My Black History

In my last postcard I wrote about my best friend in elementary school, a girl named Esther, who dreamed of being an actress. People asked: What happened to Esther?
    I want to start my Esther story from the beginning, from the first day we met, in second grade, at Lewisboro Elementary School. I wasn’t a comfortable little kid. I was nervous, weepy and painfully aware of being different. My parents were divorced. My mother had remarried. I had a stepfather. I was from a tiny mining town in Nova Scotia and had not experienced indoor plumbing until we moved to South Salem, New York when I was nearly four years old. For weeks I cried when my mother dropped me off at kindergarten. In truth, South Salem was a small town, too, just fifty miles north of New York City. But to me, it was huge and frighteningly fast.
    One terrible day I was shamed when I was pulled out of my first grade class by the school nurse who’d discovered I had not had polio shots. That humiliation was followed by several trips to the doctor where I suffered through a series of terrifying immunizations catching me up with my upscale American classmates.

I count eight candles on this cake. The kids in this photo: Sally Parker, (left) the girl who broke the glass. She died of cancer nearly a decade ago. The girl with her mouth open? Me of course. Esther, before she got contact lenses. Janet Vlachos died when we were 22. She was the prettiest girl in our class, class queen at the senior prom. A victim of severe mental illness that appeared suddenly, when she died of her own hand she broke all of our hearts.

    One day in second grade our teacher brought a little girl into the room and introduced her to the class. Her name was Esther and we were told that she’d moved to our town from New York City. She was brown, her hair was neatly braided into a dozen plaits. She was quite beautiful, and the first black person I had ever seen. I sensed her unease. As soon as I got the chance I presented myself to her, offering to be her best friend. She took me up on the offer. Being outsiders brought us together.  But there was more. My stepfather drove a school bus, the same bus that brought Esther to and from school each day.  Esther was the first kid on the bus route in the morning and the last kid off in the afternoon. One day, as he pulled the blue school bus up in front of the pillars that stood at the end of Esther’s driveway, Esther’s mother was not there waiting for her daughter as she always did. Dad looked into the yard and saw the horrible sight of Esther’s mother on the ground, in a pool of blood, unconscious. He parked the bus. He ran inside the house and called an ambulance. He waited with Esther.
    What had happened was this: Mrs. Moses, more used to taxis and subways, had attempted to back her shiny new Cadillac out of the garage, a challenge for a woman accustomed to city living. She was determined to manage country living, and to provide Esther with the very best life possible. She’d opened the car door while backing out of the garage, and tangled her leg in the machine that opened the door. She was horribly injured. She’d been there on the ground for some time by the time Esther’s bus arrived. She did recover the use of her leg, but she often said that my father had saved her life. And maybe she was right.
    From then on we were regularly invited to Esther’s house. Mr. Moses lived in New York City, where he built apartment buildings. He had his own bedroom there, and it, like everything else in that house, was grand. Brocade wallpaper. Satin quilts. Silk drapes and hugely grand paintings in ornate gold frames on the walls. One day Mrs. Moses found that my forehead was hot and my chest had several red dots. She decided I was coming down with the measles. I was immediately installed in Mr. Moses’ grand bed, where I was served orange juice spiked with ginger ale and dinner on a tray.  To my bitter disappointment, I did not have measles and was quickly released from Mrs. Moses comfy quarantine by my no-nonsense nurse mother.

At this birthday party Esther instructed us to dress as a representative of another country.  I wore a satin cape, from Esther's dress-up box, over a bathing suit. I called myself "Miss America." Esther, I think, was supposed to be an Ethiopian princess. Janet wore lederhosen and a jaunty feathered hat. The costume thing was pure Esther. Check out that painted floor in the basement party room. Fabulous!!  Wish I'd taken a picture of that throne toilet.

    Esther had a pool in the back yard, and a basement, designed for partying. The basement also had a tiny bathroom, the toilet, atop several steps, like a throne. Behind the pool Esther’s mother had a chicken coop, where she raised food of the quality she’d known growing up in South Carolina. I never saw it happen but I have to assume she slaughtered those chickens herself. She was an incredible cook, preparing delicious meals of stewed chicken, with grits and gravies I’ve never tasted before or since. Certainly she was the most colorful person I’d ever known. That my mother drank tea and coffee without cream or sugar never ceased to amaze Mrs. Moses. One day I heard her tell another guest: “They are from Canada,” as if that explained my mother’s odd behavior. She talked quickly, with a thick accent and many “mmmm’s” and clucks. She was wonderfully affectionate, unlike my own mother, and I loved cuddling into her soft and fragrant body. When I spent the night with Esther, I heard her mother roaming the house, talking softly to herself, moving things about. The entire scenario was like a royal palace, designed to keep the princess Esther well fed, dressed, entertained and cheered.

