Going to School in Black and White

by Cindy Waszak Geary

  One memory of a formative event from this time that now shames me happened on the playground in the third or fourth grade in one of the schools where there were black children. We played one of two games on our concrete playground at recess; one was foursquare, and one was tetherball. The day of this memory I was playing foursquare, a game in which four people each stand inside their individual squares and bounce balls in each other’s squares following prescribed rules. Anyone who makes an error is out, everyone moves up to the next square, and the next person in line goes into the first square. My classmates and I spent most of our time waiting in line. To amuse ourselves, someone decided to start observing the racial composition of the four people playing each game, using the words “chocolate” and “vanilla” to note the races represented. There were only white kids doing this.

  I went along with this to be cool with my peers. The black girls playing with us were rightly upset about this, and they told on us after recess. My white teacher (they were all white at this school) called us out in front of the class for this bad behavior. I am glad she did; I was duly embarrassed.

  Part of the effect, though, was to make me feel that “seeing race” was somehow wrong. So for a long time after this (decades perhaps), I pretended that I did not notice a person’s race. I would not mention a person’s race when recounting stories to family and friends—and I would resist when others asked for that information by saying I didn’t remember. Of course, I remembered, but I thought when my parents or friends asked whether someone was white or black, they were doing so to make assumptions about their behavior on the basis of race. By my reasoning, the asking of the question was a display of prejudice and, therefore, wrong. I had transformed my initial humiliation because of my playground behavior into feelings of moral superiority on the issue of race.

  After we moved to North Carolina and I heard people in North Carolina discussing school integration, I thought all that was nothing new to me. I thought my experiences in Florida made me a little more knowledgeable and possibly more principled (having learned my lesson) than my peers in North Carolina. I was wrong, of course.

  * * *

  We always rented the houses we lived in, and our first home in Durham was out in the county near the airport in a small rural community. The school in that area was an all white, kindergarten through eighth grade, very rural elementary school. In the sixth grade at this school, I enjoyed a brief period of notoriety being the “new girl from Florida.” I enjoyed the attention, though I imagined myself more sophisticated than my classmates, who all had strong Southern accents and whom I thus considered rednecks. (I have since embraced my Southernness, however, and love nothing so much as a particular type of strong Southern accent.) We attended a very small Southern Baptist church nearby, and my friends there were school friends as well.

  At the end of the school year, our landlord wanted his house back, so we moved to another rented house in Durham, but across town, making it necessary to begin again in a new school and a new church. Though the distance may have been only 10 miles from our first house, the new neighborhood felt like another planet. Instead of being out in the country, we were now “in town,” closer to Duke University, in a very middle-class neighborhood a few blocks from the highway connecting Durham to Chapel Hill.

  We lived our lives within a relatively small geographic radius. We were a few miles from a shopping center where there were a grocery store, a dime store, and a pharmacy, as well as a theater, where I was to see many movies that informed my adolescence over the next six years. The shopping center was an easy bike ride from my house and a favorite place to meet friends. The YMCA was also close by, as was a tiny drive-through we called “The Cow Store” because of the nearly life-size cow replica on top. My mother got her hair done at the nearby beauty shop. We walked to the Kwik Mart for frozen sodas in summertime.

  Yates Baptist Church and right next to it, my new school, Rogers-Herr Junior High School, were both walking distance from our house. Rogers-Herr, named for two beloved, never-married white Durham female schoolteachers, opened its doors just months after I moved to town, as I was entering the seventh grade.

  In 1967 (and until 1992), there were two school systems in Durham, one for the county and one for the city. The county schools were much whiter than the city schools. The elementary school I had gone to when I first got to Durham was a county school. Within the city system I had moved to, however, de facto school segregation reflected the racially segregated housing in the city. City schools were either predominantly white or predominantly black, and I lived in a white neighborhood. The school I went to was predominantly white.

  When Rogers-Herr opened in 1967,“freedom of choice” was a passive racial desegregation policy, allowing black children to enroll in any school they wished; Rogers-Herr was built to serve several white neighborhoods, but black children could attend if they wanted to, or more precisely if their parents wanted them to. Looking back at my yearbooks for the 1967-68 school year, I see only 27 black students out of 297 pictured. One black teacher taught music; no cheerleaders were black, although a few black students played sports, and a few were in the band or the booster club. The only other black people in the yearbook were the custodians and cafeteria workers.

  The parents of the few black students were mostly professionals, professors at North Carolina Central University. All the black students had attended predominantly black elementary schools before coming to Rogers-Herr and were good students.

  One might argue that the small number of black students who chose to attend out-of-district schools supported the claim that most black children did not want to go to white schools. But it was not just the policy that made attendance at Rogers-Herr by black students possible. My black peers in junior high school had parents who were able to get them to school and provide the emotional support to get them through difficulties they experienced being in a nearly all white school. Most black children in the city school system did not have such resources. I was, and most white people were, oblivious to these realities.

