The Education of a WASP

Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine The month of December 1961 was like a landslide for us. Small rocks I had dislodged months before gained momentum ; now, inside and around me, everything was moving too fast to stop. In mid-December we heard the rumbles; when the month had ended, we felt the crash. December began happily with a new friendship, Warren Platt, Janet's army captain beau. Warren and I had become instant friends, largely because I was his wholehearted supporter in his campaign to marry Janet soon. It was obvious that he worshipped her and, to me, Janet deserved no less. But 'Warren had other attributes in addition to his adoration of Janet. Like Ben, he combined strength and sensitivity. Warren looked like a recruiting poster (black version) promising exuberant physical fitness through army life; he was well over six feet tall and carried his muscular body with grace. But he treated all women as if they might break if he raised his voice full volume or shook hands too hard. His own hands were unexpectedly slender for such a big man. Janet told me he had wanted to be a violinist, but a music teacher in his segregated Texas school pointed out that there were - 97 - no black members of symphony orchestras, let alone black soloists. And so Warren took one of the few possible routes out of Southern poverty; he had joined the army at eighteen, had finally been trained as an engineer, and was now one year from retirement. Our friendship with Warren was to be pathetically short. After Janet's party we had gone to a jazz place in the ghetto. (We had all laughed at Warren's patient boredom; he preferred Beethoven.) In the next weeks we had gone out to dinner together and, one evening, to a movie. My last conversation with Warren took place at our house where we had come back for coffee. That night's conversation was an example of the pattern we would find so often with Negro friends. There was always the testing of us at first-the silent observing, the oblique questions, the waiting for unconscious slips of the tongue or stereotypes of thought. When the tester felt satisfied, it was as if a dam suddenly burst. Caution changed into sudden confidences , personal and moving. Sometimes I worried that the confidences came too rapidly; many times I wondered if I deserved them. Something like that was happening with Warren that night. He began describing his army life and told me, first, as a joke on himself, about his first trip home after enlistment. "Here I was, feeling big in my brand new uniform. I got off the bus in that Texas depot and walked right through the regular door-not the door marked 'Colored'-and I got grabbed and shoved right back out the door, brand new uniform and all." Warren could laugh at the memory, but he talked with a special happiness of his duty in Europe-in France, England, Germany. "On those European streets I was just an American man. Nobody saw anything but the uniform." Only back in the barracks, he said, shyly now but wanting to express it, was he treated as a Negro. - 98 - Yet I knew he was planning to live in America when he retired from the army. Janet told me he had the promise of a job with a New York engineering consultant, but he had also been offered a job by a German firm. I asked Warren why he didn't stay in Europe. Warren hitched his chair closer as if to tell me a secret. I can never forget this big man, army-trained, trying to articulate his feelings. Oh, he said, he thought about staying in Europe, thought a lot about it. They needed engineers; they wanted him to stay; he could have lived real well there. Then he said, "But you know, I got to thinking. America began because those people in Europe wanted something better than what they had. A whole lot of them came here. Well, what we've got-our ideas about democracy-maybe haven't worked yet the way they should. But they will someday." He said maybe this sounded like a lot of flag-waving, but he added, "When we've got America going the way it was supposed to go, we're really going to have something here. Something a...