Some of My Best Friends Are Black (8 page)

High school curricula suck everywhere, of course, not just in Alabama. But what was uniquely perverse for us was the community’s collective,
blue-ribbon ability to ignore the elephant in the classroom. The Oxmoor busing program was still in full swing. We were a living experiment intended to repair centuries of racial animosity, yet this was never discussed. Ever. I polled dozens of my former classmates, and no one can remember any official acknowledgment of or discussion about the Oxmoor kids’ situation: who they were, why they were being bused in, where they were being bused from, or even what busing was. Vestavia’s botched retreat from U. W. Clemon’s desegregation suit
was the only reason our school existed
. Yet as far as we were taught, God created Vestavia in six days and went golfing on the seventh.

Between 1970 and 1980, Birmingham tipped from majority white to majority black. So did most every major metropolis across the country; they became donut cities, rings of white suburbs surrounding a black urban core. My classmates and I were born in 1974 or 1975, right at the midpoint, just as that wave was beginning to crest and break on the suburban shore. We were the Children of White Flight, spirited away and raised in captivity. “Y’all were kept in a box,” Jerona Williams says. We were. When the school hosted a foreign exchange program my junior year, it was with a group of kids from Denmark—the only place on earth actually whiter than Vestavia Hills.

As we began to go off to college in the 1990s, Rodney King was viciously beaten and O. J. Simpson did or did not kill a white lady and suddenly race was everywhere. President Clinton was all over TV calling for a National Conversation About It. Words like “multicultural” and “diversity” started creeping into the lexicon. But in the eighties, back when we were growing up, it seemed as if this whole black/white thing was way down on the to-do list, somewhere below “Fix Levees in New Orleans.”

Black America’s only real intrusion into our consciousness came through popular culture: professional sports, bootleg hip-hop cassettes our friends were passing around, and
Cosby
. With a five-year run as the number one–rated sitcom in the country,
The Cosby Show
normalized blackness for white America. The Huxtables went through the same ups and downs as everybody else. Theo missed curfew! Vanessa’s got boy problems! The message to kids like me couldn’t have been clearer. Black People: They’re Just Like Us.

And in the end, that’s how we related to Tycely. She was the Huxtable kid, our wacky sitcom neighbor, the black girl who’d whirl into class, toss off a few sassy catchphrases, and then exit with the applause sign going. On debate trips, we’d crack jokes about her having to sit at the back of the bus, and she’d snap back some line about Black Power or fighting the man. Then we’d all laugh and go to the food court. It was a game, a way to defuse the tension we all knew was there underneath the surface. And Tycely went right along, quite deliberately. “It was a coping mechanism,” she says, “always making the issue of race something that people could laugh about. It made people comfortable because they knew I would never be confrontational.”

It worked. And in truth, it was her only option. For Tycely, it was sink or swim with the white kids. With the Oxmoor kids, she would have drowned. From day one, she says, “they hated me.”

The philosophical thrust behind school desegregation, over and above access to better classrooms, was predicated on the fact that children’s peer relationships exert the single biggest influence over their academic performance. Students compete and strive for achievement, social status, etc., because they see their friends doing the same. Therefore, black children were entitled to, and needed to, socialize with peer groups in which they would be exposed to the cultural norms of the majority of society. Which was a great idea, except that the Oxmoor kids and the Vestavia kids were not peers.

It’s hard to have a relationship with someone you never actually see. Vestavia, like many other schools, tracked its students into tiered learning programs: advanced, general, and remedial. Tracking, or “ability grouping,” is a commonly known practice today. What is less well known is that tracking took off in the wake of, and largely as a response to, forced desegregation. The state of South Carolina, for example, started pushing for implementation of the practice in 1964. In school districts across the South and around the country, tracking programs cordoned off black students, shunting them into lower-level classes by default, much like Alicia Thomas’s teacher assumed she belonged in the remedial reading lab.

In the 2007 settlement of Vestavia’s desegregation suit, the court found no evidence that the school had ever tracked students as a deliberate mechanism of segregation, but the de facto result was no different. At the high end, Vestavia’s honors program was a bustling hive for the overachieving spawn of social-climbing, learning-obsessed helicopter parents. The Oxmoor kids, on the other hand, were coming from a place where living conditions hadn’t much changed since Alicia Thomas was a girl. Some Oxmoor students were still living in clapboard houses and cinderblock shacks. It was a place stuck in the Great Depression, only this was in the early 1990s, less than two miles from the mall.

The racial achievement gap was stark. From 1989 to 1993, out of a cumulative 246 inductees to the National Honor Society (minimum 3.53 GPA required), only two black students were tapped to join, neither of whom were from Oxmoor. Nor were any graduating black seniors named for any of the year-end departmental honors. In four years on the advanced and college-prep track, I never had a single class with a black student other than Tycely, and Tycely never had a single class with another black student.

A quick spin through the clubs and activities in my senior yearbook shows life beyond the classroom to be no different. In sports, you had two black students on the varsity basketball team, and one each in football, wrestling, track, and soccer. But all the cheerleaders were white. Girls’ volleyball, white. Tennis team, dance team, gymnastics—white, white, white. And athletics was the high-water mark. Theater was white. French club, white. Spanish club, white. Yearbook, school newspaper, math team, scholar’s bowl—white, white, Asian, white. There was one black freshman on stage crew, a few others here and there. But that’s about it. For God’s sake, there was only one black student in the Multicultural Awareness Club. (Actually, there were also four black guys who joined Vestavia’s Future Homemakers of America. But I have to assume that this was a joke. An awesome, hilarious joke.)

