Freedom in the Family Read online

  My mother did her best to combat my hair envy. “White people’s hair is very thin, and it tangles easily,” she told me once. Another time she said, “Well, white children are more liable to get hair lice. The oil black people put in their hair keeps the lice away.” I took small comfort in those bits of information. But in a world full of girls with long, soft hair, where even my Barbie dolls were traitors, sometimes it was very little comfort.

  Of course, I noticed other differences, too. Sometimes my father took me with him when he went to his meetings in Miami’s black neighborhoods, like Liberty City and Overtown, and I noticed the stark contrast between those neighborhoods and the ones where my more affluent friends from the Horizon School lived. I saw black children playing barefoot in the street, and it troubled me. “Are all black people poor?” I asked my parents. They assured me that this was not the case, but that because of discrimination there has always been more poverty in the black community. In fact, I remember my parents specifically taking me to black neighborhoods in disrepair to show me how many blacks live (“The real Miami,” my mother always called it), so I would know how fortunate we were. We were not rich, we were told, but we were lucky.

  I also noticed social differences between blacks and whites. Sometimes, I actually saw my white friends and classmates yelling at their parents, which would have been a catastrophe in my home. My sisters and I were not beaten, but my parents were very strict and, if we were especially bad, we could expect to be instructed to find a leather belt and bring it to my mother. Her little slaps with a belt against our palms were intended much more for symbolic ritual than actual pain, but my sisters and I lived in fear of it. We did not yell at our parents. Not once.

  I had a good friend named Paul, a blond-haired stick figure of a boy with a sweet smile who, with the exception of my best friend Dorothy, was my favorite person at the Horizon School. I think we were fourth-graders together. When he invited me to his birthday party at his home, I was amazed to learn that he addressed his parents by their first names. “Thanks, Bill. Thanks, Sue.” My jaw nearly fell to the floor. Paul seemed to have much higher standing in his home than I had in mine; instead of being parents and a child, they all appeared to be buddies just hanging out. Inspired, I went home and asked my parents if I could call them “Patricia” and “John.”

  This was the first of many times I would receive my parents’ lecture on the differences between white culture and black culture, which were probably more stark than ever in the aftermath of the hippie generation. Some whites, especially liberals, were much more informal than most blacks, my parents explained. Their ideas on discipline were different. Their ideas on child rearing were different. That was why the dress code at our Unitarian church was so different from when we attended Mother’s AME church in Richmond Heights, where the black worshipers wore pretty dresses, hats, and suits and ties, and why the AME services were so emotional while the Unitarian services were so sedate.

  Needless to say, I never called my parents “Patricia” and “John.”

  It may sound as if my parents set me and my sisters out upon the sea of whiteness without any kind of cultural life raft, but that’s actually far from true. They were well aware of the nutrients we were not receiving from our outside experiences, and I know they agonized over it, so my mother in particular made it her mission to teach us who we were. In a sense, although we attended school, we were also homeschooled.

  Our home bookshelves were always full of books. Like many children, I started on the Golden Books and Grimm’s Fairy Tales and then moved up to Little House on the Prairie and Nancy Drew mysteries, but my mother also searched very carefully for the kind of books she thought would educate and enrich us culturally. She bought us Ezra Jack Keats’s books illustrated with brown-faced children, like A Snowy Day, Whistle for Willie, and John Henry: An American Legend. We had a wonderful coloring book filled with black historical figures called Color Me Brown, published by Ebony magazine, and we subscribed to a now-defunct magazine designed for black children, called Ebony Jr! We had comic books about Nat Love and other black cowboys, and on Sojourner Truth and the amazing Harriet Tubman, who had sometimes held slaves she was leading to freedom at gunpoint rather than allow them to turn back and jeopardize everyone in her party. We had illustrated books on different Native American tribes (including the Cherokees, who, our father told us, shared our bloodline on his side). And we had children’s history books on Mexican-American activist Cesar Chávez, John F. Kennedy, and, my very favorite, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

  Because there was no national holiday commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, on that day my parents let us stay out of school in the morning and we drove a long forty-five minutes to go to downtown Miami’s Torch of Friendship, a memorial originally built to honor John F. Kennedy. There, standing in a circle beneath the torch that burned perpetually skyward, we sang “We Shall Overcome” and talked about why Dr. King and others like him had been so important. We also rededicated ourselves to another year of trying to make the world a better place. Then my parents held an open house so that people could come talk, hear the freedom songs, listen to the “I Have a Dream” speech, or watch documentaries on TV. I remember loving Dr. King as if he had been a fallen member of our family.

  Yet it was not enough.

  I don’t remember the incident, but my mother says I came home from school one day and said, “Martin Luther King was just a troublemaker. He caused a lot of problems.” Obviously, I had overheard one of my classmates saying that, the classmate having overheard it from a parent.

