Читать книгу The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race - Carl C. Anthony - Страница 14
ОглавлениеI WAS BORN AT HOME in 1939 in the “Black Bottom,” one of West Philadelphia’s most run-down neighborhoods. Black Bottom, or simply the “Bottom,” was a predominantly poor and black neighborhood built on a drained swamp. In contrast, the neighborhood where the white people lived was called the “Top.” My parents, my brother Lewie, and I lived in a cold-water flat above a storefront on Cuthbert Street for the first five years of my life.
Many years later, I spoke with Anne Whiston Spirn, landscape architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Language of Landscape. She told me that in cities across the country, the poorest people—primarily blacks and immigrants—had no choice but to live in such undesirable low-lying locations. These “bottom” areas produced conditions for both criminality and the creative expression that gave birth to jazz and blues.
Mother was born Mildred Cokine.1 Her forebears were longtime residents of South Carolina, and among her ancestors were early European settlers, rice-growing West Africans (probably Wolofs), and American Indians. Her great-uncle William Jervay (likely an anglicized form of the French name Gervais) had escaped from a plantation to join the Union army and later became a South Carolina legislator.2 At some point, Mother’s family moved north to South Philadelphia. Mother was born in 1898 in the Seventh Ward, a neighborhood that the great black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, then a promising young sociologist, studied and wrote about in The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. The Seventh Ward was a neighborhood beset with poverty, illness, and crime primarily due to lack of economic opportunity. So, as soon as they could, Mother’s family moved to a neighborhood where the “better” class of black people lived; and this is where Mother grew up. Mother learned the art of dressmaking at her mother’s knee: Granny took in clients at home, and Mother would help her. Granny raised her son and four daughters on her dressmaker’s income after her husband, a carpenter, had died.
Mother was the eldest daughter; she attended William Penn High School for Girls, a prestigious, mostly black school. She was artistically gifted, and had a talent for creating sewing patterns and using them to make women’s clothes. At one point, she was hired for a job as a strikebreaker—most likely without knowing it—and as she was bused to a factory, bricks were tossed at her.
Mother was light skinned enough to pass for Jewish or Puerto Rican, but never chose to do so. Two of her sisters, Ede and Ruth, lived with Granny. Her sister Ida was married, and her brother, Carl, died young. Aunt Ede used to tell Mother that she could come back home whenever she wanted, but Mother was very loyal to Dad; I don’t think she ever wanted to leave him.
Mother must have been a great beauty in her youth, but she had lost all her teeth by the time I was born. I thought she was crazy when she painted over the mirrored faceplates on the electric light switches in the house we moved to on Kingsessing Avenue, but, as an adult, I understood that she couldn’t bear to see the change in her features.
Mother loved to draw and paint, and she made our home into a learning center. Once, she placed a lighted candle to project a shadow of my profile and, from this, traced on paper the outline of my features and cut out the image of my silhouette. It was something I treasured. I still have two paintings that she made late in her life.
Another great treasure of mine is a small book written by Mary Jenness, a poet of the Harlem Renaissance, and published in 1936 titled Twelve Negro Americans. The chapter, “A Negro Cooperative Makes Good,” is about my dad’s groundbreaking efforts to initiate a cooperative economic system for the benefit of low-income African Americans in Philadelphia. It consisted of a farm in Yardley, Pennsylvania, and a cooperative store in West Philadelphia.
Dad was dark skinned, brilliant, and charismatic. His mother had died giving birth to him and his father was unknown. As a young child, he sometimes stayed with his mother’s brother, but other times, he was circulated through a series of orphanages and foster homes. He began to live on his own at the age of twelve.
Dad’s ancestors on his mother’s side included Cherokees and Seminoles who were part of the forced march to Oklahoma known as the Trail of Tears. Born Lewis Edwards, Dad researched, learned that his father’s name was William Anthony, and renamed himself Lewis Anthony. He moved to Pennsylvania to attend Lincoln University3 and worked his way through by painting and wallpapering the university dorms during the summer. During the school year, he made extra money by writing love letters for his friends. Dad loved to give speeches as well—his college friends called him Mark Anthony. He could read and write in Latin and Greek, which seems amazing to me now, but was probably not as unusual in those days when universities often required students to take Latin and Greek.
