The Education of a WASP

Chapter Three

Chapter Three Events moved swiftly for everyone, following my meeting with Grace Christopher on May 6, 1961. I mailed her an invitation to Noah's birthday party, hoping to reinforce my verbal invitation the night we had met. Noah's party was May 24. Between our meeting and Noah's party civil rights hit the headlines. On May 14, 1961, the first Freedom Ride took place. Negro people and sympathetic white Northerners defied bus segregation laws and were pulled from their buses in Alabama and beaten. A screaming mob of several hundred white men and women attacked twenty-one Freedom Riders in Montgomery, Alabama. The governer of Alabama refused to speak to the President of the United States on the telephone . By May 21, President Kennedy had sent six hundred U.S. marshals into Montgomery after a white mob attacked a Negro church whose members had merely cheered the Freedom Riders. National Guardsmen patrolled Montgomery. For the first time we learned how violently white people would fight to maintain segregation. Reading the newspaper stories, I was moved by the courage Qf the Freedom Riders who submitted themselves to beatings - 29- -and proud that nothing like this could have happened in the North. That federal troops would eventually be sent into Omaha-to Newark, Detroit, and scores of other Northern cities-was as inconceivable then as the fact that my sympathies would not be with the troops. The day before Noah's birthday party, Ken Hancock phoned to say he had a teacher applicant for our school and did I want to interview her? Me? No. I couldn't judge her qualifications. Just ask her to see the superintendent, I suggested . The day of Noah's third birthday arrived, warm and sunny -perfect for the outdoor party. I was pleased when I saw Grace Christopher walking across our lawn holding the hand of her little boy, David. Whatever surprise the other mothers felt at seeing Grace and David there, they had the length of our lawn to adjust to it. Helen Carter strode over with her golfer's stride and shook hands with Grace; Elaine Mifflin smiled and took in every line of Grace's flawlessly tailored navy linen dress; Emily 'Wright, one of the most sweet and gentle women I knew, sat next to Grace and told her how handsome her son David was. The only jolting moment was when I saw Val Schmidt marching across the lawn, her features tensed in anger. For the first time the possibility of a scene occurred to me. But Val's anger was directed at her daughter, Janie, who she'd seen throwing sand at Noah. I chided myself for a suspicious, overactive imagination. I realize now that Grace Christopher was the most acceptable kind of Negro woman for my neighbors to meet. Daily golfing had made Helen Carter's skin actually darker than Grace's, and Grace was beautiful by Caucasian standards. Her thin nose and only slightly full mouth were not much different from white features. Her crisp linen dress with its obvious custom touches told each woman there that it was expensIve. (Only I knew, from Grace's "Thanks, I made it - 30 - myself!" when she first arrived, that it wasn't a name-designer dress.) No white woman there could have found any objection to or felt unfamiliar with this attractive, well-dressed woman with her suntan skin. Or to little David, a shy, quiet child with a gradually growing smile. After the day of the birthday party, Grace and I began to talk almost daily over the telephone. I learned that she was the daughter of a college professor. When she named the college my "Oh" must have revealed I'd never heard of it. It was an all-Negro college in Nashville, Grace said. She had been raised on campus, gotten her degree in social work, and then done postgraduate work at the University of PennsylvanIa . Her liquid, slow-paced voice had hardened mentioning the Philadelphia university. I waited, wondering. Only much later would Grace describe what it was like, going from the protection of an all-Negro college to the special "goldfish bowl" life as one of the few Negro students at a white university . "Daddy protected me," she said when we had become closer friends. "It was done with love, but I didn't know what I should have known. I went from...