5— Going to Whitted With the White Kids

Five

Going to Whitted with the White Kids

LaHoma

My resentment toward Whitted Junior High School ripened and matured as the first day of school neared. I was giving up so much: my friends, my teachers, my beautiful new school. For what? I loathed the idea of going to Whitted—it was old, it was run-down, it was on the other side of town, and I just didn’t want to go there. It was not in my neighborhood.

Shepard’s new brick façade and the surrounding vicinity were much more appealing; new homes lined the sidewalk to the school, and I had grown accustomed to walking the mile and a half back home with my friends. Most of my frustration with the new school assignment to Whitted revolved around having to walk a different route to school. Even though the walk was exactly the same distance, just thinking about the walk from Whitted was emotionally and psychologically more stress inducing, making it seem longer. Facing the change to my day-to-day routine just didn’t seem fair, especially when I felt that I wasn’t getting anything worth having in return for the disruption. For me, going to school was about more than just attending classes at any particular school. The ritual of getting to and from school took on great importance, and I bemoaned this distressing change in how I got to and from school. Once a week, for example, on my way home from Shepard, I would stop for piano lessons. My piano teacher, Mrs. Reeves, lived on the corner of Lawson and Sima, conveniently on my route from school. Mrs. Reeves had a small piano studio in her home for young black students. I never became much of a piano player despite the eight years of piano lessons, but the proximity of her studio to my home and its location along my path from school guaranteed that I was a decent player and rarely missed my weekly lessons. The lessons inspired my love and appreciation for music. I learned the notes; I could read music and make beautiful chords. And if I practiced, I could get through most of my assigned pieces. Mrs. Reeves held yearly recitals, and we were required to learn two or three pieces to play “by heart.”

Annually, we were evaluated by the North Carolina Piano Guild to assess our level of accomplishment in classical pieces. I developed advanced proficiencies with several Bach and Beethoven selections, to the delight of Mrs. Reeves, who looked forward to showcasing her troupe of budding black piano performers before the wider community of family and friends. Once I changed schools, going to her studio became increasingly burdensome, and within weeks of beginning at Whitted, I quit my piano lessons.

When students started complaining that the new assignments required longer and more challenging commuting distances to school, we were introduced to the word “busing,” although it technically did not involve getting on a school bus. Instead we were given vouchers to ride the Durham city buses. I didn’t start taking the bus right away, but eventually I succumbed to the urging of my peers. A bus stopped right outside my house.

My friends from the adjoining streets, Joyce and Phyllis, had already started taking the bus. There was another stop at the top of the hill, and they would catch the bus when it stopped at the bottom of the hill—directly in front of my house. I hated taking the bus because most of the good seats were occupied when I boarded. I would have to stand until we reached downtown, where we changed buses.

This transportation arrangement worked out until I started to participate in extracurricular activities. On those afternoons, I could not make it to the bus to get downtown to make the transfer in front of Woolworth’s. I would have to walk the mile and a half home by myself. I could control when and where I walked, past houses that became more and more familiar, waving to people sitting on their porches. I could also stop at the “mom and pop” places on the corner of Alston or Ridgeway Avenue, just before I reached home, which I liked to do when I had a few pennies for a treat.

I also hated taking the bus because it seemed that it took forever to get to school, and I had to get up extra early to catch it. We also had to ask for a transfer ticket so we wouldn’t have to pay for taking a second bus to school. If you forgot to ask for the transfer or lost it before getting on the next bus, you had to pay full price.

Despite these challenges, I often took the bus because of bad weather or just to go downtown with my friends. Downtown was a great place to see lots of other junior high and high school kids. Somewhere in the sea of black faces there may have been a few white students making the same trek across town, but they were invisible to me. Downtown was also where we met boys—boys from other schools, but more important, from other parts of town.

Learning about boys was a preoccupation, but I also needed to learn a few things about teenage girls. We often did stupid things and instigated fights over silly matters—territory, pride, possessions, boyfriends, girlfriends, and anything else we could think to fight about. Pulling hair and throwing punches were the norm, although sometimes a knife would be pulled out to stress the seriousness of the offense and bring greater attention to a particular grievance.

I was once drawn into a fight to defend my honor because the girl had said something I didn’t like.

“Don’t call me names,” I said, clenching my fists.

