Going to School in Black and White

by Cindy Waszak Geary

  “Were you with a … boy?”

  “Of course not,” I lied again.

  “Are you sure you were not with a boy?”

  Dare I tell another lie?

  “No, I was not with a boy, Mother.” As I heard yet another lie come out of my mouth, I wondered whether this boy was worth the punishment that I knew was coming for all these lies. Was he really worth this agony? I returned to the moment, my mother still fuming before her dumbfounded, guilty-as-accused, lying daughter.

  “It was just a friend,” I heard myself say.

  “A friend you had to lie about? Was it a boy or a girl, and where were you?”

  I couldn’t decide whether she would be more disappointed if I told her the truth or if I didn’t say anything. I decided to go with the latter and refused to confirm or deny her accusations. She couldn’t make me talk, so I just closed my eyes and awaited my fate.

  Frustrated with my refusal to further engage with her, she demanded I go to my room. I fell back from her stare and retreated, glad to be away from her. But now the real agony began, because I didn’t know what would happen to me. Dad had awakened during the late-night interrogation, but he remained silently on the sidelines, helpless to intervene.

  For the remainder of the weekend, my mother didn’t speak to me, did not even look at me. Agony. What could she be thinking? Maybe she would forget about it? Maybe my Dad would convince her to go easy on me. But whom was I fooling? I waited some more.

  Finally after what seemed like forever, my mother levied my sentence. And it was a doozy. No telephone or privileges outside school for three months.

  THREE MONTHS! How could she?

  “That’s forever!” I protested. This was the beginning of May… so June, July, August! The whole summer!

  “Is it?” she asked, and walked away.

  But my mother wasn’t done making my life miserable. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I managed to take my bitter medicine. I told a few friends about my predicament, and they were suitably impressed by the harshness of the sentence. They shared their condolences and teased me about the wonderful things I would probably miss over the summer. School was still in session, so I managed to have a bit of a social life during the day. But as soon as the bell rang, my prison sentence would begin.

  One evening, two weeks down and 12 to go into my punishment, we were at the table having dinner, and the phone rang. My mother picked it up.

  “Hello,” she said sweetly.

  “LaHoma?” the caller asked.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, but LaHoma has done something very bad, and she has lost her telephone privileges for three months so, no, you can’t talk to her. Please do not call back here this summer. Thank you and have a nice day.”

  She hung up the telephone, looked over at me and smiled sweetly, completely aware of the humiliation I would experience once the details of that telephone call spread through school. Satisfied that my summer fate would now be broadcast throughout my social circle, she smiled again at me—the first time in more than a month—and walked out of the room.

  That summer lasted forever, although I gradually earned more freedom from my mother’s watchful eyes. I got a job as a camp counselor at W.D. Hill Recreation Center on Fayetteville Street and worked with other junior high and high school students to supervise the daily activities of the younger kids in the community. We walked everywhere, including our weekly excursions to the pool at Hillside Park. Although the public schools were integrated, the swimming pools in Durham largely operated along racial lines. Hillside Park serviced Durham’s black community; Meadow Park was for white people only. If integration was so important, I pondered, why didn’t they integrate the pools, since the one at Hillside was frequently jammed pack with black kids from all over town. But I didn’t lose any sleep over that fact. We had survived the integration experiment at school. The white students had come, they were nice, we were nice, but they had hardly affected anything about the rest of my life.

  It was time to move up to Hillside High School.

  Courtesy of Whitted Junior High School, 1970-71

  LaHoma Smith (back row, fourth from left) in the

  National Honor Society at Whitted Junior High School.

  6— Being White at Hillside High: A Different World

  Six

  Being White at Hillside High: A Different World

  Cindy

  Sophomore Year (1970-1971)

  Hillside High School was in a quiet, middle-class residential area—small brick ranch houses across the street from the school, not so different from where I lived, and not far geographically from where I lived. Yet, I had never been in this neighborhood before the first day of school. This neighborhood was just not part of my white world in Durham.

  An element of white parents’ concerns about their children going to school in black neighborhoods was about their children’s safety, but I never felt unsafe at Hillside. The area was not the part of Durham that white people referred to then as “colored town” (if they were polite)—that part of Southern geography where black people, always assumed to be poor, lived. Nor was it what people might refer to as “the ghetto,” with its associations with drugs and violent crime.

  But the area around the school was still a part of Durham unfamiliar to my family and me, and thus it became an unspoken rule that I was not to be there in the evenings or on weekends. During the three years I attended Hillside, I never saw much more beyond what I could see from where Mother let us out and picked us up in front of the school every day.

  When I found out my school assignment that summer, I thought, naively, “This experience will teach me what it is like to be a racial minority.” I know now that even being a white minority in a public institution in America could never provide an experience similar to being black in a white world. The advantages experienced by white people compared to non-white people that presumed higher social status and greater freedom to move and speak without constraint were pervasive in Durham and did not disappear when I stepped into the Hillside school building the first day of school—or ever. Going to school at Hillside, however, did provide another world view.

