White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

Legacy of Defeat

98 The Zellers were the financially successful cousins. The Great Depression haunted the rest of my mother’s extended family the way The War Between the States haunted other Richmond families. The fallen aristocracy and the legacy of ruin were similar. From the turn of the century to the 1930s, my great-grandfather had built a successful real estate business in Richmond. He was at one time one of the city’s largest landowners. Grandpa Henry went into business with him in the 1920s. In her diary, my greatgrandmother wrote “DOOM” in black ink above the announcement of a foreclosure on the family properties in 1932. This put an end to the family real estate business after thirty nine years. Right next to the announcement, she placed Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer: “Give me the serenity to accept what cannot be changed. Give me the courage to change what can be changed. The wisdom to know one from the other.” My great-grandfather died within months of the foreclosure. Whether it was a suicide depends on which family member I ask. Everyone agrees that the disappointment and shame of losing everything he had spent a lifetime building was simply too much for him to bear. I imagine the gloom that descended after the foreclosures and my great-grandfather’s death. Grandpa Henry, the courtly gentleman who cultivated his father’s friends and glad-handed his way through real estate deals, would have been hunched in one of the living room chairs, fretting about the bills and how he could avoid losing face among his friends. Grandma Hanni would have hovered solicitously around him, asking whether he wanted ice water or fresh tobacco for his pipe. She learned to economize, shopping for bargain dresses instead of picking the first one off the rack. She kept using the silver flatware and trays that had been wedding presents, but she put her fine jewelry in the safe deposit box. She said she didn’t think it would look right on her ten-dollar dresses. My mother must have skulked at the margins, sensing the darkLegacy of Defeat 99 ness but not knowing how to name it. She was shooed out to play with other children in the neighborhood, told not to complain or make too many demands. When she was nine years old, the bank foreclosed on the house in which she lived, with its view of paddleboats on the lake in Byrd Park and acres of parkland across the street. Grandpa Henry’s brother, Ed, rescued them by finding the two-family house where he and Grandma Hanni still lived when I moved to Richmond. My grandfather, who had no college education, took a job in the blending room at the Philip Morris tobacco plant. Apparently, he was so depressed by this job that most nights he came home and went right to bed. To help make ends meet, my grandmother, who could play the piano, took a job as music teacher at a nursery school. She had graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard College, but she never expected to end up with a career as a nursery school teacher and director. My mother seemed to inherit the family’s sense of defeat. My father’s death wounded her so deeply she stopped wanting to make our home a cozy place. Although she earned a salary from teaching and my father had left life insurance, she never felt comfortable spending any money. She was stuck in the mentality that had helped her family endure the Great Depression. My mother probably never realized how cruel her frugality seemed to my sister and me. She kept the heat at sixty-two degrees, day and night, and told us to put on extra sweaters if we said we were cold. We had to turn the oven off during the last five minutes of cooking so we could use the retained heat. She stalked behind us when we left a room, turning off the lights with a loud click, berating us for wasting electricity. If we spent more than ten minutes in the shower, she banged on the bathroom door and loudly reminded, “Have you seen the size of my water bill lately?” Though our house came with central air-conditioning , she never let us use it. On humid, ninety-degree summer nights, she gave me a flimsy electric fan to balance on a chair at the foot of my bed. Its anemic breeze gave me...