But after this bigger and much badder girl pulled out a knife, I got smart and ran away as fast as I could. I was so scared that I promised God that I would never allow myself to be drawn into a meaningless fight again. I learned a valuable life lesson, and since that day I have seen myself as a peacemaker, conflict resolver, and avoider of all physical displays of aggression or violence—especially with people bigger than I.

* * *

The first few days and weeks at Whitted proved not as bad as I had imagined. As the months rolled by, my outgoing personality and desire to please the teachers surpassed my anxieties. I was in the modern dance group, cheerleading, honor society, student council and the band. I made new friends, and I relished my expanding circle of influence at school, even though I still longed for dear old Shepard. And then there were the school athletic competitions, which forced us to claim bragging rights of superiority for our school.

Durham City Schools’ efforts to integrate Whitted were most evident in the membership of student activities and organizations. The 1971 Honor Society at Whitted included its first white students. We were friends because we had mutual academic interests and goals, but we rarely interacted with each other outside school. We were all nice to each other, but Honor Society meetings were where our lives together began and ended. We certainly did not hang out or spend time together after school. Most of these students came from the Forest Hills and Duke University area and were children of privilege and prominent political figures in Durham. Despite the change in Durham school board policies, that they came to Whitted was surprising and that they remained—perplexing. I overheard black adult conversations suggesting that it would just be a matter of time before these white students would transfer to private schools, since many others had already made the decision to leave the public school system.

* * *

Much has been written about the black students forced to endure all-white schools, but very little about those white students who elected to remain in an all-black school setting when, often, their social and economic status provided them with other options. Most of the white students who remained at Whitted during those first couple of years continued on to Hillside to complete high school. I was not aware of their struggles, did not ask about their problems and lacked curiosity about their daily lives. They were, again, largely invisible to me.

I was caught up in the busyness of my own existence, and I did not feel any particular need to reach out to them. We were all the victims of our Southern traditions and had low expectations for anything beyond a friendly “hey” to the sprinkling of white students here and there. Besides, they seemed fine. Later I would discover that although this was certainly true in some cases, there were definitely exceptions. For the life of me, I couldn’t tell you who those struggling white students were.

* * *

I loved going to school, reading books, and doing homework, and I generally excelled in my classes. I was rewarded for good penmanship, studiousness, and responsiveness to authority. I increasingly took on more activities, eventually leading to my election as the student body president in ninth grade.

I still can’t explain exactly how I won that election, because it still felt as though we were the “new” kids—the interlopers. My friends and I were outsiders to the Fayetteville Street and Enterprise neighborhood surrounding Whitted, and we were definitely the geographical minority in the school. I was not particularly well known, and I was not liked by the majority of students because of the other names I had acquired, including “teacher’s pet” and “stuck up.” So even though I ran for student body president at the urging of one of my teachers, I did not think I stood a chance against my more popular opponents.

I was elated when I won, but I thought that if I was puzzled over the outcome, I couldn’t imagine how some of the other students were feeling. But no one challenged the results, so I spent the ninth grade learning how to carefully walk the tightropes among administration, teachers and my peers, both black and white. The white students were easy—they did not aspire to traditional leadership positions in the school, although they were often the top academic performers. My fellow black students presented an array of amusing and annoying challenges, mostly teases and teacher’s-pet name-calling, which I could mostly ignore. But this short tenure with student government was sufficiently difficult that it kept me from seeking similar positions in high school.

With time, I realized that the student government president position was largely titular and ceremonial and carried little sway with the majority of students. I was an ally of the teachers and administrators, who were probably relieved that I did not appear to be someone who would disturb the budding racial integration efforts. The last thing the people working at the school needed during those early days of integration was someone to challenge authority.

I spent a lot of time with the teachers and administrators. I loved most of them, especially Ms. Mamie Perry, who was in charge of the Honor Society, and Ms. Edith Johnson, the physical education and dance group teacher. I rationalized that, even though junior high had not turned out the way I planned, I still had great teachers and adults who were focused on my success. They were also the disciplinarians who ran Whitted with steely wills and wooden rulers. Mostly the rulers were used to single out the person or object of their anger or displeasure. But sometimes it served other purposes. We were more terrified of these two women because of the threat of their disapproval than anything else. Nobody wanted to get on these teachers’ bad sides.

I think I understand now why they were so loved and feared. They challenged us to excel by demonstrating how much they cared for us, how much they wanted us to succeed. They expected us to do well. Their role is one of the reasons that some teachers from that era think that integration was the worst thing to happen to black children in Durham. The black teachers held positions of prestige and power in the community, and parents held them in great esteem. Black parents were also accountable to these teachers in a way, because they would see them outside of school, in the grocery stores or churches. When I described this book project to my godmother, Mrs. Smith, she lamented that the power dynamic between teachers and students changed, diminishing as integration meant that parents and teachers no longer came from the same communities or represented the same interests.

