[2 of 5] Say I'm Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love (2020) by E. Dolores Johnson Prologue, Chapters 5 - 7

Author: E. Dolores Johnson

Johnson, E. Dolores. "Details," "A Train Ride," "Black Girl." Say I’m Dead: A Family Memoir of Race, Secrets, and Love, Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, IL, 2020, pp. 45-89.

5 DETAILS

That night, I lay in the twin bed still in my tiny pink bedroom, relieved my parents had agreed to sleep on my idea.

If only Mama would come around like she had when I'd struck out on new paths nobody understood before. Like when I left Buffalo and blue-collar life to go to college and the executive suite, Mama was the one who got behind those opportunities. Unlike David, who accused me of thinking I was better than the rest of them. Like when her nurses' aide-self called the head of the Sloan Foundation out of a meeting to get my graduate fellowship transferred to Harvard when the funds had already gone to Colombia, my second choice.

"Everything's straightened out," she told me. "The man said you are to go to Harvard."

"What man?" I said.

"The top man on the brochure." Mama had no idea she'd dealt with an executive, nor what a breach in business protocol her interruption was. She had fixed it for her baby. That was her, my constant cheerleader, even when she didn't know quite what we were cheering for.

My dreams, counter to family expectations, began in adolescence, during Saturday housecleaning. I told her I wasn't going to clean my own house as an adult, because I'd have a cleaning woman. She threw her head back and laughed, then put the dust rag and furniture polish in my hands. "Until then," she said, "get to work." Years later, when she met my cleaning lady, she gave me a wry smile and threw her head back to laugh the same way.

The time she asked to see my corporate workplace in New Jersey, I took her to the sprawling headquarters campus on the weekend when nobody was around. Mama walked wide-eyed into my office, asking if it was really mine, even though she saw my name on the door.

"How much money do you make?" she asked.

I told her.

"Dolores, what can you do that would be worth that much?" I gave her a short explanation about marketing tech products.

"I don't know where you came from, or even what you mean," she said, sitting in the leather chair behind my desk in that tan car coat she'd worn forever. "But more power to you."

Our umbilical cord was still attached that way. Always would be. And that's what I banked on to get her consent for our white family search.

I turned around in the narrow bed, putting my face at its foot, and cracked the window to feel the cool breeze on my cheeks. The soothing old sound of branches crackling on our backyard tree had always helped me think straight. And then I saw it, how selfish my need to see the white family was when it would upend Mama's painfully constructed se-cret. As the breeze wafted over me, I resolved to find a way that she would not get hurt if I moved forward. A way that would keep what she'd shown that evening off her face, the same deep-seated fear she'd shown when David got drafted and shipped out to Vietnam at nineteen.

She'd transferred on I don't know how many Greyhound buses across the country to see him off to Asia from his army base. Then every day he was gone, she watched Walter Cronkite's six o'clock news, or read war accounts in the morning Courier Express. In a small notebook on the hall table, she wrote down reported infantry units' movements and the count of American dead for all thirteen months he was at war. She and Daddy sat at the kitchen table studying that notebook, their ashtray full of the Viceroy filters she'd taken up and his ever-present Camels, praying together for their son.

David did come home, to the painted WELCOMe HoMe sheet hanging from the second-floor window of our house. He was fit and deeply tanned, but he was not fine. His deadly combat experiences marked him with the post-traumatic stress disorder that left him unpredictable and screaming in the night. The Agent Orange he'd been sprayed with in the jungles produced abnormal growths the size of grapefruit on his jaw and in his stomach and intestines. It left our handsome and vibrant David afraid to ever risk having children for fear of them being deformed.

He also came back from the war wedded to the black power movement. David was radicalized by the multitude of black foot soldiers he fought alongside of, used as cannon fodder in a white man's war that none of them understood. He'd seen too many be the point man of a triangular search formation, the position where his best buddy was blown into unrecognizable pieces when he stepped on a landmine. David railed against the honkies in Washington that used them to kill foreigners, ruining their lives, then treating them like no-'count niggers back in the States. All that race talk made Mama so afraid, she tearfully asked David if he counted her among the white devils.

"Not you, Mama." David assured her. "Of course, not you," he said, petting her tenderly until she quieted.

I certainly didn't want to put that fear and hurt on Mama's face again while searching for our white people. She was my best friend, the confidante I talked with for hours, the one who still guided me when I lacked patience or common sense. I wouldn't turn the life she'd run from and then remade into a new horror for her. I decided, as painful as it would be for me, if we couldn't come to terms in the morning, there'd just have to be another way, at another time, to find out who my white family was.
__________
The next morning, my parents and David were waiting for me downstairs on the plastic-covered green sofa, sipping coffee. Thank God Daddy was mellow, a sober look in his eyes and no Four Roses in sight yet. I got my coffee and sat in the orange chair across from them with my notebook and pen. Charles Nathan had opted out. No surprise.

I asked Mama if she was all right, after all we'd talked about the night before.

"I didn't sleep much," she said, as the dark circles under her eyes verified. "It's been so long since I left that all behind me, and I never expected this family to have to deal with it." Her thumbs twiddled at the speed of an electric mixer. "Even so, all kinds of memories have been spilling out of me the blessed night long. So, let's go ahead and talk about it a lit-tle. What do you want to know about my family?"

"Thank you, Mama. Thank you for talking to me about this. How about starting with who your people are and how you grew up?"

Her father was Henry Lewis, her stepmother was Mildred, and she had one sibling, a half sister, Dorothy, who was nine years younger. Her birth mother, who she had fond though faint memories of, died when Mama was four. I copied down their address, 635 Woodlawn Avenue in Indianapolis, Indiana, and their church, St. Patrick's Catholic parish, a few blocks away.

Her dad had seen to it there was enough for Catholic school fees even when money was short. He wanted her to have the best, and she went all the way through ninth grade at a Catholic girl's academy. "That was a darned good education for a girl in the '20s," she said.

"Lots of girls I knew didn't go to high school at all."

I asked if all the classes were taught by nuns, or did they have lay teachers in parochial school back then?

"What do you need to know that kind of thing for? Are you going to want to dig into every single thing?"

It was just my way to know more about who she was as a girl, what white Catholic girls were like back then. A piece of what I came from. Anyway, what girl didn't want to know what her mother's youth was like?

She excused herself for a moment and went up to their bedroom. When Mama came back, she handed me a thin black-and-white booklet on glossy paper. Her ninth-grade yearbook! I couldn't believe she'd kept it in our house for fifty years yet we had never known it was there.

"You been holding out on us, Mama," David said.

Her class photo of lily-white, modestly dressed girls included the teacher-nuns in floor-length black habits, no hair showing. Mama was lovely and fresh, looking earnestly into the camera. Studying her face, I was struck that her gaze was like mine in my own high school yearbook. We had the same clear-eyed determination.

"Daddy was about as far from this world as you could get, wasn't he?" I said.

She and Daddy looked at each other, and he nodded. That's when they told us their outrageous story.

__________
Ella was working as the mail clerk at Holcomb's Electrical in 1942 when my father, the company handyman, was sent down there to build some badly needed storage shelves.

His mannerly greeting and the intelligent look in his eyes struck her first. He was nothing like the shiftless, ignorant people she'd heard colored people were. He seemed so decent, she decided to treat him like everybody else, Negro or not. She introduced herself and smiled at him as he carried in his supplies and tools.

Her smile confused Charles. He knew how to talk with exaggerated respect to white women in the South, but Ella's easy friendliness threw him. It seemed genuinely intended for him, like he was a real person to her, like she saw him as an actual man, not just some brown body to do work for her, the way whites always had treated him.

But what he didn't know were the unwritten rules between Negroes and whites in the North. And he sure didn't want any trouble. Relations between the races was supposed to be better in the North, but he hadn't figured out what that meant in Indiana. But like every black man, Charles knew any fraternization with a white woman had danger written all over it.

Ella saw he was neat and well groomed in his spotless, ironed work uniform. And as he used his level, saw, and hammer to make the shelves, he was efficient and good at what he did. She chatted with him about the increase in mail since the electrical business continued to grow and watched as Charles hoisted boxes up into place from a pile on the floor.

"I caught myself staring at his slim waist and broad shoulders," Mama said, "and how easily he lifted the heaviest boxes. He was nice and tall, five foot ten, and handsome. Your father was so strong and manly, I had to stop myself from looking at him."

Was this my proper mother talking, her mouth full of spice?

