Read Online The Legs Are the Last to Go by Diahann Carroll - Free Book Online
Authors: Diahann Carroll
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would pave my way to acceptance at the revered Howard University, a place Iâd heard about for years as the most prestigious blackuniversity in the nation, my mother knew that a high school for the arts would improve me in all kinds of ways, just as she knew the right clothes would broadcast to the world the kind of person I was. I canât say her instincts did anything but serve me well and push me up the social ladder she and my father found so daunting.
I auditioned for Music and Art by playing piano and singing two songs. All my training as a Tiny Tot at church and with the Metropolitan Operaâs scholarship program for children paid off. I got in and found, to my absolute joy, teachers talking to students as if they were adults and students engaged in work at intellectual levels I had never seen before in my life. The school was a hotbed of creativity, one of the two schools that inspired the movie Fame years later. But you needed to apply yourself as a thinker, not just a performer. To that end, the school seemed to know no limits. Eleanor Roosevelt even came to our auditorium for a three-hour forum. Eugene Ormandy, the conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, came to perform. We watched him, a little man, tap with his baton and speak so quietly to our student musicians that it was a real lesson in the power of keeping your voice down. I was thrown into thinking about music theory and all kinds of things Iâd never thought about before. What was American music and where did it come from and why? Where were Gershwinâs origins? What about Duke Ellington? They took your brain at that school and really stretched it. Even your activities on weekends had to be accounted for. âMiss Johnson,â one teacher said, âwhat newspapers do your parents read at home?â When I told him which tabloids we had around the house, heinsisted I buy the Sunday New York Times instead, and that I report to him on articles Iâd read. This was really the beginning of a new life of the mind for me. I had to read the Atlantic Monthly, too. At first it was difficult, with so much to understand. But eventually I started to see how reading the Times and serious journalists could give me a broad picture of a fascinating world, all told in an erudite manner. Reading, I suddenly realized, could be so much more enlightening than Iâd ever known.
It didnât take long for me to feel I was outgrowing my parents, even my mother, who had gone to such trouble to instill her taste and her values in my young soul.
This uncomfortable feeling of becoming more worldly than your own parents isnât uncommon among daughters of any generation. But it is something that was hard to reconcile with my earlier life, and it would temper the deep bond I had with my mother in our years ahead.
But to their great credit, as I thrived in my first years at a great high school, John and Mabel Johnson continued to pursue a better life. They had property, tenants, and two sources of income. My father learned that it was wise to trade in his car every two years for a newer model. And while I was taking my work at the High School of Music and Art very seriously, in both performing and academics, my parents spent the mid-1940s realizing their dream of finally moving to the suburbsâto Yonkers, just north of the city. At first, my father had been looking for a house. But when realtors showed only inferior places down by the railroad tracks, he decided to build his own. He got a tip from a friend about a lot on Dunston Avenuein a nonintegrated area. âJust look,â the friend warned. âDonât stop, donât talk to anybody.â Heaven forbid the white neighbors would think that a black man might want to move in his family. In some ways, it was the same scenario Lorraine Hansberry wrote about fifteen years later in A Raisin in the Sun . But Dad bought the lot, found a contractor, and started building.
I auditioned for Music and Art by playing piano and singing two songs. All my training as a Tiny Tot at church and with the Metropolitan Operaâs scholarship program for children paid off. I got in and found, to my absolute joy, teachers talking to students as if they were adults and students engaged in work at intellectual levels I had never seen before in my life. The school was a hotbed of creativity, one of the two schools that inspired the movie Fame years later. But you needed to apply yourself as a thinker, not just a performer. To that end, the school seemed to know no limits. Eleanor Roosevelt even came to our auditorium for a three-hour forum. Eugene Ormandy, the conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, came to perform. We watched him, a little man, tap with his baton and speak so quietly to our student musicians that it was a real lesson in the power of keeping your voice down. I was thrown into thinking about music theory and all kinds of things Iâd never thought about before. What was American music and where did it come from and why? Where were Gershwinâs origins? What about Duke Ellington? They took your brain at that school and really stretched it. Even your activities on weekends had to be accounted for. âMiss Johnson,â one teacher said, âwhat newspapers do your parents read at home?â When I told him which tabloids we had around the house, heinsisted I buy the Sunday New York Times instead, and that I report to him on articles Iâd read. This was really the beginning of a new life of the mind for me. I had to read the Atlantic Monthly, too. At first it was difficult, with so much to understand. But eventually I started to see how reading the Times and serious journalists could give me a broad picture of a fascinating world, all told in an erudite manner. Reading, I suddenly realized, could be so much more enlightening than Iâd ever known.
It didnât take long for me to feel I was outgrowing my parents, even my mother, who had gone to such trouble to instill her taste and her values in my young soul.
This uncomfortable feeling of becoming more worldly than your own parents isnât uncommon among daughters of any generation. But it is something that was hard to reconcile with my earlier life, and it would temper the deep bond I had with my mother in our years ahead.
But to their great credit, as I thrived in my first years at a great high school, John and Mabel Johnson continued to pursue a better life. They had property, tenants, and two sources of income. My father learned that it was wise to trade in his car every two years for a newer model. And while I was taking my work at the High School of Music and Art very seriously, in both performing and academics, my parents spent the mid-1940s realizing their dream of finally moving to the suburbsâto Yonkers, just north of the city. At first, my father had been looking for a house. But when realtors showed only inferior places down by the railroad tracks, he decided to build his own. He got a tip from a friend about a lot on Dunston Avenuein a nonintegrated area. âJust look,â the friend warned. âDonât stop, donât talk to anybody.â Heaven forbid the white neighbors would think that a black man might want to move in his family. In some ways, it was the same scenario Lorraine Hansberry wrote about fifteen years later in A Raisin in the Sun . But Dad bought the lot, found a contractor, and started building.
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