My head had to be on straight before going to Indianapolis to find my white people. If the missing Lewises could be found, I wondered how hard it would be, not only to get through the shocking news I’d deliver, but also to relate to each other. How would they deal with a black woman like me who wore a millstone of race trouble around my neck, held on a heavy chain of resentment and suspicion? There was no telling who and what we would see when we looked on each other the first time.
After all, the confines of ghetto life racism I experienced growing up taught me that blacks could not be part of the wider city life. When my five-year-old self fell against our coal-burning pot-bellied stove and my arm sizzled against the cast iron like bacon in a frying pan, the white cab company lied about sending a cab right over. Instead they left Mama and I waiting on the frozen Buffalo sidewalk as my skin rose into delicate black meringue peaks.
We lived on Hickory Street, with people packed into substandard rentals like crackers in a sleeve. The block had vacant lots full of debris, a pushcart selling greasy hot tamales, and numbers-running men taking bets all day then calling out winners in a supper time evensong.
Our living room ceiling cracked from the raucous upstairs neighbors’ rent parties. Then one Christmas morning a sharp snap brought a deluge of plaster down all over us, knocking the tree over while burying the opened presents. Instead of a happy celebration, we swept, washed furniture, walls, and clothes, finally dumping chunks of the ceiling and the desert of dust into the garbage. Our white landlord didn’t return Daddy’s calls and never came to fix anything. First Daddy had a few drinks and raged about it, then he set up two wooden work horses in the living room, got on a ladder, and made us a new ceiling himself. When Daddy took the bus to answer a rental ad for a better apartment, the owner had shouted, “No niggers!” and shut the door. We knew white people didn’t want us near them. We also knew Daddy was so enraged that something as small as spilling a glass of milk or pulling a chair out from under each other could turn his humiliations into our whippings with his welding shop’s discarded leather strap.
That sealed off ghetto life told me blacks were not to expect the basics, let alone extra or different. We were supposed to accept the less-than life white people had us boxed into, the life racism would never let me out of. That made me want to get out of their box, but not get out of the black community where my little black self was nurtured by a sense of understanding one another. I didn’t feel boxed in by my black playmates or my black grandma down the street or eating the grits and collard greens that had migrated north too.
Getting good grades in school felt like getting out of white people’s box because it defied their belief that we were stupid and lazy. By eighth grade we had moved to a less segregated neighborhood, and I often spent afternoons studying at Jay Berman’s house, the boy who vied with me for first place in everything.
Jay, the lone white kid in that grade, lived a few blocks away in a house full of the books and magazines his dad read. Daddy said he didn’t work because McCarthy’s House Un-American Activity Committee had blacklisted him even though they never proved he was a communist.
One day when our homework ran late, I jumped up to go see Amos ’n’ Andy on TV, the sitcom about ignorant blacks. Mr. Berman said he was surprised at me. “You shouldn’t watch a thing like that. It makes fun of your people, and of you,” he said. “Negroes aren’t ridiculous like the characters on that show. It makes white people think your hardworking father and you are like that just because you’re Negro.”
The show was so funny, I’d never seen it as denigrating my race, and neither had the many African Americans who half-believed those white prejudices themselves. Mr. Berman asked if I’d ever known a Negro as ludicrous as Lightnin’, the shuffling ignoramus on the show.
“Nobody’s that stupid,” I said.
“A smart girl like you can do well in life if you know better than to accept nonsense like Amos ’n’ Andy. Choose what you fill your head with very carefully.”
“How should I choose?” I asked.
“Get a good education, Dolores. That will teach you how to think for yourself. Then you can figure out most anything. What’s in your head determines who you are.”
But at home, Daddy and David had an Amos ’n’ Andy routine, falling out laughing as they reenacted the idiocy. David shuffled across the floor, scratching his hangdog head, speaking country bumpkin Ebonics with an IQ of sixty-five.
“What’s ’a matter, dere, Lightnin’?” Daddy asked, playing the scheming Kingfish. “Don’tcha want ter trade your car for a bridge?”
