CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Denver Again
AFTER SETTLING in at Stillman, my father wanted to continue his graduate work. Now that he was a college dean, the school was prepared to pay for it. So in the summer of 1967 we resumed the practice of going to Denver as soon as school in Alabama was out of session.
Travel was much easier since hotels were now integrated all along the burgeoning interstate highway system. I was older and family games were replaced with Motown grooves and the latest rock anthems on the radio. My parents didn’t complain, though they seemed slightly hurt when I indicated more interest in listening to the Temptations and Cream than in guessing the mileage to the next city or what college was located in that town.
The University of Denver had built new and quite pleasant graduate student housing. Mother resumed her music classes and I returned to the ice-skating rink full-time, rising at four-thirty in the morning to make the first session at five. I’d taken something of a hiatus from skating during our time in Denver in 1965, attending music classes with Mother. Now in 1967 I dove into skating with renewed passion, spending the entire day at the rink and beginning to prepare seriously for tests and competition. I passed the first set of figure tests (the discipline of tracing a figure eight three times with the blade of the skate—no longer practiced by today’s skaters). The skating school was populated by very serious skaters, including a few destined for the Olympics. This time, when it was time to leave Denver, I really didn’t want to go home.
When we returned to Tuscaloosa, I continued to progress both in social maturity and in the classroom. Life was good at Druid. But I longed to skate and Alabama had no ice-skating rinks. So I’d practice jumping on the floor in the den to the music of Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony or Dvorak’s New World Symphony. I made up routines that I looked forward to perfecting on the actual ice when we returned to Denver. As the summer approached, I grew more and more excited.
One afternoon in April, Mother and I had just returned from the home of the seamstress who was making a whole new skating wardrobe for me. As we walked into the house, we heard the news. Martin Luther King had been shot and killed in Memphis. My father came home immediately and we sat in the little den with the red carpet, watching the assassination images play over and over on the television. No one could really believe it. My father had had his doubts about the strategy that King pursued in 1963, but he lionized King the man, like practically every other black person in America. I was sad. And I was angry.
The next day we went to school. I’d become a member of the Druid High School debate team and we were scheduled to go to Montgomery for the competition two days later. Our debate coach called the team together and told us that we’d make the trip despite Dr. King’s death. She was the only white teacher at Druid, having been sent to the black school as the token effort at integration (there were still no white students), and for the first time in my life I had a strong political and racial reaction. How dare she be so clueless! My teammates and I asked her to leave the room and we held a meeting. We would refuse to go to Montgomery in honor of Dr. King. When the poor woman came back into the room she must have immediately sensed the hostility. She announced that participation in the meet would be voluntary. Of course, no one volunteered.
There was no school the day of the funeral. Again we watched television as a family, taking in the images of the fully veiled Coretta Scott King and the tiny King children. I cannot listen to “Precious Lord” to this day without a flood of emotion harkening back to that event:
Precious Lord, take my hand.
Lead me on, let me stand.
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on to the light.
Take my hand precious Lord, lead me home.
Though I was only thirteen, 1968 was the year of my political awakening. It was one of those years that seemed to change things forever. It was not just the assassination of Dr. King. There was the Tet Offensive and the horrible pictures of Vietnam that suddenly filled our living room every night. I started to care what happened in Vietnam and would anxiously await Chet Huntley and David Brinkley’s analysis. Then there were the May riots in Paris that introduced me for the first time to student radicalism. And on June 4, there was the news from Los Angeles.
My father was a political junkie. As a result, we always watched election coverage, staying up all night, for instance, until a winner was declared in the Kennedy-Nixon contest of 1960. We watched convention coverage every four years, listening with great anticipation to the roll call of the states in the nominating process. So there we were, glued to the TV set on the night of the California presidential primary in 1968 that would likely decide the Democratic nominee.
My father was a Republican, but this time he was going to cross party lines and vote for Bobby Kennedy. We all loved the Kennedys, Bobby most of all. He was, according to my father, ruthless in the pursuit of justice as attorney general and destined to be a great President. He just needed this victory in Los Angeles to defeat the “Happy Warrior,” Hubert Humphrey, whom my father thought to be well-meaning but hapless.
The contest was very close and I was tired. As soon as Kennedy was declared the winner I went to bed, deciding to skip his acceptance speech. I’d just gone to sleep when my mother shook me and said, “Get up. Bobby Kennedy has been shot!”
My family gathered mournfully in the den. I sat on the red-carpeted floor, very close to the television set. We watched the footage of Bobby Kennedy lying on the floor, the huge football player Rosey Grier standing over him. We waited and waited. And then we heard. He was dead.
