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When we moved to Germantown in 1951, we only took the new television and my grandmother’s bedroom suite. My mother had hoped that she was leaving everything else behind – the cussing and swearing, the thugs on the street corners. She was even letting us off the harsh discipline of Catholic School.
Germantown is a district of Philadelphia that was originally settled 300 years ago by thirteen Quaker and Mennonite families from Krefeld, Germany. In those days it was 5700 acres of land to the northeast of Philadelphia. It was divided by an Indian trail which remains its main thoroughfare, Germantown Avenue. Who knows what happened to the amiable Indians? Like fallen leaves, they disappeared without mention or trace.
The Krefelders and their leader, Francis Daniel Pastorious, an aristocrat and scholar, were part of William Penn’s ‘holy experiment’. These Krefelders made the first public protest against slavery in 1688 when they declared that all human beings had the right to live as free men. At the time, this was considered too radical to be readily accepted by the Quakers.
For generations the community remained German. Both the Bible and a newspaper were printed there in German. The district didn’t begin to attract the English until 1750, when William Allen, the chief justice of Pennsylvania, built his country seat there, Mount Airy. As more English followed him, English architecture merged with German into a specific style called Anglo-German. The district was considered a German township until about 1830, when the English became dominant, setting up their own press and linking Germantown to Philadelphia by train. For the next hundred or so years, right up to the Second World War, Germantown was one of the more fashionable districts of Philadelphia.
By the time my family moved in, there were too many Melangians in the district for it to be considered fashionable any more. It wasn’t unusual in the summer months to hear the watermelon man hawking his wares in the street, selling watermelons for 25 cents or five cantaloupes for a dollar from his open-back pick-up truck. But some of the early historic residences and the Market Square with its Civil War monument were still standing, maintained by the Germantown Historical Society. They made impressions on me as permanent as 23rd Street. Germantown still had a decidedly German and English feeling about it. I didn’t know to what extent at the time.
Our small seven-room terraced house with a front and back garden made an immense difference to our lives.
To help my grandmother plant our first garden was to discover with great pride that she knew the names of the flowers and trees and how to tend the earth and things that grew from it. Marigolds and dahlias, hollyhocks and morning glories sprouted, and I checked their growth each day with awe and anticipation. She planted some seeds for me that would grow into cobs of corn for popping, so the packet said. I can’t remember if they did. She even bought the almanac to study planting times, but I discovered to my horror that her interest in what the moon and stars were doing was mostly astrological.
With her garden and her new sewing machine, Edna was nearly too busy for bad talk.
Our neighbours two doors away kept full-grown chickens in their back yard. Fluffy, our new cat, was often foolhardy enough to slip into their yard in the hope of a kill. He invariably returned pecked and injured, but he wouldn’t learn. Once he arrived home so much the worse for one of these chicken attacks that he succumbed to letting me bandage him and put him in my doll carriage to cart him about for an entire weekend.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but recently when I looked at a street map of Philadelphia, I noticed that North Philly couldn’t have been more than a twenty-minute trolley ride away from us, yet I don’t remember any one of us making the effort to go back.
There were a few odd characters in the neighbourhood, like Jet, the local hobo. He had a layer of grey whiskers covering his dark-brown skin, and his dishevelled clothes were various tones of grey, ill-fitting and dirty. He always wore a jacket and a brimmed hat as a formality, even in the hottest weather. He looked a mess. Some afternoons I’d see him shuffle along the street dragging his feet (the way Edna told us not to walk). His mangy-looking, nameless old dog was never far behind. They always moved at a deadly slow pace down the middle of the street, not on the sidewalk. He had a reputation for being regularly drunk, but I was afraid to get close enough to smell liquor on him. I used to run up to the porch and stand near the front door if I saw him coming up the street, more afraid of catching his dog’s mange than I was of Jet.
For me, the new thrill was to be allowed to play regularly with other children on the block. On 23rd Street, my mother had to be so particular about our playmates that we nearly only had each other. With Pam and Dennis at school all day, Edna was my best friend, even though I could tell when they came home that Pam was her favourite. I like to believe that it was because Pam was the first grandchild, but I suspected that it was also because Pam was beautiful with jet-black wavy hair and slanted chestnut-brown eyes. She was quiet and read most of the time, but I could never tell whether her passion for books was her own or her way of satisfying my mother’s ambition for us to excel at school.
Despite being Melangian, Ikey was the perfect Jewish mother. She didn’t feed us matzos but she was clannish, ambitious, competitive, guilt-provoking, adored her children and believed that a Ph.D. was the be-all and end-all of life.
