The Wonder Years
A look back at some of the events that shaped who I am.
Suzanne Spellen
Feb 28
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When my family moved to Gilbertsville, NY in 1960, we kind of surprised everyone there. I was six, so I wasn’t aware of a lot of what was going on, but even at that young age, I was aware that we were moving to someplace very different from where we had been.
I’ve written about growing up in Gilbertsville before, and it was truly a wonderful place to spend one’s childhood. We had a big old house, lots of land around it that belonged to us, and an opportunity to grow up outside of New York City, something my mother especially was keen on giving us. But it wasn’t perfect.
My parents bought the house sight unseen. My grandmother found the listing, checked it out, and convinced my parents to buy and move. She was my Dad’s mother. She lived on a rural road on the other side of Gilbertsville with her second husband and their teenaged daughter. They had been living upstate for a couple of years. My Dad had been in the Navy when his half-sister, my Aunt Cecelia, was born. There was almost 20 years between them in age. My aunt was a senior in high school when I entered first grade.
How my grandparents got up to Gilbertsville will remain a mystery, anyone who can shed light on that is long gone. They also moved upstate from NYC, although I don’t know exactly when or for how long. Previously, my grandmother owned a rowhouse in Harlem that she ran as a boarding house when my parents got married in the 1940s. A great many people in Harlem did the same. My mother and my grandmother both told me that one of her boarders was Billie Holiday. Sadly, she lived there during the downward spiral of her life and career. My grandmother was not impressed with her, and said that Billie was always late on the rent. I wish I knew more.
So, we moved there, and one of the first things my parents had to do was cut down the lawn. No one had been in the house for several years, and the grass and weeds had grown to about four feet tall. It was so tall you couldn’t use a lawn mower, it needed to be cut down first. My parents were both city people, and our lawn in Queens was the size of a postage stamp. This new lawn was massively larger in size and would take time.
(My house. Photo: Suzanne Spellen)
Someone gave us a scythe, the kind used for harvesting wheat (the kind carried by Death), and they went at it. Dad was swinging the scythe, and my Mom had a smaller hand scythe. I always picture them doing that job, looking older, as they were when I was an adult, but in actuality, both were in their 30’s and as tiring and hard as it was, they were up for the task. Grass was flying all over the place, and a lawn and flowering bushes were slowly emerging.
People everywhere are always curious when new people move to town, or on the block, and folks in Gilbertsville were no different. Our house fronted one of the main routes into town, and more than once, people would slow down to watch them chopping down the lawn or afterwards, working on the landscaping. My Mom especially loved tending the flowers. We kids were often helping or playing on the porch. Some people would stop for some conversation. As my mother told me much later, a lot of conversations went like this:
“Hi, how are you doing?” “Fine, thanks.”
“You people cleaning up the old place?” “Yes.”
“So, when are the owners coming?” “We are the owners.”
“YOU’RE the owners? Oh, we thought you were working for someone.” “No, we are the owners, we bought the place.”
“Oh, wow, you’re the owners. How about that. Well, nice talking to you.” “You, too.”
Mom always said it made her furious that people assumed that we were the help, the caretakers, not the homeowners. This was a prominent house and had once belonged to people of means, even though it had been empty for a while. WE owned it. For some people, it was inconceivable. None of them were antagonistic or surly. They were just gobsmacked.
That said, after a few months, as we settled in that summer, people got used to the black family on the hill, the ones who bought the old Harding place. Most people, anyway. Neither my brother nor I were prepared for our first years of school. I was going into first grade; Mark didn’t go into kindergarten until the following year. Although we were at the top of the hill, just above the village, we were not technically within the village limits, so we were eligible for school bus service.
The route my bus took went the long way out of town, went along back roads, and then circled down our road to pass the house on the way back to the village. In the morning, we were the last stop the bus made before getting to the school. That gave us more time in the morning to get ready, but after school, we had to sit on the bus though the entire route, before finally getting home. It would have taken far less time to walk home, but I was too young to walk alone. My mother didn’t know how to drive at that time, so I sat on the bus.
