White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

I Am Lee’s Daughter

141 I was just a few years shy of forty-two, the age of my father when he died, the weekend I flew to West Virginia for the 125th anniversary of Temple Israel. My father had worshipped at this synagogue, along with the rest of the Silverstein family. At the hotel, I put in my contact lenses and blinked at myself in the mirror. As my face swam into focus, I examined myself for evidence of my father’s genes. My hair color, now streaked with gray, was the most obvious link. I also saw a ghostly image of my father’s face in the shape of my eyebrows and the contour of my cheekbones. After the Shabbat service, I sipped a cup of punch and scanned the room for cousins, some of whom I hadn’t seen since my grandmother Bertie’s funeral ten years earlier. My father’s sister, Aunt Betty, prompted me when I couldn’t remember someone’s name. A stooped man with gray hair came up and gently touched my elbow. I turned and he introduced himself. It wasn’t a name I recognized . “I’m Lee’s daughter,” I said, surprised at how unfamiliar, yet how appropriate, that sounded. “I heard you were here,” he said. “I knew your father. Very well, in fact. We were in school together.” “What do you remember?” I asked, eager to add to my aunt’s collection of stories about how she and my father played tag on the lawn of the West Virginia State Capitol and rummaged through the trash there to find postage stamps for their collections. “He was so serious,” my father’s friend said. “He had an amazing memory. It was photographic, really. His mind was like a steel trap. Did you know his nickname was ‘The Professor’?” “Well, I know my mother used to call him ‘The Absent-Minded Professor’ because he tripped over his feet when he was busy thinking about something else,” I said. “That sounds like Lee!” We smiled at each other. “It’s so nice that you came,” he said, shaking my hand before he walked away. I Am Lee’s Daughter 142 My aunt drove my mother and me to the cemetery, up a winding road to a hillside overlooking the Kanawah River and the buildings that dotted the mountainsides. Fall had splashed the oak and redbud trees. It was only the third time I had seen my father’s grave. Its headstone is a simple granite rectangle, with his name carved in capital letters. When she dies, my mother wants to be buried next to him. We silently emerged from the car, and each walked in separate directions. I watched my mother and aunt, the backs of their dark coats receding, and wished they would turn around. Wouldn’t it be nice to embrace each other, to say the Kaddish, to place flowers on the grave? Their slow footsteps crunched the gravel, and I realized that this is the only way they know how to grieve: alone, silently. Letting Jewish tradition take over, I picked up three stones—one for my father’s headstone, one for my grandmother, and one for Joe, the grandfather I never knew. After watching me, my mother silently did the same. Then I pulled out my notebook and played the role I know all too well, the one I am trained to do, the one that can mask my feelings: journalist. I quizzed my aunt about our ancestors, taking notes about each one. Then I took photos of their headstones. Later, I changed into jeans, zipped my jacket against the October chill, and left the hotel. I wandered through the food court of the mall across the street, then went outside. It was getting dark. I walked down Capitol Street, which Aunt Betty said used to be the center of town before the mall came. I tried to imagine the neighborhood as my father might have seen it one afternoon from his twowheeler : his father’s law office around the corner; cars with isinglass windows; girls in cardigans and blouses with Peter Pan collars, boys in crew cuts; the twang of the West Virginia accent in every conversation ; mountains looming over everything; the Kanawah River slicing through, lights from the opposite shore faceting its surface. I tried to imagine growing up here, and what it might be like to drop by my father’s office and ask him for a quarter so...