Common Ground (23 page)

It was too late for Richard and George, by then entering junior high school at the Dearborn. All their friends were there and they didn’t want to leave. Richard took the traditional route through the black inner-city schools. George, too, stayed on at the Dearborn several more years, but toward the end of that time he came under the influence of one of its few extraordinary teachers, Harriet Schwartz, who pulled strings to get him into Roslindale High, a better-than-average school in a largely white neighborhood.

Meanwhile, Rachel sought an escape route for her younger children. One day she encountered a nun doing social work in the projects who told her about St. Patrick’s, a parochial school just around the corner. Like other Catholic schools in the changing neighborhoods of the inner city, St. Patrick’s had been cut off from its former Irish and Italian constituency, and now found itself stranded in the midst of the black community. Since most blacks were Baptists or Methodists, there were powerful pressures within the Archdiocese to abandon such schools, but liberal Catholics, concerned about the Church’s social responsibility, persuaded the hierarchy to open them to blacks. By the late sixties, at least four parochial schools were heavily black and Puerto Rican—and less than half Catholic.

For Wayne and young Rachel Twymon, who entered in 1969, and Frederick and Cassandra, who joined them in 1970, St. Patrick’s represented a startling change. They were required to recite the catechism every day, attend Mass every Friday, wear neat black-and-white uniforms, and once a year walk around with “those funny ashes” on their foreheads. Cassandra hated the uniforms and the Sisters’ strict discipline. The boys yearned for the days when they could cut school with impunity. But the classroom drills and the huge homework assignments paid off. In four years at St. Patrick’s, the Twymon children learned more than they had in all their years of public school.

Parochial school cost Rachel several hundred dollars a year, for tuition, uniforms, and books—a heavy burden for a woman on welfare—but she considered it worth the price. And, in 1973, when Frederick, Wayne, and Cassandra graduated, Rachel was determined to keep them out of the overwhelmingly black high schools in Roxbury and Dorchester. She seized on the “open enrollment” program which permitted pupils to go to any public school in the city where there were vacancies, so long as they provided their own transportation. After surveying the options, she picked the Joseph H. Barnes Junior High School in East Boston. It was an unusual choice. A tightly knit Italian community, East Boston didn’t welcome outsiders of any kind. Only a handful of blacks lived there, most of them in the housing projects; and few blacks were willing to make the long ride from Roxbury with such an uncertain welcome at the end of the line.

But for the Twymons it proved a successful experiment. The only uneasy moments each day came at the Maverick Square subway station, on the bus they took from there, or the walk from the bus stop up the hill to the school.
Outside the vegetable and fruit markets, the old Italians with their shopping baskets would stop and stare at them. In the little candy stores where the children paused to buy chocolates or soda, the clerks served them with a scowl and, once their backs were turned, rattled off something in Italian. Cassandra, who took Italian at school that year, occasionally made out a phrase like “dirty little monkeys.”

But once they reached the school, they had no trouble. In an enrollment of 350 there were barely 30 blacks and Puerto Ricans—never enough to threaten the white majority, just enough to make them objects of genuine curiosity. At first the Italian boys asked Frederick a lot of questions—“What’s that thing you got stuck in your head?” they would inquire about his hair pick, or “Why do you wear sneakers every day, why don’t you wear shoes?”—but soon his toothy grin and bold irreverence made him a popular figure in class. Frederick and Wayne both played varsity basketball. Cassandra made two close friends among the Italian girls—Rosemarie Lamonica and Maria Cali. Rosemarie had a younger sister, Lucy, with long, curly hair, and Cassandra loved to comb it, running her fingers through its silky strands.

