Real Life

As liberal as Harry Truman was with his bills for public housing, socialized medicine, education as a federal, not a state, issue and his civil rights policy, there was never any suggestion that the races should mix socially. The GI Bill restored the interrupted education of men like my father and gave equal pensions to all Americans who had fought the war together, but nobody assumed that total integration would follow. Racial separation is part of American culture.

At six I wasn’t aware of this, but I was soon aware that many children in my class had never talked to a Melangian before and some of them definitely didn’t want to. Although John Wister school was close to our house, it was just beyond our local school-district boundary. Ikey got me enrolled there anyway. For the majority of my classmates and teachers, I might have been a visiting diplomat representing my whole race, because I soon learned that what I said and did was a reflection on other Melangians and if my classmates were going to overcome their assumption that they weren’t as clean, as good or as clever, the onus was on me. For a six-year-old this is a heavy burden, but on instructions from home I did what I could to be my best self and come first in all things.

In spite of this and of being called nigger and other such names when it suited somebody, I did love my school and most of what went with it, whether it was history or social studies, spinster teachers or spelling bees. There was always some national hero’s birthday or some impending holiday that gave us another excuse to hang up our pictures and create a display. Washington, Lincoln, Easter bunnies, Hallowe’en witches, Thanksgiving pilgrims, Christmas angels, fire-prevention week, keep-your-city-clean week, brotherly-love week. There was always something to celebrate and I wanted to be there.

I never felt as wonderful by the time I got to the school gate as I’d thought I was when I left home, and I was always uncertain if anybody would be brave enough to play with me in the school yard before the morning bell. I may have been the teacher’s pet, but my classmates were still wary of me before they’d have a few hours to get used to me in class. By recess, it was usually OK, and if it wasn’t, I’d stroll around with the teacher. Mainly, it taught me how to stand alone.

In 1952 when General Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson were running for president, I overheard talk in the house that the Republicans were terrible and would bring a lot of hardship, but almost all the children in my class wore I LIKE IKE buttons to show that their parents were voting for him and his running mate, Richard Nixon. Being for Stevenson set me apart.

I didn’t know much about the Republicans except that I’d heard they’d have us selling apples on the street corner. My mother bought me a grey jacket after the election which she said was an Eisenhower jacket. It nipped in at the waist and was of corduroy. It was a catastrophe and nearly made my life miserable, because it didn’t look a bit like anybody else’s jacket at school. I had enough trouble without it. Eisenhower had been a general, so I guess it was based on some army jacket of his.

Life seemed unaffected after Ike had won. I didn’t have to sell apples, and he didn’t make us go to school on Saturday, which was the other rumour I’d heard. Things at school were different but it had nothing to do with politics. I was often singled out to do special things like deliver a folded message to the principal, pass out the milk or read out loud when visitors came into our classroom. This made my classmates like me better. So, when Miss Courtney asked us to take a partner to file out in pairs holding hands, which we did going to assembly, recess or in fire drill, I no longer needed to pretend that it didn’t matter that nobody wanted to hold my hand. I had a couple of friends. Even walking into the school yard in the morning ceased to be a crisis in my school life.

Playing with these friends was easier when I spoke with the tone and rhythm of their speech, which was slightly different from mine and much higher pitched. I imitated their manners, too, their giggles and walk and the way they cocked their heads. I don’t think I did it consciously, it just happened. At close range, I could hear their drummer and marched to their beat. As soon as I got home, I’d automatically revert to the old me. I spoke the way I was spoken to, and my thinking and body language accommodated my speech.

It was the beginning of a pattern, because at six, I led two lives which required two separate personalities. It wasn’t a game or an act, though, it was more like a function. I lived between two nations – one Melangian and one American – and I adjusted to each.

