Wait Till Next Year: A Memoir (28 page)

While she was in the hospital she suffered a stroke. Late one afternoon, she woke from a nap without sensation in her right foot and leg, and so dizzy she feared falling out of bed. Speech required great effort, and her words were slurred and difficult to understand. The doctors told us she had experienced a thrombotic stroke in the left side of her brain, causing partial paralysis on her right side. Apparently a blood clot had formed in one of her diseased arteries, blocking the flow of blood to the brain. Only time would tell if the damage was permanent.

Though the doctors assured us that most stroke survivors recovered fully and eventually regained use of their paralyzed limbs through physical therapy, I wondered if she had the energy or the will to recover. There was a
frightened look in her eyes, and her weight had dropped to eighty-eight pounds, giving her tall frame an emaciated appearance. The war with her body over the previous decade had taken a terrible toll.

Slowly, however, she began to fight her way back. She gained some motion in her arm and then in her leg. A week after the stroke, she was up in a wheelchair; a week after that, leaning on an attendant’s arm, she walked slowly down the hospital corridor, slightly dragging her leg. Her slurred speech had still not improved, but the doctors said she could go home if a hospital bed was set up on the first floor so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs.

The bed was delivered and arranged in our living room a few hours before my mother came home. We had to roll up the rug and push all the furniture against the walls to make space for it. When my mother returned and saw the disarray caused by the giant bed, her eyes closed with weary disgust. The treasured order of her home had been disrupted, and she announced that she would practice going up and down the steps every day until “that thing, that intruder,” as she called it, could be removed from her living room. Four weeks after arriving home, she had learned to negotiate the stairs, and the bed was carried away.

To celebrate the removal of the hospital bed, my father decided they should go out to dinner. She wore her favorite blue dress, the one my dad had so admired the night of the Red and Blue banquet six years earlier. I sat in their room, helping her get ready, uttering cheerful banalities, and, at the same time, wondering how she felt as she looked in the mirror and saw the partially paralyzed cheek, the deepened lines, the wrinkled skin that hung down from her upper arms. Then my father walked into the room and told her she looked wonderful. She responded with a smile so bright it seemed to me that she might believe him, that, in
the reflected gaze of his steady admiration, she saw the face of the girl he had fallen in love with.

My mother’s speech proved the most frustrating part of her rehabilitation. Though she never lost the ability to comprehend language, she had trouble finding the words she wanted, and her diction was indistinct. When the doctors suggested that it would be useful for her to read aloud, my father turned to me. Since my mother had come home from the hospital, I had stayed in school on many afternoons and spent an inordinate amount of time at the homes of my friends. I just wanted to escape, to pretend that nothing had changed. My fear of her illness had estranged us. Yet I could not witness my mother’s ferocious effort to climb the stairs or prepare a meal without feeling ashamed. Now there was something I could do to help. I went to the library for an old friend we both loved—Dickens’
David Copperfield
.

“It’s been a long time since we’ve taken turns reading to one another,” I prodded her. She resisted at first, but once we got started, it became part of a routine we looked forward to each day. I remember her halting manner, reading the scene where Copperfield’s aunt bursts out of the house because David Copperfield is a boy and not the “Betsey” she had confidently awaited. My mother paused when the scene was done, and suddenly we both started laughing. As the days and weeks passed, her voice and control grew stronger until, by way of Peggotty, Mr. Micawber, treacherous Steerforth, and loathsome Uriah Heep, all traces of a slur were gone from her speech.

Reading books together had once been a very significant part of my relationship with my mother. Now reading
David Copperfield
gave impetus to her rehabilitation, entertained us, dissipated my anxieties, and drew us closer than we had been in many, many months.

·    ·

A
s MUCH
as I loved Dickens, however, there was nothing in his vivid portrayals of nineteenth-century London to prepare my mind for the disturbing events of mid-century America. As I stood in school to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or rose with the crowd at the ball park when “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played, it had never occurred to me to question, or even to think about, the words of the ritual I was reciting. I only knew that I was an American. And to be an American was a wonderful thing. I was aware, of course, that mistakes could be made, injustices committed. I had absorbed at least that much through my contacts with McCarthyism. But that could no more lead me to question the country itself than the acts of a renegade priest would cause me to question my Catholic faith.

The beginnings of doubt came through events which took place more than eleven hundred miles away. On the morning of September 4, 1957, armed troops of the Arkansas National Guard took up positions in front of Central High School in Little Rock. Governor Orville Faubus had ordered them to prevent the enrollment of nine black schoolchildren whose registration had been ordered by a federal court, pursuant to the landmark decision of the Supreme Court which declared school segregation unconstitutional. Since Faubus had made his intentions known in advance, reporters from television stations and newspapers across the country were there to witness the confrontation. Eight of the nine children arrived together, accompanied by a group of black and white ministers. Through a failure of communications, the ninth child, Elizabeth Eckford, proceeded on her own.

Many hundreds of people shouted abuse as the small band of eight children moved toward the entrance. The Arkansas Guards, claiming they were acting under the orders of Governor Faubus, raised their bayonets to block the children’s entrance. “What are your orders?” one of the ministers asked. “To keep the niggers out,” a soldier responded. Unable to make their way through the phalanx of soldiers, the eight children and the ministers were forced to retreat.

