Their friends were artists and academics, doctors, lawyers, undertakers, and other striving government workers, and we hovered on the edge of a crowd of folk who were the outer ring of New York’s Black elite, the suburbs of “Negroland.” They went to church on Sunday, were not afraid to have a drink or two on Saturday night, and knew how to have and to give others a good time. So I was born into a house with a chartreuse wall, grew up in one hung with paintings from artist friends, and socialized with the children of the same doctors and lawyers and educators and government workers and postmen and middle managers and small-business owners.
That was the day-to-day, but education was the key: the way up the ladder to success. As their only child and the vessel into which they poured all of their aspirational desires, I had to have what they perceived of as the best. The nursery school in question and the limousine were only the beginning. It would ramp up seriously with my next school, which would mold me and influence me for the rest of my life: the United Nations International School.
• • •
The United Nations International School combined my father’s aspirations and my mother’s practicality. It was in Parkway Village on the way to my mother’s job at Queens College, and she organized after-school childcare with a classmate’s mother who had been recently widowed. The school had been formally organized only a few years prior, and each year there was talk of moving to a “new school” as the fledgling institution added another grade to stretch for the needs of the original class that was two grades ahead of me. UNIS, as the school became known, was my home away from home for the next ten years of my life.
UNIS became the crucible in which I was forged. My classmates in what was essentially an experiment in international understanding were the children of mid- to upper-level diplomats. They went on home leave every other summer and returned with tales of traveling on the Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth I, and I began to dream and push my parents into an even wider world than that of our Queens house. My school friends told tales of Calcutta and Cairo and London and Paris at birthday parties. At their homes, I sat on the floor and watched The World of Apu by Satyajit Ray and Danny Kaye in Hans Christian Andersen flickering on rented screens. I sang “Frère Jacques” along with “Oranges and Lemons.” I ate curries and goulashes and steak and kidney pies, as well as the 1950s-era well-balanced foods that my former dietitian mother cooked: meatloaf, salmon croquettes, lamb stew, and the occasional newfangled turkey TV dinner as a treat. My friends were named Shikha and Danuta and Eluned, as well as Jennifer and Susan and Charles and Ruth. In the beginning, I was the only Black person in my class and one of the few in the school, along with Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph Bunche’s son in a grade above me. That didn’t seem to matter to anyone and certainly not to me. What bothered me more was that I was an American in a world where other cultures seemed so much more exotic and to have a deeper and older history. UNIS began my search for a place in the world and left me with a sense of being a permanent outsider: neither fish nor fowl. But it gave me a fluency in the French language, a lifelong love of French culture, and a general cultural fluidity that amazes others and has stood me in good stead ever since.
It wasn’t all aspiration; my paternal grandmother lived in the South Jamaica projects and went to a happy-clappy/holy roller church. Daddy insisted that I spend some time with her as well, and I grew up also knowing the sound shoes made as they galloped up the metal treads of the cement steps and what it’s like to be in a hallway where you can smell everyone’s dinner and recognize your own, and go to a church where the Sunday rejoicing can take you on a journey. My grandmother was grand fun but basic: children should play with other children. She insisted that I go downstairs and outside to the playground, where the other kids and I looked at one another as though we came from alien planets. In fact, we did. I didn’t understand them, and they certainly didn’t understand me with my books and my French songs and English rhymes any more than if I’d dropped from the moon. But we tried to bond, over Grandma’s Kool-Aid with lemons cut up in it, and I learned that if the cement barrels didn’t smell too much like pee, they were a cool place to sit and hide with a book during the hot summer. I adjusted and learned to function there as well.
My checkered academic career then followed a pendulum swing of schools determined by whether I could align my parents with my desires or at least get one of them as an ally. The next battle I won: it allowed me to bypass Brooklyn’s Packer Collegiate Institute or a similar ritzy East Side private school and go to the public High School of Performing Arts of Fame fame. From the cloistered halls of UNIS, where girls spent time with other girls and guys did Lord knows what, it was on to 120 West Forty-sixth Street, on the subway no less, and a total immersion baptism into the world of the arts.
PA, as we affectionately called Performing Arts, was my goal. I went long before the film Fame appeared and had to convince my parents that what had not too many years prior been Metropolitan Vocational High School (vocational being a term that raised high anxiety levels in my father) would allow me to go to a good four-year college. There was never any question about that. I’d always known that I had a theatrical bent, I was always front and center in the pageants and recitals at UNIS, and PA would allow me to indulge my dreams of becoming an actress. Entry to Performing Arts was based on audition, and so I worked and crafted audition pieces for all three departments: music, dance, and drama. I was determined to get in. The music part wasn’t difficult; I’d had years of piano lessons and had been accepted to the High School of Music and Arts. I made the second set of auditions. Dance and drama were more challenging. I’d had dance lessons but had long since given them up. But no worries: my mother sewed a black sock into the crotch of my outgrown leotard and off I went, twisting and gyrating to music that I’ve mercifully forgotten. Didn’t make it there. For the drama audition, I concocted an audition piece, a monologue from a play that we’d done at UNIS, though the small problem was that I’d played the emperor of China. I went into the room in front of the audition panel, reeled off my monologue, which began, “The emperor of China is Chinese,” and answered their questions. Somehow someone saw something. Talent? A glimmer of presence? Who knows? I was accepted into the drama department, skipping ninth grade and entering high school at age thirteen. When in sophomore biology class I sat next to a young man sporting full Cleopatra-style turquoise eye makeup, I knew that my UNIS days had ended.
