During high school I worked in a shop that catered to women like my mother who, on their way to the dry cleaners, stopped in for a Fair Isle sweater or a brass crab ashtray. Or they came in for one thing and left with something else altogether—a pair of mod sunglasses, say, or a suede purse. (Outside of Christmas week you rarely saw a man in there.) The shop was chockablock with knickknacks strewn over old chifforobes and odd chairs, painted in circus yellows and tangy greens. Fancy German stuffed animals peeked out from every corner. As shoppers wandered around, they passed bead-draped mirrors that multiplied the byzantine displays.
This unlikely jumble delighted me as a child when I trailed into the shop behind my mother. My favorite items then were the many-flavored candy sticks in glass jars by the back desk where you paid for your stuff. While my mother looked around, the shopkeeper, whom I’ll call Frederica, always invited me, quite ceremoniously, to select a complimentary candy stick. Then she would beckon me toward the scroll-top desk behind which she took care of shop business with a fat Flair pen. She took her seat in the nook behind the desk, and I stood beside her—eye-level with her striking face, her deep red lips and the black-lined lids of her small dark eyes. I could see her pale scalp beneath the tight curls of her bottle-black hair. A diminutive Midwestern native with a mysterious, almost elfin presence, Frederica was different from the moms and grandmoms I knew—fair-haired White women with southern drawls who didn’t dye their hair, at least not so as anyone could tell.
While I stood at her side, Frederica opened her desk drawer and produced a worn cigar box that served as the shop’s till. Frederica would then invite me to “help” her count the money. Even after I outgrew our candy ritual, Frederica continued to pay me special attention, often recalling my precocious accounting skills with a wink.
According to rumors I heard (never from Frederica), two wealthy women opened the shop in the early sixties, using the business as an excuse (a tax write-off?) to go on far-flung spending sprees, which explained the shop’s wide range of impractical goods. As gossip had it, the shop’s owners (one was married) were lovers. When the unmarried woman died suddenly (I heard talk of liquor and a bathtub), Frederica, working there already, stepped in to save the business.
The shop faced Rivermont Avenue, one of the main roadways in my hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia. Situated conveniently near a small liberal arts college and the crucial though entirely invisible line where Rivermont Avenue becomes Boonsboro Road, signaling the boundary of the affluent section where most of us who belonged to the Order of Old (White) Lynchburg lived. This Order, such as it was, was not wholly defined by geography, however. No matter where you resided in Lynchburg, if anyone alive could recall your people moving to town, you were unlikely to qualify for membership.
This Order harks back to antebellum days when Lynchburg was a thriving commercial center where tobacco—planted, picked, and hauled by enslaved people—was traded by White folks for big bucks. In the mid-nineteenth century, owing to the Virginia leaf, shoe factories, and railroads, Lynchburg was, in fact, second only to whale oil–rich New Bedford, Massachusetts, in wealth per capita.
*
I got the job at the shop in the fall of 1976. I had just started ninth grade at Seven Hills, a private all-girls (almost all-White) high school. I didn’t own a kilt, but they were all the rage at Seven Hills—this being the height of the preppy revival. I doubted my parents would spring for a real Scottish kilt that cost nearly two hundred dollars. We were plenty well off, but my lawyer father, who practiced at his own small firm, did not approve of spending money unnecessarily. So I reasoned that with a job, I could save up for one. And a job in a store that sold kilts, better yet—I might even get a discount. Which made me think naturally of Frederica and the shop on the avenue, which had the best, if not the only, selection of genuine kilts in town.
Passing by the shop after school, I stopped in to see Frederica. I wasn’t sure just how I was going to broach the subject, or even if I could muster the courage to ask about a job. But I thought to buy a stick of candy for old times’ sake, browse the kilts, and chat her up.
Physically speaking, I was full-grown by then. Five-eight with a D-cup, a veritable giant among my peers. I towered over Frederica, who came out from her desk that day dressed in her usual sporty style—a front-button shirt and high-waisted madras pants cinched with a wide belt. She favored wavy-soled platform shoes. Bangles stacked up one arm and a man-size wristwatch on the other. On her bony fingers she wore a solitary ornament: her Sweet Briar class ring.
