At home, my mother said, “Remember to be sisters in the presence of strangers.” She meant white people, like the woman who tried to make me get up and give her my seat on the Number 4 bus, and who smelled like cleaning fluid. At St. Catherine’s, they said, “Be sisters in the presence of strangers,” and they meant noncatholics. In high school, the girls said, “Be sisters in the presence of strangers,” and they meant men. My friends said, “Be sisters in the presence of strangers,” and they meant the squares.
But in high school, my real sisters were strangers; my teachers were racists; and my friends were that color I was never supposed to trust.
In high school, my best friends were “The Branded,” as our sisterhood of rebels sometimes called ourselves. We never talked about those differences that separated us, only the ones that united us against the others. My friends and I talked about who studied german or french, who liked poetry or doing “the twist,” who went out with boys, and who was “progressive.” We even talked about our position as women in a world supposed to be run by men.
But we never ever talked about what it meant and felt like to be Black and white, and the effects that had on our being friends. Of course, everybody with any sense deplored racial discrimination, theoretically and without discussion. We could conquer it by ignoring it.
I had grown up in such an isolated world that it was hard for me to recognize difference as anything other than a threat, because it usually was. (The first time I saw my sister Helen in the tub naked I was almost fourteen, and I thought she was a witch because her nipples were pale pink against her light brown breasts, not deeply purple like mine.) But sometimes, I was close to crazy with believing that there was some secret thing wrong with me personally that formed an invisible barrier between me and the rest of my friends, who were white. What was it that kept people from inviting me to their houses, their parties, their summer homes for a weekend? Was it that their mothers did not like them to have friends, the way my mother didn’t? Did their mothers caution them about never trusting outsiders? But they visited each other. There was something here that I was missing. Since the only place I couldn’t see clearly was behind my own eyes, obviously the trouble was with me. I had no words for racism.
On the deepest level, I probably knew then what I know now. But it was not serviceable to my child’s mind to understand, and I needed too much to remain a child for a little bit more.
We were The Branded, the Lunatic Fringe, proud of our outrageousness and our madness, our bizarre-colored inks and quill pens. We learned how to mock the straight set, and how to cultivate our group paranoia into an instinct for self-protection that always stopped our shenanigans just short of expulsion. We wrote obscure poetry and cherished our strangeness as the spoils of default, and in the process we learned that pain and rejection hurt, but that they weren’t fatal, and that they could be useful since they couldn’t be avoided. We learned that not feeling at all was worse than hurting. At that time, suffering was clearly what we did best. We became The Branded because we learned how to make a virtue out of it.
How meager the sustenance was I gained from the four years I spent in high school; yet, how important that sustenance was to my survival. Remembering that time is like watching old pictures of myself in a prison camp picking edible scraps out of the garbage heap, and knowing that without that garbage I might have starved to death. The overwhelming racism of so many of the faculty, including the ones upon whom I had my worst schoolgirl crushes. How little I settled for in the way of human contact, compared to what I was conscious of wanting.
It was in high school that I came to believe that I was different from my white classmates, not because I was Black, but because I was me.
For four years, Hunter High School was a lifeline. No matter what it was in reality, I got something there I needed. For the first time I met young women my own age, Black and white, who spoke a language I could usually understand and reply within. I met girls with whom I could share feelings and dreams and ideas without fear. I found adults who tolerated my feelings and ideas without punishment for insolence, and even a few who respected and admired them.
Writing poetry became an ordinary effort, not a secret and rebellious vice. The other girls at Hunter who wrote poetry did not invite me to their homes, either, but they did elect me literary editor of the school arts magazine.
By my sophomore year in high school, I was in open battle on every other front in my life except school. Relationships with my family had come to resemble nothing so much as a West Indian version of the Second World War. Every conversation with my parents, particularly with my mother, was like a playback of the Battle of the Bulge in Black panorama with stereophonic sound. Blitzkrieg became my favorite symbol for home. I fantasized all my dealings with them against a backdrop of Joan of Arc at Rheims or the Revolutionary War.
I cleaned my flintlocks nightly, and poured my lead-mold bullets after midnight when everybody else in my family was asleep. I had discovered a new world called voluntary aloneness. After midnight was the only time it was possible in my family’s house. At any other time, a closed door was still considered an insult. My mother viewed any act of separation from her as an indictment of her authority. I was allowed to shut my door to my room only while I was doing my homework and not for a moment longer. My room opened into the living room, and an hour after dinner I could hear my mother calling me.
