it supported her conviction that college was our only hope of a good career. One thing was obvious, if being pretty attracted troublemakers, it was a quality hardly worth having and dangerous to flaunt if you did (as well as cheap, which was Edna’s final verdict on the subject). ‘Pretty is as pretty does,’ she stated.
I was about to lose Edna’s daily dose of homilies because as soon as I attended school for a full day, she got a job working for an Italian family who operated the local bakery. She probably got the job to help pay for the new fittings and furniture in every room. I knew better than to ask how we afforded it all, because it would have been considered none of my business and rude to enquire.
John Wister Elementary School was a three-storey brick building on Bringhurst Street not far from Germantown Avenue. It was a hundred years old and a big fuss was made over its wooden floors because they were the originals. John Wister was one of the early German settlers, and I was a very lucky girl, the principal told my mother before she carted me off to Miss Courtney’s class, to start first grade at a school that was so steeped in history. I was given my very own desk which had a sunken ink well, although we could only write in pencil. The desks were in rows with each attached to the bench in front and held together and supported by elaborate ironmongery. The writing surface was the hinged lid of an oblong wooden box so that you could lift it up and put your things inside. I was seated near Miss Courtney in the front of the room and though I dared not turn round to stare, I could have sworn that all the other children were white. Thank God I’d been watching a lot of television and knew how to act.
Television carted me off to places I had never dreamed existed. It took for granted that I was ready to share experiences quite foreign to my own. Mainly, it exposed those other Americans to me, the ones who didn’t live on the reservations. In 1952 the only ways that Melangians had of becoming familiar with white behaviour was by working with or for whites and by seeing movies and watching TV.
To me, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo and Fred and Ethel Mertz on the I Love Lucy show, Ralph, Alice, Trixie and Ed on The Honeymooners or George Burns and Gracie Allen were like neighbours I visited once a week. I saw what they did at breakfast or sat in their living room and overheard their conversations. Where else and how else could this have happened? While Max Bender and other white shopkeepers might have been genuinely cordial and exchanged a few niceties with a regular customer, I knew nothing about how people like Max lived or what he’d say to his wife. Radio and motion pictures didn’t give us a regular enough dose of exposure to create the familiarity, the insider’s view, that television gave us.
As liberal as Harry Truman was with his bills for public housing, socialized medicine, education as a federal, not a state, issue and his civil rights policy, there was never any suggestion that the races should mix socially. The GI Bill restored the interrupted education of men like my father and gave equal pensions to all Americans who had fought the war together, but nobody assumed that total integration would follow. Racial separation is part of American culture.
At six I wasn’t aware of this, but I was soon aware that many children in my class had never talked to a Melangian before and some of them definitely didn’t want to. Although John Wister school was close to our house, it was just beyond our local school-district boundary. Ikey got me enrolled there anyway. For the majority of my classmates and teachers, I might have been a visiting diplomat representing my whole race, because I soon learned that what I said and did was a reflection on other Melangians and if my classmates were going to overcome their assumption that they weren’t as clean, as good or as clever, the onus was on me. For a six-year-old this is a heavy burden, but on instructions from home I did what I could to be my best self and come first in all things.
In spite of this and of being called nigger and other such names when it suited somebody, I did love my school and most of what went with it, whether it was history or social studies, spinster teachers or spelling bees. There was always some national hero’s birthday or some impending holiday that gave us another excuse to hang up our pictures and create a display. Washington, Lincoln, Easter bunnies, Hallowe’en witches, Thanksgiving pilgrims, Christmas angels, fire-prevention week, keep-your-city-clean week, brotherly-love week. There was always something to celebrate and I wanted to be there.
I never felt as wonderful by the time I got to the school gate as I’d thought I was when I left home, and I was always uncertain if anybody would be brave enough to play with me in the school yard before the morning bell. I may have been the teacher’s pet, but my classmates were still wary of me before they’d have a few hours to get used to me in class. By recess, it was usually OK, and if it wasn’t, I’d stroll around with the teacher. Mainly, it taught me how to stand alone.
In 1952 when General Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson were running for president, I overheard talk in the house that the Republicans were terrible and would bring a lot of hardship, but almost all the children in my class wore I LIKE IKE buttons to show that their parents were voting for him and his running mate, Richard Nixon. Being for Stevenson set me apart.
I didn’t know much about the Republicans except that I’d heard they’d have us selling apples on the street corner. My mother bought me a grey jacket after the election which she said was an Eisenhower jacket. It nipped in at the waist and was of corduroy. It was a catastrophe and nearly made my life miserable, because it didn’t look a bit like anybody else’s jacket at school. I had enough trouble without it. Eisenhower had been a general, so I guess it was based on some army jacket of his.
Life seemed unaffected after Ike had won. I didn’t have to sell apples, and he didn’t make us go to school on Saturday, which was the other rumour I’d heard. Things at school were different but it had nothing to do with politics. I was often singled out to do special things like deliver a folded message to the principal, pass out the milk or read out loud when visitors came into our classroom. This made my classmates like me better. So, when Miss Courtney asked us to take a partner to file out in pairs holding hands, which we did going to assembly, recess or in fire drill, I no longer needed to pretend that it didn’t matter that nobody wanted to hold my hand. I had a couple of friends. Even walking into the school yard in the morning ceased to be a crisis in my school life.
Playing with these friends was easier when I spoke with the tone and rhythm of their speech, which was slightly different from mine and much higher pitched. I imitated their manners, too, their giggles and walk and the way they cocked their heads. I don’t think I did it consciously, it just happened. At close range, I could hear their drummer and marched to their beat. As soon as I got home, I’d automatically revert to the old me. I spoke the way I was spoken to, and my thinking and body language accommodated my speech.
It was the beginning of a pattern, because at six, I led two lives which required two separate personalities. It wasn’t a game or an act, though, it was more like a function. I lived between two nations – one Melangian and one American – and I adjusted to each.
During my first Christmas season at John Wister school I participated in the annual carol-singing at Grumblethorpe. Grumblethorpe was a house four blocks from school at 5267 Germantown Avenue, built by John Wister in 1744. (The year Johann Würster emigrated from a town near Heidelberg, Germany, he was nineteen and broke. Johann became a successful wine importer, anglicized his name and built a large summer house in Germantown. The three-storey house was originally known as Wister’s Big House but John’s grandson named the house Grumblethorpe after an English manor he’d read about in a novel. It has been refurbished to look as it did when John Wister and his family lived there.)
We sang our carols in the big front room. The blinds were drawn, so that the flickering light from the candles and the smell of Christmas pine and evergreens had a strange awesome effect, especially on a kid who’d not long been free of 23rd Street. I’d never seen anything like it and was dumbstruck.
Even though it was grand, Grumblethorpe was marked by Quaker simplicity. After carolling, we were shown
