It Was Like Dickens

So, as Dickens would have said, my twelfth year was my best year and my worst year. I had mastered the old English alphabet and the drawing of block letters. I drew three views of a Wheeties box in isometric perspective. I understood the difference between isometric perspective and one point perspective and could chose one or the other for my block lettering. I was beginning to draw objects and scenes from memory, and at last my father stopped having a worried look on his face when he explained things to me.

On the other hand, every day I was being punished, lectured and screamed at in school so that the very act of walking the mile to the building had aspects of going to your own execution. And WHO goes willingly to their execution, especially on a grey and overcast day? Most ordinary people would be inclined to run away.

At home, however, life had become like broad daylight. My father seemed to understand how all mechanical objects worked and we were always asking him questions such as “What is a transmission? How does an engine work?” He always had the same answer, “Get me a paper and a pencil.”

Then he would draw a diagram on the paper and as the drawing progressed there would be a narration and an explanation of the parts and their functions. One thing I loved about him was an oddity of his speech, which probably came from the study of geometry. He would say, for example, “Let this be the drive shaft, and this 'might be' where the gear is attached.” Instead of “This is the drive shaft...”

These new skills of mine did not help me in any way at school. For a child, a year is a particularly long time. As a matter of fact, at twelve a year is like forever. I could imagine that eventually I would go on to seventh and then eighth grades and escape the tyranny of Mrs. Wagner, but the teachers of the other grades were reputed to be just as bad so there was no relief or end in sight to my miseries. And then, about half way through the year, the situation became decidedly worse.

It was 1956. Rosa Parks had only been riding in the front of the bus for one year. At the same time that Rosa Parks was riding the bus down south, Clarence and his mother moved from the north end of town, where all the black families lived, to the south end, which was entirely white middle class neighborhoods. It is impossible to write about this subject without the filter of history distorting every word I say. For example, if I say the Clarence and his Mother were “Black” this is misleading because the term “Black” was not in use in the United Stated” in 1956. If I say that Clarence was a "negro," this has a sound that is also distorted.

But the hardest problem is to describe the significance of a black boy in a white school, in 1956 for a twelve year old. I knew very little about black kids. The subject had never come up at home. If I had any ideas about race at the time it was from the strange rumors that circulated among us as children. The fifties was the age of the juvenile delinquent. There was the Corn Hill section, this was a part of town where poor white kids threw gasoline on old people in a park, and set them on fire. There was Liberty Street, where the negroes lived, they were people who carried straight razors in their pockets, and if you got to close to them you got slashed.

So, I was twelve, and in sixth grade, snow was beginning to fly, and I was being punished every day for crimes I had not committed. And now there was a negro boy who had entered our class, and was seated just four seats away from me. It was only a matter of time now, I thought, until I was stabbed.