Two Ladies: A memory in collaboration with my brother, David Walker (c) Nita Walker Boles

Perhaps it was at the Capitol Building in Denver that I first learned there were differences between the races. Our Brownie troop was there in 1957 to climb the stairs to the dome, some three-hundred if I remember correctly. We came in on the basement level and my eyes saw the label above a pristine white ceramic drinking fountain: Negro.*

Before I could ask the question forming in my mind, we were ushered toward the monumental task ahead. The climb did not obscure the thought, though, and I went home to ask what it meant. There, I received a simple answer. Negro people had to drink from that fountain because some white people didn’t want to drink from the same fountain.

Oh.

In those days we often took the bus that ran in front of our house at 311 Josephine. My older sister, Mary Beth, took it to tap-dancing lessons because she was big enough to ride alone. My younger brother, David and I rode it to the library with our tall, beautiful Mother for “Story Time”. And in the summers, we all boarded it for the swimming pool at Congress Park.

Whenever we got on the bus we were seldom lucky enough to make it to the back bench before the Negro people beat us to it. They were usually older people, gardeners and maids who worked in the lovely mansions around Capitol Hill. Their quiet laughter belied some private joke having to do with our attempts to run from the front door to the bench before the best seats were taken. We would snap our fingers and sink down into a side seat, about two-thirds of the way back when we saw our efforts were hopeless.

It was a cold autumn day when the dark lady came to our front door. She had well-coiffed hair and her sturdy brown working shoes were neatly polished beneath the thin herring-bone coat she wore. Mother answered the door, and in rich, southern tones, the lady explained that she had stood waiting for some time for the bus to come.

The cadences of her voice were familiar. Our family often visited friends and relatives in Texas, where our parents had been reared. It was always interesting to hear how different the same words could sound from one person to another.

The lady said she could hardly wait any longer. The cold wind had made it necessary for her to ask, “Could I please use your bathroom?” Mother said, “Well, of course!” and ushered her toward the back of the house. We sort of paraded behind and in front of Mother and the lady, David leading the way. Mother shooed us away, saying, "Go mind your own business!" and trying to allow the lady some privacy.

I knew the way, still know the way, though the house was demolished years ago. You walked past wallpapered living room, through the dining room where oak woodwork arched the passage into the kitchen. Just to the right were the attic stairwell, and the door with a glass knob to the bathroom. But we had been pointed to the quiet of the living room to be out of the way.

It was unusual to have a stranger come to the door and ask to use the bathroom. That she was dark skinned was not unusual at all to us. Our parents worked with a couple who had a beautiful daughter, Cleo who was less dark than her Negro father, and a contrast to her blond, German mother. Like our parents, they had met during WWII. Negro,we had been told, was Spanish for Black.

Cleo’s father played with the Denver Symphony Orchestra, making him a more elite musician than our father, who just played the guitar and the fiddle. Cleo and her siblings were sometimes over for supper with their parents. Afterwards, the grownups usually had a hot game of forty-two while we all played together.
The visitor was darker skinned than Cleo, but lighter than Cleo’s father. But whatever her skin tones, she was clearly one of those people who always got to sit at the back of the bus and drink from a reserved water fountain.

When the lady emerged from the back of the house, we stood, seven and five years of age, our backs pressed against the green and white gardenia wallpaper. The lady thanked Mother heartily for her kindness, and Mother assured her it was no bother at all. The lady wrapped her coat tightly against the autumn wind, and Mother shut the door.

For a moment she stood looking at our blank faces. We were mute, but we sensed we had just seen something out of the ordinary. Kindness to others was one of the main lessons of our rearing, but we couldn’t have known how difficult this moment was in 1958. Although David and I assumed this was a courtesy extended to anyone, Mother was not sure how to feel about it.

“Well, I had to let her use the bathroom!” she insisted, defensively.
We walked silently away to find things to read, toys to play with. But there was no question in our minds. It was perfectly logical. The lady needed to use the bathroom. We had one. She used it.

The people on the back bench of the bus have faded into history, and we have long since figured out the joke of institutionalized bigotry. There is no longer any evidence that there were ever separate drinking fountains as far North as Denver. And the house, as I said, is gone with the era we witnessed passing.

Still, the moment remains frozen, no, concrete. It will never melt away from us, since my brother remembers it as vividly as I do. We know the weather that day, and the time of day, and the color of the wallpaper. We have visited this scene many times as a frame of reference for our own conduct.

“It seemed like a privilege to show her the way,” David told me when we discussed our perceptions of the event. David had intended to lead the way to the bathroom. But he was a little boy, and it was ultimately Mother who claimed the privilege, with a kind of discretion only women show one another in time of need.

In each of our lives there must be hallowed moments of which we are completely unaware. Although we, her children, have placed the dark lady’s visit next to such monuments to the Civil Rights movement as Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” oration, Mother remembered it not at all.

* I contacted the historian at the Capitol in Denver several years ago to verify my memory of the drinking fountain. During the civil rights movement, many pictures were shown of drinking fountains labeled "For Negroes Only" or some similar thing.
He stated there was no record of white ceramic drinking fountains, but that it was possible there was such a thing. He also could not confirm or deny there were separate drinking fountains. It is possible associations have made this particular part of this memory. One of the people who rode at the back of the bus could tell you. I did see those fountains somewhere in my childhood firsthand.