Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter thirteen

The only break from segregation came when we left Birmingham, which tended to be in the summer. When we would visit my grandmother and Aunt Theresa in Baton Rouge, we took the train, which provided integrated facilities.

We’d board the Silver Comet at about five in the evening in Birmingham, eat in the dining car, and sleep overnight in a bedroom berth. I can still taste the pudding, served in heavy silver ice cream cups, and feel the excitement of getting into bed as the train rushed along the tracks. But when we returned to Birmingham, the only place for blacks to eat out was A. G. Gaston’s restaurant, and Mother didn’t like to eat there because it was next door to a funeral home.

Once in a while we’d travel to Atlanta, about 150 miles away, where there was a wider variety of black restaurants and a nice movie theater. I can remember seeing Jerry Lewis’s The Nutty Professor on one such occasion, being treated to dinner at Pasquale’s, and then driving home since there was really no place to stay.

In 1959, my father decided to start graduate school. He wanted out of the ministry and into college work and began to pursue a master’s degree in student personnel administration. The University of Alabama wasn’t an option since it was segregated. As a result, many black professionals of my father’s generation received their advanced degrees from midwestern or northern schools. Daddy learned that New York University had a fine program, and in the summer of 1959 and again in 1960, we packed up the family car and drove to New York City.

The problem was that there was nowhere for blacks to stay or eat until you reached Washington, D.C. The only option was a picnic lunch of fried chicken, pork chops, bread, and potato chips to eat in the car. Mother would get up very early and prepare the feast. We’d leave before daylight, hoping to make it out of the deepest South before dark. This was in the days before the interstate highway system was completed, and for a black family some of the roads in Georgia and South Carolina could be pretty scary.

When we reached Washington, D.C., we were all excited to be staying in a new chain of hotels called Holiday Inn. The rooms were hardly luxurious, but they were clean and it was a relief to have a bathroom. My parents, particularly my mother, were not too keen to stop at the gas-station restrooms for “coloreds” because they were almost always putrid and foul-smelling. If we couldn’t find a reasonably clean bathroom when nature called, we just, shall I say, went in nature.

New York was fun. We ate at Howard Johnson’s almost every night and went to the movies, including one that everyone was buzzing about, Ben Hur. We stayed in a nice hotel called the Manhattan until we started to run out of money. Then my father managed to get a small apartment in the quarters for medical students near Bellevue Hospital.

The second time in New York we began our stay in that complex. My mother didn’t like the arrangements, though, complaining that the students would sometimes come home with blood on their clothes. I remember that there were quite a few roaches in residence too. Our dwindling resources and the less than ideal accommodations were taking a toll. Even I was able to tell that things were pretty tense between my parents. It was the first time I’d ever heard them yell at each other, and I was quite unnerved by the whole thing.

The next year my father decided to look for a more suitable place to pursue his studies. He learned that the University of Denver had a new program offering the degree that he wanted. More important, it offered reasonable student housing for families. So for the next two summers, when I was six and seven, we set out for a new destination: the Rocky Mountain state of Colorado.

The trip to Denver was longer than the trip to New York, but traveling westward, we were able to find lodging just across the Tennessee border. After a stopover we would resume driving, trying to make it as far as St. Louis or Kansas City, where we’d stop again. The car wasn’t air-conditioned, and Kansas was always flat and hot. We would play all of those games that families do: How many different state license plates can you identify? Can you guess the number of miles to the next town? My parents developed another game: What colleges are located here? On one of these trips we actually went several hundred miles out of the way to see Ohio State. My parents counted the number of college campuses visited like some people count national parks.

But all in all I loved these trips. I’ll never forget the first time we crossed the border into Colorado. When you reach Colorado, the horizon appears to rise and you know you’re about to climb a mile high. My heart would beat faster as we drew closer to Denver, and to this day I am happiest in the high mountains of the western United States. I always felt that I should have been born in the West.

The move to Denver was a good one. The university had very nice accommodations for families in Aspen Hall, complete with a full kitchen. My mother was also able to enroll in classes. Her certifications to teach were in English and science, so, to capitalize on her music skills, she decided to pursue a third qualification in music.

The problem was what to do with me. There was a day camp to which I could and did go, but the activities ended in the early afternoon. One day we were passing by the campus ice arena, and I got an idea: ice-skating lessons. I’d seen two teenage figure skaters coming out of the arena in their little skating skirts. Since I loved watching figure skating on television, I was immediately taken with the idea. The Denver Figure Skating Club ran a full-day summer school at the University of Denver arena. Skating was therefore the perfect answer: an opportunity to learn something new and high-priced child care.

In short, the summers in Denver were ideal for the whole family, with clean, cheap accommodations, educational opportunities for both Mother and Daddy, and skating for me. We discovered all kinds of activities in the relaxed atmosphere of Colorado. Evening trips to Elitch Gardens, an amusement park outside the city, were my favorite. I loved to ride the carousel and play the game where one throws balls at bowling pins, winning prizes for knocking them down. We went to see movies and discussed them afterward at a nice pizza parlor near the campus. When it was time to go home, I was really sad to leave and sorry to say goodbye to my new skating friends. Funny enough, I don’t remember reflecting much on the fact that, for the first time in my life, my little friends were white.