Friends: A Love Story by Angela Bassett

time. If you touched them with one and then the other, that was considered pitty-pat, and pitty-pat didn’t count. Of course that led to a lot of arguments!
    â€œThat was pitty-pat!”
    â€œNo, I touched you two-hands solid!”
    â€œNo, you didn’t!”
    â€œYes, I did!!!”
    To make sure you didn’t pitty-pat, you had to hit somebody solid and might even push them over. And if someone called, “pom-pom tackle,” hey, you just had to do it. You had to tackle somebody on the gravel, which, of course, my mother hated because it would tear up my clothes. Needless to say, all the pushing and tackling led to a lot of altercations.
    Fighting over pom-pom was one thing, but during the first semester of fourth grade, I was peer-pressured into fighting in school. Fred, a friend who was also my nemesis, called me out one day in homeroom. I can’t remember what he said, but they were definitely fighting words.
    The entire class said, “Oooooh!”
    I told him, “You can’t call me that!”
    He said, “I did!”
    The whole class was asking, “Whatcha gonna do, Court?”
    I remember the teacher saying, “Courtney, don’t you get up!”
    But I had been called out. I had to get up for my reputation’s sake. Next thing I knew, we were fighting and getting sent to the principal’s office. Now, this was back in the days when there was still discipline in the schools. Teachers could spank kids, and all the paddles were different thicknesses and had different names. But there was no abuse. You’d get paddled on your hands or your bottom at school, then get a spanking when you got home for doing wrong in school. Back then, parents accepted that if the teacher paddled you, you must have done wrong. And they were right; we were always trying to get away with something. I know that if those paddles were not there we would have overrun those teachers. For that incident I got paddled and suspended for three days.
    Now, when I got in trouble for fighting in class, my parents knew that something was really wrong. I was “Courtney-Boy,” as my mother called me. I was a nice kid and well behaved. Iwas not a person who fought—that was not like me at all. And worse than the fact that I fought at all was that I fought in class. My parents went down to school and had a conference with the teacher about what had gone down. Then they came home and had their powwow with each other. They came to the conclusion that they had to get us out of that school. If they didn’t, they knew that something was going to go down that would be out of their control.
    Cec and I got wind of the fact that they were thinking about putting us in a different school and we were going to run away. We packed our bags and hid them under our beds. As usual, our parents scooped us; somehow they knew what was going on. While we slept, they pulled our bags out of their hiding places and put our clothes away. The next morning we were on our way to a brand-new school—a Catholic school called Mother of Our Savior. Because it was a Catholic school, my parents would have to pay tuition. It wasn’t cheap and they couldn’t afford it but they figured out a way, although it increased their financial stress. The world Cecilie and I lived in changed overnight. This was our first experience at a mostly white school, an environment I would remain in for high school, college and grad school.
    I finished out grade school at Mother of Our Savior, followed by St. Mary of Redford for middle school. I did well academically at both places and although they were basically all white, my experiences were, for the most part, uneventful. I had my white friends at school and my black friends at home—except for one black girl at school named Marie Hollis. Boy, did I have a schoolboy crush on Marie! I remember pining over her. One day I slipped a note in her math book and waited anxiously