Black Ice (11 page)

I did not, however, tell the girls what I was thinking. We did not talk about how differently we saw the world. Indeed my black and their white heritage was not a starting point for our relationship, but rather was the outer boundary. I could not cross it, because there sprang up a hard wall of denial impervious to my inexperienced and insecure assault. “Well, as far as I’m concerned,” one girl after another would say, “it doesn’t matter to me if somebody’s white or black or green or purple. I mean people are just people.”

The motion, having been made, would invariably be seconded.

“Really. I mean, it’s the person that counts.”

Having castigated whites’ widespread inability to see individuals for the skin in which they were wrapped, I could hardly argue with “it’s the person that counts.” I didn’t know why
they always chose green and purple to dramatize their indifference, but my ethnicity seemed diminished when the talk turned to Muppets. It was like they were taking something from me.

“I’m not purple.” What else could you say?

“The truth is,” somebody said, “I … this is
so
silly … I’m really embarrassed, but, it’s like, there
are
some things you, God, you just feel ashamed to admit that you think about this stuff, but I always kind of wondered if, like, black guys and white guys were, like, different …”

They shrieked with laughter. Sitting on the afghan my mother had crocheted for me in the school colors of red and white, their rusty-dusty feet all over my good afghan, they laughed and had themselves a ball.

“Now, see, that’s why people don’t want to say anything,” one girl said. “Look, you’re getting all mad.”

“I’m not mad.”

“You look it.”

“I’m not mad. I don’t even know about any differences between white guys and black guys,” I said deliberately avoiding the word boys. (Black manhood seemed at stake. Everything seemed at stake.) Then I added as archly as possible: “I don’t mess around with white boys.”

The party broke up soon after. I sat still, the better to control my righteous anger. It always came down to this, I thought, the old song of the South. I wanted something more meaningful. I wanted it to mean something that I had come four hundred miles from home, and sat day after day with them in Chapel, in class. I wanted it to mean something that after Martin Luther King’s and Malcolm X’s assassinations, we kids sweated together in sports, ate together at Seated Meal, studied and talked together at night. It couldn’t be just that I was to become like them or hang onto what I’d been. It couldn’t be that lonely and pointless.

I looked across the quad to Jimmy’s window, and waved. He
was not in his room, but the mere sight of his lighted window brought me back to my purpose. It was not to run my ass ragged trying to wrench some honesty out of this most disingenuous of God’s people. I had come to St. Paul’s to turn it out. How had I lost sight of the simple fact?

In a few days “inside” grades for the Fall Term caught me by surprise. I had barely settled in. During reports the Rector said that interim grades were merely to give us an idea of our progress. Students called them “warning” grades. Groupmasters handed them to each student in the evening.

I churned with anticipation all day. At one moment it seemed to me that I’d been doing brilliantly. I was understanding Sr. Fuster’s musical Spanish, speaking glibly in religion about “systems of belief,” hiding from Mr. Buxton the crush I was developing, trooping good-naturedly through the inanity of trigonometry, drawing and redrawing the folds of a draped cloth in art.

One wrong answer, however, would change my perspective completely. Sure, I was understanding Sr. Fuster better, but my essays were grammatical disasters. In religion, I skittered over the surface of the language, never quite knowing what I meant to say until the moment I opened my mouth. I only
thought
Mr. Buxton hadn’t noticed my crush. I had fallen asleep during eighth-period trig. In art class, my colors were timid; my perspective was off.

Mr. Hawley handed me the thin piece of paper on which the computer in the Schoolhouse basement had recorded my warning grades. On my sheet were five grades, two Honors and three High Passes. What I saw when I looked at my warning grades were two Bs and three Cs. The school had made it quite
clear in the catalog and elsewhere that St. Paul’s grades were not letter-grade equivalents. They’d told us that High Honors were rare as A-pluses, and that Honors meant just that. No matter. I saw average. I saw failure. And what I saw on that paper, Mr. Hawley saw in my face.

