hicks, and the farms and apple orchards disappeared.
The country club was part of the ruse, the optical illusion. Just as there were dude ranches, there was such a thing as dude country. It looked like my sisters’ summer camp: rustic approaches that twisted toward dwellings with all the conveniences. The roads of the township themselves had summer-camp names: Mohawk Lane, Deer Run Circle. Some neighborhoods in the sprawling township that made a horseshoe around the top of Indianapolis had formed “private communities,” hired private police patrols, and dubbed themselves with village names that faintly recalled the Northwest Territory: Fallen Timbers Park, New Marietta, Harrison’s Creek. Mostly there was an English ring to everything.
We moved into the one house that had too much window for what had been cleared and built up around it. If we weren’t careful we’d strut our Negro ways in a fishbowl. A jazzy woman, my mother called her, a divorcee, sold us the house. Its look, 1950s futuristic, went with the woman’s gold go-go boots: too much redwood, too many acute angles, deep purple in the master bedroom. The jazzed-up divorcee was spoken of as the only person in the world who had had the guts to defy the invisible line, which seemed to strengthen itself with every new law passed against its fortification, and the I Love Lucy– era modernism of the house itself was not only a planet away from our wrecked boat on Capitol Avenue, I thought, but also a break with everything old-fashioned, everything on which Grandfather and the Negro Section of the Keep Smiling Union had had to put the best face.
“We” constituted 10.1 percent of the nation’s population, had six guys in the House of Representatives, one man in the Cabinet, a woman on the federal bench, a posthumous Congressional
Medal of Honor winner, and I didn’t care. In giving myself up to what I thought of as the landscape of freedom, I detached from myself and from those responsible for me, as if a white neighborhood were the end of all struggle. The Lady Leontyne had gone the distance for us all. Ritorna vincitor! I was, once again, out of it, until I discovered, a few years later, the social satisfactions of being a Black Power advocate in a suburban high school.
My isolation was difficult to maintain, not because of the urgency of the news, but because my mother would not act the part of mistress of the robes and my father had no intention of being master of the horse. My parents’ idea of their duty toward me went far beyond the custodial chores to which I tried to confine them. But in what was for me the dramatically uncharted meanwhile, I was alone, in my head at least, and even now I don’t know whether the lie owed its unfolding to the universal derangements of puberty or to my being a new black student in what I described to Grandfather, with furtive pride, as an overwhelmingly white school.
Someone was always trying to interrupt, to get between me and the paradise of integration. Grandfather Eustace took a renewed interest in me because of Westfield Junior High School. An expert on white classrooms, he told me to call if I experienced any difficulty of adjustment or was graded unfairly—and he told me to call collect, to circumvent my father’s complaint that not only would he have to put up with Grandfather’s interference, he would also have to pay for it.
Once my mother stopped dropping me off in the school parking lot and turned me over to the skills of the uncommunicative and unbelievably overweight bus driver, I suffered no traumas of any kind, much to Grandfather’s disappointment. He worried that I did not have the stuff to speak up when mistreated. It
wasn’t like him to hunt for that kind of thing, but then his problems, like those of the rest of the minority of 10.1 percent in 1966—remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them—were not mine.
The yellow school bus was on time on mornings that got darker
The country club was part of the ruse, the optical illusion. Just as there were dude ranches, there was such a thing as dude country. It looked like my sisters’ summer camp: rustic approaches that twisted toward dwellings with all the conveniences. The roads of the township themselves had summer-camp names: Mohawk Lane, Deer Run Circle. Some neighborhoods in the sprawling township that made a horseshoe around the top of Indianapolis had formed “private communities,” hired private police patrols, and dubbed themselves with village names that faintly recalled the Northwest Territory: Fallen Timbers Park, New Marietta, Harrison’s Creek. Mostly there was an English ring to everything.
We moved into the one house that had too much window for what had been cleared and built up around it. If we weren’t careful we’d strut our Negro ways in a fishbowl. A jazzy woman, my mother called her, a divorcee, sold us the house. Its look, 1950s futuristic, went with the woman’s gold go-go boots: too much redwood, too many acute angles, deep purple in the master bedroom. The jazzed-up divorcee was spoken of as the only person in the world who had had the guts to defy the invisible line, which seemed to strengthen itself with every new law passed against its fortification, and the I Love Lucy– era modernism of the house itself was not only a planet away from our wrecked boat on Capitol Avenue, I thought, but also a break with everything old-fashioned, everything on which Grandfather and the Negro Section of the Keep Smiling Union had had to put the best face.
“We” constituted 10.1 percent of the nation’s population, had six guys in the House of Representatives, one man in the Cabinet, a woman on the federal bench, a posthumous Congressional
Medal of Honor winner, and I didn’t care. In giving myself up to what I thought of as the landscape of freedom, I detached from myself and from those responsible for me, as if a white neighborhood were the end of all struggle. The Lady Leontyne had gone the distance for us all. Ritorna vincitor! I was, once again, out of it, until I discovered, a few years later, the social satisfactions of being a Black Power advocate in a suburban high school.
My isolation was difficult to maintain, not because of the urgency of the news, but because my mother would not act the part of mistress of the robes and my father had no intention of being master of the horse. My parents’ idea of their duty toward me went far beyond the custodial chores to which I tried to confine them. But in what was for me the dramatically uncharted meanwhile, I was alone, in my head at least, and even now I don’t know whether the lie owed its unfolding to the universal derangements of puberty or to my being a new black student in what I described to Grandfather, with furtive pride, as an overwhelmingly white school.
Someone was always trying to interrupt, to get between me and the paradise of integration. Grandfather Eustace took a renewed interest in me because of Westfield Junior High School. An expert on white classrooms, he told me to call if I experienced any difficulty of adjustment or was graded unfairly—and he told me to call collect, to circumvent my father’s complaint that not only would he have to put up with Grandfather’s interference, he would also have to pay for it.
Once my mother stopped dropping me off in the school parking lot and turned me over to the skills of the uncommunicative and unbelievably overweight bus driver, I suffered no traumas of any kind, much to Grandfather’s disappointment. He worried that I did not have the stuff to speak up when mistreated. It
wasn’t like him to hunt for that kind of thing, but then his problems, like those of the rest of the minority of 10.1 percent in 1966—remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them—were not mine.
The yellow school bus was on time on mornings that got darker
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