Stonewall (3 page)

The boys, of course, went right on having sex with each other. Not everybody participated, but none of them looked askance at the activity. Intense friendships and frequent touching were so integral to the special environment they inhabited as to seem utterly natural; even the nonsexual boys would walk back and forth to the dining hall unself-consciously holding hands. Occasionally a housemother would tell them they “shouldn't” do that, which made Craig aware for the first time that some people regarded his feelings as wrong—infuriating him, even at that early age.

The boys generally ignored “spinsterish” injunctions, and as soon as the lights under the housemother's door went out at night, they would jump into each other's beds. According to Craig, there was “no sense of shame about it and we always knew and talked about
who was going with whom.” Craig had sex with nearly half the boys in his own class of ten; several of them, in later years, did self-identify as gay.

In seventh grade, when he was eleven, Craig got himself a “steady.” He and Tony were passionately in love, but only incidentally sexual—kisses, massages, and hand-holding were about the sum of it. But they spent as much time together as possible; if Craig had dishwashing duty after dinner, Tony would wait for him outside the hall so they could walk back to their dorm together.

One day, daringly, the two boys decided to play hooky. Both were avid baseball fans—Craig adored the Chicago Cubs, Tony the Milwaukee Braves. When they learned that the Cubs and Braves were due to play a doubleheader against each other at Chicago's Wrigley Field, they decided they
had
to go, and Tony somehow got hold of enough money to buy them train tickets to Chicago. They planned to stay for only the first game so that they could get back to the school before dark and not be missed. But once the excitement got hold of them in Wrigley Field, they forgot about their resolution and stayed till the doubleheader was over. That meant catching a late train that stopped a full three miles from the school. They walked the distance in the dark along the scary railroad tracks and, to keep up their courage and to avoid falling between the trestles, held hands the whole way.

When they arrived at the dorm at eleven that night, Mr. Kilburn was waiting for them, “just livid.” The boys tried to prove how responsible they'd been by telling Kilburn they had carefully held hands during the entire three-mile walk. Mrs. Kilburn, who was present for the interrogation, said something snide about “faggots,” and Craig and Tony were not only punished but split up into different dorms. That might have been bearable, except that Tony, soon after, abruptly stopped speaking to Craig and acted as if he no longer existed. Tony never did explain why, but Craig surmised it had something to do with having been frightened by the accusation of “faggot.” The rejection deeply upset—and puzzled—Craig for many years thereafter.

YVONNE

Y
vonne's mother set her jaw, and the family knew that one more immovable decision had been reached: the youngest of two daughters, Yvonne (generally called “Chickie”) would
not
go to the segregated Lincoln Elementary School, but rather to the all-white Daniel Webster Grammar School. In 1942, blacks were not expected, not in New Rochelle, New York, any more than in the South, to make militant demands. But Theo Flowers had never let herself be guided by timid counsels. She had joined the Communist party nearly a decade earlier, impressed by the role it had played in defending the Scottsboro Boys—those nine hapless black youths falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931—and convinced that no other political group gave a damn about black people. She was far too independent ever to become a dutiful party functionary, yet she was never shy about acknowledging her political sympathies. When New Rochelle passed an ordinance requiring Communists to register, Theo, not about to deny her affiliation, marched down to the town hall and registered.

So when Theo said no to the segregated Lincoln School, her ten-year-old daughter, Yvonne, though “a nervous wreck” at the likely amount of high-volume public anger that lay ahead, felt certain that the New Rochelle authorities had already lost the battle. After all, her very birth had been successfully contested; because Theo had refused to deliver in a hospital that practiced overt discrimination, Yvonne had been born in the nearby Mount Vernon Hospital rather than in New Rochelle.