I recognized the ring right away. I had seen plenty around town. While my mother and her mother didn’t wear class rings, they, too, were alums of the women’s college—a twenty-mile drive from Rivermont Avenue that required exactly one left turn.
If Frederica’s spunky style and clipped accent didn’t set her apart, her marital status certainly did. After Sweet Briar she’d wed a scion of Old Lynchburg and had two children before the marriage ended. A divorced Sweet Briar alum of my grandmother’s vintage with a full-time job was not a combination I’d ever encountered. For me, Frederica’s outlier status added another intriguing layer to the shop’s exotic surround.
Frederica and I hadn’t been talking more than five minutes when she recalled how I used to help her count the contents of the cigar box. “I still keep the money there, you know.” In the next breath she asked me when I was going to come to work for her and count the money in earnest.
“Sure, well, I mean, of course. Sure, that would be great,” I said, stunned at my luck. I didn’t have to ask. I was being offered a job!
A couple of months later I had enough to buy a kilt. A Campbell Dress tartan: green, navy, and white overlaid with a thin yellow check. “A classic,” Frederica called it. “You’ll have that for the rest of your life.”
Not only was the job convenient to school and home and a boon to my pocketbook, being in the shop brought me a kind of cachet. Working there meant waiting on my mother’s and grandmothers’ friends, observing them, learning how they operated, how they did their business. It meant stepping into a more mature role in the eyes of Old Lynchburg. I had always considered myself to be an adult in a child’s body. By taking a job in a shop, I felt that my adult self could finally come forward and be seen.
The social exchanges that the shop provided also helped with my decision to go to Seven Hills, where the size of my class (fewer than twenty) had drastically reduced my social circle in and out of school. I’d resisted going to Seven Hills in seventh grade, when most of my close friends enrolled, because I’d been happy in public school—a member most recently of the first integrated class at Armstrong Middle, a formerly all-Black school.
The first day I attended Armstrong, I lined up with all the new fifth graders to meet the principal, Mr. Martin, who was Black. By the end of the first week, Mr. Martin was addressing us all on a first-name basis. While I saw White teachers routinely disrespecting Mr. Martin, there were never any racial issues among the students that I knew of. Socially, though, we remained largely divided along racial lines throughout middle school and junior high. A fact brought home to me when I invited a Black girl to my thirteenth birthday party at my grandmother’s pool. One of my best White girlfriends wasn’t allowed to attend because her parents wouldn’t allow her to swim with a Black person. This struck me then as a strange concept. Black women had taken care of me from a young age, fixing my meals, running my baths, washing my clothes. I didn’t see why swimming together should make any difference. My mother told me to ignore this and I did.
I don’t recall anything about my absent White friend’s response, but I did remain friends with her while my Black friend Yvette Miller and I lost touch after I went to Seven Hills. But in the eighth grade Yvette and I were buddies. She was funny and smart, and I wanted to have her at my party because I knew we would have a good time. And so we did. I can still see Yvette in her striped one-piece, jumping up and down on the diving board, shouting with infectious glee as her cannonballs hit the water.
By the eighth grade I’d attended five different schools. When I learned that instead of going directly to the main high school for four years, the rising ninth graders in my neighborhood would be sent to yet another school for two years, and one more after that, I joined my closest friends at Seven Hills, also located on Rivermont Avenue—a couple of miles from the shop—and founded as a segregation academy in the mid-sixties. There was one Black girl in our class of eighteen. During my four years there, only a few more matriculated.
*
I never actually knew who owned the shop while I was working there. I suspect Frederica held some share in the place by then. But whoever owned it, the shop’s convivial vibe and its eclectic inventory remained the same as ever. I recall opening packages made from cereal boxes posted from the Virgin Islands—no return address—and finding, layered between paper napkins, illegal tortoiseshell bracelets. These were in great demand among our regulars. Every Christmas during my tenure, Frederica gifted me one or more of these prized bangles.
The front room with its higgledy-piggledy displays held most of the shop’s wares. At the back of this front room, a framed doorway, hung with saloon-type doors, led to four small back rooms: a private office to the immediate left; beyond that, off a small, pebbled courtyard, a warren of three rooms with additional items for sale. At the very back of the shop: a toilet and a gift-wrapping counter.
