“Not so easy for some of you Brylcreem lot now in civvy street, is it?” His eyes were on me. I noticed that their focus was slightly off center, somewhere over towards my left shoulder. The little gremlin’s laughter was shrill in my ear. I set my teeth together, holding tight against the thing in my chest trying to spill itself out. I’d come here to talk about a job. Not the Royal Air Force.
“What has any of that got to do with the job you advertised?” It was all I could get out, the rage crowding me.
“You sure you want a job here?” he asked, leaning back. Toying with me. At his ease.
“I’m sure.” If there was the least hope of getting the job I didn’t want to blow it.
“You don’t look to me as if you needed a job.” His eyes running over me. My suit, shirt, tie. Whatever he could see from where he sat.
So here it was. All hope suddenly gone. The gremlin quiet. I said nothing, quietly despising him. Perhaps he was waiting for me to say “please.” His attention once more on my curriculum vitae, then again raised to me, mocking me. Tapping his teeth with the rubbered end of the pencil.
“Anyone who could afford to dress like … ”
I didn’t wait for the end of it. Rising carefully from the chair to stand near his desk, high over him. Leaning across to collect the papers and the large manila envelope which had contained them. Seeing the way he paled and quickly leaned away from me. Seeing the sudden fear in his eyes. Having no intention of touching him. Replacing the papers in the envelope and walking out of there. Doing it without a word. Anxious to be away from there quickly, lest the murderous rage overtake me and I tear him apart.
Afterwards walking aimlessly about, not seeing, not hearing, not feeling. Later that night arriving home but not talking about it to Mum and Dad.
At their invitation I’d gone to live with them after coming down from Cambridge. During the first months everything was fine. Just like those wartime afternoons and weekends. Helping Mum in the garden. Working in the basement with Dad on his models. Discussing my plans for the future. I’d written to my mother about my intention to find a job in physics research and continue with my doctoral studies. Dad and Mum were delighted. We’d dawdle over dinner talking about my ambitious plans. In spite of the five-year interruption of my studies through war service, everything was working out beautifully. I was on top. Confident. Enthusiastic. Wartime developments in electronics had opened the communications field and research was the thing. My field. At long last the studying and working would pay off.
Mum and Dad encouraged me. Sometimes at night we’d take a stroll through Loftis Lane to the local pub, the King’s Head. Have a pint or two with a gin and tonic for Mum, chat with some of the locals, perhaps join in a game of darts, then back home. Easy. Comfortable with them.
Now it was all changed. We weren’t talking any more. Well, not in the old way. After each interview, with each rejection, they became somewhat identified with the others. I was rejected because I was black. My intellect, my abilities didn’t matter a damn. All whites saw was my blackness, and because of it they rejected everything else about me. So why not those two at home? Sometimes, after an interview the very thought of returning to them was an ordeal. The irony of it! Going home to whites to tell them of the crushing cruelty and contempt of other whites.
I continued to live with them because I told myself I had nowhere else to go. Nowhere else I could afford, that is. I was still able to pay them the little they would accept for my board and lodging, so I could persuade myself I still had my self-respect. I had my meals with them as usual but gradually things were changing. Further and further I retracted into myself. Mealtimes became painful. For me, and no less so for them. I’d hurriedly down the food, hardly tasting it, then hide myself in my room. Always with the excuse of studying, though the long hours were spent on my bed, awake, reviewing every moment of the latest humiliating experience.
They never suggested that I leave. Never said or did anything to make me feel unwelcome. On the contrary, they made all kinds of overtures in their attempts to restore the former happy situation. Mum devised tempting dishes, within the limits imposed by rationing. She mended my shirts, darned my socks, cared for me. Dad enticed me with pleas for help with his models. He had an ambitious plan for converting them to electricity, and claimed that he needed my advice on the circuit designs. I’d go down with him but my heart was not in it. The bitter irony was that while silently rejecting their overtures I felt responsive to their efforts to reach me. Responsive but resistant.