Over on the Negro side of town, Charles sat in his rented boardinghouse room most nights, stewing because he couldn't find a lady of his own. He was so lonely since coming to Indy. He left his first wife, the one in Buffalo he had to marry at seventeen when she said her baby was his, but afterward that it wasn't. In Indy, he didn't know many people and hadn't made any real friends. The silence of his room was suffocating him.

But it had been years now, and Charles was determined to have his own children with a good wife. He was thirty-six years old, trying to start life over. He didn't want to wait anymore. He just wanted to find a nice colored girl as soon as possible. But where could he find such a girl? He went to several Negro churches but mostly saw old ladies and younger women with kids. Being an unknown in town didn't help him make time with the few eligible girls he did see. Their mothers wanted to know where his people were, then snatched their daughters away when he said he was divorced.

"Those church girls weren't that pretty anyway," Daddy smirked. "The good ones were already taken."

The one he was looking for wasn't on Indiana Avenue at the Sunset Terrace either, where the brown sugar went to dance. They were good looking all right, sporting outfits that clung to their charms with jaunty hats tipped over done-up hair. The ones he talked to sho' 'nuff looked like sugar but their salty invitations tasted too much like his past.

So, Charles headed out to Madame C. J. Walker's Ballroom, the place for Indianapolis Negros to mingle. He was amazed that Walker's four-story building stretched down a whole block with several black businesses in it. On his way to the ballroom, Charles peeked into the empty theater that hosted jazz greats, plays, and other entertainments. It was themed with African décor, massive statues on either side of the stage, and plush red seat cushions! He marveled that a Negro could own anything that grand, let alone a Negro woman.

On to his mission, Charles continued toward the second-floor ballroom, adjusting his tie as the music got louder. Up there he found a tuxedoed band perched on a roulette wheel band-stand, shimmying out the fox-trot that couples danced to.

He took in the scene from the bar, his eyes flitting from one attractive girl in a fancy dress to another. As he sipped a too expensive shot of bourbon, another fellow eyed his broad shoulders and shined but worn shoes before coming over.

"See something you like?"

"Yeah, plenty," Charles said.

"Looky here, Jack," the man said. "Meeting a girl at Walker's depends on how much you got in your pocket and who your daddy is, see? And, if she ain't happy with both, all you're going to get is one dance, if you're lucky."

Charles watched smooth-talking men in stylish suits lead those women onto the dance floor, realizing he was out of his league. But since there was no law against watching the well-to-do's spectacle, he stayed a while for the jazz before taking a lonely stroll back to his boardinghouse.

All the way back, that white girl in the mail room at work ran through his mind. Like al-ways. The one with guts enough to talk to him like a straight-up man. The one whose soft skin he imagined touching, even though the Klan would string up his damned fool self for looking at her, the way they did those two boys a few years ago out in the county. But man, oh man, wasn't she the sweetest woman he'd ever met?

The day came when Charles snuck down to the mail room and said the words to her he'd practiced in his mirror. "You don't mind talking to me, Ella? I mean, you seem comfortable with me. Are you a little afraid, maybe?" He wore a neutral smile, meaningless, in case she took offense.

"Oh, fiddlesticks, Charles, afraid of what? You're a nice man."

He stepped closer to her. "I hope I'm not out of line, but I want you to know that I like you. Very much."

She stared at him. Weighed his words intently. "I've thought of you too," she said.

At the sound of footsteps outside the door, Ella stepped back and began sorting letters at her mail table. Charles headed out the door just as the white man came in looking for a package.

But when Charles worked up his nerve again, he went back to the mail room during the slow part of the same day. "Ella, I want to ask you something," he whispered

"Sure, you can ask me."

"Well, I've been wondering if you would want to see me, you know, outside of work?"

"You want to take me out?"

"Yes, I'd like to take you out somewhere nice, but you know we can't do that in public, don't you? A white woman and black man being seen together wouldn't be safe or smart. And I sure can't call on you at your house, where your family or friends would see me. So, the only thing I could come up with was to invite you to come over to my place. Would you want to spend some time with me? No fooling around, of course."

When she agreed to see him at seven on Saturday night, he handed her a slip of paper with his address. She should go to the train station first and then take a Negro cab from there to his place. That way no white cabbie who picked her up from her home would know where she went. He'd take care of the fare when she arrived.

He held his finger up to his lips. "Don't tell anybody."

"To tell the truth," Daddy told me, pouring a little Four Roses in his coffee, "by then I couldn't get your mother's dainty, ladylike ways out of my mind. And those beautiful dark curls I wanted to touch so bad.."

"OK, OK," I said. "But how did you end up getting married?"

"Well, see, I was divorced," Mama said. "And that had a lot to do with it."

"Wait," David said. "Say what now? You were married before too, Mama? To who?"

She'd married a Catholic from a neighboring parish that her parents thought was her last best chance. She was twenty-six and single, a certified old maid, after a previously broken engagement. She'd convinced herself Alan wasn't that pudgy or that short. Couldn't they learn to be happy, even if she and her groom were only friends?

But he and his family tricked her. He was past marrying age too, with no other prospects. During the courtship he entertained her with concerts and dinners, but his father was secretly paying for it all while he lied and said he had a job. He kept up that loafing when they were married, hardly working. And how he chased after other girls! He'd even brought one home for dinner, who was shocked to find out he had a wife. After she huffed out the door, Alan sat for days repeatedly playing "Come Back to Me" on their Victrola while he cried. Six years into their marriage, when Ella's younger sister Dorothy told her Alan had approached her too, Ella divorced him.

Mama told us a woman getting a divorce just wasn't done back then. Hers turned out to be a near disgrace. And no respectable Catholic man, the only kind her family would accept, would have her then. After all, a divorced and remarried woman could take a man down, all the way out of polite company. The Catholic Church, with a hard and fast doctrine opposing divorce, dictated that she would be excommunicated if she ever remarried.

Mama was bound to be a childless spinster, according to the church. But she had divorced because her husband was not what she always ached for: a responsible husband to have a family with. She was thirty-three years old and time was running out. She didn't know if she'd even be able to have children if she waited much longer.

That Saturday afternoon, Ella sat in the chintz chair in her own rented room, wondering about Charles. Should she take the chance, maybe a bigger risk than her decision to divorce had been, to get what she wanted —with a Negro? She knew there would be consequences, especially when she imagined Mother's face if she knew. But, yes, she was interested enough to get dressed up, put on some lipstick, and tell her landlady a lie about where she was going. This date would be her chance to find out whether a Negro, this specific Negro, was really a standup man.

When Ella's cab pulled up at his place, Charles was waiting on the sidewalk. As he helped her out of the taxi, the Negro cabbie turned all the way around in his seat to glare at Charles, who was opening her door.

"Man, why you want to mix me up in somethin' like this?" he asked.

"Just take the dollar," Charles said. "You haven't seen a thing, understand?"

He checked the boardinghouse hallway first to make sure nobody would see her. Then he showed Ella into his room of nicked furniture, a radio on a table with two chairs, and a hot plate on the kitchen counter. Behind a screen was a bed Ella could see was neatly made with hospital corners. The place was as clean as her impression of the man.

"Have any trouble getting here?" he asked.

The Negro cabbie asked her twice if she was sure of the address; if she wanted the colored side of town. Aside from that and his shaky smile, the ride had been fine.

She sat in the easy chair across from Charles.

"You know I've been to your house?" Charles asked. "Woodlawn Avenue, right?"

"What?" Ella stopped smiling and cleared her throat. "My dad knows you?"

No, they didn't know each other, really. The year before, her dad, who sometimes worked for Holcomb's, hired Charles to do yard work. It had been just that once, and he hadn't seen Ella there. "He was nice to me," Charles said. "I realized who he was today, when I connected your last names. Nice house, too."

"He's a wonderful father," Ella said. She told him her dad was a self-taught electrician, one of the early ones around town to make a living at it. He'd been part of the crew that initially wired up the Indianapolis Motor Speedway racetrack, and that got him work referrals by word of mouth.

"He doesn't know you're here, does he?" Charles asked nervously.

Of course, he didn't. And Ella promised to keep it that way.

She was more relaxed knowing her dad trusted Charles enough to hire him. So Ella told him about her stepmother, Mildred. She had consumption and never left the house, except to go to mass down the street. It was so bad that Ella's sister, Dorothy, had quit college to take care of Mildred, and Dad had to run a tab for her medicine at the drugstore. He knew not to expect his own family back in Ohio to help, even though they owned the Marshall drugstore chain. They had money, but they had disowned him when he married his first wife, Ella's birth mo-ther. She stood too far down the ladder to suit people like them.