But her real girlfriend was Maria Cali. They sat together in class, passing notes back and forth, and during recess they chatted excitedly about boys and clothes and parties. One evening, Maria invited Cassandra to dinner. Mrs. Cali welcomed her in the parlor, saying, “The bathroom’s upstairs, dear, if you want to clean up. I won’t show you up because my feet are killing me, but you just go on up and make yourself at home.” Cassandra liked that because it was just what her mother would have said. Later, they sat down around the kitchen table to huge platters of spaghetti, hamburgers, and corn on the cob, followed by ice cream and cake. Then they all watched television for a couple of hours. When it was time to leave, Mrs. Cali gave her an imitation-alligator purse as a present from the family, which made Cassandra so happy she felt like crying. Maria insisted on walking her to the subway—“just to make sure you get home all right”—but when they passed a sidewalk flower stand, Cassandra bought a bouquet of gardenias, which she took back to Mrs. Cali to thank her for “my best evening of the whole year.” Cassandra never forgot that night in East Boston. For her, it was a symbol of the way black and white people could get along if only they forgot about what color they were and just enjoyed each other.

Only once during the year did East Boston’s simmering resentment against blacks break into a boil. It happened in October 1973, following several racial incidents in Roxbury. On Monday, October 1, René Wagler, a twenty-four-year-old white woman who lived in a racially mixed feminist collective in Roxbury, was walking along Blue Hill Avenue when she encountered three young blacks who told her, “Honky, get out of this part of town.” She shrugged it off. But Tuesday night, as she carried a can of gasoline to her stalled car on the avenue, she was set upon by the same trio and three others. They dragged her down a narrow alley to a rubble-strewn lot, forced her to pour two gallons
of gasoline over herself, and then touched a match to her soaked clothes. Burning like a torch, René managed to stagger four hundred yards to a liquor store; she was rushed to a hospital, but died five hours later. Her body was so charred, doctors said, that except for the bottom of her feet “you couldn’t tell whether she was white or black.”

On Thursday, Louis Barba, a retired contractor of Italian extraction, was fishing in Pleasure Bay Pond behind the Columbia Point housing project when a group of black youths stoned him and then stabbed him to death with his own fish knife.

On Friday, in apparent retaliation for the two killings, whites at East Boston High School badly beat a young black. The following Monday was Columbus Day and the schools were closed. But on Tuesday, another gang of whites chased six black students from the high school down Saratoga Street toward the Barnes, which was then just letting out.

When Frederick and Wayne came banging out the door that afternoon, they found the street in front of the school filled with more than a hundred whites, milling back and forth, seeking targets of opportunity. “There’s some niggers! Get the niggers!” shouted the crowd. A dozen whites ran toward them, brandishing baseball bats and sticks. Wayne and Frederick quickly retreated to the school, helping to barricade the front door. Rocks and bottles beat a savage tattoo on the brick façade. Cassandra, hunched by a window, watched the angry faces surging in the street below. Eventually, the police arrived and dispersed the crowd.

For the rest of the week, small knots of white youths gathered across the street from the Barnes each afternoon, loudly threatening to “kill the niggers.” Police escorted the blacks to and from the subway until things quieted down.

It was the first racial violence the Twymon children had ever been exposed to. Frederick, then fifteen, and Wayne, fourteen, seemed to take it in stride. Cassandra, thirteen, felt it more deeply. Though most of her memories of East Boston were warm ones, in years to come she would occasionally dream of a dark street, lined with fruit markets, down which white boys with baseball bats relentlessly advanced, shouting “monkey, monkey.”

Alone among the Twymon children, Richard remained locked in Boston’s “ghetto” schools. Graduating from the Dearborn in 1968, he entered English High, then rapidly becoming the principal black inner-city high school. English was America’s oldest non-exclusive public high school. From its massive brick pile on Avenue Louis Pasteur, it had produced a distinguished roster of alumni, among them J. P. Morgan and General Matthew B. Ridgway. By the late nineteenth century, English was the principal stepping-stone from which Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants made their leap into the middle class. When the class of 1916 held a reunion three decades later, its 459 living members included 24 physicians, 22 lawyers, 7 college professors, 20 politicians, 50 owners of their own businesses, and no fewer than 5 millionaires.

By the early 1960s, the schools’ Irish and Italians began giving way to
blacks. Since Roxbury had no boys’ high school of its own, English—located on the northwestern edge of the black community—became the logical alternative. As more blacks chose to go there, whites preferred to remain at their own district high schools. Soon the School Committee put its imprimatur on the shift, creating a set of predominantly black junior highs which fed blacks to English. By 1965, the school was 25 percent black; by 1971, 50 percent. The freshman class that year was 80 percent black.

