So Near, and So Far

School Bells Ring In Memories of a World Beyond the Trees of A Segregated City

A boy plays on the courts in Columbus, Ohio, at the former Monroe Junior High School, a landmark of the writer's youth amid the city's poor, struggling black families. (By Mary Annette Pember For The Washington Post)

COLUMBUS, Ohio

For a child, there are few things like the tingly-tense sensation that comes with the ringing of morning school bells. There always seems to be a promise in that speeded-up rhythm, an old sound that elicits the shiver of the new.

But in America the promise of those bells has often been an uneven one, as evidenced by the recent 5 to 4 Supreme Court ruling voiding efforts to keep school integration efforts alive in Seattle and Louisville. Reminders of that history -- albeit in a different tone -- also came with the recent passing of Virginia lawyer Oliver Hill, who fought alongside his friend Thurgood Marshall in cases leading up to the epic 1954 Brown desegregation decision.

These two events got me thinking during a recent trip back home to this Midwestern city, where one can still find so many touchstones from the bygone era of segregation, Northern style.

The East Side has long been the black part of town, kept that way through restrictive real estate practices. When I was a child in the early '60s, Mount Vernon Avenue was a sepia magnet of clothing stores, nightclubs and booster rallies featuring the athletic teams at all-black East High School. Black families like mine would picnic at nearby Franklin Park -- across the street from the high school -- on Sunday afternoons or summer holidays. Convertibles were parked on the angle in the grass. Sweet soul music wafted by. My mother liked Gene Chandler, Smokey Robinson and Jerry Butler. I fished in the nearby lake with a cane pole. I don't remember any white families at Franklin Park.

My aunts and uncles would talk animatedly about going to Mount Vernon Avenue to see national figures such as Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr., who came to talk about escaping poverty and finding the American dream. And it's where riots erupted in 1967, and where the tanks from the nearby National Guard base showed up, looking just like the military machinery in Vietnam that I saw on TV.

Monroe Junior High is four blocks from Mount Vernon Avenue and a half-hour walk to Franklin Park. There was never a car in our family and I walked everywhere. I turned 14 in ninth grade, my first year at Monroe, the all-black junior high, which served as one of the feeder schools to East High.

Sometimes nostalgia about those days rolls off the tongues of folks who were there. Nostalgia is often too honey-colored, but I do remember this: standing outside East High after basketball games, after the great Eddie Ratleff (we called him Eddie Rat) had led his team to yet another victory. They would be state champions. Even in a time of segregation, there was something golden about Eddie Rat, shaking hands with the players on the opposing teams, patting them on the back, telling them to keep their chins up. It was as if he were some kind of ambassador, already knowing he'd will himself from the confines of segregation. After high school, Eddie Rat got clean out of Columbus, went to college in California and had a fine NBA career. But of course not everyone possesses what it takes to will themselves up and away like that.

I don't think any of us at Monroe or East realized how unbalanced the learning situation was then. I do know our backgrounds were similar: poor, single-parent families, many on welfare, clothes grabbed from Goodwill, hominy grits in the morning, vinyl LPs stacked next to cheap stereo systems in the homes and apartments where many of us lived. A lot of lives roped around poverty.

"There was too much to worry about -- fathers in prison, food -- to think about the school situation," says Cynthia Bell, who then lived near my family in public housing and is now a health consultant in Boston.

I remember the thick stand of trees on the edge of Franklin Park, obscuring the view of Nelson Road. I always wondered: What lay beyond those trees? On the other side of that road? What was over there?

One fall day during our first year in high school, Mark, Chin, a couple of other friends and I decided to play hooky and see what lay beyond those trees. The night before, I sweated and worried. Playing hooky could get you a three-day suspension. We decided we'd bolt at 10:30 recess and took off, in a quick jaunt, toward the trees. We couldn't go as fast as we wanted to because of Mark, who had been born with polio, and limped because one leg was shorter than the other. But Mark, who had his Spalding ball cupped under one arm, waved us onward, assuring us he was lagging behind only so he could keep watch, making sure no posse of truant officers was gaining on us.