Black Ice (6 page)

“Next time they come near you,” she said, “I want you to turn around and shout, ‘Just what is wrong with you? What is your basic maladjustment?’ ”

I couldn’t say that, of course, so I determined to avoid them. Eventually, they lost interest in teasing me.

Months later, they were arrested, tried, and found guilty of raping and killing a girl in her own basement. She was discovered, as the newspapers said, as my mother often repeated, and as I visualized at odd moments during the school day, in a pool of her own blood.

I remember little else about them or about the incident. It blended into, rather than stood out from, the daily rhythm of my life. It was just like that, adolescence was: jerky, disorderly, the most important times condensed by fear.

I went inside to bed then, because for the first time since I had applied to St. Paul’s School, I realized that I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

The next morning we left early. St. Paul’s fall term began later than public schools, so my father had to take a day off from teaching.

Late-model station wagons, weighted down like our Citroën sedan, drove north with us. We watched them. We counted them. We took an inventory of their cargo. Suitcases, boxes, blankets, potted plants, reading lamps; pillows smashed up against the windows; rocking chairs, easy chairs, rolled up Orientals, and bean bags in various colors lashed to the rooftops or straddling open back doors. We decided that these folks were off to college or to boarding schools less stringent than St. Paul’s regarding matters of personal possessions. (The Vice-Rector had sent us a letter, which my parents approved of, stating that students were not allowed to own or have access to automobiles and were strongly discouraged from bringing expensive objects to school, such as fancy jewelry or stereo systems.)

I missed my baton. For the first time in three years, I would not have it close to hand where I could twirl it absently in my room, to comfort myself with the simple competence of my fingers and the smooth, cool weight of the metal. I would twirl at night after my mother had told me to turn off the lights and stop reading. Even in the morning glare of the Garden State Parkway I could remember the whirl of silver splinters of light the baton gave off, and the funnel of air around my head and legs and behind my back.

St. Paul’s did not have majorettes with epaulets and white, half-calf boots with tassels; it had no cheerleaders, drum majors, or flag squads; no prom or prom queen; no caps and
gowns at graduation; no class rings such as the big gold one Wash once gave me and I tried solemnly to give back. I had the ring, packed up and hidden, but the baton would have given me away, so I’d left it home with the rest of the folderol of a public-school education and my gospel choir robes from church. No sooner were we on the road, however, amid the station wagons and their cool-eyed passengers, than I missed each and every public-school artifact.

Three years before, I’d had my hair cut, straightened, and curled into what had seemed a most sophisticated style. My mother had warned me that it would have to be maintained: rolled at night in pink sponge curlers, oiled and brushed and styled, covered like a matron’s in the rain. I agreed happily to a price I’d never paid. After a few days, when my pressed hair began to nap up around the temples, when short and sassy degenerated into short and picky, I tried, one rainy day, to pull my hair back into a ponytail, as I always had before. The cut ends wouldn’t meet, and, five minutes before the bus was due on our corner, I stood before our bathroom mirror sobbing stupidly. What if I had judged that badly again? It was the sort of blunder I wouldn’t know about until too late.

We turned left off Pleasant Street at the sign for the school. The grounds were green and tidy. At each dormitory house, parked cars were in various stages of unloading. Young people called to each other. They darted across lawns and jogged along the paths; they stood together in groups just as they’d done in the admissions slides.

My letter said that I was to come directly to the Rectory where I’d be welcomed by the Rector and my old girl, a Sixth Former whose job it was to help a new student through the first confusing days. I remember that we discussed whether to do that or to go first to my dormitory. We had the map out.
My father drove slowly, but did not stop, and we had some trouble following the pen-and-ink drawing of the campus. Dad kept rolling, and we couldn’t decide where we were, which to do first. Eventually, we landed at the Rectory for my official welcome.

