flights of steps going up to the door, just one level block. There
were more gardens. Kids didn’t stay outside playing that I could
see. Or maybe there weren’t any, I don’t know. Joe had grease
on his hair and it was combed very straight and sticky sort of,
and he wore checkered shirts, and he talked different but I
don’t know why or how: he didn’t seem to be used to talking.
He was a teenager. I would walk down the street and he would
sort of come out and I wouldn’t know what to say, except one
day I smiled and he said hello, and then after that I would
decide if I was going to walk down the Catholic block or not
and if I was chasing boys and what was wrong with him that I
wasn’t supposed to talk with him and I couldn’t talk with him
too long or someone would notice that I hadn’t come home
with my friends on my block. And I used to come home other
ways too, where I had no one to talk to. I would walk home
by the convent and try to hear things inside it, and sometimes I
would walk home on the black blocks, all alone. This was my
secret life.
*
There was an alley next to a church on the way to school and
we would always try to get lost in it. It was only a tiny alley,
very narrow but long, dark and dusty, with stray cats and
discarded bottles and strange trash and urine and so even
children knew its every creak and crevice very soon. But we
would close our eyes and spin each other around and do
everything we could not to know how to get out. We would
spend hours pretending to be lost. We would try to get into
the church but it was always closed. We would play adventures
in which someone was captured and lost in the alley and
someone else had to get her out. But mostly we would flail
around being lost, the worst thing being that we would know
exactly where we were and there were no adventures and we
couldn’t go in the church. Then sometimes suddenly we would
really be lost and we would try to find our way out and not be
able to no matter how hard we tried and it would start getting
dark and we would get scared and somehow when we got
scared enough we would remember how to get out of the alley
and how to get home.
*
20
We had to walk a long way to and from school, four times a
day: to school, home for lunch, back to school, home at the
end of school; or sometimes we had to go to the Hebrew School
after school, twice a week. In school all the children were
together, especially the Polish Catholics and the blacks and the
Jews, and after school we didn’t speak to each other or be
friends. I would try to go to the houses of kids I liked in
school, just walk by to see what it was like if it was near
where I walked to go home, and there would be polite conversations sometimes on their blocks, but their parents would look at me funny and I could never go in. We got to love each other
in school and play together at recess but then no more, we had
to go back to where we came from. We had to like each other
on our block whether we did or not and it was OK when we
were playing massive games ranging over the whole wide world
of our block, but sometimes when I just wanted to talk to
someone or see someone, one person, it wasn’t someone on
our block, but someone else, someone Polish Catholic or black,
and then I couldn’t: because it just couldn’t be done, it just
wasn’t allowed. My parents were good, they were outspoken
against prejudice and they taught me everybody was the same,
but when it came to actually going on another block they just
said not to go there and there and there like everybody else
and when I tried to go there the parents on the other end
would send me away. There was Michael who was Polish Catholic, a gentle boy, and Nat who was black. She would come to my house and once at least I went to hers, at least once or
twice I was allowed to go there, mostly she came home with
me, my parents protected me and didn’t let me know how the
neighbors felt about it, and we always had to stay inside and
play, and her mother was a teacher and so was my father:
and I loved her with all my passionate heart. When we
moved away to the suburbs so mother wouldn’t have to walk
any steps because she couldn’t breathe I was torn apart from
all this, my home, my street, the games, the great throng of
wild children who played hide-and-seek late into the night
while mother lay dying: and I said, I will go if I can see Nat,
if she can come to visit me and I can visit her, and I was so
distressed and full of grief, that they looked funny at each
other and lied and said yes of course you can see Nat.
21
But where we moved was all white and I couldn’t see Nat.
*
So when I was a teenager I went back to the old neighborhood
to show it to a teenage friend, the old elementary school where
I had been happy and the old streets where I had been happy,
we took two buses to get there and walked a long way and I
didn’t tell anyone I was going, but now it was all black and
getting even poorer than it had been and there were hundreds
of teenage girls in great clusters on the streets walking home
from high school and we were white and we were surrounded
and they got nasty and mean and wanted to know why we
were showing our white faces there and I looked up and there
was Nat, quiet as she had always been, the same scholarly
serious face and long braids, now teenage like me, and black,
and with a gang of girls, and she told them to leave me alone
and so they did and she walked away with them looking away
from me, looking grave and sad and even a little confused:
walking away from me, but I was the deserter. I watched her
walking away, and I still see the look on her face even with my
eyes open, a remorseless understanding of something I didn’t
know but she did and whatever it was I had found her but it
didn’t matter because of whatever it was. It was the saddest
moment of my life. Later, mother died. I didn’t laugh or weep
or understand. Why are they gone?