  * * *

  The school board had expected a black to white ratio of 58 to 42 at Hillside that first year, but in actuality, it was 69 to 31, with an enrollment of about 1,200 students (7). In my college prep classes the proportion of white students was almost half, so I never felt like a minority in the classroom. Hillside had excellent vocational education in subjects such as tailoring, automotive mechanics, and secretarial skills—classes taken by the majority of students, but not me and not my friends.

  Teachers also were assigned to schools to reflect the racial composition of the system as a whole. I had memorable teachers—both black and white—during my sophomore year. I know that, in spite of my earlier worries about academic competitiveness, my educational experience was equal to what I would have gotten at Durham High School, and enriched, in a “real world” kind of way, by being at this predominantly black school.

  My English teacher my freshman year was a petite white woman, with short, straight brown hair, possibly mid-30s (old to me at the time), who spoke quietly and dressed modestly. She taught me most of what I learned in high school about black writers from the Harlem Renaissance and since. Because it was a required class for everyone, the majority of the class was black.

  She challenged us to think differently. She had been teaching at Hillside High School for several years even before desegregation—possibly the only white teacher who had—and was part of that community before the desegregation order. It was important to her that we all, black and white, understand this important but less known literature.

  I read Soul on Ice for a book report. At 15, I found Eldridge Cleaver’s theories on race and gender startling in their strangeness and bluntness. Even now I remember thinking Cleaver’s analogy of the Holy Trinity to 3-in-One oil was smart, but his observations of the significance of Lynda
Bird Johnson doing the Watusi (a popular dance in the 1960s) overblown. One sentence that I did find wise: “The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.” (8). I doubt I would have read Soul on Ice if I had not been in that teacher’s class and at Hillside.

  I was impressed by the way small things mattered to this teacher. One day I saw her bend down to pick a pencil off the floor and put it in her pocket. A seemingly unremarkable gesture, but it was so characteristic of her way of finding everything useful and of value—even what others might throw away. My geometry teacher also was a white woman, but even younger, and tall, with long, straight dark brown hair (like mine at that time). It is easy for me to imagine her in jeans and sandals outside school, but she dressed like a grown-up for teaching. She was serious about math and a good teacher. She was thoughtful about her job and fair to everyone. After a few weeks, she gave me and about five other students, black and white, boys and girls, the opportunity to do geometry as an independent study class. We went to the library and worked proofs most days, coming into the class to take tests when they were scheduled. I was thrilled. To be recognized for my abilities and to have the chance to work ahead and not feel like I was wasting time in class was affirming.

  Biology was a required class, and my teacher was a small, dark brown man with short hair and a mustache. He always wore a suit and tie. He was a little odd; some said he was shell-shocked from World War II. Sometimes I could not understand what he was saying—it sounded like he was mumbling—and his teaching was a bit scattered, but he was a nice man. Students took advantage of him, though, lying about why they did not have their assignments completed or had missed a class.

  I remember three things from his class: my mad crush on my biology partner, Tony; that I dissected a frog, which was pretty yucky; and that I learned about contraception—which we called “birth control”—from a nurse from the health department (something that was very useful to me later). It may be surprising that contraception was taught in a matter-of-fact way in school then, because it is so controversial now. But at the time, knowledge of contraception was considered practical information for students. There were girls at Hillside who had babies at home (though there were no obviously pregnant girls at school). Educators believed providing the correct information to students could reduce unwanted pregnancies. And it probably did.

  I took art from an older black teacher, slightly balding with white hair, an artist himself who had been at Hillside a long time. Art also was a part of my identity—on my own I drew, quilted (as did both my grandmothers), block printed, and crocheted. In this class, we worked with various media. We had little formal instruction from the teacher. We talked about the works of some artists, such as one of his favorite black painters, Romare Bearden, but most of our time was unstructured while we worked on projects. I kept a sketchbook for class, which I also wrote things in, sort of like a journal, including some poetry. I still do this as an adult.

  I took physical education only in my sophomore year. We had two PE teachers for the girls—a short white woman and a tall black woman. We had terrible gym uniforms—one-piece, dark blue outfits that snapped up the front with elastic around the legs. I took PE only because it was a requirement. I tried hard to lose myself in the back row of our large class so no one would call on me to do anything. Believing myself to be terrible at sports, I wanted to just melt into the scenery until the gym period was over.

  * * *

  Students from four junior high schools fed into the newly integrated Hillside High School, two predominantly black schools—Whitted and Shepard (LaHoma’s new school and her old school) and two predominantly white schools—my Rogers-Herr and Holton. I knew something of both Whitted and Shepard because we had competed against them in football, basketball and baseball. I had never thought about how these schools might be different from each other, however, and I never heard anyone talk about it, either. In my mind, they both had just been black junior high schools.

