That biblical phrase, used in the fourth of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:10 and later in Deuteronomy), is a theme that began for me in 1957. What reminds me of it is a program in my scrapbook for my last piano recital on an evening in June 1958 at the home of my piano teacher, Marlen Geier. I played Chopin’s “Polonaise in A Major”—wish I still could.
Marlen was special. She, her parents, and older brother had been transplanted from
That sight-reading skill had come in useful when someone needed to accompany hymn singing at Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings or for Junior Choir practices. During the 1957-58 school year, Marlen offered me a paying job (50¢ an hour, I think) to go over to
Gumbert was located on a bluff overlooking
In fact, they would mob me, wanting to touch my clothes and admire whatever I wore. At first, I felt uncomfortable, but since they seemed anxious to see what a teenager from the outside world might be wearing, I began dressing for the occasion. I tried to wear something different every session. Then one wintry night, things got out of hand. Girls who at first were just running their hands over my fur-blend sweater set, started to yank on my scarab bracelet, grab the kilt pin on my pleated skirt, and pull my pageboy-ed hair. They were at the point of striping me by the time some of the school staff intervened and roughly dragged the ringleaders away—as I stood all askew, shakily watching and not knowing what to say or do. That ended the weekly fashion show. My attempt to entertain had only gotten them in trouble.
As for their singing, this group was not a knock-off of the Obernkirchen Children’s Choir. Or, although most were of a similar skin shade, the Silvertones of
So Marlen struggled to get them just to sing in unison such old standbys as “The Ash Grove,” (Welsh folk song—click on titles to link to audios of these songs) “The Happy Wanderer” (originally “Der fröhliche Wanderer”) and “For the Beauty of the Earth” (she had to sneak in her countryman J.S. Bach, too). Something with contemporary appeal was “This Old Man” (with a knick knack paddy whack, give the dog a bone), made popular in 1958 because of Ingrid Bergman’s movie “The Inn of the Sixth Happiness”—and afterward Mitch Miller got a hold of it.
That June the parents of the Gumbert School Chorus were invited to a year-end concert to hear what the girls had been practicing. It made me terribly sad. Not many parents showed up, and those who came didn’t look much better off than their daughters. These families (likely dysfunctional) were the strangers within the gates of the North Hills. Those girls, isolated up on that bluff, were completely alien to the lush green hills and woods that surrounded them. Local realtors had an unwritten understanding about selling homes to “colored people,” as they were then called. It was still a decade before Fair Housing legislation prohibited redlining. Did a single black student attend NAHS while we were there? If so, he or she was very much alone.
In those days Ingomar had a black population of one: Thomas “Tug” Seymour, who lived in the basement of the Ingomar Volunteer Firehall and did odd jobs for people. Tug was from the South; he was relentlessly cheerful and obliging and could play a mouth organ, banjo and kick drum at the same time—the epitome of an Uncle Tom. As a kid, he fascinated me, and I took every chance to talk to him. I loved to listen to that accent. Probably I recognized in him the only other African American I “knew”—Uncle Remus in Walt Disney’s “Song of the South (1946). (Click on title to hear "Zip-A-Dee-Do0-Dah.") And I never had an inkling what life was really like for Tug or what he really thought.
As I reflect back on a
Perhaps the desire to escape the familiar is part of growing up for many. But my quest went even farther: to become a stranger myself, the alien within some Other’s gates.
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