He completed his college education at Temple University. After graduating in the late 1920s, he started talking with friends about starting a cooperative store. Like many of his peers, he had held a string of odd jobs for which he was overqualified—clerk, factory hand, butler, laundry sorter, and apartment manager, to name a few. Then, while working at a coffee shop owned by Finnish immigrants, he heard them talking enthusiastically about the cooperative movement.4 Inspired, Dad organized a group of friends for a year’s study of cooperative economics, focusing on the principles worked out in 1844 by a group of weavers in Rochdale, England.
One of the co-op members, a tailor, offered the back room of his shop as a meeting place. Soon after, the co-op became a small store, which then quickly took over the entire shop. Dad was invited to give talks about the cooperative, and he became well known and well liked. Eventually, the co-op teamed up with some older folks who had savings to invest, allowing for merchandise expansion and a move to a more densely populated neighborhood. Dad served as co-op manager and sometimes slept behind the counter to save money for rent. Unemployed co-op members were happy to help with maintenance, bookkeeping, and deliveries.
During the Depression, Dad was offered the use of a farm near Philadelphia and received a grant from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to buy farm equipment and fix up residence quarters for five families with farming experience. Dad and the five families were collective owners of the farm and grew produce for the co-op; others were co-op members who had access to the produce at low costs. During the time before my parents were married, Dad would bring food from the co-op and leave it on Granny’s doorstep so Mother and her family would have something to eat. For a time after their marriage, my parents lived on a co-op farm outside of Philadelphia.
Dad loved to tell the story of how he got together with Mother. One night, he explained, he had read a passage from the Bible that seemed to suggest that the next woman he met would be the “one.” It wasn’t clear if Mother was the very next woman he met or if he had had to do some winnowing before she emerged as the one he would marry. It was clear, though, that they shared a strong spiritual bond. Although they didn’t seem to belong to any particular denomination or congregation, they shared a moral and ethical focus that they passed on to Lewie and me.
Mother and Dad devoted themselves to us. They had great dreams for us and made sure we had a rich early childhood.
Our family had always been city folk. Granny, born in 1868, moved to Philadelphia in the decades after the Civil War. Dad arrived in Philadelphia around 1920 when he began to study at Lincoln University.
Dad loved to tell us about the tricks he had learned to get by when times were hard. I’ll never forget watching him pull one of those tricks: During the years after World War II, when our family had little money, Dad bought a couple of receipt pads at the stationery store around the corner and had the stationer print the words “Lewis E. Anthony, Grocer” across the top. Then, we drove down to the Italian wharf in South Philadelphia in his red Ford panel truck and bought wholesale. He could buy cases of canned food at one third of what it would have cost if we had bought it at the local A&P grocery store. When there was no money to pay for utilities, my dad would crawl to a position at roof level and delicately connect the house to the electric power line.
In 1944, when I was five years old, we were finally able to purchase a home in a better neighborhood and leave the Black Bottom, which, I realized later, had been a place of shame. The Black Bottom was an area filled with run-down buildings and lots of concrete with no trees. Nevertheless, I prided myself on knowing my way around and enjoyed shopping and doing errands with my parents. Later, while I was in college in New York, urban renewal policies mostly demolished the Black Bottom.
Our new home in West Philadelphia was a beautiful three-story, semidetached Victorian house built in the 1880s with ten rooms and a small front yard. Steps led up to a front porch that overlooked the sidewalk. The neighbors with whom we shared a wall were another black family with lots of kids. Our relationship with the neighbors had ups and downs, but, for the most part, we were friends. The neighborhood was one of Philadelphia’s first streetcar suburbs, but even before the installation of electric railways in the 1890s, a horse-drawn trolley service had made it an ideal location for the large homes of wealthy families and the professional elite who worked in downtown Philadelphia. Gradually, the mansions were torn down and the lots divided and developed as housing for the expanding middle class. By the time we moved in, only a few of the mansions remained.
We were one of the first black families on our block, but white families had already begun their flight to the suburbs. Blacks were migrating from the South into the inner-city neighborhoods of Northern cities, taking advantage of jobs created by the US involvement in World War II; and middle-class whites were leaving for “better” neighborhoods in the suburbs. The first few years of living in this half-white, middle-class neighborhood were exciting. Our new street had giant sycamore trees, and I was delighted by the beautiful tree-lined street and the stately houses. In autumn, on our way to and from school, we loved to kick up the brown leaves piled high on the sidewalk and hear the rustling sounds. Four doors down was Clark Park, where we used to play. It had originally been an industrial area with a creek—Mill Creek—running through it. Subsequently, the creek had been enclosed in a culvert underground and the industrial buildings removed. In the middle of the park was a huge bowl, the former creek bed, where we would play.