  * * *

  Being a white child among white children, I did not have to think about race when at school. To me, it was much more important to understand what it meant to be “popular.” Being a new girl kept me out of the running for being popular in this school, but I knew the coveted status was about more than having been there awhile. I knew how to be the new girl—this was the ninth school in which I had been a (if not, the) new girl. I was quiet; I did not get into trouble; I made good grades. Though I was shy about meeting new people when we moved to a new place, eventually, I had felt as much a part of what was going on as anyone else.

  Something was different at this school, though, something that the wearing off of my new girl status was not going to change. That difference was class-consciousness and my loss of innocence about the difference between the lives of the “haves” and the “have-nots.” I had not experienced this awareness at any other school. I knew some people were better off than others, but I had always been in schools and churches with children whose families lived more or less like mine, and I was able to participate without worry. My family lived modestly but wanted for nothing beyond what we could afford. Education was the more important metric by which my family measured success.

  But in this new school, it was different, and it wasn’t just about money. Not all the children of wealthy parents were popular—none of the Jewish kids or the black kids whose parents had money were as readily incorporated into the popular core group as were the blonder, WASP-ier kids. Popular students came from a group I stereotyped as families that belonged to country clubs.

  Popularity was established and maintained by conformity to style and behavioral rules. The popular kids continually curated these styles and rules, so this information was part of what separated those popular kids from all others. At the most superficial level, this closely held information manifested as what clothes to wear. I had never heard of Villager or Capez
io clothes before junior high school, or even any other name-brand fashion—my mother had made nearly all my clothes.

  I realized only certain people could be friends with each other. Only popular students became class officers or first-string on school sports teams or cheerleaders or got lead roles in the school plays. For me, not having been exposed to this cult of popularity in elementary school (as had most of my non-popular peers at Rogers-Herr, I would later find out), my entry into junior high school was disorienting and disheartening. My parents were oblivious to the social landscape that confused and rejected me, and they could not help me navigate it. I see now that this sensitization to class privileges generated my sympathy for other ways in which people might feel they were seen and treated as “the other.”

  * * *

  Cotillion clearly defined my “outsiderness” and its attendant misery. Cotillion was a once-a-month social dancing activity that children joined in sixth grade and continued through seventh grade. Children had to be invited, and parents had to pay. Because I was new, I had not been invited, and I assumed that my mother either didn’t know about it or thought we could not afford it. Not only the most popular kids participated in Cotillion, so it might have been possible for me, but I never asked my parents because we knew we shouldn’t ask for things we couldn’t afford. I assumed I would be putting my parents in an awkward position, so I did not ask.

  Once or twice a month that year, many of my classmates anticipated the upcoming Cotillion, went to the dance, and then talked about everything that went on there for the next week—what everyone wore, who danced with whom and who had either increased or decreased their social attractiveness as a result. I may have been better off by not being there, as I would not have had the right clothes or known how to dodge the social minefield that Cotillion would have been for me. But I was a lonely girl on those Friday nights.

  * * *

  My mother’s working at Rogers-Herr two of the three years I was there further reduced any hope I might have had of popularity. I knew of no other mothers who worked. My mother had never worked outside our house before I started junior high school, but with both my brother and me in school, she became the cafeteria manager at my school. Before she was married, she had managed the school lunch program in (what is now) Eden, North Carolina. So she was well qualified even if it had been a while since she had a professional job. She was excited to be the first cafeteria manager in a modern kitchen with all new equipment (including a $10,000 dishwasher!).

  To my embarrassment, everyone knew that my mother was responsible for the school’s lunches—always a source of derision, whatever the quality. Mother tried to get children to eat yogurt and whole wheat bread before those were popular ideas. I bore up under my peers’ moans and groans as best I could.

  Mother liked her staff—a white cashier and both black and white kitchen workers. She became friends with the cashier and also was close to one of the black kitchen workers. Managing the cafeteria was difficult, though. In a time when few other (white) mothers had jobs, there was no expectation that a father might help at home. I always had household chores even when Mother was not working, but my contributions were not enough to make much of a difference. After a year, she decided being a working mother was not a good idea.

  Mother must have thought the trouble she had finding work/life balance was because of the particular job as cafeteria manager, because she spent the next year taking correspondence courses so she could renew her teaching certificate and go back to work as a teacher instead. She had been a home economics teacher before she married, but she came to my school to teach seventh-grade math and science the year I was in ninth grade.