I didn’t find this too hard to live with and was under less pressure than Pam to succeed, as she was the eldest. The four years’ difference in our ages meant that we never managed to be at the same school at the same time after St Elizabeth’s. She’d always graduated or moved on before I started a school, leaving a dazzling record behind her. When trouble started for her at school in Germantown, I wasn’t around to give her either help or moral support. The streets were littered with enough ammunition for me to have helped her stave off an attack even if I was too little to be of much use otherwise. I am ashamed to say that I considered sticks and stones and bricks fair play if the odds were stacked against me. It was my mother who taught us this line of defence in spite of all her talk about being dignified and ladylike.
In the early fifties, Germantown wasn’t generally rough like North Philly but it had its bad elements, who decided to make my sister their object of torment and agitation because she was pretty. At ten she wasn’t expected to defend herself against a gang of rowdy girls and had to be escorted back and forth to school until finally the police were called in.
I’d like to think that we Melangians have stopped persecuting our own for looking too African or not African enough. Appearance even had the potential to divide family loyalties.
It pains me to think of how often Pam suffered for being too pretty and too brainy. Her years on the reservation and certainly in Germantown were harsher than mine and, no doubt, if she gave you her version of our family’s life, it would be quite a different picture. Pam neither bothered anybody nor had that early lust for the mirror or physical praise which would have given her airs to make other girls dislike her. Maybe the fact that she got the answers right all the time provoked them. I couldn’t think why else they wanted to hurt her.
I don’t know if anybody realized how much her victimization troubled me, but I kept my worry to myself and daydreamed that I was Wonder Woman and Supergirl rolled into one, on hand to swoop down from the tallest building to destroy all the ruffians when they taunted her. Of course, I also needed to plan what to do if they attacked me.
At six, I was not at all pretty. I doubt that every time my mother looked at me, she wanted to send me back, but I was not the least bit exceptional-looking. I had a big space between my two front teeth, and eyes so dark that they merely reflected the light bulb when I was asked to hold them up to the light to have their colour checked. My hair was so unfortunately thick that my mother had to divide it into three sections which she then braided. The braid on top was wound into a bun and pinned down to keep it from dangling in my face. The hairpins usually felt as if they were sticking right into my brain, and I yearned for thin hair and only two braids, although this was not the sort of vanity that I would have been allowed to express.
Soon after we moved in, two of my new friends and I were playing at dressing up on a rainy afternoon. They were wearing high heels; I only put on some rouge and pinned my two loose braids up with the one on top so that it looked like an upsweep. As soon as the rain stopped, we paraded ourselves to the corner store to buy some penny candy. The air was scented with that delicious city smell of wet tarmac blending with the sweet smell of wet grass after a summer shower. We passed an old man sitting on a low porch, rocking slowly, his hat pulled down so that his face hardly showed. A woman was standing at the screen door and I heard him say to her how nice we looked and add that the one with the braids on top of her head looked just like Doris Day.
I wasn’t allowed to acknowledge strange men, so I kept walking and acted as though I hadn’t heard him. Doris Day. One of the other girls repeated what he’d said when we were out of earshot. Trying to be nonchalant, I cocked my head to the side and looked straight ahead of me. Doris Day. I would have preferred it if he’d said Jane Russell, but Doris Day would do. I wasn’t sure I’d look so much like her without the rouge.
Nobody could have conceived that my face would sneak its way onto a magazine cover. Anyhow, at that time Melangian girls didn’t appear on any covers but Ebony and Jet, the Melangian magazines. If I’d heard my mother say it once, I’d heard her repeat a thousand times that ‘looks will get you nowhere’. This seemed to contradict what little of life I’d observed, but maybe it was her way of making me feel less inadequate and it supported her conviction that college was our only hope of a good career. One thing was obvious, if being pretty attracted troublemakers, it was a quality hardly worth having and dangerous to flaunt if you did (as well as cheap, which was Edna’s final verdict on the subject). ‘Pretty is as pretty does,’ she stated.
I was about to lose Edna’s daily dose of homilies because as soon as I attended school for a full day, she got a job working for an Italian family who operated the local bakery. She probably got the job to help pay for the new fittings and furniture in every room. I knew better than to ask how we afforded it all, because it would have been considered none of my business and rude to enquire.
John Wister Elementary School was a three-storey brick building on Bringhurst Street not far from Germantown Avenue. It was a hundred years old and a big fuss was made over its wooden floors because they were the originals. John Wister was one of the early German settlers, and I was a very lucky girl, the principal told my mother before she carted me off to Miss Courtney’s class, to start first grade at a school that was so steeped in history. I was given my very own desk which had a sunken ink well, although we could only write in pencil. The desks were in rows with each attached to the bench in front and held together and supported by elaborate ironmongery. The writing surface was the hinged lid of an oblong wooden box so that you could lift it up and put your things inside. I was seated near Miss Courtney in the front of the room and though I dared not turn round to stare, I could have sworn that all the other children were white. Thank God I’d been watching a lot of television and knew how to act.