Things got gradually worse. I hated sending the useless applications. Hated the invitations to interviews when they came. Hated the rejections which followed. Hated the whites who rejected me. Looking back, it seems certain that everything and everyone that came anywhere near me must have been tainted by my bitterness and hatred. I must have carried it around with me like some poisonous miasma, careless of and insensitive to whatever effect it might have had on others. No one mentioned it. Not even Mum and Dad. No one.
Not till that day after I’d been through another fruitless hour-long charade of an interview. That morning as I was about to leave home Mum had stopped me at the door and said, “I don’t think you should go out today.” I reminded her that I had an interview in the city. She replied, “Would it make any difference if you didn’t go?” As if she knew what was happening to me. But I insisted on going, even though I knew she was right. I didn’t want to let myself accept that she could so fully understand my pain.
After the interview I walked, aimlessly, but needing temporarily to lose myself in external sights and sounds lest I hear the clamoring of the hate inside me. Aimlessly through the Strand and Piccadilly, walking, into Green Park, and tired. I sat on a bench, wallowing in my misery, plumbing its very depths to discover me, perhaps, at the bottom. Asking myself why, why I kept on attending those interviews. Idly watching the half-wild ducks cavorting on the pond, letting the minutes slip away because I was in no hurry to go home. Not even looking up when a man sat down near by. Hearing the rustle of the paper bag, the clucking sounds he made to attract the ducks, the gentle jolt of the bench with the throw of his arm. His chatter a continuous stream until I looked up to discover whether there was someone else near him or if he was really talking to the ducks. No other person in sight. Catching his eye but looking away. He was white. I didn’t want to know him, to hear or see him. But too tired, too dejected to move away.
He got up and went to squat at the edge of the pond for closer chatter with the ducks, feeding tidbits to a few. Then back to the bench, but this time near to me. Talking. Not addressing any remark to me, just talking. Me not listening. He could have dropped dead for all I cared. Talking, as if he were hungry for an opportunity to say something to someone. Anyone. Talking, till I couldn’t help hearing some of it. About how people could be hurt by other people and things, but most of all by themselves. Stripping themselves, tearing themselves until their spirits were laid bare like an exposed wound, unprotected and unprotectable. On and on. All sorts of philosophical rubbish. Then he said something to me, I can’t remember what it was, but it got under my skin.
I turned to him angrily and said, “Look, why don’t you shut up? You white people are all the same. All this philosophical drivel has no meaning because, in fact, you are white and when you look out on the world you see it in a certain way. For black people like me it has to be different … ” And without realizing it, a lot that had been building up inside of me began to spill over onto him and I began telling him about going for interviews and being rejected because of my black skin. He shut up and listened. I wasn’t really concerned that he listened, but once I began to speak I couldn’t stop myself. After a while he turned to me and said, “You know, I’m not surprised you didn’t get any of those jobs. You walk around in hate. It’s all over you.”
And then he began to talk to me and gradually I found myself listening. He ask
ed, “Why don’t you try something else? A man like you, with your educational background, shouldn’t think that physics is the end of the world. Try something else.” Often he would say, “a man like you.” And he began to tell me about the London County Council and their need for teachers. “A man like you would be welcome.” I said, “I’m not a teacher, I’ve never been trained as a teacher.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “With your university background they’d reach to get you.”
I listened. I didn’t want to be grateful to him. I even hated myself for listening to him; but what he was saying was making sense in spite of myself. He talked and talked and I decided inside myself that I would give it a try. But I didn’t tell him so. I couldn’t even afford to say “thank you” to him. I let him talk and talk and afterwards I got up and walked away. But I phoned the London Council the next day and I got the job.
“Did you teach college level?” My neighbor asked.
“No. Secondary school.”
“Would that be about equal to our high school?”
“More or less.” I’d never thought about it.
“Any problem about your color?” he asked.