Living in our new neighborhood, we felt that we could share in the life of the city, which was still in its heyday. The downtown had great department stores and movie houses. We had a sense that we might finally be part of the great urban life. Ironically for us, however, city life had reached its peak shortly after we moved into our middle-class neighborhood and then began a sharp decline.
We didn’t play or interact socially with the white children who remained in the neighborhood. We played exclusively with black kids, most of whose families were renters living in the two-story apartment flats on Forty-Fifth Street or in row houses on the side streets. A white family, anxious to get out before blacks moved in and “ruined the neighborhood,” had sold their house to our family for about six thousand dollars.
During the war years, my dad worked at the Navy shipyard helping assemble the bulkheads that became the central structural elements of aircraft carriers. We also rented out rooms on the third floor to three young single working women, and ran the house as a bed and breakfast, serving coffee and cinnamon buns to our roomers in the mornings before the sun came up.
After the war, Dad lost his job at the shipyard, and we lost our roomers, but he was an entrepreneur and started making a living as a handyman. When I was seven and Lewie was eight, we started working alongside him—cleaning and fixing up the houses that the white people had left behind, taking out trash, and whitewashing basements. At one point, Dad got a job as a paperhanger, and I became his assistant.
Dad set up a woodshop in the basement and created a hobby room for us. We got ideas for projects from the magazine Popular Mechanics and the book Fun for Boys. I began studying magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and sending off for catalogs for building supplies and other similar products. I also enjoyed attending home and garden trade shows with Dad.
I had my own room. Dad was into color theory, so he wallpapered one wall and the ceiling with yellow paper with an ivy pattern and painted the other walls a deep mauve. I felt honored by the special attention and spent hours contemplating the patterns and the colors.
Learning activities continued in our new home. Mother loved to diagram sentences and enjoyed teaching me the parts of speech. I filled many notebooks with diagrammed sentences.
Attending an Integrated Elementary School
When September rolled around, our parents decided to send Lewie and me to B. B. Comegys, an integrated elementary school where only ten or twelve of the three hundred students were African American. I entered kindergarten and Lewie first grade. Every day, we walked six blocks through both black and white neighborhoods to get to school. The rest of the students were Eastern European Jews, Irish and Italian Catholics, and some white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The black kids we knew and played with went to Woodrow Wilson, the segregated elementary school, which was only a block from our home.
I didn’t interact much with the kids in my class at school, who hung out in ethnic clusters. We were never invited to their birthday parties and other activities outside of school. Every day, Mother carefully packed my metal lunch box with a sardine sandwich on whole wheat bread and a healthy drink. The other kids all had their lunches in bags—baloney sandwiches on white bread and soda pop. Although I knew that my lunch was healthier than what they were eating, I was embarrassed that it was different. I would slink away and eat alone.
Going to an integrated school was supposed to be a privilege, but it was stressful in many ways. I was learning to feel superior to the black kids I played with after school, but I still didn’t belong with the white kids in my class. I wanted very much to bring the black kids from our neighborhood to my school, but I didn’t have the power to make that happen. I was beginning to be aware of the invisible forces that separated the races in the neighborhoods and at school. The experience of attending an integrated school left racial scars, and the feeling of being an outsider has stayed with me all my life.
Every year during Negro History Week,5 our dad worked with Lewie and me to prepare presentations about great African Americans to share with our classmates. At the time, I was embarrassed about doing it, but later, I came to appreciate it as good training. Now I see it as a precursor of the black studies programs that emerged in the 1960s. When I compared experiences with my friend who attended the local school for blacks, I learned that they were not taught anything about black history.
In third grade, Mrs. Aikens taught us about William Penn, our city’s founder, and his plans for Philadelphia, which means “city of brotherly love.” Penn was a Quaker who believed in peace and equality among human beings. Mrs. Aikens told us how Penn had made friends with the local indigenous people, the Lenni Lenape, and had purchased land from them, and then how he had laid out the streets between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers and given the north-south streets numbers and the east-west streets the names of trees, an idea unheard of in the seventeenth century. Each house was to be set out on a large plot surrounded by a generous field of open space. He divided the city into four quadrants, each having a large public park. I was powerfully impressed by the notion that you could lay out a city based on ideas and dedicated to social justice and equality. I did wonder why there were no black people in the stories of William Penn and early Philadelphia though.6
Mrs. Aikens later took us to see the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, a display of aerial photos and models showing what Philadelphia would look like in twenty-five years. It was designed by the famous architect Edmund Bacon, who became Philadelphia’s chief city planner. It occupied two floors of a prestigious downtown department store and included a full-scale model of a street corner in South Philadelphia complete with public trash can. I was delighted by the opportunity to look into the future and deeply inspired by the aerial photos and models that allowed me to look down at the city from a God’s-eye point of view.
