or twice I ventured into a field near the three ramshackle houses to play softball with a group of blacks and a few whites who did not live on my block.
I played in the alley often. Two or three other white children not yet in school who lived on my block also played there, along with nine or ten black boys and girls. A black boy, older than the rest, taught me to play marbles, and I was good. We dug out little cup holes in the clay and drew boundaries with a stick; then everyone put the same number of marbles inside the circle as ante. Then one by one we used our special shooter to try and knock marbles into holes. Every marble we got to go into a hole was a keeper. If we lost all our players and only had a shooter, it was legal to put it inside the circle, matched by five to ten regular marbles of anyone who wanted to risk that big a loss. I always risked, winning some stunning shooters called rollerpackers. The risk answered some deep impulse that was being systematically repressed in the rest of my life.
To be a proper southern girl, I needed to learn prudence at all costs, since one false move might reveal some unacceptable tendency. At my first birthday party, for instance, we played the games popular among white children of the time: drop the clothespin in the milk bottle, pin the tail on the donkey, drop the handkerchief, blindman’s buff, and how-many-little-words-can-you-make-from-this-big-word. Mamie had bought wonderful prizes to be given the winners—brightly colored tops, packages of metal jacks, wooden paddles with tiny red rubber balls attached by long rubber strings, bags of cat’s eye marbles complete with a shooter. I won all the games, but my mother made me give the prizes to my guests, saying, “You wouldn’t want your little friends to think you’re selfish or greedy, would you?” What I wanted was fairness, but I saw that being polite might well exclude that possibility.
By the fifth grade of my all-white school, I comprehended that life among my so-called white peers was far more hazardous and cruel than it had been in the alley. None of us who played there minded whether we lost or won on a given day; it was exciting just to make holes, draw circles, and risk. Consequently, when I saw white boys playing marbles using pretty much the same strategy I had learned, I asked to play with them. They let me but giggled behind their hands at some private joke. When I won, consistently and heavily, their giggles turned into ugly snarls. They talked about me in ways that caused girls to avoid me, especially in the restroom. The back of my neck stung and turned red in spite of my willpower, but I went ahead and used the toilet when what I wanted most was to run out of the bathroom, out of the school, out of my world. But I refused to play marbles less well than I knew how, so the process of exclusion and derision continued.
As it did, I gradually formed distinctly negative attitudes toward white boys. I did not like how mean and nasty they could be to the black children across the alley from me. They routinely dropped terrified cats and kittens off high back porches, laughing uproariously when they landed with thuds I could hear from two houses away. And I very much hated them when they rubbed my nose in pink buttercup flowers until I sneezed and coughed my way into my house. Without knowing it, I was coming to associate white boys with bullies who went after white girls and all blacks.
Given these strained relations with my white classmates, I still puzzle over why that black boy taught me to play marbles so well and over why he and other black boys did not seem to mind when I won their marbles. Surely it is facile to say they won mine too and so it evened out. Did they already feel like such total losers in the world around them that a few marbles more or less couldn’t matter? Did the black boy have a fantasy that I would do just what I did and so teach me well in order to cause me pain? Did he do it to get back at the white boys who routinely shot BB guns into his front yard, scaring him and his sisters back into their house? Did he, like I, sense without words some connection between us deeper than color and gender? Or were we just having fun, was it just a game?
I refer to my alley associates as “that black boy” or “a black girl” because we never told names, white or black, though we played together for several years. In fact we hardly used words at all, which was another blessing about the alley. Inside my house, language was everything, and everyone knew lots more of it than I did, no matter how hard I tried to catch up. I now believe that we maintained that amazing anonymity and silence as protection. My mother often asked me who I was with “out there in all that red clay dust.” Because I knew nobody’s name, I could answer truthfully, “I don’t know, they’re just some kids—we have fun and I like them.” Perhaps their mothers asked similar questions. But somebody could have gotten into lots of trouble if the grownups had traced our gang. Our silence had its painful edge, since it acknowledged the impossibility of any of our becoming friends.
When I was about to enter the first grade, my mother took me aside and tried to tell me something about race relations in the South. Her success was only slightly greater than when she tried years later to tell me about menstruation by saying, to calm my fears at blood coming out of me, “Oh, honey, be glad, now you can have babies.” All I heard that afternoon when I was seven was that I was forbidden to play in the alley. That was on a Sunday, the usual day for long talkings-to by my mother. On Monday, I started school and hated it instantly.
On the first day of first grade, everyone’s mother brought her reluctant child inside a hot, stuffy old brick building, into a strange room full of small desks and large blackboards. Presiding over it all was a woman I would come to see as kindly enough, but my initial encounter with Miss Leslie left me angry and confused. It seems that part of our “lessons” was to be the acquisition of manners—of which I already had more than enough as far as I was concerned. But Miss Leslie felt it her social duty to show her little girls and boys how to set a table properly and how to sit by a papier maché fireplace and engage in chat, that essential southern practice.
In an attempt to involve us in setting up these ersatz spaces, she asked the class to bring various items from home: cushions for the little straight chairs we were to chat in; paper place mats for the little table where we were to have tea; vases for flowers or other decorations. Then she looked at the fireplace area, turned to us with a deep smile, and said: “Now the last thing we need may be hard to find, since not everyone will have one in their home. But we lack a little hearth broom.” I was confused about what she wanted, since she pronounced hearth “herth.” Guessing what she meant, since we did have a red straw broom by our fireplace that I used regularly to sweep up ashes or stray coal pieces, I raised my hand eagerly. “I can bring a hearth broom from home—we have one.” I pronounced the word as it should be.
“Well, thank you, my dear, I’m sure you can, but first you must learn to pronounce it correctly—“herth,” not “harth”—come along now, I’m sure you can say that.”
Proper pronunciation was sacred in our household. I knew that h-e-a-r-t-h did not rhyme with e-a-r-t-h, even though they might look alike if you took away the “h.” My confidence in the correctness of my way of saying it urged me on to what was probably stupid bravery. I looked Miss Leslie in the eye and said, “Oh, no ma’am, it’s “harth,” not “herth.”
My mother whispered in my unbelieving ear, “Honey, just say what the teacher asks you to here and keep saying it right at home. And say you’re sorry, like a good girl. Go on, now.” This from the same person who drilled correctness into me, even refusing to let me use street slang in order to blend in with the other children on my block. My anger flared as I turned on my mother and spat out, “You tell her you’re sorry if you are—I’m not sorry—I’m right and I don’t understand why you want me to lie.”
Deciding not to push the issue further just then, Miss Leslie went ahead with her plans for next day, saying only, “Why don’t you bring along your little broom and we’ll put it by this nice fireplace and you can show us all how you sweep the ashes.” When the long half-day finally ended, my mother went up to the teacher’s desk and spoke in hushed tones. I have no idea what she said, but I was disappointed in her for seeming to collude with someone who could not even pronounce a simple word correctly.
We got out at noon, and by two o’clock I was back in my play clothes, sitting in the alley with my black playmates. After a few days, I noticed that the handful of other white children who occasionally played there were gone. Other parents may have conducted similar awkward, muddled conversations about no longer playing in the clay