Television carted me off to places I had never dreamed existed. It took for granted that I was ready to share experiences quite foreign to my own. Mainly, it exposed those other Americans to me, the ones who didn’t live on the reservations. In 1952 the only ways that Melangians had of becoming familiar with white behaviour was by working with or for whites and by seeing movies and watching TV.
To me, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo and Fred and Ethel Mertz on the I Love Lucy show, Ralph, Alice, Trixie and Ed on The Honeymooners or George Burns and Gracie Allen were like neighbours I visited once a week. I saw what they did at breakfast or sat in their living room and overheard their conversations. Where else and how else could this have happened? While Max Bender and other white shopkeepers might have been genuinely cordial and exchanged a few niceties with a regular customer, I knew nothing about how people like Max lived or what he’d say to his wife. Radio and motion pictures didn’t give us a regular enough dose of exposure to create the familiarity, the insider’s view, that television gave us.
As liberal as Harry Truman was with his bills for public housing, socialized medicine, education as a federal, not a state, issue and his civil rights policy, there was never any suggestion that the races should mix socially. The GI Bill restored the interrupted education of men like my father and gave equal pensions to all Americans who had fought the war together, but nobody assumed that total integration would follow. Racial separation is part of American culture.
At six I wasn’t aware of this, but I was soon aware that many children in my class had never talked to a Melangian before and some of them definitely didn’t want to. Although John Wister school was close to our house, it was just beyond our local school-district boundary. Ikey got me enrolled there anyway. For the majority of my classmates and teachers, I might have been a visiting diplomat representing my whole race, because I soon learned that what I said and did was a reflection on other Melangians and if my classmates were going to overcome their assumption that they weren’t as clean, as good or as clever, the onus was on me. For a six-year-old this is a heavy burden, but on instructions from home I did what I could to be my best self and come first in all things.
In spite of this and of being called nigger and other such names when it suited somebody, I did love my school and most of what went with it, whether it was history or social studies, spinster teachers or spelling bees. There was always some national hero’s birthday or some impending holiday that gave us another excuse to hang up our pictures and create a display. Washington, Lincoln, Easter bunnies, Hallowe’en witches, Thanksgiving pilgrims, Christmas angels, fire-prevention week, keep-your-city-clean week, brotherly-love week. There was always something to celebrate and I wanted to be there.
I never felt as wonderful by the time I got to the school gate as I’d thought I was when I left home, and I was always uncertain if anybody would be brave enough to play with me in the school yard before the morning bell. I may have been the teacher’s pet, but my classmates were still wary of me before they’d have a few hours to get used to me in class. By recess, it was usually OK, and if it wasn’t, I’d stroll around with the teacher. Mainly, it taught me how to stand alone.
In 1952 when General Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson were running for president, I overheard talk in the house that the Republicans were terrible and would bring a lot of hardship, but almost all the children in my class wore I LIKE IKE buttons to show that their parents were voting for him and his running mate, Richard Nixon. Being for Stevenson set me apart.
I didn’t know much about the Republicans except that I’d heard they’d have us selling apples on the street corner. My mother bought me a grey jacket after the election which she said was an Eisenhower jacket. It nipped in at the waist and was of corduroy. It was a catastrophe and nearly made my life miserable, because it didn’t look a bit like anybody else’s jacket at school. I had enough trouble without it. Eisenhower had been a general, so I guess it was based on some army jacket of his.
Life seemed unaffected after Ike had won. I didn’t have to sell apples, and he didn’t make us go to school on Saturday, which was the other rumour I’d heard. Things at school were different but it had nothing to do with politics. I was often singled out to do special things like deliver a folded message to the principal, pass out the milk or read out loud when visitors came into our classroom. This made my classmates like me better. So, when Miss Courtney asked us to take a partner to file out in pairs holding hands, which we did going to assembly, recess or in fire drill, I no longer needed to pretend that it didn’t matter that nobody wanted to hold my hand. I had a couple of friends. Even walking into the school yard in the morning ceased to be a crisis in my school life.
Playing with these friends was easier when I spoke with the tone and rhythm of their speech, which was slightly different from mine and much higher pitched. I imitated their manners, too, their giggles and walk and the way they cocked their heads. I don’t think I did it consciously, it just happened. At close range, I could hear their drummer and marched to their beat. As soon as I got home, I’d automatically revert to the old me. I spoke the way I was spoken to, and my thinking and body language accommodated my speech.