During my first Christmas season at John Wister school I participated in the annual carol-singing at Grumblethorpe. Grumblethorpe was a house four blocks from school at 5267 Germantown Avenue, built by John Wister in 1744. (The year Johann Würster emigrated from a town near Heidelberg, Germany, he was nineteen and broke. Johann became a successful wine importer, anglicized his name and built a large summer house in Germantown. The three-storey house was originally known as Wister’s Big House but John’s grandson named the house Grumblethorpe after an English manor he’d read about in a novel. It has been refurbished to look as it did when John Wister and his family lived there.)

We sang our carols in the big front room. The blinds were drawn, so that the flickering light from the candles and the smell of Christmas pine and evergreens had a strange awesome effect, especially on a kid who’d not long been free of 23rd Street. I’d never seen anything like it and was dumbstruck.

Even though it was grand, Grumblethorpe was marked by Quaker simplicity. After carolling, we were shown around it in our usual file, holding hands in two lines. Our freshly shined shoes pattering across the floorboards made the only sound. We dared not whisper or touch the four-poster bed or the grandfather clocks. The drop-leaf tables and wooden chairs were less of a temptation. It looked as if nobody had sat in the winged armchair by the fireplace or eaten at the refectory table. The pastel-coloured walls were so quiet we were scared to cough.

Before we left, a white-haired lady chatted to us and gave us each a mug of hot chocolate with a marshmallow floating on the top. Another, similar lady passed out home-made Christmas cookies. I had never had chocolate to drink before. I stood as still as I could and was very glad my mother had put my hair in two ponytails even though I still had that silly braid on top. Edna had starched my grey and white dress which had a separate pinafore. The stillness there had a profound effect on me.

We had to walk past Grumblethorpe to get to the Band Box Theater, which wasn’t a theatre, it was a cinema. Dennis and Pam and I were allowed to go most Saturday afternoons. A few times I went with Dennis by myself and we’d sit in the back row and stuff ourselves with buttered popcorn, Jujy fruits and Neco wafers, which seemed more the purpose of going than the movie. I always felt safe when Dennis was with me, because apart from the fact that the bad boys liked him, he was bigger than most kids his age and looked like the sort of boy you shouldn’t mess with. I don’t recall that anyone ever did.

Dennis loved the movies and comic books, and after we got a record player, he used most of his allowance to buy records. One of his favourite TV shows was Amos ‘n Andy, which my mother thought should have been taken off the air for depicting ‘Negroes’ as ignorant. My brother used to provoke her by imitating the actors as soon as the programme ended. Dennis would pull faces, roll his eyes and speak an exaggerated Melangian dialect. Finally we were all banned from watching the show, but we loved Amos ‘n Andy so we would sneak and watch it anyway. He’d turn the volume down and I’d guard the door for him. The telly was in the back room on the second floor so it was easy to get away with this.

There were hardly any Melangians on TV other than the cast of Amos ‘n Andy and boxers like Sugar Ray Robinson. Once Richard Boone, who played the main doctor in a weekly hospital series called The Medic, had to treat a little Melangian girl. We all screamed with shock when she came on the screen. We’d never seen one of us in a television drama. Even the most regular police series, Dragnet, didn’t have one Melangian criminal. There was a character called Rochester on the Jack Benny show, but it was very rare to see us on TV unless singing and dancing.

Our first major media star came through on the news in 1953. Her name was Autherine Lucy. She was a young woman who wanted so much to be free to study at the college of her choice that she took on the whole city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and finally the whole goddamn United States government so that President Eisenhower had no choice but to send her an army. I don’t know why there aren’t statues of her. She was our very own Joan of Arc and to see her on the television screen facing an avalanche of rednecks was unforgettable. For weeks after her appearance, our radio and television seemed to be tuned to nothing but newscasts from the moment Edna, Thelma or Ikey came home from work. Melangian neighbours who normally only exchanged hellos had a lot to talk to each other about.

I was stunned to see the hundreds of agitators jeering and spitting and name-calling while Autherine faced them. She never looked as if she was in a hurry; when the camera panned across her face she seemed neither angry nor anxious. She had that look of patience someone has when waiting for a bus they know is coming.