I told them what Mr. Berman said, but David kept right on. “Be cool. It’s just a joke.”
But it wasn’t funny anymore, so I stopped watching. Years later I understood that mockery was created by white people. It fed prejudice against African Americans during its popular run on radio and CBS TV for thirty years until it went off air in the 1950s. That institutional racism was sponsored by products like Campbell’s Soup and Pepsodent toothpaste, broadcast into millions of homes where its disparagement was presented as entertainment.
By the time us kids in the ’hood were bussed from a Sears Roebuck parking lot on the Jefferson Special to the white Bennett High School across town, I was black to the bone. We called that old repurposed city bus the Ghetto Express because it drove straight to a neighborhood of well-to-do white people in large brick homes and back to the ’hood with no stops allowed.
During the ride, boys played the dozens, trying to outdo each other’s outrageous insults about one another’s mothers. We girls, the intended audience, cheered the most brash wisecracks and pooh-poohed those that fell flat, egging them on until one of them was out of comebacks.
“Yo’ mama’s so short she poses for trophies.”
“Yeah, well yo’ mama so fat she got her own zip code.”
At Bennett, a school with about six hundred in each grade, we ghetto kids started the day mixed in with white kids. During the brief homeroom period, we sat in wooden one-piece desks and chairs for attendance and announcements. When the class bell rang, I was separated from my friends to spend the day as one of few, or sometimes the only, black kids in honors classes.
I held back in those classes at first, worried I didn’t belong there, because these kids were white. White kids who had everything, knew everything, and whose entitlement said that was how it was supposed to be. White kids who chattered with each other and planned get-togethers as I sat silently by, invisible. White kids who had already read the books on the reading list.
But when I was the only one to answer a question about Julius Caesar in Old English, I changed my mind. Riding home later on the Ghetto Express, I sat with one of the dozens players the school had put in shop classes making shoeshine or bread boxes.
“What’s happenin’, Madame Butterfly?” he said. The kids nicknamed me that in elementary school, labeling me an egghead, a “proper” young lady, with an older brother who’d made it plain nobody was to mess with me.
“I’m reading Shakespeare.”
He cracked up. “Naw you ain’t. For real girl, what you up to?”
Those honors classes created a personal push and pull about my “place” all through high school. While I couldn’t have explained it back then, many of my Ghetto Express friends were being taught to live with the lower-class circumstances of our birth, while honors classes were opening new worlds to me. At fourteen, our futures were being determined by the tracks we were put in.
On the Ghetto Express, I threw in with some hip girls planning to join the Bennett drill team and perform at football game halftime shows. An older black girl had convinced the white coach to add some soul to the routines, and it was our mission to make them sooo fly.
At rehearsals I was lined up in a row of the school auditorium with the short girls, some white, some black, to learn the steps. Our black leader was up front showing how to rock a long step forward and sway back on the other foot with funky attitude. Her rolling hips amazed.
The team began the move, but not together. We black girls got into the groove and strutted our stuff. Some of the white girls did it, but others were reluctant, trying to make the move fit the team’s previous military marching style, as was school tradition. A head bop was added. The white girl next to me looked disapproving and didn’t do it.
After a few practices, the old military marching team was nowhere to be seen and the white girls had all quit. We added our sassiest steps in the aisle of the Ghetto Express, ignoring the driver shouting at us to sit down. Before long, we’d won our version of a civil rights coup. That white school had an all-black drill team, jammin’ with homegirls’ steps.
I wondered if my white relatives, should I meet them, would be able to respect me for finding triumph in those halftime shows. I also wondered if the Lewises could relate to my mixed race. Lots of folks couldn’t, as I learned back in high school.
One Saturday I skipped the drill team performance to sit bunched together with the black kids in All-High Stadium at a Bennett game. We were separated from the white students by mutual choice. Sprawled out behind me was an elementary classmate, a boy so black complexioned he was nearly blue. While everyone stood for the national anthem he sat, loudly running his game on a white girl so blonde I had to study her face to see if she had eyelashes.