“There are several things about these warning grades you should keep in mind,” he said. “The first is that although they may look like real grades and feel like real grades, they are not real grades.

“OK. Now, how accurate an indicator are these? Well, I’m sure that in some of your courses, there hasn’t been enough work assigned and graded for teachers to evaluate. And in that case, many teachers feel safer grading on the low side, just so that no one gets a false sense of security. So, it is possible that you might be doing better than these grades, and it is extremely unlikely that you’d be doing any worse.”

He told me that High Passes were not the end of the world. “The other thing that I doubt you are giving yourself credit for,” he said, “is that you’ve just come in, as a new Fifth Former—not many people come in the Fifth Form, as you’ve noticed, and there’s a reason why, many reasons—and you’ve just come straight from your old hometown high. Some of these other students have had a different preparation. I am certain that you’ll catch on fast. Look, you
have
caught on fast. I’ve got old girls in this house who’d kill for those grades. But the fact is, I don’t see how you can expect much more of yourself right now.”

Mr. Hawley told me that he’d seen students take a year or two to adjust to St. Paul’s, not just public-school students, but kids from fancy day schools.

“I’ve only
got
two years,” I said.

“You’re doing great.”

When girls on my hall asked about my grades, I joked: “It’s like when the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come points to the
gravestone,” I said. “All I want to know is: Is this what will be or what may be?”

“Oh, you’ll do fine.”

I wondered if anyone here had ever expected me to do better than this. White faces of the adults flashed in my head, smiling, encouraging, tilted to one side, asking if I’d like to talk, extending their welcome. “If you need anything …” Early on they’d told me that I’d do fine. I felt betrayed, first by them, then by my own naiveté. HPs were probably what they’d meant by fine—for black scholarship kids. Maybe that’s what they’d been saying all along, only I hadn’t heard it.

No sooner had the furor of warning grades subsided than the excitement of Parents’ Day began. A few parents appeared on the last Friday afternoon in October, and by Saturday morning they were everywhere, cars clogging the roads, adult voices filling the Schoolhouse, where they waited in long lines for ten-minute talks with our teachers.

Parents who had no money or no time did not come, but mine did. And so did my grandparents. They surrounded me as we walked slowly along the paths. Seeing them made me know how much I’d missed them. I guided them through the days’ activities as if marching through a dream.

In the evening, they came to the show we’d prepared for them. I sang in the chorus, and they saw me sing. I showed them my books and my papers. I walked them to each of my favorite places along the paths and pointed out where gardeners had been working all week to spruce up the grounds. My father remembered that dorm proctors at Lincoln University had handed out fresh new blankets on anniversary weekends, just before festivities, and then collected them again when parents went home. We laughed about that. But St. Paul’s was no Lincoln, they kept saying, that tiny black college in rural Pennsylvania
where milk from the nearby cows had tasted of onion grass in the spring.

I recalled the photographs of my father and his classmates, young black men with shiny hair, baring their legs and hamming it up for the camera; the photo of my father and mother, who had married the Saturday before my father graduated. They stood under a huge old tree, grinning broadly, my mother in her pedal-pusher pants, her body curving like an S against his, her arm waving in the air. Every time one of us mentioned Lincoln—and we did, again and again, because it was the only college we knew well—I thought of those photographs. As often as I saw the image in my mind, I heard snatches of what had been their old favorite song:

I could not stop thinking of them like that, their arms entwined like the branches of a mulberry, certain that they would do together what their parents had been unable to do. “We decided we were
not
going to end up divorced. We just decided it,” they always said. I’d wondered how they could have been so sure. “Our dreams have magic because we’ll always stay/In love this way/Our day will come.”

Lincoln looked green in the pictures, and, as if it were not full enough with their promise, and the promise of so many young men, black Greeks, black gods ready to march out into the world and grab it for their own, it was also home to the prepubescent Julian Bond “just running around the campus
like any other little faculty kid,” and, he, of course, was now in government.

