Oregon Humanities Spring 2008

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring 2008
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
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COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
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Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

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On the Bus

An idealistic young white woman bears witness to racial desegregation in 1970s Boston

By Alice Tallmadge

The fall of 1975, I accompanied my friend Helen as she piloted a school bus filled with high school kids from the all-black, economically depressed neighborhood of Roxbury into all-white, economically depressed South Boston. The year before, Boston had embarked on a school desegregation program that had been mandated by the courts. The purpose was to improve educational opportunities for inner-city black kids, but the plan simply shuffled them from one poor school district to another, equally disadvantaged district. Helen was committed to trying to make the controversial effort as smooth for her young, black riders as she could. When her regular bus monitor took some time off, she asked me to fill in and I readily agreed.

The racially riven city of Boston was a world apart from the safe, white suburb in upstate New York where I'd grown up, but it was where I wanted to be. For me, the mid-1970s were a potent and difficult time. Society was reeling from the Vietnam War and the duplicity, political crimes, and protest culture it had engendered. The country was still grieving the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. I was in my mid-twenties, overwhelmed with the loss of trust in every cultural institution I had been brought up to believe in, and passionately committed to making some sort of change. I couldn't do anything about the mess in Washington, DC, but what I could do, I thought then, was somehow right some of the wrongs that had been perpetrated on the black community--a culture I was attracted to but knew very little about. Deep inside I think I also yearned to experience something beyond the confines of a white skin and culture that had bred so much destruction and chaos in the world.

My house in Jamaica Plain was on a street that bordered the sprawling Bromley-Heath housing project, one of several ugly complexes where Boston stowed black families on welfare. I didn't realize at the time that poverty breeds its own desperate ethos, regardless of race. By the time I accepted Helen's offer I had been held up twice at knife point and had thwarted one purse snatcher. There was no doubt in my mind that my face marked me as an outsider. I'd grown wary as a stray cat, and my heart raced whenever I saw a band of young black teens loping toward me on the sidewalk. To my mind, being a bus monitor offered a more protected means of trying to bridge the black/white chasm.

Our bus was the first in a caravan of more than two dozen that roared over the causeway separating South Boston from the rest of the city. South Boston's staunch Irish neighborhood didn't take kindly to its schools being desegregated, and even though it was the second year of the program, outrage was still rampant. Motorcycle police escorts flanked us on both sides. Police cars--lights flashing, sirens blaring--blocked traffic at the cross streets to ensure we wouldn't risk becoming a target for rocks. (Helen had already lost one windshield.) As a monitor, my job was to ensure order on the bus, but I wasn't needed. Our passengers were quiet and pensive, staring out the window as we sped by crowds of angry, screaming residents clumped in groups along the route. When we got to the high school the students debarked, their heads high and spines erect as they lined up to pass through the metal detectors set up in front of the high school's massive brick edifice. A white student had been stabbed by a black student the year before, and the school was taking no chances.

In the afternoon the scenario played out again, but in reverse. Helen, as much the epitome of cool as I wasn't, tuned her radio to a station playing Motown or rock. She greeted each kid who climbed on the bus with a nod and an encouraging smile. When all the kids were seated she shut the doors and waited for the police sirens' wail and the gunning of the motorcycle engines. Then she turned on the ignition and led the parade of yellow buses through South Boston, over the causeway and back into Roxbury.

Within a few months, I had learned to drive my own bus. The first kids I transported were white elementary school students who were generally well-behaved unless we passed another school bus, going in the opposite direction, filled with black kids. Then they would erupt in a flurry of name-calling, their faces pasted against the windows and their little mouths screaming ugly, grown-up words.

The next year I changed bus companies and was assigned a route in a voluntary desegregation program, this time transporting middle school students from Roxbury to Newton, an affluent, white suburb west of Boston. My bus was less full than the year before, and my kids were quiet and low-key. If any of them acted up, they had to answer to my monitor, a young, spirited black woman named Civi Scott. She sat behind me and chattered as I drove us away from the inner core of the city, the roads getting wider and cleaner, the houses bigger, the lawns more lush with each mile.

She told me she wanted to move back down South where she had grown up. Maybe open a small store and be her own boss.

"They say it's better here up north but I don't think so," she said. Her Southern drawl was so pronounced that sometimes I had to ask her to repeat herself. "You know where you stand. It's all out in the open. Here, it's hidden. People say they're not prejudiced, but you know they are."

I nodded in empathy. "Boston is as racist as it comes," I told her, feeling like I was finally building a bridge.

A few months after we began working together Civi threw a hot dog party and invited me. Familiar soul music thumped in the living room when I arrived and soon I dived into it with all the pent-up motion I had in me. Beer flowed and so did laughter. This, I thought, is exactly where I have wanted to be. That was before I noticed the noise from the kitchen had grown louder and more strident. A bunch of women stood together looking out into the living room. They gyrated their hips and waved their hands, then slapped each other in wild hilarity. I tried to pretend they weren't mocking me but the movements were distressingly familiar. Finally one voice cut through any doubt. "Why, look at that white girl dance," she called out, pumping her arms and bobbing like a drunken puppet. Civi hooted along with her.

Civi and I drove together for six more months. I never mentioned the incident, nor did she. There were no more invitations and it didn't surprise me. Making inroads into the black-white divide had proved far more difficult than I had imagined in my idealistic zeal. The racial landscape was massively complex and fraught with centuries-old prejudices and stereotypes. Proximity wasn't enough to allow me into the heart of the black culture. Neither were good intentions, or busing kids out of the muggy city to a summer day camp, or daring myself to walk near the projects on my way to work. Getting to experience a different culture requires that you abandon the role of observer and allow yourself to be shown--even for a moment--another way to be. I wanted to do that, but the times sealed the door shut. I ended up making the age-old "outsider" error of thinking that I was seeing a whole, and my limited experience became the lens through which I thought I saw the truth.

Later that summer I packed my car and told my friends I was going on vacation. I lied. I wanted out. The bullying pimps, the forlorn housing projects huddled up against the skyline, the simmering racial antagonism had all taken their toll. Blacks were as maligned and marginalized as ever, but I had lost my empathy and failed to make any sort of change. I said goodbye to Boston and headed west.

Alice Tallmadge is a freelance writer and editor living in Springfield

Published in the Spring 2008 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2008 Oregon Council for the Humanities