The bus was where the first ugliness came. The school bus had both older and younger kids on it, Kindergarten through 12th grade. There was no assigned seating, everyone sat wherever they wanted. Sometimes you were next to a senior, sometimes next to someone in your class or within a whole range of ages. The bus driver kept a tight ship, and kids were noisy, but never rowdy. He wasn’t having it. I wish I could remember his name. He was a wonderful man.
Almost everyone on our bus, no matter the age, was pretty much indifferent to us. The older kids never talked much to the younger kids, anyway, they were too cool. The younger kids were ok. Except for the kids from one family. They were well-known to the teachers and staff as trouble. They lived way out by the town dump and were, shall we say, economically challenged. I never saw the parents, but they had a lot of kids, at least six, as I recall. The kids were all like stairsteps, only a year or so between them, ranging in age and height, all pale blonde and blue eyed. They were always a little unkempt, wearing hand me downs. One of the boys was in my class. When my brother started going to school, their youngest boy was in his class.
They learned their bigotry at home and brought it on the bus. Their house was more than halfway into the bus route home, so they had plenty of time to torment me. I remember the boy in my class sitting behind me on the bus and calling me names. He would just sit there and call me every derogatory name he had in his vocabulary. He would ask if my color washed off, he called me dirty, and a monkey, and he called me the N-word, hissing it in my ear. He was often backed up by one of his siblings.
They never touched me, and they weren’t loud, so the bus driver didn’t hear it. But others did. I don’t think a lot of the younger kids knew what was going on, but the older ones did. More than once, one of them would tell them to stop and shut up. Me? I just sat there, my shoulders hunched up, with tears rolling down my face.
I didn’t understand it. I didn’t know what those names meant, and I had never heard the N-word before. I just knew it was ugly and hateful, coming from the dirty face of another six-year-old. This went on for weeks, until one day, I was sitting quite close to the front of the bus, and the bus driver heard it. He pulled the bus over to the side of the road, got up and pulled the boy out of his seat, and dumped him in the back of the bus. He told him that he never wanted to hear what he heard again, and if he didn’t stop, he would report the kid to the principal. If it was up to him, he’d let the whole family find their own way to school, but not on his bus. He asked if I was alright, then got back on the road.
There was silence on the bus that night.
I took much longer than I should have to tell my parents. They had to sit me down and have “The Talk,” that conversation that all black parents have with their children sooner or later. Back in my day, for me, the talk was about how there were prejudiced and ugly people in the world, who didn’t like me, or other black people simply because of our race. These people taught their children to be ignorant and angry, just like them.
Some of them, my mother explained, didn’t have much, but to them, they were still better than we were, simply because they were white. Her explanation made sense to me. I could see the family from my seat on the bus, living in their rundown house by the town dump, and their poverty and ignorance in school. They had been made fun of by other kids for being who they were and needed someone below them to make them feel better about themselves. I got it.
Those horrible names, my parents told me, hurt, but they are only words. They said “You are beautiful and smart and will go places in this world. Unless they change, those people will not. They will always be angry, jealous and looking for others to blame for their misfortune. Watch out for them, make sure they don’t hurt you, but rise above them and show the world by becoming something. Their words are lies, and their names have no power.”
Of course, as inspiring as that was, it didn’t make riding the bus any more pleasant. I didn’t get called names on the bus again, at least not within earshot, but I could feel them behind me, hating. As my brother entered elementary school, the members of that family still held on to their hate. Mark spent his first-grade year running away from them on the playground. If they caught him, at least two of the brothers would try to beat him up. I got chased a few times myself, but, chasing me wasn’t as much fun as chasing him. I was just a girl. My brother was small for his age, although he made up for it later. He was a better target for the bullies, and the adult minders thought they were all just being boys. They looked the other way.
