Freedom in the Family Read online

  When I was in high school, changes in those barriers seemed imminent. In 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and the news of that antisegregation measure rocketed through the Negro community. Finally, after so many years of being forced to attend separate schools with less adequate facilities and supplies, the Supreme Court struck down the “separate but equal” lie that had been the law of the land, particularly in the South, ever since the racist Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka case was actually five combined cases, all of them spearheaded by the respected National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense Fund. Attorney Thurgood Marshall—who later became the first black U.S. Supreme Court Justice—argued the case before the high court, pointing out sociological and psychological research showing that segregation led to feelings of inferiority in Negroes.

  I was so excited about the Brown decision, it’s almost too difficult to describe in words. I was in the ninth grade at the time, and I immediately had a grand vision of Negroes and whites sitting side by side, building a future together. The way I saw it, there would no longer be a world of limitless possibilities for whites and a second-class citizenship for Negroes—for the first time, this nation would belong to all of us equally! I thought the Brown decision would bring sweeping changes. As young as I was, I realized it would not eliminate all the problems we had in education, but I envisioned Negroes and whites working together to solve our common problems, and I wanted to be ready.

  Of course, my reaction was fueled by naivete. It was May 17 when the decision was handed down, and I expected that we would all be going to school together by September. I had no idea what kind of delaying impact the phrase “with all deliberate speed” would mean in terms of bringing about desegregation. I also didn’t have the wisdom or experience to ask myself what negative changes might take place in the black community as a result of Brown—for example, that a Negro principal at a Negro school could not hope for such a prime assignment at a white school because he would be an outsider, subject to the prejudices of his superiors. (As it happened, in the state of Florida, all Negro high school principals were eventually demoted and made elementary school and junior high school principals3—including Daddy Marion, who had become a high school principal a few years after the Brown decision, but instead found his school designated for students in grades five through seven.) Or that the burden of “busing” students from one neighborhood to another would so often fall on Negro children, since white parents would not want to send their children to Negro neighborhoods.

  None of this, of course, occurred to me in high school. All I knew was that I was excited by the prospect of all things implied by “integration”—better science equipment, up-to-date books, modern school buildings, and all of the other benefits I knew white children received. I wanted all Negro students to benefit from integration, and to me that meant we could not afford to be ill-prepared.

  There were many fine instructors at my high school in Belle Glade, and Daddy Marion was a top-notch instructor who taught social studies as well as band. He had our little school playing sophisticated orchestra and marching band pieces while I was there. Somehow, he convinced the school to buy a bassoon, a very expensive, beautiful, and uncommon instrument he believed should be part of our school’s ensemble. Our school was in such a poor area that many of the students couldn’t even afford their uniforms, so we regularly held fund-raising drives to buy uniforms, but Daddy Marion never lowered his sights simply because most of the students were disadvantaged. He had grown up in affluence, in a home that had a music room and a library, and he thought it was critical to expose his music students to everything he could.

  I wish I could say that all of the teachers at my high school were as dedicated.

  This was “The Muck,” after all, a community of mostly poor blacks and migrants from the Caribbean who picked beans and other vegetables to earn a living, and my school was far from a coveted teaching assignment. Some of the teachers, like Daddy Marion, lived in Belle Glade and had a stake in the area—participating in church, taking part in the social fabric—but many lived during the school week in cottages owned by the Belle Glade Housing Authority, then on weekends drove forty miles to their homes in West Palm Beach. Some of those commuters were remarkably devoted to their students, but for many it was not a choice assignment. Sometimes, I felt I could see them watching the clock on Friday afternoons, eager to jump into their cars and drive away from Belle Glade as fast as they could. In my eyes, some of those teachers were not invested in the welfare of their students. Their attitude seemed to be “Well, this is just a bunch of migrant children. What good will it do to teach them anything?”

  Since promises of integration were now in the air, I couldn’t tolerate the idea that we weren’t getting the best possible education. The person accountable for that, I decided, was our principal. Don’t get me wrong. My high school principal was a very nice man, very well-liked. He always had a smile on his face as he walked through the halls, and he knew how to make people feel good. But when it came to setting tough guidelines and enforcing them, he just did not measure up. He was not an assertive man, so I had the impression, even as a student, that some of his teachers were getting away with doing less than they should. They weren’t prepared, they weren’t following curriculum guidelines, and they weren’t putting nearly as much of themselves into teaching as Daddy Marion and the other dedicated teachers.

  So what did I do? I started a petition drive to get the principal removed. Since Daddy Marion had also been my civics teacher, and I had watched my mother registering people to vote and conducting petition drives throughout the town, I had a good understanding of the procedure. I explained what I was doing to my classmates, and slowly they began to sign. First a dozen signatures, then two dozen, and before I knew it, hundreds of students had signed. I was a good motivator, even then.