Charles handed Ella the Coke she had asked for before pouring a straight whiskey for himself. She raised her glass and made a toast.

Here's to it and to it again.
If you don't do it when you get to it
You may never get to it to do it again.

"Where'd you learn something like that?" Charles said.

"That proves you don't know everything about me," she said, and laughed. "The fellas at the Catholic Thespian Society taught me that after our rehearsals. Anyway, no fools, no fun."

He liked the life in her eyes, the spirit in her soul. Without it, he realized, she never would have taken the chance to come see him.

Charles turned the radio to a moody blues tune, guitar wailing and harmonica crying. He patted his foot, digging the gravelly voice just before a colored announcer came on the air.

"Hey all you cats out there. It's Satidy night, time to get your best girl and cut a rug. Keep the dial right here, where the party keeps agoin' all night long."

Ella asked, "What channel's that? I've haven't heard radio like that before."

"I bet not," Charles said. "We Negroes have our own lingo, you know, jive talk."

She said, "No, I guess I don't know."

He pulled her up to dance to the radio, though she protested that she wasn't much of a dancer. Ella Fitzgerald's "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" was on, and much as they tried, neither could follow what the other was doing. Ella knew the fox-trot, with its set patterns, and Charles knew the country mule. They laughed through false turns and stepping on each other's feet. But when a slow tune came on, they did better. He folded Ella into his chest, and she followed his simple steps.

In no time, Charles and Ella were cooking dinner together at his place every Saturday night. After a few weeks, they added one more night a week, sometimes two. As they grew into love, Charles began to worry. He wasn't sure if she understood the trouble she could get in for being with him. Did a white girl know that somebody could attack her in the street if she was with him? Did she have any idea what she could face for breaking Jim Crow race laws and customs?

A number of Indianapolis and Marion County elected officials were open members of the Ku Klux Klan. They posed as the good guys, keeping the whites rightfully in power, and even did public service like giving away free food to needy whites. But did Ella understand that the Grand Wizard, a man name of Stephenson, used to run the nationwide hate mongering organization from Indianapolis? Did she know the Klan hated Negroes so much they terrorized and killed them?

She didn't.

Two Negro men, named Shipp and Smith, got lynched there in Marion County a few years before Charles and Ella took up. After a robbery and a murder, a white woman named Mary Ball claimed rape. The suspected men were locked up briefly, until a white mob broke into the jail with sledgehammers and strung them up.

Charles knew all about it, because he had seen a picture postcard of the lynching. It was taped up next to the price list at the black barbershop to warn customers. On it, a big crowd of whites, including women and children, milled around the brown bodies hanging from trees, their faces calm, satisfied. The victim's heads were bent over their nooses where their necks must have broken, and their limp legs swung free. They were left on display for the furious and curious to take in, as whites congratulated each other on delivering vigilante justice. It was proof, a man in the next barber's chair had told Charles, of how the Klan was the law in Indianapolis. "Don't take no chances in these parts," the man said. "The whites think the Klan is law abiding."

A studio photographer named Lawrence Beitler took the picture. As was the practice throughout the South, he sold thousands of copies, like circus souvenirs, to the white people. Charles also knew the aggrieved Mary Ball later testified that she had not been raped, and that charge was dropped against the one surviving defendant who had managed to escape the lynching somehow. But the other two men were already dead, and nobody was ever charged with their murders.

Charles told Ella somebody could get the law on him for being with her, trump up charges and throw him in jail. Beat him half to death or string him up like those boys. And nobody would do anything about it, any more than they did for those who were lynched. He was getting pretty damned scared, and she should be too.

She had to understand that, at the very least, Holcomb's would surely fire him if it was ever found out they'd been together. Probably let her go as well. And if she thought her divorce had wrecked her name, being with him would mean worse. Not just the Catholics would turn their backs on her, all white people would.

"Mama, you really didn't know any of that?" David asked. "How in the world didn't you know?"

"My white corner of the world was completely sheltered from that kind of thing. Negro business wasn't my business, or anyone's I knew. My family didn't follow politics, or race, and even if they had, a lynching wasn't anything to talk to a young lady about. When your father explained all this to me, I had only the slightest idea."

David mopped his brow with a rough swipe. "Dang!" he said. "So, you didn't know black people were invisible in the '40s? Or that white people in your northern state went along with the Klan keeping them that way, same as down south. Unbelievable."

Charles wanted Ella to think those risks through before they saw each other again. She needed to decide if the risk of being together was worth it to her. She had to be sure she could live with never taking him home to her family for Christmas. Could she, and did she want to stay on her toes, alert and discreet so they never made that one mistake in public that would ruin her life? He had never been so serious.

Charles took Ella by the shoulders and finally said it, that he loved her. Loved her so much he was willing to face the danger to be with her. His forehead sweat and his voice dropped deep with desperation when he said he had to be sure she loved him like that too. He pulled her tight into his chest and stroked her thick curls as he bent to kiss her neck.

"Think hard before you answer me," he said. "I mean it."/

6 A TRAIN RIDE

Ella was a praying woman who talked to God all day, every day. So, she took the joy and the misery of her love directly to God and the saints. The church that disowned her wouldn't be any help, but she still covered her head and went to a Catholic parish where nobody knew her to pray. In its dim light, Ella crept to the altar with a statue of Jesus looking down beatifically, his arms outstretched to comfort her. She lit a candle and sunk to her knees in supplication. She laid her life in the hands of the One who would never leave her. While an organist practiced in the loft, she prayed through several rosaries and beg-ged, "Breathe on me, dear God, and tell me what to do."

Did He want her to stay single as the church demanded, or take another chance at love and her own family? Being with Charles would be dangerous if they weren't smart. But she loved him so. The alternative was a life as a damaged-goods spinster sentenced to take care of her stepmother. The one who'd treated Ella more like a ward than a daughter after Dad brought her home in his horse-drawn buggy with the fringed top.

She had already nursed her stepmother for years. Rise before six to bring a large pot of boiling water into Mother's darkened room for her to inhale the steam. Hold a tea towel covering both Mother's head and the pot until the steam softened the congestion in her chest. Gather and launder the hankies filled with yellow mucus and clots in runny lines. Fix all the meals. And evenings, help Mother sit up in her chair, feet on the heat register, to listen to the Betty and Bob radio soap opera before putting her back to bed.

She'd be poor no matter which life she chose. Charles didn't have anything, but they could both work and try to make something of their future. But her family had few pros-pects. Dad's sixteen-dollar-a-week salary and side jobs were barely enough to get by.

"I'm ready," Ella told Charles next time at his apartment. "I love you, and I'm ready to face whatever comes our way together. I trust you to take care of me and keep us safe."

"Will you marry me and make it legal?" Charles asked. "I want to come home to you every day."

She would. She would be very happy to be his wife.

He bent down to put his soft lips on hers, held her back, and kissed her deeply. She fell into him, tasting their future, surrendering to the love she had always wanted. She didn't care there would be no engagement ring. She couldn't wear it in public anyway. His promise to provide a home and love her were all she needed.

Mama told David and me that when she accepted him, she felt God smiling down on her. He wanted her to be happy. He would save her soul, just like he did Protestants who remarried.
__________
The following week on a lunch break at Holcomb's, Ella got a good look at the kind of risks Charles warned her about. That blonde Mary Jane from upstairs, with her tight sweaters, started the trouble with Jerome, the black man who worked on the loading dock.

Employees took their lunch out in back at the picnic tables under a sky of wispy clouds. Jerome's radio played Paul Whiteman, and he tapped his foot like a piston in rhythm, lost in his own pleasure. Everybody knew he loved to dance because Jerome's talk was all about the latest steps he'd mastered and the prizes he won in colored dance contests.

Mary Jane's foot tapped in double time as she snapped her fingers. Suddenly she jumped up and started a saucy sway on her way across to where Jerome sat. She grabbed his wrist firmly with two hands, pulling him up to his feet.

"Come on here, Jerome," she said. "Dance with me. I can keep up with your fancy footwork any day."

He tried to pull away gently, deferentially calling her Miss Mary Jane. Jerome smiled and said he didn't want to dance right then, but thanks just the same. He didn't think work was the right place for dancing. But she insisted, throwing her strength into pulling him. She made some jitterbug moves and Jerome gave way into stiff, reluctant turns, this way and that. When she kicked up her leg, some of her milky white thigh showed. The man was doing everything he could not to touch her. Oblivious, Mary Jane's shoulders thrust forward with a shimmy and then dipped backward, as he stood paralyzed.

