White Girl: A Story of School Desegregation

Joined Hands

5 When I filled out a high-school questionnaire in 1974, I chose the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision as the historic event that most influenced my life. I wasn’t even born when the Court called for an end to school segregation, but the decision informed most of my education. The other event that profoundly affected me was more personal: the death of my father in 1968 due to a heart attack. He kissed me good-bye as I left for second grade one morning and he was gone by the time I came home for lunch. I was seven years old; my sister was ten. My father’s death set off a chain reaction that uprooted us from our home, sent us halfway across the country, and put me in the midst of desegregation. It devastated my family life. My mother, bitter and emotionally desiccated in the aftermath of his death, has been a widow ever since. My sister grew up to have no family of her own and to live thousands of miles away. She has asked me to call her Suzanne in this story. The father I remember was the only dad in the neighborhood who would play “Red Rover” with us. With his bald head towering at least a foot above the tallest kid, he was the most popular member of our team. His long legs and slim build made him look more like a professor than a football player. In our yard, a grassy ten-by-fifteenfoot rectangle replicated in the back of every house on our row, all the kids would chorus, “Red Rover, Red Rover, let Mr. Silverstein come over!” He would grin, lower his head, and run into their line, trying to break through the wall of linked arms. After a few rounds, my father, laughing and out of breath, would say, “I feel like a ping pong ball!” He’d push his glasses back up his nose and say, “Call someone else over!” We lived in Hyde Park, near the University of Chicago and within walking distance of Lake Michigan. We had no special connection to the city; my father had grown up in Charleston, West Virginia, and my mother in Richmond. Chicago was simply where my father found a job he liked. His specialty was a new area of law at the Joined Hands 6 time—public defender and legal aid programs. Defense of the Poor, the book he wrote about public defender programs in each state, had been featured in Time magazine. My parents chose our house, in the middle of a long, tan brick row on East 55th Street, because from there he could walk to work at the American Bar Foundation. When my sister got a new bike and gave me her old one, Dad patiently pushed me up and down the street behind our house, his hand steadying the seat. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get the hang of riding. I would wobble one way, then the other, and end up in a tearful heap on the asphalt. “Keep at it,” he said, lifting me up and brushing the dirt off my knees. When I finally took off in a wobbly circle, he stood by and cheered, “Atta girl!” In the winter, my father would load the neighborhood kids into his red Chevy and take us ice skating at a makeshift rink—a field that firemen had flooded with hoses. We’d skate from one end to the other until our cheeks turned numb, then troop into a warmup shed and huddle around a fire behind a wire grate. I still have a photograph of myself ice skating with Shawn, a neighbor boy. We’re holding hands and peering into the brutally cold air. Shawn was black, as were many of our neighbors in Chicago. I frequently played jump rope and bounced Super balls in the street with Sheila, the girl my age who lived next door. Her family was one of the first on our block to get a color TV; I would stand in our yard, peering over the fence, and try to watch through their window. When my parents bought their house in 1962, they chose to live in one of the few racially mixed neighborhoods in the entire United States, a fact that would inform the rest of my life. When Mrs. Jackson, Shawn’s mother, sat in our kitchen and drank...