Reluctant Neighbors

  “Tell me about your books.” Leaning in towards me, bringing me back to the present beside him. “Did you begin writing while you were teaching?”

  “No.”

  “Then what did you do? Quit teaching?”

  I didn’t quit teaching, as he put it, but I had no intention of explaining anything to him. Questions. Questions. Saying nothing about himself but pouring the questions on. Well, to hell with that. Every question he asked triggered some of the old memories, the old bitter memories. Here he was, perhaps safe and secure in the job he’d selected for himself and would continue to do for the rest of his working years. He was well fed, well dressed and evidently well paid. Successful. That was the word. I, too, had seen myself in similar terms, once upon a time, had studied to be well qualified to do work for which I’d be well paid and therefore well fed and well dressed. Successful. Success had come, it was true. But not in the way I’d planned it. Not through the means towards which I’d prepared myself. And all because of those, like this one beside me, who had arbitrarily erected the barriers against me, had casually closed the doors in my face.

  Because of them I’d been diverted into teaching, hating it at first, treating it as a temporary exercise in survival until something better came along. Even after the first year or two in teaching I still hoped, telling myself I could, without much difficulty, catch up with recent research and developments. Only after five years as a teacher did I finally relinquish any hope of returning to physics. Only then did I reconcile myself to the new profession and seriously apply myself to an appreciation of its demands and responsibilities. I was teaching, so I would be a teacher. And a damned good one. I’d make a real career of it.

  I was learning how to teach, how to use the tools available to me. The curriculum was a tool, not a grand design. I used that tool to serve my pupils, to stimulate and encourage their imagination, their interests and their abilities. Textbooks were tools. Field trips were tools. All were intended to be used in the thoughtful pursuit of knowledge, and I was as much a participant in that pursuit as I encouraged and prodded them to be. Demonstrably so.

  Word got around. Inside and outside the school. Parents visited, supposedly to discover what was responsible for the change in their children. Some of them were evidently suspicious of a “blackie” teacher who was having so much influence with their youngsters. Others put a severe strain on my courtesy by their patronizing airs. Some merely wanted to see the man who was their children’s chief reference. “Sir says” had become a familiar refrain, and they wanted to see who “Sir” was. Some expressed surprise to find nothing startling or strange in the classroom or its equipment. Or me.

  Teachers from other schools came along to chat with me. They had known of the school’s earlier reputation as a hangout and sanctuary for near-delinquent adolescents. They had heard that changes were taking place and they wanted to see and hear about them. Some were very encouraging. Others expressed doubts about the practicality of a situation which allowed pupils to challenge the teacher on academic as well as other issues. That the challenges were made intelligently and courteously weighed very lightly with them. We even had visits from overseas teachers in Britain on sabbatical. The London County Council sent them to observe and question us.

  It may have been this publicity which eventually separated me from teaching. After nine years in the profession I was asked by the London County Council to work as advisor in the Council’s Child Welfare Department. During the early postwar years considerable numbers of immigrants were attracted to Britain because of widespread reconstruction and the boom in skilled and unskilled employment. These immigrants were whites and blacks from independent as well as colonial countries of the then British Empire. Australia, India, Pakistan, Canada, West and East Africa, the West Indies and Guyana. Apart from these colonials and ex-colonials there were a number of aliens, refugees displaced by the war and its aftermath. Mostly males at first, wives and children following.

  The white immigrants fitted easily into the economic and social mainstream. The blacks were ostracized, exploited and rejected. Inevitably many of them found the social pressures unbearable and sought help from the Welfare Department. Here they discovered new pressures from operatives who claimed they did not and could not understand the black immigrants and were quite helpless to aid them. It was believed by the Council that they needed, within the department, someone black, with a knowledge of the host society and generally an understanding of the conditions from which many of the blacks emigrated. When approached, I argued that my knowledge of such conditions was very sketchy and limited to my own country. Furthermore, while at home, I was either untouched by many of the prevailing social pressures or too young and preoccupied with my own ambitions to care. The Council brushed aside my reservations, asserting that my demonstrated ability as a teacher was recommendation enough.

  Perhaps I was willing to be persuaded. Undoubtedly I was flattered at their recognition of my ability, even though it was not the level of recognition for which I’d studied and striven. I accepted the job and was given an office in central London with considerable freedom to operate within the Council’s wide-ranging area of influence. I was expected to visit the many area offices and consult with the welfare officers about general matters affecting black welfare recipients or particular instances which posed special problems.

  Before long I began to have grave doubts about ever being really useful in the Welfare Department. Not because of the work or the problems presented to me. They were, every one of them, merely human problems. People had left their familiar situation of hopelessness and despair for an unfamiliar situation which promised betterment. These were not seekers after the proverbial pot of gold. These were men obsessed with the need to work, to earn, that they and those who depended on them might live with dignity. They had heard of available employment at good wages and had come to find it. With and without skills. Some of them at considerable personal sacrifice, so great was their hope, so persistent their faith in a brighter tomorrow.

