From the archive, 26 June 1964: Inviting an old friend to stay

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/26/black-civil-rights-segregation-united-states

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First, I was delighted at the letter from my old friend Marian telling me she is coming this summer to Maine. Of course she must weekend with me and of course I’d go to visit her at her interesting summer job with Indians near the Canadian border.

Then the doubts came hurtling in: visions of snubs, incidents, demonstrations, police dogs, hoses, tear-gas. For my friend Marian is a Negress, and I know I am not cut out to be a heroine in an integration crisis this summer of the Civil Rights Bill.

What would my landlady say about a Negro woman coming to stay in one of her all-white apartments, built into the wing of the landlady’s own beautiful home? What would my friends say? I would have to invite some of them to a party for Marian, morning coffee at least. I would have to take her out to one of the famous New England meals such as a shore dinner with lobster and clams. I know from my New Orleans days that there is something specially provocative about inter-racial eating. When I taught there even religious groups gathered at meetings could not take even light refreshments together. But I owed Marian all kinds of hospitality. She had often fed me and put me up for the night when I went as art teacher to the Pennsylvania Adult Centre, where she acted as dietician.

At this centre Marian had occupied far better accommodation that I, for a dietician is more valuable than an art and English teacher. Because of my English background, she had shown me the manuscript of her novel about her family’s ancestry, going back to her White ancestress who had been an English governess in love with the mulatto son of the plantation owner who employed her. Marian had never been to me in the category of the Southern cooks and cleaning women who with melodious names like Samantha and Sophronia had added charm to my fifteen years of life in New Orleans. She is a University woman with dignity and beauty.

She would be horrified if she got into a Civil Rights Bill racial incident by being my guest in Maine. I didn’t want to create an incident. I am not even a Maine native but a naturalised American, glad to live in a peaceful New England small town similar to the Lancashire town where I spent my childhood. Perhaps for both Marian’s and my own sake, it would be safer not to invite her here.

Doubtfully I called my most liberal friend, a social worker, and put the question directly. “Shall I have difficulties? Just what is the situation in Maine?”

Rose gave the matter serious thought. “Of course I’ll want to meet her,” she proffered, “but I don’t know what you’ll get yourself into. We tried to give a farewell party at the Country Club for that pretty girl who was here for a while as social worker, and they wouldn’t let her into the club.” “What did you do?” I gasped. “Well, I was just threatening to leave with the whole party when one guest phoned a board member she knows, and he gave permission so long as we’d use a private dining-room. Don’t worry too much, though,” she finished. “I don’t believe she’d have any trouble on buses or at hotels. I’m not sure really. But we’ll arrange for you and Marian to come over here to something.” I brightened, thinking of Rose’s useful car. There would be no taxi problem then.

I made myself phone Marian that night on the rate of three minutes for a dollar. When her warm voice responded from Philadelphia, I came forth with my congratulations on her summer job and my delight that we might meet in Maine. But I couldn’t bring out the fateful words, “You must visit me one weekend.”

During the next few days as I combed the local newspapers for indications of how the racial question goes in Maine, my research only got me a headache. Front page headlines shrieked out: “Rocks and bottles thrown at Negro boys at Maine schoolchildren visiting Washington.” Outbreaks of violence seemed to be everywhere, but I found a small announcement of a symposium on the race question to be held at a Roman Catholic college a hundred miles away. Martin Luther King and half a dozen other experts on Civil Rights issues would speak, and there would be panel discussions.

My enthusiasm for meetings runs lukewarm, but my regard for Marian got me into the necessary buses, and I arrived at the college gymnasium where a crowd of nearly a thousand Maine people rose and clapped as the speakers came in - protected by local police, State police, and even sheriffs with wide hats and guns dramatic enough for a Hollywood set.

During the speeches, my barometer registered only what the speakers’ comments meant in terms of Marian’s possible visit to me. When a speaker warned that violence might increase if the Civil Rights Bill didn’t pass without being watered down to useless form, I could see Marian caught up in the backwash by troublemakers in Maine, where a National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People has only been formed this month. When veteran civil disobedience demonstrators quipped about how cosy a prison cell could seem when one reached it in the midnight hours, I could see myself and Marian jostled in a police car because we had picknicked together.

On the bus next morning returning home, I was hypersensitive when I saw ahead of us a Negro girl waiting by the roadside. Would the bus driver stop for her? I prayed that she was a regular like the other girls we picked up along the forested road and deposited at various restaurants and beauty shops and nursing homes for their daily work. The bus driver stopped. The Negro girl got on, smiled at us all in general, and took one of the front seats. The bus stopped again, this time for a young white girl outside a lonely farmhouse. My barometer swung with joy as the white girl took a seat by the Negro girl. Soon they were chatting busily, two regulars on their way to work at the usual time.

All at once my mental map shook into proportion. Police dogs and demonstrations faded. When I dropped the fateful letter of invitation into our corner mailbox that afternoon my knees had stopped quaking. “What’s your fuss?” I asked myself. “You’ve simply invited an old friend to come and visit.”