The Free Spirit

The Rapids, 1964 (Part Two)

"You don't own me, I'm not just one of your many toys..."

My daughter was my driving force for any and all activism I was involved in, but most particularly in 1964. She was four years old, soon to be five and due to start school in September of 1965, and she was no longer unaware of how cruel people can be. She knew when white kids didn't want to play with her, and she knew how badly some of their parents didn't want her going to their school. "There's a perfectly good school for coloured children outside of town," said one mother to me early on in the year before we'd gone to England.

"Except it's several miles from here and this school is a short ten minute walk from our home," I had replied to her. "And on top of that, she's white."

"Oh, sweetie, biracial children ain't white," she'd told me in response. She was starting to piss me off.

"You people run in fear from any drop of non-European ethnicity in someone even as small and as innocent as a four-year-old child. You've said nothing about my son attending the same school simply because you're racist and don't see my Eastern European features in him, but they're there. And in addition to that, my husband is part Native American. Any more than your amount of melanin in someone's skin and you say they aren't fit to be seen as human beings. The Bible taught people to love everyone regardless of outward appearance, and yet you pick and choose what to listen to. But don't worry, I'll take my child away from your precious pristine white children so that none of her colour rubs off on them, but she's going to that school." And so I took Stacey and Elton and I brought them back home, where they were loved equally by both myself and their father.

"It's pissin' me off, all these goddamn racists," Don said to me when I told him what had happened. "Stacey is hardly darker than Elton. Those people are just trained to see colour."

"I know they are. It just worries me that these people are going to start a riot when we send our children to school. I just don't get it. Why is this happening to Stacey?" I asked him.

"I don't know, honey... We're gettin' to the point where we can't protect her no more, too. She's already started askin' me questions. Just this mornin', she said to me, 'Daddy, why won't the other kids play with me'. How am I supposed to answer that?"

"She wouldn't be treated like this in England."

"Didn't ya say you were?"

"That was almost twenty years ago, Don. Times have changed." And that was true, they have. While there were still some racists in England, the racism in America was a hundred times worse. But all of the tensions were supposed to end with the passage of the Civil Rights Act on the second of July, 1964 - it didn't end it entirely, but it was the beginning of more equal relations. It made segregation in society illegal, and also made it illegal for children of colour to be separated from white children in school, so Stacey would get to go to the formerly all white school. In early June, it came time for Don to go off to the marines again for a month, and while we'd had an argument the previous night, I still didn't want him to leave me. Our argument had, once again, been about birth control, and he once again refused to sign the forms. It sounded silly that I needed my husband's permission to use a pill that would have no affect on him, but it would be another few years before I was able to get access to it without his signature. Regardless, I still loved him and I didn't want him to go off to the marines again.

"I'm thinkin' I'll try and be home for our anniversary this year," he told me. "Seven years is quite some time."

"They're supposed to be releasing my next single that week," I told him.

"Catherine, it's our anniversary," Don said to me.

"I'm aware. Why don't we spend that weekend in Paris like you promised me a couple of years back?" I asked him, and he let out a sigh.