floorboards made the only sound. We dared not whisper or touch the four-poster bed or the grandfather clocks. The drop-leaf tables and wooden chairs were less of a temptation. It looked as if nobody had sat in the winged armchair by the fireplace or eaten at the refectory table. The pastel-coloured walls were so quiet we were scared to cough.
Before we left, a white-haired lady chatted to us and gave us each a mug of hot chocolate with a marshmallow floating on the top. Another, similar lady passed out home-made Christmas cookies. I had never had chocolate to drink before. I stood as still as I could and was very glad my mother had put my hair in two ponytails even though I still had that silly braid on top. Edna had starched my grey and white dress which had a separate pinafore. The stillness there had a profound effect on me.
We had to walk past Grumblethorpe to get to the Band Box Theater, which wasn’t a theatre, it was a cinema. Dennis and Pam and I were allowed to go most Saturday afternoons. A few times I went with Dennis by myself and we’d sit in the back row and stuff ourselves with buttered popcorn, Jujy fruits and Neco wafers, which seemed more the purpose of going than the movie. I always felt safe when Dennis was with me, because apart from the fact that the bad boys liked him, he was bigger than most kids his age and looked like the sort of boy you shouldn’t mess with. I don’t recall that anyone ever did.
Dennis loved the movies and comic books, and after we got a record player, he used most of his allowance to buy records. One of his favourite TV shows was Amos ‘n Andy, which my mother thought should have been taken off the air for depicting ‘Negroes’ as ignorant. My brother used to provoke her by imitating the actors as soon as the programme ended. Dennis would pull faces, roll his eyes and speak an exaggerated Melangian dialect. Finally we were all banned from watching the show, but we loved Amos ‘n Andy so we would sneak and watch it anyway. He’d turn the volume down and I’d guard the door for him. The telly was in the back room on the second floor so it was easy to get away with this.
There were hardly any Melangians on TV other than the cast of Amos ‘n Andy and boxers like Sugar Ray Robinson. Once Richard Boone, who played the main doctor in a weekly hospital series called The Medic, had to treat a little Melangian girl. We all screamed with shock when she came on the screen. We’d never seen one of us in a television drama. Even the most regular police series, Dragnet, didn’t have one Melangian criminal. There was a character called Rochester on the Jack Benny show, but it was very rare to see us on TV unless singing and dancing.
Our first major media star came through on the news in 1953. Her name was Autherine Lucy. She was a young woman who wanted so much to be free to study at the college of her choice that she took on the whole city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and finally the whole goddamn United States government so that President Eisenhower had no choice but to send her an army. I don’t know why there aren’t statues of her. She was our very own Joan of Arc and to see her on the television screen facing an avalanche of rednecks was unforgettable. For weeks after her appearance, our radio and television seemed to be tuned to nothing but newscasts from the moment Edna, Thelma or Ikey came home from work. Melangian neighbours who normally only exchanged hellos had a lot to talk to each other about.
I was stunned to see the hundreds of agitators jeering and spitting and name-calling while Autherine faced them. She never looked as if she was in a hurry; when the camera panned across her face she seemed neither angry nor anxious. She had that look of patience someone has when waiting for a bus they know is coming.
A couple of times since, when I’ve been up against bewildering odds and felt fear creeping up on me or dared feel sorry for myself, I’ve only had to think of Autherine facing the mob to put things in proper perspective.
As far as I could see, there was nothing uncommon about Autherine except her courage. The fact that she looked like most other girls of her age that ambled around the reservation on a Saturday afternoon made her confrontation all the more shocking. It could have been any one of us standing in her shoes when what looked like the whole city of Tuscaloosa was determined to keep her from entering the doors of a school which our taxes helped to keep open.
While this compelling national school drama played out, I’d start each school day like millions of American children by standing at attention after the bell rang to salute the flag. Led by the teachers, I’d recite the pledge with the whole class just as I’d been doing since my first day at school. I could say it in my sleep:
I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America
and to the republic for which it stands,
one nation*, invisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
Then we’d sit down and a passage was read from the Bible. I don’t know how old I was before I realized ‘invisible’ was supposed to be ‘indivisible’.
To salute you placed your right hand on your heart, although I was never sure I’d found my heart. The pledge said things that I knew weren’t true once I’d seen Autherine Lucy and heard all the talk at home about what rights we didn’t have.
I hoped nobody at school would ask what I thought about the Autherine thing because I wasn’t allowed to lie. The teacher usually asked our opinions about current events, but I could tell from the way nobody mentioned Autherine in class that it was something we could not talk about. Patriotism was running too high to challenge it. America was like God. People believed in it.
When I discovered there was no Santa Claus, I think I cried. Part of my hurt was being robbed of my favourite myth and the rest was realizing that I had believed with all my might in something that older people knew all along was fake. I remember being told that since younger kids still needed to believe in Santa, I wasn’t to tell them he didn’t exist. I became an accessory to promoting a continuing myth and assumed I was doing the littler kids a favour by letting them believe a bit longer.
The same applies after I realized we’d been pledging ourselves to a myth about America. Obviously nobody wanted to deal with the truth, so as a child of eight I became an accessory, never exposing the deception, which everybody needed to go on believing in.
*The words ‘under God’ were added by act of Congress in 1954.
5 MOUNT AIRY AND CHESTNUT HILL
John Wister school mysteriously caught fire one Sunday night when I was in the second half of second grade, and I never went back there. I was bused to another school for quite some time.
Gradually the rougher elements became the majority in Germantown. Crap-shooters monopolized a corner of the street where we had to walk past them to the neighbourhood store. Some of them used to make passes at Ikey and Thelma. My mother was unnerved and called them gangsters. Edna called them riffraff and dared them to lay their hands on her. I suppose they were jobless as they were always there, throwing dice, calling bets and making idle threats to each other. ‘Gimme a double, sir.’ ‘Come on baby, come on.’ ‘A five and a four.’ ‘Double or nothin’.’ ‘Take yo’ hands off the dice. I’ll shoot yo’ ass.’ ‘You jive-ass mothafucka.’ We could hear them halfway up the block.
Late one afternoon when Ikey and I were coming home from Charlie Chernoff’s grocery store, all of a sudden a couple of police cars swerved up to the corner. As the police spilled out on the sidewalk, there was a melee and a shot was fired. It was like something straight out of the movies and I was scared nearly to death
