Friends: A Love Story

by Angela Bassett

  Over that first year or so that we lived on Appoline Street the climate began to change. The peer pressure shifted from being about school, good grades and running fast, to what you were wearing and how well you could fight. You had to fight to defend yourself and your reputation. Now, it wasn’t like today, where if someone is bullied, they might turn around and say, “I’m gonna kill you,” and mean it. It was more like, “I’m gonna get my cousin and he’ll beat you up,” or “I’m gonna get you after school,” and the whole school knew, gathered around and almost forced you to fight.

  When we played, we played hard! Pom-pom one-hand touch gave way to pom-pom two-hand touch and finally to pom-pom tackle. In pom-pom two-hand touch you had to touch the person solidly with both hands at the same time. If you touched them with one and then the other, that was considered pitty-pat, and pitty-pat didn’t count. Of course that led to a lot of arguments!

  “That was pitty-pat!”

  “No, I touched you two-hands solid!”

  “No, you didn’t!”

  “Yes, I did!!!”

  To make sure you didn’t pitty-pat, you had to hit somebody solid and might even push them over. And if someone called, “pom-pom tackle,” hey, you just had to do it. You had to tackle somebody on the gravel, which, of course, my mother hated because it would tear up my clothes. Needless to say, all the pushing and tackling led to a lot of altercations.

  Fighting over pom-pom was one thing, but during the first semester of fourth grade, I was peer-pressured into fighting in school. Fred, a friend who was also my nemesis, called me out one day in homeroom. I can’t remember what he said, but they were definitely fighting words.

  The entire class said, “Oooooh!”

  I told him, “You can’t call me that!”

  He said, “I did!”

  The whole class was asking, “Whatcha gonna do, Court?”

  I remember the teacher saying, “Courtney, don’t you get up!”

  But I had been called out. I had to get up for my reputation’s sake. Next thing I knew, we were fighting and getting sent to the principal’s office. Now, this was back in the days when there was still discipline in the schools. Teachers could spank kids, and all the paddles were different thicknesses and had different names. But there was no abuse. You’d get paddled on your hands or your bottom at school, then get a spanking when you got home for doing wrong in school. Back then, parents accepted that if the teacher paddled you, you must have done wrong. And they were right; we were always trying to get away with something. I know that if those paddles were not there we would have overrun those teachers. For that incident I got paddled and suspended for three days.

  Now, when I got in trouble for fighting in class, my parents knew that something was really wrong. I was “Courtney-Boy,” as my mother called me. I was a nice kid and well behaved. I was not a person who fought—that was not like me at all. And worse than the fact that I fought at all was that I fought in class. My parents went down to school and had a conference with the teacher about what had gone down. Then they came home and had their powwow with each other. They came to the conclusion that they had to get us out of that school. If they didn’t, they knew that something was going to go down that would be out of their control.

  Cec and I got wind of the fact that they were thinking about putting us in a different school and we were going to run away. We packed our bags and hid them under our beds. As usual, our parents scooped us; somehow they knew what was going on. While we slept, they pulled our bags out of their hiding places and put our clothes away. The next morning we were on our way to a brand-new school—a Catholic school called Mother of Our Savior. Because it was a Catholic school, my parents would have to pay tuition. It wasn’t cheap and they couldn’t afford it but they figured out a way, although it increased their financial stress. The world Cecilie and I lived in changed overnight. This was our first experience at a mostly white school, an environment I would remain in for high school, college and grad school.

  I finished out grade school at Mother of Our Savior, followed by St. Mary of Redford for middle school. I did well academically at both places and although they were basically all white, my experiences were, for the most part, uneventful. I had my white friends at school and my black friends at home—except for one black girl at school named Marie Hollis. Boy, did I have a schoolboy crush on Marie! I remember pining over her. One day I slipped a note in her math book and waited anxiously to see if she liked me, too. Unfortunately, she didn’t. But we ended up being good friends. I learned that you can’t make somebody like you; some relationships are just meant to be what they are.

