Going to School in Black and White

by Cindy Waszak Geary

  When I was hanging out with my friends in junior high school, we didn’t talk about race a lot, but we understood our boundaries. We knew about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., knew about the marches and the riots, heard the “I Have a Dream” speech, but knew, deep down in our souls, that we hadn’t quite arrived, even though we were now going to school with white kids. We also were supposed to be able to go anywhere in town, but our preferred stores were the ones where we knew we would be tolerated and could afford to buy something. Only a handful of stores fit those criteria: Kress Department Store, Raylass, and Rose’s. We could buy candy, books, magazines, records, socks and underwear, or toiletries. The all-white staff of clerks and shopping attendants pretended to ignore us until we were ready to pay for something. But we felt their suspicious eyes following us around the store to make sure we did not mess up anything or leave with unpaid merchandise. Their stares never bothered my friends and me because our intention was not to steal, and we never let them spoil the fun we had looking at the beautiful wares.

  One day shortly before Christmas as we waited for the bus, a few of my girlfriends and I did our usual walk through Raylass to admire all the things we planned to tell our parents we wanted for Christmas or that we hoped might be presents we’d give each other. Joyce saw it first and let out a scream.

  “Look at this, look at this!” she implored.

  We all ran to where she was standing, as she held up something that I had never before seen—a black baby doll. We circled to examine its features.

  “Look,” Joyce said, “she’s the same color we are.”

  I marveled at her hair, her outfit, her makeup, and the smile on her face. But mostly we just stared, because in all of our 14 years, this was the first time we had ever seen a doll with our skin color. I didn’t know how I felt about it.

  All the dolls that I had ever seen in Durham were white. Where did this doll come from? Who made it? Joyce exclaimed that she had to have it, and the other girls soon joined in her enthusiasm. Yes, we would tell our mothers, our aunts, our grandmothers, about our find. The only problem was that because we were all now teenagers who had outgrown dolls, the request might seem a bit ridiculous. And purchasing a doll for myself when I was also purchasing tampons and sanitary pads seemed incongruous.

  Joyce was unfazed. She proclaimed the doll as THE item to own to her sister, Phyllis, and our circle of friends, Barbara and LaVerne. Because our parents would probably think it was crazy to buy dolls for their teenage daughters, we fixated on another group of possible financiers—the boys we were “talking to” or “dating.” (I use the term “dating” loosely, since none of us could actually go out of the house on an actual date.) Rather, these were boys we talked to over the phone, or flirted with and stole kisses from whenever we had the opportunity.

  Joyce insisted that the guy she was dating would buy her a black baby doll for Christmas. Others followed suit, and soon we were probably the largest collection of unofficial advertisers for the Raylass black baby doll collection. We should have earned commissions for all the sales we generated.

  I personally never caught the black baby doll frenzy, though. I didn’t have a steady boyfriend then, and even if I had, I am sure that I would have wanted something more appropriate for my age, like a watch. As companies started to understand the sales potential of the non-white doll market, and more and more brown dolls came on the scene, we began to see more ethnically diverse dolls. But I never bothered to replace the white dolls that littered my room, and I had largely forgotten this episode. It wasn’t until I graduated from college that companies really started to mass-produce black dolls. Some 40 years later, on one of my overseas assignments, my teenage daughter and I were shopping in an upscale department store in Cameroon in central west African when she wandered away from me and returned a few minutes later.

  “Mom,” she asked, “why are there no black dolls for sale here?”

  * * *

  As baby dolls faded from my purview, they were replaced with other preoccupations more fitting to teenage girls—teenage boys and avoiding pregnancy. Although Roe v. Wade would become the law of the land in the year after my departure from Whitted, pregnancy and what to do if you ever got pregnant were hot topics among junior high girls, both black and white. I had already adopted a fail-proof method for preventing an unwanted pregnancy. In fact, my mother should have marketed her own brand of contraception, because she prevented me from experimenting with any type of risky sexual behavior in my formative years despite my curiosity and the dares and double dares of my friends. The fear of my mother’s wrath kept my legs tightly shut together.

  I was jealous of the girls who had begun dating, whose parents allowed them to leave the house in the company of boys, or even permitted them to have extended visiting hours. My parents—no, correction—my mother was having none of that. She never missed an opportunity to explain to me what the consequences would be if I: (a) had sex before marriage (b) got pregnant, and (c) had a baby before I got married. Whenever I was evenly slightly tempted to deviate from her warnings, the thought of my mama throwing me into the streets, with no clothes, no food, and no way to take care of myself, kept me virtuous long after I had the urge to be otherwise. Now I know that she never would have followed through on those threats, but I managed to test her unconditional love for me in other ways.

  There were the occasional whispers about girls who got pregnant and suffered terrible consequences—beaten by their parents, shipped off to live with relatives out of state or subjected to some other unimaginable fate. One especially traumatic rumor for us was a young girl in my class who had tried to self-abort using a coat hanger. This gossip was passed from girl to girl to remind us of the shame and of the deadly consequences of sexual activity. These warnings had no effect on some of my classmates, who, according to gossip, continued to experiment in dangerous ways, but they scared the bejeezus out of me.