It was the beginning of a pattern, because at six, I led two lives which required two separate personalities. It wasn’t a game or an act, though, it was more like a function. I lived between two nations – one Melangian and one American – and I adjusted to each.
During my first Christmas season at John Wister school I participated in the annual carol-singing at Grumblethorpe. Grumblethorpe was a house four blocks from school at 5267 Germantown Avenue, built by John Wister in 1744. (The year Johann Würster emigrated from a town near Heidelberg, Germany, he was nineteen and broke. Johann became a successful wine importer, anglicized his name and built a large summer house in Germantown. The three-storey house was originally known as Wister’s Big House but John’s grandson named the house Grumblethorpe after an English manor he’d read about in a novel. It has been refurbished to look as it did when John Wister and his family lived there.)
We sang our carols in the big front room. The blinds were drawn, so that the flickering light from the candles and the smell of Christmas pine and evergreens had a strange awesome effect, especially on a kid who’d not long been free of 23rd Street. I’d never seen anything like it and was dumbstruck.
Even though it was grand, Grumblethorpe was marked by Quaker simplicity. After carolling, we were shown around it in our usual file, holding hands in two lines. Our freshly shined shoes pattering across the floorboards made the only sound. We dared not whisper or touch the four-poster bed or the grandfather clocks. The drop-leaf tables and wooden chairs were less of a temptation. It looked as if nobody had sat in the winged armchair by the fireplace or eaten at the refectory table. The pastel-coloured walls were so quiet we were scared to cough.
Before we left, a white-haired lady chatted to us and gave us each a mug of hot chocolate with a marshmallow floating on the top. Another, similar lady passed out home-made Christmas cookies. I had never had chocolate to drink before. I stood as still as I could and was very glad my mother had put my hair in two ponytails even though I still had that silly braid on top. Edna had starched my grey and white dress which had a separate pinafore. The stillness there had a profound effect on me.
We had to walk past Grumblethorpe to get to the Band Box Theater, which wasn’t a theatre, it was a cinema. Dennis and Pam and I were allowed to go most Saturday afternoons. A few times I went with Dennis by myself and we’d sit in the back row and stuff ourselves with buttered popcorn, Jujy fruits and Neco wafers, which seemed more the purpose of going than the movie. I always felt safe when Dennis was with me, because apart from the fact that the bad boys liked him, he was bigger than most kids his age and looked like the sort of boy you shouldn’t mess with. I don’t recall that anyone ever did.
Dennis loved the movies and comic books, and after we got a record player, he used most of his allowance to buy records. One of his favourite TV shows was Amos ‘n Andy, which my mother thought should have been taken off the air for depicting ‘Negroes’ as ignorant. My brother used to provoke her by imitating the actors as soon as the programme ended. Dennis would pull faces, roll his eyes and speak an exaggerated Melangian dialect. Finally we were all banned from watching the show, but we loved Amos ‘n Andy so we would sneak and watch it anyway. He’d turn the volume down and I’d guard the door for him. The telly was in the back room on the second floor so it was easy to get away with this.
There were hardly any Melangians on TV other than the cast of Amos ‘n Andy and boxers like Sugar Ray Robinson. Once Richard Boone, who played the main doctor in a weekly hospital series called The Medic, had to treat a little Melangian girl. We all screamed with shock when she came on the screen. We’d never seen one of us in a television drama. Even the most regular police series, Dragnet, didn’t have one Melangian criminal. There was a character called Rochester on the Jack Benny show, but it was very rare to see us on TV unless singing and dancing.
Our first major media star came through on the news in 1953. Her name was Autherine Lucy. She was a young woman who wanted so much to be free to study at the college of her choice that she took on the whole city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and finally the whole goddamn United States government so that President Eisenhower had no choice but to send her an army. I don’t know why there aren’t statues of her. She was our very own Joan of Arc and to see her on the television screen facing an avalanche of rednecks was unforgettable. For weeks after her appearance, our radio and television seemed to be tuned to nothing but newscasts from the moment Edna, Thelma or Ikey came home from work. Melangian neighbours who normally only exchanged hellos had a lot to talk to each other about.
I was stunned to see the hundreds of agitators jeering and spitting and name-calling while Autherine faced them. She never looked as if she was in a hurry; when the camera panned across her face she seemed neither angry nor anxious. She had that look of patience someone has when waiting for a bus they know is coming.
A couple of times since, when I’ve been up against bewildering odds and felt fear creeping up on me or dared feel sorry for myself, I’ve only had to think of Autherine facing the mob to put things in proper perspective.
As far as I could see, there was nothing uncommon about Autherine except her courage. The fact that she looked like most other girls of her age that ambled around the reservation on a Saturday afternoon made her confrontation all the more shocking. It could have been any one of us standing in her shoes when what looked like the whole city of Tuscaloosa was determined to keep her from entering the doors of a school which our taxes helped to keep open.
