I was excited about finally getting out of Bakersfield, but I was also having a good year. On top of being elected president of our Y club, I was also elected president of my Medical Careers club, and my newfound confidence was helping me to make friends more easily than ever before.
To top it all off, I was finally able to take an art class. I’d always wanted to but, since I had been in college preparatory classes all through high school, I’d never had room in my schedule. Now, as a senior, I had room for two electives, so I signed up for art and a special sociology class. I was also accepted into an advanced composition class that would fulfill my English requirement. Instead of school being a drag, I was loving it.
I now had a diverse group of friends. In addition to Dee-Dee and Florence and Cherie and the other girls in my Y club, I made friends with two girls from my Medical Careers club, Sharon and Grace; Helene, who I met at a YWCA weekend retreat; and even some girls I met from a Y across town.
Helene was my first black friend. In Bakersfield, black people literally lived “across the tracks,” and this meant they went to a different high school. But there was a Y teen club for blacks and Yvonne had made sure that all members of the Y teen clubs in Bakersfield met each other by offering weekend retreats to which we were all invited.
At the first retreat, the black girls taught us all how to do the Jerk, a popular dance at the time. We had a great time dancing together and getting to know one another, and I especially liked Helene. She was quiet but sweet and friendly.
Helene asked me if I’d like to come over to her house after school one day and I was delighted. I took the downtown bus and she met me at the bus stop and we walked the short way to her house. Helene’s mother was welcoming and seemed open to Helene having a white friend. Helene and I went into her bedroom and listened to records and danced. I loved the music she listened to, what she called “soul” music. She taught me more dances and we laughed the whole time we were dancing. We also talked about our plans for the future. Like me, Helene couldn’t afford to go to college, so she knew she’d have to get a job after high school and save her money if she was ever going to go.
I liked Helene’s ambition and her spirit and sense of humor. We didn’t seem all that different, as far as I was concerned. I wanted us to become close friends, but I knew I couldn’t reciprocate by inviting her over to my house; my mother hated blacks too much.
When several weeks went by and I still didn’t invite Helene to my house, she seemed to cool toward me, but I just couldn’t bring myself to explain why I couldn’t invite her. So while we continued to see each other at Y events, we slowly drifted apart.
I knew not to bring Helene up with my mother. We had been arguing over the Civil Rights Movement for months. It was 1965, the height of the movement, and we were seeing marches, protests, and riots every night on TV. I felt that blacks should be treated the same as whites, but my mother continued to insist that they should “stay in their place.” She was opposed to things like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which guaranteed blacks the right to vote, while I felt these were important steps toward ending racial segregation and discrimination. My mother continued to believe that blacks were inferior to us, and no matter how much I tried to reason with her, she refused to change her mind.
I decided to try out for the senior play and during the tryouts I met Sunny, who was to become my new best friend. I still loved Dee-Dee but she was too boy crazy for me—it was all she ever talked about. And when she had a boyfriend, she didn’t have time for anything or anyone else.
Sunny was different from anyone I’d ever met. She was clever and inquisitive and seemed older than the other kids. We’d never met before because she wasn’t part of the college prep classes I’d been in since freshman year, but once we met we opened up to each other right away. It turned out that Sunny and I had a lot in common. Both our mothers were alcoholics and we’d both had to raise ourselves. And when I told her I’d been sexually abused, she shared with me that she had been raped by a group of men a few years before. She never gave me details about what happened, or who the men were, and I never asked. We had the special kind of bond born of shared suffering and shame.
Unlike Pam and Cherie and Sue, Sunny’s traumas hadn’t seemed to dampen her capacity for joy. Like Ruby, she was a free spirit. She was full of mischief and spontaneity, and she didn’t care what other people
