Sarah Phillips by Andrea Lee (beach books .TXT) 📗

Were they silent, trembling with fervor, or were they exchanging their bitter, complicated jokes about black and white people?

On the screen, the face of Martin Luther King looked very round, with a somber, slightly Eastern air, like a Central Asian moon; when he spoke, his voice seemed to range freely up into the heavens. Matthew, who had recently professed himself a cynic, made fun of me for staring so raptly at the television.

“This stuff doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “What does this march do? It’s not going to help anybody.”

I said, “Matty, it’s a great thing! It’s a symbol. All those people are there because they believe in something. They want to make the world better—isn’t it wonderful?”

“Oh, come on, Sarah!” said Matthew, with an annoying superior grin.

We had a big fight about it as we sat there in front of the television. It was an argument in which I came off badly, because, as I found, I wasn’t sure what I really thought.

Servant Problems

Whenever Gretchen and I took our favorite illegal shortcut from the gym to the Great Lodge—a route that took us across one corner of the orchard, past the pruned roses of the Headmistress’s Garden, down a brambly alley strewn with cigarette butts in back of the Junior Residence Cottage, and across the bleak gray courtyard where trucks delivered supplies—one of the cooks would wave to us from the back porch outside the school kitchen. The cook was a small, grave, fat man with yellowish-brown skin; he wore a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that gave him an abstracted, professorial air strange to see at lunchtime over a steaming pan of shepherd’s pie. In good weather he liked to pass his afternoon break in the open air, on a battered wicker chair that must have dated from the turn of the century, when the Lodge was the summer house of a Wilmington mill owner. Gretchen always waved back to him, her round face pink with democratic enthusiasm, but I knew that the cook’s greeting was chiefly for me. His raised arm seemed to offer a kind of hortatory salute that filled me with a mixture of confusion and embarrassment. During my first fall and spring as a day student at the school, I saw him often on the kitchen porch, and I averted my eyes each time.

For sixty years, until the day I arrived there, the Prescott School for Girls had operated on a simple and logical basis: the teachers and students were white, and the domestic staff—a discreet, usually invisible crew of cooks, chambermaids, janitors, and gardeners—was black. This balance was upset when I entered the Prescott seventh grade, a long-legged, eccentric-haired child of eleven—with a mouthful of braces—chafing in the regulation gray worsted tunic and white cotton blouse. I came from a family with a fixed optimism about the brotherhood of man, and I was fresh from the sheltered atmosphere of a tiny Quaker school where race and class were treated with energetic nonchalance. It astonished me considerably to discover a world in which lines were so clearly drawn, and in which I was the object of a discreet, relentless curiosity—a curiosity mingled with wariness on the part of some teachers, as if I were a very small unexploded bomb.

Early in my first month at Prescott, I sat down on my mother’s lap after dinner and she asked me what school was like. “Well, it’s a little like being in a play,” I said. “Everyone’s watching me all the time.”

I had hoped to make her laugh, but she startled me by bursting into tears. Later I heard her say to my father, “We have to be careful. That school might ruin Sarah.”

The main building, or Great Lodge, of the Prescott School was a rambling structure of russet-colored brick, gabled, towered, and turreted, set among modern annexes, playing fields, and groves of horse chestnuts in the rolling hills near the Pennsylvania-Delaware border. The school grounds lay along a wooded ridge that sloped down to Saddler’s Creek, a sluggish brown tributary of the Brandywine, on which Prescott girls took out old-fashioned canoes. Confronted directly, Prescott had the absurd charm of any monstrous Edwardian folly, but if you were walking from the train station early on a fall or spring morning, there was a frail, almost unearthly allure to the brick towers rising above masses of foliage. They were the color of sandstone spires in the Arizona desert, and they suggested something so desirable and far off that a glimpse of them over the trees could tighten your heart and make your fingers ache in the pockets of your uniform blazer.

I came to Prescott in the mid-sixties, in an autumn that turned into a long Indian summer. Life had recently published pages of pictures showing flames blossoming from storefronts in Newark and Washington, but in the countryside around Saddler’s Creek no one was burning anything but leaves. The school grounds stayed green into November, and the senior girls who had sports cars kept the tops down as they had all summer, roaring up and down Prescott’s drive until Miss Cheyney, matron of the boarding school and in charge of administering discipline to day students, punished the offenders by making them attend a special Saturday study hall; the scandal of that week was that three of the immured girls, their hair tucked up under floppy Villager sun hats, had giggled and mugged so outrageously among the austere cum-laude lists in the study hall that they were suspended. Because of the good weather, Miss Mackintosh, doyenne of the tough-kneed, brief-kilted Scotswomen who ran the athletic department, scheduled extra hockey matches, and the bright fields echoed with shouts of “Sticks!” and the thunder of hefty legs; mothers with tanned faces shrieked encouragement through the windows of station wagons.

Classes were easy for me, but friends were hard. A few years earlier I’d seen a picture of a southern black girl making her way into a school through a jeering