When I was a child a Black woman named Mary Wells cared for my sister and me. Having "live-in help" allowed my mother time during the day to visit, smoke, and drink with her friends, a combination of leisure time habits that she enjoyed, but that eventually killed her.
I was only three when Mary Wells left, too young to remember much about her, so recently, I asked my father what she was like. "She loved you very much," he answered, assuming that this was all I needed to know. Mary Wells was from the Caribbean, he added, but he didn't know which island. He mentioned that she spoke with a British accent. That's odd: strangers often asked me, during the first two decades of my life, if I was from England, and I'd say no, it must be my lisp. It may, I now realize, have been Mary Wells, passing on to me the sound of her voice.
Plus Jesus. My parents heard me babbling one day, telling myself a story about angels who got grass between their toes, and Jesus playing football and making touchdowns. They did not believe in God and when they discovered that Mary had gotten me down on my knees in prayer, nearly fired her for admitting she'd gotten me pass on her beliefs to me.
My family moved a lot when I was young. My parents said they chose towns for "their good schools." The schools always turned out to be overrated; their reputation was mostly code, I think, for "white and Protestant." I remember thinking of the few Catholics in town as exotic -- and therefore suspect.
During elementary school, we lived in Garden City, a Long Island suburb that the New York Times reported last year was found to have kept assessments of older homes at 1930s levels. That meant newer residents -- Jewish, Black, Hispanic, had been paying unfairly higher taxes, effectively underwriting the older parts of town.
We lived near my cousin's house. As a child, I loved my uncle for encouraging me in music and inviting me and my cousin to play in his family quartet. But Uncle Stevie also gave us books of plays to act out that had Negro characters like Sambo and Chloe and dialogue that made them sound stupid. Later, when my cousin dated a Negro boy, my uncle's mother sat her down and said: God made white rabbits and black rabbits and did not intend them to mix.
I spent summers in the Poconos, where I swam all day in a private lake owned by nearby cottage-owners. One summertime family was driven to the lake each morning to spend the day swimming and sunbathing while their chauffeur, a Black man in cap and uniform, waited in the car. My parents, who saw themselves as enlightened liberals, taught us to greet him with strict politeness. Even so, they made clear, like my uncle's family, that we should keep our distance. We never said anything to him beyond a polite "hello."
During my high school years, we lived in suburban New Jersey. My parents chose Chatham, another town with overrated schools, rather than Summit, the town next door whose schools had Black and Hispanic kids. In my 1954 diary, I wrote about a Chatham-Summit basketball game: "We went to the dance after. There were clusters of tough-looking kids with mostly black hair, and a lot of Negroes. The girls all wore bright red skirts with crinolines and nylon blouses. The jitterbuggers were good, and the music was jazzy and mombo-y, but we went home early."
Years later, I learned there WERE Black kids living in Chatham -- they were the sons and daughters of the servants of the rich people on the hill. They were told, a former classmate said, to enroll in the Summit schools because they wouldn't "fit in" in Chatham's schools.
In college, there were two Black girls in my class of 500. One is now a New York Superior judge; the other is author of a memoir about growing up in a family that was split apart when one branch of relatives went off to live as white. In it, she mentions that while in college, she had to go by bus to Boston to get her hair done because white hairdressers in the town of Wellesley said they "didn't know how" to do her hair.
After college, I taught English in Berkeley, California, where my students were a wonderful mix of ethnicities. But I didn't know how to respond to that diversity. My notes on student essays were myopic. A Japanese-American student started her essay this way: "When I was born my family was very glad, because they year before, my sister died by an atom bomb." I gave the girl an "A" but offered her no other response. An immigrant boy wrote: "I am a boy how is not too bright and not too good-looking either." I jotted a note instructing him to change "how" to "who." One Black student got a check but no further reaction to a poem that conveyed this despairing vision: "Life is cold, it has no feelings, if you're not on your toes, you get trampled, the strong get stronger and there is no in between!"
A decade later in Massachusetts, I enrolled my own children in Cambridge's public schools. Their friends were both Black and White, which gave me my first experience seeing people of different races as indviduals, each a collection of talents and quirks all his own. Still, just a few years ago, one of my sons' friends, now grown up, tapped me on the shoulder as I walked through Harvard Square. When I turned around, he said quickly, "Don't worry, it's just me, Paul." My expression showed what I must have been thinking: Black man. I couldn't know you. What do you want from me?
I was active in the PTA back then, and remember one meeting at which a Mr. Emory, who was opening a pharmacy across the street, asked us to support his request for a city permit to add a food take-out for the next-door factory workers. We discussed at length "the problem" we saw that schoolkids might try to cross the busy street to buy a snack, and be hit by a car. Mr. Emory assured us that he would not sell food to kids during school hours. I don't remember whether we officially opposed it, or just didn't support it, but it did not get the permit. My neighbor says one abutter went to court and stopped him. Emory Drug limped along for 20 years while other multi-purpose pharmacies flourished. It folded this year. The local paper recently reported it had been the first Black-owned pharmacy in Cambridge history.