“My color is always a problem. For some people.” I wondered if he was trying slyly to needle me.
“I mean, was there any resistance to you, from faculty or from students?”
“There’s always resistance. Some members of the faculty were friendly and helpful. Others not. The students were something else.”
“How did you get on with them?”
“We had a rough beginning. Rough.”
Remembering my very first morning at that school. I’d arrived early to present myself to the headmaster as his new staff member sent from the Divisional Office. From the street I had to cross a macadam forecourt to reach the main entrance to the school. This forecourt served as the school playground. Bunched together near the center, a group of girls was tossing a netball to each other and noisily protesting at the efforts of two boys to intercept it. They gave no attention to me as I walked around them. In attempting to grab the ball one of the boys collided heavily with a girl who promptly let loose a flood of swearing, each word succinctly, degradingly clear. They were all members of the same social class to which I found myself assigned.
“In what way?”
“They were, all of them, antiauthority. Antipolice, antiparents, antischool, antiteachers. I was black, an unfamiliar extension of the authority they disliked.”
“Were you the only black teacher in the school?”
“At that time I was the only black teacher in all of London. Yes. I was quite a phenomenon.”
“Why didn’t you quit and try another school?”
“Because I couldn’t afford to quit. It was the first job I’d found after nearly sixteen months of searching. It wasn’t the kind of job I really wanted, but at least it relieved me from exposure to the tiresome round of rejections. Anyway, I’d no intention of quitting under pressure from a bunch of children. Hell! I’d once ordered men. In any case, staying there became a challenge. A personal thing.”
“Couldn’t you use some form of punishment to restrain them?”
“Not in that school. Punishment of any kind was taboo. The headmaster believed that teaching should need no ‘fear supports.’ He believed that if a teacher was sufficiently skillful and imaginative he would discover ways of making his efforts effective without resorting to punishment.”
“And you accepted that?”
“I really didn’t care one way or another. I wanted the job and, at the time, I would have agreed to support any kind of philosophy to get it. I believed myself strong enough to cope with anything, no matter what it might be. I was not interested in philosophies or concepts. I would have tried teaching a cageful of apes if the possibility were offered.”
Saying that and remembering that that was exactly how I saw them, at first. Uncouth, near-illiterate and casually cruel without that animal’s inclination to lofty dignity. Seeing them thus and hating myself for being so easily victimized by whatever fate threw me into that situation as their teacher. I was not trained as a teacher. I was a qualified physicist denied the opportunity to practice my skills in a country for which I had voluntarily risked my life. Before eventually getting the job as teacher I came close, awfully close, to being completely demoralized. The casually contemptuous way in which my applications were dismissed at one level because of my color, and the equally contemptuous proposition that I was too well qualified for work at a lower level, eventually soured me to the point of hatred. Bitter hatred. Of those who had so contemptuously used me, and, in time, of all who looked like them. All whites.
“Why didn’t you try somewhere else? Return to Guyana or come here, to the United States?”
“Guyana? In those days it was still a British colony. White Britons still occupied the positions of influence and power. I would have been jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Or so I thought. The United States? The published stories of the treatment American blacks received did not commend your country to me. Anyway, I suppose I lived with the hope that someone would eventually say, “Mr. Braithwaite, we’re sure we can use you.” Isn’t it odd? I consider myself an intelligent man. I’d got the teaching job, but to me it was merely a temporary thing. A stopgap, you might say. I went right on hoping for an opening in communications.”
“And hating?”
“Yes. And hating. It was not something I wished upon myself.”
“All whites?”
I looked at him, wondering what the hell he was getting at. Why was he so preoccupied with my hating? That was all a long time ago. A long bitter time ago. Since then I’d been trying to live above hate instead of merely living with it. Talking with this man, this stranger, about those times and circumstances brought the memories flooding back and memory, in turn, stirred the old sensations. Oh, yes, hating some whites was only the beginning. Incipiently, before I realized what was happening, it had grown and spread itself to influence everything I did, to touch everyone I knew.