The Oxmoor kids may have been at Vestavia, but they were not
of
Vestavia. When black children attended their traditionally black schools, like Parker High, extracurricular involvement and academic achievement were not things they automatically opted out of. Education was
highly esteemed. Schoolteachers were generally among the most respected members of the black community.
Brown v. Board
led the way in civil rights precisely because black leaders felt that access to better schools would arm the next generation with the knowledge and skills to create a more open and free society. But when theory met reality, being forced into hostile, unfriendly classrooms didn’t always serve to lift up black students.

“Integration was devastating for that first generation of black children,” Jerona Williams says. “In black schools, they’d had teachers that cared. Now white teachers had no idea what they were dealing with, and the black kids were just passing through, unattached. No nurturing. James Cameron, another black teacher, and I used to have to take those bus kids to the bathroom and talk to them about hygiene, things that you’d think would have been dealt with at home. But the conditions in Oxmoor were unbelievable. James kept baby wipes and deodorant in his classroom, and would make them go to the bathroom and use them in the morning.”

It was often a harrowing ordeal. Some who went through it, like Alicia Thomas, choose to look back and see the glass half full: it was difficult, but she got something in return. Other black students came away feeling differently. Because white schools had rejected them, they rejected white schools—rejected everything white. Advanced classes were white. Standard English was white. The debate team was white. Oppositional personality, psychologists call it, striking a preemptive defiant pose. Someone won’t let you join their club? You didn’t want to be in that club, anyway. The Oxmoor kids rejected our club. And the fact that Tycely was allowed to join just meant something was wrong with Tycely.

If children conform to the standards set by their peers, in the seventies and eighties the peer pressure for black children to keep with their own was intense. Before desegregation, “acting white” was a phrase no one had ever heard with regard to school involvement or academics. Yet in the wake of busing, it rose to become one of the most hurtful insults one black student could level at another. Talking white, dressing white, being enthusiastic about anything “white” was forsaking one’s own. For the thirty-eight black students at Vestavia, there was the black cafeteria
table and there were the other cafeteria tables, and it was one or the other. There was no going back and forth.

Unfortunately, to sit at the black cafeteria table was to cut yourself off from 99 percent of what the best public school in the state had to offer. For someone in Tycely’s position, crossing the color line wasn’t a choice. If she wanted to be a part of all those activities you’re supposed to have on your college résumé, she had to be the sellout, the wannabe, the Oreo—black on the outside, white on the inside—and suffer the consequences. “The black kids were horrible to me,” she explains. “The only saving grace was that Vestavia was still so internally segregated that I never had to be in class with them. Otherwise it would have been a nightmare. They treated me like, ‘You’re trying to be something that you’re not.’ Or, ‘She wants to be white,’ they’d say. But I felt like I wanted to be in activities where I had the most in common with the people. Being on the debate team and student government, doing community service—that’s how I saw myself, and so those are the things I wanted to do. But why does that have to mean I don’t want to be black? I do want to be black. I
am
black. I can’t
not
be black.”

But Tycely wasn’t black enough, or wasn’t black in the right way. The Oxmoor students’ hatred of her was obvious. What surprised me was to learn how much they resented Chad Jones, too. I knew Chad in passing, but as we were a debate nerd and a jock, respectively, our paths didn’t cross much. With his lanky, laid-back demeanor and long Mississippi Delta drawl, Chad was about as authentically black as you could get. I’d always thought he moved freely across the color line in a way that Tycely couldn’t. And yet…

“The Oxmoor crew didn’t like me
at all
,” Chad says. “In the morning, before school started, everybody would be in their little sections—they used to be upstairs—and the guys would yell things as I walked into school, call me names. I was discriminated against more by people of my own color than I ever was by white people. My mom was a single mom, worked from two to ten, so if I had practice, one of the Vestavia families would always come and get me. A lot of families did that; some treated me like I was their own. Probably because I was an athlete, but however you get it, you get it, you know? I can’t actually pinpoint an incident
where a white person ever called me a nigger. I’m sure it
happened
, but I can’t say it was any one time. The black kids were harsher. They would say stuff to my face.”

Black students from other schools did, too. Chad was the only black player in town with Colonel Reb on his jersey. When he took the court in the state basketball tournament against majority-black teams, shouts of “Uncle Tom” rang out from the opposing bleachers. It didn’t help when Chad and the Rebels walked out with the championship trophy. “They didn’t like that shit,” he says.

It wasn’t until senior year, when Chad had a small flirtation with one of the Oxmoor girls, that they began to accept him even a little. “There was a girl with that crew I liked a little bit,” he says. “That made me get closer. It was kind of a blessing because I had dodged them for so long. I really wanted to become friends with some of them because I missed that—hell, I was black! I wanted it. I was with white kids all the time. Maybe they thought I thought I was too good for them? Here I am, over here with the white
kids and I’m still successful? That kind of hurt them, and we could never connect. So I was blessed in a sense that I got a chance to know them senior year, but the only time we hung out was before school. We never went to the movies or anything. It was mostly about the girl.”

Of course, these politics played out on a frequency most of the white kids weren’t aware of, or didn’t really get. The only time I remember the problem coming into plain view was at the annual student auction, which worked like a charity bachelor auction. Every year the underclassmen would get to bid on seniors and “buy” them for a day to haze them and what not. It was all good-natured fun, and it raised a lot of money for worthy causes—none of which makes up for the fact that the school called it “Slave Day.”