As I headed into my fourth grade of elementary school, Esther and her fellow teachers were robust in their praise of my development thus far, pointing out how supple my feet were, how natural my arch and turnout were, and they were effusive over my flexibility, which allowed me to do a ninety-degree arabesque. As the result of what would total less than a year during which I was graced with a mentor named Esther Brooks, I would be given the means to attend the Cambridge School of Ballet on full scholarship for most of the next eight years, leaving me with the undisputable belief that, as Henry Adams wrote, “A teacher affects eternity.”
My memories of staying with Uncle Richie and Aunt Laura in their home in Dorchester span different periods that began that first summer, along with a later stay during most of a school year. Adjustment to an atmosphere that was so different from Forest Edge wasn’t easy, although I tried not to forget the generosity the family of four—including their two younger daughters, Brenda and Sheila—extended to me.
The Richard Armstead home at 23 Page Street, built in the 1940s, was a clapboard painted a shiny brown with yellow trim. The downstairs level of the house was a rental, while the upstairs was where we lived. Its most prominent feature was a balcony, which I thought was very rich at the time. I slept on the pullout couch in the living room during that summer and then later when I stayed for a school year.
While Uncle Richie kept busy with his work on the police force, Aunt Laura meticulously managed to balance her full-time work as a public school teacher with being a mother of two and maintaining a most orderly home, in addition to the attention she gave to her perfect appearance and bearing. Though I didn’t always like this kind of regimentation, I didn’t dare challenge the order of things. If Aunt Laura insisted that I clean the kitchen chairs with a toothbrush to get all the crumbs out of the seams, I did it. Everything she did had a purpose.
That drive had been bequeathed to Laura by a long line of women, most directly by her mother, Charlotte Louise Moore Cook Haywood, who was born in 1915 in Newton, Massachusetts. An avid reader, Charlotte bought loads of used books and encouraged Laura to read as well. Reading enabled Laura, an only child, to escape and to connect with the characters she read about, and through them, she too took a serious interest in many pursuits: skating, tennis, swimming, dance, and piano, studying at the New England Conservatory of Music. Laura was further buoyed by her mother’s constant praise of her success as a student, and then reminded her of what she could accomplish if she continued to gain knowledge. One of Laura’s fondest memories that she shared with me was of the time her mother took her to a concert performance of the great contralto Marian Anderson. Afterward, her mother took her backstage to meet the legendary artist—a life-changing event.
Above all, Charlotte believed that hard work was for the greater good of the family’s future, and she passed that philosophy on to her daughter, Laura, who, by her example, reinforced that belief in me. Charlotte’s numerous jobs included cleaning houses, working as an elevator operator and at the BF Goodrich rubber factory for more than twenty-five years, operating an army forklift, and sorting mail for the United States Post Office for twenty-two years. Moreover, she was one of West Newton’s first black female entrepreneurs, having owned and managed a small variety store in the 1950s. She retired at the age of seventy-five, a pillar of strength and determination. Laura credited her mother as her first and best teacher in preparing her for her role as an educator. With a bachelor’s degree in education, Laura accepted her first teaching position in 1958. She went on to teach and influence her own children and hundreds more during the forty-three-year teaching career that followed.
Aunt Laura believed strongly in setting, accomplishing, and maintaining goals not only for herself, but for any child who came into her life. She also believed that when there was an opportunity to cultivate a child’s interests and ambition, such as mine in classical ballet, that opportunity must be acted upon at once. As a child I felt that Aunt Laura was unemotional and no-nonsense, but I later understood the gift that she passed on to me from her own lineage was how to be an independent, hardworking career woman.
Sometimes the lesson is held in a toothbrush: to be thorough, to turn over every stone, to persevere until the last crumb has been wiped away. Aunt Laura likewise taught me the power of paying attention to detail. She unapologetically demonstrated that a person’s loving care doesn’t always show itself in an embrace.
