and their children’s education as my mother was.
I was given more freedom when I started at John Story Jenks school in Chestnut Hill, and even though the Melangian children there could be counted on two hands, my classmates weren’t reluctant to be friendly. There were many Quaker children in the school. That breath of freedom came in the nick of time, because the discipline imposed by my family in addition to the fear invoked on the streets had been inhibiting. Street life was pretty convincing proof that my mother was right – a dignified academic career was the safest future. At nine, I clung like my sister and brother to the notion that I would go into medicine like my father and therefore tried to maintain a high standard in my school work, whatever temptations I came across.
I remember the first time I was asked to write my father’s occupation on a form at Jenks. I was confident that I could spell psychiatrist correctly. The teacher was more impressed with his occupation than my spelling and, like others then and since, she probably assumed that my home life reflected his professional rank. (In America, doctors make money. I was surprised when I came to London to discover that National Health doctors have the medical title but not the bank balance of their American counterpart.) I was a psychiatrist’s daughter and this gave people the wrong idea about my family’s income.
Times were visibly changing for Melangians in spite of the fact that Eisenhower made political apathy seem somehow respectable. The civil rights issue was like an eggshell that cracked after the Autherine Lucy case and segregation gradually continued to be challenged legally in the South and socially in the North, where habits rather than laws kept us isolated. Professional Melangian families moved to better neighbourhoods, although their white neighbours would make conspicuous attempts to keep them out and often moved out themselves if they failed.
As residential white areas got a few black families, the public school serving the vicinity reflected the neighbourhood’s mix, and a school like Jenks would end up with ten or twenty Melangian children from upper-middle-class Melangian households. Even though Jenks was still a predominantly white school, I think it was relieved to have a token number of Melangian kids because this showed it to be participating in a developing mood among liberal Americans that it was time to be nice to ‘Negroes’. People were getting more prosperous and more generous.
When I started at Jenks in the third grade, I made friends instantly with two little open-air girls who were top of the class and didn’t mind my competition. They befriended me in the classroom and never pretended not to see me in the school yard. They dragged me along to their Brownie meetings and had me join their ballet class, though I didn’t feel welcome there. They asked me to be part of their secret club, which was actually only the three of us. They were no less than best friends who invited me to their houses after school for tea, although they never came to mine. We did everything together except that I couldn’t join them in their violin recitals. I never understood why they called their mothers ‘Mummy’ instead of ‘Mommy’. I thought it was because they were Quakers. I tried to understand and imitate every nuance of their behaviour when I was with them. They spoke more precisely than my friends at Wister school. Soon I could talk exactly like them and I learned to find the humour in what they thought was funny, although it usually was corny.
Behind the surface of my polished manners of ‘excuse me, please’, ‘I beg your pardon’ and ‘no, thank you’ to virtually everything that was offered, there was a fanciful little girl who still knew the difference between a knife scar and a razor scar and was proud of knowing how to watch out for more than just the cars. But there was no need for my acquired street instinct at Jenks and no threats or fears lined the path to my house. The 23 trolley car picked me up from the corner of Southampton Avenue to cart me home in time for The Mickey Mouse Club and Rin Tin Tin on television.
Chestnut Hill was a solid white Anglo-Saxon Protestant community. The trees grew tall. The parks were beautiful. And the sun always seemed brighter there when I got off the trolley car. It was my neighbourhood during the school day.
Mount Airy didn’t feel graced like Chestnut Hill and didn’t have the village character of Germantown. The section we lived in near Mount Pleasant Avenue was very orderly with two-storey brick houses and canopied porches that displayed small flowerbeds and trimmed dark-green hedges. The big street-cleaning truck came once a week to spray the streets down. The neighbourhood looked well-tended but nondescript with block after block of these terraced houses, rather like certain areas of north London or north Manchester.
Occasionally, a kid pedalled down the sidewalk on a glossy two-wheeler bicycle or some toothless, brown-skinned, seven-year-old cowboys would bang-bang their way around a parked car. But there was never a baseball game played in the middle of the street and no one thought that opening a fire hydrant to let the water flood the street until the fire department came was a prodigious way to while away an evening. Dogs didn’t dawdle unleased on the streets, and no fathead alley cats whined away the nights.
The number 23 trolley-car depot was a block beyond our house on the other side of the road, and when we first moved to Musgrave Street, you couldn’t help noticing the rattle of the trolley cars on the track as they passed with their pole crackling against the overhead line. But this sound merely broke the silence. It didn’t disturb the peace.
Our family nearly belonged. Pam was openly admired for her studious appearance when she rushed off early to school first thing, looking as if her mind was on algebra instead of boys. She’d be wearing her new glasses and clutching her briefcase, which was always stuffed and overflowing with books and homework. She’d started at the Philadelphia High School for Girls at 17th Street and Spring Garden, which admitted girls from throughout the city on the basis of outstanding academic achievement. Pam studied the bass violin, and on Saturday morning she and Dennis went to special art classes that were given to children selected from all over Philadelphia who had exceptional artistic talent. I was just as proud of them as Edna, Ikey and Thelma were.
Once Edna had started her new job, at a factory that made children’s dresses, I was transformed from being starched and presentable to being ‘turned out’. I’d like to claim that I wasn’t made vain, merely extra confident in a wardrobe finer than anybody else’s at school. Edna bought me each new model that came off the factory floor.
Ikey was in her element working at the local library as a librarian. She walked home through rain and snow and once through a hurricane with her arms full of books for us, which gave her a reason to write her own poems and read other people’s, and I could get a reading of ‘Invictus’, ‘Crossing the Bar’ or ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ any time I wanted. They were my favourites, though neither my mother nor I knew that ‘gaol’ was pronounced ‘jail’.
Thelma remained our sweet unselfish aunt who cared about Ikey’s children as though they were her own. She enhanced her good looks to the fullest each morning with a little help from Maybelline cake mascara, a trace of eyebrow pencil and rouge with a hint of dark-red lipstick to finish it all off. She and Ikey wore straight skirts with cinched belts and stilettos that you could hear click-click-clicking on the cobblestone street in front of our house as Thelma returned from work around 5.30 pm. It was no wonder that she and Ikey got an intolerable dose of whistles, especially during the summer months.
I was free to bang the screen door going and coming with a shout to name which neighbour I was rushing off to visit. My personality still changed between home and school. The two environments were separate but equal in my head and heart.
We were a strange family in some ways, compared to the people on television. Love was not a thing we discussed. Though we liked each other, we didn’t call each other ‘darling’ and no one asked if you’d slept well when you stumbled down to the kitchen for a bowl of hominy grits or a fried egg. Sometimes we’d have a family pow-wow and decide that new resolutions were called for to make us practise at home on each other some of the good manners we exhibited outside. We could manage to adhere to the new rules for about a week, not raising our voices to each other, or speaking an unkind word, or leaping like Tarzan from the fourth stair into the living room.
There was a collection box to hold the penalty of a penny to be paid any time you used bad language or incorrect English or spoke dialect. It was always chock-full