  That’s not to say I didn’t flirt, have boyfriends, lots of boyfriends, and even make out under the right circumstances. It’s just that nothing convinced me that the promise of pleasure would outweigh my mother’s promise of pain and suffering. It also helped that none of the boys I liked in junior high school seemed that interested in sex either. THAT STUFF, I told myself, could wait until I was older.

  Illegal drug use was not common in my circle of friends, but we were becoming increasingly interested in alcohol. From the hit TV series The Mod Squad we heard of white kids using all kinds of crazy stuff, but I was never exposed to anything like that—just the legal liquid. I would take a sniff here, a sip there. Boone’s Farm 99 was the cheapest stuff we could get our hands on. It smelled disgusting and tasted yucky. Sometimes I gave in to peer pressure, but I never fully appreciated the appeal of drinking until you couldn’t walk straight. I was too wrapped up in my activities to get sidetracked with that stuff. Even cigarettes were of no interest to me, but we knew people our age who were already pack-a-day smokers.

  But back to the boys.

  It is odd, but I was never really attracted to the boys from church or even the ones from Whitted, aside from the French horn player. Yes, I flirted with them, but no one lingered on my mind once the moment (or hour) of contact was over. No, the guys I longed for were the ones who had dropped out of school (or were close to dropping out of school), whom I met on our block’s corner, or at house parties or downtown when we waited for our buses. The boys who got our attention were older, lived in distant neighborhoods unbeknownst to our parents, and therefore possessed a dangerous and mysterious allure. They were always a little older than we were, attending one of the high schools in Durham, or not, which added another layer of risky excitement.

  Part of the fun of these relationships was simply trying to arrange to meet the guys. Because none of my friends were old enough to drive, we spent countless hours whispering and talking about how we were going to get a call or note out to the boy of interest to meet somewhere we had no business being.

/>   The success of these encounters also required that the whole event be experienced en masse. Translation: We always group dated. In those days, it was the only way to spend time with a special person. These days, I think about it as the only way, whether we realized it or not, to ensure safety and protection from guys we didn’t know that well, who got too friendly, or who wanted the relationship to progress too quickly. If three was a crowd, then imagine how impossible it was to do anything with at least eight other people around.

  My friends and I delighted in discussing and plotting our next group rendezvous with our latest boyfriends. We would hang around the bus stop to see the North Durham boys in town on Wednesday, then meet the Fayetteville Street boys at a house party on Friday night, and then the Four Oaks boys would pick us up on the corner on Saturday night to drive around town. We would get dropped off two to three hours later, on the same block, and then we walked home, our parents never the wiser.

  This foolhardy activity continued throughout my junior high school years. We were especially active in the summer months, when we had more time, and could bring even more groups of guys into the dating mix. Only one rule existed for expanding our network—there had to be a guy for each of us, so, in principle, we could not date a guy who didn’t have at least four other friends he could introduce us to. It really didn’t matter if you liked the guy you met, as long as he was available when the rest of the crew showed up so you would at least be assured of having someone to talk to.

  We talked about and compared the guys to our favorite male musicians: the Jackson Five, Marvin Gaye, and Smokey Robinson. Who looked the most like Michael? Like Jermaine (my favorite)? After each encounter, we discussed every detail, critiquing every aspect, from the clothes they wore to the words they uttered. “What’s wrong with his teeth?” my junior high friend Karen complained about her latest recruit. “He really knows how to take care of his ’fro,” Janet observed. We also rated them against other love (or like) interests. We assured one another with hardly a shred of evidence that the chosen guy (of the hour) really liked her.

  One beautiful Saturday evening, we arranged to meet the Four Oaks boys. My friends and I congregated early on the block as usual, lying to our parents that we would be spending the evening at Ann’s house. We waited for the boys, searching out every car that passed, because we had no idea who would be driving or what type of vehicle it would be. Finally, the oldest of the Four Oaks crew, Steve, a senior at Hillside, pulled up in his daddy’s Pontiac. One of the other guys showed up a minute later in another car, so the five of us (girls) piled into one of the two cars—three in the first car, two in the second. We circled the neighborhood a few times, one car following closely behind the other, looking for a quiet place to pull over and talk. Then Sharon starting laughing and shouting out of the window to oncoming cars:

  “Help … we’re being kidnapped!” she hollered.

  “She’s crazy!” Steve shouted to the other car. But it was hilarious so we laughed, which egged Sharon on to continue her proclamations:

  “Help me! Help me!” she yelled. The tape decks were blasting, and we were all singing and laughing.

  The lead car turned onto a side street, headed down an alleyway, and slowed. The second car followed suit. Headlights dimmed as both cars came to a stop. Everybody got out of the cars in silence as we looked around to make sure we were alone. Then someone said something, and another chimed in. Another person giggled, and then one of the boys brought out something to drink. And the party was on, the volume from the tape deck turned up again, and the dancing, singing and laughing continued. A couple slipped away a few hundred feet, presumably to hug and kiss. The rest of us ignored them. We turned up the volume of the music.

