up North almost as much segregation and just enough tolerance to keep racial intolerance, prejudice, and bigotry from boiling over—that is, until a black family tried to move into a white neighborhood almost anywhere in the North, and whites burned crosses or attacked their homes and threatened their lives. Then, in the 1960s, when racial unrest and the black power movement shattered their complacency, whites were shocked and angered when blacks reacted violently to the deprivations they suffered. As I grew older, however, I began to see that Bill and Lorraina were expected to have no needs or wants themselves, and in some ways treated like the servers were treated at Culver. As I became more aware, I asked careful questions that were gently half answered or ignored. Still, it was not hard to go about my life as a passive agent of the status quo.
When Bill and Lorraina left to work for my grandparents, it didn’t hit the heights of drama or even register much in the way of change. As far as I was concerned they were elsewhere working for the family. I didn’t mind too much, because I knew I would see them. The big smile and hug were the way we greeted one another after the longer and longer absences from the comforts so stitched into the experience of growing up with them, but the little betrayals of our racial and social caste differences proliferated. They were still “there,” even though I was growing and changing, because that was their job. I saw them at the weekend house in Westchester County during the summer and down in Miami Beach over the Christmas holidays. I still found my way to their room and flopped down on the bed and talked to them, as I had in my childhood days, but I was no longer the same person and our relationship had changed. I no longer needed them. I was becoming, without my knowing it, another white man they worked for. I came and went as I pleased, taking for granted their always being there.
Bill, never too probing, would ask me about my life.
“Doing well?” he’d say.
“Everything’s going great,” I would typically reply.
“That’s wonderful.”
We each recited our parts. Bill still sometimes called me Skippy, and that felt good.
* * *
In Miami Beach I knew that blacks were getting tired of sitting in the back of the buses. They didn’t want to get up to let white people sit down. Because we stayed in a wealthy, whites-only colony, I rarely saw the segregation although it was in front of my eyes. But when I did, like on the buses, I felt embarrassed—perhaps even guilty—about being a white person. In New York it was easier to maintain illusions. In the South, even in Yankee-packed Miami Beach, the reality of the coming racial wars was hard to miss.
As I grew older, family dinner discussion did occasionally turn to racial issues, but the conversations never went anywhere: “Things are fine the way they are,” Major would say. “Those damned fools are only stirring up trouble.”
Sometimes Major turned to Bill for confirmation: “They like it the way it is, isn’t that right, Bill?”
“Anything you say, sir,” Bill invariably replied.
And that was the end of it. We knew it was a bad idea to rile Major. But his total disregard for Bill’s personhood was a denial of his humanity, and I could not help being aware of it. Bill did his thing regardless of Major’s insensitivity. He served the meals in stately fashion, making a production of moving dishes and trays in and out of the dining room. Grandma Bessie’s finger on the tinkling bell announced our readiness for each new course. With an ever-so-slight bow, Bill brought in the tray.
“I think I’ll take the end piece. It looks so good.”
“As you wish, sir.” The words were delivered with a deferential nod, the tray lowered from the left to just the right level.
Every now and then one of the women said, “William serves so beautifully.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Bill would reply. “You are so kind.”
As much as I wanted to take my place at the dinner table, being waited on like the adult family members was hard, and I began to shrink from the table’s rituals. There was nothing I could say to Bill when he served me that didn’t bring with it the risk of a courteous response, which to me would be hurtful.
I looked into his eyes when he passed the tray.
“Thank you,”