The school board tried to thwart Theo by redrawing district lines so that the street on which the Flowers family lived would fall outside the Daniel Webster School zone. But Theo brought formal charges of gerrymandering and won her case in court. And so, just as Yvonne had anxiously predicted, she took her place in the fifth grade class at Daniel Webster in the fall of 1942. (Nearly twenty years later, in 1961, the New Rochelle school system became the site of the North's first court-ordered desegregation, at which time a Federal judge ordered the closing of Lincoln Elementary, with its 94 percent black student population. That order was resisted for two more years, but
in 1963 a new school board ordered Lincoln razed and its students bused elsewhere.)

Yvonne was the only black child attending Daniel Webster in 1942, but she already knew many of her classmates from the neighborhood and never felt harassed or even isolated while at Webster. Yet despite her friends and her obvious intelligence, Yvonne never became an A student. Later in life she would recall the teacher who told her that she was “a C student and would always be so,” and that she should never think of anything so out of her league as a college education. “On some level, I believed her,” Yvonne says, and describes herself as an “underachiever” throughout her life.

Yet she ascribes that, overall, less to racism than to the intimidating effect of growing up with a high-powered mother she felt unable to measure up to. For Theo Flowers not only was politically aware, but also spoke five languages, read voraciously, had had a promising concert career as a singer of German lieder (a bout with tuberculosis forced her to give up singing), and was something of a local “griot”—a wise woman—consulted for political advice and courted for support throughout the city of New Rochelle.

Many of the black people in town were related, being descended from two large families that had settled there generations ago. And in the thirties and forties, a village atmosphere still prevailed. The goat man and his herd came down Yvonne's block twice a week, and the vegetable sellers and fish peddlers even more frequently. Almost all the blacks in New Rochelle knew one another, so when Theo went to the store on Saturday morning, the family knew not to expect her back until late in the day; everybody had to talk to her about something, and a cup of coffee or a drink could go on for hours.

Theo also loved to party. Indeed, it wasn't illness alone that had ended her singing career, but also an unwillingness to make the necessary sacrifices or endure the needed discipline. She had been attracted to her first husband, Yvonne's father, in part because, as a boxer (his brother was Bruce Flowers, a well-known fighter in the twenties and thirties), he lived a fast-lane life—so fast-lane that he died of alcoholism when Yvonne was four.

Theo's second husband, with whom Yvonne grew up, managed bars and always had a bottle of scotch nearby. He was an easygoing man, a life-of-the-party type who knew how to keep everybody laughing. He did sympathize with Theo's political views, and especially her blunt pro-black stance, and at dinner the family conversation often revolved around what President Roosevelt had said that day and what
the impact was likely to be on black people. But he lacked Theo's dynamism and felt awed, sometimes overwhelmed, by her energy. Theo was unquestionably the dominant figure in the house and her husband knew better than to try to curtail her. When her love of gambling sometimes kept her out at the neighbors all night playing poker (or “pokino,” the local favorite), he might pace the floor and fret—but he refrained from walking the two blocks to tell her to come home.

Theo's own parents were scandalized at their daughter's independent views on religion. They had both come from devout homes in the border states, and together ran a restaurant in Yonkers. (Cooking had long been a family specialty: Yvonne's great-grandfather and great-granduncle had been cooks in the U.S. Navy at the turn of the century.) Theo's mother was an ardent Catholic who practiced African spiritualism on the side, and her father was a devout Baptist. They had compromised by bringing Theo up Episcopalian, but could never compromise over her secularist bent as an adult; they refused to accept the Sunday morning habit in the Flowers home of listening to the famed Wings Over Jordan Choir on the radio as a legitimate equivalent for going to church.

At their insistence, Theo agreed to send Yvonne to Sunday school, but her own secularism rubbed off on the child. When it came time, at age twelve, for her baptism, Yvonne—who had also inherited her mother's independent spirit—refused to go through with it because she “didn't believe.” But unlike Theo, confirmed in her secularism by her radical-minded friends, Yvonne felt deeply troubled at her lack of belief and the way it isolated her from her dutifully baptized peers. She talked with her minister, who showed annoyance at her stubborn insistence on
understanding
the Creation and at her confessed discomfort at going on her knees to Jesus, a white man. It wasn't until her mid-twenties that Yvonne would finally find the compatible God she had long sought.

