I went back to the community office and made my request. The woman behind the counter was very accommodating. She
asked, “Did you know her?”
“A little,” I said.
“It was so sad,” she said, shaking her head. “She was such a beautiful girl.” She brought out a huge scrapbook, went through the pages and found what she was looking for. She slid the article out of a sheet protector and put it in the copy machine. Then she carefully folded the copy, slipped it into an envelope, and handed it to me. “No charge,” she said brightly.
I thanked her and walked back to the cottage rapidly. When I got there, I sat down on one of the bottom bunks, took out the article and read it carefully. It wasn’t until I had gone through it a second time that I glanced at the dateline. The paper containing the article had been published on August 16, 1961.
V
Charlie
“Darkie kids are not proper playmates for you.”
My father’s comment was directed at me. He was holding forth at the dinner table again. He often grilled us on our day’s activities, and then gave his considered opinion about every aspect of our life – friends, activities, grades, you name it.
Dinner was a highly regimented affair. Dad had been a colonel in the Marine Corps during World War II, and had been awarded a bronze star for heroism in action on Iwo Jima. The story was well known in our town and now, three years after the war, people were still calling him “Colonel Shepardson.” He had become wealthy as president of his own construction company in the Elizabeth area of New Jersey, and his involvement in politics had made him a force in the community. He was used to giving orders, and he was used to being obeyed. And he expected his four boys to behave like well-disciplined subordinates.
I was the second born and had been named Mark. My parents were leaders in the Dutch Reformed Church, and it was natural for them to give us Biblical names. Dad had been determined to have four sons, although how he arranged it is a mystery. I suppose he had simply confronted the good Lord and given Him an order. He certainly had made it clear to my mother that there were to be no girls in this family. In any event, God had acquiesced and given them four sons. Matthew (we didn’t dare call him Matt) was thirteen and in eighth grade; I was eleven and in sixth. But Luke, who was eight, went to a special class for slow learners. My father always held it against God that He had given him a child with learning disabilities. To compensate, he was even harder on the rest of us when it came to our schoolwork. And, finally, his youngest son, John, was five and in kindergarten.
“My father used to call them pickaninnies, but I’m told that they don’t like to be called that, just like they don’t want you to call them ‘n-----s’.”
Looking back on it, I suppose that Dad considered himself open-minded and sensitive, since he was aware that certain ways of referring to “them” were offensive. It was 1948 and President Truman had just opened the way for the desegregation of the armed forces. My father was still dealing with the shock of that radical change in the traditions of the Corps, and was certain that his beloved Marines would go to hell in a hurry if “they” were allowed to don the uniform.
“They’re different than we are,” he was saying. “I saw them when I was aboard ship. They can handle menial work fine if you supervise them properly, but they haven’t got the mental capacity to be officers, or even non-coms.”
Dad sat with his back to the library shelves that filled one whole end of the dining room. Mommy sat at the opposite end, next to the kitchen door. Matthew and John sat on one side of the table, the baby next to Mommy, and Luke and I were on the other, with me closest to Dad. So, while he was directing his lecture to the family as a whole, my proximity to him allowed him to lean toward me in a conspiratorial attitude, with a tiny nod and a wink, as though to assure himself that I was getting the point.
“So,” he went on, “it’s really not appropriate to get too friendly with them since it’s almost like they’re from a different country, like we don’t understand their language or their customs. They can’t be part of our clubs or our churches, so it’s not fair to give them false hopes that they can be like us. There’s a reason why they live together on the south side. It’s just better if we keep our distance. It makes everyone more comfortable.”
Dad drew each one of us into the conversation, but we only spoke at the table when it was our turn. Since it was my report that had triggered this lecture, I had the privilege of following up on his comments.
“But we go to school with them,” I ventured.
Dad nodded. “Yes, and that’s because the law up here in the north requires that they go to school with our children. But the law doesn’t say that we have to mix with them socially. They have their place and we have ours.”
But I needed to point out something else. “Charlie lives right across the street from the school,” I told him. “And there are white people’s houses right down the road. He doesn’t live where all the rest of the colored people do.”
Dad gave a little frown. “I know,” he said, “that’s because his family was there long before the school was built. Those other houses just grew out toward where he lives and no one wanted to force them to move. But you’ve seen what that house looks like, haven’t you?” I nodded. “Well, that shows you that they’re different from us. You wouldn’t want to live in a house in that condition, would you?” I shook my head slowly.
“Well,” he said, taking a deep breath, “let’s leave it that way. We’ll stay in our place and let them stay in theirs.”
My father had been inspired to share these comments with us by something I had said a few minutes earlier. When he asked me to report on what had happened at school, I was pleased to tell him about the highlight of my day, an important mission on which my teacher, Miss McKee, had sent me. I was thrilled that she had singled me out from the whole class and entrusted me with an errand which actually required me to leave the school building.
