The Prodigal Returns

I didn’t mean to take the summer off-somehow a few days turned into a few weeks, which has turned into almost two months of silence on my part. But with school around the corner and a break in my strangely busy summer, it’s time to get back on the bike and start riding.

 

It’s no coincidence that I’m starting up again as LB wraps up a summer of vacation camps and visits with friends and relatives. These activities have given me plenty of notice that yes, still, bringing up a biracial child is on a different plane than bringing up a single-race child.

 

Last week, LB attended Vacation Bible School at her church. Like many activities there, it was a mix of religion, social justice education and community bonding. Before the Bible passage of the week and the home-cooked fried chicken dinner, LB’s class heard about school in the Deep South about 50 years ago.

 

“Sister Mary”, a woman in her 60’s, talked about taking the city bus to school at a time when blacks sat in the back. She learned quickly to hold her books tight to her chest so that white kids could not grab them out of her hands and to watch her feet so that the white kids could not trip her. Naturally, her school was segregated. She had friends in school; it was just a matter of getting there in once piece.

 

Mary was still in school when desegregation came along, which brought its own set of challenges. Instead of being harassed only on the buses to and from school, she was harassed AT school as well. But she recalled being glad of the change-at least the school allowed her and other black students through the door. The religion lesson was about forgiveness. It sounds to me as thought Mary had a lot to forgive.

 

The first thing out of LB’s mouth when we picked her up was to retell Sister Mary’s story and to grill each of us about our own schooling experience. “Was YOUR school segregated, Mommy?” I told her that my state was so white I didn’t share a classroom with a child of color until high school. In a school of 2500, there were about 10 black students, a handful of Chinese, and another handful of Hispanics. College was different-for the first time I was around kids from all over, of many races, languages and incomes. It was a breath of fresh air.

 

Next was Lee’s turn. He told LB that his school wasn’t segregated either, that in fact, his best friend until 3^rd grade was a white boy who lived nearby. His high school actually had fewer black students than his elementary/middle school, though, because he paid his own way through a private school in a part of town that was overwhelmingly white. While it wasn’t segregated and he enjoyed most of his experience there, even in the late 1970’s there were a few signs that there was still progress needed.

 

I only recently heard one story about this: when the drama club chose a play that included in the cast a black couple as household servants, Lee was asked to take on the role of the husband because, well, he was black, and a black female student was asked about the wife’s role. Never mind that neither had shown an interest in drama. They both declined. The play was held with white students in those roles.

 

And Lee was discouraged from running for class president his senior year because the powers that be didn’t consider him electable. Just another sign that prejudice is NOT ancient history! Lee’s best friend made school history just three years later when HE was elected senior class president as the first black to do so.

 

LB absorbs these stories along with stories about the mundane things her father and I did growing up. The total picture helps her with perspective when she sees on the news, as we did a couple of days ago, that a biracial family in a town nearby woke to find racist graffiti on their fence. This happened in the same area where not long ago, another family of color found a cross burning on their lawn.

 

Do we talk about and deal with race every day? No, not really, other than the obviousness of the color difference right in our own home. But is it there as an under-the-surface “thing” that can’t ever really go away. People who lived segregation are still around, still telling their stories, still remembering what the pain was like. People in families just like ours are still waking up-far from the Deep South-to KKK and foul language in full view of their children.

 

School starts in three weeks. LB will begin her journey in a school not unlike her father’s high school. The difference is that we’ll be right alongside her as part of a parent committee committed to bringing in more children like LB. It’s something that Sister Mary could only have dreamed about when she was LB’s age. There’s been a lot of progress. But that fence to the north of here in need of repainting, is a reminder that we’re not out of the woods yet.