Love in Black and White: The Triumph of Love Over Prejudice and Taboo (5 page)

Pearce was, in the early 1970s when I attended and when busing first began, a racially torn and violent public school circled by fourteen portable classrooms and a parking lot that glittered with broken glass smashed during rumbles-massive fights between white and black students.

The student body was 55 percent black, 25 percent Mexican, and 20 percent white.

During classes, blacks sat in the back, mostly braiding and combing each other’s hair with big metal Afro rakes. I had been terrified of those rakes since the day I walked innocently into the girls’ bathroom and found one being waved in my face. Three black girls, sitting on the bathroom sinks, watched with amused expressions on their faces.

“Give me some money,” one of them said, tightening her grip on the rake as if it were a gun.

UYeah, you know, the stuff you use to buy things with.”

The other girls burst out laughing at my nervous na1vetO. They seemed so confident and sure of themselves while I, new to the school and unacquainted with robbery, felt so timid and uncertain. I quickly emptied my pockets and gave her all the lunch money I had, then made my escape with the sound of snide laughter, which resounded in the concrete chamber, still ringing in my ears. I did not eat lunch that day, and I never again entered a school bathroom. I became very good at holding it until I got home. One day I saw a white girl with six perfectly straight scars across her face, and I knew she had offended someone wielding an Afro rake.

My fear of blacks was mingled with admiration. They could braid their hair in neat rows from their faces to their napes; they could sprint so much faster than whites that the track team was virtually all black; they were tough and confident and had the temerity to tell a teacher to shut up; and they could dance so well I dared not even try a single step for fear of being laughed at.

My admiration developed into a mild envy. Perhaps it was simply a minority’s desire to fit in, but I sometimes wished I were black. All the popular girls in school were black and had names like Felicia and Bhonda and Janelle and Paulette. All the cheerleaders were black, and danced along the sidelines doing the bump, knocking their hips together and singing Boogie down, our team don’t mess aroun’, We got the spirit now, we gonna show you how, To boogie down, boogie down, boogie down, l’ight now!

A shiny chrome jukebox stood in the corner of the school cafeteria, belting out songs by the Jackson Five and Barry White and Marvin Gaye as crowds of black students boogied and jived and did the bump and the robot. They would dance on the tabletops to such funky, irresistible tunes as: 0She’s a dance, dance, dance, dance, dancin’ machine. Watch her get down, watch her get down.”

Rednecks, goat-ropers, and kickers looked on in scornful amusement.

They were the whites who refused to be intimidated by their minority position. They usually wore ten-gallon cowboy hats, snapdown work shirts, heavy belt buckles, pointed-toe snakeskin cowboy boots, and military buzz-style haircuts. Their lower lips bulged to one side and brown drool seeped from the corners of their mouths as they looked around for a suitable place to spit their wads of Skoal.

Their favorite target was the back of a well-raked Afro.

The only way you could tell a kicker (derived from “shitkicker” and the old Texas expression “to kick a nigger’s ass”) from a regular redneck or goat-roper was to look at their pickup trucks. If the bumper sticker read 0Goat-ropers need love too,” then the answer was obvious.

If they drove viciously around the parking lot hurling empty LoneStar beer cans at clusters of blacks, then you knew they were kickers.

Rednecks were a little less violent unless they had been out honky-tonking too long and started a fight by accusing someone at the bar of being an NL (nigger lover).

One day a kicker managed to get near the jukebox, surreptitiously dropped in a quarter and pushed A-4, 0I’m Proud to be an Oakie from Muskogee.” He laughed as he was chased from the school by an angry mob of blacks threatening to kill him if he ever put on such “honky trash” music again.

esperate to reduce racial tensions, the school launched a campaign called Partners. Every student was supposed to find someone of another race to be their partner, and the school would provide free transportation and food for a picnic at Barton Springs or Lake Travis.

I was afraid to ask any of the black girls in my classes. They were too cool, too tough, and too popular and I was just a skinny white girl who came from the North and had no idea what was 0going’ down.”

The picnic was canceled when a Partners meeting turned into a race riot. It always scared me to see kids climbing onto the tops of lockers so they could have better aim when they jumped, knife in hand, into the middle of a hallway fight.