I turned and touched my finger to my lips. “The national anthem is playing.”
“Shut the fuck up, you sorry half-breed,” he said.
Me?
With a forced a smirk I turned around, and caught the astonished look on the face of a red-headed white boy from honors class. The black kids tittered and watched to see if we’d fight, as our neighborhood code called for. Truth was, Madame Butterfly had never fought anybody. I pretended the incident was meaningless, cheering and chatting until I could escape at halftime.
But inside, I could hardly think straight. I shouldn’t have called his behavior out, but why did he have to name me as less than our black crew? I’d thought the whole Ghetto Express crowd were my boon-coons. Like the grooves of a 45 RPM record my mind looped: DoIbelong? DoIbelong? DoIbelong?
Mama was seasoning chicken when I got home and told her what had happened. She cleared her throat then said, “Don’t take that race bait, Dolores. Life’s hard enough without worrying about what people say about your being mixed. Ignore it, like I do.”
That boy’s two-by-four upside my head cracked my identity open. Everybody didn’t accept me as the black I thought I was. The specter of that uncertain acceptance would stay with me always, leaving me to wonder which blacks might harbor similar resentment.
In later years, I had another such incident, during an after-work drink with some black corporate colleagues. We took a table in the back where we could talk quietly, away from the noisy yuppies at the bar. There had been an incident where another black coworker shouted at the vice president that he was tired of working on a corporate plantation.
One man said I didn’t know how bad it really was because the white management accepted me more than darker coworkers. “Your skin’s so light, and you speak so proper you sound white.”
“I’m as black as you, and you know it,” I said, unaware in those days of my light-skinned privilege.
“My high yellow sistah, so you say.” He wanted me to agree The Man could relate to my similarity with the wives and daughters he had at home. He beat a rhythm on the tabletop and chanted:
If you’re light, you’re all right.
If you’re brown, stick around.
But if you’re black, get back.
Others accused me of thinking I was better than them because I was light. Black men told me how fine I was because I was “light, bright, and damned near white.” Darker men flattered my looks, saying I’d make a good choice as a wife. Having a fair-skinned wife would give them some status, and importantly, make their children lighter.
But I saw myself as black, no matter what they said. My father told us we were. “You kids have light skin and straight noses because your mother’s blood is stronger than mine. But you’re black, you’re always going to be black, and the white man is never going to let you forget it.”
David was probably right. Meeting with my lost white relatives could backfire because of race. But I was still ready to risk that, because even if we couldn’t relate to each other, that too was part of knowing whose blood ran in my veins.
And yet, the day I helped a shy blonde transfer student find her locker I had no expectation of making a white friend. A white friend who would teach me that race didn’t have to matter between individuals. Jackie Milligan was all soft-spoken refinement, a balm to the no-holds-barred acting out that was our normal on the Ghetto Express. She seemed honest and easy, and accepted me without judgement.
“What’s happenin’, Jackie,” I’d say, the slang making her giggle. When we were together, people’s eyes darted back and forth over us. She was five foot nine and thin; I was five foot two and overweight. She was delicate and reserved; I was rough and forward. Both of us wore glasses, were nerds in honors classes, and took piano lessons. Somehow, we made sense of things together—I brought her out of her shy ways, and she led me into her world of yachts and horses.
Her mom, a genteel spirit, drove us to their three-story brick house after school one day. It sat on a quiet street with a grassy median, so unlike my street with its multifamily units and a factory down the block. Jackie showed me her toy horse with a hair tail that resembled the real horse she had to leave behind in Michigan. All I knew about horses was my one pony ride, the animal led by a man around a circle at a fair.
When her dad came home, her mom served cookies with tea in a china pot wrapped in a tea cozy. Who knew there was such a thing? Like a British movie, we sat near the grand piano in their long living room, the teapot resting on a gold filigree coffee table.
