by Caryl Rivers
Our first assignment is about childhood, and I started to think about Growing Up Colored — which is Grandma Johnson’s word, my father doesn’t like it. He thinks Negro sounds more dignified, that colored makes people think of tenant farmers and black folks shufflin’ and jivin’. It’s funny, white people think we are all alike, but we get tied up in knots about what we ought to call ourselves, and we’re incredibly conscious of skin color, all the subtle variants of it. There’s a rhyme that used to go around our neighborhood: “If you’re white, all right; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re black, step back.” The closer you got to white, the more pale you were, the more your features seemed like white people’s — thin noses and “good” hair — the more status you had. I’m sort of medium brown, and I have good hair — which is curly but not kinky, I don’t have to put straighteners on it. Grandma Johnson always used to brag about my good hair, but to me, even that wasn’t good enough, not after I saw The Yearling.
That was my very favorite movie of all time, maybe because it was about a life that I could only imagine, in rural white America. Claude Jarman, Jr. was a boy who had a pet deer, and he also had the brightest, most golden hair I ever saw, so pale it was nearly pure white. For many months after I saw that movie I was Claude Jarman Jr. in my imagination. I even made our dog, Thunder, be my deer. I would drag him out in the backyard, and I would talk to him in my Claude Jarman, Jr., voice and pretend he was the yearling, looking up at me with big, beautiful deer eyes. Mainly Thunder just looked at me with stupidity, because in dog IQ, Thunder was somewhere between imbecile and moron. Sometimes he looked up at me and snarled, because he was not only stupid, but mean tempered as well. He always made me wonder if colored people couldn’t even have brave and loyal dogs like white people had, at least in the movies. I think maybe Thunder didn’t like colored folks, that was it, and if he had belonged to a nice family in Silver Spring he would have been Lassie. But he got stuck in Northwest with a bunch of coloreds, and that made him cross.
Everybody I adopted from the movies to be in my imagination was white: Billy the Kid and John Wayne from Flying Leathernecks and Lash LaRue. I especially liked Lash and his way of dealing with bad guys. I cut a big piece off my mother’s clothesline and went around lashing everything, including my sister, Darlene, who went crying to my mother, and Lash LaRue got grounded for three days. After that I only did it to Thunder, who snarled and ran under the porch. I got so into being these heroes that sometimes, when I’d look in the mirror, I was amazed to find this dark face staring back at me, with hair that might have been “good” but would never be Claude Jarman, Jr.’s. I remember one day I hopped on my bike and pedaled furiously, and when I got to the top of the street I looked up and said, “God, how come you didn’t make me white? I’m so smart I deserve to be white.”
There was a lot of talk about “passing” in my neighborhood, and it was hard to figure out what the consensus was. People who passed were sort of looked down on, because they were cheating, but anybody who could pass and didn’t was thought to be a sucker. The girl in our neighborhood who was, everybody agreed, the most beautiful, could have passed in a minute. She looked a lot like the movie star Jeanne Crain. Jeanne was in a movie that everybody in the neighborhood saw and talked about for weeks, called Pinky. I guess it was very daring at the time, because Jeanne Crain played a schoolteacher who was colored but who could pass. She falls in love with a white man, and he wants to take her north to marry him, and no one would ever know she was colored. In the end, she decides not to pass and go north, but to stay at the colored school where she is a teacher.
My sister, Darlene, was outraged. “I think she was stupid. She could go north and have a nice boyfriend and wear lots of nice clothes and be rich and she stayed in school! That’s really dumb.” Darlene missed the racial angle completely, but the idea that anyone would choose school over almost any alternative except lynching was incomprehensible.
