It was a Saturday evening in September 1959. I was in the basement of our raised ranch on South Wabash Avenue in Chatham.
I came upstairs, sore but satisfied. I was home from morning ballet at the Mildred B. Haessler dance school, devoted to practicing my five positions.
My parents, Ann and Andrew, might have been whispering about political issues, such as protests, sit-ins or white flight.
But their conversation always changed when I entered the room. The talk turned upbeat. They raved about the opening of Mr. Gray’s Cleaners; Lula’s son, Jack, the architect; and Charles, the doctor from Howard University.
Quinnies’ Beauty Shop was doing a booming business. Dad got promoted at CTA. And, of course, my mother’s first grade students were amazing!
As a young kid, I lived among the happiest and most-accomplished people in the world.
The bar was high.
The weekend gave way to Monday. Time for school!
The Chicago Public School district had drawn an attendance line down Michigan Avenue, so several other children and I walked west across 83rd Street and old Dearborn Avenue, unaware that it would be the Dan Ryan Expressway in three years.
I arrived early and excited at Hookway Elementary School at West 81st and South La Salle streets, where I was one of a minority of Black children in a fourth-grade class of 30 baby boomers. The Black kids were me, Mary, Anthony, Henry, Kenny and Donald.
Mary was sweet, but we both ignored the boys. Boys were “icky.”
I had happy times in school. I was a good student who loved learning and enjoyed my classmates.
On the playground before school, at recess and even during class, I had a ball. I scooped jacks, jumped rope and played tag with my wonderful new friends.
Our crew consisted of me; G.G., a German girl with waist-long braids; frilly Francine of French descent; Nickie of Greek descent with jet black hair; and cinnamon-freckled Mary, who lived a block from the school.
Then there was my favorite: sandy-blond T from Ala-baaa-ma. We all used the stretched out “a,” as she insisted.
Most West Chatham families had jobs in meatpacking and factory work.
Nickie loved to bring us all extra ham for our lunch. She also brought interesting fruits, like her grandma’s pomegranates and dates. We all feasted on Nickie’s contributions, then went back to jumping rope until the bell forced us inside.
Our group put the “f” in fun!
T sat behind me in class. We had two seats at the end of the fifth row.
On rainy days, the teacher made us stay in our seats for recess. But that was no problem for us.
We loved to make intricate designs in our coloring books. We improvised, inserted squiggles and circles and turned bland outlines into mosaic-style pieces.
One rainy day, T and I were working on a masterpiece. It might have been a horse.
Then, in her Southern drawl, T said, never looking up from her coloring:
“You know what, Andrea?”
“What?“ I asked.
“Me and my family, we’re moving to Ala-baaa-ma.”
“When?” I asked.
“Oh, real soon. We got to get away from these … n——. I hate n——, don’t you?“
I paused, picked up my crayon, wrinkled my brow and, without a clue, I answered, “Yeah!”
“Come on T, let’s make this horse’s mane purple!”
I graduated from Hookway Elementary four years later in June 1963.
There were three white students in a class of 90.