  In Britain the new conditions severely tested that faith. Long working hours for people generally unaccustomed to regular employment. An abrupt transition, to the severe pace of working in a factory or on a building site, for people hitherto conditioned by a more casual approach to labor. Time clocks. Traveling on buses and Underground trains. Accommodating themselves to the unfamiliar pounds, shillings and pence of the British currency, to new eating habits, to summer heat and winter cold, to an unfamiliar language or a familiar language used unfamiliarly and to the rigors of being semiliterate or illiterate in a highly literate society. All this and housing, too.

  The black immigrants were needed. As every soldier or sailor or airman had been needed during the war, so every pair of strong arms was needed during reconstruction. Englishmen abandoned unskilled or semiskilled jobs with the public utilities for the bigger pay packets available in the booming industries. The immigrants, especially the blacks, filled these vacancies. In the hospitals. On the buses and trams. As postmen. As garbage collectors and street cleaners. As unskilled building laborers. Before long it became apparent that these utilities could hardly function without them. They were needed for the valuable services they provided, but their presence was resented. If, like genies, they could have been summoned to perform those services, then conveniently commanded to return to invisible bottles, all would have been well.

  Being human, they needed to be housed.

  Every kind of discriminatory device was used to restrict them to the most deplorable and dilapidated sections of the towns and cities in which they worked. Those who aspired to ownership and saved and scrimped to achieve it were barred from entry to better housing by suddenly inflated prices or by prescriptive covenants. Their difficulties and frustrations increased.

  Being men they needed women.

  Some married women of the host community and so invited further tensions. Others sent f
or wives and children to join them, inevitably imposing further strain on the inadequate housing. In these desperate conditions some broke under the cumulative pressures, and became prone to the social evils which generally overtake people in similar circumstances. Black and white.

  The British, including the welfare officers, were discovering that these immigrants needed food and they needed shelter, they needed warmth against the cold and they needed to be clothed. They bred children and these children needed to be schooled. The British were just not prepared for all this. These same British, who had colonized nearly three-quarters of the world, and had acquired a reputation for tolerance and justice in those colonial territories, were suddenly finding that this reputation was being tested where they least welcomed such testing—on their own doorstep.

  They were coming out of the experience very badly, because they saw themselves as wonderful and great and superior people, and they did not like the experience of living so close to inferior people. The results of their policy of colonization had merely rendered them even more secure in their sense of superiority. In the colonies they governed inferiors and they were not yet ready to have those inferiors as their neighbors, expecting or demanding any kind of equality with them.

  So there I was, trying to be the middle man between black-immigrant workers who, like all humans, were sensitive people and immediately responsive to social stimuli, including rejection and hatred and discourtesy, and the host community which needed their work but resented their presence. I, who had gone that route, having to talk to white authority about how to behave to these immigrant blacks and finding that the whole thing was a fantastic charade. The prerequisite for decent behavior was that white officials see the immigrant workers simply as other human beings with the same needs, the same inclinations, the same hopes, the same fears. And they weren’t ready to do this. Inevitably, all that I could possibly experience in that situation was frustration.

  Every time I had to investigate the case of an immigrant, I knew I could never be objective enough to divorce myself from that circumstance. I tried, I tried desperately to be objective, but found that it was impossible. I was advised by the white authority not to become involved, but how in hell could I not be involved with myself? I was me and all those black people reminded me that they too were me, so how could I not be involved with them?

  The children suffered most. Many were abandoned to become charges of the welfare state and those who manned that particular area of its activities, the child-welfare officers.

  Whites who needed their help were cases. They were understandable. They could talk with them, empathize with them, argue with them and help them. Even the repeaters, the ones incapable of holding a job or managing their own affairs, merited sympathetic consideration. Blacks, on the other hand, were problems. They were approached as problems, generally getting short shrift from the welfare officers, who viewed them through the glass of conditioned contempt, darkly. This was the situation. I entered it believing that I could sway some attitudes. I met resistance at every step. From my white colleagues who resented an “untrained, inexperienced” person working among them with such a wide mandate. They resisted my suggestions and recommendations. They knew about blacks and how they should be handled.

  At first, I was no more welcome to the blacks. Their experiences with welfare officers had, for the most part, embittered them. They mistrusted them. My appearance did not excite or encourage them. I was just another one of those who invaded their privacy and treated them with contempt. So I had a black skin. So what?

  I had to prove myself to them. Suspecting and expecting betrayal from one of their own kind, they made my work extremely difficult. Deliberately they would be late for appointments at my office, or be absent from home when I was expected to call. At interviews they would be sullen and uncooperative, watching me, waiting for me to do or say the thing which would justify their distrust of me.