High school was a bohemian interlude after the European curricular stringencies of UNIS. We had academics for half the day and classes like voice and diction, dance, makeup, and scene preparation for the other half. It was immediately determined that I would never be an ingenue; I was too tall and had too deep a voice and too large a personality to be meek and mild or cute and cuddly. Instead I was the nurse in Romeo and Juliet, Catherine Creek in The Grass Harp, and the mother in Raisin in the Sun, all interesting casting for one who was a scant sixteen at graduation. My UNIS academics stood me in good stead, so I concentrated on the theater courses and on not getting sent back to Andrew Jackson, my local high school, at the twice-yearly project time. As senior year approached, it became time to think of colleges. I was not going to get my way twice, and so colleges that offered a theater major were off the list drawn up by my father.
• • •
Before we got into the round of college applications and visits, we took the summer off and finally made the trip to Europe that I’d dreamed about since hearing the tales of their trips from my UNIS classmates. It was the summer of 1963. My parents had decided that it was time for the Harris family to take the Grand Tour. In the early 1960s, that trip to Europe was, even for Black families, a home-going adventure. Roots had yet to Africanize us all. This was particularly true for bourgeois folks like mine for whom Europe was considered the epicenter of culture. We’d tried to go once before, but my father spotted an ad for a place on Martha’s Vineyard, and my mother used the deposit for what would have been an early
voyage of the SS France for the down payment, which allowed us to become summer-home owners, placing us yet another step up the social ladder. This time it was for real. Our month-long trip would celebrate my parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary and my sixteenth birthday. Both occurred the following year, but as that summer would precede my college freshman year, 1963 was the time.
We were doing it right with a transatlantic crossing by ship. (Little did we think of the irony of that one.) Arrangements had been made for passage and our cabin booked. The crossing on the German TS Bremen was the full megillah: the covered gangway and departure from a pier in Manhattan complete with streamers and confetti, foghorns blowing, tugboats, and the Statue of Liberty disappearing behind us. The clocks changed one hour every day to slowly acclimatize us to the time changes, and a heaping bounty of food was served five times a day: breakfast, lunch, tea, dinner, and midnight snacks. It was deck chairs, bouillon, stewards, and more. And we easily settled into a companionable routine. Then it was London (this was, after all, the Grand Tour). We saw the queen’s coach entering the stables from out hotel room window and journeyed to Saffron Walden, a small market town, to meet a friend from UNIS who was in boarding school there . . . and then it was PARIS!
Paris, la ville lumière, was a major moment for me. UNIS had given me a native command of French, as well as a lifelong case of galloping Francophilia. The European trip was one that I’d been waiting for since my first trip to the observation deck at Idlewild Airport at age five. I’d vowed then to bring a suitcase on my next visit, naively thinking that was all that was necessary for travel. Our trip was transformational, and I was finally in the Europe spoken of by my classmates. I’d finally made it: I was in France!
We had arrived in Paris, the international capital of all things elegant and luxurious. My father seemed to little notice and care even less. Europe on Five Dollars a Day firmly clutched in hand, he indulged his lifelong love for real estate and his nosiness and desire to peek in at the lives of others. He forced-marched us Right Bank, Left Bank, and all around the town on a tour of the city’s small, inexpensive hotels. For what seemed like hours, my mother and I dutifully followed the newly purchased green canvas bag he’d slung over his shoulders. Finally, he’d settled on a place near the Place de la République in the oh-so-unchic, off-the-beaten-path eleventh arrondissement that smelled of furniture polish and disinfectant. We thoroughly examined the hotel, met the proprietress (an overworked lady named Elizabeth who spent her days doing the polishing and scrubbing that gave the place its distinctive fragrance), checked in, unpacked our too-large suitcases, stowed the toilet paper that we’d been told was essential for our enjoyment of the trip, and headed out to explore.
The Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and the Champs Elysées were miles away in more touristic parts of the city and we’d see them later on our Five Dollars a Day–recommended Cityrama tour. However, on our first evening in the City of Light, we strolled down streets of our community entranced by signs that cemented the neighborhood feel of the arrondissement. The butcher, the baker, and the breadmaker’s shops all brought back the French lessons that I’d taken since first grade (le boucher, le patissier, le boulanger).
The Place de la République was one of the centers of the quartiers populaires—the Parisian neighborhoods that were home to many of the working-class Parisians who kept the city flowing. In the 1960s, it remained thoroughly proletarian. The buildings were gray with grime; the work to clean them up had been initiated in 1962 and not yet made its way to this section of town. I vividly remember watching the cafés and brasseries that surrounded the Place de la République, intrigued by the liveliness of the street life. The trip that would mark the coming of age of my oh-so-nuclear family: our discoveries about ourselves, our familial relationships, and the Europe that we’d explored together. I was becoming my own person.