* * *

Mrs. Smith, now 99 years old, reflected on that period of her professional life:

“I was one of the first black teachers at Rogers-Herr, arriving in 1970, and I stayed four years. I didn’t like it because the teachers were so prejudiced, and they decided that the students from the projects (Cornwallis) didn’t know anything so they didn’t need to teach them anything. Mr. Schooler (who was the principal at Shepard at the time) picked the teachers who would go to Rogers-Herr as part of the integration effort, and I was picked.

“When I got there, I found out that they had resources that we did not have at Shepard—books, a nice library, IQ tests, instruments, and other resources. I was surprised to see that these resources were only available to the white students.

“Integration benefited some of the students; in fact, there were some people who wanted their kids to be there. In Durham, there was quiet resistance to desegregation, but there was a lot of resentment about the whole situation.

“Black people brought a lot of money into Durham through the various institutions like North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, the largest black-owned business in the world, and they were able to negotiate favorable circumstances for some black students in Durham.

“But there were parts of Durham that were exclusively white, like Forest Hills and Hope Valley, and where black people better not go. Black police could only arrest black people. These were the communities closest to Rogers-Herr and Hillside.

“In my opinion, integration was good for the students who could take advantage of it. The ‘project’ kids seemed to resent being there, and their parents wouldn’t let the white teachers touch them, so the teachers stopped trying to discipline them. Of course this was not the way we were used to dealing with black children in our black schools. The discipline issues were different, and they continued to deteriorate after integration. There were also differences in how the students were treated, and the expectations and consequently discipline of black students were low.

“Black parents from the working class and low socioeconomic circumstances might not come to meetings because of their fear of being judged by white teachers. I always suspected that kids know when you like them, and there was a feeling that the white teachers didn’t like the black ones anyway, so they just left them to fail.”

* * *

Daily school life at Whitted had been greatly affected by our teachers. They were tough, tough, tough but fair. If you displeased them or did something to offend their sensibilities, you knew it IMMEDIATELY. We were expected to carry ourselves as young ladies and gentlemen and to represent the school and our families.

Our teachers would send home students who they believed had not paid sufficient attention to personal hygiene after gym class. They taught us pride in our appearance and the need to respect one’s self by wearing dresses and skirts of the appropriate length. These attitudes ran counter to the prevailing fashion trends of the day, the miniskirt era, but our teachers had no qualms about sending us home to change clothes when we were deemed to have violated the dress code. I came as close as I could to the “decent v. danger” lines that we imagined our teachers had, but luckily for me I escaped the judgment and punishment that I saw befall fellow classmates. It was usually hard to get anything past my mother, anyway.

Ms. Perry was most focused on academic achievement and attentiveness to scholarship. As the social studies and English teacher, she was a stickler for grammar, penmanship, diction, and vocabulary. I once made the mistake of telling a peer to keep his “damn hands off me.” Unfortunately, Ms. Perry was within earshot. She reprimanded me in front of the class for such a vulgar display of language, and then kept me after school to write 100 times on the board: “I will not use curse words, I will not use curse words.” The remnants of this punishment linger to the present time because I still have a strong aversion to cursing. Who says eighth-grade teachers don’t have power over your life?

I tried to stay on the good side of Ms. Perry, and she rewarded my efforts with high praise. But she was not one to be crossed. If I thought I was one of her favorites because of my high grades in her classes, she was quick to remind me that I was just another student to her—a student who needed to be taught to respect the rules.

Take bathroom breaks, for example. We were allowed to go to the bathroom only during class breaks. Because of the large number of female students compared to the size of the bathroom, Ms. Perry would allow only one group of girls to go at a time. To prevent loitering and shenanigans, she timed us. One day, the group of girls to which I had been assigned took what Ms. Perry must have considered too much time. She was waiting for us when we returned. She lined all the offending students up against the wall, and we were each spanked with the wooden rulers—for failing to return in a timely fashion and failing to consider the needs of our fellow classmates, who had to wait the few extra minutes it had taken us to return to class. I was embarrassed and humiliated. Although I had seen her inflict her wrath on others, I had always been spared.

I heard other students snickering, “Even LaHoma got spanked.”