The big, gray clapboard Rectory formed a triangle at the center of school with the two red-brick chapels: the homey Old Chapel and the towering Gothic. The brick was repeated in stolid dormitory houses built before the Depression; in low, modern ones that rose in the middle to two-story diamond windows; in the art studios that perched next to a waterfall. White clapboard houses made cheerful spots of light against the grass and trees. An amber-colored system of ponds and streams watered the grounds and enforced a graceful but informal spacing between buildings. From the center greensward to the dining hall or to the meadow behind the Rectory or to the gray granite library, poised like a shrine at the edge of the reflecting pond, we had to cross bridges girded by stone and masonry arches. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen, and the most plentiful.

As we headed up the brick walkway toward the Rectory receiving line, I felt a public family face spreading over our countenances. Someone asked us how we’d come up. How long was the drive? Did we drive straight through? Were we tired? Would we like refreshments?

A student runner was dispatched to find my old girl. We were guided into the house by a receiving line of older white students and a few unidentified adults. A black student greeted us, too. His name was Wally Talbot, he told us, and he was president of the Sixth Form. He was a few inches taller than I. He had a smile for the adults that was quick and bright, and a wink for me.

“Did he say that he was president of the School?” my mother whispered.

“I think that’s what he said,” my father answered, and we all turned around and looked again at the black student who was joking easily with the white students beside him.

The Rector, Mr. Oates, made us a hearty greeting as we walked toward the parlor. He was a smallish man, compact, robust. He looked straight at me and pronounced my name carefully. He looked evenly at my parents, and with respect. He knew where we had driven from, knew that my father had had to take the day off from school. I did not know whether to be flattered or disturbed that a man who’d never seen me knew so much about me and my folks.

We passed through the wide foyer of the Rectory, into an outer parlor and then a large, rectangular living room. My mother and I caught each other taking inventory: fireplaces, bay windows, bookshelves, French doors, rear patio, enclosed porch. Sunlight and birdsong drifted in from gardens. In the outer rooms, more new students arrived with their parents, and more old students greeted them.

I found myself wishing that Mike Russell were there. As Mr. Oates took a moment to exchange some man-talk with my father (they took on the look that men got when they put their hands in their pockets, tilted their heads to one side, and put aside the milder wife-and-kids smiles), I suspected that I had come to this place all on the recommendation of one professionally attentive creature who was now unpacking
his
bags at Harvard. It was the social ease and gentleness that blew so balmy around me that brought Russell to mind. It had been just that confidence that had seduced me, the poise that passed my understanding and made me think that if I were where he’d come from, I, too, would emerge young, gifted, and black for all to admire.

Instead, I stood awkward and ridiculous, cloaked in a makeshift composure so brittle that I seemed fairly to rattle inside it like seeds in a gourd. Instead of Mike Russell, the dashing
Wally with his uptilted eyes and sidelong glances implied a camaraderie I did not feel. Lanky white students made coffee-table conversation. The omniscient Rector, plain-spoken and gray-haired, welcomed us into my new “community.” And from where we stood in the Rectory, the green-and-brown grounds spread out around us, pushing the world away, holding me in as if I had been caught in a slide-projector show.

How was I to know (since I could not read Wally’s dashing eyes) that other black students had felt the same way? Not until years later was I able to ask them outright and resurrect the strangeness of it all. Ed Shockley, who graduated in my class, can still remember standing outside the Rectory looking at the grounds and wondering whether his white classmates would jump him in the woods.

Lee Bouton, one of the first nineteen girls to arrive at St. Paul’s in 1971, came to the Rectory without any family at all. As a tenth-grader, she flew from Washington, D.C., to Boston, caught a bus from Boston to Concord, and then a taxi from Concord to St. Paul’s. She carried her own luggage from one transport to the next. It was January when she and the other girls arrived to begin coeducation at St. Paul’s. The driver let Lee out in the snow in front of an administration building. The switchboard operator inside called Jeremy Price to come pick up his charge.