But Billy Williams, who was nearly sixteen, much older and more sophisticated than the rest of us, had a reasonable theory about why Jeanne Crain begged off. He said that for white people, passing was the worst crime black people could do besides raping white women and that they had a special jail where colored people who tried to pass were taken. In that jail there was a big courtyard where the “passers” were burned at the stake. We all believed it. Since you hardly ever saw any colored people in the movies, or on television — my dad had the first set on the block with a seven-inch screen — it was clear that it was very important for white people not to have colored people among them who weren’t maids or railroad porters. So white people probably would support such a jail; even the nice, polite ones, like Officer Raymond, who came to our school to explain that policemen were our friends, or Miss Greer, who helped out at the school infirmary, or Mr. Carlson, the mailman who always said hello when he passed by. I thought of them all standing around in the courtyard where Jeanne Crain was tied to a post with straw piled up around her legs, the way Ingrid Bergman was in Joan of Arc. Miss Greer was saying, “It really is a shame, she’s very good looking.”
And Officer Raymond said, “Yes, and a good teacher too, but she tried to pass. Rules are rules.” Mr. Carlson would light the fire and say, crossly, “This is the third one this week, and it’s making me late with the mail,” and they’d toast Jeanne like a marshmallow.
It was no surprise that people wanted to pass into the white world. As far as I knew — and this was true with most people in my neighborhood — the white world was a place where everything was perfect, where nobody ever had a hair out of place, where there were no dust balls (those were cleaned up instantly by the colored maid) and the main problems people had were whether Beaver would pass his test or Lucy would get a job in show business. And all white families were always wonderful, like Ozzie and Harriet. Harriet never got crabby like my mother did sometimes and nagged me to clean up my room and Ozzie never gave Ricky or David a whack, the way my father did now and then with his belt (but only when I really deserved it). And they never argued about money, the way my mother and father sometimes did; my mother wanted to save every dime and my father loved to eat out and go to a show from time to time. Sometimes he’d bark at my mother, in exasperation, “God’s sake, Evie, the Depression is over, we’re not living in a shantytown!” When I was really pissed at him, I imagined walking back into the house looking exactly like Ricky Nelson. They certainly would be surprised, and they’d treat me nicer. My dad would never take his belt to Ricky’s white ass, of that I was sure.
It’s funny, I always thought I’d grown up so insulated from what other black people had to put up with, because my neighborhood was an enclave of privileged colored people. I had thought to myself that I grew up almost white. But as I look back, I see how obsessed we were with color, how important it was to us to be almost white. Even though we lived in a colored neighborhood, and until I went to Gonzaga for high school I hardly ever saw a white face, we were obsessed by the white world and its culture, its standards, its prejudices. It seems that hardly a day went by that the white world didn’t intrude on my life — whether I was pretending to be Claude Jarman, Jr., or being proud of my good hair or wishing I could be Ricky Nelson so I could see the look on my parents’ faces when I walked in the door. (Oh, my God, Evie, look who Donald has turned into! We’d better be nice to him!) My father never called me Donnie, like everybody else, because he thought Donnie sounded like a colored name, but Donald had class. Even my name had to be almost white.
I wonder if I will ever get away from that. Even if we win the struggle in the South, even if we succeed in integrating the schools and getting rid of colored drinking fountains and all-white lunch counters, will I ever know exactly who I am, or will a part of me always be those images created by the white world that I can never weed out of my soul? All my life, no matter how old I get, no matter how much I accomplish, deep down, will I believe it would all have been better if I really was Ricky Nelson?
That is something I am going to have to think about.
