“It would have meant so much to Courtney to know that you are here”.

I am standing in an AME (African Methodist Episcopal) church basement and I am here for my childhood friend Courtney’s funeral.  I am 26, and I am offering my condolences to her mother after the service.  As her mother speaks, I hear so much more than a fatigued response.  I understand immediately what she is trying to tell me.  She’s not saying “it would mean so much to Courtney that you were at her funeral”.  She is telling me that it would have meant everything to Courtney to just once have seen me standing in her world.  “Here”.  In her black community.  In her AME church.  With her “family”.  Because Courtney had spent her whole 26 years of life standing in mine.

I grew up in Boardman, Ohio.  It’s a suburb just south of Youngstown, but it might as well be 100 miles away.  While Youngstown was a gritty, rust belt city, dotted with abandoned steel mills that stood witness to better days, Boardman was an oasis of 1980’s mall culture boasting good schools and low crime.  It was 99.9% white.  Youngstown was quite a bit less so.  When we ventured into Youngstown, which was pretty rare, as you had everything you could possibly need in Boardman, you locked your car doors.  While you were still in the car.  I remember distinctly, whenever we drove past a certain point on Market street, I always heard the familiar “click” of my dad locking the automatic door locks.

When I was in fifth grade a new family moved into my neighborhood, just one house behind and over from ours.  And they happened to be black.  At that time I was hanging out quite a bit with a neighbor girl named Allison, and I decided that she and I would go knock on the new family’s door and ask if they had any kids who wanted to play.  I imagine the reason I did this was because only just a year earlier, I had been that “new kid”, as my own family had relocated to Boardman the summer before fourth grade.  I guess you could call it “paying it backward”?  I don’t know.  I do know that the fact that they were black wasn’t really here nor there to me.  This new family lived practically in my back yard, and Allison lived way down at the end of the street, and I was prepared to dethrone Allison for someone closer.  Besides, they had a pool.  When you are 11 years old,  a friend with a pool is worth three without.  Simple math.

Allison and I stood on their doorstep and I rang the bell.  And then Allison ran.  She took off.  I don’t know if it was because they were black or she was too shy to participate in my shenanigans any longer.  I just know that I was alone on that doorstep when Mr. Spires opened the door.  “Hi”, I said, “do you have any kids?”.  And I was introduced to Courtney, and Courtney became my friend for the next 15 years.

Courtney was the only black student in our school.  I can’t even begin to imagine what that must have been like for her.  To be new is hard enough, never mind the obvious race difference.  I mean, think about it—she was the ONLY black kid in the whole school.  Can any of us fully appreciate what that must have been like?   No, we cannot.  But she fell in with everyone so seemingly effortlessly that I frankly never gave it much reflection.   And we proceeded to plant and nurture our little nerdy corner of the middle school universe.  We had a club, a secret club, and we all had secret names.  (And don’t ask me what ours were, because it’s a secret.)  Courtney played the clarinet, was an excellent student, and had a slightly bawdy sense of humor, not unlike my own.  (I will never, ever forget when we were reading aloud in Mr. Konya’s science class in 8th grade, and I saw the word “organism” coming up in the paragraph that Courtney was about to read and I thought “oh no, she’s going to say ‘orgasm’ by mistake”.  And to my never ending delight, she did.)  She had a wonderful, big laugh.  She loved horror movies.  I remember she tried to make me watch a zombie movie at her slumber party and I wasn’t having it and I spent the better part of the night in the kitchen chatting up her mom. In fact, if I’m honest, the only time I ever really thought about her “blackness” was when we had those slumber parties, because Courtney always got picked up early on Sunday mornings to go to church. She was the only one of us who did, and so I came to believe that the church was a really important thing for black people.  While all the rest of us white kids were chowing down on pancakes and orange juice out of a freezer can, surely going to hell in a handbasket, Courtney was off living her “other” life.  Her other “secret club”.  A life we weren’t a part of.  Her life as a young  woman of color.  It was a life filled with lots of extended family and friends and a vibrant church community.  She would mention this life from time to time, telling us about her cousins, or a boy from church who she thought was cute.  But none of us ever actually set foot into her world.  None of us ever even thought to ring that bell or knock on that door.

Courtney died when we were 26.  She had started taking Fen-Phen, a popular weight loss drug in the 1990’s, and after successfully losing a lot of weight, she passed suddenly of a heart attack in May of that year.  Fen-Phen was taken off the market in September of 1997, 4 months later, because it was found to cause heart valve issues.

This is how I found myself in the fellowship hall of an AME church in Youngstown, Ohio in May of 1997.  How I finally found myself in Courtney’s corner of the universe.  And her mother’s words still rattle around in my head to this day.  What if I hadn’t taken it for granted that it was easy for Courtney to live in an almost exclusively white community?     How much would it have meant to Courtney to have had the chance to invite us in and maybe even show us around her life?  That’s not much to ask, is it?  To share our experience and to be seen?  I think that’s all any of us really want.   Courtney was a young woman of color.  Did anyone of us really see that?  Or did we just assume she was  a darker hued version of ourselves?  Did any of us ever try to appreciate the emotional and mental jujitsu it must have taken to juggle both these worlds?   No, we didn’t, because it wasn’t our burden to bear.  We had other things to worry about, like boys and who got carnations on carnation day.  Besides, Courtney seemed just fine.  I realize now, some 30 years later, that maybe she wasn’t.  Maybe she was tired.  Maybe she was lonely. Maybe she felt the jabs of micro aggressions every day.  I will never know, because I never asked.  I didn’t knock on that door.  And that’s the one I really wish I had.