He backed away slowly. "You won, Miss Mary Jane, you sure did win. You're the best."

He smiled nervously, aware of his coworkers' stormy expressions. The lunch whistle blew, and Mary Jane sauntered off, swishing her hair back off her face as her lips pulled wide, relishing her moment.

As soon as she was gone, the white men moved toward Jerome. Sweating, he put his hands out in a gesture of "I don't want no trouble." But the foreman shouldered his way in front of Jerome and faced the crowd, ordering the men to knock it off. "We got work to do," he shouted. "Better go on and git to it." As the grumbling crowd dispersed, the red-faced foreman with a large bald spot grabbed Jerome by his collar and pulled him into his office.

Charles hid inside a doorway, watching from where he couldn't be seen, then disappeared inside. For days, the white men complained that the foreman should've let them teach that porch monkey to never touch a white woman. They didn't know why the boss even let niggers work near white women. But those men never got their chance, because Jerome was never seen on the premises again.

Charles made himself scarce around Holcomb's, kept his head down, and said nothing. He stopped going anywhere near the mail room.
__________
Now that Ella had said yes, Charles turned over idea after idea to find a way to marry and live without fear. It wasn't until he confided to his mother in Buffalo that a plan took shape. His mom's shock had turned to support once he made her understand that he would marry Ella, no matter what. In the end, it was his mom's idea he ran with.

Charles told Ella their best chance was to run away. They would start over in a new place where nobody would bother them. A place the law wouldn't get them.

"What do you say, Babe?" he asked, clutching her hand as if to keep her from running. "Will you go with me?"

"You mean leave Indianapolis, don't you?"

He knew she wouldn't want to leave her family. Nor the only place she'd ever lived. Charles had to break it down for her and went step by step. Did she know that a black-white marriage was illegal in Indiana? Or that they could both go to jail for intermarrying—miscegenation they called it. The sentence was years in prison, as much as seven years of hard labor for both the woman and the man.

She pulled away from him. Was it as bad as all that?

Indiana was the lone northern state in America to keep antimiscegenation laws on the books past 1888. Mixed marriage remained illegal there nearly seventy years longer than in any neighboring states, until its repeal in 1965. Learning this as a result of researching my parents' story proved the supposedly free North practiced the same Jim Crow as the South.

Charles meant not only leaving Indy, but also not telling her family. Not now, not ever. If her dad knew where they went, he could have Charles arrested, and everything he feared might happen anyway, including prison or death. He said her family wouldn't accept him, not even from a long distance. Not only could the family put a stop to their marriage, but she needed to understand how much her family's lives would be affected by her marrying him.

He said white people would shun her family for what she did. Her dad wouldn't get those extra jobs and might even lose the work he already had. Then how would he provide for his sick wife and family? If her mother knew Ella was with Charles, it could kill her in her weakened state. If Mother didn't call the law on them first. As much as Ella didn't want to leave Dorothy, did Ella realize how badly Ella being with Charles would hurt Dorothy's reputation and marriage prospects? No upstanding Catholic man would marry into such a tainted family.

Charles insisted she could never let them know. The way to keep them in the dark was to move to a new state where nobody knew them. They would go to New York, at his mother's suggestion. Interracial marriage was legal there, and they could live together in the open. He had a brother in New York they could build a new life with. His family would be her family.

"Mama, how could you bear to leave your people?" I asked, touching her arm. "You must have been so miserable."

"I decided to marry your father. And I wouldn't ruin my family's lives for that choice. I still believe it was the only choice we had." Her voice broke. She pulled the Kleenex out from her sleeve, ready for any tears. "They could get over me leaving... in time ... we'd all have to."

"And you've never contacted them since? Not ever?"

"We never looked back," Daddy said, yanking his head down in a nod of finality.

"Refugee lovers," David said, slapping his knee. "Undercover all these years." He could dig it.

I sat in the living room looking at these plain, hardworking people who led such a simple existence. I'd never really seen them. Never given them credit for having that kind of grit and courage. Never understood their belief in love over race was trailblazing.

Mama and I spent the afternoon doing Saturday chores together, shopping and washing before she started dinner. Daddy peeled potatoes and I snapped green beans as we picked up their story. Daddy had gotten into it, ready now to tell it all.

"What the hell," he told Mama. "Why not tell? Dolores is going to do right by us with whatever she decides to do." He stopped peeling. "We have your word on that, right?"

I assured him they did.
__________

In spring 1943, Ella insisted to her skeptical family that traveling alone to go visit her high school friend in Massachusetts would be safe. She wanted to get away for a while. Away from all the Indy folks who'd dropped her after the divorce.

Her dad said from the first mention of the trip that he disapproved of a young lady traveling halfway across the country unaccompanied. She didn't know anything about New England or their ways. Ella was a Midwesterner after all.

"Even so," Mama said, "my dad knew he couldn't convince me when my mind was made up. He hadn't been able to talk me out of getting divorced, so he gave in and took me to the train station."

Henry Lewis looked lost as he and Dorothy stood on the station platform, putting Ella on the train headed east. Mother, of course, was too sick to come. Ella took that moment to memorize her loved one's faces. All she could take of them were the images of Dad's too-prominent nose, and Dorothy's innocent face. The roughness of her dad's hand and the softness of her sister's when she squeezed them, the care and concern in their hugs and kisses. She'd need those memories, to take them out and study their details all the rest of her years.

Ella should come home early if she got homesick, Dad said. Otherwise they'd look for her in Indy by Memorial Day. She gave him a bright smile and cheery wave.

Once the train pulled out and her family disappeared, Ella watched the budding trees and farms roll by. Her initial melancholy was quickly overtaken by the rush she felt knowing that nobody had caught on to her plan. Good-bye to Indiana forever, she thought. Good-bye to my philandering ex-husband and the self-righteous Catholics who shunned me for divorcing him. Good-bye to the narrow-minded people who would punish her family for her being with a Negro, the Klan who would hurt Charles, and the laws that made their marriage illegal. She'd erase their power and marry who she wanted.

The ride comforted her, as the loud rumble and jostle of the rocking train running away with her seemed to give voice to her thrill, shouting, "Freedom! Freedom!"
__________
Already at work in Buffalo, Charles was nervous as a jackrabbit. He was waiting to see if Ella would fool her family or, God forbid, get cold feet. She was due in New York City that day, where he'd gone first and stayed in Harlem with his older brother Marion. But the strain of the dock job he got there ripped the hernia that had already disqualified him from the army. He'd moved on to Buffalo where his mom could look after him a while.

Then, when healed, he decided to stay in Buffalo where he got a decent welder's job.

Ella rode the train through Indiana, Ohio, and New York, arriving in Manhattan as planned. At a telephone booth in Grand Central Station, she dialed Charles's mother in Buffalo to find out her next move.

Belia answered, speaking to Ella in the sweet voice she saved for tender moments. Charles would be so happy she made it to New York, she said. But now there was a change of plans. Ella was to take another train and come on up to Buffalo, the next day if possible.

"You got enough money to get here?" Belia asked

"Yes, I do. Thanks."

"Then I'll be glad to meet you when you do, honey."

Ella stopped for the night at a hotel in Times Square. She walked around the area for a while and found her evening meal close by. The painted prostitutes in doorways and crowds of lewd men and rubbernecking tourists roaming up and down Forty-Second Street fascinated Ella at first. But the urine-soaked doorways and greasy-haired men who paid her too much attention drove her back into the hotel. She was glad she and Charles wouldn't be living in New York after seeing its underbelly.

Ella filled out the hotel postcard she found in her room's desk drawer, telling her family she was having a good trip and had stopped for the night. She wrote that she missed them already and loved them. It was to be her last word to them. That way, there could be no questions, no interference, no more lies. She and Charles had agreed that was best. The family would get over her disappearance faster if they couldn't find her.

She called Charles when he was home from work. Yes, he was well now. He'd meet her train, and they'd stay with his mom until Ella found a job and moved into a rented room. That would only be until arrangements for their wedding could be made.

