The Education of a WASP

Chapter One

Chapter One A young black man, his shaved head revealing ugly scars on his skull, stood in my living room in Philadelphia. "It's too late for talking, white lady," he screamed at me. I reached out my hands to him instinctively. He backed away, shaking his head, and walked to the door. Then he swung around. "You know it's too late, lady. Jesus Christ, you gotta know it's too late now." Eight years ago I could not have seen the fear behind this young black man's anger or felt a frantic wish to reassure him. But I had had eight years of a painful education. My husband Ben, our three children, and I had moved inexorably from white middle-class serenity to the disturbing fear that this young man was right. And if he was right, our three small children would suffer in ways it had taken me too long to understand. This, then, is the story of a step-by-step education, begun by accident and continued often with reluctance. Its main value may be that it happened to such an average family in so many gradual steps. At the beginning, we would not have believed how much our lives would change and how much - 1 - we would each change as people. As a family, we have received incomparable rewards; I also learned much I didn't want to know. We are WASPs, my husband and I, lifelong members of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority group, and some people say that it is primarily our group who created and continue "white racism" in America. In 1961 I would have denied this hotly. To me, my friends and I were thoroughly unprejudiced. But in 1961 we had not yet been tested. Black voices of complaint were heard only in the South, and it was easy for me to sit complacently in Omaha, Nebraska, detached from and deploring the white outcries against school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas, or the angry whites who harassed Negro college students attempting to occupy whiteonly restaurant seats in North Carolina. For Ben and me, in Omaha in 1961, our lives were untroubled and serene. After six years of marriage, we seemed to have reached the happy ending to the national American Dream. We even looked like a magazine ad for the typical American family. A photograph would have shown us standing in front of our suburban ranch-style house, surrounded by an acre of pampered lawn. Ben, tall, lean, and craggyfeatured , would be surrounded by our three blond, blue-eyed children. Five-year-old "Spike" (Bennett Odom Stalvey, III), slim, active, had inherited my impulsive curiosity and his father's quiet reflective moods. Noah, then three, was the mischievous, affectionate family clown, and Sarah, only two, had already discovered, and delighted in, the fact she was a girl. As the mother in the family photo, I would probably show up slightly blurred as I tried to keep Spike still while watching for Noah's next antic or for a slipping bow in Sarah's hair. But I would be smiling happily and holding Ben's hand. Our standard of living far surpassed what Ben and I had known as children. We were proud of what we felt we had accomplished through hard work, careful planning, and the good luck of having married each other. Our marriage had weathered the first years of two different temperaments trying to adjust. I was learning to appreciate Ben's cautious, reflective nature and to count on him to temper my impulsive enthusiasms. Ben contended I had taught him to enjoy people. But our backgrounds were so nearly identical that most of our other adjustments were minimal. Ben's family was Baptist, mine Lutheran. We had both been brought up in the Midwest. Ben was born in South Carolina but had grown up in Detroit. I had been born and raised in Milwaukee . Most of the men in Ben's family were blue-collar workers while in mine they were at the bottom of the whitecollar rung (frayed white-collar workers might be the term). I was the grandchild of European immigrants while Ben's ancestors were early American settlers, but security was the goal for both our families. We had inherited their nestbuilding tendencies. Our home, our family, and each other were our main interests. Ben had gone to college on the...