  On weekends and over the summers I continued to hang out at the Boys’ Club. I went to Boys’ Club camp and even became a youth counselor. The adult counselor, Mr. George Browne, was a teacher and the track coach at a prestigious and expensive private school called Detroit Country Day School. One day he told my father, “Your son is pretty smart. He should apply for a scholarship.” I did, was accepted and got a partial scholarship. My father delivered the surprise.

  “It’s going to be a sacrifice but you’re going to Country Day,” he told me in the basement just before school began.

  I was very excited! Ever since I had seen the campus I had wanted to go there. Country Day was located in the suburbs. The campus was huge to me. There were a lot of fields, it was open and the people were nice. They had glass backboards on their basketball court, which was a big deal back then to a little jock like me. And the fact that I now would have to travel twenty miles to school each day had activated the “Henry the Explorer” in me. As I got older my world got a little larger, and I would explore my neighborhood on my iridescent yellow, single-speed bike with the banana seat.

  Now that my world would include a school located twenty miles away, I was intrigued about the route out there. Riding in the car with my parents, I observed that the service road along the highway went all the way out to the suburbs. It made me want to explore on my bike. I couldn’t ride on the freeway but I could take the service road, I thought. That summer between middle school and high school I went exploring. School was out, so there was no big hurry. When I’d come to a place that was unfamiliar, I’d say, “Hmm, how am I going to do this? Well, I can go over there…” I didn’t read maps; I plotted it until I figured it out. Once football practice began in August, I knew how to ride my bike to school. My parents said, “Call us when you get there, boy.” Thinking back on it, they were pretty brave. They could have said, “Stay in the neighborhood.” Once school started, my parents paid a student who drove to take me to school. When I turned sixteen they handed down our little clunker station wagon to me and I had my first car and my freedom!

  On top of exploring the route to Country Day, while I was a teenager I explored all of Detroit. I became a bike-riding fool! I’m still a bike-riding fool today. I’d tell my parents where I was going and what route I was going to take. Then I’d pack a lunch, get on my bike and call them when I got there. They let me ride around the whole city, which is pretty amazing. I guess they knew that I liked to explore and wasn’t gonna do nothing—I just wanted to ride around. It was pretty dangerous, though. I always stayed on the sidewalk but I could have gotten hit by a car or truck—and it wasn’t like there were cell phones back then.

  Looking back on it, I realize that “Henry the Explorer” changed my life. “Henry” was huge to me because it was all about dreaming. And letting me explore the world around me was a wonderful gift my parents gave me. The things I discovered as I explored reinforced the things they were telling me about how whatever I could see in my mind, I could be. It also meant that when I could, I would be leaving Detroit.

  If ever there was a kid who was excited about going to a high school, it was me. I was really excited and thankful that my parents were allowing me to go to there. I loved going to school at Country Day because there were all these great classes and a lot of activities and there was no peer pressure about cloth
es or fighting. I became a Country Day boy—I took advantage of everything! Academically, I was a B/B+ student. I struggled with math and science because my Catholic-school curriculum hadn’t been as rigorous. But the teachers tutored me and didn’t abandon me and made learning fun and exciting. And by my junior year I got it and ended up with an A in chemistry, my most difficult subject.

  On top of my academics, I played football, basketball and ran track. Eventually, I captained all three teams and became three-sport All State. Mr. Browne, the track coach who had been my boys’ club counselor, became a good friend and mentor and grew very close to my mom and dad. When I was a freshman I was given the chance to make an announcement about a tennis tournament. I had never heard or seen foreign names like Pancho Gonzalez before, and the fact I couldn’t pronounce the names became a funny thing to everyone. After that tournament, I started reading the homeroom announcements. I did lunchtime skits and parodies of teachers with the other kids. I did student council, I sang in the choir—I did everything you could volunteer for. I did so many things when I was at Country Day that my parents, who came to practically every event—my dad often left work early—practically lived at the school.