  I had been that road before. I’d not been driven to such straits that I needed welfare assistance, but it had been close. Damned close. So I understood what motivated these attitudes. No matter what they did or said, I insisted on treating them with courtesy and respect. Without attempting to be too pally. I made it clear to them that my business was to serve them in whatever way I could within the Council’s regulations. I was paid to do that. I was not granting them favors by being available to them. Gradually, very gradually, it worked. Word got around. The blacks would come to my office and insist on seeing me, and that, too, irritated my colleagues.

  Part of the program was to locate foster parents for the children in the Council’s care. Finding homes for white children was difficult. For black children, impossible. Or so they claimed. The established technique involved matching the children to the prospective parent. This “matching” was at the pleasure and discretion of the welfare officers who believed that the primary principle to be followed was “match the color.” White to white. Black to black. Naturally, anything not white was black.

  In these circumstances no prospective black foster parents appeared. None were discovered. The black children would languish in the Council’s homes, year after year, until they were old enough to fend for themselves. Unless I could work a miracle or two and conjure up some black foster parents.

  I worked no magic, but I was lucky. In time I found some foster parents. White ones. By the simple expedient of offering them what seemed to be a reasonable amount of money to care for a child or children in their own homes. Some of these white women, housewives anxious to earn to supplement their husband’s wages, were willing to undertake just such a job. Some had a child or children of their own. They understood the needs of children and felt equipped to deal with them. The idea of working with a familiar situation in a familiar environment appealed to them. They’d be supervised from a fair distance to ensure that the job was well done. Every care would be taken in checking out the applicants.

  It appealed to me. The prospect of the black children growing up in ordinary homes, even with unusual parents and peers. If certain frictions arose, well, they happened in any family. I thought of my own relationship with the Rowlands, Mum and Dad. It had not always run smoothly, but it worked. Perhaps there were other Mrs. Rowlands waiting to emerge.

  I ran into difficulties right from the start. From my colleagues. From the welfare hierarchy. Everyone was sure my plan would never work. They distrusted the idea of placing a black child with white adults. If the white adults were enthusiastic, they saw it as evidence of the attraction of the exotic. The wish of the white woman to have a living black doll. “What happens when the child grows up to puberty and beyond? If the child is a girl, what happens when she is old enough for boy friends? Where will she find them if all the people she knows are white? And suppose the child is a boy? Imagine an adolescent black boy in a white household. What if there are young girls in the household?” On and on. The number and variety of hypotheses they threw at me, each one intended to make me see the awful enormity of the thing I was suggesting.

  They were not prejudiced. Of that they were absolutely certain. But they had to be realistic. On and on they argued. To me. Particularly boosting the terrifying specter of the black adolescent male on nightly rampage, deflowering his foster sisters. Saying this to me, as if I had myself somehow become emasculated, safe, beyond any identification with the thoughts which terrified them.

  Then there was the money. The Council had established certain definite regulations governing payments to foster parents. People should not be encouraged to become foster parents in the hope of financial gain. Altruism was the only acceptable motive. Any departure from the regulations would open the door to unscrupulous people who would take advantage of such a situation. In rebuttal I argued that the Council paid staff to care for the children in the Council’s home. Such staff were salaried. The cost per child in residence in one of those homes was very high, and rising each year. Nonaltruistic fo
ster mothers would cost less and the children would benefit far more.

  In the two years I worked in the Welfare Department I was able to place only four children with foster parents. No black foster parents. The few black women were usually housewives, themselves burdened with large broods. Four black children in four white homes. Four children in four homes. It worked for them. It might have worked for others but the weight of resistant bureaucracy defeated me. That and the quietly insistent prejudices of my white colleagues. They were, in the main, fine people, each believing in the rightness of his or her opinions. Each was sure that his rejection of the idea I presented was only in the interests of the child. Black children should be with their own kind. Any interference with the natural order of things would only produce greater problems. So they said.

  Each day on the job was loaded with frustrations for me. I’d been seconded to the department on the assumption that my advice would be helpful. Each time I advised or suggested ways and means of treating matters relating to the blacks, I was confronted with rules and regulations to the contrary. It did not help them when I argued that those rules predated the circumstances we faced, and that those rules had not anticipated the national attitude to blacks.

  I bore it as long as I could. Perhaps I was unable to separate myself from the other, less fortunate blacks. Perhaps the memory of my own rejection was too clear in my mind. The conduct of my white colleagues to black clients was not dissimilar from the conduct of the personnel officers and interview-board members I had encountered. These black clients were in the same dependent position as I had been. Needing reassurance and help. Receiving little more than poorly disguised contempt. Sometimes I’d overhear colleagues discussing one of their black “cases” in a way which would bring the anger boiling up inside me.