She was an old pro at this White House stuff by now, having been there six times. She casually flashed the White House press card to the guard at the gate and strolled up to the West Wing entrance without her stomach muscles cramping or her hands shaking so badly she was sure everyone would notice. Sometimes she just sat and stared at her card, with her picture in color and the words White House Press on it. She put it on top of all the other cards in her wallet and flashed it, trying not to be too obvious, at the checkout counter when she bought the groceries. It was silly, but she did it anyway. And since the editor, Charlie Layhmer, had gotten lots of compliments on the spreads she and Jay had been doing about the famous and near famous who came to the White House, he even let them go into Washington on company time now and then. She was for real, a member of the White House Press Corps. The sense of adventure she had known as a child came flooding back. She had been a tomboy whose knees were always skinned and whose face was often begrimed with dirt. She loved climbing trees higher, faster than anyone else. Her father had gone away to the war when she was five, and for four years all she knew of him was a photograph of a tall, thin, dark-haired man in a uniform. The photograph became more real than her memories. Then suddenly he was back, and at first it was strange; her mother, who had talked so long about his return, seemed edgy and out of sorts, but that soon passed and they were a family again. Until the night a year later when her father’s car skidded off an icy pavement when he was coming home from an AMVETS meeting. Four years in combat in Europe and he didn’t get a scratch, but he was killed instantly when his car slammed into a tree. He went back to being only the figure in the photograph, and she and her mother to the tight little family unit they had been before.
Her father had been the owner of a small drugstore in Belvedere, so her mother sold half ownership to the man who had been running the store and went to work. Mary was in school by then, and she stayed with her aunt after school until her mother returned home. Now and then her mother had dates with men; she went out for a time with a salesman Mary didn’t like much, because his fingers were stained brown from nicotine and he was fat, not at all like the slender young man in the photograph. One night she heard her mother and the salesman arguing, his voice rising in an angry rasp. “That goddamn kid, that’s all you think about!” and she never saw him again. She was glad.
In school, she was dutiful and got A’s, but what she liked best was after school, when she could run and climb trees. Puberty hit like a bombshell. All sorts of strange and unsavory things were happening to the sturdy little body that had served her so well. Worse, at school, girls who used to be full of interesting talk about movies and games and trading cards now only talked about boys. She thought about boys, too, but they never seemed to think about her. She didn’t know how to do the stuff the other girls just seemed to inherit along with their periods — flirting and teasing and inviting.
She was bewildered by this turn of events — she would gladly have packed puberty in, who wanted periods? — but she was also mystified by the new feelings and urges she was starting to experience. She picked out the popular girls to study, but of course there was the hand-eye problem with Barbara and the allergies with Mary Jane and Becky she could only admire from afar. She looked horrible in black, and besides, dying before thirty didn’t seem like much fun, especially since she expected she wouldn’t get to do a lot of living before then, at the rate she was going.
By her senior year she was just coasting along, having no idea at all about what she might do with her life. The guidance counselor, Mr. Sweeney, suggested dental hygiene. He suggested that to all the girls, along with nursing school, but Mary did not find the prospect of sticking her fingers into people’s mouths and getting them covered with saliva especially appealing. Mr. Sweeney didn’t talk to her about college, despite her A average, because in Belvedere, only rich girls went to college, and she had no interest in nursing school.
Harry Springer came into her life as suddenly as fairy godmothers appeared in the tales her mother read to her when she was a child, and no apparition with a magic wand could have surprised her more than Harry. She had, in her usual fashion, mooned over him from afar, as did nearly every girl in the school. He was the captain and the star of the baseball team, and everyone agreed that he was “very cute.”
On her dresser was the picture of him as he had been that spring, wearing a baseball uniform with the word Belvedere lettered in red across his chest, holding his bat high and his rump thrust out, the way Bobby Doerr used to stand. His hair was as golden as the hair of the Little Prince, in her favorite storybook. The face had not changed, essentially. The man had outgrown it. Some faces seem made for a certain age, oddly out of place at others. Harry Springer’s face, round and open, was made for eighteen. On the torso that had thickened from too much beer and too little exercise, it looked misplaced. It might come into focus again at forty-five, with lines in the right places.
Harry was going steady with Sally Quigley, the first girl in the class to bleach her hair, and she’d had knockers since seventh grade. Mary agreed to go out with Pudgie Bird, who managed the baseball team, and was well liked by all the boys, because he had mastered the art of sychophancy at a tender age. She dated him only because he hung around with Harry. It was certainly not a coup to be seen with him, but at least it did not put one beyond the pale, such as dating Clifford Maylin, who had terrible acne, or George Bruno, who was a thug.