A couple of times since, when I’ve been up against bewildering odds and felt fear creeping up on me or dared feel sorry for myself, I’ve only had to think of Autherine facing the mob to put things in proper perspective.

As far as I could see, there was nothing uncommon about Autherine except her courage. The fact that she looked like most other girls of her age that ambled around the reservation on a Saturday afternoon made her confrontation all the more shocking. It could have been any one of us standing in her shoes when what looked like the whole city of Tuscaloosa was determined to keep her from entering the doors of a school which our taxes helped to keep open.

While this compelling national school drama played out, I’d start each school day like millions of American children by standing at attention after the bell rang to salute the flag. Led by the teachers, I’d recite the pledge with the whole class just as I’d been doing since my first day at school. I could say it in my sleep:

I pledge allegiance to the flag

of the United States of America

and to the republic for which it stands,

one nation*, invisible,

with liberty and justice for all.

Then we’d sit down and a passage was read from the Bible. I don’t know how old I was before I realized ‘invisible’ was supposed to be ‘indivisible’.

To salute you placed your right hand on your heart, although I was never sure I’d found my heart. The pledge said things that I knew weren’t true once I’d seen Autherine Lucy and heard all the talk at home about what rights we didn’t have.

I hoped nobody at school would ask what I thought about the Autherine thing because I wasn’t allowed to lie. The teacher usually asked our opinions about current events, but I could tell from the way nobody mentioned Autherine in class that it was something we could not talk about. Patriotism was running too high to challenge it. America was like God. People believed in it.

When I discovered there was no Santa Claus, I think I cried. Part of my hurt was being robbed of my favourite myth and the rest was realizing that I had believed with all my might in something that older people knew all along was fake. I remember being told that since younger kids still needed to believe in Santa, I wasn’t to tell them he didn’t exist. I became an accessory to promoting a continuing myth and assumed I was doing the littler kids a favour by letting them believe a bit longer.

The same applies after I realized we’d been pledging ourselves to a myth about America. Obviously nobody wanted to deal with the truth, so as a child of eight I became an accessory, never exposing the deception, which everybody needed to go on believing in.

*The words ‘under God’ were added by act of Congress in 1954.

5 MOUNT AIRY AND CHESTNUT HILL

John Wister school mysteriously caught fire one Sunday night when I was in the second half of second grade, and I never went back there. I was bused to another school for quite some time.

Gradually the rougher elements became the majority in Germantown. Crap-shooters monopolized a corner of the street where we had to walk past them to the neighbourhood store. Some of them used to make passes at Ikey and Thelma. My mother was unnerved and called them gangsters. Edna called them riffraff and dared them to lay their hands on her. I suppose they were jobless as they were always there, throwing dice, calling bets and making idle threats to each other. ‘Gimme a double, sir.’ ‘Come on baby, come on.’ ‘A five and a four.’ ‘Double or nothin’.’ ‘Take yo’ hands off the dice. I’ll shoot yo’ ass.’ ‘You jive-ass mothafucka.’ We could hear them halfway up the block.

Late one afternoon when Ikey and I were coming home from Charlie Chernoff’s grocery store, all of a sudden a couple of police cars swerved up to the corner. As the police spilled out on the sidewalk, there was a melee and a shot was fired. It was like something straight out of the movies and I was scared nearly to death by the guns going off. But no one was hurt and I never found out who fired.

After my father’s medical tenure at Boston State Hospital, he came to visit with his youngest brother, Ernest, and I was more worried about the two of them walking around the neighbourhood than I was about Edna, Thelma and Ikey. My father was so gentle. His soft voice always made me feel he needed protecting, whereas I imagined only a fool would dare lay hands on one of my mothers, who each had a wild temper.