There was one other black family in our town. They moved in right after we did and had two kids too. Our families were friends. The boy was in my class and the girl was in Mark’s. When they started chasing Mark around, the boy, who was 2 years older and bigger than they were, was there to jump in and protect him. He would protect me, as well as his sister. I also had another friend, a white boy who was an outsider for other reasons. He was a strange kid, a loner, and didn’t have very many friends. But I was one of his only friends, and he protected us, too. After a while, it was no longer fun to chase the black kids around, because they and their allies fought back. It stopped.
My first-grade teacher made no effort to make life easier. One day, I was alone on that part of the playground, swinging on one of the swings. They were a heavy-duty row of multiple playground swings with heavy chains and a flexible seat made from the inside of old tires. I was just sitting on the swing, and this kid, a different kid, came up to me, didn’t say a word, but took the swing next to me, and hit me in the forehead with the chain. BAM! It was excruciating.
I had to go to the school nurse with a bleeding forehead and rising bump on my face that was growing larger. I had a horrible headache, too. When I got back to my classroom, I told the teacher who did it, and said that he had done it for no reason at all. He denied it, of course. She looked at the goose egg rising from my forehead, and said “It doesn’t look too bad, just sit down and stop lying, you must have done something.”
This was the same teacher in whose class I wet my pants in front of everyone. We had a bathroom in the front of the classroom, and after lunch, if you had to go, we lined up at the door. I REALLY had to go, and I told the teacher that, and she just made me wait in line, about 4 students back. I begged to be allowed to jump the line, I NEEDED TO GO, but she wouldn’t let me.
I didn’t make it and stood in front of the class with pee running down my leg, on my socks and shoes and pooling on the floor. Everyone was pointing and laughing. She made a sound of disgust and grabbed me and had to clean me and the floor up. Since I had no underpants on, a couple kids tried to lift up my dress, unsuccesfully. But I lived in mortification for days.
Well, I don’t remember in which order those two events took place, but when I got attacked on the playground, the school nurse called my mother. She came down to that school with the fury of an avenging angel. She went up one side of that teacher and down the other. My Mom was a teacher too and gave this woman an education I’m sure she never forgot. If you knew my mother, you wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that.
She demanded to meet the boy and have a meeting with his parents. I don’t remember if that happened or not, but I got an apology from the kid. Fortunately, my injury was not serious, and I made a full recovery. My next trauma was being told that I couldn’t have a little girl fan crush on Paul McCartney of the Beatles, this dictated by a bunch of girls in my class while swinging on the same swings. Why not? BECAUSE!! But that’s another story.
Many years later, after my brother and I switched schools, I had a schoolmate with the same last name as the family of tormentors. I approached her with great trepidation, as they were cousins. She was nothing like them. In fact, the families did not get along, because the Gilbertsville family was seen by them as white trash, and they were an embarrassment to the rest of the clan. How about that, only a town and a world away from each other.
I was also told by another friend still in Gilbertsville that as they got older, the tormentors changed their ways, at least one of them did. The boy who sat in the bus calling me names told my friend years after we all graduated that he was profoundly sorry and couldn’t believe he had been so horrible. He knew that she and I were friends and wanted her to tell me that he wasn’t the same person anymore. There is hope. It doesn’t always happen, but it can.
I remember the names of most of the people in this story – the family by the dump, their two sons, my teacher, the kid who hit me with the swing, the boy who rescued me on the playground, and the other black family. They are all indelibly marked in my memory. I only wish I could remember the bus driver’s name. He was one of the good guys and received the grateful thanks of my parents.
These experiences helped shape me. I’m not glad six-year-old me went through them, but I came out stronger, and with an understanding of people well beyond my years. I hope for a day when no child has have such a rude awakening from innocence. Unfortunately, I think that day will be a long time coming.
(My Dad with my Aunt Cecelia, around 1944)
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