“Yes,” I told him. “All whites.” Why should I be apologetic to him?
“I find that hard to believe,” he replied. “Someone like you. Educated. Sophisticated. There must have been some exceptions. At least someone.” A sly smile playing around the corner of his mouth. Perhaps all this was part of his public relations technique. What the hell did he know about it? I was no less educated and sophisticated when others like him had rejected my application. And since when did he know I was educated and sophisticated? Since the absence of other seats had forced him here beside me. The bullshitting hypocrite. Suddenly into my mind popped the face of that old man in the park. The thin mouth forming the words as he told me a few truths about myself. Realizing now that I’d not hated him. Irritated at first, by his ceaseless chatter. Then, dare I think it, grateful to him. Funny. I’d not realized that until now.
“How long did you teach?” my neighbor asked.
“I was a teacher for nine years.”
“Nine years! Well, I guess you found it wasn’t too bad. And so you abandoned physics after all?”
I looked at him, wondering at the cool effrontery of the man. He’d taken the seat beside me reluctantly, then he’d started the conversation. Now he was pursuing this questioning as if he had every right to probe wherever he chose. He’d approached me as carefully and watchfully as a predator in unfamiliar territory. Now he was relaxed, smiling with his questions. How could I allow myself to forget that he was still the predator? How deep was the smile? I debated with myself the advisability of bothering with him. Of leaning back and closing my eyes and to hell with him. Treat him as if he weren’t there. Let him taste a little of the contemptuous rejection they were so proficient at handing out. Why not? But then, wouldn’t that be following their familiar lead? I’d always prided myself on courteous conduct.
Why make an exception here merely because of his stupidity about sitting beside me? If courtesy dictated answers, it did not dictate their content. So I’d be courteous. But his type of questioning strained courtesy to its limits, particularly his way of plaiting a question into a statement.
“I’ve never abandoned physics. I merely used my scientific training to achieve other ends.” Smiling at how neatly I was packaging the response, but knowing that the truth was much more than that.
Physics had abandoned me. The doors to a career in that field were closed. Tight. In my heart I knew it, even though a perversely errant seedling of hope insisted that I continue sending applications far afield to the northern industrial centers. Receiving the invitations to interviews with the tempting money orders for the return fare. Then playing my own private game. The short letter acknowledging receipt of theirs and offering to appear for the interview on a date conveniently distant. Ten days to two weeks. Enclosing a recent snapshot of myself so they’d match the black face with the credentials and make up their minds. Saved myself a lot of traveling. The snapshot did it. No replies. I’d head homeward at the end of each teaching day hoping to find a reply and knowing there would be none, yet bitterly disappointed at my own accurate appraisal. Finally accepting the obvious. Writing no more applications. No more study sessions at the library. Bitterness and hate a twin-headed, familiar incubus.
Teaching helped. The routine of waking each morning with the knowledge of having something to do. The sheer relief of it after the long months of waiting and wondering. Untrained in the skills and techniques of teaching I borrowed every available book on the subject. I was paid to teach. I tried learning from textbooks by well-known authorities, but discarded them. They may have been good in themselves, but useless for the special circumstances in which I found myself. So I had to learn by doing. By applying my scientific training to what had become a challenge. Making as complete as possible a record of each day’s schoolroom activities, then analyzing it carefully each night, separating the positive elements from the rest. Anything which held their interest even briefly was positive. Any hint of interest from them was positive. Any comment, any question, any observation was positive. I examined it all, looking for leads, exploiting everything, using everything. Discovering their interests and gradually relating these to the requirements of the curriculum. Learning from it, then testing what I’d learned. Variations on themes. No. I didn’t really abandon physics. I made it serve my new needs. Not the science of physics, but the discipline of thinking, of exploring, of reaching for the unknown through the familiar. Smiling now at the memory of it.
Reluctant Neighbors Page 5