Friends: A Love Story by Angela Bassett Page B

Country Day boy—I took advantage of everything! Academically, I was a B/B+ student. I struggled with math and science because my Catholic-school curriculum hadn’t been as rigorous. But the teachers tutored me and didn’t abandon me and made learning fun and exciting. And by my junior year I got it and ended up with an A in chemistry, my most difficult subject.
    On top of my academics, I played football, basketball and ran track. Eventually, I captained all three teams and became three-sport All State. Mr. Browne, the track coach who had been my boys’ club counselor, became a good friend and mentor and grew very close to my mom and dad. When I was a freshman I was given the chance to make an announcement about a tennis tournament. I had never heard or seen foreign names like Pancho Gonzalez before, and the fact I couldn’t pronounce the names became a funny thing to everyone. After that tournament, I started reading the homeroom announcements. I did lunchtime skits and parodies of teachers with the other kids. I did student council, I sang in the choir—I did everything you could volunteer for. I did so many things when I was at Country Day that my parents, who came to practically every event—my dad often left work early—practically lived at the school.
    Compared to the white kids with their precise way of speaking, when I arrived at Country Day I guess I talked kind of “country.” But the more I spoke in public at school, my diction, English and vocabulary improved. I stopped sounding as country, but after being around so many white kids for so long, I started getting a little confused. After a while my sister asked, “Courtney, why do you talk ‘white’?”
    â€œWhat?”
    I didn’t understand what she was talking about. “I don’t talk ‘white’!” I’d tell her.
    It was a confusing time, and I could have used a little assistance from my dad to help me with these very different worlds I was navigating. Cecilie went to Catholic school with white kids for a few years, then went to Cass Tech, the best public high school in Detroit and an integrated, although mostly black, environment. She had a big Afro, was all about black power and wore POW bracelets. I wore a shirt and tie to school. I had been a black boy in white schools since the fourth grade. Yet I livedaround black folks. Nobody had talked to me about how to hold on to my sense of myself as a black child immersed in a world of white folks. Nobody had ever asked me, “Courtney, how do you feel going to an all-white school?” I was a child. It was just, “This is where you’re going to school.” Back then integration was a big thing and our parents wanted us to go to integrated schools. And black parents weren’t talking to kids about that kind of stuff—how to be a black kid in a “white” world—least of all my father, given his background.
    So there I was in the classroom every day, dealing with being the only black kid. I had no one to talk to about how I felt about it, nor did I know that it was even something we could have been talking about. My parents had raised me with such love and confidence that wherever I was, I liked everyone and everyone liked me. It wasn’t until I got older that I began to have a real hard time dealing with the feeling that I wasn’t wanted.
    My black friends with wealthy black parents who were Country Day “lifers” didn’t share my enthusiasm for the school. They thought, “I don’t know why Courtney is doing all those things. I’m just trying to finish, I’m tired of Country Day.” I didn’t understand why they weren’t into it. But they had been there forever and knew the negative kinds of things that were going down and could go down behind the scenes.
    It wasn’t until my senior year that I got a taste of what they may have been talking about. I had