In my first year of college, I had the ignoble task of working in the freshman dining hall, cleaning up after my classmates who weren’t on scholarships and didn’t have to do manual labor in order to afford college. It was a humbling experience. Some folks might insist that this work is ennobling rather than ignoble, enriching rather than humbling, but those folks weren’t there.
I spent twenty hours a week washing dishes. (We had this enormous dish washing machine, a conveyor belt that we’d load with dirty dishes at one end and remove clean dishes at the other in a continuous process.) Once the dishes were all re-stacked for the next meal, I and about five other guys would wipe down the tables, fill the salt and pepper shakers and straighten the chairs.
The saving grace of this work was that I met a classmate who became a life-long friend. He and I shared a compendium of knowledge of the great American songbook, classics by Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern and others. We could sing, and did sing, the classics as we remembered them from recordings by Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. The major difference between us was that whereas I couldn’t sing worth a damn, he was a classically trained pianist who could keep in key when we sang.
Just after our sophomore year, I was fortunate enough to spend about a week with him at his family’s home in Virginia, between the end of the semester and my summer plans. They lived in a very large, historic-looking house with a great yard, much grander than my family’s home. I was welcomed warmly by his family and friends.
Now, I should tell you that my friend was of the African-American persuasion and that everyone I met while I was with him shared that African heritage. I was a curiosity to some of his friends and was looked at with a bit of hesitation when we ventured out, both within and outside the Black community. This was the South in the mid-sixties. It felt a bit weird.
A number of scenes from that visit are still with me. For instance, when we visited my friend’s high school so he could see his old teachers, I was struck by how much alike his southern, segregated high school and my working class high school in Cleveland were. They were both old three story brick piles, with stairways at the two ends of a long hallway and one in the middle. Classes passed with a lot of noise, with students keeping to the right going up and down the stairs. The difference was that I engendered very curious looks from the kids, even though, in all respects other than our skin’s ability to reflect light, we were very similar.
There were some differences I encountered, however, that offered opportunities for learning. One day, for instance, we went to a beach house owned by a friend. I took along and applied sun screen, which engendered conversation. Although my friends became darker over time in the sun, sunburn was not at all common. They were all educated and traveled but had no direct experience with sun screen and were curious about how frequently it was applied and how effective it was. I, on the other hand, learned a bit about dry or ‘ashy’ skin caused when skin is stripped of natural oils.
It was on this trip that I committed my first act of civil disobedience (which was to be followed by many more in later years). A group of us decided to go to the movies. We walked from my friend’s house to a local theater, an old, ornate movie palace with Moorish touches. I led the way in and headed to the doors leading to the main floor seating area. The others quickly stopped me and suggested we take the stairs to the balcony.
I protested just a bit, saying that I liked to be close to the screen, but was met with blank stares by everyone in the group. Oh, right, I thought, flashing on the ‘whites only’ and ‘colored’ water fountains I had seen. (I had always wanted to stop at the colored fountains to see exactly what color the water was, but never had the opportunity.)
So, we watched the movie from the balcony. I took pride, and still do, in integrating, at least for one night, the upper levels of that theater. I have to admit, however, that the view from the balcony was (surprise!) not as good as from the main floor.