  That was the last straw. Although my mother liked the academic program at the Horizon School, she decided the isolation was unacceptable for us. The summer between my fourth- and fifth-grade years in school—when we moved into yet another white neighborhood—I attended summer school for the first time at a public school, Colonial Drive Elementary. I noticed the difference right away, since there were several other black students at the school that summer. I felt like I was under a magnifying glass: The way I spoke, the way I dressed, the way I could read passages from books above my grade level—everything was noted by both classmates and teachers. I remember black students at my table staring at me while I put mustard on my chicken sandwich in the cafeteria. I felt like an oddity.

  In my family’s new neighborhood, I felt worse—like a pariah.

  In 1975, when I was nine, my family moved to a waterfront home in a peaceful suburb named Point Royal, at the southern end of Dade County. Everything was fresh and untried: a new room, a wonderful new backyard on the bank of a wide canal, my very own bedroom—with carpeting! We were the only black family there, in the beginning, but that had been true in our last neighborhood, and I’d made friends. I’d played football with white neighborhood boys, breaking my glasses more than once in my scramble to catch a pass or avoid a tackle. True, some nights white members of the Unitarian church our family attended sat in their cars to patrol our home because of threats against our family, but my parents never told us this. I would make friends again, I figured.

  Walking down my new street not far from home, one day I encountered an older boy, a teenager, ambling in my direction. I did not look at him or speak to him, in the way younger children expect to be invisible to older children. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand,” the boy said as he passed, almost as if he were speaking to himself, “it’s a four-eyed nigger.”

  He was looking at me, and his words stabbed me to my soul. I had heard the word “nigger” before, but it had never been leveled at me in that way, and the boy was so much older, he might as well have been a grown man. I felt exposed, stripped of all essence save my skin color. To me, “nigger” was a word used by lynch mobs and Ku Klux Klan members, a relic I’d never expected to break the peace of one of my first days strolling happily on my family’s new street. Recalling that encounter brings to mind a poem by Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, “Incident,” about the devastating effe
ct of the word “nigger” on a black child.

  Once riding in old Baltimore,

  Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,

  I saw a Baltimorean

  Keep looking straight at me.

  Now I was eight and very small,

  And he was no whit bigger,

  And so I smiled, but he poked out

  His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

  I saw the whole of Baltimore

  From May until December;

  Of all the things that happened there

  That’s all that I remember.

  “Nigger!” a five-year-old boy teased another day, horrifying me not for myself, but for him. What kind of parents would teach such superiority and hate? “I wish niggers were still slaves!” another boy, this one my age, called at me once while I was walking our dog. I began to expect outbursts from every white child, and braced for them.

  There was also vandalism. I tried not to be bothered too much when one night someone threw slimy tomatoes against the new white wall of our house. Or when, another time, someone slipped rocks into the gas tank of our station wagon. Still, I couldn’t help internalizing the notion of being unwelcome, that it was safer to play indoors with my sisters than to venture outside, that we were under attack.

  My parents’ explanation made it a little better. “People who are prejudiced are just ignorant. They don’t know any better,” they said, which made me feel sorry for bigots, but it wasn’t long before I didn’t like my new neighborhood much at all. I learned to dread public encounters, to dread being noticed.

  For years afterward, when I left the safety of my yard, I walked with my eyes cast down.

  When the school year began, I was bused with the white students in my neighborhood to West Perrine, a black neighborhood, to attend R. R. Moton Elementary School. By now, desegregation had been achieved in many neighborhoods through busing, and the very young black children from West Perrine were bused to Bel-Aire Elementary School, where my sisters attended school, until the fifth grade. Fifth and sixth grades belonged to R. R. Moton.

  The poverty surrounding R. R. Moton was stark and depressing to me. Through no fault of their own, the residents had very little, and that was clear in the appearance of some of their homes. The neighborhood looked a little foreign to me, but I loved the school, and my mother noticed the change in me right away. R. R. Moton had a black principal, a very caring and supportive woman named Maedon S. Bullard. R. R. Moton also had some black teachers—the first I’d ever seen—one of whom was my fifth-grade teacher, Janelle Harris. I delighted in seeing people who looked like me in positions of authority at my school. Suddenly, the same girl who had criticized Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a troublemaker was writing poems like “The Struggle for Equality,” which I wrote when I was about eleven:

  It started in Africa, in the days of old,

  When liberty and freedom were better than gold.

  Then great ships came across the sea,

  Taking away in chains the ancestors of you and me.

  For many, many years the tired slaves worked,

  Until at Lincoln’s speech, their ears really perked.

  Between the States anger arose.

  Some said, “Lincoln’s a great man!”

  Others, “I ought to punch him in the nose!”

  Anger turned to hate, hatred turned into war,

  Until many men lay dead upon the ground

  And on the floor.

  The bloody war went on—men died by the ton.

  It went on for about four years,

  Until supposedly freedom for Blacks was won.

  “Slavery is dead,” the big signs read.

  Yet, it still seemed harder for Blacks to get

  Their daily bread.

  The law said that they could vote, but many armed men

  Kept them away from the polls.

  How long could this bad treatment hold?

  Then it came into realization—

  They had to change that civilization.

  “We must rise, let us waste no more time.

  Discrimination is a terrible crime.

