Black Ice (29 page)

“It means what it sounds like. I don’t drink anymore. It’s OK, really, once you know.”

He went inside and came back with two bottles of water.

“So what else did you find out writing this book?”

“Life is like a leaf!”

He coughed out that big laugh of his. “Don’t start! I can’t take it.”

“No, listen. Seriously. It’s a whole book of life is like a leaf. That’s what got me through St. Paul’s. It was stored up like a present from a willful, ambition-driven girl to the woman she
would become. Do you remember how much I hated Mr. Shipman?”

“Do I?”

“When I went back to teach—you know how it is. There’s the opening-night party in the Gates Room. Mr. Shipman came over to me and welcomed me back, just as nice. And I thought: ‘Doesn’t this man know how much I hated him? Doesn’t he remember that he
failed
me? Coming up to me like an old friend.’

“Then he said he was going to give me one piece of advice—that you know you’ve been at St. Paul’s too long when the stuff that sixteen-year-olds say starts to make sense. And he laughed. I’d never seen the man laugh.”

Anthony put his head back. He liked a story, always had. “What you’re talking about is grace,” he said.

“Is it?”

I like the simplicity of the word. Old ladies in church use it. Old drunks who don’t drink anymore use it. Grace, Tillich says, is accepting that you are accepted. Children say grace at table. Bosomy blond Baptists and tweedy Episcopalians use it. Teenagers are the only ones who shun the word, as if it might snatch from them the magic of their power.

Later that night, another friend asked me what the hardest thing was about writing about St. Paul’s. “The hardest part is writing about my family,” I said.

“Really? Not St. Paul’s?”

“St. Paul’s is the setting. It’s the place, not the main character.”

The music was going by then, loud, loud, loud like the old days, the same undanceable rock. People danced to it, torsos bolt upright, knees kicking, legs jumping, hippity-hoppity like an Appalachian buck dance.

It was cool outside. Woozy mosquitoes floated through a haze of insect repellent and cigar smoke. The porch emitted a
corona of light into the darkness, beyond which the ponds spread out smooth and black.

I recalled my great-grandfather’s stories that I had used for comfort that night when I’d sat out on the ice. “Jump, Izzy, jump. Papa’ll catch you.…” The white dog in the cane field; the witch outside the door; “Skin, skin, ya na know me?” Those were as easy to write as to tell, but not the rest of it, not the betrayal. The hard part is to find the words to say it outright: that Pap was wrong. His stories taught me fear and shame and secrecy. “Trust no man.” But I cannot throw them out. I cannot escape into some other history of my own choosing, one where the African princess is carried out of slavery at a young age by the gentle Seminoles, where she learns to hunt and fish and bear beautiful brown babies under the Spanish moss. Get serious. I’ve been given my stories, and in them, people who try to fly are burned out of their own skins.

What my stories do is tell me why—why the old people looked at us with such unforgiving eyes, why they pushed us away, but wouldn’t let go. Without the stories, I’d have nothing to explain the cacophony in my head in the indigo New Hampshire night. I’d be back to fifteen years old, sitting in the Art Building’s common room, feeling the crazy panic again, hearing the white kids telling me to buck up because slavery’s past, Jim Crow’s dead and gone without a trace. Jump, Izzy.

Nowhere else will I get the rhythm of these stories, the ghosts and their magic. That’s hard to write, too. It’s hard to write about a community of souls, living and dead, white dogs that scream like women, barracudas that follow swimmers like angels to keep them safe. It’s hard to tell it in mixed company without beginning the old explanations again, the old defensiveness and inarticulate rage. Take away the ooga-booga stuff, and Toni Morrison would be fine, a girl once whispered to me
in college. Without the stories and the songs, I am mute. A white American education will never give them to me; but it can—if I am graced, if I do not go blind in the white light of self-consciousness, if I have guides before me and the sense to heed them—it can help me to see the stories, growing like a vine out of the cane fields, up out of unmarked graves, around my soul. It can help me search out the very history it did not teach me. “Let us learn those things here on earth,” proclaims the school motto, “the knowledge of which will continue into the heavens.”

St. Paul’s gave me new words into which I must translate the old. But St. Paul’s would keep me inside my black skin, that fine, fine membrane that was meant to hold in my blood, not bind up my soul. The stories show me the way out. I must tell my daughter that. I must do it so she’ll know. Then I can go to my own room where the window is open to the black night and fly out unafraid to meet the darkness. I can fly out at dark to rub against the open sky. And ain’t I a voman? I must leave my mother and father. I must leave my husband and daughter sleeping. They will come, too, if they want. The night can carry us all. It is big enough. Others are there already, calling, welcoming. At dawn I will alight on my sill. I can slip into my smooth black skin. It will welcome me. I will stay within it most nights, and sleep next to my husband, but I will return again and again to the sky. The skin will grow wrinkled as the nights come and go, but my husband will not salt it. My skin will know me, and I will not have to fear my skin.

I did not ask for the stories, but I was given them to tell, to retell and change and pass along. (Each one teach one, pass it on, pass it on.) I was given them to plait into my story, to use, to give me the strength to take off my skin and stand naked and unafraid in the night, to touch other souls in the night. This time Izzy will jump of her own will when her legs
have grown strong enough to absorb the shock; she will not lie on the ground, splayed out alone, crippled by distrust. She will learn how to jump through life, big, giant jumps. She’ll fall, and get up again. Up, Izzy, up. Paint, dance, read, sing, skate, write, climb, fly. Remember it all, and come tell us about it.

I have never skated on black ice, but perhaps my children will. They’ll know it, at least, when it appears: that the earth can stretch smooth and unbroken like grace, and they’ll know as they know my voice that they were meant to have their share.

Lorene Cary was raised in Philadelphia and Yeadon, Pennsylvania. She was graduated from St. Paul’s School in 1974 and received a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. While studying at Sussex University on a Thouron Fellowship for British-U.S. student exchange, she earned an M.A. in Victorian literature. In 1992 Colby College conferred on her an honorary Doctorate of Letters.

In the early 1980s Ms. Cary worked as a writer for
Time
and as an Associate Editor at
TV Guide
. Since then, she has taught at St. Paul’s School, Antioch University (Philadelphia campus), and the University of the Arts, and has written articles for such publications as
Essence
and
The Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine
. In 1992 she was a contributing editor at
Newsweek
. Her short fiction has been published in
Obsidian
, and her first book,
Black Ice
, a memoir of her education at St. Paul’s, was published in 1991 and chosen by the American Library Association as one of its Notable Books for 1992. She is also the author of
Pride
and
The Price of a Child
. In 1998 Lorene Cary founded A
RT
S
ANCTUARY
, a non-profit lecture and performance series that brings black thinkers and artists to speak and perform at the Church of the Advocate, a National Historic Landmark Building in North Philadelphia. Currently she is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. Ms. Cary lives in Philadelphia with her husband, R. C. Smith, and their daughters, Laura and Zoë.