Jackie sat down at the piano, tearing into the theme from Lawrence of Arabia. She threw her head back and her long hair hung behind her. A fantasy played on her face as the music became a story of desert races I could hear. That music moved her as much as Motown did me. In the ’hood, we made fun of classical and other forms of “white” music. But the way Jackie played it, I found the feeling and beauty for the first time.
I rubbed my finger across the gold filigree table. “This is so beautiful,” I said.
“Oh this? We got that in Egypt on our trip around the world,” Mr. Milligan said.
They went around the world? The farthest I’d gone was Harlem, to visit Daddy’s relatives. The highlight was getting autographs at the stage door of the Apollo Theater on 125th Street.
The Milligans talked casually about the Taj Mahal, getting separated in the broiling sun at the Egyptian pyramids, and having high tea in London. They laughed about elephant rides and Africans staring at their white skin, the way Daddy talked about the pro wrestling matches downtown.
From then on, it was like the Milligans adopted me. And what an education they gave me, wrapped in love. As Jackie’s companion, they took me to several cultural performances. We saw Van Cliburn play piano at Kleinhans Music Hall, from seats where we could watch his long fingers fly and his delicate wrists float up from the keyboard after the last note. We saw a performance of Carmen where the sets and elaborate military and Spanish costumes awed. But what surprised me most about the opera, which I thought was the ultimate in dignified art, was the hussy who was pure trouble.
“My dear,” Mr. M. said, his eyes twinkling, “operas are full of hussies and scoundrels, just like real life.”
The Milligans took me out on their yacht one weekend, where we girls swam in the river and lunched at the cabin dining table. I even drove the boat in the river’s calm waters that would become violent rapids that rushed over Niagara Falls. At home at their dinner table, Mr. M. held court, discussing what was at stake in national elections, Martin Luther King Jr.’s versus Malcom X’s philosophies, and the import of Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers strike.
They showed me that the world held so many more options than I could ever have imagined from inside the sealed off ghetto mentality. What the Milligans gave me was not a desire for their custom ruby crystal wine glasses from Lido, Italy, but how they thought. They showed me how to do what Mr. Berman urged me to do—think for myself and fill my head with worthwhile ideas.
Mama said we should invite the Milligans to our house some evening when she was off, to show some hospitality and appreciation. Daddy worried we couldn’t pass a whole evening with such educated, well-to-do people. What in the world could we talk about?
“Anything you want,” Mama said. “Dolores talks with them, so we can too. They’re just people.”
Mama and I dressed up in stockings and patent leather heels and Daddy had on a white long-sleeved shirt and tie. Mama excused my brothers because Jackie was my friend, not theirs. She made an expensive crab dip to impress, and Daddy, who already had a few Four Roses beforehand, placed the bottle in the center of the coffee table. I crossed my fingers he wouldn’t get drunk.
“Have one with me, Mr. Milligan?” he asked as soon as they were settled.
“Absolutely, pour me one please.”
Mr. M., who loved politics, asked Daddy if he liked President Lyndon Johnson.
“I gotta be for him, for all he’s done for the civil rights bills.”
“Better than Goldwater, huh?” Mr. M. asked.
“That bastard? He’s against the unions,” Daddy said. “I’m the sergeant at arms for the local Steelworkers, you know.”
Mr. M. raised his glass in a salute.
Daddy took me to a union meeting once when there was nobody at home to keep me. There, an all-white crowd of men got loaded in the bar before a boisterous meeting upstairs to take a strike vote. Daddy was so worried about them getting out of control, he sat me next to the exit so we could run out if fighting broke out. “A black sergeant at arms can’t make angry white men behave,” he said.
Mr. M. gently jiggled his empty glass for another Four Roses. Daddy was happy then. He had a man to drink and talk shop with. They toasted each other a few times, Mr. Milligan matching Daddy drink for drink. When the Milligans stood up to go, Daddy pumped Mr. M.’s hand a long time.
“Gee, Mr. Milligan,” he said. “I had no idea educated people could be so much fun!”