My mother lit a cigarette in my room, and my father made a face. I could not take my eyes off the pack. My mother had changed brands. So absorbed had I been with my own changes, that I had not expected any from them, and my mother least of all. It was a small thing, the brand of cigarettes, but it occurred to me for the first time that in leaving home, I gave up the right to know the details of their daily life. Things might be the same when I got back for the next vacation, or they might not. I had no way of knowing, because I wasn’t there.

Whatever I had planned to tell them—about how I did not feel like myself here, how I was worried that the recruiters expected little more than survival from us, how I was beginning to doubt that they could see excellence in us, because it might pop out through thick lips and eyes or walk on flat feet or sit on big, bodacious behinds—I kept to myself. I showed off my familiarity with my new school. Why, I was fitting in fine. My teachers said so. My new friends said so—Hey, girls, come meet my folks.…

Soon they had to leave. Because it was more convenient, St. Paul’s School did not switch to Standard Time until Sunday night when the parents were gone. My family was amused by the custom; I was not. “It’s just like St. Paul’s. It’s practically a metaphor,” I said (“metaphor” having become one of my favorite new words), “for the arrogance of this place. Isn’t that the most arrogant thing you’ve ever seen, just changing
time!”

“Well, honey,” said my grandmother, “it’s just for a little while. It’s not as if they were going to keep it that way.”

“When you think about it, it’s an arbitrary change anyway,” my father said. “And now that we need to save energy, who knows whether they might just change it some more to take better advantage of the daylight.”

Everyone smiled mildly at me as if I were being unreasonable. I let the subject drop.

I fell asleep that night listening to the country sounds that replaced the parents’ festive noise. In the branches, dead limbs creaked like old doors. Every hour until midnight the Chapel tower’s metallic throat pealed out the wrong time, sharp and bright and sure.

November set in cold and damp. The work of the school chugged along:
I think I can, I think I can, I think I can
. The chipper refrain from childhood came chugging through my mind as I ran through the rain between classes. I did not have a raincoat that fall.
I think I can I think I can I think I can
. I slogged around the muddy field and hurled myself through wind sprints. Browner mud, grayer skies, blacker water. The wind penetrated the fiber of my clothing. The sun did not. But the engine of the school chugged on. Work and more work, with no way to get out. People and more people, with no way to get away from them, the same people day after day, becoming more familiar, their walks, their accents, their quirks and behavior. They said the same things, cracked the same jokes. So did I. I bored myself. We bored each other. Our teasing grew less witty and meaner.

It was in November that my soccer team played one of the boys’ club teams. Our coach urged us to play aggressively. The ball flew up and down the field. I cursed its every reversal, knowing that I’d have to turn around and run back down the same field I’d just run up. Back and forth and back and forth, meaninglessly, mercilessly. The ball zinged, and I ran parallel to it, out on the edge of the field, in wing position, just like I didn’t have any better sense. The drudgery was punctuated now and then by panic when a ball popped toward me. “Close up the hole! Close up the hole! Take it down. You’re free,
you’re free!” and then I’d see the expanse of field between me and the goal, and I’d know that I could not tag along, but would have to run fast, faster than the mob coming at me. I wheezed and ran and wheezed. I opened my mouth wide, but I felt as if I were sucking air through a straw.

I think I can I think I can I think I can
. Up jumped the good little girl inside, ever hopeful, she who believed that all she needed was one more win. Up she jumped as if this were a fifth-grade penmanship contest, the tie-breaker in a spelling bee, an audition for
Annie Get Your Gun:
“Anything you can do I can do better, I can do anything better than you.” I knew this little girl. She looked like the freckled six-year-old in my mother’s wallet. She felt like Pollyanna.

The ball came at me. The crazy little girl inside tore after it. Girls who had beaten me in wind sprints were unable to catch me. My arms pumped up and down as I ran. They helped push me forward. Maybe this was it, I thought, maybe. I almost cried with gratitude. Asthma came to clamp round my chest, but this time I was not afraid of suffocating. I huffed puffs of steam into the cold air.