Crossing Division Street

I never saw my black friends again until the first day of seventh grade at Tappan Junior High School. That day, I was so excited about being at Tappan that I could barely keep my feet on the ground. Tappan was a huge gleaming new school, thronging with well-dressed shiny-faced kids, a temple of postwar American prosperity. On that thrilling first day, those of us who had come from Angell searched anxiously for each other in the crowded hallways and embraced joyously when we met.

And then at a certain moment in the day, when I was walking down a broad corridor with a big gang of my Angell friends, we rounded a corner and there in the distance, huddled like birds on a far branch, were my Jones School friends.

I ran even harder, and I remember clearly that they were very happy to see me. They called me "Jimmy," which I hadn't been called at school since the first grade, and we hugged and embraced. My sense--who knows how much of this I impose in retrospect and how much was really there?--is that they were a hundred times more excited and nervous and apprehensive than even I on that day. This was not just the first day at Tappan for them: It was their first real day in the white world.

The next vision is so clear and animate, even after all these years, that I do not doubt it in any detail. I had my arm around Eugene's shoulders. I turned, expecting my Angell friends to be standing inches behind me, having followed me down the hall to meet these new kids.

They had not moved an inch from where I had left them at the far end of the hall. The expressions on their faces were of shock and horror.

I said goodbye to my black friends. I hurried back down the corridor to my white friends.

They were aghast. They wanted to know how and why and when I had come to know colored kids. They wanted to know why on earth I was behaving in a way that was buddy-buddy toward the colored kids. They wanted to know what in the world was wrong with me. It was as if I had revealed myself to them as some kind of frightening avatar, a being totally unlike what they had always believed me to be.

I do remember clearly trying later in the day to think it all through by myself and, in that process, marveling at how huge was the difference my white friends perceived between themselves and my black buddies. It took my breath away. The white kids talked as if the black kids were not fully or truly human.

I hungered to be accepted and approved by my white friends. I was even a politician, one of the first seventh-graders ever, I was told at the time, to be elected to the student council. One of the ways I won my white friends over and helped ease any misgivings they may have had was by turning my back on my black Jones School friends, erasing them with my eyes, never speaking, never even acknowledging a glance or nod or hesitant lifting of the eyes. I made them more than dead. I made them into beings who had never existed.

I wasn't only turning my back on kids with whom I had committed crimes against pamphlet racks. There were black kids in the larger circle of my friends from Jones School who never did anything wrong, who came from the sternly determined families who went on to do things like integrate the postal service and send their kids to Harvard. I treated them, too, as unworthy of my gaze. Dirt on the floor.

When the big things happened--the pep rallies and the assemblies and the elections and even the fooling around in the cafeteria--the black kids were invisible to all the white kids. They couldn't be pretty or handsome or cool or important: They couldn't even really be present, not truly present, because we made them not there with our eyes. It's not child's play, that trick of the eyes. It's the first step, the very beginning of the process that ends with the trains and the ovens.

Once in a while I slipped. The black kids got me. As I moved down the hall with my group and passed one of the marginal little corners or nooks where the black kids were allowed to gather, Eugene or Mike or one of the girls would look at me and catch my eye.

Their eyes always spoke plainly. Their eyes said to my eye, "Asshole."