While this compelling national school drama played out, I’d start each school day like millions of American children by standing at attention after the bell rang to salute the flag. Led by the teachers, I’d recite the pledge with the whole class just as I’d been doing since my first day at school. I could say it in my sleep:
I pledge allegiance to the flag
of the United States of America
and to the republic for which it stands,
one nation* (#ulink_40dec0d0-6f8b-512d-817d-a0ae3bf90e95), invisible,
with liberty and justice for all.
Then we’d sit down and a passage was read from the Bible. I don’t know how old I was before I realized ‘invisible’ was supposed to be ‘indivisible’.
To salute you placed your right hand on your heart, although I was never sure I’d found my heart. The pledge said things that I knew weren’t true once I’d seen Autherine Lucy and heard all the talk at home about what rights we didn’t have.
I hoped nobody at school would ask what I thought about the Autherine thing because I wasn’t allowed to lie. The teacher usually asked our opinions about current events, but I could tell from the way nobody mentioned Autherine in class that it was something we could not talk about. Patriotism was running too high to challenge it. America was like God. People believed in it.
When I discovered there was no Santa Claus, I think I cried. Part of my hurt was being robbed of my favourite myth and the rest was realizing that I had believed with all my might in something that older people knew all along was fake. I remember being told that since younger kids still needed to believe in Santa, I wasn’t to tell them he didn’t exist. I became an accessory to promoting a continuing myth and assumed I was doing the littler kids a favour by letting them believe a bit longer.
The same applies after I realized we’d been pledging ourselves to a myth about America. Obviously nobody wanted to deal with the truth, so as a child of eight I became an accessory, never exposing the deception, which everybody needed to go on believing in.
* (#ulink_fb7f0db5-1a9d-5e96-b583-930aacfb9101)The words ‘under God’ were added by act of Congress in 1954.
5 MOUNT AIRY AND CHESTNUT HILL (#ulink_96bf74cd-dfff-5532-ae7b-7844b270988b)
John Wister school mysteriously caught fire one Sunday night when I was in the second half of second grade, and I never went back there. I was bused to another school for quite some time.
Gradually the rougher elements became the majority in Germantown. Crap-shooters monopolized a corner of the street where we had to walk past them to the neighbourhood store. Some of them used to make passes at Ikey and Thelma. My mother was unnerved and called them gangsters. Edna called them riffraff and dared them to lay their hands on her. I suppose they were jobless as they were always there, throwing dice, calling bets and making idle threats to each other. ‘Gimme a double, sir.’ ‘Come on baby, come on.’ ‘A five and a four.’ ‘Double or nothin’.’ ‘Take yo’ hands off the dice. I’ll shoot yo’ ass.’ ‘You jive-ass mothafucka.’ We could hear them halfway up the block.
Late one afternoon when Ikey and I were coming home from Charlie Chernoff’s grocery store, all of a sudden a couple of police cars swerved up to the corner. As the police spilled out on the sidewalk, there was a melee and a shot was fired. It was like something straight out of the movies and I was scared nearly to death by the guns going off. But no one was hurt and I never found out who fired.
After my father’s medical tenure at Boston State Hospital, he came to visit with his youngest brother, Ernest, and I was more worried about the two of them walking around the neighbourhood than I was about Edna, Thelma and Ikey. My father was so gentle. His soft voice always made me feel he needed protecting, whereas I imagined only a fool would dare lay hands on one of my mothers, who each had a wild temper.
The summer Blair and Ernest came to visit us in Germantown is the summer I remember there best. To sit next to him or pass him on the stairs was nearly too exciting. This was less because I had missed my father than because men rarely crossed our doorstep. Aside from the insurance broker who made a regular Friday collection of my grandmother’s insurance premium, a couple of doctors making house calls when we were too sick to go to their surgeries, and a friend of Thelma’s who took us on a family outing once to Bear Mountain, I can’t remember men coming to our house. In those days respectable women didn’t receive callers as they would today. In the 1940s and 1950s when I was growing up, the social and sexual role of women was entirely different. There was no parade of ‘uncles’ trooping through. The only uncles I had were blood relations like Henry, and he only made one whirlwind visit to see us after the Korean War ended before he moved to California.
Both Blair and Ernest had marked Bostonian accents. A Bostonian accent in the fifties was equivalent in American to speaking the Queen’s English in England. It held a class distinction as much as anything else. For some reason a Bostonian accent implied that you were educated, cultured and well bred.