I had been sad and angry when Martin Luther King was shot. Now I was just devastated. What was happening to our country? That year would get worse. In August 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, thousands of miles away from Birmingham. But I watched that too in horror. I felt terrible for Czechoslovakia’s leader, Alexander Dubĕek, and angry at the Soviet Union. My parents and I watched the Chicago convention too, with the whole controversy about the seating of the alternative delegation from Mississippi and the brutality of the police against the demonstrators in the streets. Nineteen sixty-eight was a tough year to come of age politically. I was too young to do anything about what was happening but old enough to know that the situation was very bad. There had been a Time cover in 1966 that asked “Is God Dead?” I didn’t dare ask my parents about it then, but in 1968 the question seemed inescapable.
One night, not long after the Chicago convention, I went to my father’s study, sat down with him, and asked what he thought of what was occurring. I told him that I felt like there was chaos all around us and I was scared. His response was, in retrospect, not surprising given his conservative, religious perspective. He said that the values of the country had gone off track. People didn’t respect one another, the country, God, or anything else anymore. But America was going to survive, he told me, even though it might not appear that way right now. He was devastatingly critical of Lyndon Johnson, even though he admired him for his role in the passage of the civil rights legislation, and also disapproved of Hubert Humphrey. Daddy told me he would vote for Richard Nixon, who would bring order.
• • •
DESPITE ALL the upheaval, we did make it to Denver in that summer of 1968. When we arrived, I went immediately to the ice rink, not even waiting to unpack. The schedule on the board showed me taking seven lessons each week, preparing for the battery of tests that rank skaters according to national standards. This was momentous news. I was going to train in the elite program that prepared skaters for competition.
My parents were very proud but told me that they couldn’t afford seven lessons. They went to one of my coaches, Diana Lapp, and asked to speak with her. I waited outside. I assumed that they were explaining that they just didn’t have the money for a full program. But after a little while, they emerged. I’d have the seven lessons a week as prescribed. I
was thrilled and resolved to work very hard. I have no idea where or how they found the money. It wasn’t the last time that they would exhibit incredible selflessness where I was concerned—nor was it the last time I would take their sacrifice for granted.
That summer I became really serious about my skating and I got better fast. The problem was that we would soon return to Alabama, and one could only get so good practicing on the floor in the den. I couldn’t believe my good fortune when my father asked me to call a family meeting: the subject would be whether to live in Denver for a full year.
My father had decided that he was never going to complete his graduate studies by taking two classes each summer. He had asked Stillman for a one-year leave of absence. Although he had been at the college for only two years, his request was granted. We would return to Alabama at the end of the summer, pack up what we needed, and return to Denver for the 1968–69 school year.
This all sounded great. But where would I go to school? And what about piano? I was doing very well at Birmingham-Southern. As it turned out, finding a piano program was easy. I would enroll at the University of Denver’s pedagogical academy at the Lamont School of Music. The teacher gave me a full curriculum to study until I returned from Alabama.
The decision concerning my school was much harder. My parents weren’t impressed with the Denver public school curriculum, which was at the leading edge of “experimental” education (read “not very structured or systematic”). Students were encouraged to be creative, even if they were wrong. “New math” was all the rage. My parents liked “old math” and thought that creativity was important but only after you knew the basics.
They learned, however, that there was a really fine college preparatory program at George Washington High School that was very rigorous. They tried to get me admitted there. But it was not in the neighborhood in which we would be living (on the university campus) and I was denied entry. In fact, they were told that there was a chance that I would be sent to Manual High School, located in what could only charitably be called “the hood,” because Denver had begun a busing program to achieve racial integration. My parents found this idea preposterous. They questioned the notion that black kids would learn better just by sitting in a classroom with white ones. This perhaps reflected their experience with excellent but segregated schools in Birmingham. Now they were facing an almost laughable irony: their middle-class daughter could be bused across town to a poor black neighborhood in order to achieve desegregation. My parents decided to look for a private school alternative.
There were two possibilities: Kent Country Day School and St. Mary’s Academy. Both were all-girls schools. My parents were more attracted to Kent initially, although it was more expensive. But on further examination, it became clear that St. Mary’s, one of the oldest educational institutions in Denver, had the really outstanding college preparatory curriculum. There was only one problem: it was Catholic.
I’ve noted earlier that my family, thanks to Granddaddy Rice’s experiences in Louisiana, was militantly Protestant. My father could not believe that the best educational option for his daughter was a Catholic girls school. My parents visited the campus while I was skating. That evening we sat in the apartment to review their findings. They started slowly, making clear that the final decision would be mine. Still, the curriculum was excellent and there was no religious education requirement for non-Catholics. The last point sealed it, together with the fact that most of the nuns no longer wore habits.
The next day I visited St. Mary’s. I liked the campus, whose entry was dominated by a stately convent and a circular driveway with a statue of the Virgin Mary in the center. The modern classroom building had a huge open space in the middle called the forum and beautiful classrooms and science labs. I was excited at the thought of enrolling there.
I filled out the application and was accepted before we left for Alabama. We also went to “The Denver,” the large department store downtown, and bought my new uniforms: a navy and green watch plaid skirt; white blouses; blue, green, and white sweaters; a green blazer for special occasions such as assembly; green, blue, and white knee socks; and saddle shoes!
