White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

Invisible

Invisible In the eighth grade, I was reassigned to Hill Middle School, the same school that my mother had attended in the 1930s when it was all white. The Binford building could only accommodate sixth and seventh grades, so all of us had to attend eighth grade elsewhere. Hill was about 85 percent black by the time I arrived in the fall of 1973. It was close enough for me to walk; the black students, and whites who lived farther from school than me, were bused. The building’s yellowish brick walls looked grimy up close. Two pine trees as tall as the building’s three stories flanked the entrance. Behind the school was an asphalt playground, and across the street was a playing field where Mom had once learned field hockey. The school’s asphalt tennis courts were in the next block, across trafficchoked Thompson Street. Most mornings, I went to school with Liz. Once again, she was not in any of my classes because she was not on the honors track. I was lonelier than ever because there were only two other white girls to sit with in the cafeteria. Most of the white people I knew from Binford had gone to private schools. A lot of the black kids, including Walter, had also been dispersed, mostly reassigned to other Richmond public schools. When I told my mother that Sandra was transferring into Trinity Episcopal, a new school south of the James River, she shook her head and sighed. Trinity was one of the schools around Richmond that had opened or expanded in response to the busing-fueled demand . “Private schools give kids lots of book smarts, but no common sense,” my mother said. “Those little darlings are so sheltered.” “Don’t you think Sandra will have more friends than I do?” I asked. I was pointing out what I saw as an advantage. I didn’t care so much about reading Chaucer in English class and being well prepared for the SATs, the educational advantages that private schools were supposed to bestow on me. I wanted a chance to be popular, 87 88 something that would never happen to me as a white girl at my current school. “She might, but everyone is the same,” my mother said. She also pointed out that most of the private schools in Richmond were Christian. If I became a student, I would have to go to chapel and recite the Lord’s Prayer even if I didn’t want to. My mother also objected to paying the tuition, though it was something she could have afforded had she made it a priority. My father’s life insurance and my grandmother’s resources had left her with enough money to send me to ballet lessons (a waste, as I was so clumsy the teacher cut me from the spring recital) and summer camp. Her main criticism of private schools had nothing to do with money. Rather, it had to do with my father’s ideals. “The world is not made only for privileged white people, you know,” she said. I certainly had enough evidence that this was true, so I let the subject drop. Sandra was one of the friends I missed most as I yawned my way through French class without anyone to help me make up fake definitions, or as I cowered in the back of the locker room when changing for gym class. The only bright spot that year was my independent study with a literature specialist from the Richmond public schools. I had started out in Miss Torrey’s English class. She squinched her mouth, prefaced every sentence with “aw, uh, aw, uh,” and hobbled around the room on legs that looked like they might give out any second. Her idea of a class was telling each of us to read a passage from the textbook aloud and then asking if we had any questions. When I asked if we could ever do any creative writing, she said, “Few students can write any poetry that makes sense, so we won’t waste our class time on it.” At dinner, I told Mom what Miss Torrey had said about poetry. My mother knew I liked to write poetry as well as fiction, that I spent hours in my room filling spiral notebooks with my own writing. She looked up from her salad bowl and said, “This is appalling! How does an English teacher have the right to say...