Asked to perform for blacks the same assimilating role it had played for others, English by then was ill equipped for the task. In 1967, following a study which condemned its curriculum, physical plant, and library, the New England Association of College and Secondary Schools placed English on a two-year probation. Moreover, as its student body grew progressively black, that change wasn’t reflected in the school’s staff and administration. Its headmaster was white, as were seventy-four of its seventy-seven teachers, and all of its guidance counselors. By the time Richard Twymon entered in September 1968, the black community would no longer tolerate such imbalance. Martin Luther King’s assassination four months before had bred a new air of militancy in Roxbury. Prompted in part by New York’s battle over control of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville schools, Boston blacks demanded their own version of “community control.” As classes began that fall, black parents at the embattled Gibson, supported by five white teachers, withdrew their children and opened a “liberation school,” refusing to return unless a black principal was appointed and black parents were given a major voice in operating the school.

Two weeks later, the new spirit reached English. On September 17, two black students were suspended for wearing dashikis to school. “When a considerable number of students dress differently it constitutes a divisive influence,” explained Headmaster Joseph Malone, an Irish veteran of forty-five years in the system. But four days later, some two hundred blacks—many of them dressed in vividly colored robes and beads—massed in front of the school. A bomb threat forced evacuation of the building. Malone abruptly caved in, lifting his ban on “African garb,” recognizing the Black Students’ Union, and announcing a new “black history” course.

For Richard Twymon, that week’s events were puzzling. Raised to cherish his association with whites, he found the new black militants a bit silly. Everybody was “runnin’ their mouths but not sayin’ much.” He certainly wasn’t going to wear one of them jive “dasheekees.” And when other black freshmen held a ceremony to burn their neckties, he didn’t know what to do. His mother didn’t want to hear anything about his burning a perfectly good three-dollar necktie, so Richard discreetly left it in his locker that day.

By his sophomore year, he began to absorb the new style. Richard’s guide was Hugh Jenkins, one of the school’s three black teachers and faculty adviser to the Black Students’ Union. Jenkins had taught at English for eight years, seething at the insensitivity of his white colleagues, one of whom once told him, “If it weren’t for us, you’d still be in Africa.” He taught the new black
history course, seeking less to create black heroes than to “set the record straight about the American experience.” He didn’t want to lionize Crispus Attacks; he wanted to show his students how Woodrow Wilson, the great peacemaker, had helped establish racial segregation in the District of Columbia.

But Richard learned more from Hugh Jenkins outside class than in. Born and raised in North Carolina, Jenkins had lived half his life under rigid segregation, and he had no patience with the accommodationist spirit of Boston Negroes. “Don’t let the white man walk all over you,” he told Richard. “Don’t be docile. If you have a disagreement with him, let him know. Speak right up. That’s what you got a mouth for.”

One day in the school cafeteria, a white boy cut into line in front of Richard. In the old days, he would have shrugged it off. But now he said, “Hey, man, I waited my turn, you wait yours.” When the white kid said, “Shut up, nigger,” Richard hit him over the head with his tray, knocking him to the floor.

The next year, Richard was asked to sit in on meetings of the ten-man committee which ran the Black Students’ Union, now renamed the Afro-American Society. Although not a committee member, he was the “eleventh man,” the “scribe” who took notes on its agenda: such as the complaint from one boy that his teacher sang “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” as a public invitation for him to quit school. After the committee lodged a formal protest, the teacher was reprimanded.

That winter the grievance procedure broke down. When two black students were disciplined for allegedly stealing clothes and money from an employee’s locker, some three hundred blacks seized the school auditorium, demanding the pair’s reinstatement. The next morning, members of the Afro-American Society—Richard Twymon among them—roamed the corridors gathering blacks for a still larger meeting which broadened the protest, calling for more black teachers, new “black studies,” and an end to actions by school officials which were “detrimental to the pride and spirit of black students.” By early Friday, officials determined that English was in “such a chaotic state” it should be closed down. Over the weekend, the headmaster warned that to reopen the school would be to “endanger the lives of the faculty, administrators, and student body.”