When spring of my sophomore year came around, my classmates started making noises about junior prom, a ritual open to all grades at our school despite its name. A few weeks before the dance I got wind that a senior named Rob was thinking of asking me. I knew Rob from choir. He was kind, and smart-boy witty. In a school where choral music was not just appreciated but championed, we all revered the very mature bass voice and heart he brought to his solo in “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
But Daddy’s admonition clanged like a warning bell in my ears: “White boys will be your friend but they’ll never date you.” Is Rob so far down the pecking order of white boys that he can’t find a single white girl to date? Is something wrong with him? Is he settling for me?
I panicked. I’d been raised to think well of myself. I didn’t want to go to the prom as someone’s consolation prize.
I decided to prevent that from happening by inviting someone to the prom myself—not a boy I had a crush on; someone who couldn’t say no on the basis of race. There was that one Black boy in our school—the son of the head coach of the university’s basketball team, Frederick, now a junior—and I felt, given our race, that it was only natural that Frederick and I should go to prom together.
What I knew of Frederick fit the stereotypes I had of Black people. He was the son of a basketball coach and played basketball himself. He had the slangy language. He slouched his lanky body through the halls in a way that was different—which is ordinarily taboo in high school, but with Frederick was appealing, intriguing, as if he didn’t give a shit about looking so different from every other boy in the school. From a distance, I admired his easy Blackness. Yet it set him apart, put him out of reach, even for me. In the face of prom looming, I felt an urgent need to try to cross that line.
It was hard to work up the nerve to call him. I had spoken to him maybe once or twice in passing. But the potential awkwardness of going to a fancy dance with someone I hardly knew seemed outweighed by the logic of going to prom with a fellow Black person. A Black date felt like the safest possible choice. If only I could make it happen.
The day after I learned of Rob’s plan to ask me to prom, I was ready to do an end run around him by asking Frederick instead. That afternoon after school, I grabbed the phone book off the kitchen counter and brought it upstairs to my bedroom where I could have some privacy. I grabbed my red Trimline phone from my desk and plunked down on my bed with the phone book and the phone. I opened the white pages and thumbed through the Cs until I found Frederick’s last name. The address listed was in my town; it had to be the right number.
I could hear my heart beating against my skull, and I began to sweat a little while I rehearsed my opening lines twenty or thirty times. I imagined Frederick on the other end of the line. Would he even know who I was when I said my name? Should I try to speak with a bit of edgy jargon to sound Black enough to him? Did I even know any edgy jargon?
No.
Finally, I pulled the red phone onto my lap, lifted the receiver from the cradle, listened for the dial tone, and dialed the number. It rang three times, then someone answered. “H’lo?” The voice sounded distant. Uninterested. Like the fact of the phone ringing in his house was an annoyance. It must be Frederick, I thought. I began talking. At first he had no idea who I was so we stammered through an awkward back-and-forth where I explained that I was Julie, a sophomore. I knew my “white” voice wasn’t going to communicate my race so I said I was the sophomore at school. The Black girl. Now that I knew he knew who I was, I took a deep breath and cut to the chase.
“Hey, so prom’s coming up and I figure it’s only logical that we go together.”
“Yeah? Yeah.”
“So—?”
“Yeah, yeah, no that makes sense.”
“Cool. We’ll go to prom then.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay great. Thanks. Bye.”
The deed was done. But instead of the relief I’d expected would flood me, my blood continued pounding in my head. I was mortified. I’d just asked a guy to the prom whom I didn’t even know, all because we both had brown skin. Isn’t that racism?
Am I prejudiced? Can Black people even be prejudiced? What the hell kind of person am I?
I was also a little scared. What would it be like to go to the prom with a guy who was for all intents and purposes a stranger to me? And on top of that, a Black guy. What would it be like?
By the next day I was feeling ashamed. I walked through the halls at school preoccupied with thoughts about what I’d done to Frederick. He probably didn’t want to go to the prom with some girl he barely knew. He deserved better. So did Rob, the guy I feared was settling for me and was trying to avoid.
I called Frederick back that night and told him a small lie. I told him I’d just heard Rob had been planning to ask me and now I felt badly that I’d jumped the gun.
“So, I guess you and I shouldn’t go,” I stammered.
“Okay, cool.”
I went to prom with Rob dressed in a white Victorian-style dress that suited my mother’s sensibilities, with a neckline that rose to the bottom of my chin. Decades later I can see that Rob was brave, even transgressive of social norms in asking me to prom. Maybe even that I was a girl he actually just wanted to take to prom.
Frederick and I never spoke again. His family moved away at the end of that school year. Later I’d learn that his father, who’d been the first Black head coach of any major sport in the Big Ten, had died of cancer just months before my stupid stunt.