Pat

The private school where I teach held a zoom vigil last week in the wake of recent killings of Black people.  Students of color spoke, faculty spoke, parents spoke. I watched and listened, amazed by the courage and strength, especially of the teenagers.  One junior spoke about growing up in Dorchester, around mostly Black people without money.  His mom told him, "When you drive, don't drive fast.  Don't play your music loud.  Don't put down your windows."

He said, "Then I came to Thayer, and the Thayer kids were all speeding into the parking lot in their jeeps, blasting their music, windows down.  And then I went to Scituate and Cohasset, and I thought, 'What is this?' " Scituate and Cohasset are wealthy South Shore towns with both year-round homes and summer homes.   You can leave your bike overnight at the beach, and no one will take it.  My husband and I have called Cohasset a "pretty how town," a phrase that I think we got from e.e. cummings. Scituate has at least two country clubs, and Cohasset at least one.  

Both Scituate and Cohasset are virtually all white.

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Scituate is my favorite place in the world.  We went to Scituate for the entire summer, starting when I was four.  I knew nothing about race, and I didn't think about whether a place was white, likely because ninety-nine percent of my life was white.  In the summers, we played tennis and golf and rode our bikes and went to the beach.  As we got older, we babysat almost daily.

When I was a junior in high school, I applied to a summer school program at Milton Academy.  It was called MASP -- Massachusetts Advanced Studies Program.  The guidance counselors at my Catholic school had told me about it, and they told me of other students who had gone.  Kids lived at Milton Academy for six weeks, and took classes six days a week.  I got wait-listed.  At the Open House, my mom and I listened to one teacher, Ted Allen, talk about writing.  He dazzled us -- I don't remember what he said, only that Mom and I were a bit starstruck, realizing, Oh, that's why kids come here.

The director spoke and some other teachers spoke about the program, diversity, learning.  

On the ride home, my mom said, "Well, now you know why you didn't get in."

I didn't know.  

She said, "They talked about diversity and increasing the number of minorities in the program this year.  You're not a minority."

When affirmative action comes up, one of my sisters still says to me, "Remember?  Because of affirmative action, you almost didn't get into that summer program."

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I was sixteen.  I went to a nearly all-white school.  My family was bitter about the waitlist; I was surprised since I'd always been told how smart I was by my Catholic school teachers, but not bitter.  I wasn't good enough; other kids were better.  I sent back the paper to say that I wanted to stay on the waitlist and hoped they would let me in.

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When MASP accepted me some time later, I sat at the kitchen table with my parents and debated whether to do the program.  I felt conflicted: on the one hand, I wanted to go; on the other hand, I felt impatient and false.  I kept saying that I wanted to become a social worker, but I wasn't doing anything towards that goal.  If I was serious, I should start working at a shelter now, for the summer.  Going to summer school seemed a luxury (and it cost money, a lot of money!  I think it was $1800 back in 1989), and I needed to get going on my career.

My parents listened.  To their credit, they didn't laugh or condescend.  They told me that I had plenty of time to work in shelters and that this summer program was for just one summer, that it wouldn't get in the way of my desire to be a social worker.

I signed up.

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I got the writing teacher we'd heard speak, the charismatic one that impressed my mom and me.  Ted Allen.  He was dynamic, asked the hard questions, made us think on levels I didn't know existed.  At forty-seven years old, I think, Wow, it would be great to take that course now; I could get so much out of it.  I was a kid who liked happy endings, was dutiful and hardworking, and didn't, I think, really get nuance.  I loved Ted's dynamism, bluntness, charisma, intellect.  I was so out of my league, and I partly knew it, and I partly didn't.

He had us watch Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, and I was confused at the end.  I remember his reading from my journal one Friday (on Fridays he read excerpts from our journals; if there was something that you didn't want him to read or read aloud, you just had to mark that in your journal), and my entry started like this, "Do the Right Thing was good."  I remember being both excited that he was reading an entry of mine and embarrassed that my first sentence was so elementary.  I remember that I wasn't sure what the point of the movie was and that I didn't totally get it.  I appreciated it, but I didn't really get it.

One day Ted thrust his black arm out over the table (what I would ten years later learn was called a Harkness table) and said, "What do you see?"  We were quiet.  He repeated himself, "What do you see?  Say everything that comes to mind.  Go."

