Some of My Best Friends Are Black (3 page)

On the subject of school integration, I started by going back and looking at the history of busing at my high school in Birmingham, Alabama. Digging into the issue of fair housing and white and black neighborhoods, I wound up in a place I’ve never lived but where the segregated American cityscape came into being: Kansas City, Missouri. For the history of workplace discrimination and affirmative action, I went back to my onetime employer, New York’s advertising industry, where I worked as a copywriter starting in the late 1990s. And lastly, to try to understand what is
still the most segregated hour in the country, I went all the way back home to southern Louisiana, where small towns dot the countryside and the Roman Catholic Church still today maintains separate black and white parishes—right across the street from each other.

When I say I had no idea what I was doing when I started this endeavor, I’m not exaggerating. But my ignorance, it turns out, really was the single greatest asset I could have packed to take with me: I walked out my front door with nothing but questions and couldn’t come home until somebody gave me the answers. Astute readers may have already noted what I only fully came to realize along the way. The strange career of Jim Crow took root and grew out of the same place that I did. It was in Louisiana that a minor statute to mandate separate white and colored railcars overcame a challenge from local activists and went on to be upheld by the Supreme Court in the case of
Plessy v. Ferguson
in 1896, thus establishing the legal precedent for constitutionally sanctioned segregation across the country. And it was just down the road from my high school in Birmingham where Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement did the impossible in the spring of 1963, breaking through the color line of the most segregated city in America to expose the violent inhumanity of segregation and ultimately bring about its demise. Quite by accident, retracing the persistence of the color line in my own life took me down that same road in reverse. I went from the streets where Jim Crow was killed back to the swamp where he was born. I started at the end and wound up at the beginning, and it was there that I found what I went looking for.

“Turn on the heat, Mom.”

“It’s on, baby. It’s on.”

It’s way too early. The sun is barely up, it’s cold out, and Alicia Thomas is warming up the engine of her big yellow school bus. She cranks the heat for her two young boys, Robert and Walter, who sit a few rows back. Still bundled up in winter coats to stave off the February chill, they’re pulling out their schoolbooks to get in some last-minute studying before homeroom.

Up in the front row, I reach over and hand Ms. Alicia—as all the kids call her—the warm cup of coffee I’d promised when she invited me along for the ride. She says thank you with a sweet, sunny Alabama smile, which seems impossibly bright given the hour. We idle a few minutes while she double-checks some gauges. Then she puts the bus in gear, and we’re off.

Alicia Thomas drives the bus. Not the regular bus, and not the short bus. She drives the other bus, the bus that brings the black kids. Every weekday morning for nearly four decades, her bus, or a bus quite like it, has followed the same well-worn route: out from the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama, along Highway 31, up Columbiana Road, down the far side of Shades Mountain, and out into the Oxmoor Valley below. There, in Oxmoor, the bus picks up its quota of federally mandated integration
and hauls it back to the leafy, lily white enclave where I went to high school: Vestavia Hills. It’s a route Ms. Alicia could probably navigate blindfolded. In the early 1970s, long before she drove the bus, she rode it as a student.

“It used to get so cold,” she says with a shiver, remembering her mornings at the stop. “The boys had to light campfires to keep us warm until the bus came.”

“You had
campfires
?” I say. “At your bus stop?”

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “We were so country.”

Less than ten miles from the million-dollar cul-de-sacs of Vestavia Hills, the Oxmoor where Alicia Thomas grew up was little more than a rambling crisscross of back roads on the outskirts of nowhere—not a town at all, really. There were a few ranch-style brick houses for those who could afford them, but clapboard and cinder block shacks were more the norm, some with dirt floors, others with no running water. There wasn’t much else to see in the sprawling seven thousand acres of the Oxmoor Valley. It was a scrapyard, a garbage dump for the industrial waste of the U.S. Steel Corporation, which at one time held a monopoly on Birmingham’s steel trade.

