part of the fellowship that paid for my position at the legal department. There were about forty of us at the retreat. We found ourselves thirty-five miles north of New York City in a converted mansion. The idea was to immerse us in a process of racial exploration and understanding to open us up to the problems we would confront. The retreat location was self-contained. Many of us never left the grounds the entire time, and no one except invited lecturers and support staff intruded on our isolation. Long sessions, led by skilled group leaders, were devoted to the examination of our feelings and beliefs when it came not only to race but to a whole kaleidoscope of social issues ranging from gender to religion, family, and politics. Hungry for change, we quickly made real progress in revealing little pieces of ourselves, and finding we could survive the inevitable questions and challenges that followed.
I had to overcome my fear that the black attendees would either ridicule me or feel alienated by a white guy who wanted to talk about the confusion occasioned by his relationship with a butler and a maid. In response some of the black attendees talked about the pain of having their mothers or fathers work endless hours for white families at their expense. They told me what it was like to have parents they rarely saw, who came home exhausted and filled with resentment. Although they fought to conceal their emotions, I could feel their pent-up anger, and heard an affirmation of what I had always suspected about Duby and Sister Baby—that my gain was their loss. Without a thought, I had taken their place in important ways. I felt as if I was on slippery ground. My love of Bill and Lorraina was built on the degradation of their primary relationships with two children, an affront that was generative, creating the potential for dire social consequences. While I learned from my new black confidants what it was like to be on the losing side of my relationship with Bill and Lorraina, they got to hear something about white guilt. Bill and Lorraina had given me the nurturing that helped me to sense the pain inflicted by a racial caste system. It was hard to imagine my being at the retreat without that relationship.
My internal conflicts at least began to find a way to be expressed. I could better understand black anger even in so-called integrated areas of the country. And I began to see why it was so hard to create a solid bridge between black and white people in the United States. We, the whites, had all the advantages of a caste system, and they were trying to create a life for themselves in an oppressive environment. In the meantime it seemed to be the consensus among the attendees at Tarrytown that we could begin the process of reaching out and being open to the difficulties ahead. When white people heard the basis of black anger expressed in a reflective mode, there was an opening for understanding. For their part the black attendees seemed willing to believe that at least the whites in attendance were ready to work with them to foster a more egalitarian society. And that made the isolation of all of us at the retreat easier to handle, creating some space for us to come together in that protective setting.
Lectures and seminars also created an intellectual framework for our experience. Historians, social psychologists, activists, writers, and musicians visited us. We learned about the cruelty of slavery and the evolution of dispossession, how blacks were terrorized in the South after the Civil War and penned into urban ghettos in the North. We studied black resistance to prejudice in the United States and elsewhere, in countries like Algeria. We learned about black survival and the high price black people paid to exist in a hostile country that created new forms of bondage in the South and treated them as invisible in the North. Every second of our waking day was devoted to learning more about the issues that would drive us in our work as civil rights activists. The thoughtfulness with which the program was created and run, the caring of the participants toward one another, the high quality of the presentations, as well as my own desperate need to find the inner logic between the way I grew up and the work I was starting to do at the NAACP, were liberating.