Blair didn’t act as if he was at all impressed with himself, though. He made jokes which I didn’t understand but I laughed all the same, following him about like our puppy followed me. When he arrived he’d brought us each a Timex watch and a pair of turquoise slippers with bronco riders printed on them. He might just as well have given me diamonds.
He had a big grey Studebaker parked in front of the house behind our grey 1950 Chevrolet. I hated to see him go outside the front gate, because I thought it was dangerous and couldn’t conceive that somebody who never raised his voice could deal with danger. He’d been in the war, but fighting with guns I didn’t imagine had anything to do with ferocious street combat.
I adored my uncle Ernest and thought he looked like Louis Jourdan, whom I’d seen in a movie at the Band Box. My father had never brought him before. Ernest was young and would scramble about on the floor, demonstrating some of his war skirmishes, showing how he pulled out his trusty sword when the Japanese attacked. I never believed that they used swords in the Second World War but I didn’t tell him. To look out from the kitchen window and see him lazing in the blue hammock near the fat heads of Edna’s orange and yellow marigolds made me wish he would marry Thelma.
Blair and Ernest took us to Valley Forge so that we could see where George Washington engineered America’s victory against King George’s army. Then they rushed back to their studies. Blair was already specializing in psychiatry. Ernest still had to pass his Massachusetts bar exam to qualify as a lawyer. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to have a father living in the house all the time.
By Blair’s next visit, we had moved to Mount Airy, which is the district beyond Germantown Avenue. In the late eighteenth century it originally attracted wealthy families who built country seats there, like Upsala, owned by the Johnson family descended from a German, Dirk Jensen, one of the original Krefelders who settled in the district. Like Cliveden House opposite Upsala, these local landmarks were always there to recall the past, those early European settlers and their struggle for freedom. The old buildings looked odd in a neighbourhood of 1930s terraced houses.
Cliveden House at 6401 Germantown Avenue was built between 1763 and 1767 and was turned into a fortress in 1777 during the Battle of Germantown when British soldiers used it to stave off George Washington’s advancing troops.
I walked around the Cliveden House gardens when I went back in the summer of 1985. This English-looking estate occupies an entire city block of a Melangian urban community. The design of the façade of this mid-Georgian house was based on an engraving entitled ‘A View of the Palace at Kew from the Lawn’, published in London in the Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle in 1763.
Edna, Thelma and Ikey continued to work as they did throughout my childhood and Blair sent regular contributions. As much as anything, I think that they willed our progressive moves which always bettered our circumstances and improved the environments that we were growing up in. Like the move from 23rd Street to Germantown, the move to Mount Airy when I was nine made a great improvement in our lives. There were trees and tended hedges everywhere and the nearly new apartment complex across the road had the lawn mown regularly. My mother liked the neighbours and the neighbourhood. It was peaceful and the Melangian families thereabouts were as concerned about their children and their children’s education as my mother was.
I was given more freedom when I started at John Story Jenks school in Chestnut Hill, and even though the Melangian children there could be counted on two hands, my classmates weren’t reluctant to be friendly. There were many Quaker children in the school. That breath of freedom came in the nick of time, because the discipline imposed by my family in addition to the fear invoked on the streets had been inhibiting. Street life was pretty convincing proof that my mother was right – a dignified academic career was the safest future. At nine, I clung like my sister and brother to the notion that I would go into medicine like my father and therefore tried to maintain a high standard in my school work, whatever temptations I came across.
I remember the first time I was asked to write my father’s occupation on a form at Jenks. I was confident that I could spell psychiatrist correctly. The teacher was more impressed with his occupation than my spelling and, like others then and since, she probably assumed that my home life reflected his professional rank. (In America, doctors make money. I was surprised when I came to London to discover that National Health doctors have the medical title but not the bank balance of their American counterpart.) I was a psychiatrist’s daughter and this gave people the wrong idea about my family’s income.
Times were visibly changing for Melangians in spite of the fact that Eisenhower made political apathy seem somehow respectable. The civil rights issue was like an eggshell that cracked after the Autherine Lucy case and segregation gradually continued to be challenged legally in the South and socially in the North, where habits rather than laws kept us isolated. Professional Melangian families moved to better neighbourhoods, although their white neighbours would make conspicuous attempts to keep them out and often moved out themselves if they failed.
As residential white areas got a few black families, the public school serving the vicinity reflected the neighbourhood’s mix, and a school like Jenks would end up with ten or twenty Melangian children from upper-middle-class Melangian households. Even though Jenks was still a predominantly white school, I think it was relieved to have a token number of Melangian kids because this showed it to be participating in a developing mood among liberal Americans that it was time to be nice to ‘Negroes’. People were getting more prosperous and more generous.