The summer Blair and Ernest came to visit us in Germantown is the summer I remember there best. To sit next to him or pass him on the stairs was nearly too exciting. This was less because I had missed my father than because men rarely crossed our doorstep. Aside from the insurance broker who made a regular Friday collection of my grandmother’s insurance premium, a couple of doctors making house calls when we were too sick to go to their surgeries, and a friend of Thelma’s who took us on a family outing once to Bear Mountain, I can’t remember men coming to our house. In those days respectable women didn’t receive callers as they would today. In the 1940s and 1950s when I was growing up, the social and sexual role of women was entirely different. There was no parade of ‘uncles’ trooping through. The only uncles I had were blood relations like Henry, and he only made one whirlwind visit to see us after the Korean War ended before he moved to California.

Both Blair and Ernest had marked Bostonian accents. A Bostonian accent in the fifties was equivalent in American to speaking the Queen’s English in England. It held a class distinction as much as anything else. For some reason a Bostonian accent implied that you were educated, cultured and well bred.

Blair didn’t act as if he was at all impressed with himself, though. He made jokes which I didn’t understand but I laughed all the same, following him about like our puppy followed me. When he arrived he’d brought us each a Timex watch and a pair of turquoise slippers with bronco riders printed on them. He might just as well have given me diamonds.

He had a big grey Studebaker parked in front of the house behind our grey 1950 Chevrolet. I hated to see him go outside the front gate, because I thought it was dangerous and couldn’t conceive that somebody who never raised his voice could deal with danger. He’d been in the war, but fighting with guns I didn’t imagine had anything to do with ferocious street combat.

I adored my uncle Ernest and thought he looked like Louis Jourdan, whom I’d seen in a movie at the Band Box. My father had never brought him before. Ernest was young and would scramble about on the floor, demonstrating some of his war skirmishes, showing how he pulled out his trusty sword when the Japanese attacked. I never believed that they used swords in the Second World War but I didn’t tell him. To look out from the kitchen window and see him lazing in the blue hammock near the fat heads of Edna’s orange and yellow marigolds made me wish he would marry Thelma.

Blair and Ernest took us to Valley Forge so that we could see where George Washington engineered America’s victory against King George’s army. Then they rushed back to their studies. Blair was already specializing in psychiatry. Ernest still had to pass his Massachusetts bar exam to qualify as a lawyer. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to have a father living in the house all the time.

By Blair’s next visit, we had moved to Mount Airy, which is the district beyond Germantown Avenue. In the late eighteenth century it originally attracted wealthy families who built country seats there, like Upsala, owned by the Johnson family descended from a German, Dirk Jensen, one of the original Krefelders who settled in the district. Like Cliveden House opposite Upsala, these local landmarks were always there to recall the past, those early European settlers and their struggle for freedom. The old buildings looked odd in a neighbourhood of 1930s terraced houses.

Cliveden House at 6401 Germantown Avenue was built between 1763 and 1767 and was turned into a fortress in 1777 during the Battle of Germantown when British soldiers used it to stave off George Washington’s advancing troops.

I walked around the Cliveden House gardens when I went back in the summer of 1985. This English-looking estate occupies an entire city block of a Melangian urban community. The design of the façade of this mid-Georgian house was based on an engraving entitled ‘A View of the Palace at Kew from the Lawn’, published in London in the Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle in 1763.

Edna, Thelma and Ikey continued to work as they did throughout my childhood and Blair sent regular contributions. As much as anything, I think that they willed our progressive moves which always bettered our circumstances and improved the environments that we were growing up in. Like the move from 23rd Street to Germantown, the move to Mount Airy when I was nine made a great improvement in our lives. There were trees and tended hedges everywhere and the nearly new apartment complex across the road had the lawn mown regularly. My mother liked the neighbours and the neighbourhood. It was peaceful and the Melangian families thereabouts were as concerned about their children and their children’s education as my mother was.

