A Date with Vergil Patterson

It was 1955. I had traveled from Boston, two nights and three days sitting up on the train, for my first teaching job at a select school for young ladies in Tacoma, Washington. Although I had had no courses in education or any other kind of teacher training – my degree was in English literature – I had been hired to teach the third grade. The Annie Wright Seminary served the daughters of the educated upper classes in Tacoma and up and down the West Coast.  Although there were the famous boy’s  boarding schools: Groton, Exeter, Choate, few were for girls and most were on the East Coast.  The school had originally been only for girls from elite families who boarded during the school year and just went home for holidays. However, Annie Wright had just opened an elementary day school for younger girls from the good families of Tacoma. That was why I was hired, a month after graduation from college, to be the third grade teacher. I was 22.

A large ornate gate opened on to a small campus of green lawns, stately trees and bushes which flowered almost constantly in the damp, moderate and forgiving climate of the Pacific Northwest. The school and campus were completely enclosed by a large attractive ironwork fence. The buildings themselves were of a solid red brick, containing all the classrooms and offices, sleeping and eating areas. An elegant cloister ran from the main building to another solid red brick building, the chapel.

Annie Wright was run by the Episcopalian diocese of Washington and the school took very seriously their responsibility for the moral and religious upbringing of the young girls entrusted to their care.  For the girls there was compulsory chapel twice a day, and we stood to say grace before meals. They wore uniforms, rose and curtsied whenever an adult came into the room, and addressed us respectfully by our last names. We teachers wore dresses or skirts with stockings and “good” shoes. I can still hear the wavering chorus of my third graders when I came into the classroom as they rose, dipped and said in one singsong voice, “Good Morning, Miss Walter.” The older girls were required to wear a hat and white gloves when going off the school grounds and they had to be accompanied by a chaperone. Most of the faculty were good Episcopalians and had been with the school for many years but there were four of us, new and restive young female teachers from other parts of the country, all living together in what had once been the servant’s quarters on the fourth floor. Miss Jenkins, the head mistress, had recruited us from the best colleges in the East.

Annie  Wright Seminary

After almost a year of compulsory morning chapel, rising to sing, kneeling to pray, standing to recite, after almost a year of the debate which raged in my mind as we recited the apostle’s creed: “I believe in God, the Father almighty”? Do I?  What does that mean? “And in Jesus, his only begotten son” – do I believe in Jesus? If I don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus can I keep saying this? What is the significance of “only begotten? “ Can you believe in God but but not in Jesus, and as for the Holy Spirit?! Well, actually I found that easier than the other two – more abstract, more subject to my own interpretation.  After a year of that daily debate a friend took me to a Quaker Meeting in Seattle and I felt I had come home. The Quakers never professed to anything, though they did ask searching questions, which gave some clue to what we ought to be doing. They wanted me to know that I and everyone else had “that of God” in us, and after that you were pretty much on your own. Questioning was no longer heretical – it was in!

Every Sunday morning I slipped out through the iron gates and walked quietly through the suburbs of Tacoma to the small modest home of Clara and Stanley Shaw who were very old (about sixty).  The other attenders or members included a middle aged couple, a family with three children, and a smattering of other “old” folks. I was far from home, on my first job, earnest and wet behind the ears. - They welcomed me with warmth and grave courtesy. About  six  months later later a young man, about my age, a Negro in a soldier’s uniform, began to attend our Meetings. The good Quakers ignored the uniform and treated him with a similar warmth and courtesy in spite of the historic Quaker peace testimony: “ Do you abjure war and fighting with any outward weapons whatsoever?”   I had never seen a Negro in Tacoma, other than the porters on the train when I arrived from Boston. I cannot remember seeing any Negroes in the small New England towns where I grew up. But there was an army base in Tacoma, and, as I learned later, a whole colony of Negro families and workers around the base.

