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Off North Road: School time
August 25, 2005
By Russell Hoxsie, M.D.
School time from the vantage point of seventy-eight years is a precious time. There are so many memories, memories which seem to extinguish the painful and exasperating experiences, yet enlarge and bold-face the miraculous ones. The first day of kindergarten brought one of those epiphanies of my young age. I was raised a rather isolated young boy, with a brother and sister, father and mother. We lived in several successively larger but simple frame houses in New Bedford and Cape Cod during my first nine or ten years. The Great Depression dominated much of our lives but, luckily, my dad held his steady job and we fared better than most.
Starting kindergarten at the Harrington School in New Bedford was the first real venture outside the protective web of my modest family. Aside from trips to my grandparents, I hadn’t been anywhere else: an old mill house in the small town of Gilbertville, Massachusetts, on a high bank above the Ware River, and shorter visits, although more exciting, to the busy corner of Chad Brown Street and Oakland Avenue in the big city of Providence where my widowed grandfather on mother’s side lived with his three maiden sisters. I hadn’t even been to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus by the time I’d entered school.
Mother and I walked down Tremont Street from number 14, across Maple Street and the trolley tracks on Arnold Street, crossed a couple more streets I’ve forgotten to the corner where the old red school, old even in 1932, stood amidst dusty playgrounds and cement walkways. The broad front steps of the main entrance were crowded with five-year-olds like me. The girls were in dresses and the boys in short pants or knickers. Everyone sat erect, knees bent and rigid. No one looked up or spoke as we found a place on the stairs. None of the kids had come with a parent, as I remember, except for me. They were probably all as apprehensive as I was, awaiting the first day of we didn’t know what.
Little else remains in my memory of that first confrontation except for the remarkable fact that one of the children sitting on the broad cement steps was a Negro. Without television and only the beginnings of an acquaintance with Amos and Andy on the radio, I don’t suppose I had ever seen a Negro child, let alone approached close enough to sit with on the same cement steps.
Even to this day I feel the shock of my visual encounter and the shudder going through me signaling that this day was to be even more of an earth shattering event than I had anticipated. Here I was actually going to share a blanket at nap times and sit side by side in funny little miniature chairs and finger paint alongside a boy (or girl, I don’t remember that detail) who seemed as different from me as day was from night.
I’ve often wondered these years going by what had given me that apprehension, that shudder deep inside me that so unsettled me as I walked into the Harrington School yard. I’ve lost all other memory of that black kid as school progressed. Perhaps, like too few white kids of the time, I learned to suppress his or her image and ignore the difference that existed between us. Perhaps I learned to hold hands going out to recess. Perhaps I snuggled up at nap time or shared my bottle of milk, warmed on the hot-air register to take the chill off, at milk and crackers time. Maybe, just maybe, I quickly discarded the perception of difference and became for a short period in my life color-blind.
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