I was one of two boys in the sixth grade who had been chosen to be members of the student patrol. That meant that we arrived at school before the rest of the students were allowed in the building, that we went up to the third floor to put on our “uniform,” which consisted of a metal medallion which we wore strapped to our right arm, and a white Sam Brown belt. Then the two of us were to station ourselves at either end of the building, open the doors when the bell rang, and keep order among the rush of kids filing into school. I had been assigned to supervise the girls’ entrance, and I enjoyed being the only boy among all those little females. I was tall for my age and a member of the oldest class in the building, so I fancied that they all saw me as an older man with a lot of authority over them.
Since we were seated in alphabetical order and my name was Shepardson, I had to sit in the back row in the next to last seat in class. The only seat after mine, the one in the right rear corner of the room, was occupied by Charlie Vander.
Charlie was the only Negro boy in the school.
On this morning, Miss McKee was taking the roll; when she called my name, I answered “Here.”
“Charlie.” Silence. His seat was empty.
Miss McKee mumbled to herself, “Late again.” Then to no one in particular, “Did anyone see Charlie this morning?” A general shaking of heads.
She went behind her desk and sat, pulling out a pad of paper and writing something. Then, without looking up, she said, “Mark!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Come up here, please.”
All heads turned in my direction. They knew I wasn’t in trouble because I was the golden boy of the class. But they were curious. So was I.
Handing me the note, Miss McKee said, “Go across the street and see why Charlie isn’t here. And show this note to the hall monitors.” I started to leave, but she added, “Go in the cloak room and put on your patrol equipment.”
So it was that I was liberated from Roosevelt School first thing in the morning; I was holding a pass w
hich trumped the authority of the hall monitors, and was off to search for a fellow-student who had gone truant. Looking both ways, I crossed Springfield Avenue, dodging the traffic, and walked the two hundred yards to the Vander home.
Charlie lived in a house which had been built a very long time ago. I had walked by it many times, but always on the other side of the street. This was the first time I had been up close to it, and I noticed details I had never seen before. The place was badly in need of paint, and some of the siding was hanging at odd angles. A broken green rocking chair sat in the middle of the wide front porch, and the three dogs sprawled around it looked up at me with mild curiosity. There was no grass alongside a front walk which consisted of delaminated plywood sheets laid end to end. Mud was everywhere, and on its side by the porch steps lay the remains of an old tricycle. In a pile at one end of the porch, I noticed a dozen or more bags of what must have been garbage, judging from the squadrons of flies in formation around them. And at the front door lay an ancient mat, the encrusted mud all but obscuring its greeting: “Welcome.”
I had the definite feeling of being in alien territory, about to enter a world so different from my own that I couldn’t even imagine it. I realized that nothing in my past had even vaguely prepared me for this encounter. I rarely spoke to Charlie – no one did – and he spent his days sitting in his seat sort of huddled inside of himself. He almost never spoke in class, and yet he got almost all A’s on his report card. This, to me, was an extraordinary phenomenon, and I realized that I was probably the only kid in class who knew about it.
I would share the occasional comment or joke with him, but for the most part he was totally cut off from the class, stuck in the corner farthest from the teacher’s desk. Yet, on one or two occasions, he had flashed his report card at me after Miss McKee walked by passing them out. He knew that I was the smartest boy in the class, and I guess he felt that I would be the one person who could appreciate his accomplishment.
After the first grading period, he folded his card inside out so the grades were on the outside, then turned sideways in his seat and laid the card in his lap so it was shielded from everyone but me. He didn’t say anything, merely waited until I glanced at him, then flicked his eyes downward to call my attention to his card. I studied it for a moment, then looked at him in wide-eyed astonishment. He smiled, refolded his card, slid it into its envelope, and put it away. I’m sure he figured I wouldn’t tell anyone else, because they wouldn’t want to believe he could do so well. And so it remained our secret. And Miss McKee’s, because she never let on to the class that he was a good student. His perpetual silence misled everyone.
I raised my hand to knock on the door, but Charlie opened it. “I saw you coming,” he said.
“Miss McKee sent me over to see why you’re not in school.”
A voice from inside called, “Who is it?”
Charlie turned and said, “Someone from school.”
“Well, don’t keep him standing there,” the voice said. “Ask him to come in.”
Charlie turned back and looked at me, letting the invitation hang in the air. When I backed away shaking my head, he asked in an amused tone, “You afraid?”
The challenge was like a punch in the face. I had never in the world figured on going into the house of black people. I had expected that I would merely stand at the door for a second, ask the question, and return to class. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t know how long I had; when would Miss McKee be expecting me back? I didn’t want to get into trouble by being gone too long.
But there was something else, something deeper. I had sat alongside Charlie all through sixth grade, and there was something of a silent companionship that had built up. I knew that he respected me, maybe even trusted me. But that classroom was my world. His shrunken, invisible presence in it testified to that. There was no doubt as to who was, and who was not, at home there.
Standing on his doorstep in this moment, however, made me realize with shock that I had left that world. I was suddenly in Charlie’s world, a place as alien to me as that room full of white students must have been to him. I had no idea how to act or what to say. In a shattering moment of insight, I suddenly understood Charlie’s silence.