The actual dates were all right because Mary now and then got to dance with Harry and joke and talk with him. Parking afterwards was an exercise in masochism, listening to Harry and Sally sighing and moaning in the front seat while trying to keep Pudgie’s fat, fast little fingers away from anything strategic.
When Sally’s family moved to Detroit, Harry was heartbroken for an afternoon, and then he started to date another popular girl, and Mary and Pudgie stayed in the backseat, maneuvering.
The more impossible it seemed that Mary could ever get Harry Springer, the more desperately she wanted him. When he went off to the state All-Star game — major league scouts would be there, it was said — she reconciled herself to the inevitable. If he signed with a major league team, they would ship him off for seasoning to the minors someplace, where he would find other girls willing to share the front seat with him. The way the men in town talked, he might be the first local boy to play with the Washington Senators, and as a big league player, he would be as far out of her reach as the moon.
But Harry came back to Belvedere after the game somehow different. The talk about the Senators continued, but he no longer wanted to hear it. He asked her out, no longer immune to her adoration, which she did not even try to hide. Now she was in the front seat, and stopped maneuvering. On the fifth date he lay on top of her and unzipped his fly, and he thrust himself into her. She braced for the terrible pain of defloweration, legend in the girls’ locker room. Mary Frances Conlan had actually fainted at one story of a girl who had bled to death screwing, although the worst story — believed by one and all — was of the virgin who was given Spanish fly by her boyfriend and was so overcome that she grabbed the nearest thing she could find to plunge into her lust-bedeviled body; it turned out to be a screwdriver. She died horribly, of course.
There wasn’t much pain as Harry bucked up and down, but not much fun either. When he said, “How was that, babe!” she sighed, “Wonderful,” while she wondered, Could that be it? What they wrote all the poems about, what Romeo and Juliet died for? In the locker room, it was practically Scripture that some girls were frigid, and that they could never enjoy sex unless they went to a doctor and maybe had some kind of mysterious operation — which was not as good as Spanish fly but at least cured you of being frigid. She guessed she must be frigid but hoped she would get over it, because she was as much in love with Harry as ever.
After that, Harry dumped her. She heard stories that he had be
en seen at a roadhouse where the really wild kids hung out, the ones who Would Never Amount to Anything, and drank themselves senseless. Harry had been seen with an actual whore — which Mary pronounced “war” because she had seen it written but never heard it said.
As graduation neared, she was in a panic. She was a slut now, and she was in love with a man who didn’t want her. No other man would want her either, because all men wanted virgins to marry, that was sacred writ in the locker room too. They felt cheated if they didn’t get a virgin, and sometimes, even after many years of marriage, would throw it up in a girl’s face in an argument, “You were a slut and I married you anyhow.”
How could she get a man, now? Becky Bellingrath, who had a store of arcane information, said that there were people you could go to who would insert a little sac full of pigeon blood into your vagina, and on your wedding night you would bleed convincingly. But one girl had unwittingly been given blood from a sick pigeon, and when the sac burst, all the pigeon germs seeped into her body and she died a horrible death, her face contorted and screaming in pain. Or you could buy a horse. Girls were known to break their hymens in vigorous riding, so if you owned Trigger, you could say it was his fault you weren’t a virgin.
Neither pigeon blood nor horses seemed a solution to Mary’s problem. She was not sure how to get the former, and the latter was not practical on her street of neat little ranch houses. She was still going to her pediatrician, Dr. Adderly, and he gave her lollipops after each visit. She could not imagine herself saying to him, “Forget the lollipops, Doc, can you get some pigeon blood for my vagina?” As for Trigger, he’d hardly fit in the garage between her mother’s car and the wall, and her bike was there anyhow.
She was, she realized later, a bit mad at the time. She took to waiting outside Harry’s house, behind a line of trees, to see him as he came in and out. She called him on the phone, and when she heard his voice, hung up. She lived as if she were moving underwater—everything was slow and out of sync, and pain was everywhere. It hurt even to breathe.
