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5: Receiving My Class Assignment in High School
- University of Virginia Press
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5 Receiving My Class Assignment in High School H aving left my father standing on the stoop at our Richmond house in February 1952, my mother, Steve, and I headed for Jacksonville to start a new life. We moved into my Aunt Mamie’s spare room for a few months until we found a two-room apartment near our schools. My mother got a job for a little over $100 a month as a beautician in the hair salon of the city’s largest department store, and my brother entered the neighborhood elementary school. I warily entered my second high school, Robert E. Lee High. In Richmond I had attended Thomas Jefferson High School. While the two schools were 555 miles apart, their responses to me seemed identical. At Thomas Jefferson, my teachers and principal appeared to have learned early that I was the child of a beautician and a drinker who was often out of work. The plot thickened when I arrived at Lee, where my mother was known simply as a single mother who was a hairdresser. In those days, that was all the officials needed to know to place me in the social hierarchy of the school. They may have picked up more about my standing from the hand-me-downs from my cousins that I wore to school. My wardrobe was a radical departure from the khaki slacks and cotton button-down shirts worn by the school’s favored boys. Teachers branded me as a working-class boy for whom a college-bound track was unrealistic. Before long, I could see that I was being treated differently from better-off students. It was obviously due to money, appearances, language, and bearing. Once painted as a poor risk by a critical mass of adults, I felt in- Receiving My Class Assignment in High School 33 visible next to the favored teens from “better” families. The school seemed to belong to them. Another curious similarity between the two high schools, four states apart, was the fact that their English teachers gave me identical career advice: “You need to quit school and learn a trade.” As the primary guardians of the language, apparently it was their job to guide us to our ultimate class destinations. I had no reason at the time to doubt their assessment of me. After all, most of them went to college, and my people did not. So as I came to internalize this dim view of my prospects, I grew more and more intimidated by the teachers , the successful students, the academic challenges, and even the person who oversaw the one realm where I had been somebody, my basketball coach. It all convincedmethatIwasincapableofearningdecentgradesorobtainingajobin whichIwouldeverneedanythingtheytaught.Ibecameallergictohighschool. But my mother apparently saw something I didn’t. When she realized how the school was sorting out my future, she went to see the principal and demanded that he put me in their college preparatory track. They had no defense when Lula Jane Stephens went to bat for her boy. Ironically, my experience in high school whetted my appetite for learning, but not their kind of learning. I embarked on such weird adventures as reading and relishing nearly all the articles from A to Z in Compton’s Encyclopedia, and each week I made trips to a newsstand where I could use the World Almanac and Information Please to look up and compare population figures from all around the world. But I was never able to connect this appetite for learning to what happened in high school. Of all the consequences of the class hierarchy in high school, the most painful was the implication that I was unworthy of having friends from among the “better people” in our school. This was especially painful when I pondered dating. I kept hearing that voice inside saying, “You’ve got no money, you’re scrawny, you don’t know how to dance, and you wear hand-me-down clothes. You don’t have a chance in the world to have a girlfriend!” Pretty much the only time I felt comfortable was with my one faithful companion, basketball. In Jacksonville, I again sought friends among the also-lost: peers involved with vandalism and petty thievery, high school dropouts, and work-shy twenty-somethings hanging out on the streets looking to create trouble. On occasions I joined their marauding at such places as Riverside Park, where we [18.215.15.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:51 GMT) 34 learning whiteness harassed...