Then I ran into a first-grade classmate, now a prosperous lawyer and president of a benevolent foundation that supported such events. I was snowed. (I also ran into my eighth-grade art-history teacher, another amazingly emotional few moments. I had written my first research paper for her, not yet aware of what the future held, mired in the past as I would remain for unhappy years to come.) What a great cause. Had his foundation purchased the endless piles of Capezio shoeboxes?
I loved the music and skills but wondered that the performers were so slender and glowing with joy, not bewilderment, no "queens for a day."
What happened? I needed no kids' Broadway for my birthday. I was looking for Trenton, my childhood home that had so collapsed into poverty after all of us middle-class whites crossed the bridge into prosperous Bucks County, to school systems Latinos risk drowning to attend illegally, from the other side of the river, beyond those tracks so close yet so far where some of those suburbanites sneak for their drugs and white parties. Some of them.
I was looking for the center of the slums, not the nouveau riche surrounders, new inhabitants of the Hiltonias and Glen Aftons we whites, most of us, had fled. African Americans ruined neighborhoods, not used to white life--that was a given. That's why we had fled.
I swept the hypocrisy under the rug as I carpooled to my tony private school in Princeton. I had other issues: being different like they were, ill at ease among those meant to be my peers. But what hell I had been rescued from. But any of those people left behind would gladly have traded their agony for mine, wouldn't they?
So I found a new sort of heaven: prosperous families of color who had moved away from their less fortunate brethren to better lives. Nothing wrong with that. I was happy for them.
I was happy at the prospect of a possible renaissance of my hometown, one sought by my idealistic uncle, a realtor in Princeton, whose dreams were cut short by a murder in the chic townhouse community refurbished under his leadership.
Perhaps there was more to it than that.
Now we white exiles must move back and integrate Trenton, if they'll have us, the new Hiltonia.
Maybe they won't, though they accepted us most cordially last night--but how few attended the reception afterward, how white it was, how segregated even the audience seats, each row a black or white stripe. Maybe they won't, though most applauded with hands in their lap instead of in the air, as I had noticed in previous years..
Maybe they won't, because of their struggle to escape the inner city, unaided, in our absence, unhelped in realizing their dreams, that climb out of the ashes into the hollow desert we had allowed Trenton to become.
All this is speculation. How dare I criticize those neat piles of Capezio shoes?
I did not interview any of the people at the reception. All I would have quoted would be fake enthusiasm, inner despair at financially supporting an event now rejecting us as we once rejected them, the new dancers, the twenty-first century that will reject the so-called Enlightenment culture in fifty years, that will proliferate to become the majority here and throughout the world, confining us to a zoo of the past in Iceland or somewhere similar, where we will be forced to retreat once again in quite a different scenario. Our Enlightenment culture permitted decimation of Native Americans, enslavement of African Americans yanked cruelly from their homeland.
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