Back then the Oxmoor kids had to be up at five a.m., Alicia tells me, to walk through fields of chickens and cows, some of them upward of a mile, just to reach the bus stop. In her day, the bus they rode was a rickety, scrap-metal clunker, lurching around the hairpin turns of the city’s mountainous terrain. Their bus driver? Some old white guy clutching the wheel, half scared to death by the rowdy children crammed in behind him. “I can just remember riding down those big hills,” Alicia recalls. “The brakes going out and the bus
packed
with kids. It was three to a seat with the rest on the floor or standing in the aisle, with no air-conditioning. And here’s this one old white guy driving all these black kids? He couldn’t handle all those kids.”

“What was the guy’s name?” I ask.

The question brings her up short. “You know,” she says, “in all those years of driving us, I don’t think he ever even spoke to us once to tell us his name. We just called him Shaky, ’cause he was always so nervous. ‘
Shaky, slow down! You gon’ kill
us!
’”

Vestavia Hills sits just south of Birmingham, the largest city in Alabama and, at one time, the largest industrial center in the South. Together with the neighboring towns of Mountain Brook, Homewood, and Hoover, Vestavia forms the nucleus of “Over the Mountain”—the catchall term for Birmingham’s suburban sprawl, so named because you go “over” Red Mountain to get there from downtown.

Having lived there, I suppose I can say that whites in Vestavia aren’t any more or less racist than the ones in the other suburbs. But when the school system was formed there in 1970, born in the exodus of white flight, the city
did
go to great lengths to put its feelings on display. Vestavia’s chosen mascot was the Confederate rebel, “Colonel Reb.” An ornery, cartoony-looking fellow, the Colonel resembles a cross between Yosemite Sam and an angry Mark Twain, his hat cocked back and a clenched fist sticking out. The official school banner? The Confederate battle flag. Flown from pickup trucks and waving high in the bleachers, the Stars and Bars was always on proud display. If you stumbled onto a Vestavia football game by accident, you might think you were at a Klan rally with a concession stand.

That’s the image Vestavia wanted, and it stuck. To this day, racial incidents land the school on the five o’clock news. There are many in Birmingham’s black community who still refuse to set foot in “that racist suburb,” because, to them, this isn’t just a suburb. As a symbol, Vestavia Hills was nothing more than white flight’s parting shot at the civil rights movement, the final insult.

Alicia Thomas first arrived here as a five-year-old kindergartner in 1971. Friends of hers had come the year before, so what she encountered wasn’t a complete surprise. There were problems. Name calling, graffiti on bathroom stalls. Huddled around the bus-stop campfire, the stench of smoke would sink into your clothes; once you got to school, you’d sometimes hear “God, what’s that smell?” or “Those niggers stink” as you walked down the hall.

For the first several months, Alicia says, she and the black students were all put with a black teacher and had their classes in a corner of the cafeteria, still segregated from the white kids. Even after she was put in
regular classes, white teachers didn’t always treat her fairly. They assumed she was slow, less capable. “My third-grade teacher was a mean lady,” Alicia recalls. “I had to say to her, ‘I
can
read. I
can
write.’ One day she told me I had to get out of her class and go down to the learning lab. I ignored her and just sat there and read my book. I wanted her to know that I could read.”

It was the same when she went out for the volleyball team in middle school. The coaches told her she couldn’t join because the bus kids had to leave at three thirty and couldn’t be counted on to stay for practice. “So we didn’t even try out,” she says. “I didn’t know they couldn’t tell us not to try out for something. And my parents had a car. They could have driven us back after school. But the coaches told us no.”

And so went Alicia Thomas’s time in Vestavia Hills: kinda separate, not exactly equal. Yet she looks back on it without regret, even when remembering the worst. “I don’t feel like I got as much out of the system as the other kids,” she explains. “I don’t. We didn’t have anybody fighting for us. My feelings got hurt. But the little stuff I went through, it’s nothing. I’m okay with it. I didn’t have anything growing up, and Vestavia gave me something I probably wouldn’t have had. I know how much it did for me, and I hope it can do the same for my boys.”