"Some of the young people at home are starting to get organized to protest the situation," said my mother. "They've put a little group together, but I'm not sure just what they intend to do. They are still in the talking stages, but several of your friends are involved. Roosevelt Tinsley, Sylvia Newsome, and Russell. Russell Woolfolk." For the first time since I had arrived at Draper, I felt something more than a twinge of longing for home. If this activity of my friends actually came to something, I thought, they could have a role in bringing segregation to its knees. And meanwhile, I would be safely tucked away in a boarding school in Connecticut, where I could read about it in the papers. "It's mostly college students," said my mother, "but there are also quite a few high school students participating. It will be interesting to see if they can get something done. People are tired of waiting."
After dinner, we cleared the table and my mother helped Cousin Gwen wash the dishes. I sat with my father in the living room while he read the newspaper and probed the spaces between his teeth with a toothpick. I could hear conversation coming from the kitchen. My mother and Cousin Gwen were talking about me and, at one point, my mother confided to Cousin Gwen that she was concerned about me being under "pressure." "He's the only one of us up there, you know," she said.
"I know, Clarissa, but that pressure is no different from what he'll face if he gets out into the world and becomes a doctor or a lawyer. The boy's got to learn how to stand on his own two feet," said Cousin Gwen. "Look at these youngsters in Harlem spending all of their time with each other, and most of them aren't going anywhere. When they're around the whites, they clam right up. The colored kids only talk to each other, and half the time you can't even understand what they're saying. And if they eventually do talk to a white person, it's usually a policeman or somebody who is telling them what to do. They don't have any idea what it's like to talk to a white person as an equal, much less a white person sitting next to you at the dining room table. I know it's worse in the South, but this is not paradise. If you want to amount to something today, you have to broaden your reach. You have to look beyond what's familiar to you, beyond what's comfortable to you, no matter what color you are."
I was emboldened by Cousin Gwen's words. I had no idea she thought that way. From what she said, it sounded as though she wouldn't disapprove of me going out one night with Burns to hear jazz in a nightclub. Once again, she had surprised me by revealing something about herself that I had never suspected. Across the room, my father rustled the newspaper. I was certain he was also listening to the conversation in the kitchen.
"He wasn't sent up there to be a guinea pig, you know," said Mother. "We sent him there to get the best education we could provide, to get him ready for college. But if he's going to have problems because he's the only one there, well, I don't have to put my child through an ordeal just to give him an education. It isn't worth it. I'll bring him home."
"Honey, he's going to have problems with white folks anywhere he goes," said Cousin Gwen. "Even in a school like that where they claim to want him so bad, he's bound to have problems. And he's going to have problems with white folks for a long time to come. They sure don't seem to be in any hurry to treat us as true equals. But that doesn't mean we have to accept it. That boy can handle anything they throw at him. He's already proved it, but he needs you to stand by him."
As the words drifted from the kitchen into the living room, I thought about how I had been taught to give whites a wide berth whenever I was in their presence, to be suspicious of anything they said or did. Those feelings hadn't vanished at Draper. My experience with Vinnie had confirmed what I had been taught. My conversation with Michaux in Harlem had evoked it as well. But then there was my encounter with Burns, and the thrill of making secret plans to go out to a nightclub together, of gaining each other's confidence. It seemed, at least between the two of us, that it didn't matter what color we were, and I wondered if this was the way it was supposed to be when integration finally arrived.
My father rustled the newspaper again. "Have you thought about what you'd like to do while you're here?" he said. "Is there anything you need? We could do a little shopping if you need something." This was as good a time as any to make a move, I thought.
"I don't have any plans for tomorrow," I said. "But a friend from school has invited me to his house for dinner on Saturday evening." I held my breath, waiting for Dad's response.
"That's nice, son," he said, without taking his eyes away from the newspaper. "Where does he live?"
"Park Avenue," I said. Dad put the papers down abruptly and looked across the living room at me.
"Park Avenue!" he exclaimed. "You traveling in some mighty fancy circles for a colored boy, ain't you? Who is this fellow?" I could tell he was suppressing a smile.
