Common Ground (114 page)

But once the clock struck eight and a dozen Townies tumbled through the door, the climate in Room 415 changed markedly. Under other circumstances, some of those very whites made cautious overtures across the racial gulf, but together in a classroom, under the appraising eyes of their colleagues, none dared such a gesture. Only the most outgoing blacks could thaw that icy front, and neither Curt nor Cassandra boasted the necessary self-assurance. Even Jerry Sullivan’s bluff geniality couldn’t crack the rigid demarcation which kept the whites massed on one side of the room, the two blacks sheltered in the lee of the teacher’s desk.

Curt and Cassandra barely knew each other, rarely exchanging more than perfunctory greetings, but they found solace in each other’s presence. Sometimes, as the whites gibed at them from across the room, Curt turned in the second row to give Cassandra a sardonic little grin, to which she responded with a barely perceptible nod. But Curt was there only three hours a day. When the bell rang at 11:06, he gathered up his books and headed for the Occupational Resource Center across town, where he took vocational courses. For the next twenty minutes, as the students downed box lunches at their desks, Cassandra was the only black left in the room. With a dozen Townies whooping around her, she bowed her head and concentrated on her baloney sandwich. Sometimes when she finished eating, Jerry Sullivan stopped by to ask how she was doing, but that did little to relieve her loneliness. As the weeks passed, Cassandra felt acutely uncomfortable in Room 415.

Increasingly, she sought out her one true friend at the school, a lively, high-strung girl named Desiree Johnson. Cassandra and Desiree shared a first-floor locker, where they met every morning to deposit their coats, pick up their books, and exchange the latest gossip before walking arm in arm to their homerooms. As Cassandra grew more disturbed by her isolation, she implored Jerry Sullivan to let her eat lunch, at least occasionally, in Desiree’s room. That was strictly against the rules, but realizing how lonely Cassandra was, Jerry reluctantly acceded.

Others proved less sympathetic. Exasperated by Cassandra and Desiree, civil service instructor Dick Glennon dubbed them “Frick and Frack,” a phrase the girls found vaguely insulting (“If we called him something like that,” Cassandra complained, “we’d be in trouble”). One morning, when she and Desiree lingered in the corridor through the opening minutes of his class, Glennon ordered Cassandra to stay half an hour after school. Afraid of staying in Charlestown after the other blacks had gone home, she refused. Punished with a one-day suspension, Cassandra conceived a burning resentment of Glennon, whom she labeled a “prejudiced person.”

Uncomfortable in most classes, she was sometimes careless in attendance. When the librarian complained that Richard Wright’s
Native Son
was two weeks overdue, Cassandra insisted that she’d returned the book. Their dispute dragged on through Cassandra’s third-period class, earning her another one-day suspension.

Her favorite subject was English, partly because her teacher, Maryann Mathews, took special pains to involve blacks in the class. Most Charlestown teachers regarded Shakespeare as too complex for their students but Maryann refused to believe that. That fall she had her students read
Othello
—with Joe Strickland as the noble Moor. At first, Joe mouthed his lines with little apparent comprehension. “Ay,” he mumbled, “let her rot and perish, and be damned tonight; for she shall not live: no, my heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand.”

“Joe,” Maryann interrupted, “do you know what this is all about?”

“I’m not sure,” he conceded.

So Maryann translated Iago’s treachery into sporting terms. Suppose, she suggested, that Clarence Jefferson had tried to grab Strickland’s place on the basketball team by arousing jealousy in Maryann’s husband, basketball coach Larry Mathews.

Joe began to read his lines with new conviction. “O monstrous, monstrous!” he cried.

Even Maryann hesitated when, working their way through a new anthology, they came on a story called “The Boy Who Painted Christ Black,” about a Georgia youth who stirred a furor by depicting the Savior as a black man. “There’ll be a lot of fuss in this world,” says one character, “if you start people thinking that Christ was a nigger!”

Knowing the Church’s importance in Charlestown, Maryann feared that the story might offend some Townies, but eager to give her black students a sense of belonging, she decided to take the chance. After they’d read it aloud, one girl from a devout Bunker Hill family exclaimed, “Miss, I’m surprised you’d teach something like that!” But Cassandra was quietly pleased. She’d always pictured Christ as brown—like the gaunt and bearded beggar who panhandled on Columbus Avenue.