That day I learned another lifelong lesson—that students will respect you if they believe that the discipline is fairly distributed. My dear Ms. Perry ran a tight but fair ship, though I always wondered what would have happened if there had been white students with us because I never saw white students being disciplined that way.

Ms. Johnson oversaw the modern dance group that included only girls who would respect her rules for conduct. None of the white students joined the dance group, either from lack of interest or lack of confidence—I cannot say. Ms. Johnson did not select girls based on dance talent, experience or body type. Her philosophy was that if you really wanted to dance and demonstrated willingness to practice and learn the routines, she would be willing to accept you into the group.

Ms. Johnson started each year with a large group of willing souls who thought they could keep up with the rules and be allowed to perform at school programs, pageants and the annual dance performance. Sounds simple enough, but the annual dance performance always had fewer girls than had started at the first practice. Ms. Johnson’s strict conduct policies proved more effective in selecting her dancers than any other screening process.

Ms. Johnson also used the dance group as a recruiting pool for the cheerleading squad. She was not as democratic or inclusive with this group. Tryouts were held for the junior varsity and varsity teams, and you needed to demonstrate general athletic abilities, including flexibility and coordination.

When I entered Whitted, I never thought of myself as a cheerleader. Besides, I couldn’t do the splits, cartwheels and somersaults that I thought were necessary. But I learned I liked performing in front of crowds, and with just a teeny bit of encouragement from my friends—and sizing up the competition—I decided, why not?

So I begged my mom to sign me up for a few private gymnastics classes before the tryouts. I thought I could learn everything I needed to know in a couple of lessons. The white instructor promised to help me learn how to do all the impressive feats that would turn me into the next Cathy Rigby. I didn’t care about any of that, especially because I had never seen black gymnasts on any local or national teams. I just wanted to learn to jump high, turn a cartwheel with confidence and gain sufficient flexibility to muster up a decent split so I could make the squad.

I practiced with diligence for a few weeks to give myself a chance of making the final cut, or at the least, avoid embarrassing myself in front of my peers. I could not think of anything worse than that; I thought I could be forgiven for not measuring up to the high standards of Ms. Johnson, but looking stupid in front of my peers would be the worst possible outcome. I also worked on a dance routine—one of the three try-out requirements, along with a chant and yell (with enthusiasm of course) and some sort of stunt (cartwheel, flip, somersault, split, etc.).

The day of tryouts arrived. My mom had pressed my hair the night before so it glistened. My clothes were clean and tidy, my shorts were short (but not too short), and I had on the double-down socks popular in the day. I sat patiently with at least 50 other hopeful candidates. We all watched and applauded for each girl’s routine—regardless of how good it was. It was us against Ms. Johnson.

Finally it was my turn: “LaHoma Smith,” I heard Ms. Johnson say. I took my position and began my chant to the tune of the hit show, “The Adams Family”:

Dadadadum (Clap clap) Da dadadum (Clap clap)

Da dadadumDa dadadum

Da dada…dum….(Kick ball chain step…Clap clap)

We’re rough and we’re tough…We really got the stuff… You can’t mess with us…

The Viking family...(Moving my hips and shuffling my feet from side to side)

Da…da da dum (Clap clap)……Da dadadum(Clap clap)……Da dadadum….Da dada dum….

Da dada…dum….(Clap clap)

Pose….Smile..…High spread eagle jump…..Pose again…..High kick… Cheer with pump fist ….

Go Vikings!!!

Then I ran really fast, spread my legs and turned upside down into a cartwheel…

(Nailed it!)

“Go Vikings!!!!” I exclaimed one more time for good measure.

There was polite applause from the other girls waiting their turns. I took my seat on the bleachers. I could not read Ms. Johnson’s face. She was probably a good poker player, because nothing about her expression betrayed her thoughts about each performance. You had no idea if you had done a good or lousy job by her standards. Did I kick high enough? Did I yell loud enough? Were my legs straight enough in my cartwheel? Did I move my hips enough? Or maybe I moved them too much, and Ms. Johnson would think that I was too “grown” to be a good representative for the school? No way to know.

We waited for the remaining girls to try their luck, and then it was over. Ms. Johnson thanked everyone for coming out, reminded us that only eight to 10 girls would be chosen, and that the lucky few would see their names posted outside the gym. She said that everyone was a winner, or something to that effect, but by then, we were all filing out, relieved that was over while calculating our prospects, given what we had seen from the competition.