She was equally stubborn about her sexuality. Entering high school in 1946 at age fourteen, she quickly acquired a steady boyfriend. They loved each other and stayed together throughout the four years of high school, but when Yvonne was fifteen and he sixteen and they attempted to have sex, she said he was “too big” and the act went unconsummated. Since he was also her best friend, she confided to him that she had felt erotically attracted to other girls from an early age—could remember standing in front of a mirror at age six or seven
and defiantly shouting that “when I get grown, I am going to have all the girlfriends I want to have.”

She didn't have to wait that long. While still in her early teens, she started to “mess around” with a friend of her mother's, a beautiful woman who looked like Lena Horne. Though Theo had a number of gay friends in her sophisticated circle, and though Yvonne had always felt able to confide in her mother, she kept the affair a secret. Yet in a more general way, she did try to tell her family about her attraction to women. Indeed, she was no more than twelve or thirteen when she abruptly announced it one night at the dinner table.

Her family's reaction was the equivalent of “pass me the peas”—as if she hadn't said anything at all. She next tried putting the news in a letter, which she read aloud at the dinner table. Again, nobody said a word, as if they hadn't heard her. It was only years later, after Yvonne had left home, that she and her mother finally talked openly about her sexuality. Theo accepted her daughter's insistence that she was lesbian once she understood that it wasn't going to keep her from getting an education or having a career, wasn't going to stop her from having “plans and dreams.” In Yvonne's view, much of the homophobia that exists in the black community is a function of middle-class aspirations, and the taking on of the narrow values of that class. Theo had a radical's disdain for mere assimilation and scorned white bourgeois provincialism. Her politics of inclusion made it necessary for her to accept and applaud differences of all kinds—though in regard to her own daughter's lesbianism, the best she could manage was tolerance.

Yvonne was no less precocious in her early obsession with jazz. She had grown up around music, but by age twelve had (abetted by Frank, a clerk in the New Rochelle record store who shared her zeal and fed it with weekly releases) developed her own special taste for bebop—for Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Tadd Dameron and, above all, for Thelonious Monk. She tortured her family by playing her 78s over and over at top volume, until everyone knew every line on every Thelonious Monk record. By the time Yvonne was fifteen she had become so immersed in bebop and progressive jazz that she researched and wrote a ten-page “history of jazz.” It was for her own edification, not to fulfill a school assignment.

It was also at fifteen that she persuaded “Aunt” Janet, one of her mother's hell-raising friends, to take her to the New York City jazz clubs—the Royal Roost, Birdland, and the other hangouts that dotted
Fifty-second Street, then the jazz mecca of the world. Yvonne had had her first drink at twelve, and had quickly taken to it, but she never viewed the jazz clubs as places to party. She was one of those dead-serious fans who listen to music with such intensity that they become nearly oblivious to the drinking and seduction scenes taking place on the periphery. Nobody dared mess with her; she was there to
listen
. Later, when her particular favorite, Thelonious Monk, played at the Five Spot for two years, Yvonne became a fixture at the club. One night ‘she went straight up to Monk and told him he was the only man she would ever marry. He gave her a silly, spaced-out smile.

KARLA

K
arla's parents told her that Jews were “the Chosen People” and the
goyim
were not to be trusted (“the minute something goes wrong, they'll turn around and call you a kike”). Such cultural assumptions aside, Abraham and Rhoda Jay saw themselves as, if anything,
anti-
religious. Abraham's grandfather, a tyrannical, ultra-orthodox rabbi, used to drag his grandson out of bed at four o'clock in the morning to help make a
minyan
. It turned Abraham off religion for the rest of his life, and Karla never remembers setting foot in a synagogue (the one time Abraham took his children to temple to experience a
seder
, the presiding Reform rabbi—to Abraham's chagrin—skipped the service). Karla knew she was Jewish, but had no real idea what that meant—“except that other kids had Christmas trees and we didn't.”