With everything in place, we prepared to return to Alabama to execute the move west. Daddy had agreed to get the school year started at Stillman, so we would not return to Denver until October. I’d start school a month or so late, studying the St. Mary’s curriculum at home in Tuscaloosa and trying not to fall behind.
My parents were very anxious to get home to Alabama because there was a lot to do. I was scheduled to take a skating test on the Saturday morning that we were to leave. It would have necessitated a delay in our departure of about two hours. My father was adamant that we couldn’t afford to wait. I could take the test when we returned in the fall. To this day, I still don’t understand that decision. But grumpily I got in the car that morning and we set off for Alabama to prepare the move to Denver for one year. I secretly hoped that we’d never again live in Alabama.
Early in October, we loaded up the U-Haul and headed for Denver. Yes: the U-Haul. There wasn’t much money since neither Stillman nor Denver was paying our moving expenses. We had to drive somewhat more slowly than usual, and there was the awful moment when the little trailer almost dislodged from the car somewhere near Kansas City. But we arrived with everything intact and moved into our new home: a two-bedroom graduate student apartment with rented furniture. From my point of view, it was the nicest place we’d ever lived. It was in Denver.
My new life in Denver was very structured. Every morning I got up at four-thirty and headed to the rink at five. At seven, I finished skating and went to school. After school I practiced piano, did my homework, and went back to the rink for another hour. Then I came back home and was in bed by nine-thirty. I had no free time and I didn’t care. I loved the rigorous skating program, and my new piano teacher challenged me, insisting that I begin to participate in piano competitions. I could tell that I was advancing more rapidly than I had at Birmingham-Southern.
St. Mary’s was a good fit for me academically. Though I was several weeks late in starting, I quickly caught up and had little trouble with the work. Socially, though, I hated the school. I didn’t make friends very easily, unlike at Druid, where I had been popular. I’d gone from Alabama, where I never had a white classmate, to St. Mary’s, where there were only three black girls in my entire class of seventy. Yet there seemed to be a huge wall separating me from my black sisters. Maybe I was just the new kid on the block, or I didn’t try hard enough, but I sure didn’t feel welcomed by the few black students.
In general, I didn’t care much for the social dynamics of an all-girls school. Life seemed to revolve around trying to attract the boys at our brother schools, Mullen Prep and Regis High. I explored becoming a cheerleader (one way to meet football players) but soon learned that the schedule interfered with skating. The only sport that St. Mary’s played was field hockey, and after being hit with a stick by one of my sisters during tryouts, I decided that the ice was friendlier. Most girls skied, a sport that I had neither the money nor, at the time, the inclination to try, fearing an injury that would end my skating season. St. Mary’s didn’t have a band, so that was out as an activity. I finally joined the glee club and was installed as the accompanist. I didn’t love that either, since I ended up playing for high school sopranos who sang “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” from The Sound of Music with equal measures of gusto and horrendous pitch.
My parents certainly sensed that St. Mary’s was not a perfect fit. They asked repeatedly whether everything was going okay. But that year I never confided my true feelings about the school. My parents were, after all, paying more than a thousand dollars in tuition—money they really didn’t have. I wanted them to think that I liked St. Mary’s and not worry. Moreover, it was just for a year, and my life revolved around skating in any case. I had plenty of friends at the rink, especially Debbie Mitchell, who was my closest buddy.
Debbie and I wo
uld skate every day and hang out together on the weekend. While we practiced, our fathers would stand and talk in the parking lot, and they got to know each other well. Debbie’s father was Maurice Mitchell, the chancellor of the University of Denver. When my father finished his coursework that spring, Chancellor Mitchell offered him a job at the university.
Again we had a family meeting. I thought moving to Denver was a no-brainer. Though settling here would put my mother more than 1,300 miles from her mother, she too wanted to move and seemed confident that she could land a good teaching job. My father was a little worried because the financial package at the university wasn’t quite as good as Stillman’s. But after he worked out an arrangement for low-cost faculty housing, everything fell into place. My father returned to Alabama before the school year ended and resigned from Stillman. Mother and I followed as soon as school was out at St. Mary’s. My dream had come true. We were going to live in Denver. Permanently!
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Leaving the South Behind
WE MOVED into one of the modest three-bedroom homes that were rented to young faculty at a highly subsidized rate for a maximum of two years. My parents gave me the master bedroom because it had its own bathroom and I was getting to the age where that kind of thing mattered.
One of our neighbors was an Israeli family. Benzion Netanyahu, a professor of Hebraic studies, taught in the Department of Religion, giving him and my father common interests. The Netanyahus had three sons but only one was young enough to live at home. Their oldest son, Bibi, was in college, and their middle son was serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. Our families shared what I now understand to have been a Seder meal during the Passover holiday. Many years later when Bibi Netanyahu was elected prime minister of Israel for the first time, my father reminded me of this example of far less than six degrees of separation. I still send greetings to Professor Netanyahu when I see his son.
Extraordinary, Ordinary People Page 11