  Word of my petition got out, and it frightened some teachers. One day, a math teacher I respected began discussing my petition in his class—and he told the students that if any of them had signed it, they could be arrested and thrown in jail. To me, because I had not yet seen what this black teacher had probably seen in his lifetime, this was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. We lived in the United States of America! He probably just didn’t want to upset the administration at the school. Whatever his reason, he spread that lie, and it spread fast. That same day, students began approaching me, desperately asking to have their signatures removed. I tried to explain that there was no way they could be sent to jail for signing a petition, but they wouldn’t believe my word over a teacher’s. I felt sad and disillusioned.

  I wasn’t going to give up. The way I saw it, they had given me their signatures, so those signatures now belonged to me, and I refused to let anyone remove his or her name on the basis of false information. The students were very anxious, though. At one point, their demands got so heated that I figured I should make a run for it and put my petition in a safe place—suddenly I was being chased out of the school yard by thirty or forty students!

  I didn’t know it then, but my future as a freedom fighter had already begun. In the years to come, I would have experiences I never would have dreamed of as a fifteen-year-old high school student. Once I got to college, other instructors—teachers I truly admired—would continue to criticize any actions they deemed as radical. Students would be afraid to participate in activities that would make valuable changes. I would learn that one could, indeed, be jailed for the simplest of actions.

  I graduated from high school in 1957, three years after Brown v. Board of Education. By that time, the excitement over the ruling had died down and reality had set in. I never attended an integrated school, and even today some schools have never been truly integrated.

  Our principal was removed by the school board the term after I circulated the petition against him, but later I would wonder if maybe th
at math teacher had been sincere in trying to protect the students from unjust retribution. He knew something I had not fully learned back then: He knew that, as Negroes, the rules we had learned in our student lessons about the blessings of freedom in the United States of America surely did not apply to us.

  I would learn that for myself very soon.

  Four

  TANANARIVE DUE

  “Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can anyone deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It’s beyond me.”

  —Zora Neale Hurston

  I tried to change my skin color right away, almost from the first time I noticed it.

  My parents decided to move to Miami from Quincy when I was three years old, convinced I would receive a better education in a big city than I would in the quiet, rustic area of my mother’s birth. There were no schools in Quincy that could take me. Mom loved living in Quincy, with its moss-draped trees and red clay roads steeped in family history, but Mom and Dad already had two children by 1968, and they considered us their first priority. My grandmother, whom I called Mother, had also moved back to Miami by then, and she would be invaluable in giving our growing family added support. So we moved.

  Because I needed to be at least five to enroll in kindergarten in Dade County’s public school system, my mother began to apply to Montessori and other private schools. My grandmother was working, so Mom had to take me with her when she visited several schools by driving around town in the family station wagon. I watched curiously as the white children played on the school jungle gyms, wondering if I would be joining them soon. But at each school, we got the same answer from administrators with pinched, pale faces: Whites only.

  I already had a solution in mind. Once we were back home, I found a bottle of Johnson & Johnson baby powder, poured the powder into my hand, and began to pat it on my face. Then my neck. Then, stretching my arms out one by one, I patted the powder onto each of them until they were covered. I took off all my clothes and dusted myself from head to toe.

  I was proud of myself. “Mommy!” I called, excited, from the crib I still slept in because my mother—never one to follow convention for its own sake—had never seen a need to replace it. “Will they let me go to school now?”

  I’m sure I didn’t understand why my mother suddenly looked so stricken. I was her first child, only three years old, and I’d already been infected by the racism she’d spent her entire adult life trying to fight, as if racism were a stranger who’d entered our home despite all the locks on the doors. I already wanted to change who I was so the outside world would be willing to accept me. Okay, so I had to be white to go to school. That was easy enough to fix!

  As far as I was concerned, my mother and grandmother were white, anyway. I was richly brown-skinned like my father, but my mother was a golden peanut color, and her mother was even lighter, the color of a peanut shell. Even my baby sister, Johnita, had coloring closer to my mother’s than my own. These variances in shading had not meant anything in particular to me until the day I covered myself with powder. Suddenly, I saw my complexion with a more critical eye. I needed to be white like Mommy and Mother, and everything would be fine.

  My sisters and I were the children of integration. My mother and grandmother’s generations had grown up in a very segregated setting, as had nearly all Southern blacks since we first arrived on this nation’s shores, but my sisters and I were born after the Civil Rights Act, after the Voting Rights Act, the first generation of so-called “Freedom.” In many ways, we were the testing ground for the ideals my parents had been sacrificing their time and lives for.

  While my parents didn’t set out on purpose to raise us in a nearly all-white setting when we were very young, that was the end result. We lived in three mostly black neighborhoods in Miami for a time—we rented homes in Liberty City and Opa-locka, and later we rented a house from relatives in middle-class, black Richmond Heights, closer to my grandmother—but eventually my parents were ready to buy a house, and they found themselves stymied. Black families have always cherished property because it was denied us for so long, and my parents were unable to find families willing to sell their homes in the mostly black neighborhoods that appealed to them. Instead, they took their home search to suburbia, and we ended up in the land of whites.