When I started at Jenks in the third grade, I made friends instantly with two little open-air girls who were top of the class and didn’t mind my competition. They befriended me in the classroom and never pretended not to see me in the school yard. They dragged me along to their Brownie meetings and had me join their ballet class, though I didn’t feel welcome there. They asked me to be part of their secret club, which was actually only the three of us. They were no less than best friends who invited me to their houses after school for tea, although they never came to mine. We did everything together except that I couldn’t join them in their violin recitals. I never understood why they called their mothers ‘Mummy’ instead of ‘Mommy’. I thought it was because they were Quakers. I tried to understand and imitate every nuance of their behaviour when I was with them. They spoke more precisely than my friends at Wister school. Soon I could talk exactly like them and I learned to find the humour in what they thought was funny, although it usually was corny.
Behind the surface of my polished manners of ‘excuse me, please’, ‘I beg your pardon’ and ‘no, thank you’ to virtually everything that was offered, there was a fanciful little girl who still knew the difference between a knife scar and a razor scar and was proud of knowing how to watch out for more than just the cars. But there was no need for my acquired street instinct at Jenks and no threats or fears lined the path to my house. The 23 trolley car picked me up from the corner of Southampton Avenue to cart me home in time for The Mickey Mouse Club and Rin Tin Tin on television.
Chestnut Hill was a solid white Anglo-Saxon Protestant community. The trees grew tall. The parks were beautiful. And the sun always seemed brighter there when I got off the trolley car. It was my neighbourhood during the school day.
Mount Airy didn’t feel graced like Chestnut Hill and didn’t have the village character of Germantown. The section we lived in near Mount Pleasant Avenue was very orderly with two-storey brick houses and canopied porches that displayed small flowerbeds and trimmed dark-green hedges. The big street-cleaning truck came once a week to spray the streets down. The neighbourhood looked well-tended but nondescript with block after block of these terraced houses, rather like certain areas of north London or north Manchester.
Occasionally, a kid pedalled down the sidewalk on a glossy two-wheeler bicycle or some toothless, brown-skinned, seven-year-old cowboys would bang-bang their way around a parked car. But there was never a baseball game played in the middle of the street and no one thought that opening a fire hydrant to let the water flood the street until the fire department came was a prodigious way to while away an evening. Dogs didn’t dawdle unleased on the streets, and no fathead alley cats whined away the nights.
The number 23 trolley-car depot was a block beyond our house on the other side of the road, and when we first moved to Musgrave Street, you couldn’t help noticing the rattle of the trolley cars on the track as they passed with their pole crackling against the overhead line. But this sound merely broke the silence. It didn’t disturb the peace.
Our family nearly belonged. Pam was openly admired for her studious appearance when she rushed off early to school first thing, looking as if her mind was on algebra instead of boys. She’d be wearing her new glasses and clutching her briefcase, which was always stuffed and overflowing with books and homework. She’d started at the Philadelphia High School for Girls at 17th Street and Spring Garden, which admitted girls from throughout the city on the basis of outstanding academic achievement. Pam studied the bass violin, and on Saturday morning she and Dennis went to special art classes that were given to children selected from all over Philadelphia who had exceptional artistic talent. I was just as proud of them as Edna, Ikey and Thelma were.
Once Edna had started her new job, at a factory that made children’s dresses, I was transformed from being starched and presentable to being ‘turned out’. I’d like to claim that I wasn’t made vain, merely extra confident in a wardrobe finer than anybody else’s at school. Edna bought me each new model that came off the factory floor.
Ikey was in her element working at the local library as a librarian. She walked home through rain and snow and once through a hurricane with her arms full of books for us, which gave her a reason to write her own poems and read other people’s, and I could get a reading of ‘Invictus’, ‘Crossing the Bar’ or ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ any time I wanted. They were my favourites, though neither my mother nor I knew that ‘gaol’ was pronounced ‘jail’.
Thelma remained our sweet unselfish aunt who cared about Ikey’s children as though they were her own. She enhanced her good looks to the fullest each morning with a little help from Maybelline cake mascara, a trace of eyebrow pencil and rouge with a hint of dark-red lipstick to finish it all off. She and Ikey wore straight skirts with cinched belts and stilettos that you could hear click-click-clicking on the cobblestone street in front of our house as Thelma returned from work around 5.30 pm. It was no wonder that she and Ikey got an intolerable dose of whistles, especially during the summer months.
I was free to bang the screen door going and coming with a shout to name which neighbour I was rushing off to visit. My personality still changed between home and school. The two environments were separate but equal in my head and heart.