By morning, Ella had disappeared from her family. She was on the train to Buffalo where nobody would ever find her, to marry a man nobody knew she was involved with.
__________
The afternoon of June 19, 1943, Ella tidied up the display of kitchen linens in her section of Nora's Dime Store. With the last customer gone and the cash drawers accounted for, she wished everyone a good weekend and dashed out the door. She hadn't breathed a word to her coworkers about Charles, let alone her wedding that night. She'd already learned to keep that to herself, because even people in Buffalo, where interracial marriage was legal, were against it. Seemed like just about everybody was.

At her rooming house on Elmwood Avenue she got into her aqua dress with the white lace collar. She added the petite white hat and veil, dashed some lily of the valley toilet water behind her ears. After checking that every detail looked perfect in the mirror, she finally slipped into white heels and gloves. When she came downstairs to meet Charles in the parlor, he let out a low whistle and laid his hat over his heart. While Ella bid good-bye to the landlady, who wished them well, Charles took her suitcases to the waiting cab.

Reverend Sydney Johnson, who would preside over the ceremony in his living room, reviewed the marriage license before starting. Belia and her man, Jimmy Thomas, were the witnesses and only guests. When Belia had approached the minister about officia-ting, he was apprehensive. She wanted him to marry a colored and a white together? The way white folks carried on about race mixing, and most Negroes too, he didn't really want to do it. But the couple had pledged to become members of his flock like Belia was, so what could he say? The reverend prayed there would be no trouble in the congregation about this that would empty his pews or the collection plates that he'd spent so many years building up. During the ceremony, though, he had to admit that Ella was a woman in love, and Charles was bursting with pride as they made their pledges. He hoped it would be enough to see them through what they would most certainly have to endure.

They took a cab back to Belia's rear rental flat on Hickory Street to celebrate with fried fish and love songs on the kitchen radio. When Ella said how good the fish tasted, Belia told her to come on by so she could learn her how to cook Charles's favorites.

"You can start calling me Mom, like he does," Belia said. "I'll be your mama now." Before they left for the room Charles rented, Belia kissed them. She said they both needed somebody to love, and she was happy they found each other. "I'm gonna do what I can to help you," she said. "But you got to be strong. This ain't gonna be easy."

On their walk home, Charles asked, "You know what my mother said about you before the wedding? She said 'That's one brave white girl you got there. She sho' 'nuff loves you. And that's all I needs to know 'bout her."

I have wondered so many times, what made my parents step out so far on hopes and dreams. Would they have seriously considered marrying if they had foreseen what lay ahead of them?
__________
A few weeks after the wedding, Cousin Rosalie was having a birthday bash. Charles said Rosalie was such a live wire the party was going to be out of sight, with dancing till dawn and the best down-home cooking you ever tasted. All the uncles, aunts, cousins, and who-so-evers were coming.

"I wanted to go to a party so bad," Mama said to David and me, stretching her short legs out under the coffee table. She and Daddy had spent all their time with just Grandma and Jimmy for weeks. "I wanted to meet the family and have some laughs."

"Yeah," Daddy said, rolling his eyes. "We wanted some laughs."

Belia told Ella she wouldn't enjoy the crowd much. It wouldn't be her kind of music. Instead, why didn't they come to her place for dinner that night? But Charles wasn't about to miss that much fun.

The night of the party, Charles started on his Four Roses as he snapped his polishing cloth over the toes of his shoes. He wanted to look good when he and Ella walked in. He'd looked over her dresses and suggested the one he liked best on her, and at the last minute, pulled off his stocking cap to admire the smoothed down waves it made in his hair.

They walked over with Belia and Jimmy and found Rosalie in her front yard.

"Hey, baaaby!" the near six-foot, coal-black woman in a red flounced dress called

"Looky here, it's my cousin or nephew or whosonever kin you is, Charles. And this here must be your new wife. How you doing, girl? Come on in; we're gonna party down!" Her hips gyrated like a lawnmower to the bebop music spilling out of the house.

The crowd was all Negro, as Ella expected. But what she wasn't ready for was the way people stared at her without any acknowledgement or smile. One man's mouth hung open, his eyes following her through the room. She overheard him say, "What's that white woman doing here?"

She, Charles, and Belia made their way through a crowd of dancers trying to outdo each other. Some of them moved with a hypnotic abandon to the record pulsating with horns and drums. It looked so exciting, Ella playfully wiggled her eyebrows up and down at Charles on the way to the kitchen to meet Belia's brother, Butch.

Butch's voice boomed above the noise, bragging about how good his BBQ sauce had come out. "I put my foot in it," he said, praising himself in the highest, a toothpick bobbing from the corner of his mouth. The man was built solid, had a pockmarked face, and wore a stingy brim black hat with a small feather in the band. His signature, that hat never came off, except in church.

Belia whispered to Ella that Butch thought he ran things in the family. "But I runs the family around here, and Butch just runs his mouth." She introduced Ella, and Butch nod-ded, making a barely audible grunt.

Butch's wife, Edna, an amiable seamstress, gave Ella a smile and invited her to come over for coffee sometime. But before Ella could reply, Butch jerked around and said Edna better check with him about any invitations.

Belia stepped up in Butch's face. "Don't start," she said. "We done talked about this."

He stared back, but before he could say anything, a pretty woman in a formfitting dress appeared, leaning against the kitchen doorway. With a sweep of her extended arm at the kitchen gathering, she curled the left side of her lip and raised an eyebrow, sneering.

"I didn't believe Charles would have the balls to bring his white woman out in front of us tonight. Ain't that some nerve?" she asked nobody in particular. Charles stepped between his first and second wives and suggested his ex should go up front to have her fun, where people would be happier to see her.

"Just 'cause dark meat ain't good enough for you no more, don't mean you can bring your white trash here where folk are trying to have a party. Who wants to look at her?"

"It was terrible," Mama said. "I hadn't seen that kind of prejudice against whites before. I was in the middle of all these Negroes who knew her and not me. I thought we should leave, but Daddy didn't move."

"This rude woman is my ex-wife," Charles told Ella. "Now you can understand why I wouldn't want to be married to her."

Butch started yelling the one volume he seemed to have, cursing Charles. It wasn't bad enough that he'd married a white woman and run away with her. He was trying to get them all killed when the law or her daddy came with a gun looking for her.

His ex chimed in. Wasn't their marriage against the law? Looked like Charles had forgotten his own fool nigger place. But the rest of them hadn't forgotten theirs. They knew what a mad peckerwood could do to a nigger. And why did Charles think any of these party people wanted to meet Ella when no white folks had ever been a friend of theirs?

"Dammit, y'all quit it now," Belia said. She had her hands on her hips and a look in her eyes that put the fear of God in them. "Ain't I already told you not to jump all over them? Can't you so-called church niggers show some Jesus in you? We got a new member of the family here, married good and legal."

Butch knocked that bowl of thick barbeque sauce over, and red splatters dribbled down the wall. Then he jumped in front of Charles, toe-to-toe with his clenched fists raised Charles nudged Ella into a corner and stood ready to take on his uncle. His ex watched from her perch against the door, looking mighty satisfied.

Rosalie came running in, asking if these niggers had lost their minds, fighting in the middle of her birthday. "Stop this right now," she said, pulling on Butch. "Don't y'all break none of my stuff. And don't anybody call the cops. You knew she was coming," she said, cutting her eyes to Ella, hanging back in her corner.

Belia pushed Charles aside and poked Butch in his barrel chest. Said he had to apo-logize. He glared, his lips glued together. Until he apologized, Belia didn't want to hear another word from him. "You need to take that five-dollar hat off your five-cent head till you get some sense in it," she said.

She turned to Charles and Ella. "You need to listen to me when I say no. Charles, you should've known who was going be here. And that Butch would act like an eggbeater in a cesspool. You better smarten up if you don't want this kind a trouble."

The partygoers argued among themselves and took sides. Some said Charles and Ella hadn't done anything to them; give the white girl a chance. Others said Charles deserved to get his ass kicked for bringing a white woman there. What did she want with them anyway?

The family and community stayed split on whether to let Ella into their lives for a long time. Some made it their business to avoid her until the close relatives let up some. Aunt Edna had Ella over for coffee anyway, when Butch wasn't home. She joined forces with Belia to get others to see Ella was all right.

In time, they were at the all-family Christmas breakfast every year, eating the brains-and-eggs scramble Uncle Butch made special for the holiday. And Rosalie's kids, who were similar ages to my brothers and I, were our birthday party guests. But some never got in the boat.

On Christmas six months later, Ella and Charles woke to bright sun spilling over a wintry cold day. They had scrambled eggs she made on the hot plate in their room and listened to carols on the radio as they exchanged gifts of perfume and cologne.

