and darker, mornings of rain, frost, untrammeled snow; and it was there, mud free, on mornings when the sun’s running yolk caught the moon in the ether. My new school was miles away —these were the days before court-ordered busing, before long rides were considered harmful to white students—and the bus meandered by drained swimming pools, clay tennis courts, collapsed barns, abandoned greenhouses, a colonial-style fire station, an unsuccessful-looking Catholic church with matching grammar school, and a complex called the Jewish Community Center.
Like everywhere else, the suburbs had good, bad, and middling addresses. The school bus picked up cheerleaders with bouncy hair; sulky white trash who smoked in front of hot rods on cinder blocks in scrappy yards; nerds from the chess and visual-aid clubs who howled when the bus passed dogs in the act of doing it in the nettles; and the show-offs from the Golden Ghetto, that strip that had gone fabulously Negro professional in the early 1960s.
With their never-wear-white-after-Labor-Day clothes-consciousness, their coordinated outfits that did homage to the seasons, clothes so new that in some cases the packing cardboard had not been removed from the collars, the black kids made a screaming tribe in the back of the bus. I sat in front with the nerds, directly behind the melting Buddha driver.
I lost the show-offs from the Golden Ghetto at the doors to Westfield. I saw them again during gym period, when their voices reached full fire and the coach applauded the towel-snapping in the showers. But even in gym I was at a safe distance from the
show-offs, having been assigned to the squad for nerds and tubbies, guys who, in a game of “burn ball,” when one team tried to murder the other with a basketball, either immediately ran into the line of fire so that they could sit for the remainder of the class period or hung back by the bleachers until they were picked off like plastic ducks in a shooting gallery.
I came upon two or three of my fellow black students whom I had known in the banished, forgotten days of Capitol Avenue. One boy had been a playmate and then disappeared. I saw him infrequently, when our parents went to the same picnics. We picked up at these picnics where we had left off in his or my back yard, hammered at badminton birdies, and then he was gone again, waving from the back of a new Buick Electra.
People vanished that way from my Capitol Avenue life. They simply didn’t live nearby anymore and the sledding parties on their hills came to an end. Families moved, mothers became Catholics, fathers went over to the Republicans. I didn’t pick up much in those days, like a radio with a broken antenna that has to be moved from corner to corner before it can adequately receive a signal, but in the hallway at Westfield, unable to remember the combination to my locker, I understood where many of them had been disappearing to.
I scarcely acknowledged my former playmate and soon he failed to notice me in the halls. It was harder to deny two popular girls from my former life. They were older, “cool” in Westfield terms, because they were loud at the black table in the cafeteria about the Tighten Up, the latest dance step, and yet their names appeared on the straight-A list of the honor roll published in the school newspaper. I never saw them on the bus.
In Capitol Avenue terms they were real “upper shadies,” because they had never lived anywhere near Capitol Avenue and were often on their way to Cape Cod or coming back from Hilton
Head. Boarded-up theaters in the “inner city” were named after their grandparents. Their hair almost bounced, their braces flashed in the fluorescent light, and they had my sisters’ permission to make comments about my “high-water” trousers. They said my cuffs fell so high above my shoes I wouldn’t have to roll them up in a flood.
But their laughter couldn’t follow me far: the rules of Capitol Avenue no longer
Like everywhere else, the suburbs had good, bad, and middling addresses. The school bus picked up cheerleaders with bouncy hair; sulky white trash who smoked in front of hot rods on cinder blocks in scrappy yards; nerds from the chess and visual-aid clubs who howled when the bus passed dogs in the act of doing it in the nettles; and the show-offs from the Golden Ghetto, that strip that had gone fabulously Negro professional in the early 1960s.
With their never-wear-white-after-Labor-Day clothes-consciousness, their coordinated outfits that did homage to the seasons, clothes so new that in some cases the packing cardboard had not been removed from the collars, the black kids made a screaming tribe in the back of the bus. I sat in front with the nerds, directly behind the melting Buddha driver.
I lost the show-offs from the Golden Ghetto at the doors to Westfield. I saw them again during gym period, when their voices reached full fire and the coach applauded the towel-snapping in the showers. But even in gym I was at a safe distance from the
show-offs, having been assigned to the squad for nerds and tubbies, guys who, in a game of “burn ball,” when one team tried to murder the other with a basketball, either immediately ran into the line of fire so that they could sit for the remainder of the class period or hung back by the bleachers until they were picked off like plastic ducks in a shooting gallery.
I came upon two or three of my fellow black students whom I had known in the banished, forgotten days of Capitol Avenue. One boy had been a playmate and then disappeared. I saw him infrequently, when our parents went to the same picnics. We picked up at these picnics where we had left off in his or my back yard, hammered at badminton birdies, and then he was gone again, waving from the back of a new Buick Electra.
People vanished that way from my Capitol Avenue life. They simply didn’t live nearby anymore and the sledding parties on their hills came to an end. Families moved, mothers became Catholics, fathers went over to the Republicans. I didn’t pick up much in those days, like a radio with a broken antenna that has to be moved from corner to corner before it can adequately receive a signal, but in the hallway at Westfield, unable to remember the combination to my locker, I understood where many of them had been disappearing to.
I scarcely acknowledged my former playmate and soon he failed to notice me in the halls. It was harder to deny two popular girls from my former life. They were older, “cool” in Westfield terms, because they were loud at the black table in the cafeteria about the Tighten Up, the latest dance step, and yet their names appeared on the straight-A list of the honor roll published in the school newspaper. I never saw them on the bus.
In Capitol Avenue terms they were real “upper shadies,” because they had never lived anywhere near Capitol Avenue and were often on their way to Cape Cod or coming back from Hilton
Head. Boarded-up theaters in the “inner city” were named after their grandparents. Their hair almost bounced, their braces flashed in the fluorescent light, and they had my sisters’ permission to make comments about my “high-water” trousers. They said my cuffs fell so high above my shoes I wouldn’t have to roll them up in a flood.
But their laughter couldn’t follow me far: the rules of Capitol Avenue no longer
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