My high school life was not all yachts and opera. By age sixteen, I worked after school as a second-shift aide at a nursing home. A yellow pinafore uniform that repelled liquids and stains was required, the reason for which I quickly learned. My job, along with the rest of the all black staff, was to get the elderly patients on the dementia ward, all of whom were white, washed and put to bed. I had entered the servant class.
The residents had limited mobility and little understanding of the realities of their lives. Those capable of holding a conversation I could follow thought we were way back in time, when they were younger. Like Blanche, who talked to me in a booming voice as if I were one of her elementary school students. As I pushed her wheelchair into the bathroom and set her on the toilet, she would instruct me. I worked steadily to wash her face and hands as she kept on: “Time to go over your homework.” I answered math problems while removing her dress, and after she peed, slipped the soapy washcloth between her legs.
I made my rounds from patient to patient. If the woman was bedridden, she was rolled onto one side. A grey metal bedpan was wedged under her bare bottom, then she was rolled back over and up onto the pan. I hoisted one after another onto bedpans, waited to hear the tinkle or grunts, and gave them toilet paper or wiped them myself. Then scrubbed their soiled bodies.
One of mine was Mrs. L., the only patient well-to-do enough to have a single room. The day staff dressed her in impeccable suits and a hairdresser kept her hair coiffed, all paid by the family who never came to see her. I started her bedtime routine by turning her wheelchair toward me. Without a word, she whipped out her hidden dinner fork from under a tartan lap blanket and stabbed the back of my hand, guerilla style. That little old lady who didn’t know where she was came down hard enough to make blood flow from the puncture of several tines. That was the last night I drug home from that job, put my smelly yellow uniform in a soapy bucket overnight, and started my homework.
Mine was the same job my mother did for seventeen years at the state mental hospital. That’s why it seemed such a good find when the nursing home hired me. In the end, it did pay off, because that job taught me what an unskilled worker could expect to do for a lifetime. Thankless, servile, dirty work that paid a pittance. That was not the doing-well life Mr. Berman told me to pursue, the one the Milligans modeled for me, and not the one I was going to accept. I wanted something better. How to get it, I didn’t know, but I was determined to find out.
My fellow honors students talked endlessly about going to college. All of them were going, it seemed. Wanted to go. Had to go, according to their families. My goal had been to graduate high school like my brothers did. They finished school, my parents said, proud the boys had gone further than Daddy’s sixth grade and Mama’s ninth. But my white classmates were going further. They debated the merits of places I’d never heard of, like the University of Rochester or Barnard. Jackie’s heart was set on the University of Michigan, where her dad had gone. She had some crazy, foregone conclusion I was going to college too.
I asked my trigonometry teacher, an older woman in lace-up shoes who had encouraged my work, if she thought I should go.
“Why, yes,” she said, “a good student like you should apply. I’ll set up an appointment for you with the guidance counselor to figure out a plan. She helps on all college questions.”
I arrived early to the appointment in my good plaid wrap-around skirt and white blouse to make an impression and browsed college catalogs while waiting my turn.
Then a trim white woman in black heels called me to take the seat she gestured at. She sat behind a desk, empty except for office supplies and a phone book.
“What can I do for you?” the thirty-something Miss Guidance asked.
I bumbled through my request for help figuring out about going to college.
“College?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. “Oh no, Dolores. Colored girls don’t go to college. If you do anything after high school, you should go to Fosdick Masten Vocational School and take up sewing. It’s right downtown by the baseball stadium.”
She flipped her dark hair back over her ear, as white women do to signal what they think is their allure or power, crossed her legs, and rifled through the phone book. She wrote the phone number of the trade school on a slip of paper and handed it to me. Standing up, she went over and opened the office door, signaling the end of the conversation. Not knowing what to say, I thanked her and wandered out, defeated.
Was that why I didn’t know about college? I wasn’t supposed to go because I was black? But she’d said something ridiculous about me sewing. I’d earned a single D in eleven years of school—in sewing. That D was generous given the skirt I tried to make in eighth-grade home economics with the cheap, stretchy plaid fabric and difficult pleated pattern. That teacher made me take the skirt out and do it over so many times, the final eyesore had uneven pleat widths and plaid lines as wavy as fields of grain. I still wasn’t over the humiliation of walking across the auditorium stage in it at the fashion show, before dumping it in the garbage.