Then Ella opened the surprise gift the two gay men downstairs had given her. She was touched by the thin tea towels inside the Santa Claus wrapping paper. That show of kindness reciprocated her plate of Christmas cookies a few days before. They had a community in that tenement, where each person's humanity was recognized with kindness and res-pect, no matter what they faced out on Buffalo's intolerant streets.

Ella described how back in Indianapolis the family would have gone to midnight mass on Christmas Eve to see the baby Jesus in the crèche. Then back home, they'd have opened a little present and eaten Mother's date nut cookies before bed.

"Are you sad, babe?" Charles asked. "You must miss them something terrible today."

"Oh, horsefeathers, Charles. I miss them, sure, but you know very well I'm not sad." She rubbed her growing belly. "You just want me to tell you again that you and the baby are the most important things in my life."

Daddy smiled across the living room at David and me. "That was Charles Nathan she was carrying," he said. "We moved to Hickory Street a few houses down the block from Grandma to that rear flat where you were little. Then you came, David, and then you, Do-lores. You know the rest."

__________
The next morning, I told my parents about the class on finding your family, where I'd learned how to search for our white folks.

"You went to school on this before you even came home to talk to us?" Daddy asked.

"Yeah, but I did come and ask you before going any further. As it turns out, I might have a business trip to Indianapolis in the next few months. I'm thinking about staying afterward to look for the Lewises."

"That soon?" Mama said. "We're just getting used to the idea and you're halfway out the barn door already. It's just like you not to have an ounce of patience. But you must remember you made me a promise."

"I'll keep you out of this. Don't worry."

We agreed I'd need more details to pull off the search. So, luckily, my parents filled in a lot more blanks in the following weeks. In fact, Mama called the very next day with Daddy on the extension.

"Hey," she said, "we thought of something else important you should know ..."

7 BLACK GIRL

My head had to be on straight before going to Indianapolis to find my white people if the missing Lewises could be found, I wondered how hard it would be, not only to get through the shocking news I'd deliver, but also to relate to each other. How would they deal with a black woman like me who wore a millstone of race trouble around my neck, held on a heavy chain of resentment and suspicion? There was no telling who and what we would see when we looked on each other the first time.

After all, the confines of ghetto life racism I experienced growing up taught me that blacks could not be part of the wider city life. When my five-year-old self fell against our coal-bur-ning pot-bellied stove and my arm sizzled against the cast iron like bacon in a frying pan, the white cab company lied about sending a cab right over. Instead they left Mama and I waiting on the frozen Buffalo sidewalk as my skin rose into delicate black meringue peaks.

We lived on Hickory Street, with people packed into substandard rentals like crackers in a sleeve. The block had vacant lots full of debris, a pushcart selling greasy hot tamales, and numbers-running men taking bets all day then calling out winners in a supper time evensong.

Our living room ceiling cracked from the raucous upstairs neighbors' rent parties. Then one Christmas morning a sharp snap brought a deluge of plaster down all over us, knocking the tree over while burying the opened presents. Instead of a happy celebration, we swept, washed furniture, walls, and clothes, finally dumping chunks of the ceiling and the desert of dust into the garbage. Our white landlord didn't return Daddy's calls and never came to fix anything. First Daddy had a few drinks and raged about it, then he set up two wooden work horses in the living room, got on a ladder, and made us a new ceiling himself. When Daddy took the bus to answer a rental ad for a better apartment, the owner had shouted, "No niggers!" and shut the door. We knew white people didn't want us near them. We also knew Daddy was so enraged that something as small as spilling a glass of milk or pulling a chair out from under each other could turn his humiliations into our whippings with his welding shop's discarded leather strap.

That sealed off ghetto life told me blacks were not to expect the basics, let alone extra or different. We were supposed to accept the less-than life white people had us boxed into, the life racism would never let me out of. That made me want to get out of their box, but not get out of the black community where my little black self was nurtured by a sense of understanding one another. I didn't feel boxed in by my black playmates or my black grandma down the street or eating the grits and collard greens that had migrated north too.

Getting good grades in school felt like getting out of white people's box because it defied their belief that we were stupid and lazy. By eighth grade we had moved to a less segregated neighborhood, and I often spent afternoons studying at Jay Berman's house, the boy who vied with me for first place in everything.

Jay, the lone white kid in that grade, lived a few blocks away in a house full of the books and magazines his dad read. Daddy said he didn't work because McCarthy's House Un-American Activity Committee had blacklisted him even though they never proved he was a communist.

One day when our homework ran late, I jumped up to go see Amos 'n' Andy on TV, the sitcom about ignorant blacks. Mr. Berman said he was surprised at me. "You shouldn't watch a thing like that. It makes fun of your people, and of you," he said. "Negroes aren't ridiculous like the characters on that show. It makes white people think your hardworking father and you are like that just because you're Negro."

The show was so funny, I'd never seen it as denigrating my race, and neither had the many African Americans who half-believed those white prejudices themselves. Mr. Berman asked if I'd ever known a Negro as ludicrous as Lightnin', the shuffling ignoramus on the show.

"Nobody's that stupid," I said.

"A smart girl like you can do well in life if you know better than to accept nonsense like Amos 'n' Andy. Choose what you fill your head with very carefully."

"How should I choose?" I asked.

"Get a good education, Dolores. That will teach you how to think for yourself. Then you can figure out most anything. What's in your head determines who you are."

But at home, Daddy and David had an Amos 'n' Andy routine, falling out laughing as they reenacted the idiocy. David shuffled across the floor, scratching his hangdog head, speaking country bumpkin Ebonics with an IQ of sixty-five.

"What's 'a matter, dere, Lightnin'?" Daddy asked, playing the scheming Kingfish. "Don'tcha want ter trade your car for a bridge?"

I told them what Mr. Berman said, but David kept right on. "Be cool. It's just a joke."

But it wasn't funny anymore, so I stopped watching. Years later I understood that mockery was created by white people. It fed prejudice against African Americans during its popular run on radio and CBS TV for thirty years until it went off air in the 1950s. That institutional racism was sponsored by products like Campbell's Soup and Pepsodent toothpaste, broadcast into millions of homes where its disparagement was presented as entertainment.
__________
By the time us kids in the 'hood were bussed from a Sears Roebuck parking lot on the Jefferson Special to the white Bennett High School across town, I was black to the bone. We called that old repurposed city bus the Ghetto Express because it drove straight to a neighborhood of well-to-do white people in large brick homes and back to the 'hood with no stops allowed.

During the ride, boys played the dozens, trying to outdo each other's outrageous insults about one another's mothers. We girls, the intended audience, cheered the most brash wisecracks and pooh-poohed those that fell flat, egging them on until one of them was out of comebacks.

"Yo' mama's so short she poses for trophies."

"Yeah, well yo' mama so fat she got her own zip code."

At Bennett, a school with about six hundred in each grade, we ghetto kids started the day mixed in with white kids. During the brief homeroom period, we sat in wooden one-piece desks and chairs for attendance and announcements. When the class bell rang, I was separated from my friends to spend the day as one of few, or sometimes the only, black kids in honors classes.

I held back in those classes at first, worried I didn't belong there, because these kids were white. White kids who had everything, knew everything, and whose entitlement said that was how it was supposed to be. White kids who chattered with each other and planned get-togethers as I sat silently by, invisible. White kids who had already read the books on the reading list.

But when I was the only one to answer a question about Julius Caesar in Old English, I changed my mind. Riding home later on the Ghetto Express, I sat with one of the dozens players the school had put in shop classes making shoeshine or bread boxes.

"What's happenin', Madame Butterfly?" he said. The kids nicknamed me that in elementary school, labeling me an egghead, a "proper" young lady, with an older brother who'd made it plain nobody was to mess with me.

"I'm reading Shakespeare."

He cracked up. "Naw you ain't. For real girl, what you up to?"

Those honors classes created a personal push and pull about my "place" all through high school. While I couldn't have explained it back then, many of my Ghetto Express friends were being taught to live with the lower-class circumstances of our birth, while honors classes were opening new worlds to me. At fourteen, our futures were being determined by the tracks we were put in.

On the Ghetto Express, I threw in with some hip girls planning to join the Bennett drill team and perform at football game halftime shows. An older black girl had convinced the white coach to add some soul to the routines, and it was our mission to make them sooo fly.

