Color: Essays on Race, Family, and History

The Mitchell Movement

The Mitchell Movement All of us, I imagine, recall dreadful moments from our schooling. In my case, I attended a venerable, brutal, allboys school in New York City which was—and proudly so— the oldest private school in the United States. When I was a student there, the Collegiate School consisted of a large red historic building—with great porticoes and a Dutch-stepped roof—and a newer, more utilitarian structure. Most of the old building housed a church named, seemingly incongruously, the Dutch Reformed Church (and one only wonders what it was before the Reformation); the rest was used for office space; the other structure, the newer part, was a rather improbable grey chunk of stone, singularly undistinguished. 13 Collegiate, of course, had its long-held traditions. Most were innocuous; the others—like its penchant to push students to their limits—could be, and far too often were, sinister . Children did learn there; many, however, paid a great price. No one, at least in the twelve years I was enrolled, was not affected: the best students were thick-skinned; another group graduated somewhat punch-drunk; the rest of us departed with something essential missing: we had been violated , but we did not know by what, or how we might be healed. There was just a big gash in our psyches, ineffably dooming us to chase our severed halves, like cut worms. The school—and my years there—seems forever a part of my memory, and though I would like to think that this essay will be my last word on this painful subject, I find myself going back to my time spent there—again and again—as one switches one’s tongue around a diseased tooth to discover if it still hurts. This, of course, is the writer’s lot and joy: that which has most hurt him has, paradoxically, given him his life. I constantly remember being the only black in my classes, and the time, on the first day of Spanish class—I was in the fourth grade—when the teacher, Mr. Calvacca, asked me, “Would the colored boy in the red jacket read the sentence?” meaning me, the “colored boy,” who now was as beet red as his vermilion blazer. Or the time the music teacher took one of my classmates, who she claimed was making spitballs, and made him stand before the class, fill a six-ounce cup with his own spittle, and drink it down before our terrified eyes. Not only was this act disgusting, but I shall never forget that thinboned student, trying to create the ghastly meal that he would soon be called upon to swallow. There are many more such instances—the beating of a boy in the stomach in the headmaster’s office for some minor infraction, the constant dreary verbal bullying—but the result was that never to my knowledge was any teacher ever punished for any act of cruelty to his or her charges. The school 14 c o l o r was a famous one: thousands applied to get accepted; it was the door to Harvard, Heaven, and Respectability; and parents took the school’s methods as sacrosanct. Rarely would a parent stick up for his child: my parents scurried to the school when a teacher made a homosexual pass at me in the fifth grade; a famous cartoonist once came to the school to dispel a teacher’s notion that his son was “too creative.” But these were unusual occasions—as exceptional as finding gold in a neighbor’s stream. Since I was black—and one of the first of two black children in the school’s three-hundred-year history—things, of course, grew more complicated. Injustice as I perceived it often flared up Janus-faced. Clearly the place believed certain things, and one could get into trouble for any number of reasons , including laziness, boyishness, failure to listen, failure to keep a neat appearance, and so on. But for the black child, in a totally alien environment, everything shimmered with possible associations, imaginings, and repercussions. When a teacher singled me out, I often wasn’t certain of my offense, and so the justice imposed always seemed, at least initially, to be capricious. Yet in those few eternal seconds, the flood of interrogative disgust, self-recrimination, and plain bewilderment was pure agony. And further, if one was singled out because...