    On Sundays there might be a visit from Esther’s father, who was called, by Esther’s mother “Mr. Moses.” Just as she catered to Esther’s every whim, she worked hard at making Mr. Moses happy. Mr. Moses traveled in a limousine, with a driver. One beautiful fall Sunday we all loaded into Mr. Moses’ Lincoln for a ride. Our journey took us along lovely, winding country roads. Our driver, whose regular beat was New York City, was not used to curves, and drove with his foot on the brake. As soon as the car gathered any speed at all, he jammed on the brakes to ease gingerly around the next turn. Esther and I giggled in the backseat with Mrs. Moses, who admonished us for laughing. We were to understand that Mr. Moses dignity was to be respected, even during that hilarious herky-jerky ride. 
    Imagine the grandeur of all of this to a little girl born into a house where the bathroom was a two-seater outhouse located in the back yard. None of this wonder made an impression on Esther, who’d been born into this lifestyle, and often seemed bored and irritated by her mother’s lavish devotion to her. But to me, it was spectacular. I felt as if I’d fallen into one of my fairy-tale books. When Esther grew tired of a dress, she gave it to me. For the first time in my life I had ruffly party dresses.
    Esther came to my house, too. Our house was small and plain, and we ate a lot of spaghetti as my stepfather, whom I called Dad, was Italian. One day Esther and I visited another classmate in the neighborhood. Sally offered us soda, and then, when we were done drinking, dropped Esther’s glass on the floor, breaking it. The next morning at the bus stop I told Sally it seemed to me that she’d deliberately broken the glass. Yes, she answered. She said that no one in her family wanted to use a glass that had been used by a colored person. It was my first experience of racial prejudice.

    Many years later, when we were grown women, I asked Esther if she remembered that incident. She did, she said, of course she did, and there were many other such incidents, but I had been totally unaware of them. And she had never told me. She said that a boy who went to my church used to regularly whisper “nigger” in her ear. And more recently, she’d been unable to get a cab take her to the hospital when she was hideously ill and vomiting with what turned out to be appendicitis. The solution, she explained, was for her white husband to hail the cab while Esther hid in the shadows. 
    But all of this understanding came much later. I thought Esther, the princess, was a princess wherever she went. When she went to the prom with a white boy (there were very few black people in our high school) the car ran out of gas on the way home. Her mother accused Esther of messing around with the boy, and using running out of gas as an excuse for being so late. For hours she lectured Esther about the importance of keeping her purse closed. Translation: having sex.
    “If only!” Esther recalled. “I was dying for someone to make a pass!”

Esther with her baby boy, grown up and as beautiful as ever.

    Esther’s father died during our senior year of high school. Esther went to Bennington College in Vermont. And that’s when I lost touch. But many years later I found her again. I was in New York visiting my brother. We rendezvoused in New York City, a few blocks from where she lived. She dropped her youngest son at school. We went to breakfast. That’s when we talked of our shared childhood, and of the secrets each of us had kept back then. Esther had lost her passion for acting and she’d also lost her father’s money which somehow dried up completely after his death. She’d earned a masters degree in physiology. She married once, divorced, and then married again. Her oldest son attended Harvey Mudd College on a scholarship. Just before her fiftieth birthday she and her husband adopted a second son.
    Mrs. Moses, it turns out, was not her mother at all, but her nanny—hired help. Esther stayed close to her until she died, penniless, in a nursing home at the age of 90. Esther told me that every once in a while Mrs. Moses would say “I wonder what happened to that little June girl?” It breaks my heart that I didn’t stay in touch with her. She’d opened my eyes to so many things, the culture of Harlem on visits to New York when I was the only white person for as far as I could see, and the pleasure of her affection—a feature not available in my home. I also learned to love grits, and iced tea richly laced with sugar.
    In 2008, just before the Crash, we celebrated our fortieth class reunion, back in Westchester. Esther and I chatted with excitement before the event. It was our first class reunion in all those years, and we spent hours on the phone imagining how it would be. On that night Esther and I saw each other and joyfully embraced. I met her husband, a fabulous man who obviously adored her. And then they were gone, into the crowd and the shuffle of the reunion.
    I haven’t spoken to her since that night, because my life has changed so dramatically since then it’s a difficult task to catch old friends up on what I’ve been doing. Lost a great job. Got cancer. Fought it and got it again. My mother, as beautiful and regal as a queen when we were kids, died, blind and broken in a nursing home. Who wants to know all of that?
    What shines most brightly today are the memories of two little girls, from different ends of the world, who came together and loved each other purely, innocent of their differences. And when people argue that prejudice is over, that black people get just as fair as shake as white people do, in the deepest part of my heart, I know the truth. They don’t.