  My mother “the teacher” was even worse for my popularity status than my mother “the cafeteria manager.” Apparently Mother expected the same kind of compliant classroom behavior she had experienced in the 1950s from her (all female) high school home economics students, and she was not prepared for the discipline challenges she faced in the junior high classroom. Although I pretended not to hear, kids often said mean things about her. On the other hand, some of Mother’s friends were my favorite teachers, and I enjoyed their attention because they were her friends. Teaching wasn’t any easier for a working mom than being a cafeteria manager had been, however, so she quit teaching at the end of the year. To my relief, she showed no interest in finding a way to come with me to high school.

  Eventually, I made friends with some girls who had been around longer than I, who had similar backgrounds to mine and lived in similar neighborhoods. Judith became my closest friend in junior high and high school and was my eventual roommate in college. She lived just a couple of blocks from my house; we saw each other after school almost every day. Judith was sweet, shy, and petite. She cared about a lot of the same things I did—boys, clothes, making good grades. She was more athletic and outgoing than I was. She had lived in Durham all her life. We both had younger brothers in elementary school. Our mothers became friends.

  In the fall of seventh grade, Beth, the daughter of a friend of Mother’s, invited me to a church retreat (her church, not mine). Beth’s mother bribed her to go by offering her the opportunity to bring a friend. I was grateful to be invited. Beth and I were both shy, and we were glad to have each other’s company that cold, autumn weekend. Beth, Judith and I became part of a small circle of friends that included Chris, Jen, and Lynn. We remained close at Rogers-Herr and later, Hillside.

  I learned there was little room for moving out of one’s social station. With the help of my new friends, I soon figured out my place and what was possible for someone with my status: academic achievement, booster club, drama club, school plays (chorus and tech, not speaking parts), and intramural sports. I also learned what was not possible: cheerleading, class offices, the leads in the plays, and, for boys, sports teams. I kept my aspirations within bounds.

  None of my friends in junior high school were black. I certainly talked to my black classmates during the school day, and we were in clubs together, but there was little or no socializing outside of school. I did not consciously avoid being friends with black students or consciously make an effort to do so. We were just in different social spaces. They lived in a different part of town and went to different churches, and their parents were not friends of our parents. There just seemed to be no interface between us, other than in the classroom.

  Until a discussion in high school, I had no idea of difficulties the black students had experienced at our junior high school just because they were black. When I noted with some sympathy during this discussion that it had not been so comfortable as a non-popular white girl in junior high school either, one of these black peers said: “Oh, that’s right. I remember you were part of that crowd that was not so popular.” Even after the changes that being at Hillside had wrought within me, it hurt my feelings a bit that she had noticed.

  Luckily for me, I found a place outside of school with more acceptance and less social hierarchy—my church. I was raised as a Southern Baptist, the denomination of my mother’s upbringing (though not my father’s—he had not gone to church as a child), and church is what grounded us wherever we lived. Church was the center of my mother’s social life, and church was where I always knew adults were paying attention to me and cared about me. In those days, churches were rarely integrated, and mine was all white (except for the janitor, who was an employee but not a member of our church).

  Yates Baptist Church was close to where we lived and next door to Rogers-Herr. Besides our house and school, church was where I spent most of my time. In addition to being at all worship services (Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday prayer meetings), I was a member of the youth choir and in other youth activities.

  Because of geography and local politics, I had school friends and church friends, with little overlap. Both my school and my church were less than a mile from the line that separated the Durham city and county school systems. Most children who had grown up in my church live
d on the other side of the boundary.

  When parts of the county became annexed to the city, they were not always also incorporated into the city school system. Newly annexed neighborhoods were allowed to decide which system they wanted to join. Usually, they decided to stay in the county system, effectively maintaining the county’s relative whiteness and the city system’s greater blackness. Before we moved to Durham, votes to merge the two systems had always failed. Racism played a part, but so did the fear that a unified system would mean an increase in the county’s tax rates.

  * * *

  All my friends at church lived close to me but went to county schools and had very different school lives than mine. My church friends also were from working or middle-class families and had similar educational aspirations. My school friends also lived close to me but attended different churches, so there was little mixing of the two groups. I learned early to compartmentalize my friends by school and church. Within both these places, my friends were pretty much each other’s best friends, intensifying a disconnection for me between these two groups. My compartmentalization contributed to a sense of myself that I did not share with others—it was a secret self that knew the whole of my life and relationships but kept that whole to myself.

  * * *

  The whiteness of both my junior high school and my church meant that I had little interaction with black people in Durham before I went to Hillside. My rather abstract views on race were informed, in addition to my shaming experience in elementary school, by my religious upbringing and my interpretation of Jesus’ command to love your neighbor. I was confused about why my church was still all white and why there was no effort to include black people. Although overtly racist remarks rarely were uttered in our church, few spoke about supporting civil rights efforts. The young youth minister, Steve, did encourage our youth group to question this gap between Jesus’ teachings and church reality and to consider how we should live our lives within the context of our faith and our community. The formation of my racial consciousness as an ethical issue took place mainly in this space.