Front Porch: There was nothing black and white about this college friendship

When I was in college in the 1960s, I drove an old Volkswagen, one which had the best mileage in the world.

If I should run out of gas, there was a lever on the floor, which, if turned 180 degrees, provided access to another gallon of gas. Good thing, too, because there was no gas gauge in the car.

A fellow student and good friend of mine would comment something to the effect of, “What is it with you white people that you’re more interested in your furniture and don’t care if your car looks like that out on the road?”

Her father, who was an auto mechanic, had fixed up a car for her to drive. I don’t remember what it was exactly, but I think it might have been a classic Chrysler. I’d come back to her with words like, “What is it with you colored people that you’re not so interested in where you live as long as you look good driving down the highway?”

We always laughed when we said things like this because we often poked at stereotypes – and because we frequently actually had answers for one another for these kinds of questions.

(Note: Back in the ’60s, “colored people” was the preferred self-designation by African Americans, rapidly falling out of favor by the end of the decade, wherein Afro-American, minorities, Black and people of color replaced the term, which had grown to be considered derogatory.)

She was from a middle-class Black family in Tampa, Florida, and I was from a middle-class white one in Miami. We met as students in the journalism program at the University of Florida, became friends and worked on projects together – including in other courses, such as an in-person study of whether Black women were treated differently than white women in job interviews. We “interviewed” for lots of jobs around Gainesville, Florida, in that sociology experiment.

She was interested in my growing-up experiences, and I was in hers, and we asked everything. She rode a bus to grade school with white kids, sort of – entering, being seated in and exiting the bus from the back. We talked about how that felt. In my much younger years, I lived in New York City, where public transit was desegregated by 1861, so I just couldn’t imagine her experience. Yet, irony of ironies, there I was, myself a member of the last segregated class to graduate from Miami Edison Senior High School.

My father was an immigrant; her family went back to the days of slavery. Technically, she observed, if being American was about how long you’ve been here, she was more American than I was. There was much to digest with that.

We talked about hair. She took pride in hers, as well as the hue of her skin. Not as a gotcha question, I asked her why she straightened her hair then. She took the question as it was meant, with curiosity and sincerity – and she had an answer, which we also discussed at some length.

When her husband, whose skin tone was much lighter than hers, wanted to see a movie at a segregated downtown Gainesville theater, he’d put on a sort of turban-like head covering, hokey-up some kind of “foreign” accent and be admitted because he appeared to be an international student.

He’d laugh about that a lot when he’d get back to their apartment, where we were likely studying. She was not amused. Some conversation followed about that, too.

After we graduated, I married a man who was stationed at Fairchild Air Force Base, so off I went to the western side of the country, and we never saw each other face to face again. We wrote letters for several years, then just exchanged Christmas cards and messages, and in time, contact was lost.

She divorced and remarried, went on to law school and became an attorney, did civil justice work and was involved in some interesting projects, including one with Nelson Mandela. I am happy her life turned out well.

I have one more car story that feels relevant.

We both had to go to Miami one weekend in our senior year and drove down (330 miles) in her vehicle. On the way back, her car threw a rod, and there we stood on the side of the road. This was before Florida had all its spiffy interstates and we were on Highway 27, a mostly two-lane road down through rural orange-grove country in the middle of the state (now a four-lane road dotted with Walmarts), and with not a gas station or sign of civilization in sight.

We assessed the situation and decided we were an unlikely pair to get picked up, what with things being the way they were. So, according to the previously posited car theory, we came up with a plan to look down the road, and depending what kind of car was coming, one of us would stand by the road and the other sort of hid behind the car.

She’d say, “OK, station wagon coming; that’s your people,” and we’d position ourselves accordingly. Several cars went by, and we’d check the race of the drivers to see if we’d guessed correctly. We weren’t right each time, of course, but often enough that it made for spirited conversation later.

As it turned out, we were rescued by a Volkswagen. The driver was a friend of ours, also a journalism student and editor of the Alligator, UF’s student newspaper, who recognized me (I wrote for the paper) and also knew her from all our classes together. He and his girlfriend were also coming back from a weekend in Miami.

The only thing we concluded car-wise was that riding with our suitcases on our knees in the back seat of a VW was far less comfortable than it would have been in her car.

What I remember looking back to in those days was how comfortable we were talking with each other in the most open and frank ways.

I cannot possibly imagine those conversations taking place in these times. I’ve tried to picture how they would be perceived if someone overheard them now. Even in this retelling, I expect there may well be some offense taken or just plain cringe factor emerging.

I’m sad that such trust and openness no longer feels possible.

My friend and I really could talk about all the hot-button stuff. You should have heard our discussions centering around how she was considering voting for George Wallace for president.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net.