Starting when I was about 3, the center of my summer world was the pool club my family belonged to.
I can still remember my hands gripping the rail of the high dive as my chubby wet feet carefully inched up the steps. I remember Pixie Stix and melty ice cream sandwiches and whiffs of cigarette smoke tinged with chlorine. Shallow pools of sun-heated water on the concrete. It was all glorious to me.
Our pool bag had a cloth patch that said “ARA” (the club initials), which let us breeze through the entrance. Membership did, in fact, have its privileges.
One day, my mother called a family meeting. I was maybe 7 or 8; I’m not sure. She told me and my brother that one of our family friends, a member of the P.E. faculty of the local college, had applied for a pool membership. He was well-known and respected in our small town.
And yet, his membership was denied.
I should add here that this was the late 1960s, and he was African-American.
He was not a radical. I don’t think he was trying to make a statement. I believe the man simply wanted a place to swim.
My mother presented the facts to us and said that she wouldn’t be serving on the pool board anymore. Since we were the ones who really used the pool, however, she wanted to consult with us.
Some of our friends had expressed their disapproval of the board’s decision, she said, but had not given up their memberships.
We could do the same, she said.
I think that perhaps the way she presented the situation made the choice clear to us.
Young kids tend to be pretty dualistic. This is right. That is wrong.
This, obviously, was wrong.
I could not understand those who paid lip service to civil rights but who saw no compelling reason to inconvenience themselves.
Later, my mother was called a nasty name on the street by someone we knew. What he called her contains the word “lover,” although my mother explained that the term had nothing to do with love. When I found out about it, I couldn’t believe we had ever sat in this family’s living room and admired their Christmas tree, or that we worshiped the same God at the same church.
Eventually, of course, our pool club was integrated, and life went on. We never rejoined.
The seeds of my cynicism were well and fully planted.
Almost 40 years later, I shared the story with my older daughter, who voted for the first time in this election. I wanted to give her some context for the sea change that has occurred in my lifetime ó which is pretty much Barack Obama’s lifetime, since he’s exactly three months younger than I am.I also shared with her what my friend Jasika had said after the election. A professional actress and a woman of color who sometimes jokingly describes herself as “high yellow,” Jasika sent me a Facebook message about how happy she was to have been put in her place by the election. She had her hopes that Obama would prevail, but I think she really hadn’t believed deep down that her country was capable of electing a black president.
The impossible was now possible. I could feel the intensity of her joy from hundreds of miles away. I could feel my cynicism withering.
I don’t think that we are yet in a “post-racial” America. But we do seem to be closer to realizing the hope expressed by writer Margaret Atwood: “… that people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‘race’ ó the human race ó and that we are all members of it.”
Contact Katie Scarvey at kscarvey@salisburypost.com.