Looking back, I have come to appreciate the honesty of that kind of love and those invaluable lessons that Aunt Laura passed on to me. As a nine-year-old, however, I had to work very hard to keep a stiff upper lip whenever I was hurting. Unfortunately, this set up a pattern of holding in and hiding feelings. Instead of voicing fears and legitimate concerns, I learned to keep them secret.
Not long into my stay in Dorchester, I first experienced a physical symptom that had no earthly explanation, something I felt that I could tell no one about. No one. Not Uncle Richie, not Aunt Laura, not Esther Brooks or any of the teaching staff, not even Agatha. It seemed like a fluke the first time it happened, without warning or cause, when I noticed that my hands suddenly became excessively moist with perspiration. I tried wiping them on my clothes, but that only exasperated my circumstance. When it happened a few weeks later, and then a week or so after that, I knew this wasn’t random. Why was it happening? Was I being punished for having a bad thought? Was it a form of stigmata? Was it connected to being born out of wedlock?
If only I had confided in someone who might have helped me search for an explanation, I might have warded off the undercurrent of thinking there was something wrong with me being a foster child.
Instead, I carried this heavy burden of a secret and soldiered on, only seeking refuge in prayer in the confessional, where I sought out forgiveness through contrition.
In the fall, to my immense relief, Agatha decided to move to Roxbury with my sisters for the school year. She was now in her late sixties and the Maine winters were becoming much too harsh for her. In planning for her later years, she had held on to the brownstone in Roxbury—where she had lived before moving to Forest Edge full-time—so this was more of a return to a previous home that it was a move to someplace new.
Agatha’s Roxbury brownstone at 48 Burrell Street was adjacent to a burnt-out brownstone full of dumped trash and oversized mice. Ma tried to rid us of the threat of vermin by catching them and drowning them in Mason jars filled with scalding water—a sight that horrified me. Other than the unfortunate decline of what had once been an up-and-coming neighborhood, being reunited with Agatha was all that I really cared about.
This move to Roxbury, in fact, was also a way of continuing to honor the wishes of our mother, Dorothy, who never stopped in her valiant campaign for her daughters to be together. Combined with the challenges of snow and freezing temperatures at Forest Edge, this was Agatha’s public reason for coming to Roxbury, but I suspected the main factor in her decision was that she missed me as much as I missed her.
Roxbury was formerly known as “Rocksbury” for its plentiful supply of puddingstone, a combination of glacial debris and volcanic lava. English colonists established “Rocksbury” in 1630 as one of seven villages in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In the 1940s and 1950s, Roxbury became home to thousands of African Americans who migrated from the South to escape Jim Crow. They were now included in the melting pot that already consisted of Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants. Once home to Fredrick Douglass, Malcolm X, and Simon Willard, and just three miles south of Boston, the “Bury” offered three centuries of impressive historical buildings and landmarks.
Sadly, the same Roxbury that had been the center of important industrial trade and farming, a place that had boasted baroque and Renaissance revival architecture and that had once claimed Franklin Park, designed by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, had met with a downturn in the 1960s with increasing poverty and social unrest.
On the streets in the fall of 1968, it was ev
ident that the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had left everyone shell-shocked, with race riots taking their toll on the poorest neighborhoods, and anger over Vietnam, drugs, crime, and violence spreading.
In this atmosphere, Agatha was pleased to find the haven of St. Patrick’s Grammar School, which was within walking distance from her brownstone on a well-kept block. She felt it was important that Sheree, Lori, and I receive the benefits of a private school education, and she made sure that we followed the safest route to school and back. In my case, Agatha was careful to plan the most secure commute for me from St. Patrick’s to Cambridge by bus, and two trains and then home again after classes.
I regularly turned down rides from parents of ballet classmates who lived in better parts of Boston, although in the winter I sometimes couldn’t resist.