  Down with the Ku Klux Klan! Up with the NAACP!

  We’ll show them how really tough we can be!”

  Marches, sit-ins, jail-ins—they did everything—

  Like listen to the speeches of Malcolm X and M. L. King.

  They had peaceful demonstrations, yet they still got arrested.

  The courage of these people had really been tested.

  We struggled then, and will still struggle now;

  And we are going to keep on struggling until victory is won.

  And, as said in the words of Frederick Douglass, “There is

  No progress without struggle. This struggle may be a moral

  One, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both moral

  And physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes

  Nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

  I had become politicized, feeling a stronger sense of identity and belonging. I began reciting my poem in oratorical contests sponsored by black organizations in Miami; at one, the Theodore R. Gibson Oratorical Contest, I won year after year. (Father Gibson was a former Miami NAACP president and a very influential minister, civil rights activist, and Miami City Commissioner. When Florida’s McCarthyism-inspired “Johns Committee” tried to subpoena his NAACP membership list in 1959, Father Gibson refused to comply and was arrested as a result).1 My sisters and I were also attending NAACP meetings and annual national conventions, and as I got older, I was able to absorb more of the meaning of the rhetoric of civil rights.

  Yet at school my classmates mocked the way I spoke in clear, grammatical English, calling me “Oreo.” Even a teacher mocked my accent in the cafeteria one day. I was hurt, but the irony was not lost on me: Many of these same students probably had never heard of the NAACP, nor could they say what the initials stood for. They did not consider me “black enough,” yet I knew more about black history than they did, and I had more of a sense of being a link in a chain that stretched back to the days of slavery. I longed for close black friends at Moton, but I did not allow my classmates’ attitudes toward me to sour my feelings about blacks. To me, other black children simply remained a mystery: brash, sometimes intimidating, streetwise, always awakening a sense of longing in me. One thing that puzzled me about the black students at Moton was why they always seemed to be wearing the latest fashions—whereas my mother was dressing me and my sisters from department-store bargain racks, her cousin Joyce’s bags of hand-me-downs, and thrift stores like Goodwill. The black students also tended to wear flashy jewelry. My sisters and I looked neat, but we were far from fashionable, and we wore very little jewelry. Why could poorer families afford better clothes and gold chains?

  Again, I received a cross-cultural lesson: Poor families, my mother said, often attach more significance to designer labels and fashion trends because of damaged self-esteem. Parents couldn’t afford higher education for their children or move their families into bigger or nicer houses, so they spent what money they did have on clothes and jewelry for their children. Middle-class blacks, too, tended to surround themselves with material goods—bigger cars, more expensive furniture, clothes, and jewelry—to make up for being treated as second-class citizens. That was the only visible measure of wealth in a neighborhood where people have so little, she told us. (And this is certainly something that has remained true in inner city neighborhoods today, where children lose their lives over Nikes and emulate rap stars who shower themselves in gold.)

  My first “boyfriends” were two classmates from Mrs. Harris’s class at R. R. Moton. I really liked Cleo, the shy, soft-spoken boy who first asked me to “go with” him—which was a status in name only. He would be mine, and I would be his. When another classmate, Tommy, was absent for a few days because of a sudden illness—he recovered!—he heard I had asked about him. He wanted to go with me, too
, and one day he came to my house and brought me a watch as a gift. My mother flipped when she saw it. I could not accept such a gift, she told me—and Tommy later confessed that he had stolen the watch from his sister. He thought he needed to give me an expensive gift to impress me, which was far from true. Cleo invited me to a school dance as his date, but at that time his parents couldn’t afford to buy him a suit, so Mrs. Harris gave him one. That didn’t matter to me, though, because I had always liked him as he was. I believe Tommy and Cleo came to blows over me once in the schoolyard. My favorite boy, though, was Darren, a sixth-grader who had a neatly combed Afro and played the trumpet in the school band like I did. (I’d inherited my mother’s trumpet from high school and college.)

  One day, Darren asked me to “go with” him, and I was thrilled. Then he heard a rumor that I was already going with Cleo and Tommy, and he confronted me to ask if it was true. “Well, yes, kind of,” I said, squirming. It had never occurred to me that it was wrong to go with more than one person at a time, but I saw hurt and accusation in Darren’s pretty brown eyes that day. Something inside of me shriveled.

  Yes, I liked Cleo and Tommy, but Darren was different. His grammar was very good, and he was serious about school and his music. As a sixth-grader, he was also much more mature than Cleo or Tommy. Mom had not liked Tommy at all after the watch-stealing revelation, but I thought Mom would like Darren. Even at the tender age of ten, I could sense that Darren was a boy I had things in common with, someone who could be a true friend. After he found out I already had two “boyfriends,” though, I don’t remember him ever speaking to me again. In the next bone-dry years of junior high school and high school, when not a single boy I liked would ask me to go with him, I would remember Darren as the one who got away, the one I’d done wrong. I would always wish we’d met when we were older, when both of us didn’t still have so much to learn about the perplexing, painful dance between boys and girls.