One week went by. Then two—an eternity. Finally, without ceremony, Ms. Johnson posted the list of girls who had made the squad on the door outside the gym. I hastily scrolled down the alphabetical list of names on the Junior Varsity list … Parker, Reynolds, Sims, Stevens … there was no Smith. I backed away to reflect on the realization of this defeat. I knew I was not the best, but I thought that I had done at least as good or better than any of the girls whose names appeared on the list.

As I turned to go, I heard another girl saying,

“LaHoma you made it.” Annoyed with such cruel teasing, I turned to see who was mocking me.

“No, I didn’t,” I said, and turned away from that terrible door with the terrible list. Someone else pushed me back in the direction of the door. This time I noticed another list. My friend pointed to my name.

“See … on the Varsity squad.”

I looked—terrified that she was wrong—and then terrified that she was right. There it was: “LaHoma Smith.” I hadn’t even considered looking at the names for the Varsity squad—the current members on that squad were all ninth graders. But there it was, in black and white.

I was excited, then scared. I had never been a cheerleader before, and now I was on the varsity squad for Whitted!

Go Vikings!

For the remainder of my time at Whitted, I was a varsity cheerleader. We traveled to all the local junior high schools to cheer our sports teams. The visit to Rogers-Herr made a lasting impression. This was the school that Cindy had attended. What nice facilities they had—even nicer than my beloved Shepard! The bathrooms were light and spacious. The building and equipment all seemed new. We played the game, but the outcome seemed to lose its importance as I looked around the building and noticed how much nicer the gym at Rogers-Herr was compared to our old, worn-out bleachers at Whitted. Their uniforms seemed much nicer and newer than ours. Even though integration had occurred, their varsity cheerleaders were all white, just as our varsity cheerleaders were all black. But I didn’t care. I loved my school.

* * *

Most of our teachers were women, but there was definitely male influence at Whitted. Besides our principal, Mr. McAllister, the main male role model for me was Mr. Hodge, the band director. I did not play a band instrument when I started at Whitted, but I had taken piano lessons for eight years and loved music, knew my notes and could carry a tune. Mr. Hodge encouraged students who were interested in music to try out for the band, and then he would assign you an instrument to learn.

I knew I couldn’t play the piano in the band, so I yearned to play the clarinet or flute because those were the instruments usually assigned to the girls. To my horror, Mr. Hodge assigned me to play the French horn, an odd-shaped gigantic piece of heavy equipment that I noticed was typically played only by the guys. I had never even heard of the French horn until Mr. Hodge assigned it to me.

When I protested, he smiled, gave me a knowing pat on the head, and told me I would be fine. I always wondered why Mr. Hodge assigned me the French horn—maybe because even at that age, I was one of the taller girls and he had enough petite ones playing the flutes and clarinets. I looked over and saw that one of my equally sturdy friends had been assigned to play the saxophone.

One of the worst things about playing the French horn was the bulky, awkward shape of the case, which made carrying it difficult. But I learned to play the instrument. I was one of four French horn players, and the only girl. I took a bad situation and made it worse by developing a crush on one of the older, male French horn players. This made being in the band more fun, but playing in the French horn section itself was daunting. We were often the subject of whispers and jeers—especially when Mr. Hodge would call on the French horn section for attention or to practice a refrain that we had brutalized.

By ninth grade, I had earned first chair even though I was only a fair French horn player at best. Mr. Hodge’s passion and ability to inspire his young musicians, regardless of talent or possession of an instrument, helped advance the musical fortunes of many Whitted students that year. They were then ready to join the dynamic marching band of Hillside High School.

* * *

Every once in a while, my neighborhood friends and I would avoid going directly home from school. We would linger near Five Points—close to the intersection of West Main and East Chapel Hill streets in downtown Durham—waiting for and eventually catching the bus transfer that would take us home. We strolled down the sidewalk, looking in the windows, avoiding the stores where we knew teenage black girls would not be welcome. The sit-ins of the 1960s were now more than 10 years past, and while we were able to order food at the Woolworth’s without a problem, unspoken rules about how to comport oneself in this evolving climate prevailed. I did not fully understand what it all meant, but I knew better than to question, and even more important, I knew how to conduct myself. Besides, there were lots of places to shop downtown. Belk-Leggett, one of the most popular department stores, featured a beautiful display window the length of the store. The styles and prices were well beyond my eighth-grade budget, but that could not stop me from looking.

