BoomerGirl Diary

There was a slumber party every other weekend in seventh grade.

That’s what 12-year-old girls did in 1968, when we were too young to date, drive or go downtown to rock concerts.

Sleepovers, back in the day, involved gorging on junk food, swilling bottles of Coke, slow dancing with pillows to Beatles ballads, and conducting all-too serious séances and levitations. (At my Halloween party, my sugar-fueled friends and I levitated my 6’3” father 12 inches off the floor using only our pinkie fingers. True story. It freaked us out!)

Of course, prank phone calls were de rigueur. Before the dawning of *69 and Caller ID, you could spend an entire evening disrupting the lives of unsuspecting neighbors, friends and business owners without fear of repercussions:

“This is Miss Higginbottom from the electric company. There’s been an outage in your neighborhood, and I’m calling to see if your refrigerator is running? Yes? Then, you better go catch it. Hahahahaha!”

“Hello. Smith’s Drug Store? Tell me, do you have Prince William in a can? Well, you better let him out. He’s going to suffocate in there! Hahahahaha!”

Our favorite, of course, was the infamous bowling alley joke: “Hi, Starlight Bowl? Yeah, do you have 10-pound balls?” I’ll let you fill in the punch line.

There were many memorable slumber parties that year, but the one I’ll never forget was at Donna Jones’ house.

Donna was my first black friend. I had recently transferred from an all-white parochial elementary school to a progressive girls’ academy where 30 percent of the students were African-American. Donna was in every one of my classes. She was funny and bright, a great artist and dancer, and almost 6 feet tall.

Typical of the times, my middle-class upbringing hadn’t exposed me to many people of different races. Before seventh grade, I could count one hand — make that two fingers — the black people I knew by name.

There was Alberta, our housekeeper, who came twice a week to do laundry and clean. I had known Alberta my entire life. She was a genteel, jovial woman whose infectious laugh and big, bosomy hugs I remember fondly to this day.

William was my grandmother’s longtime houseman. A consummate gentleman, he dressed impeccably and performed his job with dignity and grace. My grandmother and mother loved him, and his family, deeply.

Back then, Alberta and William never seemed to question their positions in life or their limited opportunities. Neither did anyone else. That’s just the way things were.

So, it was no small thing when my mother’s station wagon pulled into Donna’s driveway on a cul-de-sac teeming with black children playing street games on a warm, spring evening.

As three white girls emerged from the car, sleeping bags and birthday gifts in tow, every kid on that block stopped dead in their tracks and stared at us. Only then did I truly understand what segregation meant.

The party felt very familiar. There was plenty of junk food and pop to keep us flying all night. I got a crash course on how to dance the “Funky Chicken.” And Donna Jones established herself as the undisputed world champion of prank phone calls. “Prince William in a can”? “Ten-pound balls”? Child’s play. This girl was a creative genius!

The daughter of a doctor, she had a backyard swimming pool. As the 10 of us splashed in the water, I couldn’t help but notice that the only difference between us, besides the color of our skin, was that the black girls were all wearing bathing caps. (Something about chemicals and the straightening process, I would learn later.) And I realized that Donna would have infinitely more opportunities than Alberta and William. Maybe “the way things were” was starting to change.

When Barack Obama walked onto that stage in Chicago on Tuesday night, as our president-elect, I wondered how Donna — who, at last check, was a fashion designer in Milan — was celebrating the moment. And I thought about Alberta and William, and how they might have felt had they lived long enough to witness the monumentally historic occasion.

And I thought about the way things were, even in my own lifetime, and how far we’ve come as a people. How far I’ve come as a person. And I wept with joy, and gratitude, and fervent hope that the better world we’ve all been dreaming of has finally arrived.