by Andrea Lee
That evening as we were walking home down Franklin Place, we heard the noise of a motor behind us and looked around, surprised to see the red truck. The stack of furniture was much reduced, and the dark-haired boy was standing up, leaning on the back of the cab. The truck paused, its motor chugging like a train engine in the quiet street, and the woman opened the cab door to call out hello to us in a friendlier voice than she had used before. “You went swimming,” she said. “Was it fun?”
“It was OK,” I said, thinking that if she got out and tried to grab us, I would run up the nearest driveway and pound on the door of Mr. Nansemond, an elderly bachelor from St. Kitts who grew blue hydrangeas.
“You girls want a ride down the street?” asked the woman, and when we said “No,” she gave the same kind of harsh chuckle she had given that afternoon. “We’re going to drive back to Jersey now, so goodbye to you. Just remember you are lucky little girls to live here.”
She slammed the cab door, and the truck roared off into the darkness. I hugged my wet towel and said to Lyn, “They wanted to kidnap us.”
“Oh, no they didn’t!” said Lyn stoutly. “Don’t be such a chicken.” But she looked at me with eyes that were very round and bright. For a minute we stood feeling small in the warm summer evening with the big shadowy trees rustling over our heads, and then we took off down the street as if hobgoblins were pursuing us. We gave long, shrill, panicky whoops as we ran, and we didn’t stop until we stood safely at our front doors.
The next morning I took a look at the lawn furniture my family had bought from the truck: it was knocked together out of rough, hairy pine logs with a lopsided look and an immediate appeal to spiders and crawling insects. No one in the family ever sat on the furniture, and my mother made a few quips about the “Romany spell” that must have been cast to get her to buy something so worthless; in the winter my father chopped it up for firewood. It was the same for the rest of the neighborhood; stories of the ephemeral tables and chairs that fell apart during thunderstorms or barbecues became standard jokes up and down Franklin Place. As for me, for several nights in a row I woke up with a jolt, thinking, “Gypsies!”
It was not that I had really feared being stolen: it was more, in fact, that they seemed to have stolen something from me. Nothing looked different, yet everything was, and for the first time Franklin Place seemed genuinely connected to a world that was neither insulated nor serene. Throughout the rest of the summer, on the rare occasions when a truck appeared in our neighborhood, Lyn and I would dash to see it, our hearts pounding with perverse excitement and a fresh desire for alarming knowledge. But the Gypsies never came back.
Marching
Sometimes the suspicion crossed my mind that all adults belonged to a species completely different from my own. One was never quite sure what they cared about, just as it was hard to tell why they laughed, and what kind of laughter it was. The eye of a grownup, like that of a cat or a praying mantis, seemed to admit a different spectrum of light. Compared to my world—a place of flat, brilliant colors, where every image was literal, and a succession of passions grabbed my soul with forthright violence—the atmosphere in which my parents existed seemed twilit, full of tricky nuance.
My father, especially, could be quite confusing. Once, when my family was visiting New York, and Uncle Freddy, who was a lawyer for the NAACP, was taking Daddy, Matthew, and me on a tour of Harlem, Daddy began to talk in a high, affected voice.
“Look at the tenements and the trash!” he said. “I’m awfully glad I’m not a Negro, aren’t you, Frederick?”
“Oh, yes,” said Uncle Freddy in the same kind of voice. “I wouldn’t like to be a Negro!”
“But they don’t mind the mess as we would,” said Daddy. “Negroes are jolly people.”
“They’re the Happy People!” exclaimed Uncle Freddy, and the two brothers chuckled together, on an odd note. They looked alike as they laughed, though Uncle Freddy, younger, slimmer, more urbane, browner-skinned than my father, with a pair of pale eyes that were like a jolt of electricity in his dark face, was the handsomer of the two.