I was given more freedom when I started at John Story Jenks school in Chestnut Hill, and even though the Melangian children there could be counted on two hands, my classmates weren’t reluctant to be friendly. There were many Quaker children in the school. That breath of freedom came in the nick of time, because the discipline imposed by my family in addition to the fear invoked on the streets had been inhibiting. Street life was pretty convincing proof that my mother was right – a dignified academic career was the safest future. At nine, I clung like my sister and brother to the notion that I would go into medicine like my father and therefore tried to maintain a high standard in my school work, whatever temptations I came across.

I remember the first time I was asked to write my father’s occupation on a form at Jenks. I was confident that I could spell psychiatrist correctly. The teacher was more impressed with his occupation than my spelling and, like others then and since, she probably assumed that my home life reflected his professional rank. (In America, doctors make money. I was surprised when I came to London to discover that National Health doctors have the medical title but not the bank balance of their American counterpart.) I was a psychiatrist’s daughter and this gave people the wrong idea about my family’s income.

Times were visibly changing for Melangians in spite of the fact that Eisenhower made political apathy seem somehow respectable. The civil rights issue was like an eggshell that cracked after the Autherine Lucy case and segregation gradually continued to be challenged legally in the South and socially in the North, where habits rather than laws kept us isolated. Professional Melangian families moved to better neighbourhoods, although their white neighbours would make conspicuous attempts to keep them out and often moved out themselves if they failed.

As residential white areas got a few black families, the public school serving the vicinity reflected the neighbourhood’s mix, and a school like Jenks would end up with ten or twenty Melangian children from upper-middle-class Melangian households. Even though Jenks was still a predominantly white school, I think it was relieved to have a token number of Melangian kids because this showed it to be participating in a developing mood among liberal Americans that it was time to be nice to ‘Negroes’. People were getting more prosperous and more generous.

When I started at Jenks in the third grade, I made friends instantly with two little open-air girls who were top of the class and didn’t mind my competition. They befriended me in the classroom and never pretended not to see me in the school yard. They dragged me along to their Brownie meetings and had me join their ballet class, though I didn’t feel welcome there. They asked me to be part of their secret club, which was actually only the three of us. They were no less than best friends who invited me to their houses after school for tea, although they never came to mine. We did everything together except that I couldn’t join them in their violin recitals. I never understood why they called their mothers ‘Mummy’ instead of ‘Mommy’. I thought it was because they were Quakers. I tried to understand and imitate every nuance of their behaviour when I was with them. They spoke more precisely than my friends at Wister school. Soon I could talk exactly like them and I learned to find the humour in what they thought was funny, although it usually was corny.

Behind the surface of my polished manners of ‘excuse me, please’, ‘I beg your pardon’ and ‘no, thank you’ to virtually everything that was offered, there was a fanciful little girl who still knew the difference between a knife scar and a razor scar and was proud of knowing how to watch out for more than just the cars. But there was no need for my acquired street instinct at Jenks and no threats or fears lined the path to my house. The 23 trolley car picked me up from the corner of Southampton Avenue to cart me home in time for The Mickey Mouse Club and Rin Tin Tin on television.

Chestnut Hill was a solid white Anglo-Saxon Protestant community. The trees grew tall. The parks were beautiful. And the sun always seemed brighter there when I got off the trolley car. It was my neighbourhood during the school day.

Mount Airy didn’t feel graced like Chestnut Hill and didn’t have the village character of Germantown. The section we lived in near Mount Pleasant Avenue was very orderly with two-storey brick houses and canopied porches that displayed small flowerbeds and trimmed dark-green hedges. The big street-cleaning truck came once a week to spray the streets down. The neighbourhood looked well-tended but nondescript with block after block of these terraced houses, rather like certain areas of north London or north Manchester.

Occasionally, a kid pedalled down the sidewalk on a glossy two-wheeler bicycle or some toothless, brown-skinned, seven-year-old cowboys would bang-bang their way around a parked car. But there was never a baseball game played in the middle of the street and no one thought that opening a fire hydrant to let the water flood the street until the fire department came was a prodigious way to while away an evening. Dogs didn’t dawdle unleased on the streets, and no fathead alley cats whined away the nights.