At the sound of the three o’clock bell, I would rush out of the school ahead of the others. If I were lucky my bicycle tires would still be inflated and I could escape before the crowds of students made their mass exodus to see the after-school fighting sessions in the parking lot of the Baptist church across the street.

One boy at school was neither white nor black. He had a light brown Afro and skin that was covered with dark brown and very white splotches. Looking back on it, he was probably the product of a genetic fluke similar to albinism. His schoolmates teased him mercilessly. They nicknamed him 0Patches.”

“How did he get like that?” I asked my friend Kelly.

“I bet his mom is white and his daddy’s a nigger,” she replied.

“Is that what happens when whites and blacks… you know…

do it?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said sagely. “What’d you think?”

From that day on, for at least two years, I thought the children of mixed marriages were covered with black-and-white patches.

Ironically, Mexicans dated either whites or blacks and no one cared.

Mexican boys, with their long, shiny black hair and heavy Spanish accents, were very popular among white girls. They had romantic names like Felicio and Fernandez and Emilio. My friend Kelly’s older sister, a beautiful Baptist with green eyes, dated a Mexican. She drove a baby blue Mustang with her long blond hair flying in the wind and made all the white boys hot with desire. But she turned them all down and remained true to her Mexican companion.

Dating Mexicans was fine, even 0cool,” at least among white students, but if a white girl did so much as speak for more than five minutes with a black boy she was labeled an NL. Blacks and whites never touched each other, never danced together, never came in close contact with each other except through sports like football and wrestiing. If a white did not laugh at a racist joke, he was shunned as an outsider.

Racist jokes (which I recount here only to reveal the twisted attitudes of white adolescents during that period in Texas) usually ran like this: How can you find a nigger in the dark?”

Tell him to smile.”

“Why do blacks always have sex on their minds?”

0Because their pubic hair is on their heads.”

The taboo against touching a white was so powerful that some blacks took it as a dare. At the public swimming pool my friends and I always had to be on guard against adventurous black boys. One scorching summer day Jill, Kelly, and I-three young blonds-were bobbing up and down, splashing, laughing, and chasing each other in the shallow end of an Olympic-style swnnming pool complete with three diving boards and several lifeguards. Kelly and Jill were developing more quickly than I was, and their bikini tops were just starting to get round while mine hung flat and shapeless. Suddenly I felt a hand squeeze me between the legs. I screamed. So did Jill and Kelly.

We whirled about and saw three black boys swimming away underwater.

UGoddamned niggers!” Jill shrieked, pounding the water furiously with her fists. “I’m gonna tell my brother!”

“You horny black bastards!” Kelly shouted.

The three boys, no older than fourteen, climbed out of the pool, shook the beads of water from their Afros, slapped each other’s backs, and looked back at us, laughing triumphantly. White pussy!” one of them shouted, jogging along the side of the pool with his fist in the air.

“I got me a handful of white pussy!”

From that day on I stayed away from the swimming pool and ran through the sprinkler in our backyard instead.

One night when my mother was working late and I had cooked my father and brother Dan a meal of Hamburger Helper and frozen string beans-the one meal I could prepare-I rode my bike down to the twenty-four-hour Minit Mart to buy some candy. Like most twelve-year-olds, I was addicted to Life Savers, Sugar Babies, MOM’s, Clark bars, and Zots-the hard candy that fizzes in your mouth.

When I reached the store I realized I had forgotten my money. I looked at the candy longingly, then left the store and headed home.

It was about eight at night and already dark. I had to ride through the valley first, then ascend the hill to Greensboro Drive. Too tired to ride uphill, I got off and walked my bicycle. Suddenly I heard a male voice behind me.

Want some money?”

I turned around and saw a black boy of about fourteen riding a ten-speed bicycle. He was so dark I could only see his clothes and the bicycle. I’d never been addressed by a black before; I’d never been alone with a black before. Frightened, I started walking faster.

“Girl, I seen you in the candy store,” he said, getting off his bike, dropping it on the curb and hurrying after me. “I seen you lookin’ at the candy. You din’t buy nothin’. Why come? Don’t you got no money?

I’ll give you some.”

“I don’t need any,” I said over my shoulder, quickening my pace.

“I’m going home.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jane Smith,” I lied.