  Compared to the white kids with their precise way of speaking, when I arrived at Country Day I guess I talked kind of “country.” But the more I spoke in public at school, my diction, English and vocabulary improved. I stopped sounding as country, but after being around so many white kids for so long, I started getting a little confused. After a while my sister asked, “Courtney, why do you talk ‘white’?”

  “What?”

  I didn’t understand what she was talking about. “I don’t talk ‘white’!” I’d tell her.

  It was a confusing time, and I could have used a little assistance from my dad to help me with these very different worlds I was navigating. Cecilie went to Catholic school with white kids for a few years, then went to Cass Tech, the best public high school in Detroit and an integrated, although mostly black, environment. She had a big Afro, was all about black power and wore POW bracelets. I wore a shirt and tie to school. I had been a black boy in white schools since the fourth grade. Yet I lived around black folks. Nobody had talked to me about how to hold on to my sense of myself as a black child immersed in a world of white folks. Nobody had ever asked me, “Courtney, how do you feel going to an all-white school?” I was a child. It was just, “This is where you’re going to school.” Back then integration was a big thing and our parents wanted us to go to integrated schools. And black parents weren’t talking to kids about that kind of stuff—how to be a black kid in a “white” world—least of all my father, given his background.

  So there I was in the classroom every day, dealing with being the only black kid. I had no one to talk to about how I felt about it, nor did I know that it was even something we could have been talking about. My parents had raised me with such love and confidence that wherever I was, I liked everyone and everyone liked me. It wasn’t until I got older that I began to have a real hard time dealing with the feeling that I wasn’t wanted.

  My black friends with wealthy black parents who were Country Day “lifers” didn’t share my enthusiasm for the school. They thought, “I don’t know why Courtney is doing all those things. I’m just trying to finish, I’m tired of Country Day.” I didn’t understand why they weren’t into it. But they had been there forever and knew the negative kinds of things that were going down and could go down behind the scenes.

  It wasn’t until my senior year that I got a taste of what they may have been talking about. I had been playing three sports for three years and I was exhausted. I wanted to play football, prepare for and take the SATs, then run track. When I announced that I was not going to play basketball for my senior year, word got all the way to the headmaster of the school. He called me into his office.

  “Courtney, I hear you’re not going to play basketball this year,” he said to me.

  “No, I’m going to rest and focus on my studies and get ready for track.”

  “Well, Courtney, we want you to play,” he responded.

  “But I don’t want to play,” I told him.

  “We want you to play.”

  “But I don’t want to play.”

  “Courtney, we want you to play.”

  “Well what if I don’t play?” I asked.

  “We will revoke your scholarship,” he said as he stared at me over the top of his bifocals.

  “What do you mean?!”

  “We will revoke your scholarship if you don’t play.”

  “I didn’t know I had an athletic scholarship.”

  “Well, you do.”

  I walked out of the office in shock. I had made Country Day my whole life—I was a Country Day boy! Now the headmaster was trying to intimidate me. When I told my parents what had happened they couldn’t believe it. They thought I had a needs-based scholarship, too. The headmaster may have been lying—I don’t know. My family had a powwow. We probably could have pushed it but it was 1977 and my parents were hard-pressed to pay what they were paying. We didn’t want to risk what could happen if the school took any money away from us. We agreed that we’d put the incident behind us and I’d suck it up and play. Needless to say, it was a long season. On top of that, our team wasn’t very good. But I didn’t get an attitude—I played and played hard.

  That year I had a girlfriend, Kristin. Because there were very few black students, we had known each other the whole time. But all of a sudden during senior year it was different. “Wow, it’s you!” Kristin and I both lived in Detroit but didn’t see each other outside of school. We practically lived at Country Day; we were both there for fifteen hours a day. I would see her during the school day, when we were studying, when she would come by practice and at Country Day parties. We were tight. This was when I first learned that sometimes when the timing is right a friendship can turn into a love relationship.

