White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

Black Is Beautiful

As a white person, I was automatically in the out crowd at Binford. The coolest kids in the school were black. They wore metal spoons hammered into bracelets and carried plastic Afro picks or metal “cake-cutters” in their back pockets, the handles wiggling as they jive-walked the school’s linoleum corridors. They confidently sang phrases from the Temptations or the Jackson Five in a falsetto that echoed through the halls. At recess, they cranked up their transistor radios in the corner of the playground and danced. The dancing was nothing like the American Bandstand show I had seen on TV, in which white teens wiggled their hips at each other. The kids at Binford bent their knees and shook their backsides. Another dance step was the “clacker,” a sideways jump that brought their feet together in midair. After watching them enviously, I decided that I needed to improve my own dancing. One Saturday, I bought a Sly and the Family Stone 45 RPM at Gary’s record store at the Willow Lawn Shopping Center. When I got home, I went down to our basement and turned on the yellow plastic record player, a gift from my mother’s greatuncle Clarence. As the music blared, I leaned forward and tried to imitate what I had seen. I felt too foolish to tell even Liz about this project. I practiced the following week after school, jumping sideways enough times to learn the clacker. When I did it at the bus stop, one of the seventh graders who waited there pointed and laughed at me. I was embarrassed. How could I show anyone what I had learned when our school didn’t even have dances? If I asked the black kids for help, I thought they’d laugh at me, too. It wasn’t my dance to claim. I stopped trying to learn. The black girls playfully shoved each other as they stowed their belongings in the coatroom. I had finally figured out how to understand the white southerners. Now I had to get used to the way these girls talked, the accent and slang unfamiliar to me. Black Is Beautiful 57 58 “Who you go with, girl?” one girl asked another, pointing to the initials she had penned on the back of her spiral notebook. “Aww, haww, haww,” answered the first girl. “Ain’t none of your bid-ness.” Another girl scrawled “Tootsie” on the back of all her spiral notebooks , making the O’s like upside-down hearts. “Tootsie + S.O.V.S.,” she wrote. It took me a while to figure out that Tootsie was her nickname , and S.O.V.S. was “some one very special.” Many of the black kids used nicknames that had nothing to do with their real names. Nobody ever told me the reason for this, though it could date back to slavery days, when black people wanted to name themselves instead of using the names that the owner gave them. At school, nicknames ricocheted around me without explanation . By listening carefully, I eventually learned to identify “Tiny,” “Li’l Sis,” and “Tiger.” I made up a nickname for myself: Quicksilver. I wanted a name that endowed me with characteristics I thought I lacked—speed, and the ability to slip away, shimmering, if someone tried to squash me. I wanted to be like them, but I was afraid they would make fun of me for it. I never saw another white person scrawling “A.K.A.” (also known as) on her books. So I kept my nickname a secret, something I wrote only in the diary that I had started keeping at home. I noticed that the black kids dressed differently than I did. My fashion world was ruled by the hippie look—fringed leather jackets, torn bellbottoms, muslin shirts, and love beads. Our fashion heroes were the characters in The Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch, who were far from being hippies but still managed to look groovy. Once the weather cooled off, I usually wore desert boots, Levi jeans or corduroys, and a T-shirt or striped rugby shirt to school. My favorite T-shirts advertised Cold Bear or Boone’s Farm wine. Looking back, I’m shocked that none of the adults, my mother included, questioned my willingness to walk around advertising a product that was illegal for me to use. My favorite jeans were tie-dyed purple and yellow, with yellow buttons to close the fly. Second best were...