Of the three retail rooms at the back, two were hardly large enough for one customer to browse. One of those sold nursery stuff, the other kitchen items. They both looked like playrooms, or abandoned playrooms, because Frederica did not tolerate children roaming unattended in the store.
In the largest of the back rooms—large enough for three or four customers to browse at once—we kept the bulk of the women’s clothes on offer. A narrow closet held housecoats, beach cover-ups, and Lilly Pulitzer dresses. Floppy hats dangled from hooks; a chest of drawers burst with linens. It looked more like a crowded dressing room than a shop. It was both. Women who wanted to try on clothes could shut the door.
White women, that is.
I worked at the shop for nearly two years before I saw a Black customer come through the door. I was seated in a chair beside Frederica’s desk where I often sat tagging new stock or doing homework on slow days. Frederica didn’t usually wait on customers when one of her assistants was there. But that day she came out from behind her desk before I could properly get to my feet.
I watched as she swung shut the saloon doors that led to the back rooms. She then approached the woman and asked if she could help her. The woman said she was just looking around.
Frederica hovered around her, needlessly fussing over merchandise, before returning to stand in front of the saloon doors with her hands behind her back like an usher. I noted that just above her head, above the now-shut saloon doors, was a small sign that read: private office. I had seen the sign before, of course, but thought of it as part of the quirky décor. The small office back there was used mostly for file storage, and the door was kept closed. Regular customers just waltzed on by it to browse merchandise in the back rooms. I understood then that the sign served another purpose. Frederica asked the customer again if she needed any help.
Frederica knew almost all the customers, and I had never seen her be so interested in helping one. I detected an edge in her solicitation. Surely the Black woman did too. She left a few minutes later.
Never one to hold back my curiosity, I immediately asked Frederica why she had closed the doors.
“Because that’s the private office back there, you see.”
“But there are other rooms with inventory—”
“We don’t want her going back there.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, though I was starting to. “Do you know her?”
“We don’t want Black women trying on clothes.”
“Oh.”
And that was all I said about it. Ever.
I seem to recall one other Black woman coming into the store while I was there and Frederica handling it just as she had before. To the best of my recollection, I never waited on a Black customer while working there alone. I never had to close the saloon doors or lie and say we didn’t have a fitting room. There weren’t many clothes in the front room—just a rack of kilts and a trunk of sweaters— so anyone who didn’t know about the back rooms wouldn’t have much of a reason to try on clothing in the first place.
Later it dawned on me that the store layout was very purposeful. But I never challenged Frederica’s rule. Neither did I speak to anyone about it—not even to my parents. As well pedigreed in “Old Lynchburg” as they were, racism was part of their conditioning and therefore mine as well. They had certainly been brought up to think of Black people as being inferior, and undoubtedly they—and the society that produced them—conveyed this bigotry to me, bestowed it upon me, even, as if it were something to be proud of.
But in my nuclear family this attitude was not encouraged or even discussed aloud. On the contrary: my father had working relationships with the town’s few Black lawyers and served on the board of a historic African American foundation. As a state-appointed defense attorney for over two decades, he represented many Black clients—not his social equals, certainly, but men (mostly) that he believed deserved a fair trial and a second chance. My mother, a dancer by training (who later earned a doctorate in art history), was an active civic volunteer in the arts, often working across racial lines. Before and during my employment at the shop, she helped establish a dance division at our local arts center and brought multiracial touring companies from around the country to perform there. She collaborated in at least one of these efforts, bringing the Dance Theatre of Harlem to Lynchburg, with the local chapter of the Links, an international volunteer organization for women of African descent. During the seventies I encountered dancers and performers of many colors and creeds at post-performance receptions that my parents hosted in our house. While I was in middle school and junior high, my mother also danced in a two-person company—her partner, a Black woman and former Broadway dancer.
But all of this interracial activity (progressive for seventies Lynchburg) did not mean we had, as a family, taken a close look at our racist conditioning or examined the tenets of White supremacy that undergirded our sense of self and position. That would take years—and would prove a lifelong process. My two sisters and I would go off to college and travel widely before this examination began to take place—in the late eighties and nineties. Then our political decisions as well as our social ones would start to reflect our rejection of the bigoted views we had absorbed in Old Lynchburg. While I was working at the shop, however, if the seeds for this shift had been planted, they hadn’t yet taken root.