"Gordie Burns," I said. "He's in the class ahead of me."
"Burns, huh?" said my father. "His people must be from Scotland. 'Man's inhumanity to man. Makes countless thousands mourn.'" I gave him a puzzled look. "That's Robert Burns, Scotland's greatest poet," he said with a wink. "All right. Your mother and I were going to take everybody out to dinner on Saturday, but if you have a social engagement, I guess we'll just have to make other plans."
Chapter Eight
At breakfast the next morning, my mother brought up my plans for Saturday. "I understand you have a dinner invitation for tomorrow night," she said, excavating a wedge from her grapefruit. I did my best to appear nonchalant.
"A friend from school asked me to dinner at his house," I said.
"And he lives on Park Avenue?" she said, obviously impressed.
"That's what he said. I don't have his address. I have to call him," I said. I wasn't sure what the fuss was about. I assumed Burns came from money, with a chauffeured limousine and all that, and I'd heard about Park Avenue, but I'd never seen it. Although Cousin Gwen seemed interested in the discussion, she remained silent. The reactions of my parents, however, made me curious.
"Well, we have to hear all about this," said my mother. "What time are you supposed to be there?" I was becoming concerned, wondering if my parents would take me to Burns's house and park the car on the street to wait for me until dinner was over.
"I don't know," I said. "He wants me to give him a call today." I knew I had to make that call when no one else was around, and I began thinking about how it could be orchestrated. I decided it might be best to go for a walk and call Burns from a pay phone. I could even take a subway down to 125th Street and make the call from there.
"You know your father and I were planning to take everyone out to dinner on Saturday," said my mother, pausing for dramatic effect. She finished her grapefruit and rested her spoon on her plate. "But I suppose we can just as easily go out tonight," she added, with a sigh. "That is, if everyone is available."
"I'm free," I said. "I've got some reading to do for a class and I might want to go out for a walk a little later, but other than that, I'm available."
"Me too," said Cousin Gwen. "I'd love to go out to dinner tonight."
"Well, that settles it," said my father. "Let's plan to meet here at six o'clock, and we'll get ready to go to a restaurant. Gwen, you got any ideas about where we should eat?"
"You can get a pretty good meal at Lucille's down on 125th Street," said Cousin Gwen. "That's about the nicest place around."
"Sounds good enough to me," said Dad. "Clarissa, why don't we go out for a drive this morning? Gwen, you're welcome to come along. We can leave the socialite here to do his schoolwork before his engagement tomorrow night." Dad laughed good-naturedly, and everyone at the table joined in.
"Just give me a moment to get my things together," said Cousin Gwen, and she rose from the table and went off to her bedroom.
"What do you have to read, son?" asked my father.
"American history," I said. "Right now, we're reading Tocque-ville's Democracy in America. It's pretty interesting. Have you read it, Dad?"
"I can't say that I have. What's it about
?"
"Well, this Frenchman came to the United States in the eighteen hundreds and spent almost a year traveling around the country and making notes about what he saw. The book is about his observations of the United States."
"I don't suppose he has anything about Negroes in there. For most of these white historians, we don't even rate a footnote."
"You'd be surprised, Dad. There's quite a bit about slavery, and about the treatment of the Indians as well as Negroes. There's even a section on mulattoes and the friction between light-skinned Negroes and dark-skinned Negroes. It's quite interesting."
"Is that so? And have you discussed any of this in class?"
"So far, we haven't," I said, and it occurred to me that we might not discuss it at all.
Wrapped in a stole of muskrat pelts and wearing a black felt hat with a long pheasant feather, Cousin Gwen returned to the front room. "Well, I'm ready when you are," she said. She stood before a hallway mirror adjusting the feather at a dashing angle. The pelts covered her shoulders and arms so conspicuously, she looked like a trader from the Northwest Territories, but I thought better of mentioning it.
