to look like a nice little girl and refused to wear clothes that didn’t have a look of flair and independence. I would have teetered around in stilettos if only I could have got away with it.
First it was music, then it was clothes, then it was boys. Or first it was music, then it was love, then it was boys. I’m not sure. All I know is that while I was jumping up and down dancing in the mirror to the beat, not being in love just didn’t seem good enough. I pulled my cinched belt tighter and waited. Falling in love with love came before falling in love with somebody.
It’s a wonder that I kept my studies up, but I did. One day the school principal called my mother to find out why I was wearing lipstick to my seventh-grade class. This came as a bit of a shock to poor Ikey, who sent me to school looking as refined and dignified as possible. She never realized that on my way to catch the trolley car in the morning I slipped into a telephone booth en route and made a few subtle alterations. Like Superman, my persona was transformed by my get-up. I’d come out of the telephone booth with my skirt hitched up by a belt to a much shorter length, my hair swept to the side in a winsome braid, and at least two thick layers of Westmore’s Oooh-La-La Orange on my lips. The iridescent lipstick cost 49 cents at Woolworth’s. I kept it in my briefcase.
My whole demeanour changed under the ‘Oooh-La-La’ spell. I wanted to be noisy and boisterous and saw nothing appealing in being dignified. I didn’t want to imitate open-air girls except in their occasional company. Instead I wanted to mimic the DJ on WDAS (the Melangian radio station), whose fast, hip monologues derived from the reservation dialect. The friends I made in the neighbourhood were happy to do the same thing and were impressed that I was good at it.
My musical preference reflected my love for music from the reservation and its dialect. I didn’t want to sing along with Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly or ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’. I wanted to moon about to Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Little Anthony and the Imperials, and the Flamingoes. Anybody with that sound of a cappella singing that I used to love to hear on 23rd Street was for me.
Dennis thought that I looked and acted a bit ridiculous but he did enjoy my departure from childhood. We didn’t have the same taste in music, unfortunately. Our allowances would have gone further if we’d wanted the same singles, but he was more into Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. They were all right but hardly made the kind of music that you could stand in a dark corner and do a slow stroll to, which was what I wanted to do.
I was a nightmare for my mother, and it was probably a shock as much as a relief that I qualified for entry into the Philadelphia High School for Girls when I was thirteen.
Pam was going to the University of California in Berkeley, where Uncle Henry lived, after her graduation from the Girls’ High. Ikey took the day off to go to Pam’s graduation, and took me. I hoped the fact that she graduated summa cum laude from the best school in the city made her trials in Germantown pale.
My sister and brother hadn’t been infected by the music craze the way I was. With Pam in the all-city orchestra and Dennis going out for football and track, I guess they didn’t have time. Dennis was going to Central, which was as scholastically competitive as Girls’ High. There was hardly time to think about much other than studying, although I kept boys and music high on the list of priorities after I started there.
The Bivins family lived across the street. Mr Bivins was a detective in the downtown police force and his daughter Lynn was my best friend, along with Jean and Gloria Scott who lived a few blocks away. Lynn was a beanpole and although being tall and thin was not considered a plus on the reservation, where having big legs was the great physical attribute, Lynn was very popular with the boys. She had a younger sister, Patsy, who was born with Down’s syndrome. When Lynn’s mother went out, we were often expected to baby-sit for Patsy, who at eight couldn’t converse or follow instructions. But she had the sweetest nature and was easier to mind than a baby as long as you didn’t leave her on her own for a minute.
As soon as Mrs Bivins went out, boys were invited in and invariably there would be some necking in the kitchen beside the refrigerator, shielded from view in case someone walked in unexpectedly. Patsy would sit patiently waiting and watching. We were sure that she couldn’t tell and she seemed a harmless enough voyeur. What we didn’t bargain on was that the sight of two adolescents kissing and groping next to the refrigerator would make such a lasting impression that she tried to imitate us in the presence of Lynn’s mother intermittently for months after. Mrs Bivins never quite figured out what Patsy was doing rubbing up next to the refrigerator.
Lynn, the two eldest Scott sisters and I never considered more than necking. We didn’t even deign to talk about anything else.
There were four children in the Scott family and Mr and Mrs Scott both worked to keep them all fed. It was the girls’ responsibility to take care of the house and even the youngest, Helen (who has since become one of the singers in the Three Degrees), was well trained to do the cleaning and cooking. The three girls and their younger brother Robert were all pretty, especially by Melangian standards, with their green-grey eyes, fair skin and tawny hair. Mrs Scott, whom they got their good looks from, suspected that boys would be endlessly banging on their door. What she didn’t imagine was that we would go out looking for them while all our parents were out at work.
Ikey probably hoped that if she was lenient and patient, my new personality would disappear as mysteriously as it had appeared. She tolerated new habits like smoking cigarettes as long as I restricted them to the house. I’d enjoyed sneaking a smoke with friends but didn’t find the experience half as gratifying when it came around to doing it at home.
I don’t know if the girlfriends I entertained found as much resistance from their parents to our fast noisy talk as I did, but it was certainly easier for me to get on with the life I was making for myself before Ikey, Edna and Thelma got home from work.
When Edna lambasted me for thinking that I was a woman, she wasn’t far off the mark. I’d put a wiggle in my walk and my head was full of love lust. My ‘fast’ ways were encouraged by my older friends but beneath the new, worldly exterior, my intentions were harmless. I didn’t really want to do any more than a bit of necking under a red light bulb in a darkened room with some new heart-throb of mine from the local playground who, I’d decided, was the beginning and the end of my life … for a week or two. We girls loved sauntering by the nearby playground where the teenage boys were always sweating in the heat of a basketball game or lolling about at the edge of the court waiting for a chance to play. We pretended not to notice them as we drifted past slowly enough to be seen in a pair of short shorts or a tight skirt, hoping to attract the attention of our latest forecourt fantasy. (That priest who accused me of switching down the aisle at St Elizabeth’s must have had a premonition.)
Suffice it to say that by the time I sat in front of the television watching John F. Kennedy win the nomination to run as the Democratic candidate in the 1960 presidential election against Richard M. Nixon, I was a fully fledged teenager. I felt terribly sophisticated while I chomped chewing gum and smoked an Alpine mentholated cigarette and waited for the party returns.
Dennis was ready for college that summer and had been accepted at the University of California at Berkeley like Pam the year before. My mother decided that with both of them at college on the other coast, we needed to leave Philadelphia and move west. I was horrified by the thought of being wrenched from my beloved city. I didn’t think I could cope without my favourite TV show and my favourite radio station.
Television, radio and the industry that manufactured teen culture had fashioned me far more than anything that was fed to me at school except the talk about freedom and equality, the principles of which I used as an argument against my mother’s protests that I didn’t have a right to do with my life as I wanted. After all, she said, wasn’t my life her life too? I didn’t think so.
She proved me wrong when she packed me onto a propeller plane and dragged me to the other side of America.
Although I didn’t want to go to California,