We were a strange family in some ways, compared to the people on television. Love was not a thing we discussed. Though we liked each other, we didn’t call each other ‘darling’ and no one asked if you’d slept well when you stumbled down to the kitchen for a bowl of hominy grits or a fried egg. Sometimes we’d have a family pow-wow and decide that new resolutions were called for to make us practise at home on each other some of the good manners we exhibited outside. We could manage to adhere to the new rules for about a week, not raising our voices to each other, or speaking an unkind word, or leaping like Tarzan from the fourth stair into the living room.
There was a collection box to hold the penalty of a penny to be paid any time you used bad language or incorrect English or spoke dialect. It was always chock-full at the end of the week and went to the person who’d made the fewest faux-pas. My grandmother never played …
There was a certain amount of democracy in our house, although hard and fast rules for the children like no cursing were never allowed to be broken. There was an assumption that we had as much right to an opinion and a vote in matters as the women. The word fair was used a lot, perhaps too much. It only confused me into thinking that life was going to be fair.
Television continued to be my teacher. Family sitcoms like Ozzic and Harriet and Father Knows Best not only kept me amused, they made me informed and aware of things that I was not exposed to through my own experience. For instance, women on the television were always crying, but I don’t remember seeing my mother or grandmother cry through my childhood. For any upsets other than physical injuries, we were invariably told to ‘save the tears’. It was almost a relief to fall down and skin a knee, because I could wail the house down without the least reproach.
One of the things that set us apart from other kids in the neighbourhood is that we weren’t beaten. Even though people didn’t yell out of the windows in Mount Airy or curse each other so that it could be heard by passers-by, we often overheard the parental threat of the strap or the belt and the screams and cries that resulted from such punishment, which my mother considered uncivilized and inhumane. We were never punished in this way and were thought lucky by kids who were. Edna would threaten us with the strap if we incensed her while my mother was out, but it fell on deaf ears, even if she stomped off as far as the back yard to pull a switch from the stinkwood tree.
We couldn’t afford holidays, but I didn’t feel that we were missing much, and at that time, family holidays weren’t considered a necessity and planned with the feverish intensity that they are today. We had the odd day trip to Atlantic City or the Catskill Mountains, which broke the monotony. That we’d been somewhere and seen something was enough when school started and we had to write about our vacation. At Christmas we got enough presents to entertain us until a birthday brought some more. Most of the family’s birthdays fell within a week of each other in the spring.
Apart from these minor deviations, we carried on like a lot of other families. We were just noisier. Mornings were absolute chaos. Any kitchen would be busy in the morning with a family of six, but when three of them are women, there’s never enough space and our kitchen wasn’t particularly large. The radio didn’t blare as loudly as my grandmother claimed it did, but Dennis refused to switch it off so that Edna could think, and she refused to stop shouting about it so Ikey could think. There was always that beat in the background, for instance Bo Diddley singing ‘Down Yonder, Down On The Farm’ on the local Melangian station until it got switched to a station with Eddie Fisher or Tony Bennet crooning something above the din of the family rushing up and down the stairs trying to make their way to their separate lives. My mother developed the irritating habit of calling several wrong names before she hit upon the name of the person she really wanted to address. ‘Pamala, I mean Dennis, I mean Marsha.’ She did this so often that my aunt and grandmother caught the habit of it, too.
Fits and fights over whose turn it was in the only bathroom filtered downstairs into the kitchen through a crack in the floorboards to mix with the snitch of swearing that came with a last-minute touch-up with the straightening comb as one of the women singed her scalp in the rush of confusion.
‘Was the cat fed?’ ‘Have you got your milk money?’ ‘Who took my last piece of chewing gum?’ ‘Put your front-door key in your pocket …’ I can’t think how anybody arrived in one piece ready to start the day. Luckily the long journey to school on the trolley had a calming effect.
There was nothing that I thought I needed that I didn’t have except an atomic-bomb shelter stocked with neat little shelves of canned goods and folded army blankets and candles and a flashlight. Lots of people had converted their basements like this in case the Russians bombed us, a threat often implied in the Junior Scholastic and the Weekly Reader which we got at school. Instead, our basement was like an overstuffed attic with that oval portrait of my grandmother always in the way. Things were put down there when they had no other home and part of it was used as a laundry room. It was doubtful that it would ever become a bomb shelter, or even get a facelift of knotty pine walls and be called a den.
This is where my mother was one day, sorting out the coloureds from the whites to do a wash load, when I was called down to speak with her.
Ikey was standing on the platform near the washing machine when I bounded down the staircase. It was one of those old-fashioned washing machines that look a bit like a white pot-bellied stove with a separate wringer attached on top. No one ever went down to the basement unless they were doing the wash, and this made it the only place in the house you could be guaranteed a bit of privacy. It was lit by a bare bulb which hung down from the ceiling and cast spooky shadows.