* * *

Black people had started shopping downtown. The civil rights movement and the call to dismantle segregation by boycotting businesses had done much to make shopping in most places possible, but it didn’t mean that it was always comfortable. Other stores on Main Street were Montaldo’s, Thalhimers, Montgomery Ward and Baldwins. Black people initially entered these places cautiously to see how white people would react. Older residents stayed alert, and most expected someone to ask them to leave. But there were no major incidents as Durham came to symbolize a progressive model of successful race relations—at least in the retail sector.

I could think of no excuse to enter any of those stores anyway, because my mother made most of my clothes—a point of constant conflict between her and me. Why did she have to make ALL my Sunday dresses? Why couldn’t we get one of these store-bought dresses once in a while? My closest friends knew my agony and teased me mercilessly. I begged Mama so much and made such a fuss that by the time I got to high school, she relented and allowed me to purchase an Easter outfit from Baldwins for church. I can’t get into that dress now, but I still own it.

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 calling 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.

“Were you with a … boy?”

“Of course not,” I lied again.

“Are you sure you were not with a boy?”

Dare I tell another lie?

“No, I was not with a boy, Mother.” As I heard yet another lie come out of my mouth, I wondered whether this boy was worth the punishment that I knew was coming for all these lies. Was he really worth this agony? I returned to the moment, my mother still fuming before her dumbfounded, guilty-as-accused, lying daughter.

“It was just a friend,” I heard myself say.

“A friend you had to lie about? Was it a boy or a girl, and where were you?”

I couldn’t decide whether she would be more disappointed if I told her the truth or if I didn’t say anything. I decided to go with the latter and refused to confirm or deny her accusations. She couldn’t make me talk, so I just closed my eyes and awaited my fate.

Frustrated with my refusal to further engage with her, she demanded I go to my room. I fell back from her stare and retreated, glad to be away from her. But now the real agony began, because I didn’t know what would happen to me. Dad had awakened during the late-night interrogation, but he remained silently on the sidelines, helpless to intervene.

For the remainder of the weekend, my mother didn’t speak to me, did not even look at me. Agony. What could she be thinking? Maybe she would forget about it? Maybe my Dad would convince her to go easy on me. But whom was I fooling? I waited some more.

Finally after what seemed like forever, my mother levied my sentence. And it was a doozy. No telephone or privileges outside school for three months.

THREE MONTHS! How could she?

“That’s forever!” I protested. This was the beginning of May… so June, July, August! The whole summer!

“Is it?” she asked, and walked away.

But my mother wasn’t done making my life miserable. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I managed to take my bitter medicine. I told a few friends about my predicament, and they were suitably impressed by the harshness of the sentence. They shared their condolences and teased me about the wonderful things I would probably miss over the summer. School was still in session, so I managed to have a bit of a social life during the day. But as soon as the bell rang, my prison sentence would begin.

One evening, two weeks down and 12 to go into my punishment, we were at the table having dinner, and the phone rang. My mother picked it up.

“Hello,” she said sweetly.

“LaHoma?” the caller asked.

“Oh, I’m sorry, but LaHoma has done something very bad, and she has lost her telephone privileges for three months so, no, you can’t talk to her. Please do not call back here this summer. Thank you and have a nice day.”

She hung up the telephone, looked over at me and smiled sweetly, completely aware of the humiliation I would experience once the details of that telephone call spread through school. Satisfied that my summer fate would now be broadcast throughout my social circle, she smiled again at me—the first time in more than a month—and walked out of the room.

That summer lasted forever, although I gradually earned more freedom from my mother’s watchful eyes. I got a job as a camp counselor at W.D. Hill Recreation Center on Fayetteville Street and worked with other junior high and high school students to supervise the daily activities of the younger kids in the community. We walked everywhere, including our weekly excursions to the pool at Hillside Park. Although the public schools were integrated, the swimming pools in Durham largely operated along racial lines. Hillside Park serviced Durham’s black community; Meadow Park was for white people only. If integration was so important, I pondered, why didn’t they integrate the pools, since the one at Hillside was frequently jammed pack with black kids from all over town. But I didn’t lose any sleep over that fact. We had survived the integration experiment at school. The white students had come, they were nice, we were nice, but they had hardly affected anything about the rest of my life.

It was time to move up to Hillside High School.

Courtesy of Whitted Junior High School, 1970-71

LaHoma Smith (back row, fourth from left) in the
National Honor Society at Whitted Junior High School.