“Thank you,” I would gratefully say as we approached an attractive burgundy three-story home on my street, “you can drop me off here,” claiming it as my own home. Quickly stepping out onto the dimly lit sidewalk, waving until the car was out of sight, I ran for my life down the middle of the street until I was safe inside our apartment at 48 Burrell Street.
Besides being reunited with Agatha and studying three afternoons a week at the Cambridge School of Ballet, I had a growing social life and a promising academic fourth-grade year at St. Patrick’s. Even though the nuns tended to be stricter than my teachers at West Lebanon Elementary School, they were generally kind and they were also interesting personalities.
Early in the school year, Sister Catherine Williams corrected me about an assignment while poking me in the chest as her beady eyes peered into mine, which I’m sure were wide with terror. The habit she wore exaggerated the humiliation of being singled out, in front of the whole class, for doing something differently. Was this how school was going to be in the big city? It took great effort to keep the lump in my throat from rising above the bow tie that was attached to my Peter Pan collar.
There was another nun with untreated psoriasis that she constantly itched and scratched to the point of bleeding. One day when my new friend Lauren Turner and I were whispering in English class, I was reprimanded and given detention. After the final bell rang, I made my way to the detention room and was met by Sister Psoriasis. It was just the two of us that day.
Glumly, I sat there in silence, still unsure of how to tell time; I watched the light begin to fade, knowing that there was just one last bus that I could catch to get over to Cambridge to ballet class in time. Finally, before I had been dismissed, I stood up and began to collect my books and my plastic Capezio bag with my ballet clothes in it.
SISTER (scratching menacingly): And where do you think you’re going? Detention isn’t over.
ME: I have to get to ballet class.
SISTER: Oh, no. You’re not going anywhere. Sit down!
“I can’t be late or I’ll have to sit out the whole class,” I said defiantly and stepped toward the door.
Suddenly she ran toward me and I picked up my pace, racing down the hall. Terrified, I outpaced her, running down the stairs, taking two steps at a time. Becoming winded, the red-faced nun stopped and leaned over the banister, screaming at me as I dashed toward the exit.
SISTER: Why can’t you be like all the other girls?
ME: Because I’m not!
Other than that encounter, the teachers at St. Patrick’s were very supportive of my interest in dance. They encouraged me to perform in the spring recitals—in such standard fare as a baton twirler in Yankee Doodle Dandy, dancing to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” for the Veterans Day program, or as one of the daughters in Fiddler on the Roof.
All of my teachers were proud of an article about me and my participation in the Cambridge School of Ballet that appeared in the Christian Science Monitor—another Agatha Armstead coup that was as pragmatic as it was promotional. Rules were being bent to allow me to maintain my status as a ward of the State of Maine, even though I was living in Massachusetts part of the year; the feature story made everyone involved feel that the extra effort undertaken on my behalf was worth it.
To be featured in the Christian Science Monitor, an international newspaper, was incredible. But when Esther Brooks selected me to appear on television to demonstrate ballet fundamentals, I couldn’t believe something so impossible was happening to me. It was The CBS Newcomers show, starring Dave Garroway, a pioneer broadcaster of morning and late-night television shows. After starting on the NBC network in 1949 with Garroway at Large, three years later, on January 14, 1952, he was the founding host of the Today Show, one of the longest-airing morning news shows that is now celebrating more than fifty years on the air!
My first television appearance was a storybook experience. The lights, the camera, and, yes, the action left me spellbound. When the segment ended, Mr. Garroway applauded from his desk, ready to turn to the next guest, who was poised and sitting beside him. Still standing at the barre on the set, I stared at the exotically radiant woman. I had seen her before; she was pure Hollywood. She was Eartha Kitt! Later, backstage, she was with her daughter, a beautiful, blond-haired little girl. I thought how lucky they were to have each other.
Many of the nuns commended me for my appearance on the show, also noting that they were pleased by what dance had given me. Sister Francis Lillian, always kind and thoughtful, reminded me that no matter how hard I was working to also take time not to work so hard. “Enjoy life,” she recommended. “It passes by so quickly.”