On September 4, 1957, the Little Rock Nine were to begin classes at Central High School. At the sight of young Elizabeth Eckford standing alone, the irate mob descended. “Lynch her, lynch her,” someone yelled. Two weeks later, the National Guard safely escorted the students into the school.

When fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford reached the school a few minutes later, she was greeted by a wall of hate. At the sight of the young girl standing alone, the irate mob descended on her,
The New York Times
reported, “baying at her heels like a pack of hounds.” “Lynch her, lynch her,” someone yelled. Finding the entrance blocked, Elizabeth turned around and headed back through the mob. With great difficulty, she finally reached the bus stop, where she collapsed on the bench, trembling, tears streaming down her cheeks.

Among the witnesses was a
New York Times
reporter, Benjamin Fine. We all knew Mr. Fine. He lived in Rockville Centre, and his daughter, Jill, was one of my classmates. He understood that as a reporter he was professionally bound to act as an observer, not a participant. But at the sight of the young girl, who reminded him, he would later say, of his own daughter, he entered the scene he had been sent to observe. He approached the tearful Elizabeth, put his arm around her, and lifted her chin, saying, “Don’t let them see you cry.” The menacing crowd of some five hundred closed around them, hurling threats and epithets. “Get a rope and drag her over to this tree,” someone hollered. Suddenly a sympathetic white-haired woman fought free of the crowd and, with Fine’s help, boarded the bus with Elizabeth to escape the melee. The crowd, frustrated and frenzied, then turned on Fine. “Now it’s your turn,” they shouted. “Grab him and kick him in the balls.” “You
got a nigger wife?” Mr. Fine did not answer. “Are you a Jew?” someone asked. “Yes,” Mr. Fine said. “A dirty New York Jew? Have you been to Moscow lately?” As National Guardsmen stood by, the mob beat Fine badly enough to send him to the hospital. That night, Faubus made it clear he would continue to defy federal-court orders. Resolution ultimately would be in the hands of the president.

At the beginning of the school year, with the crisis in Little Rock looming, we were fortunate to have two teachers who thought much more could be learned from the drama in Arkansas than from the prescribed textbooks. Mr. Geise, our social-studies teacher, was a passionate liberal who, in his first year of teaching at South Side, had been an outspoken critic of Joe McCarthy. An anonymous note had arrived in his mailbox warning him that he wouldn’t get tenure if he continued to make political statements. He threw the note away and continued to speak out. During Little Rock,
The New York Times
became our chief text, and each day we began our class with Ben Fine’s dispatches.

“What’s going on here?” Mr. Geise asked, opening our class discussion. “Can we, for a moment, put aside our emotions and see what forces are behind this conflict? Does a governor have the right to defy the order of a federal court? Who is the ultimate sovereign in a democracy? Where is the president of the United States in all this?” The questions Mr. Geise posed initiated a discussion that gave real-life content to the abstract concepts of federalism, sovereignty, and states’ rights.

The news we debated and interpreted in social studies was enriched and amplified in English class by Mr. Jenkins, the first black high-school teacher hired to teach in Long Island. A graduate of Columbia College, with a master’s degree from Teachers College, Mr. Jenkins had rapidly become one of the most respected and accessible teachers
in the school. Day after day in classroom discussions, he combined humor with knowledge of history and literature to challenge our unconscious biases and dare us to think independently. When he heard us congratulating Jill on her father’s bravery, he intervened. Of course Mr. Fine was brave, he said, but how would you feel if a reporter had joined the angry crowd to help block Elizabeth from entering the school? Think with your mind, not just with your heart. Was there a line that had to be respected between reporting on an event and taking part in it?

That night, I sat with my parents as we watched on television the very events we had been discussing in school. We saw the mob surging forward to intimidate the young girl, the Guardsmen standing idly by, refusing to help her; the girl enduring the vulgarity with all the dignity she could muster. “Why doesn’t Eisenhower send in federal troops to protect that girl? She’s got every right to be there,” I said, angrily echoing the arguments I had heard in school. “Why did you vote for Eisenhower anyway?” I asked my father.

“It’s certainly an ugly, complicated mess,” said my father, and then he began to smile. “I haven’t seen you so upset since Bobby Thomson.” “Well,” my mother interrupted, “I know one thing, somebody should be doing something to protect that little girl.” They were both right. Aside from the death of James Dean and the struggle to keep the Dodgers in Brooklyn, no public event had so fully engaged my private emotions. To challenge the president of the country, to berate angrily a governor I had never heard of from a place I did not know, was for me an immense expansion of political consciousness. It was a turning point, or, at least, the start of a turning point.

During the next two weeks, while the “Little Rock Nine” stayed at home waiting for the president to act, our
teachers staged a mock debate for our class: “Should the president send in federal troops to desegregate Central High?” Mr. Geise played the role of Governor Faubus, passionately declaiming the impossibility of legislating emotions and feeling. “You cannot change people’s hearts merely by law,” he said, quoting President Eisenhower. Mr. Jenkins became a spokesman for the White House, arguing that federal troops would only provoke further violence, leading to a shutdown of all public schools in Arkansas and, perhaps, in other parts of the South. The position of the children and the NAACP was argued by two other teachers, who repeated the powerful reasoning of the Supreme Court that separate schools were inherently unequal and represented a denial of the constitutional right to equal protection of the laws.