I'd never talked about race in a classroom before, never heard people talk openly about race anywhere.  I didn't know what to say, and I'm not sure whether I said anything.  But I remember that this boy, Jake, who lived in a town neighboring mine and who seemed so much more experienced and worldly and smart and mature than I was, spoke up and said something that wasn't positive, something that, it seemed to me, he didn't necessarily think, but he understood that others did and he understood that saying these things, these racist or biased things, was what Ted was trying to get us to do.  To go there to that place.  To get race right out there in front of us, like his black arm.

I said nothing.

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One Saturday when I was sitting by the tennis courts, Ted came and sat with me.  I told him that MASP didn't look at all like my high school, which was nearly all white.  I didn't know what to do about this, how to make my high school more like MASP, more like the real world.  

Ted said, "Change schools."

I was about to be a senior in high school.  I didn't know what to do with that advice.

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My family was still going to Scituate, but only on weekends.  This was the first summer, I think, that my family didn't go down from mid-June through Labor Day.  (This helped me to miss Scituate less, though I still missed it.)  One Sunday I invited a group of MASP friends to come down to Scituate for the day; it was about thirty minutes from Milton.  Caroline, Jenn, Cecilia, EunJin, Pat, another Jen, and maybe another person or two that I don't remember.

Caroline and Jenn and Jen are white, like me.  Cecilia and EunJin are Korean.  Pat is Haitian.  I was still trying to remember the difference between Asian and Haitian and got confused sometimes.  Pat was black, and she lived in Mattapan, I knew this.  And I knew from my parents that Mattapan could be a dangerous place.

But I wasn't thinking about all of this.  I was thinking about a Sunday in Scituate.

Someone -- my parents?  my grandmother and aunt who lived up the street? -- picked us up and drove us to my parents' beach house.  We hung out on the porch, we walked to the beach, we talked and talked and laughed and laughed.  Except Pat.  Pat sulked.  And I didn't know why.  We tried to get her to join in and talk, and I asked her what was wrong, but she shrugged, said very little, and kept a towel over her head at the beach.  I was annoyed: what was wrong with Pat?  I had invited her to spend the day at my favorite place in the world, at my parents' house, with this group of people that she was friends with, too.  I couldn't understand why she was in such a bad mood.

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Pat and I stayed friends through the summer though I still felt frustrated by that Sunday in Scituate.  We exchanged letters that fall, and I remember that I was shocked by her elementary-school print and incomplete sentences.  And I wondered how well we had known each other.

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It's thirty years later, and I'm at the zoom vigil to honor Black Lives Matter and the most recent violence against a Black person, against George Floyd, who was killed by a white police officer.  I'm listening to this black teenager talk about growing up in Dorchester and going to see his new Thayer friends in Scituate and Cohasset, and his being shocked that these places exist, places where white kids his age drive around in jeeps in their bathing suits, blasting music and singing and looking like something out of the movies.  I think, What a shock for him -- that these wealthy white towns exist just thirty minutes from his neighborhood where he has to be careful when he walks outside the house, where his mom doesn't want him going for runs these days because of what happened to Ahmed Aubery.

And it's then, thirty years later, that I remember Pat on the beach in Scituate, towel over her head, not talking to any of us, in a seemingly bad mood.  What was going on for her?  What worlds were colliding for her?  What did she feel driving down Ocean Avenue and sitting on the beach in a sea of white, so likely the only Black person in sight?

I sat in Ted's class and read and thought and talked about race and inequality and injustice.  I looked at his arm when he thrust it in front of me, afraid to speak and afraid not to speak.  But I didn't take the conversations and questions and pull them out of the classroom.  I wasn't a horrible or thoughtless kid, but I was ignorant.  I was so ignorant that I didn't take what I learned on Saturday in class and see it on Sunday in Scituate with my white family; didn't get that Pat's letter did reveal that we hadn't really gotten each other, or rather, I hadn't gotten her; her education or neighborhood or background hadn't crossed my mind.  

I turned seventeen that summer.  I can be disappointed in myself for not getting inequality or race or injustice or paying attention to the right things.  If I forgive myself, then I also need to forgive the students in front of me, the ones who worry more about their GPA's and college applications than the Black experience at our school.  But I'm the teacher now.  

Ted Allen told me years ago when I was the student, "Go to a different high school."  

I don't want to go to a different high school.

I want to make my classrooms better.  My school better.  I want to have the conversations in the classroom, in classrooms similar to those Milton classrooms, to get my students to see real life outside the classroom in ways that I didn't at their age.