After seeing the Garroway program, an elderly sister decided that she and a few fellow nuns would teach me the steps of Irish dancing, more specifically the Irish jig. Along with the rest of my class, I was delighted to watch these stoic nuns metamorphose into free, unrestricted beings. Slightly lifting their skirts to demonstrate, they jumped, laughed, snapped, clapped, scuffed, and stomped themselves into near hysteria. They were liberated and happy. Their energy was infectious, making me want to join right in; that is, until I heard the elderly nun say, “Please line up in girl boy order. We’ll rehearse the steps first, then I would like you all to link pinky fingers with your partner.”
My heart sank as I felt a tingling of wetness in the tips of my fingers. My dance partner was the “it” bad boy, Baron “Pudgy” Lewis, who wasn’t pudgy at all but skinny, and not the most forgiving kid on the block. I desperately wiped my hands against my navy uniform jumper, only increasing the involuntary sweating.
The elderly, bespectacled sister sat down at a tired upright piano as Pudgy reached his pinkie out to mine and we tentatively linked. Horrified, I could see the minute beads of sweat as they began to appear. I prayed that my partner would be distracted by the steps as the sister began to count with a spirited clap: “And a one, and a two, and a three…let’s go…Scrape-hop, scrape-hop, a one, two, three.”
Fully formed drops of sweat glistened on the tips of my fingers. Now I prayed the music would stop. The nun was in a personal frenzy, striking the keys, eyes closed, transported back to Ireland, oblivious to little brown children kicking up rosin with their worn shoes.
I could feel Pudgy’s cold stare. Collected perspiration created a tiny streamlet between our upright forearms. A drop hung at the tip of my elbow before falling onto the wooden floor, mixing with the rosin. All in slow motion. Splash. I looked straight ahead. The music stopped. Small fingers unlinked. I stole a glance.
It was a moment out of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, which I later read, copying down this quote:
…and at parting, gave him my hand. But oh, what a clammy hand his was!…As ghostly to the touch as to the sight!…It was such an uncomfortable hand, that, when I went to my room, it was still cold and wet upon my memory.
Smarting from embarrassment, I promised myself that I would never allow this to happen again. I decided to avoid close physical contact that might set off or expose my symptoms. Without being conscious of it, I somehow turned the idea of my affliction into a form of self-protection. But at a
n awful cost.
Whenever Agatha wintered in Roxbury, for periods that might only be a few months or extend into a year or longer, she didn’t think for a minute that because she was approaching seventy years old she shouldn’t be employed. To the contrary, she felt that the high urban cost of living for herself and her foster daughters warranted her return to the workforce. When she applied for a position with the Social Security office in Dudley Station, a notoriously rough neighborhood where all the commuting lines convened, they were honored to have her, especially as a senior citizen, as she brought much experience from an earlier position working for the State House in Boston.
Agatha walked in a cloak of white light, but traveling at night could be treacherous, and I worried about her coming home from work in the evening. Ma maintained that there were angels watching over us, even at Dudley Station.
That’s what she assured me whenever I had to go see the dentist there. Besides the neighborhood, I found the Warren Dental next door to the Dudley Station to be suspect anyway. Ma insisted we go there instead of Grover Dental at Northampton Street when the office announced they weren’t taking Medicaid anymore. Either way, no one wanted to deal with the insurance requirements provided by the various state agencies that had to be billed for my visit. They would tell me, a nine-year-old, “We sent your original to Augusta to be paid, but it was sent back ‘not approved.’” The standard response also included a note that informed the dental office, “Please find a copy of our dental fee schedule for the State of Maine children.” All of this transpired as the secretary inevitably became exasperated, along with the other patients waiting to be seen. Everyone knew my business, everyone knew I was a foster child, and everyone knew I was on some sort of welfare. I just wanted to go home.
The Women Who Raised Me Page 14