"Well, come along then," said my mother. "We should be back in a couple of hours, son." As soon as the door closed, I felt a wave of excitement at being left alone in Cousin Gwen's apartment. Not only would I be able to call Burns and make arrangements to go out on Saturday night; if I was careful about the time, I could even browse through the books in Cousin Gwen's study or go for another walk to see more of Harlem. But I knew if I went out and returned too late, my parents would be worried and it would be much more difficult to sneak away with Burns the next day.
I found the piece of paper on which Burns had written his telephone number, and I went into Cousin Gwen's bedroom to call him. It was a small, cluttered room, with dark drapes and a double bed covered with a pink spread. Next to the bed, the telephone was sitting on a night table surrounded by bottles of pills, a small tin of hard candies, a half-filled water glass, ajar of cold cream, and a small ceramic vase filled with dusty plastic flowers. On the same side of the bed were books stacked in piles on the floor and a large wicker basket filled with newspapers and magazines, some of which I knew, like Our World, Sepia, The Afro-American, and the Amsterdam News, and others, like the Liberator, the Nation, and the New Masses, that I had never heard of. The television sat on a table in a corner of the bedroom opposite a large, stuffed lounge chair, with a notebook lying on the seat cushion. Cousin Gwen spent most days in her bedroom watching television, hoping to see a colored face. Every so often, but rarely more than once a month, she said, a Negro entertainer like Rochester or Peg Leg Bates or a singing group like the Mills Brothers or the Ink Spots, or sometimes just an unknown, rubber-legged tap dancer with straightened hair, would appear like magic on the television screen and Cousin Gwen would pick up the notebook and make an entry, recording the entertainer's name, the show, and the date, time, and channel. Even though the drapes had been pulled back, the room, which looked out on the back of the building, seemed dark and heavy with the musty smell of old clothes, barely disguised by the fragrance of moth balls emanating from the overstuffed closet.
I picked up the receiver and dialed Burns's number.
"This is the Burns residence," said a voice at the other end. It was the voice of an older woman, chilly and formal, with a vaguely European accent. "With whom do you wish to speak?" Suddenly I was at a loss for words. Even though I had never met her, the mere sound of the woman's voice made me freeze.
"Hello? Hello?" said the woman. "Is anyone there?" I struggled to speak and finally managed to get a few words out.
"Gordie," I said, haltingly. "Gordie there?" I could just imagine what she must have been thinking, but her icy voice never lost its formality.
"One moment, please," she said.
After a moment, Burns got on the telephone. "Garrett?" he said. "I thought it might be you. Are you all ready for tomorrow night?" He sounded as excited as I was.
"Yeah," I said. "But I still have to work out a few details. I have a feeling my parents are going to want to drive me down to Park Avenue and drop me off at your place. I told them that I was invited to your house for dinner, but I think they are going to insist on bringing me."
"That's okay," said Burns. "I'll tell the doorman to expect you, and the elevator boy will bring you right up as soon as you get here. You can meet my parents. Just don't tell them we're going to a nightclub. Say we're going to a movie."
"Sounds all right with me. Say, Burns, who was that woman who answered the phone?"
"That was Hildegarde, my mother's secretary. She always answers the phone. Why do you ask?"
"Oh, I don't know. She just sounded so formal. I wasn't expecting it."
"Yeah," said Burns, with a snicker. "She thought you sounded a little strange too. She almost hung up on you." We both laughed.
"What club are we going to?" I said.
"Jinxie's. It's uptown, on Seventh Avenue. Coleman Hawkins is playing there this weekend. He's always good. It's a nice place."
"What time should I plan to get to your apartment?"
"How about seven o'clock?" said Burns. "That way we can be uptown by eight, in time for the first show." My heart was starting to pound again. This was going to be great. An adventure cloaked in secrecy. Going to see Ruth Brown at the Majestic would seem like child's play compared to this. I got his address and said goodbye to Burns, put down the receiver, and sat on the side of Cousin Gwen's bed. I wasn't sure when my parents and Cousin Gwen would return.