Maryann spotted unrealized potential in Cassandra—a lively intelligence, a quick if caustic wit, a vivid flair for self-expression, tools which were rarely put to work. (Tests that year showed that Cassandra read at a tenth-grade level, spelled at a ninth-grade level, calculated as a sixth-grader.) Maryann was particularly dismayed by Cassandra’s reluctance to read, her dismissal of book after book as “boring,” “stupid,” or “dumb.” When Maryann assigned her
Julius Caesar
, Cassandra called it “a lot of ‘Thou are beautiful, Juliet’ or some mess like that”;
The Glass Menagerie
was “a bunch of dumb little animals”;
Seven Days in May
, a “stupid war story.” Every time Cassandra picked up a book, she went to sleep after ten pages or so. “They’re all so boring,” she complained. Once, in a counseling session, Maryann told her, “I’d like to punch you in the nose. You think so well, Cassandra; you write wonderfully. If you’d just do a little work, you’d be getting an A. But you get C’s. I want to grab you by the shoulders and shake you.” Cassandra shrugged.

Larry Mathews, who had her in his economics class, found Cassandra even more exasperating. She was clearly brighter than most of his students, but sometimes she didn’t bring the most basic materials to school. “I need a pencil,” she’d tell him. “Do you have any paper?” And frequently she simply put her head down on the desk and closed her eyes.

“Are you ill, Cassandra?” he’d ask. “Do you want to go to the nurse?”

“No,” she’d say. “I’m okay. I’m just tired.”

Much of that fall, Cassandra was simply exhausted, worn out by her nightly rounds. For she and her sister Rachel had ripened into handsome young women, captivating the dudes who hung out at the bars and nightclubs near the corner of Massachusetts and Columbus avenues.

Ever since Little Rachel became pregnant at age thirteen, her mother had known the girls were “messing around.” At first she sought to restrain their
sexuality with strict pronouncements about where they could hang out, whom they could see, what they could do. But the girls displayed a knack for threading their way through their mother’s most elaborate obstacle course. Just when Rachel thought she had them hemmed in, they found some loophole through which to crawl. If she dispatched them to the corner for ribs and fries, they’d return hours later with Kentucky Fried Chicken, saying they’d misunderstood her and gone all the way to Shawmut Avenue. One night a neighbor spotted them at the Venice, a dark, noisy tavern just up the avenue from Methunion Manor. In months to come, whenever the girls disappeared for a couple of hours, Rachel could invariably find them around the pinball machines at the rear of that dusky bar. She never caught them with a drink in their hands—they were clearly underage—but she always suspected that the men they met there slipped them drinks or drugs under the table.

When she taxed them with their transgressions, they were flatly unrepentant. At fifteen and sixteen, they regarded themselves as emancipated young women, ready to taste forbidden pleasures. Their bravado only drove Rachel to new strictures: before they left the house at night or on weekends, they had to clean their rooms, wash the dishes, scrub the bathtub. When the girls protested that none of their friends did such onerous housework, Rachel would fly into a rage. “What am I?” she’d cry. “The jolly black mammy who cleans up after everyone around here?” Sometimes after the girls did their chores, Rachel would find some small deficiency and order them to spend the rest of the night correcting it.

Their arguments grew louder and angrier, mother and daughters confronting each other in a pitiless test of wills, neither side about to back off. Sometimes the scenes ended with one or both girls stomping out of the apartment while their mother stood in the hallway shouting after them, “If you go this time, you don’t need to come back!”

Aware that the girls were fooling around with men, Rachel urged them to be careful—to choose their sexual partners with some discretion, use birth control devices, make regular visits to the gynecologist. As in other matters, the girls often ignored these warnings.

In mid-September 1976, Cassandra got sick. The doctor prescribed daily medication, but she often forgot to take it. One evening, Rachel entered her daughter’s room to ask if she had taken the medicine. “I ain’t taking those stupid pills,” said Cassandra. “Oh, yes, you are!” “No, I ain’t. Now get off my case!” Something in Cassandra’s response ignited the flashpan of Rachel’s anger. In a moment, mother and daughter were flailing at each other with fists and nails. The squall was over in thirty seconds, but it left Rachel spent with rage. Later that night, when her friend Daisy Voigt called from New York, she poured out the story of her recalcitrant daughters.

Daisy had grown up on Hammond Street, just a block from the Walkers’ house on Ball Street. Leaving Boston at the age of nineteen, she had gone to New York, where she raised two children, entered public relations, and made something of a name for herself in Harlem’s cultural and political worlds. But
for nearly two decades she had stayed in touch with the Walker clan, especially with Rachel. A curious blend of sophistication and earthiness, Daisy provided a perfect sounding board for Rachel’s mounting desperation.

So affected was she that evening by Rachel’s tears that the next morning she wrote the girls a seven-page letter.