Although Albert protested, I insisted that he take me home. As I got out of the car, he yelled, “Hey, man, I’ll see you on Monday, okay?”
“Yeah, see you on Monday,” I answered, desolate. As I walked into the house and up to my room, I knew that I was somehow a second-class citizen. He was my buddy, but he wasn’t able to do anything about what had happened. This knowledge caused me to feel rage, a very different kind of rage than when I was angry with my parents. I was enraged enough to not want to live in the United States, to want to get away from it all. I didn’t want any white friends. I wondered how I could manage that and finish my education. If I kept thinking about what had just happened, I wouldn’t be able to work or practice or sleep. It was paralyzing.
I sat down, but I couldn’t pray. I was mad at God too. My eyes glanced around my bedroom and rested on an old clarinet that I hadn’t played for a while. I picked it up to try to forget what had just happened. After a few lame phrases, I heard banging on the ceiling downstairs and my stepfather’s irate voice yelling at me.
“Stop that damned noise! It was nice and peaceful around here till you got back and started your noise. Stop that noise before I come up there and shove that damned clarinet down your throat.”
Now my rage had a more immediate and visible enemy. I could hate him and know that one day I would do something about it. I was going to leave this tormentor and his house—this whole stupid town—and go as far as I could go. It was a bit more difficult for me to leave this country. That I’d have to work on, but I could distance myself from Warren.
Nothing like what had happened that night ever happened when I was with my black buddies. We just knew where to go and where not to go. We knew that we weren’t going to change Youngstown, and we weren’t trying. We wanted to be survivors. That meant not rocking the boat.
Back in school, Albert handled things very differently than Mickey. He kept referring to the incident and mentioned that he had told his parents.
“Would you come over and talk with Mom and Dad about it? I want them to know what happened. I’m not going to the VFW again. They’re dead set against it. They made me promise. I wish you’d come over and talk with them sometime.” He was serious.
I wanted to talk with them, but I felt that the real issue was talking to the actual racists who ran the VFW. Somebody should talk to them.
MY TICKET OUT OF YOUNGSTOWN APPEARED IN THE form of two unlikely people: Ms. Mary Lou Phillips and Professor Ron Gould. Mary Lou Phillips first met our family through Warren’s mother, who needed to get approval for social security. (Aid for the Aged is what it was called in Ohio at the time.) Mary Lou came to the house to interview Warren and my mother to find out as much info as she could to qualify Warren’s mother for Aid for the Aged. During one of Mary Lou’s home visits, I came home from school and my mother introduced me as “my son François, who sings.” She asked Mary Lou if she would like to hear a song. I certainly wasn’t shy about singing, so I ended up singing a few songs for her right there in the living room. Mary Lou was impressed, and immediately suggested that I meet the organist-choirmaster from St. John’s Episcopal Church, Ron Gould, and maybe take some voice lessons with him.
I waited to take my cue from my mother. This singing was not for the Baptist church, and I could just hear her saying “No!” Well, she surprised me and said I should do it if I really wanted to. The deal was set, and Mary Lou promised to be in touch with me soon to confirm a starting date. I was a bit suspicious of this white church, St. John’s, but I was willing to give it a try. I wanted to learn to sing better.
My life changed drastically from the moment I met Professor Gould of Youngstown State University and St. John’s Episcopal Church. Neither he nor Mary Lou were much older than I was, but their experience and world outlook was so vastly different from mine that sometimes I felt I was trying to communicate with aliens. They were both white and probably had never been discriminated against because of their color. I wondered if either of them could ever understand how wounded I’d felt at the VFW and the Ukrainian Catholic church.
I trusted them, but at the same time, I didn’t trust them because we were so different. Yet, we shared so much through our love of music and the arts that I felt charmed and even entranced at times. It started out very professionally on a weekly basis, with Mary Lou paying for my voice lessons with Ron.
On Wednesdays, I was allowed to leave half an hour early from school and take my voice lesson at the church with Ron. He was a wonderful coach who taught me how to sing my first Schubert, Bach, Handel’s Messiah, etc. Eventually Ron and his wife, Marsha, started inviting me to come home after the lesson for dinner. They didn’t have children and served as a combination of big brother, sister, and parents for me. They lived within walking distance to my house, and Mary Lou didn’t live far either. I could always go over to their houses to get away from fighting at my own home. They provided a sanctuary.
Within several months, my lessons increased in frequency to several times a week after school and sometimes on weekends, depending on my school studies and activities. Even though I grew up in the black Baptist Church, I reluctantly gave up conducting my Baptist church choir at Mt. Carmel and began singing in Ron’s Episcopal church choir. I explained that I was leaving simply because I needed the money, and Mt. Carmel couldn’t provide a weekly salary. My parents would never give me an allowance, so I had to earn my own money. Meanwhile, St. John’s hired me as their tenor soloist and paid me twenty-five dollars per Sunday, no small chunk of change in those days. It paid very well for a high school student.
Ron and Mary Lou’s influence gradually replaced the home and church life I had grown up with. Ron seemed to be an expert on Italian, German, and French vocal music, especially for the tenor voice. Although I was studying Latin in school and was going to study French later, I didn’t have a clue about how to sing any German, French, or Italian language songs. Mary Lou was an encyclopedia about popular performances, performers, and musical theater. Sometimes when the three of us were together, I spent the whole time listening and trying to figure out exactly what they were talking about. I would come away from our sessions feeling ecstatic and “high.” Fortunately, they were natural teachers and spent hours and hours explaining to me America’s musical traditions and our relationship to world music. Mary Lou especially loved reggae and jazz.
She was the first person to explain to me that American Negro spirituals were the foundation of all American music. It took a while for that to sink in. I had never heard that the slaves did anything of significance except work themselves to death on the plantations in the South and in white folks’ homes in the northern states. How could they have known anything about music? I wondered.
“Slave songs were work songs, because the slaves were required to sing while they worked. They turned this horrible condition into a great song repertoire,” Mary Lou explained. “I hope you’ll always sing these songs, which you already sing so well. One day you’ll do many concerts like Roland Hayes or Paul Robeson. Except I’m hoping you’ll be able to do more in opera too. I think you have the flare for drama. You just need the right training.”
Ron agreed. “We’ll work on that more and more in the oratorios. That’ll prepare you to do lots in opera. You must learn to let your voice teach you. I’ll help you to listen to yourself. You mustn’t sing heavy arias for your lyric tenor while you’re young and still developing. I intend to start you with Handel’s Messiah and eventually get to Bach’s wonderful Passions. I’ll see to it that you’re ready before you go away to college.”
This kind of talk exhilarated me.
In a town like Youngstown, blacks and whites did not traditionally mix like this. We were becoming friends, though I was still suspicious and sometimes fearful. I was afraid that they would eventually stop talking to me and reject me because of my skin color. How could these white people know so much about black music and black people? Why were they so eager to share this treasured knowledge with me? Nobody had ever spent so much time on my