  Rogers-Herr and Holton both had predominantly white student populations before the desegregation plan, but Rogers-Herr students thought of themselves as being very different from Holton students. We considered Holton, located in East Durham, a “redneck” school, and Holton students thought Rogers-Herr students were “stuck-up.” There were few if any, friendships between Rogers-Herr kids and Holton kids before coming to Hillside, and only a few afterward.

  * * *

  I realized my sophomore year that one of the best things about being at Hillside was that it liberated us from much of the influence of social class that had caused me so much grief in junior high school. At least it liberated me from caring about it as much. Some of the students whose parents were at the highest rung of the social ladder at Rogers-Herr had left public schools and gone on to prep school, and others left in their junior and senior years. All the rest of us had been dumped into an existing school culture that tolerated us but did not need us much. Where any of the white people fit in vis-a-vis each other was of little concern to most of the student body. Having been popular in junior high school was of little consequence at Hillside.

  Racial quotas were imposed for some activities, but it was a much more level playing field for white students than it had been at Rogers-Herr. If anything, we all were at the same disadvantage in this new place. Cheerleading and band at Hillside, for example, had longstanding traditions that reflected a black culture unfamiliar to us. Being popular in junior high school was not helpful in getting on the cheerleading squads. Quotas ensured some white faces, but we recognized that the white girls who made the squad were affirmative-action cases and were not the same caliber of cheerleaders as the black girls, who knew what it meant to be a Hillside Hornet. The white girls had a steep learning curve when it came to the more soulful traditional Hillside-style cheers, in sync with the band’s “blacker” music.

  * * *

  My friends and I went to most of the football games and got to see our friend, one of the white girls who made the squad, cheerlead. While there were white students in the band and cheerleading, there were few white football players. All high schools in Durham played their football games at Durham’s County Stadium in northern Durham, a neutral location acceptable to my parents for extracurricular activities. Though I never loved the game itself, I enjoyed the spectacle, especially the Hillside marching band’s half-time show. Their syncopated movement (“stepping”) to music was so much better than the routines of any of the bands from the white schools. We saw and talked to our black classmates at the games, but we never socialized outside the stadium.

  * * *

  In school, I began to learn about a middle-class black culture. Most of what I had seen about black life on television was through the news shows, primarily focused on the poverty of black life or related to civil-rights struggles that often turned violent. I had thought most differences between black and white cultures were related to differences in resources. For example, I expected poor black people (who lived in ghettos) to speak differently than white people because of their isolation from white people and their lack of education. A common “complaint” among white people was that they could not understand what poor black people were saying.

  Primetime television series rarely spotlighted black characters when I was in junior high and high school, but when they did, they were characters firmly assimilated into white culture: Bill Cosby in I Spy, Lincoln Hayes in The Mod Squad, Julia in the show of the same name. Television shows depicting middle or upper-class black families—What’s Happening!!, A Different World and the like—did not appear until after I graduated from high school. I expected the educated black people I was around at Hillside would speak more or less like white people all the time. And they did, more or less, but not always.

  Many of the educated black people with whom I spoke at Hillside had been educated in mostly black settings, and there were some differences in their speech that interested me. The black teachers pronounced “Aunt” “aahnt” while
my white friends and I said “ant.” Black adults at school and students also added a second syllable when pronouncing the name for the letter “r.” Instead of one syllable, it became two, saying “r-ra.” This was not evident in specific words, just in how the name of the letter was pronounced, unless the word ended in an r. For example, I heard my black teachers pronounce the word “car” as “car-ra.” I thought it was so odd that I had never heard it before—certainly not in conversations between (white-assimilated) black people I had heard on television or in movies. It was my first inkling that black life, even middle-class black life, could go on without full assimilation into white life, and probably preferred to do so.

  The rest of the cultural difference is a bit harder to describe, but there was a greater formality between teachers and students and among adults also than I had experienced in my white world, even my Southern white world that has its own code of whom to call “ma’am” and “sir.” There seemed to be more social space between black students and teachers, even among the teachers themselves, and certainly a greater hierarchy among teachers and administrators based on age and experience. Greetings and salutations were longer; people took more time to get to the heart of the conversation because there were a lot of words spoken to establish relationships with one another. There was more “small talk” at the beginning of a conversation to give everyone time to relax and understand how each one in the conversation was doing. Efficiency was not the point of communication; creating relationship was.

  I appreciate this use of language now as an adult, though at the time, I was secretly annoyed with this formality. I had some judgment about it; it seemed a bit to me like putting on “airs.” I was used to some of the small talk and storytelling Southerners use in their casual conversations with one another, but in these black conversations it seemed somehow different. I was shy and self-conscious in my conversations with those I did not know well. I might have felt some anxiety about not knowing the rules of how to engage in this kind of dialogue. I’m sure I was concerned about possible missteps between my elders and me. My unconscious white privilege turned this anxiety into irritation.