White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

Ann and Lee, Mom and Dad

12 My mother, Ann, never wore black because she called it “an old lady color.” Her favorite color was blue, and she wore it almost every day—navy cardigans in the winter; baby-blue, sleeveless blouses and cotton skirts in the summer. She kept her black hair short and parted on the side, her bangs clipped back with a metal bobby pin. The only makeup she ever wore was red lipstick, which she kept in a pocketbook that seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of Kleenex, Bic pens, and Life Savers. Her waist was trim enough for her to tuck in her blouses and cinch her skirts with a belt. Winter in Chicago was something my mother never could get used to. She had grown up in Richmond, where flowers bloomed in March and snow usually melted the day after it fell. She kept her “shoe boots”—red rubber boots with old loafers inside—out in the front vestibule all winter, grudgingly pulling them on every time it snowed. “Wooo!” she would say, winding up her plaid muffler and pushing open the front door, “Feel that cold air!” Her voice sounded as deep as the rumble of traffic outside. It was so low, strangers sometimes thought she was a man when she answered the phone. My mother’s education in the segregated schools of Richmond, which she attended in the 1930s and 1940s, had hardly prepared her for the life she lived in Chicago. Yet she had an inquisitive streak that made her want to leave the South to attend the University of Michigan for college and Bank Street College of Education in New York for graduate school. My father also encouraged her liberal tendencies. In Chicago, she taught nursery school every morning at the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club down the street and helped supervise an indoor playground called the Tot Lot. Her classes were as racially mixed as the rest of the neighborhood. Once a week, she and some of her friends took a University of Chicago class called “The Negro in America.” They read literature by James Baldwin, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. DuBois and discussed Negro history. Ann and Lee, Mom and Dad 13 In the afternoons, my mother and I sat at the yellow and white Formica-topped kitchen table, a Dr. Seuss book open in front of us. Pointing her index finger at the individual letters, she taught me how to sound out the hiss of the “s,” the pop of the “p,” and the crunch of the “c” until I could read. The day I haltingly made my way through the first pages of Hop on Pop she clapped her hands. When my father came home for dinner, she asked me to read for him, too. As Mom and Dad, my parents seemed to have a deep and abiding rapport. They met on a student ship in the summer of 1948. My father was on his way to Sweden for an exchange program and my mother was on her way to travel around the European capitals with a girlfriend. Both were taking the summer off from graduate studies in New York—my father, from law school at Columbia; my mother, from Bank Street. As Jews with southern roots, they had an instant bond. The long crossing home gave them a chance to stroll around the ship’s deck, watching the water churn past, chatting about what they had seen in Europe and the studies they planned to resume when they returned. Their courtship took place in the bustle of New York’s Chinese restaurants, Broadway shows, and Central Park. They married in 1950. At our house in Chicago, they must have bickered about something , the price of the tulip bulbs he planted or the wrinkles she couldn’t seem to iron from the shirts he had to wear to court. But I have a hard time remembering any of their conversations with each other. Anything I try to imagine sounds flat and mundane. What I do remember is their gestures: his hands brushing her neck to clasp the silver necklace she wore when they went out to the movies; his arm circling her shoulders as we walked across the beach at Lake Michigan. Or the two of them whispering as they passed the binoculars back and forth while we watched the eclipse of the moon in a field near our house. Their togetherness felt as sturdy as the floor under my bed...