At rehearsals I was lined up in a row of the school auditorium with the short girls, some white, some black, to learn the steps. Our black leader was up front showing how to rock a long step forward and sway back on the other foot with funky attitude. Her rolling hips amazed.

The team began the move, but not together. We black girls got into the groove and strutted our stuff. Some of the white girls did it, but others were reluctant, trying to make the move fit the team's previous military marching style, as was school tradition. A head bop was added. The white girl next to me looked disapproving and didn't do it.

After a few practices, the old military marching team was nowhere to be seen and the white girls had all quit. We added our sassiest steps in the aisle of the Ghetto Express, ignoring the driver shouting at us to sit down. Before long, we'd won our version of a civil rights coup. That white school had an all-black drill team, jammin' with homegirls' steps.

I wondered if my white relatives, should I meet them, would be able to respect me for finding triumph in those halftime shows. I also wondered if the Lewises could relate to my mixed race. Lots of folks couldn't, as I learned back in high school.

One Saturday I skipped the drill team performance to sit bunched together with the black kids in All-High Stadium at a Bennett game. We were separated from the white students by mutual choice. Sprawled out behind me was an elementary classmate, a boy so black complexioned he was nearly blue. While everyone stood for the national anthem he sat, loudly running his game on a white girl so blonde I had to study her face to see if she had eyelashes.

I turned and touched my finger to my lips. "The national anthem is playing."

"Shut the fuck up, you sorry half-breed," he said.

Me?

With a forced a smirk I turned around, and caught the astonished look on the face of a red-headed white boy from honors class. The black kids tittered and watched to see if we'd fight, as our neighborhood code called for. Truth was, Madame Butterfly had never fought anybody. I pretended the incident was meaningless, cheering and chatting until I could escape at halftime.

But inside, I could hardly think straight. I shouldn't have called his behavior out, but why did he have to name me as less than our black crew? I'd thought the whole Ghetto Express crowd were my boon-coons. Like the grooves of a 45 RPM record my mind looped: Dolbelong Dolbelong? Dolbelong?

Mama was seasoning chicken when I got home and told her what had happened. She cleared her throat then said, "Don't take that race bait, Dolores. Life's hard enough without worrying about what people say about your being mixed. Ignore it, like I do."

That boy's two-by-four upside my head cracked my identity open. Everybody didn't accept me as the black I thought I was. The specter of that uncertain acceptance would stay with me always, leaving me to wonder which blacks might harbor similar resentment.

In later years, I had another such incident, during an after-work drink with some black corporate colleagues. We took a table in the back where we could talk quietly, away from the noisy yuppies at the bar. There had been an incident where another black coworker shouted at the vice president that he was tired of working on a corporate plantation.

One man said I didn't know how bad it really was because the white management accepted me more than darker coworkers. "Your skin's so light, and you speak so proper you sound white."

"I'm as black as you, and you know it," I said, unaware in those days of my light-skinned privilege.

"My high yellow sistah, so you say." He wanted me to agree The Man could relate to my similarity with the wives and daughters he had at home. He beat a rhythm on the tabletop and chanted:

If you're light, you're all right.
If you're brown, stick around.
But if you're black, get back.

Others accused me of thinking I was better than them because I was light. Black men told me how fine I was because I was "light, bright, and damned near white." Darker men flattered my looks, saying I'd make a good choice as a wife. Having a fair-skinned wife would give them some status, and importantly, make their children lighter.

But I saw myself as black, no matter what they said. My father told us we were. "You kids have light skin and straight noses because your mother's blood is stronger than mine. But you're black, you're always going to be black, and the white man is never going to let you forget it."

David was probably right. Meeting with my lost white relatives could backfire because of race. But I was still ready to risk that, because even if we couldn't relate to each other, that too was part of knowing whose blood ran in my veins.
__________
And yet, the day I helped a shy blonde transfer student find her locker I had no expectation of making a white friend. A white friend who would teach me that race didn't have to matter between individuals. Jackie Milligan was all soft-spoken refinement, a balm to the no-holds-barred acting out that was our normal on the Ghetto Express. She seemed honest and easy, and accepted me without judgement.

"What's happenin', Jackie," I'd say, the slang making her giggle. When we were together, people's eyes darted back and forth over us. She was five foot nine and thin; I was five foot two and overweight. She was delicate and reserved; I was rough and forward. Both of us wore glasses, were nerds in honors classes, and took piano lessons. Somehow, we made sense of things together—I brought her out of her shy ways, and she led me into her world of yachts and horses.

Her mom, a genteel spirit, drove us to their three-story brick house after school one day. It sat on a quiet street with a grassy median, so unlike my street with its multifamily units and a factory down the block. Jackie showed me her toy horse with a hair tail that resembled the real horse she had to leave behind in Michigan. All I knew about horses was my one pony ride, the animal led by a man around a circle at a fair.

When her dad came home, her mom served cookies with tea in a china pot wrapped in a tea cozy. Who knew there was such a thing? Like a British movie, we sat near the grand piano in their long living room, the teapot resting on a gold filigree coffee table.

Jackie sat down at the piano, tearing into the theme from Lawrence of Arabia. She threw her head back and her long hair hung behind her. A fantasy played on her face as the music became a story of desert races I could hear. That music moved her as much as Motown did me. In the 'hood, we made fun of classical and other forms of "white" music. But the way Jackie played it, I found the feeling and beauty for the first time.

I rubbed my finger across the gold filigree table. "This is so beautiful," I said.

"Oh this? We got that in Egypt on our trip around the world," Mr. Milligan said.

They went around the world? The farthest I'd gone was Harlem, to visit Daddy's relatives.

The highlight was getting autographs at the stage door of the Apollo Theater on 125th Street.

The Milligans talked casually about the Taj Mahal, getting separated in the broiling sun at the Egyptian pyramids, and having high tea in London. They laughed about elephant rides and Africans staring at their white skin, the way Daddy talked about the pro wrestling matches downtown.

From then on, it was like the Milligans adopted me. And what an education they gave me, wrapped in love. As Jackie's companion, they took me to several cultural performances. We saw Van Cliburn play piano at Kleinhans Music Hall, from seats where we could watch his long fingers fly and his delicate wrists float up from the keyboard after the last note. We saw a performance of Carmen where the sets and elaborate military and Spanish costumes awed. But what surprised me most about the opera, which I thought was the ultimate in dignified art, was the hussy who was pure trouble.

"My dear," Mr. M. said, his eyes twinkling, "operas are full of hussies and scoundrels, just like real life."

The Milligans took me out on their yacht one weekend, where we girls swam in the river and lunched at the cabin dining table. I even drove the boat in the river's calm waters that would become violent rapids that rushed over Niagara Falls. At home at their dinner table, Mr. M. held court, discussing what was at stake in national elections, Martin Luther King Jr.'s versus Malcom X's philosophies, and the import of Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers strike.

They showed me that the world held so many more options than I could ever have imagined from inside the sealed off ghetto mentality. What the Milligans gave me was not a desire for their custom ruby crystal wine glasses from Lido, Italy, but how they thought. They showed me how to do what Mr. Berman urged me to do-think for myself and fill my head with worthwhile ideas.

Mama said we should invite the Milligans to our house some evening when she was off, to show some hospitality and appreciation. Daddy worried we couldn't pass a whole evening with such educated, well-to-do people. What in the world could we talk about?

"Anything you want," Mama said. "Dolores talks with them, so we can too. They're just people."

Mama and I dressed up in stockings and patent leather heels and Daddy had on a white long-sleeved shirt and tie. Mama excused my brothers because Jackie was my friend, not theirs. She made an expensive crab dip to impress, and Daddy, who already had a few Four Roses beforehand, placed the bottle in the center of the coffee table. I crossed my fingers he wouldn't get drunk.

"Have one with me, Mr. Milligan?" he asked as soon as they were settled.

"Absolutely, pour me one please."

Mr. M., who loved politics, asked Daddy if he liked President Lyndon Johnson.

"I gotta be for him, for all he's done for the civil rights bills."

"Better than Goldwater, huh?" Mr. M. asked.

"That bastard? He's against the unions," Daddy said. "I'm the sergeant at arms for the local Steelworkers, you know."

Mr. M. raised his glass in a salute.

Daddy took me to a union meeting once when there was nobody at home to keep me. There, an all-white crowd of men got loaded in the bar before a boisterous meeting upstairs to take a strike vote. Daddy was so worried about them getting out of control, he sat me next to the exit so we could run out if fighting broke out. "A black sergeant at arms can't make angry white men behave," he said.

