“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“I mean about him being better?”
“No,” I answered.
“Then why can’t I go to his school and to his movies?”
This was the deeper infection, and I did not know how to deal with it. Words were poultices to seal the infection in. I could recall them from my own childhood in answer to a “why?” For children are not born with answers. Words spoken by my parents, my teachers, my friends. Words could seal in the infection and seal in also the self that might never break through again except with extreme luck. But I had no choice save to use them. I told him about prejudice. No one has ever made the anatomy of prejudice simple enough for children.
“And the reason you don’t go to Reggie’s school,” I remember saying, “is because there are people like Reggie’s father.”
“It’s all complicated up,” Conway answered.
It was a relief to laugh at his child’s expression, but I noticed he was not laughing, and at home some minutes later, when I had finished storing the groceries in the pantry, I found him pressed against his mother’s rounded bosom crying without restraint. But even that did not end it. “He cried it all out,” his mother said. She was wrong.
Seven years afterward, in the late spring of 1950, we had a letter from the headmaster of Conway’s New England preparatory school: “We have been unable to reach him.... He seems to prefer to be alone and will not participate even in those activities for which he has undoubted talents. Naturally this attitude has given us serious concern, for an important part of our educational program is training in citizenship and co-operative living....”
Perhaps there is only a slight connection, but I would be hard to convince.