22
Neither weep nor laugh but understand.
Spinoza
*
Mother would be sick and dad worked two jobs, teaching and
in the post office unloading packages. Mother would be upstairs in her bedroom in bed, near death, or in the hospital, near death. My brother would be sent somewhere and I would
be sent somewhere: to separate relatives, suddenly, in the
middle of the night. But sometimes we were allowed to stay
home. A black girl would put us in the bath together and wash
us and put us to bed. My brother and I would play and splash
water and the black girl would wash us and smile, but she was
always tentative, never belonging there. She was always young,
there were so many, even I knew she was young, not as old as
any other big people I had ever seen, and for days on end she
would be the only one to talk to us or touch us
or do anything
with us. They were nice to us but never said much and none
stayed too long because we were too poor to pay for help and
eventually we always had to be farmed out separately to one
relative or another. The house of our parents would be dank
with disease and despair, my father’s frenetic dinner served so
fast because he had to get to his second job, the only minutes
we could even see him or hear his voice, and the only one who
talked to us or was nice to us was the black girl who put us in
the bath together where we played and played, after we had
our argument about who had to sit on the end with the faucet,
and she put us to bed: and I always wanted her to stay and be
my friend or at least talk and say things I could understand
like other people did. No one stayed long enough so that I
remember her name because we were funny kinds of orphans:
mother wasn’t dead but dying; father loved us but couldn’t be
there; the relatives split us up so we were always alone in
strange houses surrounded by strange ways of doing things
and adults who weren’t as nice to us as our father was and
they thought that if they were your grandmother or aunt it
made being there less lonely: which it did not. They must have
been teenagers, so much bigger than we were that they seemed
23
like adults. They must have been poorer than even we were.
They were black and we were white: and whoever it is I remember, on your knees by the bathtub, as the blond-haired baby boy and I splashed and squealed, as you dabbed and
rubbed, whoever it is: where are you now? and why were you
there at all? and why couldn’t you stay? and while mother lay
dying, you were kind.
*
Once mother was hiring the girl herself. She must have been a
little better then, standing up in the living room, dressed in
regular clothes not sick clothes, without my father there or any
doctor. I came in and there were lots of women and my mother
talked to them one at a time but all in the same room and one
was white and the rest were black and my mother said who
would you like to have and I said hire the white one.
*
I had never seen a white one so I said hire the white one.
*
Hire the white one, I said, maybe seven years old. Hire the
white one. My dying mother hit me.
*
When we had to move from Camden because my mother
couldn’t walk steps or breathe and was frail and dying, the
neighbors on our block got sullen and banded together and
came and said don’t you sell to blacks. Our next-door neighbor
got sullen and threatening and said don’t you sell to blacks.
These are our friends, said my parents. We will do what’s
right, don’t you worry, said my father ambiguously. We sold
to Polish Catholics, blond, with heavy foreign accents. Not
Jews but not black. The best offer, my father swore. The
neighbors were chilly anyway but soon they all moved. The
blacks were coming closer. So they sold to blacks and moved
out.
*
One of the houses where I had to stay was my uncle’s: marriage, not blood. He was richer than us, a judge, a reform democratic politician even though he had friends in the Klan,
and he was vulgar, and I hated him, and the reform democrats
won and my uncle and his friends looted the city and got rich
and that’s why the blacks in Camden are so poor.
