically Negro high school of which Oscar Robertson, the great basketball player, “the Big O” drafted by the Cincinnati Royals in 1960, was the most illustrious graduate.) As more Negroes came to Shortridge, many white families moved north and east into the Broad Ripple district—“Ripple” was Shortridge’s historic rival, and it was all white. Other whites left the tree-lined streets near Thirty-eighth Street, selling comfortable 1920s houses to buy land north of the city limits and build one-story ranch houses, sending their children to the brand-new high school the county had just built, and taking business they’d once transacted on Monument Circle to Glendale, the shopping center where Ayres and Block’s, the downtown department stores, built their first suburban branches. My classmate who pointed out the “nigger” in the schoolyard at 66 was not, I was learning, unusual in her attitudes.
The Indianapolis people who became my parents’ friends—Catholic and Jewish intellectuals and activists who were Democrats, other East Coast transplants—shared their point of view about race. Some of them had gone to Shortridge themselves and, like my parents, identified their neighbors’ sudden moves to the suburbs as what sociologists called “white flight,” and believed it should be resisted. Like my parents, their new friends read the moderate Indianapolis Times and reviled the conservative Eugene C. Pulliam papers, the Indianapolis Star and the Indianapolis News. Like us, they subscribed to the New York Times, which arrived a day late, and which I considered the journalistic version of the Supreme Court—a corrective. Even as my father kept his sermons at Christ Church tame, he let loose out of town. In a speech to the women’s caucus at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 1961, he declared it “really ludicrous that we presume to call ourselves Christians, when it can be a major issue in a northern urban parish in the year 1961 whether a Negro can serve as an usher,” and, protesting the church’s failure to do anything about the growth of slums, added, “the real purpose of the church can be quite brutally shown to be a religious convenience for those who can pay to live in the suburbs.” My parents’ new friends were people with whom they discussed these issues, people who voted for Stevenson in 1956 and, with my parents, for Kennedy in 1960.
At home I had no doubt where I really stood on the issue of race. I cared about my father’s progress in bringing Negroes into Christ Church—first into the congregation, then the choir, the ushers, and the Sunday school. I understood by his tone of voice that he had been, as he later put it, “traumatized” by his experience with the vestry. It scared me when he was frightened, but it reassured me when he talked about the million dollars Mr. Lilly had given for the cooperative downtown ministry, the opening of a mission storefront out near the speedway. I thought of Mr. Lilly as my father’s protection. He was a shy man and I barely met him, but we were welcome to swim in his pool “anytime.” Going there was like entering a little piece of Hollow Hill, leaving the flatness, winding up a hill to the large white stucco house, its walls thick with glossy-leaved euonymus, reaching the large, round old-fashioned swimming pool, also painted white, a few leaves or petals of the big magnolia tree floating on its freshwater surface.
We didn’t join the Riviera Club, where a lot of our friends went, because it didn’t admit Jews or Negroes, and we weren’t taken to the amusement park, which was also segregated. There were two private schools in Indianapolis, Tudor Hall for girls and Park School for boys, but many of the old Indianapolis families had gone to Shortridge for generations and sent their children there, considering loyalty to their alma mater a badge of honor. I met some of the children from Park and Tudor and from the Catholic schools at Mrs. Gates’s dancing classes, which were also all white but which allowed Jews. There, Mrs. McMurtrie, dressed in a flared black dress cinched at the waist with a wide belt, taught us to fox-trot, waltz, and tango; we knew she and Mrs. Gates had determined a new dance might last when she instructed us in a decorous version of it—in eighth grade she taught us the stroll, her elegant black-pumped foot incongruously executing the backward lunge.
To her friends in the East, my mother boasted about Shortridge, which had a daily newspaper and offered French, Spanish, German, Latin and Greek, history, social studies, math up through various advanced versions of calculus, biology, physics, and chemistry. I argued with my boarding-school cousins who thought it was strange that we went to public school. I told them about Dr. R. Ruth Richards, whom I had for biology, who had a doctorate and should have been teaching at a university, and about Mrs. Henrietta Parker, my chemistry teacher, who had worked on the Manhattan Project, though with her shiny blue eyes, her white hair stylishly caught up in a bun, she hardly looked like someone who would build a bomb. I started Shortridge i
n an eighth-grade “special class” that offered a faster pace of learning and a curriculum that included typing and French. We met in one room on the third floor of the enormous redbrick four-storied building; special class was not as freewheeling as St. Luke’s, but it was more fun than 66 and a respite from football and cheerleading. I and my new friends there prided ourselves on being “intellectual,” and for my oral report I spoke on Robert Frost. When I went back to Shortridge the following year as a freshman, I knew my way around the building. My friends and I all signed up for Latin and choir and were placed in the “g” (“gifted”) classes that separated children of the middle class, including a large population of Latvian immigrants, from those less well prepared, usually black children or the children of the white families who had come up from Kentucky or West Virginia. Junior year, because our sophomore Latin class excelled, our Latin teacher, who was named Josephine Bliss and raised cattle on a farm, started an intensive class in ancient Greek that met every morning. My father was thrilled, regaling me with stories of his Yale class in Greek scansion in which he had received a failing grade from Eugene O’Neill Jr., son of the playwright.
Before I knew what a “social club” was, I heard whispers in the halls of invitations to teas given by WOW (Women of the World) and GALS (G is for the good girls that compose us, A is for the angels that we are, L is for the love we show each other, S is for the sex we rate by far) and acceptances to the two elite clubs—you could only pledge one of them. Subdeb and Euvola, I was told as if it went without saying, had a quota for Jews and, like the other clubs, excluded Negroes altogether. But when I saw the tiny black and gold pins—black enamel with the club’s name in gold lettering—that you wore on a sweater or shirt close to the tip of your left breast, I burned with longing. “What a pretty pin!” I might say, though when I saw “pledges” approach “actives” and offer them candy in the halls, I pretended not to notice. Sometime in October, two of my friends from eighth grade and I were asked to pledge ARC (“All are considerate”). It was a club of dubious ranking, but I did not hesitate; now I had an acceptable answer to the question, “What are you pledging?” Now I too carried a bag of candy in my purse, risking punishment if a teacher caught me offering it in the hall or demerits from the club if I failed to remember an active’s favorite.