  I kept doing my thing and keeping my eye on the sparrow—I had decided I was going to Harvard. My mother’s brother Lee had graduated from Harvard back when I was eleven. That’s when I decided I wanted to go there. Now, I didn’t know anything about Harvard—Uncle Lee had gone there so I wanted to go there. But as far as Country Day was concerned, I decided, “Y’all can try to do to me what you think you’re going to do. I’m going to Harvard and I’m not letting anything get in my way.”

  Neither my college counselor, nor the teacher who was the Harvard rep at Country Day, thought I would get into Harvard. He focused on helping the white kids. My counselor tried to steer me toward applying to smaller, less prestigious schools. The lack of confidence they had in me really did not make me question myself. I applied to Harvard, Brown, Northwestern, University of Pennsylvania and Michigan, even though my counselor told me I had a very low chance of getting into any of them due to my test scores. But as the acceptance deadline loomed, I did play with the idea of applying to one or two “safety schools.” That April, my mother called me at school to tell me that an envelope from Harvard was waiting at the house. That same day there was a big invitational track meet after school. And all of a sudden the Harvard rep was acting nice to me. He was handing out the first-place tabs for the preliminary, semis and final races (of course I was coming in first in my heats of the hurdles). That’s how I knew I had gotten in. I was admitted to every school I applied to. We talked about it as a family. I got more financial aid from Brown than Harvard. But my mother’s people were in Boston. My parents felt more comfortable with me going there. Once again, even though it would cause strain, they decided they would make the sacrifice. Kristin was going to Swarthmore, outside of Philadelphia. We decided we would wait for each other. My dad told me, “Courtney, that’s going to be tough; you’re going to college now. But do your thing.”

  After all my hard work, solid academic achievement and school spirit, at graduation I got an incredible surprise: I was awarded the Headmaster’s Cup, the highest honor a Country Day student could rece
ive! Everyone stood up and clapped for me. My mother told me later that my father had been in tears. That summer I got a little parchment with my name written in calligraphy in different colors, saying I’d been admitted to Radcliffe, Harvard’s former sister school for women—someone obviously thought that with the name Courtney I was a girl! Later they sent the parchment for Harvard. I got them framed and still have both.

  Chapter 3

  In My Element

  That summer of 1976, I visited Aunt Golden and Uncle Grover in North Carolina then she took me to Yale and deposited me there. That was the first time I had seen the campus. Before classes started I attended the two-week preregistration orientation program for minority students, so I had friends and knew my way around the campus before everyone else invaded. I definitely felt intimidated when the other students arrived, though not as much as I might have. When I heard where these other kids had gone to school—prep schools like Andover and Exeter—I started thinking again that they were smarter. Everybody seemed to have taken years of ballet and flute and piano. They were all so talented and said they were majoring in subjects like premed and political science. I was the only person thinking about being a drama major, and I was fighting that at the time. I remember thinking, Well, they say schools in the North are better than the schools in the South. But then I’d see how the kids acted and say, “But they don’t seem to have much going on in the common-sense department.”

  I had three white roommates. They were nice enough. The young woman who shared my bunk bed was from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I remember thinking they washed their hair a lot. And I had to get used to the whole climate thing—I didn’t know anything about layering. I remember freezing, and lying on top of the radiator and waiting for that tick, tick, tick as it warmed up. When I bought boots, I got the wrong kind. Everybody kidded me as I trudged through the snow in my yellow rain galoshes. For my work-study job I washed dishes in the cafeteria and tutored kids from the community in math and English. I didn’t have much money and Mom didn’t have any money to send me, yet I came home every Christmas. One time I brought my roommate Deedee with me. Her mother had passed away while we were in school, so I said, “Come on, Deedee, and come home with me!” After we bought our tickets we only had seven dollars between us.