Common Ground (59 page)

During his career in the Boston schools, he had found time to coach freshman basketball at Boston College, where he came to know a black student named David Nelson, who went on to a career in Boston politics. In 1970 when Louise Day Hicks announced for the congressional seat being vacated by Speaker of the House John McCormack, Nelson challenged her. Ultimately, another Irish candidate, John Moakley, made it a three-way race. Needing all the Irish support he could find, Nelson called on his old friend from BC days. After conferring with his family, Power took $1,000 they’d been saving for their summer vacation and donated it to the Nelson campaign. A few weeks later, the Powers threw a fund-raiser for Nelson in their Hyde Park home. And two nights a week for the rest of the summer, Frank and his wife, Eunice, campaigned door to door in white neighborhoods. Frank marched with Nelson in the Bunker Hill Day parade and on primary day he manned a polling place in the North End. Nelson finished a close third, but the episode may have cost Power the biggest prize he ever sought. By 1972, his reputation as an administrator had spread and he was widely regarded as the leading candidate to become Boston’s School Superintendent. But several votes on the School Committee switched at the last moment and the job went instead to Director of Curriculum William Leary. Some believe Power lost the job because of his refusal to play traditional school politics, but Congresswoman Hicks may also have blackballed the man who had dared to campaign against her.

At Charlestown High, he had to tread more carefully, but even there Power occasionally revealed the depth of his feeling on racial questions. Through the fifties and sixties, the school had only one black teacher and a handful of black students. Good athletes won respect on the playing field, but others suffered abuse. Whites leaned over the railings of the school’s big central stairwell and spat on minority students below. Racial epithets rang through the hallways. Some blacks and Hispanics withdrew at midterm. In June 1972—two months after he lost his bid for the superintendency—Power used his graduation speech to address changes in the school which worried him deeply. When he first came to Charlestown “the kids that frequented the Monument area knew precisely the historical significance of the battle and could relate it accurately
to visitors.” But now, he said, consider “a gray granite school dominated by the Bunker Hill Monument, that citadel dedicated to the proposition that ‘All Men Are Created Equal,’ except those at whom we whisper or shout ‘nigger, spic, chink’ and occasionally ‘guinea.’ Yes, all men are created equal, but are some of us created more equal?”

By then, the principal source of friction at the high school was the presence of several hundred students from the predominantly Italian North End, which had no high school of its own. For years many of its teenagers had gone to the in-town high schools, but as those schools became increasingly black, the North Enders sought sanctuary at Charlestown High. There they were regarded as interlopers and often derided as “guineas” and “wops.” As long as they recognized that the high school was Townie turf, an uneasy peace prevailed, but in September 1973 the Italians fielded their own slate of senior class officers. At first, the Townies took them lightly—no North Ender had ever held such an office. But the Italian candidate for class president was a charmer named Mark Forziati, who ingratiated himself with the girls in the class and campaigned hard with the “shop mugs” in the electrical course who came from all over the city and felt no particular loyalty to the Town. When the votes were tallied, the unthinkable had happened. Not only had Forziati won, he had carried a North End girl in with him as class secretary.

The Townies were stunned, then angry. Fights broke out in the corridors, ostensibly over courting rights to Charlestown girls. One morning, after a boy was suspended for punching a North Ender, he went home, got a revolver, and came back gunning for his rival, until an assistant headmaster wrestled the weapon away from him. That evening, as several Townies hung out on their regular corner by the high school, a car screeched around the square and shots ricocheted off the granite façade. When the Townies retaliated, they were usually led by twenty-five male students who called themselves the HOBARS, an acronym for “Help Our Boys Against Radical Suckers.” Initially, the HOBARS were little more than a joke, a secret society formed by athletes and big men on campus to bamboozle the rest of the school. By the early seventies, though, they had focused on the newly aggressive North Enders. Some teachers and administrators, holding the HOBARS responsible for the harassment of blacks and Hispanics as well, suggested that their name should really stand for “Hoodlums Opposed to Basic American Rights.”

