Fifty Years Ago Today…

 

Proviso High School Freshman Class Officers 1958

…I had just arrived on campus, parents in tow, to begin an adventure that no one in my known lineage had experienced.  College.

I have written about some of my escapades during those idyllic four years in the prairies of Wisconsin.  I matriculated at the small liberal arts Ripon College in the small town of the same name that prides itself at being the official Birthplace of the Republican Party.  Go figure.

But this post isn’t about that.  This post is about the four years prior to that beautiful autumn day when I first heard the lovely strains of the bell tower carillon that would keep me on schedule, more or less, for the next few years.

Tomorrow morning I will catch a flight to Chicago to visit my soon-to-be-88-year-old mother…and to attend the 50th high school reunion of the Proviso East H.S. Class of 1962.

High school.  Mine was not the angst-filled horror so many woman of my generation report.  There was angst, though.  Plenty of it, now that I think about it.  But more memorable were the good times, the personal achievements, the great friendships…and the freedom from those gawdawful navy blue gabardine uniform jumpers with the white Peter Pan collars.  Oh how I hated that getup.

High school was the time I really had to come to terms with my mixed heritage. Until then, I had been sheltered and coddled by family and Catholic elementary school nuns who were absolutely fascinated by this social science experiment named Lezlie. None of them had been exposed to “colored” children for very long.  The half-dozen or so of black families who made the sacrifice to afford the tuition had only been allowed to enroll their kids for a few years before my arrival.

But I didn’t fit their model of a black child in almost any way.  We were all well-behaved, at least most of the time.  But not all of us were prepared for the rigors of the brand of education those nuns put down.  I was.  Little goodie two shoes, was I, with impeccable manners and an IQ that literally shocked them.  All of that fun stuff resulted in me being selected for a special high school experiment.

So I walked into that gigantic high school building with a target on my back, although I didn’t know it yet. 

Proviso East is a township high school, with feeder elementary children coming from at least six different towns.  There were 4,000 of us!  And out of that number, thirty (30) new freshman were selected based on IQ and achievement in the lower grades to join an accelerated program that became known as the Plus 30.  Now do you see the target?

Now in this horde of hormones were children from family backgrounds very typical of the Midwest at the time.  I never knew how many “colored kids” there were – people didn’t talk about things like that back then.  But I figure we wouldn’t have filled an entire study hall that seated roughly 40-50 students.

There was a large contingency of Italian Americans who grew up in Melrose Park, Illinois.  There were numerous children with unpronounceable names like Kwiatowski and Ciechanowski.   There were Jewish kids from north Maywood, the white part of the segregated town I was born and raised in.  And there were WASPS like my English/German second husband, who hailed from Forest Park.

I loved being a leader, which seemed to come quite naturally, so within the first month I decided I would run for class secretary.  I really wanted to be president, but this was 1958. Women were either vice-president or secretary, period.  I knew my “place.”  For the time being, that is.

Then it hit.  The heartbreaking, totally unexpected and utterly baffling racial backlash against me.  From the black kids in the class!

Who the hell did I think I was, they asked among themselves?  They didn’t know me because I didn’t attend the public school with them.  What they did know – Maywood was a very small town for a Chicago suburb – was that I was from “that Hurst family.” She’s light, bright and almost white… and we hate her.

Week after week, month after month, year after year, I was “the bitch” the black girls loved to hate.  At least once a week a rumor would make its way to my ears that The Girls would be waiting for me to pass the park on the walk home.  They were going to kick my yella ass.

Thank God the black boys in the class didn’t feel that way.  In fact, they would gather me up at dismissal and escort me home, past the hissing, spewing crowd of girls and home to my Mama.

So I had some decisions to make – after I cried about three rivers of tears after school in the safety of our basement recreation room.  Would I try to endear myself with these mean girls who wasted no time learning how to smoke and drink liquor in the girls rest rooms, or would I make my own way, on my own terms?

Thankfully, I had the ovaries to choose the latter.  I endured the mean-girl wrath as I won that election; became a permanent fixture on the honor roll, in spite of all those “uppity advanced classes” I had to take; became the first black girl to become a drum majorette; and was the first black student to make the National Honor Society (that I know of).

Oh how those girls hated my beige ass.

So, it has been with keen curiosity that I have approached this reunion. I’ve only attended one other – the 10th – and the Mean Black Girls maintained their snarling distance. By then, I found them both funny and just a little bit worthy of pity.  We were close to thirty years old.  I had left high school behind me.  They hadn’t, apparently.

As it turns out, it looks like I will be in a most familiar position this Saturday night.  I might be the only African American woman returning to celebrate our half-century after high school, according to the list of paid participants.  Some of my antagonists are already dead.  Others have moved to other parts of the country, like I did.  The others probably think it is beneath them…or is it above them?

I am looking forward to seeing my real high school friends.  I hope I’ll be able to recognize them!