features. She was the first sophisticated woman I knew, and her class was my introduction to culture. She taught us a few French phrases and ignited a lifelong love of that language in me. After school, she taught the basics of ballet to those of us who were willing to stay, which led to years of dancing lessons that my mother somehow managed to pay for. Our teacher spoke of her daughters, Piper and Kyle, and their unusual names were a beacon to an exotic world I wanted to enter. When our school performed an abbreviated version of The Nutcracker Suite at Christmas, the teacher provided the costume for my dance as a Chinese doll: a pair of pajamas with black pants and a pink top with black frog closures and a cheongsam-style neck. She gave them to me as a Christmas gift and they became a prized possession.
My mother was an involved parent; our teachers were invited to our home. Lunching on the tuna salad sandwiches and Campbell’s French onion soup my mother set out on our cloth-covered kitchen table, the teachers who came to the projects seemed at ease in their surroundings. They also seemed to appreciate my mother’s efforts to provide my brother and me with some semblance of the idealized life we were bombarded with by Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized our teachers might have come from similar situations themselves, raised by striving parents to lift themselves out of poverty via the well-trod route of higher education. I was proud that my mother was not intimidated by my teachers and conversed with them easily using the Standard English that to my young ear sounded so much more refined than the black Southern dialect that wafted on the air in our neighborhood. When my mother made an appearance at the school, I was always bursting with pride at her neat, well-groomed, and undeniably attractive appearance. Her hair was always pressed and curled, not nappy even at the “kitchen” near the nape of the neck that often announced the need for a visit to the hairdresser in those days. Her stockings were absent of runs; her shoes were polished and not worn out at the heels like those of some of my classmates’ mothers. Chatting with the teachers, she looked like one of them.
In fourth grade, there was stern and wonderful Mildred Garling, also a member of our church. Mrs. Garling was a teacher who appreciated my abilities but gave me less special treatment than I had received in first and third grades. When I finished my class work early, rather than let me help out in the school office, collect weekly milk money, or grade other students’ spelling tests, Mrs. Garling gave me more work to do. When she noticed that I was not as proficient in math as in language arts, she requested that my mother drill me with flash cards at home. The gifts she gave me, while less enjoyable than a magazine subscription or pretty Chinese pajamas, were more valuable. From Mrs. Garling, I learned discipline and not to expect that the world would let me rest on my laurels.
Elementary school was filled with memorable characters and experiences. My fifth-grade teacher, Mr. Hull, an Ichabod Crane–like Appalachian white man, cautioned us against underestimating hillbillies. His admonition completely baffled us. Before television’s The Beverly Hillbillies, most children of my Negro community saw no distinction between groups of white people. My personal assumption was that all of them were from Leave It to Beaver land, and went home at night to manicured lawns and neat houses where they ate steak and creamed peas for dinner. I would eventually find out how deeply our teacher was affected by the sense that other teachers saw him as being from the Mud Lake side of white America. Red-faced and nearly apoplectic, he sent me to the principal’s office after my friend Delores and I circulated a petition protesting his decision to appoint our student council representatives—choosing two bright but shy students—rather than allowing us to elect them. The fact that his fellow teachers agreed with my position greatly exacerbated my crime. I was sent home until my mother could come to the principal’s office with me. As far as I was concerned, my petition was democracy in action, a peaceful protest against a dictator. Mr. Hull was violating our student rights to hold an election that, incidentally, I had lobbied all summer to win. My mother supported my actions in principle, but was furious with me for causing her to miss half a day of work. “Why can’t you just go to school and act like other kids?”
In time, she came to accept that being “like other kids” was something I would never quite get the hang of. In the end, after hearing my impassioned plea for justice, the principal convicted me on a technicality: I had circulated a document throughout the school that had not been cleared through her office. The previous afternoon of suspension constituted my punishment. This was my first inkling that the system might be rigged against me. I was a little upset with Mama for not being angrier with Mr. Hull. He later felt her wrath, though—not for this, but for referring to a dark-skinned, chubby classmate of mine as Aunt Jemima. I was proud that my mother stood up for her and demanded an apology from Mr. Hull. Justice delayed felt better than no justice at all.
My sixth-grade teacher, a very proper lady, gave our class a memorable lecture on avoiding “niggerisms”—i.e., loud and unruly behavior and bad table manners—before a field trip to the Detroit Institute of Arts. This clearly did not have the desired effect. A couple of us watched, mortified, as several students decimated the ketchup, relish, and mustard packets offered at the end of the cafeteria line. Today, I realize they might have been hoarding food so they wouldn’t go hungry later.
Among my small but cherished memories of elementary school: my pride the day my Aunt Dean’s husband chauffeured a carload of us in their turquoise Cadillac on a class trip to the zoo; and the time my dance performance as Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer was written about in the Pontiac Press, though I’m still not sure why.
When I was in fifth grade, my brother Spurgeon and I took part in a school-wide speech contest on the subject “What Good Sportsmanship Means to Me.” I relished the opportunity to show off my ease with public speaking, a blessing that had been nurtured by Easter Sunday pieces and other church programs. Though the specifics of my talk are long forgotten, I know that like so many things in my life, much of the content was gleaned from the lessons of Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and other sources from the TV world, where cheaters never won and kids settled their disputes without the physical throw-downs that happened every day in the projects. I transcribed my carefully wrought words onto the index cards we were encouraged to use onstage and practiced my delivery in front of Mama’s vanity mirror. Never one to suffer from stage fright, I made it through the preliminary round of the competition, as did my brother and several other of the more attentive students.
On the night of the finals, after all the contestants had spoken, the judges’ deliberations dragged on and on. The contest audience grew restless, and our elementary school band was asked to entertain them with an unrehearsed number. Our band teacher, eyes cast heavenward, prefaced our off-key, squeak-laden rendition of “Clare de Lune” with these words to the audience: “You know not what you ask.”
When the judges finally emerged, the decision was first place for my brother, second for me. Although I felt my speech had been the best, in those prefeminist days, losing to my older brother was an acceptable outcome. The judges’ decision later led to some very unsportsmanlike reactions from other parents, and culminated in one contestant delivering his speech months later at sixth-grade graduation, a head-scratching non sequitur as far as the audience was concerned. Just a couple of years ago, my mother disclosed that on her next visit to the beauty shop after the contest, our hairdresser remarked, “You must be very proud of your children taking first and second like that. Your son didn’t win, though. Your daughter did.” Even now, it makes me smile to know that at least one adult shared my opinion of that performance.
At Bethune, I also unofficially began my advertising career by creating the slogan for my brother Gary’s winning campaign for student council president: You’ll Rise to the Highest Ranks If You Vote for Gary Banks! At the time, a decade before innovators like Bill Bernbach ushered in advertising’s creative revolution, I’m sure I was influenced by ad slogans from my early childhood, like, You’ll Wonder Where the Yellow Went, When You Brush Your Teeth with Pepsodent. I was also secretly gratified to have been part of vanquishing Gary’s opponent, the undisputed light-skinned diva of Bethune elementary, who, as I prepared for my role as Rudolph in the school Christmas play, had advised me, “Just go outside in the cold until your nose turns red.” She said this knowing that my chocolate-brown nose would probably turn blue before it