But whatever the HOBARS represented, it was less ideological than geographical, the defense of Townie turf against all comers. Like the Town itself, the school felt short-changed, exploited, assailed on all sides by outsiders seeking to erode its identity. The long-promised new building was still bogged down in disputes over racial balance, and in 1974, after Judge Garrity ordered Charlestown High transformed from a three-year to a four-year institution, it was more grotesquely overcrowded than ever. Its enrollment—spread over three buildings—had ballooned to 1,150, with 800 of them in the obsolete main building alone. But fire laws permitted only 636 students in the building at one time, so they were shuttled in and out all day, an elaborate game of
musical chairs which made serious education all but impossible. Teachers and students feared things could only get worse the following fall when the judge’s desegregation order embraced Charlestown.

The old school on the hill might not be much. Its building was crumbling, its academic record was dismal, most of its alumni were destined for dreary blue-collar jobs. But to many Townies, it stood for priorities they staunchly professed: community above achievement, solidarity over mobility. Precisely because Charlestown High embodied notions scorned by the outside world, the Townies valued it all the more. It was theirs and nobody was going to take it away from them.

Cassandra Twymon woke that morning in September 1975 torn between fear and anticipation. Part of her wanted to pull the blanket over her head and stay there for hours, snug and secure. Yet another part of her reached for the new day, craving the action, the color, even the danger it promised. If nothing else, she was going to be a celebrity that day, a TV star like the kids at Southie the year before. She didn’t want to miss that. Hurriedly she pulled on the new outfit her mother had made for the occasion—dark blue pants and a matching smock, decorated with a light blue transportation motif: little men on bicycles, a horse and buggy, a railroad train and a switchman with a stop sign. She had new blue shoes and stockings. She knew she’d look good on TV.

At breakfast their mother fed her and young Rachel a little lecture about staying out of trouble. “Yes,
Mother
,” Cassandra said with a weary nod. She was so accustomed to her mother’s homilies that she hardly listened anymore. By the time the hand on the kitchen clock touched seven, she was almost relieved and rushed for the door (Rachel had another three-quarters of an hour before the bus returned to take her to the Edwards). With a jaunty wave, Cassandra ran across the avenue to the corner of Columbus Square.

The bus had been scheduled to arrive at 7:15, but already it was 7:30 and still no sign of it. Four other kids were standing on the corner by then—two black girls named Darlene Wynn and Diane White, and a brother and sister, Enrique and Janeth Rivas, who said they came from Bogotá, Colombia. Cassandra didn’t know where Bogotá was, but it seemed a long way to come just to go to school in Charlestown.

It was chilly that morning, and the kids at the bus stop broke into an impromptu dance to keep warm. Finally, at 7:40, bus No. 354 came creaking up the avenue. It had already picked up thirty-two students in Lower Roxbury and most of its seats were taken when the group from Columbus Square boarded. Cassandra squeezed into a rear seat beside a skinny little girl who had clearly been crying, but most of the kids seemed anything but cowed by the morning’s events—shouting, stomping their feet, pointing out the window at passersby as the bus wound through downtown Boston. Although Cassandra knew they were just trying to cover up their nervousness, she joined in. Somehow, it made her feel better too.

The clamor subsided as they turned onto the Gilmore Bridge. To their left,
in a large vacant lot overgrown with weeds, five other buses stood waiting in a row. Quickly, police formed them into a convoy: a police car, two motorcycles, a bus, two more motorcycles, another bus, and so forth. The flashing blue lights of the patrol cars, the canary-yellow buses, the navy-blue uniforms of the policemen standing guard along the sidewalks wove a bright band of color through the desolation left by Charlestown’s urban renewal. To Cassandra, peering out the bus window, the scene had a festive air, like one of those Armed Forces Day parades she had watched as a little girl down on Boylston Street.

As the convoy climbed Breed’s Hill, the blue corridor thickened, patrolmen standing shoulder to shoulder on either side; and, turning onto the square, it moved through a vast blue sea—police on the sidewalk, in the streets, on the grassy slope beneath the Monument. Here and there behind the cordon, civilians jeered and hooted as the buses rolled by. When they pulled up to the high school, Cassandra’s attention was diverted to the horde of reporters and cameramen straining against the wrought-iron fence. Someone flung open the doors and shouted, “Everybody out, and make it quick!” As she clambered down, Cassandra turned toward the clicking Leicas and whirring Minicams, posing for one exquisite moment like a movie star on her way to a Hollywood premiere. Then, wheeling on her platform heels, she did a syncopated little strut through the schoolhouse door.