In the back of the car, I sent a look that was a question over to Matthew. The year was 1959, and I was six and Matthew was nine, and the car was a black Packard with seats of a green and yellow strawlike weave that lit up with a rustic sparkle in the late-spring sunlight. “They’re joking, silly—pretending to be white,” whispered Matthew. I said nothing, but bent my face into the breeze from the open window and peered at the ruinous streets around us, wondering at the complicated twists in grownup funny bones.
Daddy taught Matthew and me to stick out our chins and say “Negro” with near-military briskness when we spoke of ourselves in the classrooms of our Quaker school, and occasionally he brought home for us stacks of books filled with the strenuous exploits of heroic slaves. When he wasn’t preaching sermons, or visiting his parishioners from the New African Baptist Church, he seemed to spend his time in rooms full of men with dark suits—rooms in which the words “civil rights,” constantly spoken, took on such gigantic significance that they seemed to be about to emerge from the clouds of cigarette smoke like the title of a Cecil B. DeMille movie. Yet sometimes, when Daddy was sitting quietly with my mother in the evenings, he would talk unflatteringly about Negroes, referring to them as we, or us. “Yes, that neighborhood has gone downhill, now that we have moved in,” he would say. “There’s nobody like us for spoiling a community.” And once, when Mama was urging him to make some changes in the garden of our house, he looked at her and said in a withering voice, “You seem determined to make the house vulgar. Do you want it to look like it belongs to a colored man?”
When Daddy and I visited Washington in July of 1963, everything was white stone and concrete, and the monuments radiated heat like white-hot stars. Mama was in Europe, and Matthew was braiding lanyards and winning swimming prizes at a Baptist camp in the Poconos, and I experienced the unspeakable, nearly monstrous joy of monopolizing my father. We stayed in a tall, cool brick house that belonged to a trio of elderly ladies, cousins of my father’s. They all had heads of tiny serpentined gray curls, and crocheted edges around their washcloths; they fixed paralyzing meals of greens and ham and biscuits, and called Daddy by his middle name. The house had shining floors, and many glass doors that opened in on airless rooms; over the mantelpiece of an unused fireplace filled with copies of Ebony hung a portrait of my great-great-grandfather, a bony, austere-looking free mulatto named Amos Twist. The little girl who lived in the house next door was named Jody, and was a relative in some way. She had long buff-colored hair strained back in such tight braids that her eyes seemed to bulge from their sockets. She called her bicycle Lancelot; we spent the simmering afternoons riding up and down the pavement screeching at each other. I was absolutely happy.
Some developing project kept Daddy downtown all day, and when he came back for dinner and hugged my head against his chest and said, “Hi, Baby,” his shirt under his suit jacket was as wet as if he’d jumped into a swimming pool. Daddy and the youngest of his cousins sat around the dinner table late into the night, talking about integration and Dr. Martin Luther King, and once Cousin Rachel gave me a naughty thrill when she exclaimed, in a piercing voice that I could hear from my bedroom, “But Forrest”—his middle name was Forrest, and in her Tidewater accent it became “Farst”—“for Negro ladies, there’s not a decent public toilet in the District of Columbia!”
On our way back to Philadelphia at the end of the month, Daddy and I rode in a cab to Union Station. The driver wore a small gray cap tilted onto the back of his head; the arm he draped along the top of the front seat was a rich brown-black, the color of peat moss, and his voice, rising slowly from his throat, had a dark, peaty sound. When he found out Daddy was a minister, he addressed him as “Reverend Doc,” and the stories he told about the senators who rode in his cab made Daddy shout with laughter. When we came within sight of the station, the driver whistled a few notes and then said, “Yessir
, the District is a pretty empty town in the summer, but in a month or so, say on the twenty-eighth of August, gon’ be a whole lot of people here, that right, Rev?” He turned his head slightly toward us, so that the corner of his eye showed like a white thread between his close black lids.
Daddy said, “Going to be a whole lot of people here. A lot of people marching.”
“Amen,” said the driver. He stopped at a light and turned his broad face around completely, so that he and my father could smile together like accomplices.
