—W. E. B. Du Bois, “Evolution of the Negro”
What Is Best
It was the Friday before winter break at Toomer High. Mama knocked on my door, telling me we were going to take a girls’ day. I didn’t have to go to school, and she’d arranged for a substitute to cover her class. We were going to have some fun.
“For real? Can we have pizza?”
“We’ll see. But let’s go out.”
“Where’re we going, Mama?”
“It’s a surprise, baby. Wear something nice, though. Not jeans.”
I wore a plaid kilt and a pink sweater but slipped on my penny loafers. Mama was in heels and a blue wool dress with a matching self-belt. The pearl earrings my father had bought her for their anniversary hung from her lobes. We buckled in and she drove to the toniest part of town, where the streets were cobblestone, and pulled up to a new, L-shaped building. There were four floors and wooden shingles on top.
“Mama, why are we at Coco’s old school?”
“Don’t get upset.” This was what she usually said right before she was about to upset me. “We’re going to talk to the admissions counselor here.”
“No, Mama! Uh-uh!”
“Just keep an open mind, baby. If you don’t want to transfer, you don’t have to. But please be polite, okay? Don’t embarrass me in front of that white man.”
Inside, the school counselor told us to call him by his first name, because at Braithwaite Friends School everyone was on a first-name basis from the students on up to headmaster. Which meant I couldn’t call the counselor anything, because I’d been taught that children shouldn’t address adults by first names. I couldn’t tell him that, though, because that would be correcting an adult, which I was also forbidden to do. This was a no-win situation.
The counselor informed us that I had placed in the ninety-ninth percentile with my reading and writing scores on the state’s secondary school standardized tests. He didn’t say how he’d received my test scores, only that my language skills were quite surprising since I’d lagged over a year behind in science and math. He didn’t want to give me those percentiles, however. That would only discourage me.
“I know that Ailey can catch up,” Mama said. “She’s a very hard worker.”
This charade had gone way too far. I turned to my mother and she looked back at me. Her eyes narrowed, and her lips pursed for a quick moment, before her face was brushed free of emotion again. That’s when I knew: my mother had sat me in the fool’s chair.
The counselor picked up a small stack of folders and straightened them by knocking them on top of the desk. “All right, but we can’t take her for this spring semester. That’s too soon, I hope you understand.”
“I understand,” Mama said.
“But I’ll have a place for her next fall,” he said. “And I have high hopes for your sophomore year, Ailey. Your sister Carol was a superlative student here and fully integrated into school culture.”
The counselor had been smiling in an encouraging way, but when he said “integrated” he paused and blushed. He looked down at his files, as if he’d said something naughty. At the end of the interview, he began filling out the paperwork needed for my enrollment at Braithwaite Friends School.
*
My mother wasn’t much into art. She tended to use books as decoration instead: one wall of our living room was taken up by custom shelves. The former owners had installed them, and when the real estate agent had walked my mother through the house and she saw those shelves, she’d instantly put down a bid. And then there was a child’s quilt that had been passed down in my mother’s family that hung on my parents’ bedroom wall. Its edges were tattered, and its scattered stars had faded to an anonymous gray, so my mother had framed it and sealed it in glass.
Aunt Diane had given Mama her only official piece of art, a reproduction of a Norman Rockwell painting. A poster, really—though Mama had that framed as well—that depicted a little Black girl named Ruby Bridges on her first day in a segregated school, back in 1960. In the painting, she wore church clothes: A dress with petticoats underneath. Ankle socks and Mary Janes. The faces of the federal marshals escorting her were hidden, but anyone looking at the painting understood why they were bookending her. There was implicit, hushed violence in the brightly colored scene: tomatoes had been thrown at the child, their brutal juice clinging to the bricks. Ruby was in kindergarten, so she couldn’t read the word “nigger” scrawled on the brick wall behind her.