But inside the crowded lobby her spirits faded. With so many minority students trying to get through the metal detectors at one time, the lines were long and slow. When her turn finally came, an aide searching her handbag confiscated the hair pick she used to tend her Afro. Protesting bitterly, she was ultimately allowed to keep it after she pointed out that its prongs were plastic, not metal. But the long wait and the dispute left her in a sour mood as she climbed the curving staircase to her homeroom on the third floor.

Room 38 was a bare brown box with fourteen scarred wooden desks lined up in three files before the blackboard. As Cassandra entered, she saw that the first file contained only two black girls at the first desk and a Puerto Rican girl directly behind them. Cassandra took the seat next to the Puerto Rican. In the middle file sat the two Colombian students and one black boy. As the white students came in, Cassandra noticed that all twelve of them squeezed into the third file of desks by the windows, as far as they could from the minority students. So much for integration, she thought.

Just then Frank Power came on the public address system, officially opening the new school year at Charlestown High. The headmaster congratulated them on the orderly manner in which the day had begun and assured them that measures were being taken to make school “a pleasant and rewarding experience for all of you.” He cautioned: “We have only one hard-and-fast rule at this school: respect the rights of others. We are going to do that this year. We are going to respect other people’s right to get an education here. We are going to respect their rights as human beings. Now, let’s get to work. Remember, you’re here to learn. That’s the purpose of this school.”

But not much learning got done that day. First, their homeroom teacher, a business instructor named John Rowley, had to take down all their names, distribute cards for them to fill out, and read them a seemingly endless list of rules and regulations. Cassandra noticed that as he sat on the edge of his desk, he turned slightly toward the white students by the window, so that she often had difficulty hearing him. From the corner of her eye, Cassandra could see the white kids whispering and giggling. Occasionally she caught a message hissed in her direction: “Anybody smell something peculiar in here?” or “Throw them a banana, Tarzan.”

So it went the rest of the day, as she shuttled from history to biology to typing, music, office practices, and physical education. Some of her classes were half empty, since many whites were boycotting, while some blacks and Hispanics had stayed away in fear of trouble (of the 883 students Judge Garrity had assigned to Charlestown High, only 315 showed up that day—235 whites, 66 blacks, and 14 Chinese and Hispanics). In some of her classes, the teachers made them sit in alphabetical order, but none of the whites she sat next to so much as acknowledged her presence. The whispered gibes continued and, once, on the way into her office practices course, a white boy blocked her path, refusing to move until a teacher ordered him out of the way.

Nevertheless, the day ran its course without major incident. When the final bell rang at 1:32 p.m., the whites were held in the classrooms until the “minority” students could be loaded onto buses. Riding down the hill toward the bridge, Cassandra saw a pretty blond girl about her age standing on the sidewalk. The girl raised her hand as if to wave at the buses, and Cassandra was about to acknowledge the gesture when she saw that the girl wasn’t waving at all. Only the middle digit on her hand was raised. She was giving them the finger.

At home that night, Cassandra told the story of her first day at school over and over, accompanied by comic pantomimes and caricatures of the whites she had encountered, and Rachel chimed in with similar tales from the Edwards Middle School. Their brothers—Richard, George, Wayne, and Freddie—alternated between hysterical laughter at the dramatic recitations and outrage at the indignities their sisters had suffered. Eventually, talk turned to revenge, each brother topping the others with some notion of how to pay “whitey” back. This brought a stern lecture from their mother. “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk from you,” she said. “I’m sending you to get an education. If you get into fights, you’re going to get suspended. And if you’re suspended, there’s no way you’re going to get an education. So if somebody wants to start something with you, don’t you oblige them. If they hit you, don’t you hit them back. All they’ve done is prove how inferior they are to you. Just turn your back and walk away.”