Many elements of the exhibition excited me. The sketches, aerial photographs, and motion pictures reflected my love of drawing and other modes of visual communication. My passion in math and science and my enthusiasm for making things were satisfied by the architectural plans and elevations and the various charts, displays, and models. Going to the exhibition was like magic. Something in me clicked, and I knew I wanted to be like the people who created the exhibition. However, just as I became enthusiastic about designing and building cities, I was dimly aware that white flight to the suburbs had begun. The dominant culture was losing interest in the urban environment and focusing primarily on building racially restrictive suburbs. Gradually, the pattern of suburban sprawl and inner-city decline was becoming established.
Growing up, my experience of the natural world was always linked to the human community. It was never an idyllic encounter with the untrammeled landscape of water, sky, rolling hills, forest, and mountains. I didn’t have such experiences until I became an adult.
Starting in early childhood and continuing throughout my youth, I developed emotionally and formed my sense of identity through my explorations of geographic space in the city of Philadelphia and beyond. As I walked throughout the city and observed patterns in the neighborhoods, I learned about ethnic communities and about issues of race and class. It occurs to me now that my love, fascination, and obsession with cities are simultaneously the cause and the effect of my walking everywhere.
Our family, like nearly all black families in the forties, fifties, and later, never went on vacations; however, when I was ten years old, Dad got the idea to take us on an overnight trip to the nation’s capital. On our way there, he was arrested for speeding through a little town—Laurel, Maryland—midway between Washington, DC and Baltimore. I don’t think we were really speeding. The officer, who had a thick Southern accent, didn’t seem to care one way or the other about anything we said. He had the power to lock my father up, and we couldn’t do anything about it. I vividly recall the sensation of being in a strange, surreal landscape. I had a vague notion that we had crossed into the South and that this was the kind of thing that was said to happen there.
Dad had often told us, “You never know what is going to happen. Things could turn weird at any time. When they do, you have to stay steady and figure things out. You gotta keep your eyes open. You gotta be able to deal.” At the age of nine, I was too young to fully understand what was happening, but clearly things had turned very weird. The officer took possession of the car and took Dad away to jail, leaving my fifty-two-year-old mother and two young boys standing in the street outside the home of the justice of the peace. Such callous and pointless treatment made no sense at all.
We had just enough money for Mother to get on a bus. Lewie and I hitchhiked and met up with her in the Baltimore bus station at Travelers Aid, where we called Aunt Ede and waited for her to wire us enough money to get home. I don’t recall how long Dad was in jail and don’t remember hearing any stories about what it took for him to be released and regain possession of the car, but I’m sure it was difficult and expensive.
My first years after moving to the new house were overflowing with wonder and spontaneous learning. I was enchanted with the park, the trees, the rocks beneath my feet, and the stars above. I loved walking through the city, going to movies downtown, and exploring the department stores. Gradually, though, a shadow side began to emerge. The neighborhood was changing. Although we lived in a beautiful house, as early as 1945, our second year there, our beautiful new neighborhood had begun to deteriorate. Banks made a practice of denying loans for home improvements and repairs in our neighborhood and others that were inhabited primarily by African Americans. Likewise, city agencies reduced spending on maintenance and upkeep of public properties—such as parks, schools, and libraries—in neighborhoods like ours. By 1956, when I left home at the age of seventeen, the neighborhood had become a ghetto.
After the war ended and my father was no longer needed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, no one except the four members of our family ever set foot in our house. Dad put so much time and energy into improving white people’s houses and landscapes that he was unable to keep our house in working order, much less improve it. There were always paint buckets, brushes, ladders, and other tools in our living room and no place to sit down. The upstairs and downstairs toilets were out of commission for a long time, and we had to use the toilet at the gas station, four blocks away. Sometimes, we didn’t have money to pay the electric bill and had to use candles and kerosene lamps to see after the sun went down.
“There is no Santa Claus,” Dad once said to us. “You want toys? You need to make them.” We did have a well-equipped workshop and books and magazines that gave us ideas for things to make. I was often proud of the things we made, but I also wondered why we couldn’t just buy things the way other families did.