Something began to burn and flutter in my chest: it was as if I had swallowed a pair of fiery wings. The newspapers had been writing about the great civil-rights march that was to be; I had heard adults talking about it, and I knew vaguely that that was why Daddy was in Washington, but all that had been happening at a distance. Now, suddenly, a tremendous picture appeared in my mind, as clear and severe in its lighting as one of those old battle engravings that swarm with distinctly uniformed soldiers the size of fleas. I saw a million men, their faces various shades of black, white, and brown, marching together between the blazing marble monuments. It was glory, the millennium, an approaching revelation of wonders that made blood relatives of people like my father and the cab driver. The force of my emotion made me sit up very straight and clench my back teeth; my stomach, bound in the tight waistband of a plaid skirt, ached slightly.
Daddy seemed unmoved by the conversation in the taxi; in fact, at the newsstand in Union Station he began to complain about the driver. “That son of a gun took an extra dollar twenty-five!” he said, clutching a Washington Post under his elbow and going through his wallet.
On the train, Daddy studied a letter from his briefcase, read the paper, and then opened a detective novel titled Stiffed in San Remo. The train went through a tunnel of trees hung with swags of Virginia creeper and then passed a cornfield where a towheaded boy stood waving, his hair bouncing in the breeze like the corn tassels. I was holding The Melendy Family, but I was thinking about the Crusades and the French Revolution; in my mind, still reeling with my new vision, rang vague, sonorous chords of a grand processional.
“I’ll go on the march with you,” I said to my father.
Daddy marked his place in the novel with his thumb and looked up. “What?” he said.
“I said I’ll go with you on the march.”
“Sweetie, that’s a great idea,” said Daddy. “But it’s so far in the future. Let’s think about it when the time comes.”
“But I know I want to go!”
Daddy sighed. “Sarah, you know that if you go, Matthew will want to go too, and I’m not sure that Cousin Rachel will have room for our family and for Uncle Freddy and Aunt Iz. But we’ll see—we’ll ask your mother when she gets home.”
Dusty summer air blew in through the window, and I sat back in my seat feeling the baffled resentment I experienced whenever I ran up against adult obtuseness. From the Crusades to Cousin Rachel’s bedroom space! In a few minutes Daddy looked up again from his reading and patted me on the knee. “My brave girl,” he said, looking at me with a certain amount of understanding in his bright little eyes; but I was already angry.
In August my brother and I watched the Washington march on television, the two of us lounging on the creaky green glider that stood on the sun porch at home. As I had known, there had been no question of my going along with my parents: my mother, ever practical, had immediately squelched the idea for fear of stampedes and what she called “exposure”—by which she meant not sun and wind but germs from possibly unwashed strangers. Matthew and I had been confided into the care of evil-tempered old Aunt Bessie, who distrusted most forms of technology and agreed only grudgingly to allow us to turn on the television to see the march.
As we watched, the quiet gray crowd moved down Constitution Avenue and split in half near the end, spreading out like a pair of vast wings in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I strained my eyes at the specks of faces in the procession and imagined my mother and father there, and the mothers and fathers of my friends. Was it grand for them, I wondered, or were they exercising the curious adult talent for considering trivial things in the midst of great? Were they silent, trembling with fervor, or were they exchanging their bitter, complicated jokes about black and white people?
On the screen, the face of Martin Luther King looked very round, with a somber, slightly Eastern air, like a Central Asian moon; when he spoke, his voice seemed to range freely up into the heavens. Matthew, who had recently professed himself a cynic, made fun of me for staring so raptly at the television.
“This stuff doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “What does this march do? It’s not going to help anybody.”
I said, “Matty, it’s a great thing! It’s a symbol. All those people are there because they believe in something. They want to make the world better—isn’t it wonderful?”
“Oh, come on, Sarah!” said Matthew, with an annoying superior grin.
We had a big fight about it as we sat there in front of the television. It was an argument in which I came off badly, because, as I found, I wasn’t sure what I really thought.