“Well, are you?” He repeated the question.
I scrambled around in my brain for a response. “Uh, I think Miss McKee will be expecting me back.” Charlie nodded, his mouth tightening slightly. “Are you sick?” I asked. “I have to tell her why you’re not in school.”
He paused. Drawing a breath, he said, “Somebody stole my shoes. I don’t have no shoes.”
I scowled in disbelief. “Who would do that?” He shrugged, showing no emotion except for a twitch at the corner of his mouth. “Don’t you have other shoes?” I asked, giving him what seemed like the obvious solution.
His eyes fixed on mine. There was a long pause as though he was trying to figure out what I was thinking. At length he said, “I ain’t got but the one pair.” My eyebrows must have shot up in surprise because he went on: “I know you got a lot of shoes, but I ain’t got but the one pair. And they’re gone.”
I didn’t know what to say. I stared at him for a long moment, then asked the only thing I could think of: “Can’t you come over in your bare feet?”
For the first time, I saw a flash of emotion in his face. “Yeah! And look like some kind of dumb n----r?”
I was so confused that all I could think of was escape. I mumbled a goodbye and stumbled off the porch in my hurry to flee the awkward situation. I ran across Springfield Avenue, flustered, my mind churning with conflicted feelings. I knew I had upset him, although that certainly hadn’t been my intention. And I was angry with myself for the truth which he had revealed – I had been afraid to go into his house. And I was appalled at the idea that he thought he couldn’t come to school because his only pair of shoes was missing.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I rolled about trying to escape the troubling images and ideas that were the residue from my day. My father said Charlie and I should not be friends, and yet there was a unique bond between us – our shared secrets in the back of the room, our grades which put us both at the top of the class academically, although only the teacher and I were aware of that fact. And now I was the only person in the class who had set foot on his property and sensed that cultural divide first hand. What if I had gone through that door? What would I have seen?
Around midnight it all came together. The regret about showing my cowardice – what was there really to be afraid of? – the guilt about hurting Charlie’s feelings in ways I didn’t fully understand, and a growing curiosity about where he lived and what his world looked like beyond Room 36 in Roosevelt School. And then it hit me. He had said, with a kind of sad knowing that, although he had only one pair of shoes, I had many. That was it! Giving him a pair of my shoes would answer all of these regrets, and it would be a positive indication of friendship to a person who had few if any friends.
Now I was awake, pre-living the moment when I presented him with the gift – I saw him at the door, accepted his invitation to enter, offered him the paper bag enclosing the symbols of his freedom to return to class, watched the smile cross his face, and bowed my head humbly as his family approached and blessed me for my generosity. It was such an exciting scenario that I replayed it a dozen times, anxious for the morning to arrive. Eventually, it morphed into dream form and entertained me until the sun rose.
I need to confess here a life-long fear of authority stemming from the ways in which my father constantly intimidated us. He never truly left the Marine Corps, at least emotionally. It represented the highest achievements of his life, and had brought him the greatest recognition. He lived his life as if he had the starring role in a play called “The Colonel.” He knew that it was discipline which had brought him safely back from the Pacific, and he figured that discipline would allow him to run his family in the most efficient way. No emotion, no softness, just duty, obedience and su
ccess. I hated him but I respected him. I felt safe around him…except when he thought I was in the wrong!
I never did anything without his permission. So, in my mind, giving those shoes away would impress him with my imagination and Christian generosity. But more than that, I felt that I could show my courage by bucking his authority; he respected courage. It was a very unusual thing for me to dream up and carry out a plan that he hadn’t approved first. But my fear of his authority had run head-on into my conviction that, for the first time, he was wrong! He told me I couldn’t be friends with Charlie. I knew that that attitude revealed his prejudice, and prejudice was wrong! I guess I wanted to prove something to him.
As soon as I was dressed the next morning, I rummaged through my closet looking for the perfect pair of shoes. I had six pairs – new sneakers, old sneakers, sponge-soled ties, black dress shoes, brown school shoes and beat-up old school shoes. My father made sure I kept the dress shoes polished. Sometimes I wore the brown shoes to school and sometimes I wore the sponge-soled ones, because the old school shoes, which were the most comfortable, were in such bad shape. But I hated the black dress shoes because they were new and stiff and hurt my feet. And I wore them only when I had to dress up, which I also hated. That was the pair my searching finger paused over.
I ran downstairs, took an empty grocery bag from Mommy’s pile in the pantry, and put the shoes in it along with my school books. Mommy didn’t seem to notice anything unusual, and I tried my best not to let her sense that something was up. I was so full of anticipation that I didn’t want anything to interrupt my plan, realizing that parents can sometimes be funny about these things. So I managed to get out the house, hugging my package, and made it to school without having to share my plan with anyone, not even my friends. Because it occurred to me that some of them might think it was odd that I was planning to do something like this for…someone like Charlie.
Life Surprises Page 9