Too upset with the counselor’s advice to face the kids on the Ghetto Express, I went around to the empty street behind Bennett to think, where nobody would see me.
She hadn’t even reviewed my transcript. Was she crazy, randomly picking sewing of all things, out of a hat? None of the white honors students were being told to take up sewing at Fosdick Masten. Pacing up and down the street, I snorted out loud, imagining the eye doctor’s cashmere-clad white daughter taking up other people’s hems. She would never sit in her fancy mansion with the music room and library I’d seen, pumping the pedal on a Singer sewing machine for a dollar. Why should I?
As I kicked through red and yellow fallen leaves, my rage boiled. I was not about to let this white woman blow me off because I was black. Not after all those firehoses turned on civil rights demonstrators. Not after that new law for equal access Mr. M. kept talking about. I pulled out the notepaper with the phone number to call and ripped it to pieces. I wanted what my white classmates were going to get. That sorry white lady wasn’t going to keep me from having it.
Now I wonder how many other worthy students’ professional careers that woman killed because of their color. How many lives were consigned to low wages, limited housing, or health choices by other guidance counselors like her? How many teachers, homeowners, dentists, and business leaders were lost to the black community because of them?
I applied blindly to a few colleges in New York state my classmates talked about, without understanding that different colleges taught different things, without knowing the distinction between public and private universities, liberal arts or professional majors. I had no idea some were harder to get into, or which offered scholarships, or what the relevant selection criteria was. I never asked anyone else how to get into college.
Daddy watched me work on applications at the kitchen table as he rinsed collard greens in the sink for Sunday’s dinner. “You know college costs a lot of money?” he asked.
I didn’t.
“Why are you filling out all those papers? We don’t have that kind of extra, you understand? If you want to go to college, I don’t know how you’re going to pay for it.”
I kept on mailing completed applications, adding requests for financial aid, like some of the white kids were doing.
One crisp Saturday morning that fall, Mama and I hung sheets out on the line in the back yard. Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Mosby, leaned over the chain-link fence and asked if I was taking the exam for Howard University the next Saturday.
Mama and I looked blankly at each other, dropping the wet sheet and wooden clothespins back in the basket to listen. Mrs. Mosby said the scholarship exam could be a great chance to get college paid for, and I should have a good shot at it with my school record. It would be held in the Urban League office where she worked. That neighbor said that education was the way up and out. “You would do well to go to Howard,” she said. “It’s the leading black university in America.”
I’d never heard of it.
“Put her name down,” Mama said. “What time will it be?”
The only preparation I made that week was to get the specified pencils and pack a good eraser. It would probably be something like the SAT, which I also hadn’t known people prepared for. That Saturday at the Urban League, I answered everything and checked it twice.
Acceptances started coming in for my classmates, including Jackie, who was heading to the University of Michigan. A few mainstream white schools accepted me, like Russell Sage, offering financial aid so paltry Daddy said we’d have to go to the poor house.
I came home from school one afternoon to find Mama still hadn’t left for work yet, even though her clock-in time had passed. She sat in the living room in her spotless white shoes, stockings, and nurses’ aide uniform, ready for her second shift at the hospital. An oversized envelope rested in her lap, torn open.
“It’s all set,” she said, beaming. “You did it.”
“Did what?”
“You got into Howard University.”
“I did? I got in?”
“And, you got a full scholarship. The whole kit and caboodle paid for four years.”
“For real, Mama?”
“Yep,” she said, handing me the letter on university letterhead that read, “We are pleased to inform you . . .”
I clutched the page, jumping up and down. I was going to college. And not just any college, but the most prestigious black university in America. Mama got up from the easy chair and started singing. There was no greater joy, as I clapped in time to her off-key song:
Hooray and hallelujah,
You had it comin’ to ya.
Goodie, goodie for you,
Goodie, goodie for me.
You rascal, you!