Servant
Problems
Whenever Gretchen and I took our favorite illegal shortcut from the gym to the Great Lodge—a route that took us across one corner of the orchard, past the pruned roses of the Headmistress’s Garden, down a brambly alley strewn with cigarette butts in back of the Junior Residence Cottage, and across the bleak gray courtyard where trucks delivered supplies—one of the cooks would wave to us from the back porch outside the school kitchen. The cook was a small, grave, fat man with yellowish-brown skin; he wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that gave him an abstracted, professorial air strange to see at lunchtime over a steaming pan of shepherd’s pie. In good weather he liked to pass his afternoon break in the open air, on a battered wicker chair that must have dated from the turn of the century, when the Lodge was the summer house of a Wilmington mill owner. Gretchen always waved back to him, her round face pink with democratic enthusiasm, but I knew that the cook’s greeting was chiefly for me. His raised arm seemed to offer a kind of hortatory salute that filled me with a mixture of confusion and embarrassment. During my first fall and spring as a day student at the school, I saw him often on the kitchen porch, and I averted my eyes each time.
For sixty years, until the day I arrived there, the Prescott School for Girls had operated on a simple and logical basis: the teachers and students were white, and the domestic staff—a discreet, usually invisible crew of cooks, chambermaids, janitors, and gardeners—was black. This balance was upset when I entered the Prescott seventh grade, a long-legged, eccentric-haired child of eleven—with a mouthful of braces—chafing in the regulation gray worsted tunic and white cotton blouse. I came from a family with a fixed optimism about the brotherhood of man, and I was fresh from the sheltered atmosphere of a tiny Quaker school where race and class were treated with energetic nonchalance. It astonished me considerably to discover a world in which lines were so clearly drawn, and in which I was the object of a discreet, relentless curiosity—a curiosity mingled with wariness on the part of some teachers, as if I were a very small unexploded bomb.
Early in my first month at Prescott, I sat down on my mother’s lap after dinner and she asked me what school was like. “Well, it’s a little like being in a play,” I said. “Everyone’s watching me all the time.”
I had hoped to make her laugh, but she startled me by bursting into tears. Later I heard her say to my father, “We have to be careful. That school might ruin Sarah.”
The main building, or Great Lodge, of the Prescott School was a rambling structure of russet-colored brick, gabled, towered, and turreted, set among modern annexes, playing fields, and groves of horse chestnuts in the rolling hills near the Pennsylvania-Delaware border. The school grounds lay along a wooded ridge that sloped down to Saddler’s Creek, a sluggish brown tributary of the Brandywine, on which Prescott girls took out old-fashioned canoes. Con
fronted directly, Prescott had the absurd charm of any monstrous Edwardian folly, but if you were walking from the train station early on a fall or spring morning, there was a frail, almost unearthly allure to the brick towers rising above masses of foliage. They were the color of sandstone spires in the Arizona desert, and they suggested something so desirable and far off that a glimpse of them over the trees could tighten your heart and make your fingers ache in the pockets of your uniform blazer.
I came to Prescott in the mid-sixties, in an autumn that turned into a long Indian summer. Life had recently published pages of pictures showing flames blossoming from storefronts in Newark and Washington, but in the countryside around Saddler’s Creek no one was burning anything but leaves. The school grounds stayed green into November, and the senior girls who had sports cars kept the tops down as they had all summer, roaring up and down Prescott’s drive until Miss Cheyney, matron of the boarding school and in charge of administering discipline to day students, punished the offenders by making them attend a special Saturday study hall; the scandal of that week was that three of the immured girls, their hair tucked up under floppy Villager sun hats, had giggled and mugged so outrageously among the austere cum-laude lists in the study hall that they were suspended. Because of the good weather, Miss Mackintosh, doyenne of the tough-kneed, brief-kilted Scotswomen who ran the athletic department, scheduled extra hockey matches, and the bright fields echoed with shouts of “Sticks!” and the thunder of hefty legs; mothers with tanned faces shrieked encouragement through the windows of station wagons.