24
I would be delivered to his house and his cronies would
come and they would talk about the niggers and even when
they were the government of the city they were planning to
move out to somewhere else and they planned to steal especially from the school system, or that was the part I heard: they stole equipment from Head Start programs and looted school
equipment and cheated on school-lunch programs and left the
blacks to die and called them niggers and my uncle had a bar
where he sold the niggers liquor and ridiculed them for getting
drunk and bragged that he could sell them horseshit and they
would drink it. He had friends who were friends of Nixon and
friends who were friends of the Klan. Now Camden is a ghost
town with black ghosts on those streets where we played our
real childhood games. I had a divine childhood, even with the
woman dying, and father away day and night working, and
death coming suddenly, and my brother and me separated over
and over, orphans in different places for years at a time: I ran
in those streets and played hide-and-seek and Red Rover Red
Rover and jumped rope and played fish and washed my doll’s
hair with the other girls outside on the steps and sat behind
cars near telephone poles and on strange days played witch: it
was divine until I was torn away from it: and I walked down
Catholic streets and black streets without anyone knowing and
I loved Joe and Nat and Michael: then the vultures moved in
when I had gone away, but I heard their plans and I know
what they did: and the wonderful neighbors on the block where
I lived hated blacks: and I said hire the white one at seven
years old: and the vultures picked the bones of the city and left
it plundered. Oh, Nat, where are you? Did you weep or laugh
or understand?
25
Neither weep nor laugh but understand.
Spinoza
*
We were very tiny, in the third grade— how small are seven-
and eight-year-olds? — the little girls from my block. We were
on a big street not too far from the school, one you had to
walk down. It was a rich street, completely different from ours.
There was no brick. There were big windows in the fronts of
the houses and each one had a different front, some rounded
or curved. There were fences around the few very nice steps up
to the door, ornamentation on the outside, around the
windows or on the facade, wide sidewalks, huge trees lining
the street so it was always shady even in the early afternoon
when we went home from school. We were small and happy,
carrying our books home, chattering away. A bunch of black
girls approached us, surrounded us. They were twice as tall as
we were, real big, from junior high school. They surrounded
us and began teasing and calling us names. They demanded
Diane’s scarf. We were silent, very afraid. She was beginning
to give them the scarf when I said no, don’t. There was one
minute of stunned silence, then raucous laughter: wha you say
girl? Don’t, don’t give it to them. Now why not girl we gonna
take it anyway. Because stealing is wrong, I said sincerely. They
surrounded me and began beating me, punching me, kicking
me. They kept on punching and kicking. I remember falling
and saliva pouring from my mouth and screaming. They kept
punching me in the stomach until I fell all the way to the
ground then they kicked me in the stomach over and over and
then they ran away. I lay on the ground quite a while. No one
offered to help me up. Everyone just stared at me. I got up but
I couldn’t get all the way up because I couldn’t straighten my
stomach, it hurt too much. I held it with both hands and stood
bent-backed. No one touched me or helped me or spoke to
me. I must have said something like my daddy told me it’s not
right to steal. Then someone said that she knew someone who
said my daddy was a sissy. A what? A sissy. He’s a sissy. What
does that mean, I must have asked. You know, she said, that’s
2 6
what all the boys say, that he’s a sissy. Enraged, I walked
doubled up home, determined to find the girls who had beat
me up. But my parents told me not to because they would just
hurt me more. I wanted to go into every junior high school
class and look for them. But it would just make trouble and
they would hurt me more, I was told. I remembered sissy and I
remembered my girlfriends doing nothing. They were somehow
worse than awful and mean. Doing nothing was worse.
*
When you get beat up you don’t see much, you begin falling,
you begin trying not to fall so you feel yourself falling and you
feel yourself trying to stay straight and the fists come from
every direction, down on your head and in your face and in
your gut most, and you keep not falling until you can’t breathe
anymore and then you fall. You hit the cement and you feel it
hit you and you see the feet coming at you and you keep trying
to protect your face especially and your eyes and your teeth
and if you can move once you’re down you try to kick back,
to use your legs to get them off of you, but if you fall so that
your legs are sort of twisted under you then you can’t do that
and you can feel your back twist away from your stomach and
it’s real hard not to piss and once they’ve stopped it’s real hard
not to vomit. You don’t know anything about other people
except the ones hitting you if there are a mess of them and
they are all punching you at once. You don’t think, oh, my
friends are standing around watching. It’s after, when you are
suddenly alone, when the heat of the hitting bodies is suddenly
cold air on your sweat and you suddenly understand that you
are not being punched anymore, it has stopped, and you are
Ice And Fire Page 3