As the decades passed, I began to wonder why my neighborhood, stayed so clearly divided, with many Black families lived on the other side of Huron Ave but almost none on my side. This year, one of my neighbors told me that the elderly owner, now deceased, of the houselot bordering mine had refused for decades to advertise her rental apartment in order to avoid having to rent to a Black family. Upon her death, she'd insisted, her house must not be allowed to be sold to anyone who was Black.
I've been looking back, recently, at what I now see was a comfortable but very White life. I'm doing a kind of oral history with my dad. He tells me some of the same stories I've heard before. But now I'm asking different questions and getting stories I'd never heard before. About the day in the 1950s when a Black man asked him if the seat beside him on the Long Island railway commuter train was taken. Dad said no, it was free, and the man sat down and then told Dad he rarely gets to sit: people always tell him "the seat is taken."
I recently went to the library and read old copies of the Amsterdam News, New York's African American newspaper, to see what Black people were experiencing in the 1940s, when I was in elementary school, supposedly being taught everything I needed to know about my country. Article after article described civil rights struggles with railroads, the YWCA, Horn and Hardardt cafeterias, the Army and the Navy.
The newspaper's want ads, meanwhile, were for "delivery boys" and other jobs for men who were still called "boy." I remember in particular the elaborate ad for an elevator operator requiring applicants to be "of average size and stature, high intelligence, natural graciousness, mellow voice, even temper, and a sort of savoir faire which aids in meeting and dealing with 6 million people a week."
During World War II, my father said, the government hired him to replace high-paid factory workers gone to war. He was told to target his outreach to "housewives, the handicapped and Negroes." He discovered that many Black men he hired had earned PhDs but had been working for years as janitors, bellhops and delivery "boys."
I, in my 60s, and my father, in his 90s, are taking another look at layers of our lives that we've mostly ignored and never until now talked about. In the process, I'm gradually awakening from my cozy oblivion.
For more of Barbara Beckwith, visit:
www.barbarabeckwith.net - my blog
www.cddbooks.com What Was I Thinking? Reflecting on Everyday Racism
www.nwuboston.org National Writers Union/Boston - we write for love AND money
www.wpcr-boston.org White People Challenging Racism: Moving from Talk to Action
I was only three when Mary Wells left, too young to remember much about her, so recently, I asked my father what she was like. "She loved you very much," he answered, assuming that this was all I needed to know. Mary Wells was from the Caribbean, he added, but he didn't know which island. He mentioned that she spoke with a British accent. That's odd: strangers often asked me, during the first two decades of my life, if I was from England, and I'd say no, it must be my lisp. It may, I now realize, have been Mary Wells, passing on to me the sound of her voice.
Plus Jesus. My parents heard me babbling one day, telling myself a story about angels who got grass between their toes, and Jesus playing football and making touchdowns. They did not believe in God and when they discovered that Mary had gotten me down on my knees in prayer, nearly fired her for admitting she'd gotten me pass on her beliefs to me.
My family moved a lot when I was young. My parents said they chose towns for "their good schools." The schools always turned out to be overrated; their reputation was mostly code, I think, for "white and Protestant." I remember thinking of the few Catholics in town as exotic -- and therefore suspect.
During elementary school, we lived in Garden City, a Long Island suburb that the New York Times reported last year was found to have kept assessments of older homes at 1930s levels. That meant newer residents -- Jewish, Black, Hispanic, had been paying unfairly higher taxes, effectively underwriting the older parts of town.
We lived near my cousin's house. As a child, I loved my uncle for encouraging me in music and inviting me and my cousin to play in his family quartet. But Uncle Stevie also gave us books of plays to act out that had Negro characters like Sambo and Chloe and dialogue that made them sound stupid. Later, when my cousin dated a Negro boy, my uncle's mother sat her down and said: God made white rabbits and black rabbits and did not intend them to mix.
I spent summers in the Poconos, where I swam all day in a private lake owned by nearby cottage-owners. One summertime family was driven to the lake each morning to spend the day swimming and sunbathing while their chauffeur, a Black man in cap and uniform, waited in the car. My parents, who saw themselves as enlightened liberals, taught us to greet him with strict politeness. Even so, they made clear, like my uncle's family, that we should keep our distance. We never said anything to him beyond a polite "hello."
