that her complexion bestowed. My brother’s student council victory was my very satisfying rejoinder.
All in all, Bethune Elementary was a positive experience. The school cemented my early identity as a noticeably smart kid, which was more than fine with me. Having not been blessed with the light skin, long hair, or professional parents that conferred status in those days, I was happy to flaunt an attribute that could make me stand out. I loved basking in the spotlight, and cultivated a community of people who expected great things from me. Adults, unlike kids, placed high value on doing well in school, as if they knew we good students would pay the price among our peers for our straight As, and they cheered our accomplishments in the neighborhood’s churches, beauty parlors, and barbershops. Being one of those kids was worth the price of being far from the most popular kid on the playground.
Soon, it was time to move onward to Jefferson Junior High. As usual, I was chomping at the bit.
* * *
They were calling all the smart kids first. One by one, homeroom 202 of Jefferson Junior High’s class of 1964 was assembled at the front of the gymnasium on the first day of school. Many of us had heard of each other, though we came from four different elementary schools. In Pontiac, if you were a brainy Negro child, word got around. Bespectacled Veta Smith came from Bagley School, but lived on the other side of the projects. Alvin Bessent’s parents were friends of my step-grandmother. His name had stood out when she mentioned him as someone who might be even smarter than me, a speculation I highly doubted. We were gathered into a group of about twenty and ushered to homeroom 202 as other kids in the gym murmured their awareness of who we were—“That’s the smart room.” They said this without a great deal of envy; other kids had their own, more admired claims to fame. Athletes, cool kids, great dancers, and girls with precociously developed bodies were quite secure in their identities. Being smart was okay, but it had limited appeal. Kids could aspire to become better football and basketball players. They could find ways to become more popular. God willing, they might develop the breasts and booties of the precociously hot girls. But smarts were considered a gift that you either had or you didn’t. Whether this was right or wrong, the school seemed to embrace the concept. Once our collection of future lawyers, dentists, journalists, doctors of philosophy and medicine, advertising executives, nurses, and engineers was assembled, we were never separated during the three years of junior high school. Of the group we left in the gym, only one student was ever added to our homeroom.
The kids of homeroom 202 were young, gifted, and black, although in those days we would have called ourselves Negroes. Thanks to the magic of academic tracking, we no longer ran the risk of catching an after-school beatdown for being a teacher’s pet. All of homeroom 202 was the teacher’s pet, and the beauty of it was, no one else was around to see it.
We became leaders of Jefferson Junior High. Whereas in the past, we might have felt competitive with other bright kids, as a group we took on an expanded identity. For the first time in our school careers, we were not oddities to be put on display like trick ponies: Watch this, everybody! Valerie, spell antidisestablishmentarianism! We were part of a group. In the confines of the classes we shared, we were free to fully express our potential, to speak Standard English, voice our unrealistic aspirations, even ask our dorky questions—Where does the wind come from? Who writes the dictionary?—without fear of being mocked.
For me, the three years of junior high school were a time full of creativity. A poem I wrote, “Mountains,” was even published in a national anthology, Songs of Youth.
One night, as I lay on my bed daydreaming, an idea came to me for a Jefferson Junior High personal growth event—“Personality Week” would benefit the girls of Jefferson; it would consist of inspirational talks from prominent local women, beauty and fashion events, and a contest for the title of “Miss Personality.” I called my girlfriends Veta and Dorethia to help flesh out the details, and somehow we convinced the school to actually put on Personality Week. Two of the speakers we recruited were the artist wife of one of our English teachers and a nurse who was married to my family doctor. The doctor’s wife was especially memorable because she arrived in a powder-blue Lincoln Continental convertible with a white leather interior and elegant suicide doors. That swanky car was as inspiring to me as anything she said during her talk about how to achieve professional success.
As commentator of our Personality Week fashion show, I practiced the sophisticated delivery I admired in television hosts and local TV news anchors. Even though Personality Week was a scaled-down version of my daydream, it was a big enough deal that I didn’t even care that I had no shot at being voted Miss Personality. I was too much of a mouthy show-off to win a popularity contest. In fact, the girl who won was a popular hairdresser who had been a stylist to a thriving clientele at her family’s salon since she was twelve. Veta, Dorethia, and I were satisfied with the outcome. After all, Veta remarked one winter day as we trudged the icy two-mile trek from Jefferson to Lakeside, “We’re too smart to be really popular. Most of the kids we know couldn’t even fathom the things we talk about.” It was certainly an immodest statement, and probably untrue, but we wrapped ourselves in it like an oversized blanket and huddled in its warmth. We girls of homeroom 202 were at least smart enough to stick together.
The incongruity is that the environment in which we flourished was at least 99 percent black. In high school, where the kids of 202 would later find ourselves among very few other black students in college prep courses, it was easy to see that our de facto segregated junior high was indeed unequal. We had received enrichment assistance; the “white” schools had received more. Just as Michigan had so many lakes that even the projects could be built at the water’s edge, there was so much factory money fueling the school district that even “black” schools could get a few extras.
Still, there was a benefit to being in a virtually all-black school—at Jefferson we could compete fairly to do whatever our talents would allow. In high school, the teachers’ imaginations could not stretch far enough to envision any of us playing the leads in the school musical or the children’s play put on by Pontiac Central High each year. At Jefferson, even as Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus and Dr. King marched into our awareness, we were thriving in a school where the only white faces belonged to teachers.
I later tapped this experience as the basis of my first ad campaign for the UniWorld Group. The campaign was created to support historically black colleges. Through my research, I learned that most of the towering figures of black America had been educated in all-black environments. Some of them wrote essays for the campaign, detailing the benefits of their undergraduate educations. Jesse Jackson played college quarterback—a position denied to blacks at white schools. Astronaut Ron McNair credited his black college counselor with making him believe he had the intelligence to major in physics and earn a doctorate at MIT. The campaign’s first print ad featured a handsome black Cyrano de Bergerac. The campaign was tagged, America’s Black Colleges: Are You Smart Enough to Go? My years at Jefferson had taught me that in segregation, there could be a surprising benefit: freedom from discrimination.
Decades later, my experience as an advertising creative working in an African American agency would amplify the same contradiction, which persists to this day. In those junior high days, though, the inconsistency flew below my radar. I was too busy enjoying success to negotiate better terms.
Chapter 2
Mom Drops the Nuclear Family Bomb
When I was thirteen, my mother married the man next door. Albert Munson was a nice-looking, dark-skinned man who moved into his Lakeside apartment with his children Mack and Sharon when I was ten. Mack and Sharon’s mother lived elsewhere in the projects with several younger children from a different marriage. Mack was a fairly good-looking guy, but Sharon was really quite beautiful, with a lovely face and a body that attracted a lot of attention from older guys. One day Sharon, who was two years older than me, was bored enough to cross our shared front lawn and talk to me. We bonded over the revelation that her favorite aunt was married to my cousin and that my little cousins were also hers. From that time on, if her real friends, a couple of tough girls named Ritchie and Mary Jane, were not around, we would watch TV, gossip, and bake cookies or cupcakes together. If