  We did not feel welcome there. My parents shielded us from the direct threats some of our neighbors made—like one in particular who dumped his garbage in our backyard and vowed to shoot me or my sisters if he saw us walking on his grass, and was, ironically, father to one of my favorite playmates—but we felt the unspoken effects of intimidation. We knew when tomatoes or eggs had been thrown against our house. Or when someone had put rocks in my father’s gas tank overnight. Or when stones were thrown against our house, making me wonder if one would shatter a window and come flying into my bedroom. More than my sisters, I was also subjected to the pain of the word “nigger,” for which I never had a comeback. That was a word that had been used by slaveholders and murderous mobs. Nigger was not a word I took lightly.

  We were even surrounded by whites at church. Both Mom and Dad had African Methodist Episcopal backgrounds, but in the 1960s my father had been intrigued by the Unitarian Universalists—a more informal version of Christianity once supported by Thomas Jefferson, among others. Unitarian churches accept members of all faiths; the religious aspect is left much more to individual rumination, and sermons tend to reflect broad ideas such as peace and social activism. Unitarians in Tallahassee had been very supportive of civil rights, since many of them were politically active white liberals, I had been dedicated at the Unitarian Church, and there was a Unitarian Universalist church in Miami. At our church altar were large paintings of a Christian cross, a Jewish Star of David, and a Yin and Yang, all side-by-side, showing the church’s sense of inclusion. But this was not a traditional church, and most of the members, many of whom wore shorts and sandals to services, were white. I can think of only one other black family at our church, and they, like most Unitarians we knew, attended Sunday services only sporadically.

  Quite by accident, I had also ended up at a mostly white private school in Miami. A woman named Nancy Adams, a dear friend of my mother’s from the civil rights movement, arranged for me and Johnita to receive scholarships to the Horizon School for Gifted Children. Horizon was run by Dr. Benjamin Fine, a progressive thinker in gifted education. Nancy was convinced that the three of us were truly special children, although my youngest sister, Lydia, was not old enough to attend the school. Nancy paid for our first year out of her own pocket, which at the time was more than $1,000 each. Because our parents had done so much for others, she wanted to make sure their children would have advantages in life. The curriculum specialized in bright children, and Mom thought it would give me and my sister the best start. I have no recollection of any other black children at the Horizon School except my sister—although my mother reminds me that a Miami Herald newspaper reporter, Bea Hines, had a son there, and my godmother, Florida Rep. Gwendolyn S. Cherry, had a niece there—although they were much older than we were.

  When I was in the second or third grade, a boy in my class asked me, “What color is black people’s blood?” It was the most ridiculous question I could imagine. “It’s green,” I lied, completely straight-faced. I think he believed me.

  Despite my realization that many whites were apparently ignorant about black people, I could not help constantly noticing our differences and comparing myself unfavorably to whites. I remember draping a bath towel across my head and swinging it back and forth as if the towel represented my long tresses of hair, imitating the white women I saw on television and the long-haired white girls at my school. I might have forgotten all about this fantasy except for Whoopi Goldberg, who, reliving her own childhood during her one-woman show on Broadway many years ago, put a towel on her head and did the exact same thing. It brought the memory back like a thunderclap.


  I hated my wiry, unmanageable hair. I hated getting my hair combed and greased. I hated driving into West Perrine, a nearby black neighborhood where some of the homes were unsettling to me in their shabbiness, to go to the beauty shop. The beauty shop didn’t have air-conditioning, so it was always hot and filled with sour-faced strangers, and the radio was always preaching about Jesus instead of playing music. “You better stop being so tenderheaded,” my hairdresser said when I cried out in pain, either from a sharp yank or, sometimes, a burn from her pressing comb. On a few occasions, my mother sat me on a kitchen stool at home and tried to straighten my hair herself, heating up the big burner until it was a glowing red coil, filling the house with the sweet scent of hair oil and the sour scent of singed hair. Once, she burned the top of my earlobe so badly that the dark crust of a scab was visible for days, though usually the burns weren’t so obvious. “Oh, darling, I’m so sorry!” Mom always exclaimed. I was thankful that my sisters and I only had our hair straightened for special occasions, such as Easter. Then, of course, once the hair was straight, it had to be treated oh-so gingerly, which meant that if my school took a field trip to a public pool, I had to wear a swimming cap and keep my head above the surface because I could not get my hair wet. It was hard to enjoy the pool at all, I was so worried about my hair. I couldn’t stand having kinky hair, and I couldn’t stand having it straightened. I couldn’t stand my hair hardly at all.

  I combed my Barbie dolls’ hair with a burning sense of envy. Almost all of my dolls were black, including my Barbies—to her immense credit, Mom saw to that, even if she had to travel far and wide to find them—but while Barbie’s skin may have been the some color as mine, her features and hair looked more like a white woman’s. Her hair was so soft, so silky. And, best of all, it was so lonnng, hanging down as far as her waist. Barbie didn’t need a towel on her head. Barbie’s hair blew in the breeze.