During my high school years, we lived in suburban New Jersey. My parents chose Chatham, another town with overrated schools, rather than Summit, the town next door whose schools had Black and Hispanic kids. In my 1954 diary, I wrote about a Chatham-Summit basketball game: "We went to the dance after. There were clusters of tough-looking kids with mostly black hair, and a lot of Negroes. The girls all wore bright red skirts with crinolines and nylon blouses. The jitterbuggers were good, and the music was jazzy and mombo-y, but we went home early."
Years later, I learned there WERE Black kids living in Chatham -- they were the sons and daughters of the servants of the rich people on the hill. They were told, a former classmate said, to enroll in the Summit schools because they wouldn't "fit in" in Chatham's schools.
In college, there were two Black girls in my class of 500. One is now a New York Superior judge; the other is author of a memoir about growing up in a family that was split apart when one branch of relatives went off to live as white. In it, she mentions that while in college, she had to go by bus to Boston to get her hair done because white hairdressers in the town of Wellesley said they "didn't know how" to do her hair.
After college, I taught English in Berkeley, California, where my students were a wonderful mix of ethnicities. But I didn't know how to respond to that diversity. My notes on student essays were myopic. A Japanese-American student started her essay this way: "When I was born my family was very glad, because they year before, my sister died by an atom bomb." I gave the girl an "A" but offered her no other response. An immigrant boy wrote: "I am a boy how is not too bright and not too good-looking either." I jotted a note instructing him to change "how" to "who." One Black student got a check but no further reaction to a poem that conveyed this despairing vision: "Life is cold, it has no feelings, if you're not on your toes, you get trampled, the strong get stronger and there is no in between!"
A decade later in Massachusetts, I enrolled my own children in Cambridge's public schools. Their friends were both Black and White, which gave me my first experience seeing people of different races as indviduals, each a collection of talents and quirks all his own. Still, just a few years ago, one of my sons' friends, now grown up, tapped me on the shoulder as I walked through Harvard Square. When I turned around, he said quickly, "Don't worry, it's just me, Paul." My expression showed what I must have been thinking: Black man. I couldn't know you. What do you want from me?
I was active in the PTA back then, and remember one meeting at which a Mr. Emory, who was opening a pharmacy across the street, asked us to support his request for a city permit to add a food take-out for the next-door factory workers. We discussed at length "the problem" we saw that schoolkids might try to cross the busy street to buy a snack, and be hit by a car. Mr. Emory assured us that he would not sell food to kids during school hours. I don't remember whether we officially opposed it, or just didn't support it, but it did not get the permit. My neighbor says one abutter went to court and stopped him. Emory Drug limped along for 20 years while other multi-purpose pharmacies flourished. It folded this year. The local paper recently reported it had been the first Black-owned pharmacy in Cambridge history.
As the decades passed, I began to wonder why my neighborhood, stayed so clearly divided, with many Black families lived on the other side of Huron Ave but almost none on my side. This year, one of my neighbors told me that the elderly owner, now deceased, of the houselot bordering mine had refused for decades to advertise her rental apartment in order to avoid having to rent to a Black family. Upon her death, she'd insisted, her house must not be allowed to be sold to anyone who was Black.
I've been looking back, recently, at what I now see was a comfortable but very White life. I'm doing a kind of oral history with my dad. He tells me some of the same stories I've heard before. But now I'm asking different questions and getting stories I'd never heard before. About the day in the 1950s when a Black man asked him if the seat beside him on the Long Island railway commuter train was taken. Dad said no, it was free, and the man sat down and then told Dad he rarely gets to sit: people always tell him "the seat is taken."
I recently went to the library and read old copies of the Amsterdam News, New York's African American newspaper, to see what Black people were experiencing in the 1940s, when I was in elementary school, supposedly being taught everything I needed to know about my country. Article after article described civil rights struggles with railroads, the YWCA, Horn and Hardardt cafeterias, the Army and the Navy.
The newspaper's want ads, meanwhile, were for "delivery boys" and other jobs for men who were still called "boy." I remember in particular the elaborate ad for an elevator operator requiring applicants to be "of average size and stature, high intelligence, natural graciousness, mellow voice, even temper, and a sort of savoir faire which aids in meeting and dealing with 6 million people a week."
During World War II, my father said, the government hired him to replace high-paid factory workers gone to war. He was told to target his outreach to "housewives, the handicapped and Negroes." He discovered that many Black men he hired had earned PhDs but had been working for years as janitors, bellhops and delivery "boys."
I, in my 60s, and my father, in his 90s, are taking another look at layers of our lives that we've mostly ignored and never until now talked about. In the process, I'm gradually awakening from my cozy oblivion.
For more of Barbara Beckwith, visit:
www.barbarabeckwith.net - my blog
www.cddbooks.com What Was I Thinking? Reflecting on Everyday Racism
www.nwuboston.org National Writers Union/Boston - we write for love AND money
www.wpcr-boston.org White People Challenging Racism: Moving from Talk to Action