Had I told my parents about Frederica’s policy, my mother would certainly have expressed her disapproval, and probably my father as well, but I doubt either would have insisted I quit. Nor, I suspect, would they have been terribly surprised. Coming of age, as they did, in the Jim Crow forties and fifties, they would have considered Frederica’s attitude a product of her times. But I did not tell them.
Looking back, I believe I made this choice because I would have been too ashamed to continue working there, knowing they knew what that meant. I didn’t think I would ever be caught out. Or I prayed I wouldn’t be. So for the last two years I worked in the shop, I was prepared to deny Black customers the same privileges as White ones. It wasn’t like I needed the paycheck. But I cared for the economic and social benefits of working there more than I cared to stand up for what I knew was right.
I was practicing segregation, redrawing a kind of color line with every shift at the shop. There was the world out there, not racially integrated by any means, but taking big, risky steps in that direction, and there was the private world inside the shop where my mother’s and grandmother’s lifelong friends in their wraparound skirts and sweater sets wanted to know, not where I was going to college, but when I would start at Sweet Briar. In Frederica’s world I didn’t expect to see—and only rarely saw—Black customers, or any other non-White person, for that matter.
For one thing the inventory lay well beyond the means of most of the African Americans who regularly traveled to our end of Rivermont; the vast majority were so-called maids and gardeners who rode the bus route along the avenue in their uniforms and work clothes to the houses of White families like mine. It’s possible the shop’s tacit policy was well understood among Lynchburg’s small Black middle class, who could afford to shop there but were not inclined to patronize any place where they had to endure the likes of Frederica’s censure.
What would have happened, I wonder now, if my mother’s dance company partner had come into the shop? Or my lone Black high school classmate, daughter of a dentist, my fellow officer in the student government—what if she had shown up and wanted to try on a kilt? The fact that this never occurred to me suggests that I trusted her to know “her place” well enough that she wouldn’t shop where she couldn’t trust me enough not to disrespect her.
The possibility never crossed my mind, because I was so inured to the lines of segregation that divided Old Lynchburg. I knew them—and followed them—instinctually, trusting I wouldn’t be found out. And despite all that I knew to the contrary, despite the exposure and celebration of difference that my parents’ relatively evolved views had afforded me, I chose to live by this ugly rule and hope that I didn’t have to acknowledge or, God forbid, enforce it. It lived in the air like a faint whiff of poison as I continued to be a reliable employee—relied upon to enforce the color line.
When I had been cared for and fed by Black women my whole life long, why didn’t I think to ask Frederica just what it was about Black women’s skin that would taint our clothes? Was physical intimacy in this quasi-public sphere—sharing clothes or swimming in the same water—seen as a step too close to romance, to miscegenation? I reach for the sense here. I really do. But there is never any sense in bigotry.
From my current perspective I also see myself as parallel to Frederica in some ways, both of us feeling like outsiders in Old Lynchburg, she with her Mediterranean air and I with my out-of-bounds mother. Did we believe if we kept up the old codes at the shop, if we excluded others, we would somehow feel more included?
The private truth of my public-facing job was that I didn’t have the courage to think for myself. Rather than stepping forward, I was hiding in that shop, hiding behind Frederica’s rule. Hiding from the complexities that I would inevitably encounter once I started asking questions and thinking more critically about race and privilege, which I wouldn’t begin to do until I was in college—in African American studies courses in which, in some cases, I was the only White person in the class.
Somehow, I had enough sense by senior year in high school to choose a college in New England (and the economic privilege to afford it). To anyone who asked, I replied that I wanted to experience a different part of the country. But it was not a wholly rational decision. By then I felt an urgent gut-level need to flee the South. I see now that it was not just about leaving home; I had to get far away from the person I was tempted to be in the shop on Rivermont Avenue.
I got rid of my kilt a long time ago, but I still have those tortoiseshell bracelets. They hang on a rack above my dresser. Whenever I look at them, I think of the turtle who died so I could have her shell.