  Suddenly a bright light flashed toward us. I adjusted my eyes to focus on who it was. Everyone ran back to the cars. A voice barked, amplified by a megaphone:

  “Police. Don’t move. Stay where you are.”

  A black officer got out of his car. A white officer also got out but stayed behind. The black officer approached our cars, slowly, peering inside one, then the other. This took forever, as I kept thinking one thing: “My parents are going to kill me.” Finally, he spoke:

  “What are you kids doing out here?”

  We all looked at one another, and someone (not me) said something stupid like, “Talking.” The officer gave us a disgusted look, and countered, “We didn’t notice a lot of talking when we drove up.” He then asked the most sobering question: “Do your parents know you are here?”

  The very thought that he would let them know sickened me. I stood stone silent, contemplating the punishment that awaited me.

  “Yes, they do,” Sharon lied, knowing that her parents would kill her if they knew where she was. I didn’t say a word.

  “How old are you?” the officer asked.

  “Sixteen,” Sharon lied again. I had to give her credit—she was quick on her feet.

  “Who was screaming out of the cars?” the black police officer asked. “Is someone here in trouble?”

  All our eyes turned toward Sharon again. She had been the one shouting from the car earlier, not out of fright, but with delight. Now, we were going to jail because she could not keep her mouth shut and for lying to the police. Her big sister explained that Sharon wasn’t screaming, she was singing a song. We rolled our eyes in collective disgust as one lie trickled out after another.

  The black officer went back to the patrol car to confer with his white counterpart. I considered my fate and wondered if I would ever see daylight again once my parents found out. Another few minutes passed, and the officer walked back to us.

  “OK kids. This is a warning. Go home. You are on private property, and you are underage. I am not going to think about what you are doing, or what you could be doing, but you can’t do it here, so go home. If I see you out here again, I am going to take you to jail and call your parents.”

  We scampered back into the cars before he could change his mind and drove away. The Four Oaks boys dropped us off on the corner. The five of us girls stood outside for a few minutes to regroup, cursing Sharon for her big mouth, and thanking God for allowing us to return home without a police escort.

  The charm of group dating was broken.

  * * *

  Black working class parents have the reputation of being strict adherents to the biblical reference “spare the rod, spoil the child,” to paraphrase several verses from Proverbs (Old Testament) and Hebrews (New Testament). The belief was that if you really want your children to behave and do well in life, then you need to discipline them, using force if necessary. The reasoning was that parents should let their children know the boundaries for self-preservation, and if the punishment seemed harsh, it was for their own good. And no parents wanted good for their children more than my parents.

  Years later, they shared that they had seen what happened to people who had challenged Jim Crow laws, and they had seen what happened to black kids who did not behave. Thus, they sought to protect us from our selves by physically reminding us by a flash of a belt or twig, whenever we disobeyed, to prevent us from resisting authority, white or black. I noticed that Marcia and Jan, my young “Brady Bunch” TV idols, never experienced this much love from Mike and Carol Brady!

  As a girl, I had an additional burden: my mother.

  I had a love/hate relationship with my mother from junior high through high school. I adored my father. We were similar in temperament and overall disposition. He rarely raised his voice. He never wandered off course, never solicited answers to unwanted questions. I could persuade my father to trust me to do almost anything as long as it was not immoral or illegal.

  But Mom was another creature. She questioned my every move, every decision. She challenged everything I did and everything I said, first with an innocent query—then with deadly commentary.

  “Are you going to wear that dress? It’s too short.” She asked and declared.

  “Why is that boy call
ing you so late—decent people don’t call other people’s houses past 9 o’clock.”

  I never got a break. She wore me out. I would have to create a strategic offense in my devious 14-year-old brain to counter her inevitable defense to any of my plans for fun and pleasure. Even my friends knew my mother well. Whenever we were planning some new scheme to venture out of parental view, the question was never about my father. It was always, “What are you going to tell your momma?”

  To label my mother simply as the disciplinarian would be to minimize the power dynamics in our household. She ruled with absolute supremacy and indifference to the humiliating circumstances into which she sometimes placed me. She had a sharp tongue and an even sharper insight into the inner workings of a young girl’s mind.

  One summer evening I tested the limits of what I thought was an unreasonably early curfew. Hours past the designated time, I tried to slither past my father, asleep in the chair in front of the television. My mother, sitting in the dark, turned on the bright light in the kitchen to stop me.

  “Where have you been?” she barked.

  “With my friends like I told you,” I lied.

  “Which friends?” she countered.

  “You know, Yvonne and Charlene.”

  “Call them right now and let me talk to them.”

  “It’s too late to call them now; I’ll call them in the morning,” I said.

  “No, we will call them now.”

  I couldn’t think of a retort, so I yawned, claimed that I was sleepy, and kept walking toward my bedroom. Wrong idea. She ran up behind me, grabbed my arm, and turned me around—her eyes piercing through me. She pressed me against the wall.