“I know that ain’t right. What’s yo real name?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Tiki.”

One of those boys with the funny names. I wondered how long he had been following me.

“I been watchin’ you.” He grabbed me by the arm and started dragging me away from the street. My bike made a clanging sound as it hit the curb. I tried to run, but he clutched me firmly. I struggled. He tightened his grip.

“What do you want?” I asked, feeling helpless.

“I wanna give you some.”

I knew he was not talking about money. He pulled me across the yard between two houses, then pushed me up against the brick wall and pressed himself against me. His thick lips seemed to cover my whole face. I could barely breathe. I had never been kissed before and was not sure what he was doing to my face with his mouth. I thought about screaming, but I was afraid people would come and see what this black boy was doing to me. Shame would follow me all the days of my life. I pleaded with him instead.

He shoved a clumsy, fumbling hand under my shirt and felt my flat, boyish chest. He immediately let go of me and stepped back.

Apparently he did not realize I was so young and undeveloped. He seemed apologetic.

“Want some gum?” he said, handing me a stick of Wrigley’s spearmint.

I stared at him in disbelief, then ran back to the street, grabbed my bike and bolted, trembling with shock and fear and, I must admit, a bit awed that a boy had kissed me.

“Don’t be like that!” Tiki called after me. “I din’t mean no harm.”

No one was home: My father had gone to a meeting and my brother had gone out with friends. I ran over to Jill’s house, breathless and shaken. I told her that the black boy down the street, Tiki, had forcibly kissed me.

Jill looked horrified. “You let that nigger has you?” she cried.

“No, I didn’t let him. He pulled me-” Her father called to her from the next room.

“Yes, sir, I’m coming, sir,” Jill said. Like many of my friends in Texas, she had to address her parents as “sir” and “ma’am.”

I tried explaining what actually had happened, but Jill said, “You’d best leave now.” I wondered why she was so abrupt. I went home to an empty house and brooded.

The next day the news was all over the neighborhood. Everyone but the adults knew. Jill had told her sisters and brothers, who had told Kelly’s sisters, who had told the boys next door and down the street.

I was an outcast. Jill and Kelly did not want to be seen with me, yet Jill’s brother Eric continued to play basketball with Tlki, Mojo, and Dookey.

My parents and two older brothers were rarely home, and some neighborhood boys knew it. My father was juggling several jobs at once: as the minister of a tiny white church near the Gulf of Mexico, as a professor at Austin Theological Seminary, and as a full-time graduate student in psychology at the University of Texas. My mother, who was working on a master’s degree and had a full-time job as an elementary school teacher for kids with special learning disabilities, came home late and sometimes with bruises from hulking eighteen-year-old sixth graders with “emotional problems.”

One evening when I was home alone the doorbell rang. I left the chain on the door and opened it cautiously. I saw Tiki’s face and immediately tried closing the door. His foot was in the crack.

“I gotta use your phone,” he said urgently. “It’ll just take a minute.”

“Leave me alone,” I said.

“Please, it ain’t gonna take but a minute. I gotta call someone. It’s important. Our phone’s busted and I don’t know no one round here.”

“I can’t let you in.”

“You still mad bout what I done, ain’t you? Like I tole you, I din’t mean no harm. All I wanna do is use your phone. I won’t mess witchoo.”

I was used to obeying my father and brothers, and I was also used to trusting people, so when he persisted, I finally undid the chain, let him in, and showed him to the kitchen phone. He picked up the receiver, dialed a few numbers, then hung up.

“I gotta check something first,” he said, then ran down the hall, flicking on all the lights and looking into each room. It was not hard for him to tell my brothers’ rooms from mine. He stared around my yellow room, then turned out the lights and just sat there.

“What are you doing?” I asked from the hallway, keeping a safe distance from him.

“Shhhh! Just a minute.”

He sat there in the darkness, peeping through my curtains from time to time and telling me to “Hush up!” every time I asked what he was doing. A few minutes later he stood up, walked down the hall and left the house. I locked the door again, wondering why he had never finished making his phone call. He was up to something, but I was too young and naive to realize he was ingeniously trying to convince his friends he was having a white girl. A few minutes later the doorbell rang again. This time it was a black boy I had never seen before. I left the chain secured.