(personal version)
Given two turntables, a sound mixer, and a stack of records from the eighties,
could you find two songs that are close enough in beats per minute and blend them together? What if I could demonstrate that the ability to synchronize two different records reflects the deeper intelligence required to reconcile one’s existence between two separate worlds? Below is a personal version of the previous post. It starts with the same opening paragraph as the academic one.
“Shut up before we send you back to Africa!” That short, toxic, projectile was shot at me in seventh grade by a white eight grader and it still lingers 40 years later. He said it to push me out of a small circle of small talk in between classes. Perhaps it has kept its salience this long because I came to believe others in my school had been repressing this same resentment. Perhaps the memory is still fresh because it stirred up a deep yearning for the language to respond accordingly. Without the words and the opportunity to respond, the negative energy contained in that projected hatred gets trapped within your spirit.
I attended one of those small New England prep schools that literally made it into the previously popular “Official Preppy Handbook” during the 80s. Docksiders, Volvos, polo shirts worn inside of oxford shirts, and CB jackets adorned with ski lift tags were customary. My alma mater, Providence Country Day School (PCD) in East Providence, RI, went from 5th to 12th grade with a student body of about 400 young men (it has since become coed). At no point in time while I attended that school did I observe more than 5 other black students there simultaneously. There were no Black teachers or administrators. Nor were there any “diversity” or peer counselors. When it came to dealing with cultural matters such as my colleague’s “repatriation” offer, I was on my own.
That feeling of being on my own was reinforced by the historical pictures they kept in the lunch hall. Starting clockwise, one could begin with PCD’s founding in 1923 and scan all of the sports team pictures until that present. One morning back then I started my own census, looking for Black students through the 30s, 40s, and 50s. I cannot remember any showing up before the 70s. One here, another, a few years later— a name without a story — historically substantive to me, but seemingly immaterial to the overall history of the school. In that moment of summary I realized that I too will appear, like those before me, as an ethnic moment in time.
Somewhere on another wall at PCD right now there is, perhaps, a dark picture of me posing with the 1984 varsity Lacrosse team. We will be standing together and next to my name it will say, “Co-Captain”. I will appear to have been successful given that I held a leadership role in a sport where you don’t see many Black students playing. What won’t be known is the day an opposing white player knocked me down from behind before calling me the N-word in the middle of a game, and the fact that none of my teammates came to my defense.
By contrast, I grew up in one of those neighborhoods that transitioned from white to black and brown in the seventies. The Elmwood section of Providence, RI. had architecturally significant, Queen Anne Victorian homes inhabited by a few of the whites who remained, and tenements for the middle class like the one my parents bought. The family who rented our first floor was African American. Our neighbors on one side were Dominican. Many of the other neighbors on the rest of the street were either Cape Verdean or were an aftershock of the Great Migration in the same way we were.
We had just enough money to make it in the post-industrial collapse that Rhode Island limped through, but we lived from “paycheck to paycheck”. My father’s last job before he was disabled was at a metal factory where he cut raw steel down to smaller machinable portions. My mom worked for a local councilman and was paid intermittently “at his discretion”. Thus the contrasts between home life and life at school had two dimensions: race and class.
So how do you reconcile two vastly different worlds and maintain your identity without having someone who had a similar experience lead the way? Looking back I realize now that I had taken the first step when I connected with my inner voice. That voice told me to walk to the front of Pond Street Baptist Church when they “opened the doors of the church”. When confronted with another episode of intolerance, that same voice told me to “keep going”.
Engagement was the second step. Despite discomfort, I engaged my school. I played three sports, acted in school plays, wrote for the school newspaper, and served on the student council. In my daily interactions, I took risks talking with other students even while bracing for the intolerance they may be harboring. It was a magic act.
At home, I plunged into the warm waters of Black culture. Watching my parents and grandmother, I learned how to cook transplanted South Carolinian cuisine (which included pancakes). I soaked in the mixture of Motown, Gospel, Jazz, Funk, and Rap that thumped daily from a pair of three-foot speakers. In my backyard, I played basketball with the neighborhood brothers. At church, I tapped my foot to the cadence of the preacher and the hymns that prepared me for him.
Several things happened by vigorously engaging home and school environments. One of the benefits was found in learning the pace of each world. Knowing each pace was like knowing when to merge into traffic. I’m convinced that another benefit from having been fully present in each world was that it drew out good will from among the strangeness. Elders at church would put a dollar in my pocket after I read the announcements and welcomed the visitors. Teachers would unwittingly provide a moment of belonging when they patiently answered the unnecessarily philosophical questions I would ask. And there were a few students who stood out as being more friendly than others.
The last component was expression. By learning how to express myself in both contexts, I could be more of myself in both. Yes, I changed my vernacular—code switched—in between home and school. But I could also double back. Occasionally, I would deliberately inject lingo from home into school conversations, and vice versa— I would intentionally drop my academic, nerdy, vocabulary right into the middle of a backyard basketball game. And unlike the well used trope about ambitious Black kids being accused of acting white, I didn’t get that treatment.
When you read Dr. King’s writings, you’ll notice that he did it too. He would code-switch in the middle of his speeches—reverting back and forth from scholar/philosopher to preacher. In his last speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”, when he talks about the ages he’d like to live in, he imagines aloud the possibility of seeing “Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes”. Later, when describing why marches he led persisted despite violent opposition, he said, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.”
Spinning records on two turntables while using a mixer to switch back and forth is what allowed me to achieve against the odds of frequent intolerance at school. Listening to an inner voice that told me to, “keep going”, engaging home and school in order to find my place and generate good will, and finally, developing methods of expression in each world to turn my double consciousness into a private party.
Though I was on my own at PCD, my experience was shared by so many other “Black prep school pioneers” then and since. All of us who made it with our minds and spirits intact had to exhibit a kind of “synchronistic intelligence” to not only survive, but achieve. Others have achieved much more than I have even emerging from similar circumstances, but I have passed along what I learned to my two sons. Armed with those reflections and their mother’s guidance, they were exceedingly successful at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. And now I’m also sharing what I’ve learned with you.