Vergil Patterson – or was it Vergil Petterson? I am not sure.  He sat with us in  Meeting for Worship for nearly three months before he asked me whether I would like to go out on a date with him. We had chatted at potlucks or in the social spaces before or after Meeting but I knew almost nothing about him – our conversations were polite and cautious – but I saw no reason to refuse, so I said yes. He picked me up in a taxi outside the gate at Annie Wright and we drove through a part of town which was unfamiliar to me, not that I could see much more of Tacoma than one was likely to see chaperoning a group of giggling, white-gloved teenagers. When we entered the movie theater, which seemed enormous to me, I was taken aback to see an ocean of black people. I was the only white person in the room.  I thought it was strange that all these Negroes would choose to go to the same movie theater. I suppose I knew about segregation but that was some bad thing they did down south, maybe in Mississippi. I tried to look natural and to conceal my extreme self-consciousness, glad that we would be mostly in the dark.  I was aware that the other people in the audience were sending us covert glances but trying not to stare.

After the first date Vergil and I continued to be friendly, but formal. I think we may have gone out a few more times, but there was no connection between this off-shoot of my Sunday mornings and the lively social life I was enjoying on Saturday nights. With the other young teachers on the fourth floor we went to the “Y” on Saturday night to meet other young people, men in particular. It never occurred to me that Vergil might be interested in being a part of that wild partying crowd – twenty-something year olds kicking up their heels, and eyeing each other speculatively while we danced and drank. Sometimes the party moved to my little house just off the grounds of the Annie Wright Seminary when we wanted to make a night of it.

Vergil was formal, serious, and careful. I imagine I responded in kind. I also responded, as my mother would have advised, by inviting him “home” for dinner. It was the “right” thing to do.  If a young man asked  a young woman out a few times she, in turn,  invited him home for dinner, but home in this case was the formal dining room at the Annie Wright Seminary. The girls sat at assigned tables with a teacher at the head and we “dressed” for dinner. We stood behind our chairs in the dining room until the headmistress came in and was seated and no one left until she had finished.

I had just enough sense to know that I should ask permission first. I made an appointment to see Miss Jenkins. I knocked, with some trepidation  on the big carved wooden door to her office, and then went in. She was sitting alone, at a big desk, with the sun coming in through a bank of windows behind her. She smiled and invited me to warmly to come in and sit down. After I few pleasantries

I explained why I was there, “I h’ve met a man at church and I would like to invite him to dinner.”

She smiled benevolently and said ,“That would be just fine.”

 I went on. “But I thought you ought to know he is a Negro.” There was a small but perceptible pause in which, I imagine, the reaction of her father, the Bishop, the Board of Trustees, the parents, and the reputation of the school passed through her mind, and then she looked at me directly and said in a level voice: “That will be just fine.”

Vergil came to dinner. Everyone was very polite. The girls tried not to stare. He may have been their first Negro too.  We met him a few more times at Quaker Meeting and then I left for the summer and his unit moved somewhere else and we did not try to keep in touch. I thought of him occasionally, and wondered what happened to him, until, a few years later, I saw, or think I saw, a brief notice in a Quaker Journal about a workcamp in Chicago to be led by a Vergil Patterson.

It was 1955. Eisenhower was President and Nixon his Vice-President. The country was not at war, though the seeds of war were germinating. Eisenhower sent the first American advisors to Viet Nam, and the Pentagon launched the first nuclear submarine. Electricity was generated commercially for the first time by an atomic power plant. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born. In January, Marian Anderson became the first black person to sing at the Metropolitan Opera House, and in August, Emmet Till was killed for speaking to a white woman in Money, Mississippi. In December, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back  of the bus. I was only dimly aware of current events. At Annie Wright we seldom saw a newspaper and I did not have a radio. My friends were talking about other things. The tectonic plates in America’s racial geography were shifting and I, a naïve particle on the crest of a wave, discovered myself carried along by the undercurrent.

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Tacoma, Washington 1955