“You shouldn’t talk that way. It’s not nice.”
“No, it’s not. See how guilty I look?” Lydia crossed her eyes, and I tried not to giggle.
“Baby, you know Nana doesn’t count Miss Delores. Claire Prejean Garfield would rather be stranded on a desert island than be friends with her dark-skinned maid. And that’s why nobody likes her.”
“Lydia, don’t say that. She’s not perfect—”
“That’s an understatement—”
“—but Nana still needs love.”
“Baby, your heart is too big. You have to learn to be a little colder.”
*
Lydia didn’t point out the change in my mother’s schedule, that Mama not only picked up Lydia and me from our different schools, she dropped us off in the mornings, too. That Mama didn’t dress up in her stylish, feminine clothes on early weekday mornings, tapping around in the kitchen in the heels that made her inches taller. There was no big leather purse filled with folders or student papers. It took me an entire week to notice that she was wearing tracksuits in shades of blue or pink and designer tennis shoes that kept her feet close to the ground instead. When I asked why was she dressed so casually—was she teaching physical education now?—she told me she had decided she was tired of teaching those little badass kids at Wells-Barnett. They had worked her nerves for years, and it’s not like she needed the money. Between Daddy’s practice and his moonlighting at the hospital, there was more than enough, and besides, she had a family to see about.
I didn’t challenge my mother’s change of heart. It made sense to me that she’d want to stay home in more comfortable clothes and read the books she wanted, ones that weren’t written for third graders. Maybe she’d lost the excitement for the smell of chalk and the sound of high, needy voices. I could understand, because I’d lost my desire for school, too, ever since that day Cecily had sat beside me on the steps and told me she couldn’t be my friend anymore. After that, I’d brought a sack lunch to school and eaten it while locked in a bathroom stall. That way, I wouldn’t have to look at Cecily and her crew.
I didn’t regain any enthusiasm when I enrolled at Braithwaite Friends. There were only twelve other Black students in the entire upper school—what they called the sophomore, junior, and senior grades. If I hadn’t had Lydia back, I don’t know what I would have done, because it was lonely at Braithwaite Friends. Really lonely. At Toomer, I’d been popular for all of two months, but at least everybody there was like me. The only white person at Toomer had been the art instructor. In her office she’d hung prints by Romare Bearden and Elizabeth Catlett. Braithwaite Friends was not just in another part of the City. It seemed to occupy a minuscule country all its own, one where there were no combinations on the lockers or padlocks because it was assumed that the students didn’t steal. The cafeteria was called the “dining room,” and the options were varied and delicious, not like the single, processed meal at Toomer that you either had to eat or go hungry. There were three kinds of soups. A salad bar with raw, bright vegetables and both creamy and vinaigrette dressings. Hot entrees were made to order, and if you were vegetarian someone in the kitchen came up with a creative concoction and put parsley on the side of the plate.
It was hard to figure out the financial or social pecking order at Braithwaite Friends. Nobody seemed to be an outcast, and nobody had bad teeth, either. There were straight teeth or braces in these kids’ mouths. On their bodies, neat, clean clothes, but nothing too stylish or ostentatious. Someone who looked like a nerd might have lots of friends and you’d find out that his father had given him a Mercedes for his sixteenth birthday. Mama had told me to seek out the Black kids. Undoubtedly, they would be lonely, too, but the twelve others in my tribe looked at me blankly whenever I offered my special, colored-person smile, which communicated that we were in this integration thing together. In the dining room if I put my tray down next to someone Black, they would rise and relocate at another table, sitting down in a sea of whiteness. The Black girls were the worst: none of them knew how to fix their hair. Besides me, every single girl relaxed, but didn’t grease at all. Their dry edges looked so broken and defeated.
After a month at Braithwaite Friends, only my teachers had made the place bearable. I’d never known teachers who asked for kids’ opinions and discussed ideas with them instead of telling us what we should think.