To distract myself, I went into the study. There were books everywhere, in bookcases surrounding the day bed, in piles on the floor, stacked in the windowsill, and on top of a desk. I chose a bookcase at random and began running my finger along the titles on the spines. Little Women. Great Expectations. Call of the Wild. Moby Dick. All familiar, although the only one I had read was Great Expectations. I moved to another bookcase. Cane. Home to Harlem. Black Boy. Their Eyes Were Watching God. The only one I recognized there was Black Boy, and that was because I knew the name of its author, Richard Wright. Wright also wrote Native Son, which my parents had lying around the house for a while, but for some reason, they always managed to keep it away from me. I decided to move to a third bookcase. The Negro Labor Vanguard, International Socialist Review, Black Bourgeoisie. Cousin Gwen certainly had a broad appetite for books, but now I was lost. There was nothing familiar to me here at all; however, my curiosity about the last title led me to take out the book and open it. It was new, written by someone named Frazier, and it had that wonderful, fresh smell that new books have. I turned to the table of contents and noticed a chapter titled, "Behind the Mask." A statement at the beginning of the chapter caught my eye "There is an attempt on the part of parents in middle-class families to shield their children against racial discrimination and the contempt of whites for colored people." Boy, did that sound familiar, so I skimmed the page until I saw another sentence that gave me a start. "Despite such efforts to insulate their children against a hostile white world, the children of the black bourgeoisie cannot escape the mark of oppression." The mark of oppression. I had never heard the term before and I wondered exactly what it meant. It sounded awful. Did I have the mark of oppression, I wondered. And if I did, what was it like? Could it be seen?
It was getting late and my parents would be arriving any minute with Cousin Gwen, so I replaced the book on the shelf, went over to the day bed, and fumbled through my bag until I found my copy of Democracy in America. I took it into the living room and sat down on Cousin Gwen's worn and faded sofa, opened it to the bookmark, and read until my eyes fell upon the following words: "In one blow oppression has deprived the descendants of the Africans of almost all the privileges of humanity. The United States Negro has lost even the memory of his homeland; he no longer understands the language his fathers spoke; he has abjured their religion and forgotten their mores. Ceasing to belong to Africa, he has acquired no right to the b
lessings of Europe; he is left in suspense between two societies and isolated between two peoples, sold by one and repudiated by the other; in the whole world there is nothing but his master's hearth to provide him with some semblance of a homeland." Could this be the mark of oppression, I thought, the absence of any sense of one's humanity? If so, I was certain it did not apply to me, although I lingered over the part about being 'left in suspense between two societies and isolated between two peoples.' I already felt suspended between two societies, but, I told myself, this notion came from a book that was written by a Frenchman more than a hundred years ago. Lots of things had changed since then. Or had they? Certainly not, according to Lewis Michaux. He could have written that paragraph himself. And yet, despite our resentment at the oppression we had suffered in this country, every Negro I knew still considered it home. We paid our taxes, served in the military, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, and wondered when things would get better.
Chapter Nine
By Saturday afternoon, I was more excited than I'd ever been. The sky was cobalt blue and cloudless and, under a brilliant afternoon sun, Harlem shimmered like a mirage. During dinner at Lucille's the night before, to my relief, no one had mentioned my upcoming visit to Burns's apartment, and now I was doing my best to appear composed by sitting on the sofa in the living room and reading Democracy in America. At one point, Cousin Gwen came in and sat down in the wing chair across from me to read one of those magazines I had never heard of, the Negro Vanguard, and I found my thoughts drifting away from my book and toward Cousin Gwen. She seemed so wise, wiser than just about anyone I'd ever met. Maybe her wisdom was the result of owning all of those books, but to me those books on the masses and the vanguards seemed pretty boring. I didn't bother to look at them. I had the feeling they could get you into trouble, even though Lewis Michaux was selling them out in the open on Seventh Avenue, with a police car right down the street. And then it occurred to me how different Cousin Gwen was from the rest of my parents' friends. She was unconventional. She spoke her mind regardless of what others might think. And she had a library filled with books. I had visited the homes of most of my parents' friends and there might be a few dust-covered volumes on a shelf next to some bric-a-brac, but no one, not even my parents, had a library. It was as though they had stopped thinking about ideas, about the world and how to change it. Obviously, Cousin Gwen hadn't.
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