“What’s that door still closed about? You not finished your homework still?”
I came to the door of my room. “I’m still studying, Mother, I have a geometry test tomorrow.”
“You can’t bring the book and study out here? Look your sister working on the couch.”
A request for privacy was treated like an outright act of insolence for which the punishment was swift and painful. In my junior year, I was grateful for the advent of television into our house. It gave me an excuse to retreat into my room and close my door for an acceptable reason.
When I finally went to bed, scenes of violence and mayhem peopled my nightmares like black and white pepper. Frequently I woke to find my pillowcase red and stiffened by gushing nosebleeds during the night, or damp and saturated with the acrid smell of tears and the sweat of terror.
I unzipped my pillow-covering and washed it by hand surreptitiously every weekend when I changed my bedlinen. I hung it on the back of the radiator in my room to dry. That pillow-covering became a heavy, unbleached muslin record of all the nightly blitzes of my emotional war. Secretly, I rather enjoyed the rank and pungent smells of my pillowcase, even the yeasty yellow stains that were left after my blood was washed away. Unsightly as they were, the stains, like the smells, were evidence of something living, and I so often felt that I had died and wakened up in a hell called home.
I memorized Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poem “Renascence,” all eight pages. I said it to myself often. The words were so beautiful they made me happy to hear, but it was the sadness and the pain and the renewal that gave me hope.
For east and west will pinch the heart
that cannot keep them pushed apart
and he whose soul is flat, the sky
will cave in on him, by and by.
My mother responded to these changes in me as if I were a foreign hostile.
I tried confiding in a guidance counselor at school. She was also the head of the english department, who kept telling me that I could do much better work if I tried, and that I could really be a credit to my people.
“Are you having trouble at home, dear?”
How did she know? Maybe she could help, after all. I poured my heart out to her. I told her all my unhappiness. I told her about my mother’s strictness and meanness and unfairness at home, and how she didn’t love me because I was bad and I was fat, not neat and well-behaved like my two older sisters. I told Mrs. Flouton I wanted to leave home when I was eighteen, or go away to school, but my mother didn’t want me to.
The sounds of traffic outside the window on Lexington Avenue grew louder. It was 3:30. Mrs. Flouton looked at her watch.
“We’ll have to stop now, dear. Why don’t you ask your mother to drop in to see me tomorrow? I’m sure we can fix this little problem.”
I didn’t know which problem she meant, but her condescending smile was sweet, and it felt good for once to have a grownup on my side.
Next day, my mother left the office early and came to Hunter. The night before I had told her Mrs. Flouton wanted to see her. She fixed me with a piercing look from out of the corner of her tired eyes.
“Don’t tell me you making trouble again in this school, too?”
“No, Mother, it’s just about going to college.” Somebody on my side. I sat outside the guidance room door while my mother was inside talking to Mrs. Flouton.
The door opened. My mother sailed out of the office and headed for the school exit without so much as a look at me. Oh boy. Was I going to be allowed to go away to school if I could get a scholarship?
I caught up with my mother at the door leading to the street.
“What did Mrs. Flouton say, Mother? Can I go away to college?”
Just before the street, my mother finally turned to me, and I saw with a shock that her eyes were red. She had been crying. There was no fury in her voice, only heavy, awful pain. All she said to me before she turned away was, “How could you say those things about your mother to that white woman?”
Mrs. Flouton had repeated all of my words to my mother, with a ghoulish satisfaction of detail. Whether it was because she saw my mother as an uppity Black woman refusing her help, or both of us as a sociological experiment not involving human feeling, confidentiality, or common sense, I will never know. This was the same guidance counselor who gave me an aptitude test a year later and told me I should consider becoming a dental technician because I had scored very high on science and manual dexterity.
At home, it all seemed very simple and very sad to me. If my parents loved me I wouldn’t annoy them so much. Since they didn’t love me they deserved to be annoyed as much as possible within the bounds of my own self-preservation. Sometimes when my mother was not screaming at me, I caught her observing me with frightened and painful eyes. But my heart ached and ached for something I could not name.