My ADIRONDACK Life
WHEN PEOPLE ASK ME ABOUT MY LIFE AS A BLACK person growing up in the Adirondacks among a predominately white population during the 1950s and ’60s, several persistent images explode in my mind.
In one, I was a high-school student in the small iron-ore mining hamlet of Witherbee. It was the first day of the school year. The teacher welcomed her new class of students and asked us, in seating order, to identify our family’s country of origin. Each year I would endure the pain that accompanied this exercise. I was always the lone black student in class.
As I waited my turn, my heart felt like it might jump out of my chest and my hands grew sweaty. Each of my fellow students called out, proudly: Poland, Italy, Canada, Ireland, Spain and so on. I dreaded what I knew would follow—my classmates bursting into hysterical laughter as I timidly pronounced, “Africa.”
Africa was perceived by them, me and everyone else in town as a vine-covered jungle, mysterious and dark, in a faraway land inhabited by wild animals and uncivilized black people. Sadly, no one in class, not even the teacher, recognized that Africa was not a country. All our knowledge of the continent came from the popular Tarzan movies screened on Saturday afternoons at
