after school, twice a week. In school all the children were
together, especially the Polish Catholics and the blacks and the
Jews, and after school we didn’t speak to each other or be
friends. I would try to go to the houses of kids I liked in
school, just walk by to see what it was like if it was near
where I walked to go home, and there would be polite conversations sometimes on their blocks, but their parents would look at me funny and I could never go in. We got to love each other
in school and play together at recess but then no more, we had
to go back to where we came from. We had to like each other
on our block whether we did or not and it was OK when we
were playing massive games ranging over the whole wide world
of our block, but sometimes when I just wanted to talk to
someone or see someone, one person, it wasn’t someone on
our block, but someone else, someone Polish Catholic or black,
and then I couldn’t: because it just couldn’t be done, it just
wasn’t allowed. My parents were good, they were outspoken
against prejudice and they taught me everybody was the same,
but when it came to actually going on another block they just
said not to go there and there and there like everybody else
and when I tried to go there the parents on the other end
would send me away. There was Michael who was Polish Catholic, a gentle boy, and Nat who was black. She would come to my house and once at least I went to hers, at least once or
twice I was allowed to go there, mostly she came home with
me, my parents protected me and didn’t let me know how the
neighbors felt about it, and we always had to stay inside and
play, and her mother was a teacher and so was my father:
and I loved her with all my passionate heart. When we
moved away to the suburbs so mother wouldn’t have to walk
any steps because she couldn’t breathe I was torn apart from
all this, my home, my street, the games, the great throng of
wild children who played hide-and-seek late into the night
while mother lay dying: and I said, I will go if I can see Nat,
if she can come to visit me and I can visit her, and I was so
distressed and full of grief, that they looked funny at each
other and lied and said yes of course you can see Nat.
21
But where we moved was all white and I couldn’t see Nat.
*
So when I was a teenager I went back to the old neighborhood
to show it to a teenage friend, the old elementary school where
I had been happy and the old streets where I had been happy,
we took two buses to get there and walked a long way and I
didn’t tell anyone I was going, but now it was all black and
getting even poorer than it had been and there were hundreds
of teenage girls in great clusters on the streets walking home
from high school and we were white and we were surrounded
and they got nasty and mean and wanted to know why we
were showing our white faces there and I looked up and there
was Nat, quiet as she had always been, the same scholarly