Mr. M. gently jiggled his empty glass for another Four Roses. Daddy was happy then. He had a man to drink and talk shop with. They toasted each other a few times, Mr. Milligan matching Daddy drink for drink. When the Milligans stood up to go, Daddy pumped Mr. M.'s hand a long time.

"Gee, Mr. Milligan," he said. "I had no idea educated people could be so much fun!"
__________
My high school life was not all yachts and opera. By age sixteen, I worked after school as a se-cond-shift aide at a nursing home. A yellow pinafore uniform that repelled liquids and stains was required, the reason for which I quickly learned. My job, along with the rest of the all black staff, was to get the elderly patients on the dementia ward, all of whom were white, washed and put to bed. I had entered the servant class.

The residents had limited mobility and little understanding of the realities of their lives. Those capable of holding a conversation I could follow thought we were way back in time, when they were younger. Like Blanche, who talked to me in a booming voice as if I were one of her elementary school students. As I pushed her wheelchair into the bathroom and set her on the toilet, she would instruct me. I worked steadily to wash her face and hands as she kept on: "Time to go over your homework." I answered math problems while removing her dress, and after she peed, slipped the soapy washcloth between her legs.

I made my rounds from patient to patient. If the woman was bedridden, she was rolled onto one side. A grey metal bedpan was wedged under her bare bottom, then she was rolled back over and up onto the pan. I hoisted one after another onto bedpans, waited to hear the tinkle or grunts, and gave them toilet paper or wiped them myself. Then scrubbed their soiled bodies.

One of mine was Mrs. L., the only patient well-to-do enough to have a single room. The day staff dressed her in impeccable suits and a hairdresser kept her hair coiffed, all paid by the family who never came to see her. I started her bedtime routine by turning her wheelchair toward me. Without a word, she whipped out her hidden dinner fork from under a tartan lap blanket and stabbed the back of my hand, guerilla style. That little old lady who didn't know where she was came down hard enough to make blood flow from the puncture of several tines. That was the last night I drug home from that job, put my smelly yellow uniform in a soapy bucket overnight, and started my homework.

Mine was the same job my mother did for seventeen years at the state mental hospital That's why it seemed such a good find when the nursing home hired me. In the end, it did pay off, because that job taught me what an unskilled worker could expect to do for a lifetime. Thankless, servile, dirty work that paid a pittance. That was not the doing-well life Mr. Ber-man told me to pursue, the one the Milligans modeled for me, and not the one I was going to accept. I wanted something better. How to get it, I didn't know, but I was determined to find out.

My fellow honors students talked endlessly about going to college. All of them were going, it seemed. Wanted to go. Had to go, according to their families. My goal had been to graduate high school like my brothers did. They finished school, my parents said, proud the boys had gone further than Daddy's sixth grade and Mama's ninth. But my white classmates were going further. They debated the merits of places I'd never heard of, like the University of Rochester or Barnard. Jackie's heart was set on the University of Michigan, where her dad had gone. She had some crazy, foregone conclusion I was going to college too.

I asked my trigonometry teacher, an older woman in lace-up shoes who had encouraged my work, if she thought I should go.

"Why, yes," she said, "a good student like you should apply. I'll set up an appointment for you with the guidance counselor to figure out a plan. She helps on all college questions."

I arrived early to the appointment in my good plaid wrap-around skirt and white blouse to make an impression and browsed college catalogs while waiting my turn.

Then a trim white woman in black heels called me to take the seat she gestured at. She sat

behind a desk, empty except for office supplies and a phone book.

"What can I do for you?" the thirty-something Miss Guidance asked.

I bumbled through my request for help figuring out about going to college.

"College?" she asked, raising her eyebrows. "Oh no, Dolores. Colored girls don't go to col-lege. If you do anything after high school, you should go to Fosdick Masten Vocational School and take up sewing. It's right downtown by the baseball stadium."

She flipped her dark hair back over her ear, as white women do to signal what they think is their allure or power, crossed her legs, and rifled through the phone book. She wrote the phone number of the trade school on a slip of paper and handed it to me. Standing up, she went over and opened the office door, signaling the end of the conversation. Not knowing what to say, I thanked her and wandered out, defeated.

Was that why I didn't know about college? I wasn't supposed to go because I was black? But she'd said something ridiculous about me sewing. I'd earned a single D in eleven years of school—in sewing. That D was generous given the skirt I tried to make in eighth-grade home economics with the cheap, stretchy plaid fabric and difficult pleated pattern. That teacher made me take the skirt out and do it over so many times, the final eyesore had uneven pleat widths and plaid lines as wavy as fields of grain. I still wasn't over the humiliation of walking across the auditorium stage in it at the fashion show, before dumping it in the garbage.

Too upset with the counselor's advice to face the kids on the Ghetto Express, I went around to the empty street behind Bennett to think, where nobody would see me.

She hadn't even reviewed my transcript. Was she crazy, randomly picking sewing of all things, out of a hat? None of the white honors students were being told to take up sewing at Fosdick Masten. Pacing up and down the street, I snorted out loud, imagining the eye doctor's cashmere-clad white daughter taking up other people's hems. She would never sit in her fancy mansion with the music room and library I'd seen, pumping the pedal on a Singer sewing machine for a dollar. Why should I?

As I kicked through red and yellow fallen leaves, my rage boiled. I was not about to let this white woman blow me off because I was black. Not after all those firehoses turned on civil rights demonstrators. Not after that new law for equal access Mr. M. kept talking about. I pulled out the notepaper with the phone number to call and ripped it to pieces. I wanted what my white classmates were going to get. That sorry white lady wasn't going to keep me from having it.

Now I wonder how many other worthy students' professional careers that woman killed because of their color. How many lives were consigned to low wages, limited housing, or health choices by other guidance counselors like her? How many teachers, homeowners, den-tists, and business leaders were lost to the black community because of them?

I applied blindly to a few colleges in New York state my classmates talked about, without understanding that different colleges taught different things, without knowing the distinction between public and private universities, liberal arts or professional majors. I had no idea some were harder to get into, or which offered scholarships, or what the relevant selection criteria was. I never asked anyone else how to get into college.

Daddy watched me work on applications at the kitchen table as he rinsed collard greens in the sink for Sunday's dinner. "You know college costs a lot of money?" he asked.

I didn't.

"Why are you filling out all those papers? We don't have that kind of extra, you understand? If you want to go to college, I don't know how you're going to pay for it."

I kept on mailing completed applications, adding requests for financial aid, like some of the white kids were doing.

One crisp Saturday morning that fall, Mama and I hung sheets out on the line in the back yard. Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Mosby, leaned over the chain-link fence and asked if I was taking the exam for Howard University the next Saturday.

Mama and I looked blankly at each other, dropping the wet sheet and wooden clothespins back in the basket to listen. Mrs. Mosby said the scholarship exam could be a great chance to get college paid for, and I should have a good shot at it with my school record. It would be held in the Urban League office where she worked. That neighbor said that education was the way up and out. "You would do well to go to Howard," she said. "It's the leading black university in America."

I'd never heard of it.

"Put her name down," Mama said. "What time will it be?"

The only preparation I made that week was to get the specified pencils and pack a good eraser. It would probably be something like the SAT, which I also hadn't known people prepared for. That Saturday at the Urban League, I answered everything and checked it twice.

Acceptances started coming in for my classmates, including Jackie, who was heading to the University of Michigan. A few mainstream white schools accepted me, like Russell Sage, offering financial aid so paltry Daddy said we'd have to go to the poor house.

I came home from school one afternoon to find Mama still hadn't left for work yet, even though her clock-in time had passed. She sat in the living room in her spotless white shoes, stockings, and nurses' aide uniform, ready for her second shift at the hospital. An oversized envelope rested in her lap, torn open.

"It's all set," she said, beaming. "You did it."

"Did what?"

"You got into Howard University."

"I did? I got in?"

"And, you got a full scholarship. The whole kit and caboodle paid for four years."

"For real, Mama?"

"Yep," she said, handing me the letter on university letterhead that read, "We are pleased to inform you"

I clutched the page, jumping up and down. I was going to college. And not just any college, but the most prestigious black university in America. Mama got up from the easy chair and started singing. There was no greater joy, as I clapped in time to her off-key song:

Hooray and hallelujah,
You had it comin' to ya.
Goodie, goodie for you,
Goodie, goodie for me.
You rascal, you!

DMU Timestamp: October 04, 2024 22:43