Major Steps

In 1968 she was ready to march in a new direction

"You can always get warm, but it's hard to stay cool." My mother's words, muttered every summer since I can remember, rang like a mantra in my head as I stood in the uncut grass of a football field (the 20-yard line, to be precise), knees locked and eyes forward, arms akimbo, to balance a 28-inch-long metal stick at a 45-degree angle, just so. Perspiration trickled down my temples and collected under my jaw, but I held still. Since reaching my teens, I'd come to dread the wasteland of summer vacation -- heat and more heat, the sodden press of humidity that could force my painfully coifed pageboy to retract its hooks, sun that turned my caramel complexion to burnt umber if I forgot to wear a hat.

It was the 19th of August, 1968, four days until the Soap Box Derby Parade and nine days before my 16th birthday, and I still hadn't figured out how to keep my minimalist emergency 'do (French twist with bangs pinned to the side) from shrinking to that fine corona of frizz usually found in the National Geographic photographs of ostrich heads. Why, oh why was I standing here at attention like a tin soldier, ankle-deep in crabgrass in the middle of a sweltering Midwestern summer, sweating out all the good sense Mom had pressed into the curls on my head?

Four months earlier, in April, a week or so after Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder, I was packing up my cello one afternoon after orchestra practice when Rhonda bounded up, flute propped on her shoulder like a baseball bat, and clapped me on the back. Rhonda was always doing things like that; copper-skinned and confident (even in glasses!) to the point of being uncomfortably gung-ho, she was what my grandmother would call, wrinkling her nose, sturdy. I started to straighten up, but she couldn't wait. "Rita," she whispered, "I've got a terrific idea. Let's try out for the majorette squad!"

Funny thing is, even though I gulped and felt my heart pound into my throat, I thought it was a great idea, too. In the Byzantine hierarchy of high school, majorettes and cheerleaders were the Cream. Cheerleaders enjoyed a noisy devotion from the masses, but majorettes were the serene wizards, the silvery circumferences of their batons humming before them like horizontal pirouettes. If I said yes, if I tried out and actually made the squad, maybe I could finally be . . . I closed my eyes to savor the possibility -- popular.

Just thinking the word sent a shiver of longing through me. What was it like? Ever since junior high, I'd been called "brainiac." I thought I was used to it, but sometimes, on pale green spring mornings or glimpsing the tentative expression on my face reflected in a store window, I'd wonder. Although I'd never been exactly reviled, had never borne the brunt of schoolyard taunts or classroom pranks, I'd also never been pursued by a boy, at least not ardently. I could not imagine attaining the courtly cool of Carla, every hair in perfect alignment against her cocoa profile. Nor could I ever hope for the effervescent cuteness of Quinita, barely 5 feet tall, with wide-spaced, tilted almond eyes large enough to bring any basketball player down to her size. I just wanted . . . well, not to be regarded with dread or, worse, utter indifference. But how to accomplish that, skinny-Minnie me with my Catwoman glasses and hair that frizzled in the rain because I was not allowed to put a relaxer in it? How could someone who attended all AP classes and played cello in the school orchestra become popular?

I picked up my bow from the music stand and loosened it, slowly. "Why not?" I replied, utterly cool.

We figured the only way to break the barrier of the all-white majorette squad was to make it impossibly hard for them to refuse us. Rhonda had taken twirling lessons before and volunteered to coach me during the open training session offered by the senior majorettes during the last weeks of the school year.

We joined the other supplicants after school in the incandescent gloom of the band room for a crash course in twirls -- verticals and frontals, figure eights, around the worlds -- which Rhonda supplemented later in her basement, enthusiastically breaking down each sleight of hand into its elemental actions: wrist down then wrist up, clockwise then counter.

For the second week, we broke into groups to learn a routine of our choice, which we were expected to perform for auditions that Friday. Rhonda made for Donna's corner. I followed, reluctantly; Donna was a senior and the best twirler on the team, and I found the gleaming blond waves capping her stocky frame rather frightening. But when she announced, "This routine is hard, you'll have to work," looking each of us in the eye without much hope or even sympathy, I began to like her: Fair was fair. By audition time, I knew the routine as well as Rhonda; we had even invented a few moves of our own. We were careful not to show our cards, though; we never stood next to each other during practice or laughed at each other's jokes. An old survival trick: Don't give them a chance to cry disrespect; if they're going to dismiss you, at least make them scramble for their excuses.

And so it happened that in Akron, Ohio, for the 1968-69 school year, two Negroes joined the Buchtel High School majorettes: a Historic First. The neighborhood buzzed, my mother beamed, the president of the local NAACP chapter came up after church to shake my hand; even my father, usually dismissive of nonintellectual pursuits, pulled out his camera as I struck a few poses in the driveway.

The first item on the outgoing majorettes' agenda was to form the new Line. We were ranked by height, then shuffled among the returning twirlers with adjustments for body build, hair color and style -- and complexion. No one mentioned race, but it was on everyone's mind that year, and it hung in the meeting room until Rhonda blurted out: "What are we, a handful of M&M's?" We all laughed, and that was that. There were too many other things demanding our attention: marching techniques and stand-alone routines, halftime formations and pep rally drills. We practiced every afternoon after school in the deserted hallways. The seniors stood apart, arms crossed, forbearing and aloof. Beth, Cindy, Toni: veterans on the Line, proprietors of all Knowledge, purveyors of Secret Remedies (Vaseline on bare legs in winter, Band-Aids on heels to prevent blisters), our shepherds through the Valley of the Shadow of Football Seasons Past. It was heady but confusing: Flash a smile but maintain synchronicity, switch your hips while lifting your knees, high step and sashay. The amount of paraphernalia was staggering -- two uniforms (cotton for summer parades, corduroy for the fall), regulation boots with pompoms, kid gloves for November games. When Donna offered to sell me her gear, I hesitated, sniffing condescension (All Blacks are poor, live in the ghetto, etc.), until she pointed out that we were about the same height and it was silly to waste money on a vaguely militaristic outfit I'd wear for four months out of the year. So I walked with her to the white neighborhood two blocks the other way from school and sat on a chenille bedspread eerily similar to my own as she rummaged through her closet. Two grocery bags full: She even threw in the corduroy underwear.

"Hey, you finally got one!" I ducked my head to hide my irritation, but the pigtailed little girl squatting in the grass would not be deterred. "That's good!" she said. "Aren't you glad?" I stole a glance at Rhonda throwing aerials at the far end of the yard to the oohs and aahs of a pack of neighborhood kids. Big deal. After snatching at air for a half-hour, it was about time I caught the thing.