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Driving Lessons
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Because the Open High didn’t offer a driver’s education class, I signed up for a class at TJ in 1976, the year I turned sixteen. The atmosphere there felt like middle school all over again. Two boys were the only other white people in the class—and the only other students who would talk to me. We all trooped out to a trailer across the street from the school, shivering in the cold, spring air. The trailer housed a driving simulator, but we called it the “stimulator” as a joke. We had to watch films of someone driving a car and pretend to drive along at consoles built to look like dashboards. After a few weeks of that, we could take lessons in real cars. The test-driving range at Parker Field, now the Arthur Ashe Center, was all the way north out The Boulevard, a traffic-choked street that passed the field where the minor-league Richmond Braves played. I hated riding my bike to the lessons, but it would have taken three bus transfers to get there. I arrived at the first lesson feeling sweaty and hassled. Mrs. Jones, the TJ gym teacher, ran the driver’s ed range. A thin black woman with a medium complexion and acne-scarred cheeks, she wore nylon sweat pants with matching jackets. She chewed mint gum and carried a clipboard. All of her assistants were black, mostly juniors and seniors at TJ who had recently gotten their licenses and needed an afternoon job. During my first lesson, Mrs. Jones assigned me to LaVerne, a heavyset, dark-skinned girl who wore glasses with chunky gold frames. When she saw me, she looked irritated. I don’t remember any other white students on the days that I took lessons. “Get in,” she said, motioning to the driver’s seat. “Hands at 10 and 2,” she ordered, meaning approximately where the numbers 10 and 2 on a clock would be. Then she climbed in next to me. The car had an extra brake on the passenger side, just in case the instructor needed to stop the car quickly. “Now, go around the cones,” she said, pointing to a series of orDriving Lessons 120 121 ange cones that were set up in the gravel field. The idea was to steer around each cone without knocking it over. I put the car, a four-door sedan, into drive and got around the first cone. The car’s rear swiped the second one. Boom! LaVerne jammed on the brake and glared at me. My body rocked back and forth in the aftershock. “Get out and pick it up, girl. Anyone ever taught you how to steer?” I climbed out, humiliated, picked up the cone, and climbed back in. LaVerne was yelling “Hey, girl! Whass up?” out the window to another instructor. “OK, go,” LaVerne said to me. I made it to the end of the cones, but knocked one over on the way back. LaVerne rolled her eyes, and said, “Why are you so dizzy?” My head was spinning by the end of the lesson. It was getting dark and I had to pedal back home through the rush-hour cars whooshing past me. The rest of the lessons went similarly. Even Mrs. Jones looked annoyed when she had to drive with me. Because she and her assistants had already pegged me as incompetent, I felt like I could do nothing right. I’m sure I was a bad driver to begin with—the same clumsiness that kept me out of the dance recital made my driving hesitant and erratic—but other teachers might have had more patience . No sooner did I start to relax than they jammed on the brakes to tell me my hands had slipped from the correct “10 and 2” position to “9 and 3,” or that I was riding up on the car in front of me. By the end of the driver’s education class, my driving was worse than it had been when I started. I didn’t even come close to passing the final test. I rode my bike home utterly dejected, convinced I would be stuck riding my yellow ten-speed forever. I felt singled out for scorn as the only white person taking lessons. The consequences were keeping me from a crucial rite of passage. Though my sixteenth birthday had come and gone, I was still asking for rides everywhere. My mother, who sat on...