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155 FIVE Close Together but Still Apart friendships across race only went so far Fourth grade at the Robert E. Lee Elementary School in Austin, Texas, was a difficult year for Harriet “Hattie” Allen. It was 1971, and Hattie, an African American child from East Austin, on the “other side of the highway ,” had just transferred into the predominantly white and affluent Lee Elementary School in West Austin. Her teacher, a white woman, tried to label Hattie mentally retarded and have her sent to another school. She was one of only three black students in her class: one of the others was a boy who was academically advanced; the other was a lighter-skinned girl with long hair. According to Hattie: “I was an average kid, I didn’t have long hair, and I have dark skin, so I kind of bore the brunt of my fourth-grade teacher, who was in fact an elderly woman who was not happy with black children coming into white schools, she had a fundamental problem. So I had a very difficult time adjusting in fourth grade . . . [coming] from an all-black school where I felt comfortable.” But Hattie never went back to an all-black school; she spent the rest of her school days surrounded by mostly white classmates, and she graduated from Stephen F. Austin High School in 1980. Hattie will tell you that her mother, a nurse who worked at a hospital near Lee Elementary, was “ahead of the curve” when it came to school desegregation. She had enrolled Hattie and her brother in West Austin schools before the court ordered the school district to move students from one school to the next on the basis of color. Her mother had asked people at her work about the different schools and their reputations, and when she became concerned Chapter 05 10/3/08 2:18 PM Page 155 about the quality of education her children were receiving in their historically black elementary school, she knew how to work the system and gain access for her kids to schools that, at the time, most other black students could only dream of attending. The distance between her mother’s dream of finding better schools for her children and Hattie’s personal trials and tribulations at these “better” schools mirrors the double consciousness many African Americans have concerning school desegregation. The trade-offs between what they must give up in terms of comfort, familiarity, and acceptance in a mostly black school and what they gain in often more prestigious, more academically competitive, and better-resourced white schools are enormous and hard to fathom in the abstract. Personal journeys such as Hattie’s help us understand. When we interviewed Hattie—once in 2000 and again in 2002—she was in some ways the same thin, energetic (self-proclaimed “hyper”), and enthusiastic person she said she had been in high school. She was employed as a social worker and was unmarried and had no children. She said she had few friends as an adult, especially few who were black. She told us that since her days at Lee Elementary she had constantly straddled white and black social spheres, never feeling completely comfortable in either one. Hattie recalled, for instance, the popular white girls in her fourthgrade class, the cute outfits they would wear and the gymnastics classes they took. But Hattie’s father worked as a janitor at that time, and her mother was a nurse with an associate’s degree, so fancy clothes and gymnastics classes were not an option. “I wanted to go so bad, and my mother would say, like, ‘We can’t afford that,’ you know . . . but she would feel bad. She would want me to be able to go.” Similarly, Hattie can remember how much her mother wanted her to be socially accepted by the white students. But Hattie knew there were boundaries: friendships with white students could go only so far, especially when it came to out-of-school activities. She noted that one of her white friends in sixth grade invited her to her house for a party, even though her other friends never invited Hattie to their houses. She said, “I came home, and I was excited, ‘Oh, a friend invited me over to her house.’” 156 c l o s e t o g e t h e r b u t s t i l l a pa r t Chapter 05 10/3/08 2...

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