Sometimes, before I was school aged, he would say, “You know, I was on my own when I was your age.” I didn’t know quite what to make of that. I grew to believe that I didn’t deserve to live in a nice house and that we didn’t deserve to have the toys that other children had.
My father’s response once when I showed him a toy I had made was crushing but not unusual: “You did a terrible job,” he bellowed. “This is a mess. You need to have discipline and do it right.” In retrospect, I realize that he was trying to make sure we developed the means to be independent. The challenge of his parentless childhood had inspired him to develop extraordinary skills and savvy that he tried to pass on to us. He was quite present and worked hard to be a good father, but he lacked the emotional foundation that a secure home environment brings. He couldn’t pass down to us what he hadn’t received himself.
Although whites continued to flee to the suburbs, there were small pockets of a block or two where no black families had moved in. We thought of those as white neighborhoods. The buildings on our block were actually bigger and better designed than the homes in those so-called white neighborhoods. Our three-story house, for example, was semidetached with a front porch and a small backyard while the nearby white neighborhood was composed of two-story attached row houses with porches running the length of the street. Despite the obvious differences, we thought of our neighborhood as being of lower quality because black people lived there.
During the years of my later childhood and early adolescence, as whites abandoned inner-city neighborhoods and the city’s industrial employment base collapsed, my parents began to lose hope for a bright future for us. Lewie and I were slated to go to Central High School, the best academic high school in the city, where graduates became doctors, lawyers, and scientists. When we graduated from Tilden Junior High School in the summer of 1952, we both scored in the top 1 percent in the citywide academic achievement tests. Clearly, our parents wanted us to be different from the other young people in our neighborhood. They had chosen the location of our house so that when we grew up, we could walk to the University of Pennsylvania, which was less than a mile away. They had done everything they could to keep us from being caught in an educational tracking system that would isolate us from achievement in the larger society.
Why then did our dad decide to send us to Dobbins Vocational School to learn to work with our hands? Vocational school was where you sent kids who couldn’t achieve academically. The most obvious explanation is that he wanted us to have the skills to work with him in a family business. He admired the success of Italians in Philadelphia’s construction industry and hoped to emulate them by establishing his own company, Lewis E. Anthony & Sons.
Another factor must have been a loss of ambition and hope for us after the many disappointments he had suffered. He was a brilliant self-made man with many skills and talents, yet he had been unable to overcome the stigma of racism and fulfill his potential. This was due in part to the absence of family support that resulted from his status as an orphan. He was probably afraid that without solid vocational skills, we would be at the mercy of the social and economic forces that had crushed his own dreams and aspirations.
Attending Dobbins Vocational School
To get to Dobbins Vocational School, we had to take a bus, two trains, and another bus. The trip took about an hour. On the way, we would pass by the television station, WFIL-ABC, Channel 6, which was home to Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. We watched American Bandstand every afternoon, giggling at how the show cleaned up black music, toning down its sexual content for a white audience. We never saw any black people dancing on the show.
When we enrolled at Dobbins, we were assigned a homeroom in the cabinetmaking and carpentry shop. We went to basic subjects like math, English, and history in the morning and shop in the afternoon. Our first assignment in shop was to make isometric drawings of thirty wood joints on tracing paper with a thirty-sixty-degree triangle. I loved making drawings of tongue-and-groove, mortise-and-tenon, dovetail, and all the other wood joints.
For the first assignment, I remember making a border around the drawing a half inch from the paper’s edge with a 1B pencil. For the title block in the lower right-hand corner, I filled in guidelines for lettering with a 4H pencil. I used a soft pencil for the lettering and for outlining the wood blocks and a harder pencil to fill in the details.
The teacher was evidently impressed; he sent me home with a note to my parents, suggesting that I be reassigned to architectural drafting. My dad objected, but the counselors at Dobbins prevailed. I was switched out of carpentry and cabinetmaking and assigned to the architectural drafting homeroom. The studio had about thirty students distributed evenly in tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades. It was run by Mr. Hruslinsky, an excellent teacher and disciplinarian. I loved his class. He expected nothing but the best from us. Every semester, four or five students in the studio would win first or second prizes in regional or national competitions.
Our main activity was making copies of house plans taken from magazines we had selected. I chose split-level ranch houses from magazines like Better Homes and Gardens. I particularly liked futuristic-looking houses with butterfly roofs, jalousie windows, and accordion-folding doors. I loved making perspective drawings of these houses.
