Some of My Best Friends Are Black by Tanner Colby Read Free Book Online Page A

dated Tyrone Williams, a young man from Birmingham, also the first in his family to go to college. As graduation neared, she says, “Tyrone went home for spring break and brought me back three applications for teaching jobs. He said, ‘I got you Homewood, Jefferson County, and this new system, Vestavia Hills.’ Vestavia called while I was still a student, because they were under court order to find black teachers. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t be here.”
    Jerona started teaching algebra at Vestavia in the fall of 1972. Tyrone, who would eventually be a school principal, went to work in the Birmingham city system. Together they bought a home on the north side in Forestdale and had four children: Tycely, Tyrenda, Tyra, and finally a son, Tyrone, Jr. For several years, despite being able to do so, the Williamses chose not to enroll their own kids at Vestavia. “The principal called me in,” Jerona says, “and asked me why I wasn’t bringing my kids to the school. Vestavia wanted them because they had to make the count. I told him I wanted my kids to be grounded, to be rooted. I wanted them to know black culture and know what’s what before they came over.”
    When her oldest daughter was ready to start middle school, Jerona decided it was time.

    When I say I don’t know any black people, that’s not
exactly
true. I used to know one. I just haven’t spoken to her in seventeen years. Tycely Williams and I met in eighth grade at Vestavia’s Pizitz Middle School in the fall of 1988. I was the skinny new kid with braces, recently arrived after my parents moved my brother and me from Lafayette, Louisiana. Freshman year, Tycely and I joined the debate team together. Your typical debate nerd was prone to spend his Friday nights playing Axis and Allies or smoking clove cigarettes while moping around to The Cure. But Tycely was one of the most popular kids in school. Member of the homecoming court, student government chaplain, Class Favorite, Best All Around, Ms. Vestavia finalist—you name it. After we graduated in 1993, we lost track of each other the way people used to do before Facebook. The only thing I’d heard of her since then came from a mutual classmate who’d picked up some random news through the alumni grapevine. “I think she’s friends with Oprah or something,” he said.
    Tycely is not friends with Oprah, but she does run her own nonprofit management consulting business in Washington, D.C., which is where I tracked her down in the summer of 2008. If I was going to write a book about why I don’t know any black people, it only made sense that she would be the first person I’d call. I drove down from New York, we had lunch, caught up, and began what has become, for both of us, a very illuminating high school reunion.
    During our time, the Vestavia school system as a whole was 4.4 percent black, but the high school itself was closer to 3 percent—only 38 out of 1,238 students. Almost all of them were from Oxmoor. In our graduating class, Tycely and one other student were admitted because they were teachers’ kids, and only one black student, Chad Jones, actually lived inside the Vestavia city limits. Chad was the superstar athlete, our double state champ in basketball and soccer. His mother, a single parent, had moved to Birmingham from Tupelo, Mississippi, when he was twelve. She worked nights at the local phone utility as they struggled to keep both feet inside the school district, moving from unit to unit in the handful of apartment complexes located on Highway 31. (“I think we lived in all of them,” he says today.) Being the superstar athlete, Chad enjoyedhis own set of rules when it came to crossing the color line. Tycely didn’t have that advantage. She had only one chance to fit in, and that was by being the Black Girl with a Really Great Attitude.
    “Even on my first day of school,” Tycely says, “I promised myself that I would be nice to everyone, because there was a fear that