Mr. Price “took me to the Rectory, where the welcoming tea was going on. There were parents there, and other students, and I walked through the door with Jeremy Price, feeling very intimidated. He’d taken my bag. I didn’t know where my room was. I didn’t know anything. And I walked in, and you know how when you walk into that [outer parlor] there’s a couch facing the doorway? Well, Loretta [the other black girl] was sitting right in the middle of the couch, and she jumped up and said: ‘Oooooooooh! Here’s another one!’ And she came
over and gave me this big hug. And right behind her was Mike Russell with this big, beautiful smile. I felt like, maybe it’s going to be all right, you know?”

My family and I stood in the Rectory just a year and a half after Lee’s first tea. Unlike her, I was armed with the experience of a proper, on-campus interview, and I was escorted by attractive young parents and a cuddly kid sister. Unlike Ed Shockley, I was not afraid that the white boys were going to catch me alone in the woods one night and beat me up. But for the first time, I had a whiff, as subtle as the scent of the old books that lined the wall, of my utter aloneness in this new world. I reached into myself for the head-to-the-side, hands-on-hips cockiness that had brought me here and found just enough of it to keep me going.

My dormitory was around the corner from the Rectory, over a bridge and across the road from the library. Inside, just off the common room, steps led to the open doorway of the housemaster. He, too, was on hand to greet us.

I wasn’t sure about Mr. Hawley. He had a round face whose top half was nearly bald and whose bottom half was covered over with a full, tweed-colored beard. Between the top and bottom halves a pair of glasses perched on a small nose and caught the light. He made a funny face when he spied my sister: “And look what you brought along! We’ve got a couple of those creatures running around somewhere. I’ll see if they’ve been run over yet by some station wagon gone berserk.”

I was later to learn that all the intelligence and will, all the imagination and mischief in that face was revealed in the pale eyes behind the glasses, but on this first meeting, I could only bring myself to concentrate on the beard and the Kriss Kringle mouth.

Mr. Hawley, it turned out, had family in Philadelphia, so we talked about the city, and my parents described for him just exactly where we lived.

Like other St. Paul’s buildings, the Hawleys’ house had alcoves, staircases, and a courtyard, that presented to me a facade of impenetrable, almost European, privacy. The housemaster’s home was directly accessible from the dormitory, but only by going from the vestibule into the common room, then up stairs, through a heavy wooden door, into a hallway, and another, inner door. Once in the living room, I could see through the windows that we were across the street from the gray granite library, but I would not have known it had the drapes been pulled. The architecture that I so admired from the outside did not yield itself up to me from within as I had expected. I now felt disconcerted, as I had in the Rectory. Mr. Hawley wanted to know just how far one would drive along Baltimore Pike to get to Yeadon, and I, standing in his living room, had no idea where his kitchen might be.

Mrs. Hawley, a short, soft-spoken woman, appeared from the rear hallway. Like her husband, she said ironic things, but more gently. Startlingly blond children came with her, one peeking from behind her skirt.

Mr. Hawley directed us to my room and showed my father where to park by the back door so that we could unload more handily. We carried my things up from a basement entrance. Doors whooshed open and closed as other girls and their families came and went, and the halls echoed with the sounds of mothers’ heels.

My room faced east. In the afternoon it seemed dull and empty and dark.

“This’ll be lovely when you get it all fixed up,” my mother said, by which I assumed that it looked dull to her, too.

Fine dust had settled contentedly over the sturdy oak bureau and cloudy mirror, over the charming, squat little oak desk
and chair and in the corners of the closet. White people, as we said, were not personally fastidious (any black woman who’d ever been a maid could tell you that, and some did, in appalling detail, so I’d heard stories). I was determined to give the place a good wash.

The casement windows matched those elsewhere on campus. My father opened one, tightened the wing nut to hold the sash in place, and stood looking out into the meadow. Then he peeked into the room next door, which was still empty, and recalled how, at Lincoln University, the first students to arrive scavenged the best furniture in the dormitory. “If there’s any furniture you don’t like, better speak now,” he joked. “I guess you wouldn’t want to do that here.”

I checked the room next door, and pronounced, with laughter but not conviction, that I’d gotten a fair bargain.