We also had to copy watercolor and pencil landscape sketches by accomplished practitioners. The trick was to get the work done in an hour. Although we viewed anything that wasn’t modern with suspicion, I enjoyed copying drawings of the ruins of Egyptian and Greek buildings. We also made copies of drawings from Sir Banister Fletcher’s classic reference book, A History of Architecture, first published in 1896 with updated editions coming out throughout the twentieth century.
Although Dobbins was about six miles from our house, Lewie and I would sometimes walk home, saving our transportation money to buy model airplanes. The walk took about an hour and a half and gave us an interesting tour of race and class divisions in Philadelphia’s neighborhoods. First, we went through a bad neighborhood and sometimes had to go out of our way to avoid being caught by local gangs and beaten up. We passed Girard College, a forty-threeacre campus boarding school for poor, orphaned, or fatherless white boys between six and eighteen years of age. The college, although owned and operated by the city, was, nevertheless, off limits to black people.7 After crossing the Schuylkill River, we passed through luxurious Fairmont Park and the Philadelphia Zoo. At the tip of the park, we caught a glimpse across the river of exclusive boathouses with their social and rowing clubs, which did not, we imagined, include any of us. Before reaching home, we walked through the familiar run-down neighborhood where I was born: the Black Bottom.
In 1955, when I was sixteen years old and halfway through the eleventh grade, Dad decided to take Lewie and me out of school to work in the family business, doing house painting and wallpapering. Soon, Lewie had a run-in with Dad and left home. Six months later, I left too.
It started one evening when Dad told me to turn off the TV and go to bed. I resisted. He said, “As long as you are living here in my house, you will do as I say. If you are old enough to make your own decisions, you are old enough to support yourself.” Feeling rebellious and sassy, I replied, “I’m a man-child.”
My father didn’t take to that answer. He walked me out of the room and into the hallway, repeating what he had just said. I came back with the same response. We replayed the scene several times—from the hallway to the doorway to the porch steps to the sidewalk to down the block. Finally, when I repeated my line that I was a man-child, my father said, “You are on your own,” and walked away.
After that collision of our two strong wills, I never lived at home again. Later, overhearing a conversation among adults, I learned that when he had come back into the house, Dad had seemed upset as he told Mother, “Your son is gone.”
I spent that night at Aunt Ede’s house, borrowed fifty dollars from her, and caught a Greyhound bus the next day for a destination as far away from Philadelphia as I could imagine: the home of Dad’s relatives in Enid, Oklahoma. I landed unannounced on the doorstep of Great-Uncle Lewis and Aunt Mary, who took me in. Being away from home for the first time, I experienced a wonderful sense of personal emancipation. At the same time, I was shocked and troubled by the sudden immersion in a world of blatant segregation.
First Exposure to the Segregated South
My journey on the Greyhound bus was my first exposure to the American South. Although Philadelphia was no more than a dozen miles above the Mason Dixon Line, we had learned to think of it as a Northern city. The South was indeed another country. Signs of racial segregation were everywhere: separate toilets, separate drinking fountains, separate seating areas, and separate entrances to buildings. On buses, it was generally understood that African Americans took seats starting in the back and coming forward while whites started in the front and moved backwards. I had read in the newspapers and heard stories about the culture of segregation that victimized black people, but I wasn’t conditioned to such formal protocols. Early on in my time there, I boarded a bus and took a seat toward the front. Nobody said anything to me, but the tension was palpable. The bus driver didn’t start driving. Then, it dawned on me: I’m in the wrong seat. I stood up and moved more toward the rear of the bus to make room for the white passengers who were boarding.
Here I was, late in my teenage years, finally being exposed to the formal racial protocol of the South, a protocol that presumably every African American in the South already explicitly understood. And they had to: African Americans who violated the caste system, with its elaborate restrictions on small acts like showing affection in public or expressing even the slightest disagreement with a white person, were punished with many forms of violence. The culture of segregation condoned outright murder of African American people by lynching and other means and was strengthened by denial of the right to vote.
Spending time in Oklahoma and encountering such visible racism was a jarring experience for me, but one that helped me identify the more hidden racism of the North, where there were no written-out signs, but the feeling of being in the wrong seat was all too familiar.
I stayed with my relatives in Oklahoma for about five months. I found various jobs—most memorably one at an animal hospital—and managed to save around two thousand dollars before returning to Philadelphia. I took a room in the house Aunt Ede shared with my grandmother, worked odd jobs, and attended Temple University High School part time to finish my secondary education. I applied to the University of Pennsylvania (since I had grown up just a mile away, I had always assumed I would attend), but Temple failed to forward my records as promised, and that option evaporated.