• • •
That fall it was back to school, but with all of the intensity of senior year and college looming large on the horizon, it was time to get serious. My father virtually committed Lovejoy’s College Guide to memory and could spout school statistics as fluently as other men reeled off batting averages. I wanted to go to Sarah Lawrence and major in theater; however, it was Bryn Mawr, which decidedly had no theater major. As they had with his own high school, aesthetics played a role. No other school I visited could match the beauty of Bryn Mawr: the gothic-style stone buildings, archways, cloisters, and towers. In spring it was breathtakingly beautiful with flowering trees and rolling greens, and the academic pedigree was unbeatable. The small glitch was that they were said to require Latin as a part of their entry requirements. I certainly had taken Latin, but at UNIS. No matter, my determined mother marched into the guidance office, found a way to enter that on my transcript, and voilà: the next September, I was sitting in the auditorium listening to President Katharine McBride tell entering freshmen and their families that when they graduated, Bryn Mawr girls could write about anything. I certainly couldn’t then and was a less-than-stellar student, squeaking along in everything except French, which I majored in. I did excel in making friends and in fitting in, and unlike many of the other scholarship members of my class, Black and White, amazed my classmates from far more patrician backgrounds with my knowledge of and participation in social matters ranging from private schools (UNIS) to cotillions (I was “presented to society” by the New York Girlfriends at the Waldorf Astoria in New York my freshman year) to summer addresses (that house on Martha’s Vineyard). I even managed to circumvent things slightly and discovered a way to participate in college theater. As a French major, I took a junior year abroad, mirabile visu with Sarah Lawrence, which had been my first choice for college.
The class of 1968 was a pivot class. The Bryn Mawr that we entered harkened back to an earlier time and was a genteel white institution in which Black maids and porters served meals at table and sang spirituals at Christmastime in the dining halls. It was a school where academic gowns were worn to freshman convocation and a tea set was a requirement listed in the freshmen handbook. There were hall porters who led students back to dorms with lanterns after dark and sign-out books and something called in loco parentis. But when I entered in the fall of 1964, the world was changing. Skirts and fists were going up, politics were front and center, and a new world order was emerging. We came clean for Gene (McCarthy); I manned phone banks. We protested against the war in Vietnam, and I led the chorus: “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today!” We started a chapter on campus for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and when Whitney Young, the head of the Urban League and a fellow classmate’s father, became our graduation speaker, we didn’t think he was nearly radical enough.
It was a time of upheaval. President Kennedy had been assassinated during my senior year in high school, and my college years were fraught with assassinations: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964; Malcom X in 1965; Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968; and just after graduation, Robert Kennedy in June of the same year. In the four years that marked my college career, the civil rights movement made momentous changes in the world that I was about to enter. Other changes had taken place as well, both light and weighty, ranging from the futuristic vision of the 1964 New York World’s Fair that gave us “It’s a Small World After All!” to the Vietnam War and LBJ. Even my time in France announced the beginning of what would become known simply as les événements—the youth revolution of ’68. That changed France forever.
I moved through it all. My academic finishing was a graduate year in France, this time in Nancy, a provincial capital that paled next to Paris, where I longed to be. It netted me a license ès lettres and cast my Francophilia in cement. When I returned to New York at the end of the summer of 1969, I knew that I had to get a J.O.B. That, too, had been in the plans.
• • •
My mother was at Queens College, and she knew about a new program. It was called the S
EEK Program—an acronym for Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge, with the oh-so-politically-phrased motto “Learn to Struggle/Struggle to Learn.” It appealed to my growing sense of revolutionary awareness and had a better-paying full-time lecturer position than the teaching assistantship that had been offered when I graduated from college. Most important, it was a program designed to funnel African American and Hispanic (here read “Puerto Rican”) students into the City University system. It had been offered to me before I left for the graduate year in France and had been promised to remain mine during my studies. The director of faculty and curriculum of the burgeoning program was named Sam Floyd.
I returned from my graduate year, started teaching in the fall of 1969, and immediately began to immerse myself in the world of New York City that I was discovering anew after four years away at college and a graduate year abroad. At first, dutiful daughter to the end, I remained at home. But gradually the lure of Manhattan and the bright lights of what folks from the outer boroughs still referred to as “The City” beckoned. It was time to move. Mindful of the commute to the college and perhaps listening to some unknown inner compass, I traced neighborhoods on the subway lines and decided on Greenwich Village, where I was attending classes toward my doctorate at New York University’s nascent Tisch School of the Arts in Performance Studies. I knew no one in the Village and had to threaten the landlord with a racial discrimination suit to get a one-bedroom in what my father referred to as an old-line tenement that had just been renovated with an eye to the area’s gentrifying. It was a heady time: friends from high school had also returned to the city from their various college sojourns and we reconnected. The Black Arts Movement was growing and the arts were flourishing. Things seemed possible.
My Soul Looks Back Page 3